Robert Fulford, a prominent figure in Canadian journalism for seven decades, has died at age 92.
Fulford died Tuesday afternoon “peacefully and surrounded by family,” according to Sarah Fulford, editor for Maclean’s.
In a career that began in the 1950s, Fulford would go on to work or contribute to: the Canadian Press, magazines Maclean’s and Toronto Life and newspapers Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail and National Post. He also hosted the CBC Radio program This Is Robert Fulford for several years beginning in 1967.
He was arguably most closely associated with Saturday Night, the magazine where he would enjoy a two-decade run as editor.
In 1984, Fulford was invested as an Officer of the Order of Canada, praised as “a man of critical integrity and a sage in his field” and for solidifying Saturday Night’s “position as a major organ of Canadian opinion and ideas.”
Robert Fulford interviews Marshall McLuhan on the effects of mass media.
The list of topics Fulford took on his writing in columns and longform pieces was much longer than the number of outlets he worked for, and included Canada’s national identify, English-French relations, Canada’s relationship with the United States, his hometown in the book Accidental City:The Transformation of Toronto, and on all manner of culture, especially after becoming the Star’s literary editor and daily arts columnist in 1959.
“I began reading Robert Fulford when I came to Toronto to go to [University of Toronto]. I learned so much about the city, the arts, writers, politics, you name it,” Bob Rae, Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations, said on social media on Tuesday. “When I got to know him he was such a presence — shy, within himself, but funny, even mordant. I was in awe of him. Still am.”
Inauspicious beginnings
Fulford was born in Ottawa in 1932 but grew up in Toronto, as his father A. E. Fulford was based there as a Canadian Press journalist.
In 1988’s Best Seat in the House: Memoirs of a Lucky Man, Fulford recounted growing up with friend and future legendary musician Glenn Gould in Toronto’s Beaches neighbourhood, and he recounted some early journalism jobs that were not prestigious or rigorous.
“I once wrote a profile of Foster Hewitt, whom I never met, for a magazine that an oil company gave away free to truck drivers,” he wrote in Best Seat in the House. “I wrote most of a travel magazine that never appeared, about places I had never been.”
Archives19:46Mordecai Richler and Robert Fulford discuss Canadian literature
Mordecai Richler and Robert Fulford discuss the Canadian literary scene.
Fulford became editor in 1968 of Saturday Night, by then a periodical whose origins were nearly a century old.
“It is not for everyone, but it is not just for the high-brow elite. You might term them the middle brows,” Fulford told the Globe two years later.
Fulford steered the magazine as it struggled to remain above water as a business entity, in an expanding newsstand filled with U.S. and European titles.
“The directness, the simplicity, the lack of affectation in his writing: he could have taught [George] Orwell,” Globe and Mail columnist and CBC At Issue panelist Andrew Coyne said on social media on Tuesday. “And my God the sting. When Fulford took you to the woodshed, in his even-tempered, understated way, you felt it for days.”
In one such example, Fulford assailed the Canadian Film Development Corporation, the predecessor of Telefilm Canada, for providing about $75,000 to help produce director David Cronenberg’s early film Shivers, also known as Parasite Murders. The film, Fulford wrote in 1976, was “an atrocity, a disgrace to everyone concerned with it — including the taxpayers.”
“If using public money to produce films like The Parasite Murders is the only way that English Canada can have a film industry, then perhaps English Canada should not have a film industry,” he wrote.
Back to Black
In 1987, Hollinger Inc. purchased Saturday Night from its previous owner, an investment company. Fulford resigned, expressing concern about Hollinger owner Conrad Black’s desire for a hands-on approach to the editorial content, according to a Globe and Mail report at the time. Saturday Night would cease publication in 2005.
Fulford found himself a Black employee late in his career, writing for the National Post, which he described in a 2000 column as having “burst from the gate like a thoroughbred” and was “much better than I had expected.”
“The editors of the National Post, under Mr. Black’s corporate umbrella, have created an editorial culture that is generous, creative, and encouraging,” he said. “To write for the Post is a pleasure.”
Former Post editor Kenneth Whyte said in a 2020 tribute upon Fulford’s retirement that he had endless curiosity.
“Bob was always writing in the spirit of ‘I can’t wait to share this,'” Whyte wrote.
Ideas54:25The Triumph of Narrative – Part 1
The 1999 CBC Massey Lectures by Robert Fulford |
Fulford wrote several books of nonfiction, including The Triumph of Narrative: Storytelling in the Age of Mass Culture, an outgrowth of his appointment as the CBC Massey lecturer for 1999. Fulford’s examination touched on the role of gossip, journalism, and unreliable narrators.
“If we ignore the technology for a moment and consider the stories and themes, mass culture appears to circle endlessly around the same trail, meeting on its path again and again the same characters in roughly the same stories,” he wrote. “It is a good general rule that the more successful a work of mass culture, the more it will conform to a pattern with which our grandparents were on intimate terms.”
Fulford’s last published work was Life in Paragraphs: Essays in 2020.
According to an obituary in Wednesday’s Globe and Mail, Fulford is survived by four children, two grandchildren and his second wife Geraldine Sherman, who he met while hosting his CBC Radio program.