C.P. Champion on a Toronto historian’s memoirs
© The Dorchester Review Vol. 2 No. 1 Spring/Summer 2012
“The lives of historians are generally a bore,” Niall Ferguson has said, “just scribble, scribble scribbling.” That is probably true for most readers whose first choice would not be a historian’s memoirs. But at their best, such apologias can be a stirring encounter between the scribe and his own life and times. John Lukacs’ Confessions of an Original Sinner takes one from pre-war Hungary through the events in The Last European War, A History of the Cold War, and his other books, to the pretentiousness of much of American elite academe today. Lukacs calls himself a “reactionary” rather than a conservative: half-Jewish, half-Catholic, nostalgic for the bourgeois civilization of interwar Budapest, he is more humanly-grounded than Eric Hobsbawm, the soft-spoken communist who, discussing his memoirInteresting Times on BBC Radio, said of Stalin’s victims: “dead is dead.” Quebec historian Marcel Trudel’sMemoirs of a Less Travelled Road reveal a liberal who adopted French Enlightenment hubris and the predictable attitudes of his time: the “rebellious” anti-clericalism, bohemianism, and secularism of the ascendant quiet revolution.
Michael Bliss’ Writing Historyis more smug and less rewarding. Regarded as one of (English) Canada’s top historians, he retired from the University of Toronto in 2006 “satisfied” at having “gone the distance in a good profession.” He is appropriately scathing of the “academic mouse race,” a world of “unspeakable dreariness,” his department a “soul destroying” nest of ignorant, idle posturing and waste. The “fashionable post-modern relativism” of the 1980s and 1990s was sophomoric, he says, “based on fallacies we had covered in week two of second year ethics,” and “most social theorizing” is “bunkum.”
Bliss was reputed by some to be a conservative. This is a mistake. As a student he fell under the spell of socialists Stanley Knowles and Kenneth McNaught, but distanced himself from the NDP and Marxism, which he came to see as a “surrogate religion” (111). He refers to Stanley Ryerson’s communist history as “almost cartoonish” and McNaught, the Marxist professor, as “the Cadillac-driving Rosedale Red.” In the 1970s he defended Conrad Black’s Duplessis from an attack by Ramsay Cook, his own mentor who as an ideological Trudeauite propounded the incontrovertibility of the Leftist doctrine of the pre-1960 grande noirceur. Last year Bliss pronounced the era of Tommy Douglas and socialized health care over, and published in the Globe an admirable indictment of the contemptible Norman Bethune. He is conservative in the traditionalist sense that he believes that modern society is afflicted by “appalling selfishness and communal disintegration,” citing public sympathy with Robert Latimer, who in 1993 gassed his crippled twelve-year-old daughter, Tracy, to death by shutting her inside his pick-up truck and directing the exhaust fumes into the cab through a hose.
Like his contemporaries J.L. Granatstein and Desmond Morton, Bliss believed that promoting national history was a public duty, the tenured historian’s patriotic contribution to nation-building. Such men adopted nationalism as a surrogate gospel exercised through Toronto noblesse oblige, academic bonhomie, and TV appearances. They took a dim view of younger historians who abandoned national history and “turned inward” towards regionalism, women’s history, and other particularisms, “personalized, privatized, and solipsistic.” Bliss condemns parochialism but refers to his own Toronto institution as “Canada’s University.”
He claims as his models A.J.P. Taylor for short sentences and Gibbon for elegance. For relaxation he likes Joseph Conrad, P.G. Wodehouse, Anthony Powell, Penelope Lively, and Joyce Carol Oates. He approves of Pierre Berton’s wide-ranging, “professional” popular books but loathes Peter Newman as “unreadable, inaccurate, smarmy,” and “sniggering.” But do Bliss’ worthy biographies of tycoons and medical giants imply a liking for Carlyle and a rejection of Tolstoy? The memoir is silent. He offers few thoughts on the interplay of history with memory, identity, or culture. Describing the loss of his thin Methodist christianity during a “long shower” in 1961 when a callow “flash of insight” revealed to him that “God was a superstitious invention” and “life after death … probably logically untenable,” he echoes the second-year “philosophy” that he himself disdains. Bliss had been considering ministry in the United church after initially poor academic results. South Ontario Methodists, whom Loring Christie called “a vicious breed,” were blockheadedly anti-papist and we later get a glimpse of casual anti-Catholicism: a “relic” of the medical giant Sir William Osler, kept in an old whisky tin, which Bliss calls “better than anything the Vatican had.”
But is this all that the great historian has to say about two thousand years of culture, of the predicament of modern man, apart from “radical Cartesian doubt” adopted at U. of T.? Bliss has sought in the heroes of scientific discovery and medical breakthroughs — in biographies of Osler, Banting, Cushing — a temporal salvation to replace the weak puritanism he lost at age twenty. He was not a man to stand against the trends of the times: he admired the Kennedys and deplored Vietnam, where he believed America was “destroying an Asian civilization.” Trudeau was “an amazing cross between John F. Kennedy and the young Laurier” and, “I told our children that Trudeau would be a pretty good role model for them to follow.”
Bliss’ fight for Canada was really a fight to preserve Trudeau’s legacy. Teaching history, he says, drove him into public affairs. He was “frustrat[ed] with the parochialism of the Canadian history beat.” Canada was a “Mickey Mouse sort of a country in some respects” compared to the United States. Bliss embraced Trudeaumania, became disillusioned in the mid-1970s, and redoubled his devotion in the 1980s. In between he liked Bob Stanfield and Joe Clark. “I think we were both attracted,” a colleague wrote, “by Clark’s … attempt to formulate a conservatism that transcended rather than repudiated Trudeau’s statism” – in other words, something that was not conservative and would be unlikely to win office.
Bliss’ Trudeauism is sufficiently ideological that he believes, with all his heart, that Trudeau wrought a “constitutional revolution” and “led Canada in the direction of a new democracy, emphasizing true popular sovereignty” (319). This is a spectacular delusion when one considers that the 1982 constitution removed supreme authority from Parliament and transferred power to judges, lawyers, and radical interest groups not answerable to the electorate.
Bliss and his chums went berzerk over the Meech Lake Accord and he persists in describing it as a reversion to “nineteenth-century contempt of democracy.” Mulroney failed to consult “the people.” But whom does Bliss think Trudeau consulted in his revolution from above? Meech was the product of “eleven, white male politicians,” he says; but Trudeau’s deal was the product of ten – a significant number, of course, because it was signed by Trudeau and nine premiers, without Quebec.
It is on Quebec that Bliss reveals the depth of the illusion he shares with other protégés of Ramsay Cook. Outraged by Parliament’s recognition (on the Harper government’s initiative) of the Québécois as “a nation,” they cannot see that this might not have been necessary in 2009 had Mulroney’s amendments been ratified in 1990. Instead Bliss is raring to include a critical chapter on Harper in the next edition of Right Honourable Men, his best-selling whiggish survey of prime ministers from Macdonald to Chrétien. The book argues illogically that power over time descended “from the grip of autocratic prime ministers … to the will of voters in an age of mass democracy, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and referenda on constitutional change” (under Mulroney).
Bliss says dismissively that Quebec’s assent was “not urgent” in the 1980s; no province’s “signature” was required; anyway the Parti Québécois was at a “low ebb” (277). In each case Bliss seems to have the wrong end of the stick. Perhaps the PQ was at a low ebb precisely because Trudeau was out of power; perhaps it was Trudeau who since 1968 had inflamed separatism and aggravated the unity crisis. A genuine federalism required flexibility. The significance of Mulroney in history may well be that Meech would have slain with one blow both separatism and the top-down federalism that provoked it.
Trudeau’s constitution survived but the result was farce: no sooner had his party returned to power in 1993 than the PQ was back with another referendum! Yet the steely helmet of the anglophone Trudeauites remains ever impervious to the damage done by the liberalizing, homogenizing federalism that Guy LaForest in his brilliant Trudeau and the End of a Canadian Dreamcalled the “constitutional dialogue of the deaf.” After meeting a BC minister who supported Meech, Bliss wrote in his diary: “I thought how sad to meet such a parochial politician” (292).
Parochial is one of his favourite words. To his credit Bliss is self-conscious about his inability to speak French, a “sometimes embarrassing shortcoming” (294). Like many liberals he believes himself to be non-ideological. This is consistent with the small-town Ontario missionary presumption according to which the true Canadian spirit subsists in the secular liberal Toronto elite and its state-supported tentacles. His most recent public forays, given to monarchy-bashing, stem from that same Roundhead pietism of which his rôle as “national” historian is an expression.