Robert Fulford, shown in 1993, spent decades as a journalist and over this time he wrote or co-authored more than a dozen books, contributed to Canada's leading publications, including The Globe and Mail., and was inducted into the Order of Canada.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
In 1954, when the black art of industrial psychology was gaining a foothold in Canada’s more voguish executive suites, Robert Fulford submitted to two days of personality probing – Rorschach, IQ, aesthetic appreciation tests, etc. – designed to ascertain his sociability and fitness for management at Canadian Homes and Gardens, where he was then on staff.
“He is very alert and appears better at tasks which require quick, accurate thinking, than sustained concentration,” the resulting report read, according to an account of the episode Mr. Fulford provides in his 1988 autobiography, Best Seat in the House: Memoirs of a Lucky Man. The attention deficit disorder divined (if not diagnosed) by the consulting psychologist may have doomed Mr. Fulford in school – he had dropped out in frustration before graduating Grade 12 – but his restless need to seek out a never-ending array of new subjects also proved one of his greatest natural gifts.
Over a career that spanned more than seven decades, Mr. Fulford wrote himself into being as an agile public intellectual, pronouncing with encyclopedic knowledge on contemporary art, film, books, urban planning, jazz, geopolitics and dozens of other subjects.
Mr. Fulford died on Tuesday at the age of 92, at Meighen Manor, a Toronto long-term care residence where he had been living for the past three years.
A champion of Canadian arts, he nevertheless disdained the alarmist anti-Americanism of his fellow cultural nationalists. And with a mammoth appetite and ferocious work ethic compensating for his lack of formal education and training, Mr. Fulford was an early exemplar of the multiplatform threat, hosting TV or radio programs while juggling full-time editing or reporting jobs, advisory board memberships and other freelance assignments. He wrote or co-authored more than a dozen books, contributed to more than 50 publications, was inducted into the Order of Canada, won armfuls of awards, and revived the critical fortunes of Saturday Night magazine during an acclaimed editorship that stretched almost 20 years.
“There’s an inexhaustible curiosity about public life and the human experience in Fulford’s journalism,” wrote Ken Whyte, under whose editorship Mr. Fulford became a twice-weekly columnist at the National Post in 1999, in an October, 2020, online tribute. “He’ll go anywhere and everywhere, and he approaches each subject with intelligence, a wealth of reference, and enthusiasm … Bob was always writing in the spirit of I-can’t-wait-to-share-this.”
Mr. Fulford sits in his office at Saturday Night magazine in 1977. After becoming the magazine's editor in 1968, he reanimated the publication with new writers and more coverage of Canadian arts, culture and politics.Erik Christensen / The Globe and Mail
Robert Marshall Blount Fulford was born in Ottawa on Feb. 13, 1932, the third of four children of Frances Gertrude (née Blount) and A.E. (Ab) Fulford, a hard-driving Canadian Press reporter and editor whose big stories included the Dionne quintuplets and the 1939 visit to Canada by King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. Shortly after Robert’s birth, the family relocated to Toronto for the elder Fulford to take a job at CP headquarters, settling in the remote Beach area of the city.
One of Mr. Fulford’s earliest journalistic efforts was a squib for his mimeographed Grade 9 class newspaper about his friend, next-door neighbour and Malvern Collegiate classmate, a budding talent named Glenn Gould. “He is a confirmed bachelor at 13 and thinks popular music is terrible,” the 14-year-old Mr. Fulford wrote. In 1952, the two friends founded a company, New Music Associates, as Mr. Fulford tried his hand as an impresario, co-producing three concerts featuring Mr. Gould, including his first live performance, in October, 1954, of the piece with which he would become synonymous, Bach’s Goldberg Variations. The company ceased operations in 1955, after Mr. Gould took New York by storm with a concert that January.
By then, Mr. Fulford was already a working journalist. Through his father’s connections, he had snagged a part-time position as a copy boy at The Globe and Mail while he was still at Malvern; in 1950, at the age of 18, he quit school and joined the newspaper’s sports department, picking up the scraps left behind by older colleagues: high-school matches, lacrosse, water skiing at the Canadian National Exhibition, canoe races, rowing, lawn bowling.
It was an unlikely position for someone who, as he wrote in his memoir, “didn’t like to watch people play games.” (More than half a century later, he would win a National Magazine Award for an essay published in Queen’s Quarterly, “Those Imbecilic, Stultifying Games: Notes on the Age of Sports,” which dripped with such disdain for the “sports-entertainment complex” it felt like an exorcism of that barely tolerated first job.) In 1952, editors granted Mr. Fulford’s request for a general assignment position, and he spent the next two years covering news of the day: murders, natural disasters, benumbing Canadian Club speeches, city hall.
But he had greater aspirations. “My hope was eventually to write magazine articles and books, but I was also beginning to realize that when I hear a good story, I have an almost physical need to tell it,” he explained in his 1999 CBC Massey Lectures, The Triumph of Narrative: Storytelling in an Age of Mass Culture. “In a simpleminded twenty-year-old’s way, I began thinking how I could express that urge in my work. I wanted to write long articles that used some of the techniques of literature, and I began studying journalists who had mastered that trick.”
In a hurry to broaden his experience, over the next half-decade Mr. Fulford joined the editing staff at the Maclean-Hunter magazines Canadian Homes and Gardens, and Mayfair, where he cut his critical teeth on the growing visual-arts scene. After a few pieces about jazz for the Globe, he became the freelance Toronto correspondent for Down Beat magazine.
He married Jocelyn Dingman, a fellow Globe and Mail reporter, in 1956. They had two children, James (born in 1958) and Margaret (1960).
In 1958, Mr. Fulford landed at The Toronto Star as literary editor and a daily arts columnist, writing about books Monday to Friday and visual arts for the Saturday paper, where he became an early champion of local artists such as Michael Snow.
In addition to the usual American and European literary sensations and gossip, the young Mr. Fulford sought to cover the fledgling English-Canadian literature scene, though at the time he was an ambivalent cultural nationalist. It wasn’t until 1970, as he declared in a Notebook column for Saturday Night, that he finally got over the attitude, common among those of his generation, who “grew up believing that, if we were very good or very smart, or both, we would someday graduate from Canada.” After years spent opposing nationalism, he realized, “that if you weren’t a nationalist, in some sense at least, then somebody else’s nationalism would roll right over you.”
He put that into practice at Saturday Night after he became its editor in the spring of 1968, reanimating the magazine with new writers and more coverage of Canadian arts, culture, and politics. (He had already been one of its most high-profile writers, albeit pseudonymously, serving as film critic Marshall Delaney since 1965.) In 1972, he told The Globe and Mail that Saturday Night was about “the survival and flourishing [of the] Canadian identity.”
But the monthly was itself barely surviving, and in the fall of 1974 it suspended operations.
Even after a fundraising campaign enabled a relaunch in April, 1975, the magazine’s financial fortunes remained bumpy, until the Webster family purchased it in the spring of 1980 and pledged new backing, allowing Mr. Fulford to finally breathe a sigh of relief and focus solely on editorial matters. The change bore bountiful fruit: The following year, Saturday Night scored a record five gold medals at the National Magazine Awards.
Mr. Fulford also returned to long-form writing, turning out a series of features that won him eight gold NMAs over five years. He left Saturday Night after it was sold to Conrad Black in 1987 because he feared editorial interference. Still, he later worked happily for Mr. Black’s National Post, and chastised those who found glee in the controversial media mogul’s legal troubles.
Mr. Fulford’s writers praised his deft touch, which extended to line edits executed with the precision and passion of a Renaissance sculptor. In an introduction to A Life in Paragraphs, Mr. Fulford’s collection of essays published in October, 2020, writer Ian Brown describes the first time, in the late 1970s, he watched the editor work through a story he’d written, about the Inco strikes.
“It was as if he had the purer version of the story memorized in his head, and he was cutting through to that essence,” Mr. Brown wrote. “But what amazed me most of all was the way he seemed to understand the story as a physical entity, as a weight of facts and sentences and paragraphs in the form of pages. We had to carve the story out of that block. This act of engineering was going to try to take up actual space in the attention span of readers, so it had to be worthy of the spot.”
Still, Mr. Fulford’s relationships with writers – even those whose careers he had helped launch by plucking their submissions from the slush pile – were often complicated.
“Bob, by his own admission – and he said this to me more than once – was ferociously competitive with men, including men of a different generation, like Ian Brown,” observed Katherine Ashenburg, who served as Mr. Fulford’s editor when he became a weekly arts columnist for The Globe in 1992. Still, she recalled attending the 1996 National Magazine Awards gala with Mr. Fulford, which was hosted by Mr. Brown, when the men were in the midst of public mudslinging. She braced herself. “But at the end of the evening Bob turned to me and said, ‘He did a really good job.’ So I was very pleased that he could be fair, even in the midst of his rivalry, or whatever it was with Ian.”
But then, Mr. Fulford operated with a sense of noblesse oblige. In 1979, writing in the pages of This Magazine, the playwright and essayist Rick Salutin attacked a Saturday Night cover story that, as he saw it, simultaneously praised the gains of feminism while assuring readers the “women’s movement” was no longer necessary. “So Mr. Fulford has a larger message, and that message is, The System Works,” wrote Mr. Salutin, who dubbed the smug rhetorical manoeuvre “Fulfordism.”
Mr. Fulford responded to Mr. Salutin’s charges in the pages of Saturday Night. “We didn’t know each other,” Mr. Salutin recalled. “I was this scruffy playwright leftist, but he didn’t think it was beneath him to engage as if we were equals. And his response was respectful.” Two years later, Mr. Fulford commissioned a lengthy cover story from Mr. Salutin about the history of Jews in Canada.
He had his limitations. “Bob was totally, sometimes hilariously, ungifted in certain areas of locomotion and outdoor activity,” noted author Douglas Fetherling in his 1996 memoir Way Down Deep in the Belly of the Beast: A Memoir of the Seventies. “He never did learn to drive an automobile, for instance. His wife, Geraldine, had once tried to teach him, and she took him out for some practice on a country road. Far off in the distance Bob saw another car approaching, menacingly he believed, and so he drove into a ditch.”
Over a career that spanned more than seven decades, Mr. Fulford, pictured in 1988, wrote himself into being as an agile public intellectual with encyclopedic knowledge on contemporary art, film, urban planning, jazz, geopolitics and dozens of other subjects.Supplied
Mr. Fulford had divorced his first wife, Ms. Dingman, in 1970, and that same year married Geraldine Sherman, his original producer on the CBC Radio show This is Robert Fulford. They had two children, Rachel (born 1971) and Sarah (1974). Ms. Dingman died in 1976. He leaves Ms. Sherman, his four children and two grandchildren.
He had been mulling his own demise for years. After suffering a stroke in 2008, he wrote an essay for Queen’s Quarterly, How It All Comes Out: The Obit Writer Reluctantly Thinks of Death, trying to reconcile the significance of the lives he had celebrated in obituaries during his career with the continuing cruelties of the world as depicted by W.H. Auden in the poem September 1, 1939, composed during the outbreak of the Second World War.
“What, then, can we do as we live out our lives?” Mr. Fulford wondered rhetorically. “Follow Auden and, so far as we are able, ‘Show an affirming flame.’”