Dear Bill...

Dear Bill... McGill University

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ALUMNI QUARTERLY - winter 2008
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Home > McGill News > 2002 > Fall 2002 > Dear Bill...

Dear Bill...

Dear Bill...

"I've been accused of being a bit of a dilettante," says William Weintraub, BA'47, of his varied career. "I guess I never really made up my mind." He surveys the mountains of boxes, envelopes and assorted foolscap that made up the topography of his home office this summer, the documents generated by a lifetime of producing award-winning novels and documentary films, a feature film, a play, and a best-selling popular history of Montreal, City Unique.

This past June, Weintraub packaged a half-century of correspondence with Brian Moore, Mordecai Richler and Mavis Gallant -- totaling 1,342 letters -- and sent them to their new home: the Rare Books and Special Collections Division of the McGill Libraries. His remaining papers followed over the course of the summer.

"We frequent the Royal St. Germain, the Old Navy, and other gin mills of note, meeting the unbarbered, the unemployed, and the uninhibited," wrote Weintraub to Moore of his Parisian exploits in January 1951. "Half the world's poetic misfits are huddled together in St. Germain des PrÈs and the language is American. Some of them live in buck-a-day flops and some of the gals (average age 16 to 21) commute from bed to bed in order to pay nothing."

Photo Brian Moore and William Weintraub, at Christmas dinner, in Westmount, 1958

Weintraub had just left the Montreal Gazette (as an alternative to being fired) and was exploring the freelance life in Europe. Moore, later to be a successful and acclaimed novelist, was still toiling at the Gazette and beginning to publish potboilers with titles like A Bullet for My Lady and A Gun for Gloria, under pseudonyms like Bernard Mara and Michael Bryan. Both were young, talented and hopeful: the world of art and literature lay before them.

"Bill's letters provide a wonderful personal insight into the Montreal literary scene in the 1940s, '50s and '60s," says a delighted Irena Murray, Chief Curator of Rare Books and Special Collections. "The correspondence goes to the end of Moore's life and close to the end of Richler's," she points out. The Gallant letters, less frequent in the '50s and '60s but plentiful in the '80s and still ongoing, have a 20-year embargo placed upon them, at Gallant's stipulation.

Dilettante or not, Weintraub's life makes a good story, and he definitely knows how to tell stories. "In those days, journalism in Montreal was awash in alcohol. Most of us young reporters could only afford beer, but on that fateful night in 1950, the night that led to my downfall, there were several bottles of rye whiskey on the table," begins his recently published Getting Started, a memoir spliced with excerpts from letters Weintraub exchanged with Gallant, Moore and Richler throughout the 1950s. The correspondence shows them plotting their literary careers while avoiding death by hunger or cold -- and all while recovering from the "dire hangovers" that litter their anecdotes.

Photo Photo View larger
A 1953 letter to Weintraub from Mordecai Richler typed on the back of a playbill.

But literary pursuits were secondary elements of these friendships, Weintraub says. "This was before the word 'Canlit' appeared on the scene," he explains. "We might have some comments on each other's work, but there was no feeling that this was a literary movement." Rather, the friendships started in journalism.

"Moore and I were working for the Gazette at the same time," he recalls. "We seemed to be on the same wavelength, and to find a common dislike for certain people. And we liked to read books, which not everyone on the Gazette did at the time." Gallant, meanwhile, scribbling for the now-defunct Standard, was part of a group of journalists who used to socialize in the Press Club until she left for Paris in 1950 (amidst her peers' gloomy predictions of failure and a slinking return) to pursue a writing career.

When Weintraub visited her that winter, she said to him, "There's a young fellow from Montreal -- you might want to meet him." The "young fellow" turned out to be Mordecai Richler, also in Paris learning to be a writer. "There just seemed to be community of interest," he says. "It wasn't a matter of seeking out fellow writers."

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