Best man in the seat

Robert Fulford, 1932-2024

Robert Fulford, 1973

It’s Ken Whyte who taught me that journalistic fame is the most fleeting of all — fishwrap by sundown and all that — so I probably need to tell most of you who Robert Fulford even was. He was perhaps the great Canadian journalist of the last 70 years, if we think of journalism as the art of telling stories and helping other journalists tell theirs. He held a magazine called Saturday Night above water for decades after the forces of gravity and finance should have done for it, and his enthusiasms — for a story, a publication, a colleague — elevated their objects’ place in the culture a thousand times.

Fulford died on Tuesday at 92. It’s impossible to imagine him living a much shorter life. He had so much to do. Here are the obits in the Globe, the National Post and the Star. He worked at all three papers. The first two assigned the obit to their best writers well ahead of the dreadful day. The third carried CP. Fulford would have noticed.

Everyone’s quoting a piece Ken Whyte wrote when Fulford retired in 2020, shortly before he moved into a Toronto long-term care home. It’s here, paywalled. The thing I can barely convey to you today, and that weighed heavily on me when we were colleagues at the Post, was how vast Fulford’s talent was. You couldn’t read him without thinking, “Man, if this is the standard, I’m really going to have to start picking my game up.” Here’s Ken, on the beginning of Fulford’s career:

A native Torontonian, born in the Beach in 1932, he’d started in journalism while still in high school, reporting on amateur sports for CHUM radio. He dropped out in 1950 to join the Globe & Mail as a sports reporter, and by 1959 was a columnist for the Toronto Star. He produced a daily column about books and the arts for the Star, a crazy feat of productivity, especially given his high journalistic standards, his prodigious research (he read all the books, watched all the shows, attended all the galleries), and the fact that he was also hosting the weekly arts show This Is Robert Fulford on the CBC and freelancing for Down Beat and Saturday Night.

In case you missed it: he was a high-school dropout.

A lifetime later, Fulford astounded all of us by leaving the Globe to join the National Post when it was all of a year old. If anything, that particular choice — to stay away for the launch, but then to jump ship once he’d seen what we were up to — was validation beyond our hopes. Ken again:

I was going to attempt here a list of Bob’s greatest hits from the National Post but there are too many to choose from. By rough count, two thousand columns. Instead, I’ll give you a few samples from 2001, which is when I thought he got comfortable and demonstrated the full range of things he could profitably tackle for the paper. There was George W. Bush as a Shakespearean character. This piece on mendacious libel litigation. This one on dinosaur discoveries. This about draft dodgers in Canada. And this on lying. Here’s the first of a three-parter on the historian Niall Ferguson.

I first became aware of him in 1987, when I was an undergrad at the UWO Gazette. Saturday Night published a 100th-anniversary issue, glossy enough to persuade me to pick the thing off the newsstand and pay cash money for a copy. Mordecai Richler was in it, an excerpt from his upcoming novel, Solomon Gursky Was Here. The throwaway vignette about the tavern in the Eastern Townships. I was hooked.

Saturday Night is probably something I also need to define: a monthly magazine on Canadian topics, cheeky, underfinanced, entirely unashamed for more than a century to be in the business of telling Canadian stories as though they deserved to be told. A hobby for rich patrons, Norman Webster in the 1970s and 80s, Conrad Black afterward. Then it died. The glossy 100th-anniversary issue made me a regular reader. Fulford quit, nervously, when Black bought the magazine, but remained on cordial terms with his successors, John Fraser and Ken Whyte, and by 1999 he decided he didn’t even mind working for Black any more.

We had lunch twice. One was a get-to-know-you session after he joined the Post. He’d just written a column in which he declared that some young cultural figure was full of shit. All day today I couldn’t remember who it was, and now I remember but I’ll pretend I don’t. Fulford’s dismissive column drew an avalanche of praise from people who didn’t realize they couldn’t stand this person until Fulford told them it was all right. At lunch he roared with laughter. “People who don’t agree on anything agreed that this guy was a jerk,” he said. “I think I united the country, Paul!”

A couple of years later, the publisher of the Montreal Gazette thought I might make a good editor for the newspaper. He suggested a plan: I would quit my job as a smart-aleck Post columnist and try running something modest, like The Gazette’s editorial pages. If I didn’t wreck everything I would be promoted to editor-in-chief. It was tempting, but I was nervous. I was starting to think I might be a bit of a loner.

I jumped on a train from Ottawa and had lunch with Fulford in Toronto. He had been a great editor. Should I give it a try? He paused to consider it. “When I quit Saturday Night, I was despondent,” he said at last. “For months. And then one day I woke up and I thought, ‘Somewhere in Canada today, a writer is going to sleep through a deadline and a Saturday Night cover story is going to fall through. Or an advertiser is going to pull a major ad buy because they didn’t like somebody’s choice of a photo. Or some other catastrophe is going to threaten to wreck everything the people at Saturday Night have been working to accomplish.”

Pause for effect. “And it won’t be my problem.”

After that epiphany, he said, he slept like a baby, and while he still had another few million words to write, he never took another management job. “You’re a writer, Paul,” he said. “You don’t want to fire people.”

I headed back to Union Station, ready for my train home. At the newsstand on the way, I picked up a copy of The Gazette and saw that the owners had fired the publisher who’d offered me the job. The path Fulford had warned me against was foreclosed. But it was a great lunch.