Mordecai Richler - The Incomparable Atuk (New Canadian Library)

MORDECAI RICHLER was born in Montreal, Quebec, in 1931. Raised there in the working-class Jewish neighbourhood around St. Urbain Street, he attended Sir George Williams College (now a part of Concordia University). In 1951 he left Canada for Europe, settling in London, England, in 1954. Eighteen years later, he moved back to Montreal.

Novelist and journalist, screenwriter and editor, Richler, one of the most acclaimed writers, spent much of his career chronicling, celebrating, and criticizing the Montreal and the Canada of his youth. Whether the settings of his fiction are St. Urbain Street or European capitals, his major characters never forsake the Montreal world that shaped them. His most frequent voice is that of the satirist, rendering an honest account of his times with care and humour.

Richlers many honours included two Governor Generals Awards and innumerable other awards for fiction, journalism, and screenwriting.

Mordecai Richler died in Montreal in 2001.

THE NEW CANADIAN LIBRARY

General Editor: David Staines

ADVISORY BOARD
Alice Munro
W. H. New
Guy Vanderhaeghe

This book was first published in Canada by
McClelland and Stewart in 1963.
Copyright 1963 by Mordecai Richler
Afterword copyright 1989 by Peter Gzowski

This New Canadian Library edition 1989

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency is an infringement of the copyright law.

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

Richler, Mordecai, 19312001
The Incomparable Atuk

(New Canadian library)
Bibliography: p.
eISBN: 978-1-55199-565-6

I. Title. II. Series.

PS8535.134A92 1989 C813.54 C89-094602-7
PR9199.3.R5A92 1989

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

McClelland & Stewart Ltd.
75 Sherbourne Street
Toronto, Ontario
M5A 2P9

www.mcclelland.com/ NCL

v3.1

The following dedication appeared in the original edition:
For My Father

What would happen in Canada if full sovereignty were invoked and the southern border were sealed tight against American mass culture if the air-waves were jammed, if all our comic books were embargoed, if only the purest and most uplifting of American cultural commodities were allowed entry? Native industries would take over, obviously. Cut off from American junk, Canada would have to produce her own.

Richard H. Rovere, Macleans, Nov. 5, 1960

Twentymans dreadful equipment was unloaded at a dock in Montreal on a cold wet Wednesday. As reporters pressed forward, uniformed security men wheeled the crate into a private railway car that had been held in readiness on a nearby siding. There were in fact many crates, each a different size or shape, all but one empty. A typically cunning Twentyman manuvre calculated to frustrate the curious, watchful crowd assembled on the dockside. If the manuvre was typical of Twentyman it was also, as usual, wholly successful. Even JeanPaul McEwen, the most astute journalist in Canada, couldnt find out what, if anything, was in which crate. She had to return to Toronto emptyhanded. Worse. Her chartered aeroplane was ordered to circle the field until another one had landed safely.

Who in the hells in that other plane? McEwen demanded, outraged.

Some Eskimo. Wait. The pilot listened in on his radio. His names Atuk

McEwen lit up another Schimmelpenninck as her plane was obliged to circle the field for a further ten minutes. Im going to remember that name, she said.

Atuk.

Atuk, the incomparable, came to Toronto from Baffin Bay in 1960. As every Canadian schoolboy now knows it was out there on the tundra that the young Eskimo had been befriended by a Royal Canadian Mounted Policeman who had fed and clothed him and taught him English. At first Sgt Jock Wilson, generous to a fault but no man of letters, had discouraged Atuk from writing poetry. He had pointed out to the lad that verses would not get him the bigger, better igloo he craved and, whats more, his writing was ungrammatical. But when Atuk persisted Sgt Wilson showed his poems around to the fellows at the local trading post. The clerks, as he expected, could not detect even a feeble talent, but a visiting advertising executive, Rory Peel, was impressed. Its a gasser, he said. A real gasser.

The Twentyman Fur Co, a vastly misunderstood enterprise, was, at the time, suffering from a run of foul newspaper publicity and questions in parliament because, it was claimed, the Eskimo was dying of consumption, malnutrition, and even frost-bite, all because of what the white man had done to make his accustomed way of life unfeasible. Peel, the brightest young advertising man in Toronto, was flown north to see if he could come up with an idea. And so, to the everlasting consternation of Sgt Wilson, he gave Atuk two electric blankets, a sack of flour, his cigarette lighter, and twelve bars of chocolate in exchange for a sheaf of his verse. The poems, as everybody knows, later ran in a series of advertisements in magazines all across Canada. A professor from Eglinton University, Norman Gore, sought out Atuk at Baffin Bay, and came back with the ingredients of the now famous volume of poems.

The success of Atuks book was such that he was flown to Toronto for a literary party at the Park Plaza Hotel. His thoughtful publisher laid in a supply of chocolate bars and put some raw salmon on ice. A press conference was arranged. Atuk was interviewed on television. He was taken to see a midget wrestling match, a striperama, Rabbi Glenn Seigals Temple, and other wonders of Toronto. Afterwards Atuk simply refused to return to the Bay. Instead he turned to Professor Norman Gore for help.

The front door to Gores house was ajar and Atuk, following a native practice, walked right in.

Hallo?

A scuffle in the living-room. Sounded like a lamp being knocked over. Atuk entered just in time to find Nancy Gore, the professors nicely plump wife, doing up the top two buttons of her blouse. Her face was flushed.

Sorry to intrude. I seek the professor.

A tall, muscular Negro began hastily to dust a table.

Ah, that will be all, Joseph.

Thank you, mam, the Negro said; and he fled.

The professor will be home, ah, shortly if you care to wait. Em, excuse me.

When Gore turned up an hour later Atuk came right to the point.

I wish to stay in Toronto, Atuk said.

Youve had a quick succs dstime, Gore said, so you think its easy. Actually, the writers path in this country is a thorny one.

Maybe I will be lucky.

But Gore was troubled. Though he adored the chunky little primitive, he was not blind to the sly side of his nature. A certain un-Presbyterian shiftiness. It would be enlightening, he thought, to see what might come of a savage innocent in Toronto. Notoo cruel.