Michael Coren looks uncomfortable in his own skin. Tucked into a booth at an English-style pub in downtown Toronto, he sips a pint of Diet Coke and fidgets like a teenager. Dressed like a dentist on a golf holiday -- snug-fitting, yellow, polo shirt and khakis -- Coren gives the impression of being a restless and constricted soul. It is as if, at any moment, his personality might explode out of his stubby body and fly off in search of a more suitably expansive home.
At 42, Coren is younger than you might think. Funny how morally conservative punditry has a way of aging its purveyors, making them seem stuffy before their time.
In appearance, he is equal parts intellectual imp and British soccer thug -- swollen and slightly jaundiced-looking, shaved head (his trademark), an empty hole in his ear where the stud used to be. His eyebrows appear to be missing, but on closer inspection, they are in fact so pale you can barely see them. His familiar face consists of a pointy nose, gap-toothed grin, pale narrow eyes. He is, all things considered, a very odd guy.
He is also a guy Canadians are seeing a lot of these days. Coren's television phone-in show, Michael Coren Live,airs every weeknight at 10 on the CTS, the Christian Television network. During the one-hour program, his familiar mug and briny accent work together opining on the issues of the day. There he can be found quoting scripture to guests who range from labour leaders and journalists to spiritual gurus.
But Coren, who made his name in Canada as a hard-line right-wing pundit, wants his audience to know he has changed. Since becoming an evangelical Christian six years ago, he insists he has transformed into a much more compassionate soul.
"Sometimes you have to change, otherwise you're a very shallow person," he says. "I was an attention-seeker in the past. Always mentioned in the gossip columns. Going out to book launches populated by the same people dressed in black feeling very cynical about each other. It was just awful. I think I misrepresented myself too. I was searching for an image that wasn't really me at all. Ten years ago, I was very pretentious. I spent a period of time wearing bow ties and smoking cigars and hating every minute of it. Simply having an English accent in Canada does convince some people you have an intelligence you don't -- which is not very fair to Canadians. I don't go out any more. Many doors have been closed to me because of my views."
What's this? Self-flagellation from one of the most notoriously brazen and unapologetic egos in Canadian letters and journalism? Such self-abasing talk would have been unthinkable from the lips of the old Michael Coren. You remember him, the vehemently anti-gay, anti-feminist, free-market-promoting, arts-funding-bashing newspaper columnist turned radio and television host.
"I'm a completely different character now," he maintains. "Before my conversion, I was mocking to gays. On many issues, I was angry and judgmental, but today my perspective on poverty has changed. I now believe deeply in the need for a welfare state and public health care and I'm a great supporter of an ethical foreign policy, whereas before I didn't really care."
Over the checkered course of his career in Canada, Coren has gone through many professional, political and personal incarnations. In a silver-tongued shape-shifter like himself, the three are, of course, never entirely separate. When he first arrived on Canadian soil in 1987, it was as a promising, young, literary biographer. To date, he has written 10 books, including biographies of G. K. Chesterton, H. G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle and C. S. Lewis. His movie-pegged biography of Tolkien (J.R.R. Tolkien: The Man Who Created Lord of the Rings)was recently published.
But the quiet existence of the literary biographer was not one that could contain Coren's personality. He could never content himself to be a Boswell to anyone else's Johnson. Some believe he made a mistake.
"I would have preferred it if he'd stuck to writing literary biographies," says Doug Pepper, former publisher at Random House Canada who is now at Random House in New York. Pepper published Coren's biography of G. K. Chesterton, as well as his collected Frank magazine columns (Coren's only book to make it on the bestseller list). "He had a real eye for that."
Coren's reputation in Canadian publishing was tarnished by an overwillingness to sign contracts for books that never materialized, most notably the authorized biography of Mordecai Richler, a project Coren struggled with for years before giving up and repaying the $60,000advance. "Michael is a very strange mixture," says Bruce Westwood, Coren's former agent and the person who negotiated the doomed Richler contract. "On the one side, you can't deny the intellect and the brilliance. But has he lost face in the publishing business? My goodness, yes. Why did he get the contracts in the first place? Because he's a fascinating, brilliant person and, once you get by the political leanings, he's an excellent writer. Michael has been a terrible loss to the Canadian writing community, and he has no one but himself to blame."
In the case of the Richler biography, Coren says he simply wasn't up to the job. "During the researching of it, I realized I'd need to know [Richler's]life so intricately. I just knew I couldn't do it. He deserves better. He deserves the real thing. I just hope for his sake it isn't an academic. He hated academics."
But some publishing insiders maintain the reason the project failed was because the Richler family refused to co-operate after Coren's bitter falling out with eldest son, Daniel -- the person who introduced Coren to Richler Sr. Daniel, however, says that while things did sour for a time between him and Coren, the bad blood had no bearing, as far as he knows, on Coren's decision to pull out. "He had written something in The Sun with a thinly veiled, unflattering portrait of my wife using dialogue from a dinner party at our house," Richler recalls. "When I tried to explain to him how incredibly disloyal this was, he gave me some sort of mealy-mouthed response and I was like, 'Fuck you, man.' "
"I think the reason he dropped the project was the result of double booking. My dad was very loyal once he pledged his allegiance to someone."
Coren established his reputation as a outspoken advocate of conservative values in the pages of this newspaper and later as a columnist for the Sun group papers (for whom he still writes a weekly column). He made many notable enemies by writing a not-so-anonymous social satire column for the gossip tabloid Frank, in which he mocked acquaintances and colleagues in Toronto's literary and media upper crust. "I left Frank after three years because it no longer seemed any fun," he says, with some regret. The column, modelled on Auberon Waugh's poisonously funny diary in Private Eye, started off as an anonymous gig, but Coren soon went public. "My ego got the better of me," he recalls. "The funny thing was that, even then, people didn't believe it was really me. I remember being at a party once and and a journalist came up and said, 'You know, you should really sue Frank for putting your name on that column.' "
Despite his reservations about the Frank stint now, Coren remembers what inspired him to take a mickey out the Canadian media establishment: "I've never been embraced by the Canadian media world. There is an establishment in this country that guards its borders very closely. When I first came here, The Globe was very pompous. It was that whole Upper-Canada-College-buttoned-down-striped-shirt thing -- and I didn't fully understand it at the time. Having come from Fleet Street, I thought, 'Why is this Canadian newspaper acting more pompous than the Times?' "
Coren's men's issues column, which appeared in The Globe, focused obsessively on the abuse men suffer at the hands of feminist extremism. Custody battles, domestic abuse and sexual harassment in which men were the victims of a legal system influenced by legions of hairy-legged Viragos were among his favourite hobby horses. It was a popular counterattack on the identity-based gender politics of time. Used to excess, however, the old saw proved a troublesome line of reasoning. How long, his critics argued, could Coren adopt the victim-based rhetoric of his ideological opponent before he, too, unwittingly fell into the same trap?
While Coren adores political trench warfare, he is not adept at choosing one party line and sticking to it -- unpredictability is something he prides himself on. As proof, Coren boasts of having powerful opponents on both sides of the political fence in Canada. Since his recent softening, invitations to Conrad Black and Barbara Amiel's Christmas parties have dried up. "Barbara didn't like the fact I'd changed some of my views. Prior to that I'd heard she wanted me to be the editor of the National Post before it was launched, not Ken Whyte. But after [the conversion]I was no longer one of the anoited."
But Coren could just as easily be cast as an attention-seeking ideological tramp, an emotionally insecure, but eager-to-please showman who comes up with a new act when the old one stops having the desired effect on his audience. "I have a reputation for being a loose cannon, which I'm proud of," he says. "People tend to see me as right-wing, I guess, which is a bit weird, but whatever. You can't control what people think."
The story of Coren's lifelong spiritual journey is perhaps the strangest, and most character-illuminating, tale of all. Born in the late 1950s to working-class Jewish parents in Ilford, Essex, Coren attended Hebrew school as a child and experienced "some anti-Semitism growing up, but nothing horrendous or scarring." Though three of his four grandparents were Jewish, he says he never really identified as a Jew. "I was Jew-ish, in the literal sense," he says.
While studying at Nottingham University, Coren developed an interest in the Christian faith, but not a high regard for Christians. "They all seemed so pathetic and victimized," he recalls. Years later, while writing the Chesterton biography, he felt intellectually drawn to Catholicism and converted (Chesterton was a devout Catholic). In 1984, Coren was knighted by the Catholic church, and three years later he met his Goan-born wife, Bernadette. They fell instantly in love, married, and settled in Toronto, raising their four children (ages 4 to 13) as Catholics.
Life, he recalls, was going along swimmingly for him as a half-hearted Catholic and family man until he underwent what he hesitantly describes as "a religious conversion."
Late one night, Coren was watching TV when he came upon a leading evangelical Christian writer, Roger Simpson, being interviewed. The next morning, he woke up a changed man.
"It sounds like a cliché, but everything was literally different. I felt really, really good. And people suddenly seemed different, no longer a mass, but complete individuals. But still I thought nothing of it -- maybe it was just a good day, right? I woke up the second day and I felt wonderful again, and throughout the day I had this deep desire to grab a Bible and read it. This feeling was accompanied by a desire to be silent and listen. I realized I wanted to pray -- and, man, this was really freaking me out! I fought it. I remember thinking 'This is nuts, I don't want this in my life. I don't want my life to change.' But after a while, I began reading scripture and praying in private. I told no one."
Eventually, Coren called his evangelical Christian friend, Justin. "I spoke to his wife. I said to her, 'I know this sounds strange, but I have to tell you, I feel this connection between Justin and Roger Simpson, the Christian writer. And his wife said, 'Twenty-two years ago in a coffee shop, Roger brought Justin to Jesus Christ.' " Coren looks up, his eyes wide with wonder.
And thus Michael Coren was reborn a Christian broadcaster -- a convenient niche for a man who had burned many bridges within the mainstream media.
Mention Coren's name in journalism and publishing circles, and you will find he has many former friends, people whom he charmed and subsequently offended. But even among the vast Coren-slagging camp, it is rare to find someone who has known him who does not retain a strange affection for his impish ways.
A Globe colleague, who asked not to have her name printed, recounts the story of the day then-Globe columnist Robert Fulford criticized Coren in print.
"When Fulford walked into the newsroom the day after the critical column was published, the entire Arts section gave him a standing ovation. That's how unpopular Michael was," she recalls. "But the fact is, he just never fit in. He's one of those guys who, in England, would look more normal than he does here. Over there, he'd just be a stylish mercenary."