The Trial That Shadowed Mordecai Richler
One of my projects over the past year has been reading through as much of the work by Canadian writer Mordecai Richler as I’m able to find. So far, that comprises all but one of his novels, most of his short stories, at least two-thirds of his essays, the three Jacob Two-Two books for kids, and some of his standalone nonfiction (what still eludes me: O Canada! O Quebec! his controversial 1992 treatise on separatism; On Snooker, which, well, is on the sport that isn’t pool, and published a few months before his 2001 death; the crime-ish 1957 novel A Choice of Enemies; and his 1977 travelogue Images of Spain.)
It’s for an essay I’m working on, for a publication to be determined someday — right now, the piece doesn’t quite hold together, and I’m not sure what’s missing, except that something is missing, likely not to be found till I’ve read every scrap he ever produced, and perhaps gone back to visit Montreal for the first time in several years. Though I didn’t grow up in there, I did attend university (at McGill) in the late 1990s, and spent so much time there as a child that it felt like my second home city. And Mordecai, the prodigal son, was a presence, because the world he wrote about was the world my grandparents settled in and my parents grew up in, down to the very streets.
I figured, doing this project, that I’d reflect on Richler as a Canadian-Jewish writer, and the unconscious influence he had upon my own Canadian-Jewish writer sensibility, if indeed he had it at all. What I did not expect to discover that two of his best novels — St Urbain’s Horseman and Barney’s Version — would revolve around accusations of heinous crimes and feature trials at critical junctures in the narrative. And that those novels derived those plot points from a real-life trial Richler attended in London in the early Sixties, when a film director he knew on trial for rape.
Here is how Charles Foran described the particulars in his 2010 biography Mordecai: The Life and Times:
“Florence [Richler, Mordecai’s wife] was an old friend of director Silvio Narizzano, a fellow Montrealer and Mountaintop Theatre alumnus who had joined the Canadian exodus to England in the fifties to work in TV. Narizzano and his wife, Bea, remained part of the expatriate scene. He came under a legal cloud that summer of 1963 when he was accused with another man of indecent assault, rape, and buggery. The victim was a Swedish au pair and the co-accused was a Londoner named Benjamin Franklin Levene. A navy deserter, the working-class Levene was known to police for a series of bomb hoaxes, one of which had shut down Victoria train station. At the trial the judge decided that Levene was a ‘pest,’ as News of the World put it, and merited seven years in prison. Narizzano, an upstanding citizen, had made errors of judgment in the company he kept; he received a fine.”
Narizzano, then thirty-six and primarily working for Grenada Television as a director, had fallen into a some sort of friendship with Levene, a couple of years older. How much Narizzano may have known of Levene’s past criminal doings was not clear. But in May 1963, both were arrested when the au pair, then eighteen, alleging the men, after asking her “to be a prostitute for them”, had bound her hands and beat her in a flat they shared in Belgravia, London. (The brief news account of the men’s arrest in the Liverpool Echo, with the headline TV MAN FOR TRIAL: Alleged Offence Against Au Pair Girl, printed the girl’s name in full. Since she is still alive, and her address is easily findable thanks to Swedish law, I won’t be printing her name here.)
Two months later, Narizzano and Levene went on trial at the Old Bailey. Richler attended the court proceedings, on his own or at times with another friend, Reuben Ship, or with Florence, who, according to Foran, “watched as [Richler] shifted from friend of the co-accused to cold-eyed reporter, taking mental notes on the already-emerging fault lines between hip and unhip, as well as the ageless class divisions underpinning the new Swinging London.” Or perhaps Richler wanted to see if someone he knew, who ran in the same Canadian expat circles as he and Ted Soloratoff and Ted Kotcheff did, someone his wife considered a friend, would be convicted of rape.
The au pair testified in mid-July 1963 about what happened to her. She was, according to the Daily Mirror, on the stand for two days. She said the assault happened just ten days after she’d arrived in London from Sweden. She said she was terrified, escaping her ordeal only after Narizzano and Levene fell asleep in the flat.
The cross-examination and closing arguments by the barrister defending the men was so brutal, so damning of the au pair’s character and morals, that the presiding judge made a point of calling it out, according to the Liverpool Echo. “If it was intended to keep her away to-day it has succeeded,” said the judge on July 16. If I understand the criticism it was meant to be ‘Look what kind of girl she is -- a filthy girl. She even has remained to listen to these things….Let it be said right away she has a right to be in court during a trial in which she is involved, and no one can be criticised for what is a plain legal right.”
The following day, Levene was found guilty and sentenced to serve a seven-year sentence. Narizzano was ordered to pay a 400-pound fine ; after the case concluded, Narizzano’s employer, Granada Television, said: “Mr. Narizzano’s job is still open.”
Another who wondered about Narizzano’s future was the journalist and future author William Weintraub, who would remain a good friend to Richler for many decades. “Say, what’s with Silvio? Was he framed? Does he still get work?” wondered Weintraub in September 1963. The answer was yes — and then some. Narizzano’s career ascended the success ladder. Two years later he directed Georgy Girl, starring Lynn Redgrave (seen with Narizzano in the picture below) in a star turn opposite Alan Bates and James Mason. Narizzano would continue to alternate between film and television work until his death in 2011. His Guardian obituary makes no reference at all to the rape case.
Narizzano had nothing more to do with Benjamin Levene, but Levene wasn’t finished with the case. He was released from prison early, in 1968. He proceeded to send harassing postcards to David Roxan, a News of the World reporter who covered the trial, as well as to Richler. Levene had learned of the 1971 publication of St Urbain’s Horseman, which so clearly based the tribulations of its lead character, Jake Hersh, upon Narizzano, with a villainous, politically incorrect and mordantly funny co-defendant, Harry Stein, equally inspired by Levene.
That Hersh was much more of an avatar for Richler was lost upon the ex-con, who bombarded Richler with dozens of cards. Some were stamped with images of Jesus. Some were “Sincere Sympathy” cards from “Your Sweet Harry Stein.” Some were of fascist and racist material. The harassment carried on for years, and Richler decided to stop showing the increasingly unhinged missives to Florence, such as this one from 1982: “You created me, so live with Harry Stein…Your bowles [sic] and bladder must have given way when you realized We found out And read the book??? Whos idea was it did you get a lot ‘a laughs, And a lot more cash??? Whose idea was it to try to kick me in the balls while I was undergoing the Treatment??? 7 years a crime your sidekick committed.”
In 1970, two years after getting out of prison, Levene sued Roxan and the News of the World for libel over its 1963 coverage of the rape trial. Levene took umbrage with the piece for concluding that “justice catches up with a vicious pest” and that being labeled a “hoaxer obnoxious” who “craved publicity like an addict needed a reefer” caused him to suffer, per his complaint, “hatred, ridicule, and contempt.”
During the libel trial, as covered by the Guardian on June 27, 1972, Levene claimed he was a “victim of lies” and as a result, “life has become such a total misery that unless I come here today to bring this action it is not worth living.” Levene railed against Roxan — “he publicly annihilated and slaughtered me” — and resented the depiction of the end of his time in the Navy; he had not been court-martialed but had “been invalided towards the end of the war with ‘very good’ character.”
Levene then concluded his argument by admitting to the all-male jury that he “may have been terribly irresponsible in my time, but I have never hurt anyone, I am not capable of wilful wickedness.” Never mind that he had been acquitted of the count of rape on a technicality, but convicted on the other violent acts against the Swedish au pair.
Three days later, the jury ruled in favor for Roxan and News of the World, and ordered Levene to pay their legal fees. “It would be a sad day if newspapers and publishers were forbidden to publish and comment on matters of public interest and facts leading to important convictions,” said Justice Melford Stevenson, according to the Guardian. “They are entitled to comment provided they do so fairly and without malice.”
Stevenson had one more comment for the jury. “What you will have to consider is whether a man convicted on rape and burglary in the same evening had a reputation worth anything at all when the article was published.” Levene vowed to appeal, but I couldn’t find any record of him doing so. Nor could I find out when, exactly, he perished.
He did, per Reinhold Kramer’s Mordecai Richler: Leaving St Urbain, try one last legal gambit in 1993, twenty-two years after the publication of St Urbain’s Horseman. Levene sued Richler and his UK publisher Weidenfeld & Nicolson for libel, claiming he’d been “unfairly maligned” in the novel, and requesting an injunction against further libel. The lawsuit went nowhere.
I don’t want to end this newsletter with the men involved. I want to end it with the au pair. I know her name, and I know where she lives, and I thought about contacting her, but that thought didn’t last long. What would be the point? What purpose would it serve to dredge up an old wound? It’s enough to know that there was a girl who arrived in London in search of something bright and hopeful, and a monstrous evening forced her to bare her terror to unyielding men, skeptical of her story, ready to pick it apart.
Was it enough justice that one man was convicted and the other deemed, essentially, to be in the wrong place at the wrong time in the worst sort of company? Did she watch Georgy Girl and wonder if the film should have been made at all? Did she read St Urbain’s Horseman and wonder about the inspiration? Or did she bury everything, carry on, and build a fortress so thick it hid her violent assault from anyone’s prying eyes, strangers as well as loved ones?
It seems more honest not to search for answers, but to leave them as questions.