Robert Fulford, who died Tuesday aged 92, was one of Canada’s leading cultural journalists.
As a critic and essayist, his expertise spanned art, literature, architecture and music. As a columnist on current affairs, he grappled with some of the most urgent questions in Canadian justice and politics.
His famously clear prose was the product of fastidious rewriting, always at least twice, a rule he shared with the generations of younger writers he edited and mentored. Publishing, as he used to say, was a “necessary evil” that sadly stopped the rewriting process.
He wrote and rewrote for all the Toronto broadsheets and the leading magazines, and did radio on CBC and an interview show on TVO. He became a public intellectual in the post-war glory days of Canadian journalism as the city loosened up into a dynamic cultural centre, no longer the dourly provincial “gray lady” he described in his 1996 book Accidental City: The Transformation of Toronto. He remained a prominent voice on culture and current affairs when he retired in 2019, closing with a column on the urban theorist Jane Jacobs. A new collection of his essays, A Life In Paragraphs, was published in 2020.
He had lived in Toronto most of his life.
He was editor of Saturday Night magazine for 19 years, where he also reviewed movies under the pseudonym Marshall Delaney, which ironically freed him to reveal more about himself and his passions. He wrote regular columns in Maclean’s, the Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, and for twenty years in the National Post. He has several honorary degrees and is Canada’s all time leader in gold National Magazine Awards.
He also contributed to Queen’s Quarterly, which let him write long. He liked a joke the writer Morley Callaghan made about him, that he was really good for about four or five thousand words.
Fulford gave the 1999 Massey Lectures on The Triumph of Narrative: Storytelling in the Age of Mass Culture, arguing for the centrality of stories in human life, both public and private, from gossip to literature and the grandest histories.
Fulford stood well apart from them because he was an intellectual and they weren’t
He was a terrific gossip as well as a wonderful mentor, said John Fraser, who succeeded him as editor at Saturday Night. He had a keener eye for culture than the other giants of that era in Canadian journalism, Peter C. Newman and Pierre Berton.
“Fulford stood well apart from them because he was an intellectual and they weren’t,” said Fraser, executive chair of the National NewsMedia Council and former master of Massey College. At the end of a Fulford column, you often felt different about something you thought you knew about. His talent was to see through the “public cant” on politics, arts, architecture, music, especially his love for jazz, or anything really, and to deliver something original.
“He made you think,” Fraser said. “It was crucial that he wasn’t academically trained, because he didn’t feel any restrictions on where he could go.”
Fulford was “Mr. Saturday Night,” as the Star once called him, a striking figure with a pronounced forehead who came to look, as a 2007 profile in the Ryerson Review of Journalism observed, like “a cross between Alfred Hitchcock and Mr. Weatherbee.”
Robert Marshall Blount Fulford was born in Ottawa on Feb. 13, 1932. Journalism ran in the family, including a great-grandfather who edited a London, Ont. newspaper, and great uncles in the American press. His father A.E. Fulford was a Canadian Press journalist who died in 1957. His mother Frances Gertrude Blount Fulford retired from Eaton’s, volunteered teaching English to immigrants, and died in 1995.
Fulford grew up on Southwood Drive in the Beaches area of Toronto, where his next-door neighbour and best friend was Glenn Gould, who became a world famous pianist.
There’s an inexhaustible curiosity about public life and the human experience in Fulford’s journalism
Aged 13, he had a job delivering telegrams in Toronto’s east end, and a memory of leaving work on a summer day to see the papers with news of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
Through his father’s connections, he was hired as a 16-year-old weekend copy boy at The Globe and Mail, which he found more interesting than class at Malvern Collegiate Institute, from which he did not graduate.
Having worked his way up to writing about sports and crime, he jumped ship and wrote a daily books column for the Toronto Star, appearing in the Saturday paper alongside Robertson Davies, solidifying his reputation as a boy wonder.
“American novels have been few and frequently disappointing so far this season, but the publisher’s lists for the months ahead suggest that 1959 may turn out to be a fairly good year after all,” he wrote in an early piece, anticipating a new William Faulkner novel.
The year 1959 did in fact turn out well for his journalism. For example he wrote a splashy front section feature on an exciting new literary community known as the “Beat Generation.” At New Year’s, he made a prediction for 1960: “No one, at any time, will be bored by anything I write.”
That held true throughout a singular career.
After stints at Canadian Homes and Gardens and Mayfair, in depth coverage of Expo ’67 and some back and forth between the Star and Maclean’s, he became editor of Saturday Night magazine in 1968, which he ran for nearly two decades.
In 1970 he married Geraldine Sherman, who is also an arts journalist and used to produce radio shows at CBC. They first met and fell in love while making a radio show together, called “This Is Robert Fulford.”
One of their two daughters, Rachel Fulford, was an executive producer on Trailer Park Boys. The other, Sarah Fulford, is editor of Maclean’s, and previously of Toronto Life, where he also used to write. Fulford also has a son and daughter from his first marriage to the late Jocelyn Dingman.
He was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1984, with a notice that he is “rightly described as a man of critical integrity and a sage in his field.”
In 1987, he quit Saturday Night when it was bought by Conrad Black’s Hollinger. He wrote a memoir in 1988, taught journalism, wrote and rewrote. He was a longtime top tier Globe columnist chafing against new management when he joined the National Post in 1999, prompted in the final moment by a Globe copy editor who changed “Hemingway” to the correct but tin-eared “Mr. Hemingway.”
“There’s an inexhaustible curiosity about public life and the human experience in Fulford’s journalism,” wrote Kenneth Whyte, the Sutherland House publisher and former National Post editor who hired Fulford and also used to edit Saturday Night, in an appreciation in 2020, not long after Fulford’s final Post column. “He’ll go anywhere and everywhere, and he approaches each subject with intelligence, a wealth of reference and enthusiasm. That last quality is crucial. Ennui is an occupational hazard of newspaper columnists. Bob was always writing in the spirit of I-can’t-wait-to-share-this. And he meant it.”
EDITORS’ NOTE:In this story published Oct. 1, 2024, The Canadian Press erroneously attributed the quotation “all-out war” to Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly in the third paragraph. In fact, Joly did not use that phrase. She said the latest moves by Israel and Iran are risking further escalation in the Middle East.
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