When my great-uncle Robert Fulford was growing up in 1930s Toronto, it was still a podunk town that talented people hoped to “graduate” from, he later said. The Canada that contained this backwater was a provincial society where the culture and politics of the U.S. and the U.K. seemed by definition more significant than whatever was happening here.
As Bob wrote in his memoir, about the people he grew up with in the east-end neighbourhood of the Beach, “We saw nothing of importance in the actions of Canadians and never dreamt that our own corner of the Empire could do anything worth noting.”
The fact that Bob came to write that sentence in a book titled Best Seat in the House: Memoirs of a Lucky Man – published not in London or New York but Toronto – is a testament to the stunning eruption of Canadian culture that he lived through and helped nurture.
Robert Fulford nurtured Canadian culture and amidst heavy-weights the likes of Margaret Atwood, right, and Joni Mitchell.Louie Palu/The Globe and Mail
It was the age of Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro, Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye, Arthur Erickson and Frank Gehry, Joni Mitchell and Neil Young – and as the country’s most prominent cultural critic, Bob had something interesting to say about all of them.
Over the course of his career, Canada built itself a culture, more or less from scratch. He was one of the architects.
The man I knew as Uncle Bob died last fall at 92, and in February his friends and family gathered at the Toronto Reference Library to celebrate his remarkable life. No one dies on a schedule, not even a faithful keeper of deadlines like Bob, but the timing of his memorial struck at least a few of us as meaningful. Canada is currently living through a revival of national self-awareness prompted by Donald Trump’s attacks on our economy and sovereignty. If the moment is going to mature beyond flag-waving and grocery-store boycotts into a real homegrown cultural revival, as some people hope, there could hardly be a better guide than the intelligent, subtle, effective Canadian nationalism of Bob Fulford.
He got his front-row seat early on, as a boy in the Beach, when the Gould family moved in next door. Their son, Glenn, was an eccentric piano prodigy the same age as Bob, and the two quickly became friends. Toronto was not so provincial as to miss the genius in their midst, and Bob soon found himself consorting with a phenomenon. In the early 1950s, he even had the distinction of helping to organize the first ever Glenn Gould performance of Bach’s Goldberg Variations in a little local auditorium.
Their friendship didn’t survive Gould’s demanding and neurotic personality, but it was a crucial first indication to Bob that world-class talent could appear in his own part of the world – next door, even. It was an insight he never forgot.
Obituary: Prominent public intellectual Robert Fulford was a champion of Canadian arts
Over the next few decades, as Canada’s filial connection to Great Britain frayed and the magnetic force of America repelled even as it attracted, Canadian culture was struggling to be born. The Massey Report urged government support for the arts, the CBC was coming into its own and young artists were bringing a fierce new sensibility to their particularly Canadian experience of the world.
Bob was in the thick of it all. He liked to joke that he had worked at just about every reputable Canadian publication, twice – The Globe, the Toronto Star, Maclean’s and eventually Saturday Night magazine, where he was editor-in-chief from 1968 to 1987. In that time he became the country’s leading arts journalist and played a role in discovering or championing an almost impossible roster of serious cultural figures: Michael Snow, William Kurelek, Mordecai Richler, Margaret Laurence, Mavis Gallant, to name just a few. He published Margaret Atwood’s poetry and had an 18-minute interview with Neil Young on CBC Radio right after Young went solo.
Fulford praised Frank Gehry’s Art Gallery of Ontario redesign as a ‘richly diverse civic bazaar inhabited by many peoples from many places.’J.P. Moczulski/The Globe and Mail
Bob was not some rah-rah Canadian chauvinist: He didn’t award points to an artist simply for being Canadian and he disdained anything he saw as boosterish. He was willing to puncture homegrown heroes he thought were overblown, such as the designer Bruce Mau or the photographer Yousuf Karsh, and he didn’t share the reflexive anti-Americanism of other cultural nationalists. Many of his personal heroes, from Duke Ellington to Philip Roth, were quintessentially American. (Broadening his horizons further still, he compared Roth’s magnificent late period to those of Titian and Matisse.) Bob just happened to look around at the cultural scene in midcentury Canada and notice that we had our own Ellingtons and Roths.
Marcus Gee: Robert Fulford was a master of his ‘noble profession’
His brand of nationalism was refreshingly free of hang-ups. Bob didn’t fetishize a singular Canadian identity, recognizing that his country was defined by “diversity rather than uniformity,” as he wrote in an appreciation of Frank Gehry’s Art Gallery of Ontario redesign – a “richly diverse civic bazaar inhabited by many peoples from many places.”
The Fulford household was more tolerant than average when Bob was a boy: His father forbade him to march in anti-Catholic Orange Order parades and his mother Frances apologized for the antisemitism of The Merchant of Venice when she read it to him. Like his mother, who taught newcomers English in her retirement and even took a stab at learning Urdu, Bob celebrated the new immigrant society that had transformed the sleepy Toronto of his youth.
There were blind spots in Bob’s kaleidoscopic appreciation of Canadian culture. He had relatively little to say about the arts of French Canada or the country’s Indigenous peoples. He lived in Toronto his whole life, and his view of Canada was distinctly a view from the shores of Lake Ontario.
Fulford in his office at Saturday Night magazine in 1972.ERIK CHRISTENSEN/The Globe and Mail
But he was almost never close-minded. Sent to Montreal’s Expo 67 as a special correspondent for the Star, he fell in love with that bilingual island city. Although he worked on a typewriter well into the 1990s, new technologies and media didn’t daunt him. He wrote appreciatively of the Toronto sketch comedy show SCTV (which in the late seventies featured Eugene Levy, Martin Short, Catherine O’Hara and a who’s who of Canadian comedy arguably more impressive than the nascent Saturday Night Live), and loved aspects of the internet that facilitated research, such as the aggregation website Arts & Letters Daily.
The unexpected and novel sustained him, not just as fodder for his columns – although his son-in-law Stephen Marche calculated that he wrote 11,000 of them in the span of his 70-year career – but as a way of being in the world. He was hungrily curious, addicted to print. “If you are not learning, you’re dying,” he once wrote.
The simple fact that he could satisfy his creativity in public for seven decades without leaving the confines of his native country was an artifact of the era. A career like that is sadly unimaginable in the Canada of today, but an audience for his kind of cultural criticism was emerging in the ferment of the sixties, Canada’s coming-of-age decade.
At one point, Bob wrote a daily books column for the Star, covered the Toronto art gallery openings every Sunday, had his own CBC radio show and appeared regularly on the groundbreaking CBC current events program This Hour Has Seven Days. Canadians were trying to figure out who they were, and interested like never before in those who could help them do it.
For all his ubiquity in Canada, Bob’s fame never extended south of the border. A recent New Yorker article about the filmmaker David Cronenberg related an anecdote, bizarrely, involving “the novelist Robert Fulford,” although scholars will search in vain for any works of fiction under that name.
I think he must have made his peace with any obscurity he suffered outside of Canada. The truth was, he was good enough to appear in The New Yorker or any other English-language magazine. He just happened to have cultivated exactly the career and social life he wanted in his hometown of Toronto. Who needed New York?
There was an element of principle in his decision to stay Canadian, too. As a natural cosmopolitan with an eye for whatever was finely made – no matter what its origins – Bob came to nationalism late. He actually wrote a widely cited column in Saturday Night about his conversion experience and that of his generation, a piece published in 1970 whose kicker resonates more than ever today.
“What we didn’t realize,” Bob wrote, “was that if you weren’t a nationalist, in some sense at least, then somebody else’s nationalism would roll right over you.”
Actors Rick Moranis, left, and Dave Thomas in a scene from SCTV, a sketch comedy show that Fulford wrote about favourably.Handout via The Canadian Press
Gradually over the past 20 years or so, it seems like Canada has forgotten that point. Our sense of self has dissipated. It’s a hard thing to describe, but maybe one way is to ask: Who is today’s Bob Fulford? The question answers itself.
Maybe it’s because the internet has brought American pop culture even more intimately into our living rooms, into our very pockets. The overdue reckoning with Canada’s crimes against Indigenous people has undermined our national morale. (Witness the federal government’s decision to fly the Maple Leaf at half-mast for six months after unmarked graves were apparently found at the former Kamloops residential school.) Free trade with the U.S., an obvious economic boon, has possibly even fulfilled the prophecies of the 1980s nationalists who warned it would bring us too much into our neighbour’s orbit.
Now Donald Trump says he wants to annex Canada. Most of the country recoils at the idea. But it also forces us to ask, why not? What makes us cling to our nationhood? We know there’s an answer, but beyond fewer guns and more public health care, we sometimes struggle to articulate it.
Bob’s approach wasn’t to make oracular pronouncements about the Canadian soul. He was a journalist and so relished the specific. Instead of trying to divine the essence of our culture, he looked hard at particular books and plays and records and paintings, and he wrote down what he saw with discernment and authority. This is Canada, his work said, a worthwhile, flawed, endlessly various, often beautiful place.
To put it another way: Canada is a place that deserved Bob Fulford’s attention. It deserves ours, too.
Robert Fulford in 1993.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
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