For my father-in-law Bob Fulford, life was columns

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Stephen Marche is a writer based in Toronto.

Bob Fulford once told me that the obituaries for journalists are always more prominent than they deserve. It’s a kind of afterlife perk of the profession, to be overemphasized in death in the pages of the newspapers and magazines you once filled. If journalism consists largely of saying “Lord Jones is dead” to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive, as G.K. Chesterton, the English critic put it, journalists never shy from relating, at length, the deaths of our own Lord Joneses. But I doubt it’s possible to overemphasize Bob’s role in Canadian culture. If you lived in this country between 1960 and 2020, and you picked up a newspaper or a magazine, you read Robert Fulford. He played a role in your life.

Bob was my father-in-law. He was also my friend, and a colleague. He embodied the essence of a columnist to me. His career produced several interesting books – 1995’s Accidental City is still the best thing written about Toronto, the city Bob loved, and his Massey Lectures are a vivid testament to his faith in narrative – but they were diversions from his main practice. He could make a book, if need be, but writing columns was his state of being.

I believe he may have written more columns than anyone else in history. He began professionally at 16, and continued, without significant interruption, to the age of 88. His first columns reported on high-school sports, and the one thing that did not interest him in this world was sports – and yet he wrote fluently and enthusiastically. If they’d offered him the paint-drying beat, he would have taken it, and crushed it. For seven years, he wrote a five-days-a-week book column for The Toronto Star, with a column on art on Saturday. Almost the entire time I knew him, for nearly 30 years, he was writing three columns a week. Now extend that over the course of 70 years. That’s 11,000 columns. Eleven million words. Almost 20 War and Peaces.

He was 92 years old when he died. The secret to his longevity was smoking unfiltered Gitanes for decades, drinking heavily, and eating too much. His idea of exercise was walking to the magazine store and carrying home stacks of issues. But he was ferociously health-focused if he thought it was necessary to his work. He quit drinking at 60, cold turkey, just like that. I asked him why, and he told me that, at 60, a writer has to choose between drinking and writing. Most choose drinking. Bob chose writing.

In his late seventies, he had a stroke which left him with some speech aphasia from which he largely recovered. His doctors considered his recovery a miracle, and he achieved that miracle through the sheer will to write again. It was not necessarily even will. It was his nature. In the end, he stopped writing columns only when vascular dementia took away his capacity. The columns grew shorter and shorter until they weren’t there any more.

For Bob, life was columns. The world arrived to him in thousand-word jolts. As a son, he was a columnist. His father had been a reporter for The Canadian Press. As a husband, he was a columnist. Geraldine, who was his radio producer before she became his wife of 54 years, edited every piece. As a father, he was a columnist, too. My wife, who herself became a magazine editor, remembers research trips – the Stratford Festival, art-gallery openings, bookstores – and colouring on the floor of his office as he banged on his old typewriter. Babies were only of mild interest to him, but children who had ideas, who could introduce him to a new trend, he loved. Bob accepted me as potential son-in-law material when I mentioned to him, at one of our first meetings, that I had met the painter Alex Colville and that he collected fast, expensive cars. He got a column out of my anecdote. I was OK in his books after that.

Later, when I became a columnist myself, we would meet for lunch and talk shop, although he was never the kind of person to lecture younger writers. Toronto is full of journalists 30, 40, 50 years younger than him who remember his generosity fondly. “I’m old enough to have protégés who are has-beens,” he once wrote. I remember, coming into his house one day, seeing a high-school student talking with him in his office. The kid was thinking about a career in journalism. Bob met with everyone who asked to meet with him.

He wrote during the peak of column-writing, before the digital revolution transformed how people write and how they read, when newspapers had devoted audiences and fat profit margins. This business was in his blood. He could recall fondly the heat of linotype machines, and how in rural papers they tried to cool the air by running water. He told me about an editor who kept clippings of his staff writers’ outputs and weighed how much copy they had produced over the course of a year. He told me about an editor who made the writers hand in the stub of a pencil before issuing them a fresh one. He told me that Graham Greene had a habit of going broke, and that James Baldwin was the saddest man he ever met in his life.

He never criticized my writing, although he did have a pet peeve. He hated backed-in sentences, sentences like this one: “The creator of the murder-mystery genre, Wilkie Collins wrote The Moonstone in 1868.” If I ever used such a bad apposition, I would inevitably receive a note. Once, I intentionally put a backed-in sentence into a piece just to see if he would notice; I received an e-mail the next morning.

He taught me to buy the most expensive chair you can afford and to have hundreds of pens in the house. You never want to give yourself an excuse not to write. He gave me one truly indispensable piece of advice, and I still believe it is the only real rule of the writing life: “Always have more than one boss.” The reason for that rule is simple enough: A writer needs to be willing to be fired. The columnists who survive, the columnists who resonate and who matter, serve readers. They don’t serve causes, they don’t serve editors, they don’t serve themselves. They serve readers. Bob served readers.

Bob served readers through a rabid, almost pathological curiosity. The influx of books into his house was extraordinary. He read at least three books a week and I was always amazed at how he could find the one interesting chapter in, say, a monograph about Canadian cultural policy out of some prairie university press, and squeeze an interesting thousand words out of it.

Bob’s columns were an act of continuous synthesis. He had an enormous file system of clippings. Take anything: The Bento box, Yitzhak Rabin’s corpse, a reprint of Lady Into Fox. What did it mean? What did it amount to? He would write excellent pieces on Middle Eastern politics, a new Shakespeare adaptation and The Big Bang Theory, often in the same week. Bob wrote the first drafts of the history of Expo 67 and Canadian art and jazz. He was indispensable on those subjects. At his peak, in the 1970s and 1980s, his columns were as good as any that have been written in this country.

Readers go to columnists for insight and curiosity, but also to have their own confusions and general misprisions recognized, to test out ideas about what the hell is going on. The columnist, as opposed to the novelist or the scholar, writes in time. Moment by moment, we make sense. The columnist writes as people live, in motion and greedily and forgetfully. The point of being a columnist is not to be right, but to grow slightly less wrong after careful inspection of reality, insofar as possible. We are not, on this Earth, given to anything other than such partialities. To have somebody to be wrong with you is of great comfort in this world. When readers would come up to Bob on the street, they were immediately intimate with him, as if they knew each other. They had already been having a conversation with him. He just happened not to have been present.

The columnist part of him was the last to go: As the vascular dementia took him, he still read the papers and magazines, pen in hand, underlining key passages, in the service of columns that he could never write. On his deathbed, my wife read to him from his favourite poet W.H. Auden. He once told me that the ten dollars he spent as a boy on a copy of Auden’s Collected Poems was the best investment he ever made. Think of how many columns he got out of it.

Bob was not dead two hours before I pitched this piece to the editors at The Globe and Mail. I know he would approve. “Writing an obituary of a notable person seemed to me, for many years, a desirable assignment,” he wrote in a wonderful piece about obituary writing for The Queen’s Quarterly. “Mastering this minor journalistic art, the printed gesture of farewell, seemed important to me.” Writing obituaries is how columnists process death. At one of our lunches, I asked him why I found myself compelled to write even during grand personal tragedies and celebrations, why I wrote the day my father died, on the days my children were born. “You can’t control life,” he told me, “but you know how to control a sentence.” This is the cosmic purpose of the columnist. He wrote my father’s obituary for me.

The morning after his death, I showed a draft of this column to my wife, who edits Maclean’s magazine and sometimes my stuff. “I feel bad that Bob will never be able to read this,” she told me, a little teary. Then she immediately began cutting and sharpening and reordering.

I can see Bob, sitting with the piece, pen in hand, underlining whatever parts might be valuable, leaving the rest to the silence he has so unwillingly, unpunctually entered.