‘MAN, KING AND MESSENGER. ROBERT REX RAPHAEL, A GRATEFUL COUNTRY SHALL MISS HIM’
The name alone could serve as an epitaph. Robert Rex Raphael Murphy, 1947 – 2024. Robert, the first name, unknown to most. His private life, in this most indiscreet era, remained private. The vast range of his colleagues knew little of it.
Rex, the king of Canadian journalism. No one else rose to the top of radio, television and newspapers. He was the undisputed king of the CBC, long-time host of Cross Country Checkup and featured commentator extraordinaire for The National. For decades he was a premier columnist at both The Globe and Mail and here at the National Post.
It remains a singular honour for us that he appeared in our pages. We did not just read his columns, we savoured them. It was an acquired taste for some, but pity those who did not acquire it.
A man who passionately loved his home — a proud Newfoundlander and patriotic Canadian — was at home amongst us. And we were blessed to have Rex’s japes — Japes of Wrath was his column’s title at the Globe — at our breakfast table, explaining and exasperating, revealing and reviling, analyzing and assailing, lauding and lacerating, our own sesquipedalian curmudgeon who made us laugh.
The CBC and Globe consider themselves the proper custodians of Canadian identity, carefully curating the consensus of what Canadians ought to think and say. But they remain pretenders to the throne. Rex remained the true king, and I was proud to be part of his court.
Raphael, the archangel. An angel is a messenger, and archangels are entrusted with the important messages. There is Michael, the mighty warrior. And Gabriel, who could turn a memorable phrase. Raphael is the great companion for travellers along the way. And so Murphy was just that, the sage and storyteller who walked alongside Newfoundland as she found her home in Canada, and Canada as she too often lost the way.
Man, king and messenger. Robert Rex Raphael, a grateful country shall miss him.
It no doubt pleased and pained him that he was known by a single name only, Rex, like Oprah and Beyoncé. Pleased him, as it put him on a first-name basis with the man on the street — or the woman who held it all together in a fishing outport. Pained him because the cult of celebrity was one of the many toxic things he lamented.
Distinctive voices in Canada have come disproportionately from hockey: Foster Hewitt, Danny Gallivan, Don Cherry. Bob Cole died recently. Rex was a distinctive national voice, one formed in the rough-andtumble of Newfoundland politics and amidst the rare books of an Oxford library.
Born in Carbonear before Newfoundland joined Canada, Rex came of age as the province became the personal dominion of Joey Smallwood, the charismatic premier with authoritarian tendencies. At Memorial University, where Rex enrolled at 15, he was elected student union president at 18. Rex refused to be a courtier, an option open to him in the closed coterie of St. John’s politics.
He became a vocal critic instead, a choice that took courage, the dominant virtue of Rex’s public life. He was sympathetic instead to John Crosbie, scion of a prominent family, who broke with Smallwood.
Twenty years later the federal government closed the cod fishery, leading to the largest layoff in Canadian history. That event seared itself into Rex’s soul. He wept when Newfoundland bled.
Crosbie, the fisheries minister, went back home and faced the irate fishermen face to face. That was courage. Crosbie later told Rex that if he had run for cover on that day, he could never again have shown his face in public. He would have been ashamed. That too few had courage and too few knew shame would be a constant theme of Rex’s commentary.
Rex taught Canadians that, contrary to “Newfie” jokes premised on the prejudice that they were stupid, there was no shortage of smarts on the island. He went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar in 1968, a member of the same cohort as a certain future president.
Ten years ago in Vancouver I introduced Rex at a public conversation hosted by Convivium, a journal of faith in our common life that I founded along with Peter Stockland. I noted that he went to Oxford as “the man from the real Rock who redeemed the class which also included the pride of the suitably — named Little Rock, William Jefferson Clinton.”
When Rex took the stage he veritably bounced, contorted, twisted and gesticulated in spasmodic glee at the comparison. “I am the Rock … Clinton the Little Rock,” he chortled, declaring on the spot — with the rhetorical extravagance that was his wont — that he had never had a finer introduction. Likely not true, but he was kind. Poor Peter had a challenge in getting Rex back on topic. But why, really? Rex was pure delight on any topic.
He could have had a career in politics or academia, but neither seemed to suit.
Stockland eventually did get in a question about how he found his way into journalism.
“It was pure accident,” Rex said. “Journalism just happened. I stumbled into doing a small fill-in at some station somewhere, then ended up filling in for somebody else, and within about four or five months I was hired by the CBC down in Newfoundland and had a few stormy interviews, and that kind of made my name, if you will.”
Journalism was his profession. He was better at it than anyone else, but it was not his passion. Rex knew better than to confuse the passing with the enduring. Rather the latter should inform the former. The words which endured, not the passing copy of the day, nourished both his mind and his soul. He was a man of the library more than the newsroom.
“There is a genuine passion in me, and I don’t want to sound too precious about it, but it’s true,” he told Convivium. “Literature. It always came at me with great force. It still does. Literature and classical music. I came from a place — a small town in Newfoundland — where there were not a hell of a lot of books and suddenly (you’re at university) and the books are multiplied.”
Newfoundland, literature and music. Upon his death, more than few recalled “his favourite place,” Gooseberry Cove, a rocky beach — or as Rex would have it, “the sand is much more masculine.”
“The going to it, and the coming from it, over the splendid wilfulness of the Cape Shore road itself, is the only thorough justification for the invention of the automobile that has yet been hit upon,” Rex wrote. “But the arrival upon it, and the staying at it — well, weld your favourite Beethoven adagio to that tease of (Gerald Manley) Hopkins above, and you have a foretaste.”
Upon his death, fellow Newfoundlander Mark Critch commented that others would say that it was a “nice beach”. Rex instead invoked the music of Beethoven and the poetry of Hopkins. And justly so, for when Rex stood on the beach, Beethoven was beating in his heart and Hopkins uplifted his soul.
“There was no greater wordsmith in Newfoundland,” said Critch, who grew up as Rex’s neighbour in St. John’s and later did impressions of him on This Hour Has 22 Minutes. “And it’s a place where we are known for wordplay. You might not always agree with what he had to say but oh, how he could say it.”
And if he could say it, it was because he learned from those who said it best. I never had a conversation with him that did not include some reference to a 19th century writer. It was his favourite literary period.
“I subscribe to the spirit of Oscar Wilde’s dictum which should be something of a motto for opinion-mongers,” Rex wrote in the introduction to a collection of his columns, Canada and Other Matters of Opinion. “On occasion it becomes more than a moral duty to speak one’s mind. It becomes a pleasure.”
When William F. Buckley, Jr. died on Feb. 27, 2008, I was in Palm Beach visiting the founder of this newspaper. Buckley took immense pleasure in his writing. During the afternoon, Conrad Black and I wrote our respective remembrances of WFB who, like Rex, wrote with erudition, elegance and élan, informed by literature, philosophy and theology.
An afternoon of writing about Buckley’s writing prompted a dinner conversation about prose stylists. I proposed that John Henry Newman, the quondam Oxford don become a Catholic cardinal, was the greatest prose writer in English (a position taken by James Joyce). Conrad admired Newman, but argued that Abraham Lincoln was superior. Years later, when I related that conversation to Rex, he bounced, contorted, twisted and gesticulated in sheer delight. He was as much fun at the dinner table as he had been on stage. He thought that is exactly what newspaper columnists should do; read Newman and Lincoln and many others, admire and learn from them, and declare a position on who was better.
He was immensely pleased that his career had found its way to the Post, where columnists did just that. He was convinced that today’s news could not be properly understood, much less intelligently commented upon, without knowing about Newman and Lincoln, and Shakespeare and Milton for that matter.
“If you want to do commentary or write essays, all of the English speakers and English writers are there to give you at least some fuel or at least something to aim at,” Rex said. “And I think having some knowledge of both poetry and prose, from the 16th century to the 20th, is part of your instrument also.”
“You want context?” he continued. “That’s why we have literature and history. To give us that. So journalism turns out to be a place where if you read a lot of either John Donne or Walter Pater, these are allowed to play out. Likewise, if you read Cardinal Newman for his clarity and beauty, there’s something in there. I think Newman’s idea of humanism and education and the idea of the university, that is, to my mind, extremely current.”
I don’t recall ever discussing Kipling with Rex, but Rudyard would have recognized Rex. He knew how to “walk with Kings — nor lose the common touch.”
Thus he could propose Don Cherry to represent the sovereign as governor general.
“The Clarkson-saul era has left its high-toned and circumpolar imprint,” Rex judged. “We have had a governor-generalship of lofty (and, let us whisper it, bloodless) pretension, a harvest time for the canapé-and-string-quartet set. It has been a Chardonnay era at Rideau Hall. It’s time for some beer.”
Rex loved people who loved beer, even though I never drank it with him. He was the sort who liked to dine at the Royal York but put more stock in what the waitress and the bellhop thought than the consultants in the conference rooms loading up their Powerpoints on building an inclusive executive suite. Rex was more inclusive than that. He read the literature that most didn’t — or even couldn’t — and brought that to bear on the joys, hopes, griefs and anxieties celebrated and suffered by the ordinary folk of our times.
That explained the fire that raged — not too strong a word — within him at the disdain held by the current federal government and their fellow eco-travellers for the Alberta oilsands. Rex loved the oilsands passionately in large part because it gave economic dignity and a measure of hope to thousands of Newfoundlanders — there were direct flights from St. John’s to Fort Mcmurray — whose livelihoods, families and villages had been devastated by the closure of the fishery.
One of Rex’s journalistic heroes was Malcolm Muggeridge, the brilliant British writer who wrote in 1933 about Stalin’s famine-genocide in Ukraine. That took real courage at a time when Walter Duranty of The New York Times was winning the Pulitzer Prize for parroting Soviet propaganda. Muggeridge would go on to write brilliant satire and then, though an atheist at the time, would bring Mother Teresa to global attention in his documentary film, Something Beautiful for God. Muggeridge’s dissent from the elite consensus on the Holodomor was a lodestar for Rex’s work. He was proudly contrarian because there were so many lies — or just foolishness — to be contrary about.
“The great Gandalf of twentieth-century journalism, Malcolm Muggeridge, long ago noted that the age we live in has voided the power of satire to castigate it,” Rex wrote. “Our reality is far more absurd that any satirist’s imaginings. What Swift could invent Flavor Flav or Nancy Grace? Where is the Molière who could draw from his mind’s own store the daily councils of The View? Larry King probing Sean Penn on the geopolitics of Iraq? One void probing another. Shaw would retire gibbering into the darkness at the challenge of conjuring such a scene.”
A void opens when a Robert Rex Raphael departs the scene. But the darkness will not extinguish the lights he left us. Literature keeps the darkness of the present from obscuring the light of the past. The best journalism is literature.
“Mordecai Richler believed in words,” Rex eulogized the Canadian giant of journalism and literature. “This is a difficult faith to maintain. It can only be maintained with great scruple, discipline, exactness and passion. These are all of them virtues of character and mind. And for all the projected dishevelments of Richler — the rumpled getup, the loitering cigarillo, the lingering Scotch — nothing was allowed to interfere with that which counted. He believed in writing as an art, that art exists for its excellence, and that from that excellence, rather than from some pre-attached agenda, it did its good work for men and women everywhere.”
Rex wrote truly about Richler. He wrote truly too about himself.
“Good night, sweet prince,” laments Horatio.
Good night, sweet Rex. Our king was salty too, as the chilly seawater spray of the Atlantic blows upon Gooseberry Cove.
The king is dead. May Raphael and the other angels sing him home to rest.
HE BECAME A VOCAL CRITIC ... A CHOICE THAT TOOK COURAGE. — DE SOUZA