Vice, gaiety and spangled pasties in old Montreal
F I C T I O N
By William Weintraub McClelland & Stewart
272 pp., $29.99
It’s a happy publishing season
that includes a
new book by
William Weintraub. The Sage
of Montreal, a
dignified presence with laughter in his eyes, is sure to provide pleasure, both in the matter and in the manner. No one can more brilliantly evoke the great period of Montreal’s history, just before the Quiet Revolution, when it was the northern capital of vice and gaiety, with its nightclubs, brothels, bars and naughty burlesque houses, a nocturnal playground to rival New York and Chicago.
Weintraub is the author of the novels Why Rock the Boat and The Underdogs and also of two volumes of non-fiction of classic rank, City Unique: Montreal Days and Nights in the 1940s and ’ 50s and Getting Started: A Memoir of the 1950s. This time it’s another novel, set in Montreal in 1948. It’s the story of a 17-year-old McGill freshman’s struggle for adulthood.
Richard comes from a Jewish family that’s comfortably off in the anglo enclave of Westmount. When we first meet him he’s with friends discussing their painful efforts to be rid of the burden of virginity. They’re devouring sundaes in Gagnon’s ice-cream parlour, “the extravagant Pistachio Surprise, the reliable maple walnut with hot fudge sauce, the understated but seductive Choco- Mint Parfait.” Richard is saved from these frustrating sessions by his Uncle Morty, an unreconstructed slum Jew without cultural affectations. Uncle Morty knows all the right people, not only in the shmatte trade but in the dives and boîtes as well as City Hall and police headquarters. He takes his nephew to the Gayety burlesque theatre to see the stripper Lili L’Amour and visit her in her dressing room. Lili is mad at Morty (who denied her entrance to his gambling joint “for her own good”), but she takes to Richard, who is a poet and, as it turns out, an excellent choreographer and PR man.
Lili gives him one of her spangled pasties, and in no time the boy is in love with her.
A group of pious businessmen is set to clean up the city, to shut down the dens of iniquity, the stews and whorehouses that give Montreal its meretricious glamour. This alarms the priest whose help they enlist. Such a campaign would endanger the powerful benefactors whose contributions are fuelling the archbishop’s frenetic building of churches and convents. His Excellency hopes to make cardinal with his building. The priest suggests an alternative assault on vice: Arrest Lili L’Amour. Thanks to Morty, the stripper gets out of town just in time.
Richard is in despair when he learns his true love has hitched a ride to New York with the head of the CPR in his private rail car. But she sends a friend of hers to take advice on her act from the boy. Richard writes a press release that changes her whole career, bringing her fame and fortune. But not before she skillfully relieves him of that painful virginity. He’s consoled by letters from Lili — consoled and tormented.
We’re given a fascinating view of a McGill education, to which Richard now devotes himself. A gorgeous rich girl admires his poetry.
She’s literary editor of a new magazine, and tries to recruit him for the Communist Party. He’s told to work some Communist doctrine into his poetry. Reading a book by Stalin he finds it so crushingly boring that his interest in Communism begins to fade.
Uncle Morty points out the dangers of a Communist record. He argues that Richard only wants to get laid, and Communism is not the way.
I don’t want to give away the story, which is full of surprises. What gives the novel its charm is partly the attractive personality of the protagonist, but also the author’s extensive and detailed knowledge of Montreal, including pastry and other comestibles, not forgetting the arts of striptease and public relations. The Sage was in his day a newspaperman, magazine writer, playwright and for many years a filmmaker.
Like his friend the late Mordecai Richler, he’s well placed as a Jew to see the ridiculousness of many francophone obsessions, which he mercilessly lampoons. At the same time his affection for his native place is boundless. In common with many others of his city, he is capable of a certain lightness of sensibility, a readiness for fun, which makes him the best of company. ❚ Kildare Dobbs’s memoir, Running the Rapids: A Writer’s Life, will be published next month by Dundurn Press.
Weekend Post