KAREN MULHALLEN
Karen Mulhallen is editor-in-chief of Descant magazine and the author of five volumes of poetry and a travel-fiction memoir. For many years she was the arts features editor of the Canadian Forum and the Canadian columnist for the Literary Review. Her essays on literature and culture have appeared in magazines in Canada and abroad. She teaches English at Ryerson Polytechnic University.
FOR ENGLISH CANADIANS of a certain age, Pierre Elliott Trudeau conjures up endless summer—summer in the air about him, even as he skis down another glamorous slope, in Gstaad or, closer to home, on Mont Tremblant, or south at Aspen. In his skiwear he reminds us that there are no impediments. It is all possible, not just in Canada but in the land to the south and in the mountains of Europe. He seems like one of the Olympians, one of those golden beings who soar. Yet also a father, not young, often accompanied by his three young sons.
There is no separating him from his aura. It’s as if he had come to us from a story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, unspeakably glamorous, charmed, and, because he is ours, his story does not end in damnation but in an elegant city, where he continues to thrive and we continue to await his infrequent but important pronouncements. And there it is again. They are not just remarks, or even comments. When Trudeau speaks, it is still a pronouncement.
My diction suggests he is either a dictator or the Messiah, and there’s a bit of both in views about him. In press photographs the year he became prime minister, the summer of 1968, he often appeared in sandals and kurta. If not Christ, he was at least one of G.I. Gurdjieff’s Remarkable Men. He had been to India, and this was the era of the Mahareshi Mahesh Yogi, of the Beatles, of the West going to the East and the East coming West. Incense and the sound of sitars were everywhere. Not long after he managed a collaboration with the heavenly theatre director as he staged the births of two of his sons on Christmas Day—births already astonishing enough, given their father’s age and rumoured earlier inclinations. And the dictator? That aspect, too, was soon revealed in the October Crisis in 1970, the War Measures Act, and the arrests, detentions, and censorship that followed.
In that first run to office, Trudeau carried the spirit of the anti-Vietnam War era, of the student uprisings throughout the Western world. Although he was a wealthy internationalist by birth and training, and a law professor, he represented energy, youthfulness, optimism, and radicalism to those who were young in the late 1960s. Any comparison of a picture of Trudeau next to one of Lester Pearson, John Diefenbaker, or Louis St. Laurent provides proof ocular that Trudeau represented a new age. In hindsight, this image seems almost an error in judgment. Although Trudeau had supported the union in the Asbestos strike of 1949, and argued John Stuart Mill’s philosophy that “a democracy is judged by the way the majority treats the minority,” he still called in the Canadian army against a small group of Québécois separatists. Even if it is true that “martial law is preferable to civil war,” a kind of papal authority has always been one of his personae.
When I look at the dates, I realize that Trudeau was only six years younger than my father, yet for Canadians of my generation (the pre-boomers and boomers who constituted the enormous voting power of the 1960s) he was a contemporary. He was the youthful dark horse, scarcely three years in parliament before he became prime minister. His first decade was marked by a series of cover-shots and fashion spreads: Trudeau as MP in the Commons, wearing sandals and sporting an ascot; Trudeau in the election campaign of 1968, bouncing on a trampoline, diving into swimming pools. Casual, athletic, youthful, we assumed these qualities meant he was sincere. And he was no ordinary Johnny Canuck. If the British comedies of the era characterized us as dim-witted, plaid-jacketed lumberjacks, there was our elegant prime minister giving them the finger. Sporting his habitual red boutonnière, he swings down a banister in England at the 1969 Commonwealth Conference in London or, evening-tails flying, he pirouettes behind the queen.
He was sexy. Before his marriage his name was attached to a string of glamorous young actresses, Louise Marleau and Barbra Streisand among them, and he partied with his old school chum from the London School of Economics, the Jamaican prime minister Michael Manley, another man with a sexual and political charge. His marriage to a woman nearly thirty years his junior, while it seemed to be a blow to the women’s movement, also confirmed the myth of his sexuality and, soon after, his potency. Press photos and fashion sketches from those early years show Trudeau in a leather trench coat with épaulettes, appropriately collaged with images from the Beatles’ album Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Fashion, New Music, World Culture, all capital-letter words. The only prime minister ever featured in the press for his clothes—and his footwear.
One of Trudeau’s personae remind us of the influence in the period of Oriental thought and specifically of a popular form of Indian mysticism. Trudeau was born just as Hermann Hesse’s books began to be published, and he came to prominence as my generation was discovering Hesse. In Hesse’s works we can seen the subthemes of much of the debate over our enigmatic prime minister. If he caught our imagination by his mysteriousness, the nature of the mysteriousness seemed justified by the very literary texts we were absorbing: Eastern mysticism, search for the self, disregard for convention, denunciation of militarism, and opposition to narrow nationalism. Hesse’s characters in Siddhartha, Steppenwolf, and Magister Ludi resonate as well. Middle-aged intellectuals, ascetics, sensualists, their journeying and their search for salvation highlight the tensions between the private and the public, the contemplative and the active life.
Trudeau, like Hesse, had been to the source. Wearing a Sikh turban, he had backpacked the Indian subcontinent. In Bedouin headdress, he had travelled in the Near East. He was both enlightenment and sexual liberation. “The state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation,” he argued and, as minister of justice in 1967, he reformed Canada’s draconian and destructive divorce laws and liberalized laws on homosexuality and abortion. He caught the women’s movement and gay liberation, all at once, and made clear that his reforms would be significant, not just smoke and mirrors. His clothing might fuel Trudeaumania, but it was more than just appearance.
For, looking away from individual cases, and how a Man is by the Tailor new-created into a Nobleman, and clothes not only with Wool but with Dignity and a Mystic Dominion—is not the fair fabric of Society itself … the creation of the Tailor alone? (Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus)
Trudeau’s style echoed changes already afoot. In the June 1950 issue of Cité libre, the magazine he had helped to found, he wrote of the need to “cast out the thousand prejudices where past encumbers the present” and of the “struggle for the New Man.” That past included narrow nationalism. In June 1964 he spoke of the “hope that in advanced societies, the glue of nationalism will become as obsolete as the divine right of kings.” Four years later the London Spectator saw his advent as Canada’s coming of age, as if Trudeau, singlehandedly, “would catapult it into the brilliant sunshine of the late twentieth century from the stagnant swamp of traditionalism and mediocrity in which Canadian politics had been bogged down for years.” The sense of change was perceived at home and abroad.
The first article devoted to Trudeau’s clothes seems to have been in 1968, where he insisted that he bought clothes “for comfort, not effect.” Fatuous as articles on his clothing might have seemed to a man who had Petro-Canada, an Offical Languages Act, a Charter of Rights, a Constitution, and an Opportunities for Youth project on his plate, Trudeau still played to the crowd. Photographed dancing beside the campaign bus, his physical vitality captured the public imagination to the point where the hijinks and animal magnetism became the stuff of crowd expectations. In his Memoirs, a caption for a photograph of him sniffing a carnation during the leadership convention reads: “In my box at the convention pretending nonchalance with the aid of a carnation, not a rose.” Colleagues commented on how quickly the “egghead” had become the political professional. From the beginning, he was recreating himself for the public gaze.
Commentators agree that fashion is a material culture, regulated by capitalism and commodification. The reading of fashion is a study of the relations of power and persuasion. Even anti-fashion, in its challenge to accepted norms and sensibilities, is self-conscious and hierarchical. Sartorial extravagance has always been a mark of aristocratic power and privilege, first among men, but, since the eighteenth century, among women, as it became a wife’s responsibility to display her husband’s wealth through her clothing. And, as cultural critic Kaja Silverman explains in Fragments of a Fashionable Discourse, imaginative dress in the second half of the twentieth century has become a way of challenging not only dominant values but traditional class and gender demarcations.
Trudeau turned the last hundred years of Western male vestimentary sobriety on its ear. Flowers and capes demanded the limelight. And he continued to outmanoeuvre in the grace with which he sported the větements of power, wonderfully evoked and mirrored in a December 1969 Ottawa photograph with John Lennon and Yoko Ono on their Give Peace a Chance mission. All three are garbed in the homogeneous uniform of the power élite. If we didn’t know otherwise, we’d swear they were stockbrokers or General Motors executives.
Trudeau’s shape-shifting was catalytic. My own family, for example, was highly political and deeply divided. My father was a Tory organizer who ran rural campaigns from the family library and worked for a time as Dalton Camp’s assistant. My mother had been a newspaper editor and printed the Canadian Forum on her presses in Belleville. My eldest brother was a Marxist, and I had worked for the Young Conservatives at the University of Toronto. Trudeau’s style spoke directly to the divisions in my own family—its agrarian conservatism, its urban socialism, its Canadian nationalism. In the 1960s, like many of my generation, I turned left. Trudeau was the emblem and liberalization of our whole social contract, not just of Liberal Party Politics. He symbolized the shifts from Tory to Red Tory, from the moderate New Democrats to the Waffle, from a dormant to an active Canadian nationalism.
In the summer of 1968 Canadians felt they had leapt from the nineteenth to the late twentieth century in one vault. The great release had already been signalled by the World Exposition in Montreal the year before. It was carried forward by Trudeau’s affiliations with that city. As a bilingual Montrealer, his background was both English and French, his culture international à la mode.
The real Birth of the Nation, then, was one hundred years after Confederation, beginning with Expo and including the patriation of the Constitution and the creation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. As an equal on the world stage, Trudeau defended his dream of Canada abroad and at home. In its way, it is a nationalist dream, historical, romantic, and contemporary. Canoeing in his Memoirs, he reminds us of one of the coureurs des bois. Garbed in buckskins, his skin is brown, his cheek-bones high. And yet, as our first prime minister born in the twentieth century, he also seemed to carry the century with him. Winning the 1980 election, he welcomed us to the 1980s. The body’s map is society’s fabric.
For neither in tailoring nor in legislating does man proceed by mere Accident, but the hand is ever guided on by mysterious operations of the mind … Body and the Cloth are the site and materials whereon and whereby his beautified edifice, of a Person, is to be built. Whether he flow gracefully out in folded mantles, based on light sandals … or girth himself into separate sections … will depend on the nature of such an Architectural Idea: whether Grecian, Gothic, Later Gothic, or altogether Modern, and Parisian or Anglo-Dandiacal … In all which, among nations as among individuals, there is an incessant, indubitable, though infinitely complex working of Cause and Effect: every snip of the Scissors has been regulated and prescribed by ever-active Influences, which doubtless to Intelligences of a superior order are neither invisible nor illegible. (Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus)
Two texts by the nineteenth-century English writer Thomas Carlyle provide an interesting sidelight on fashion and public office. In Sartor Resartus [The Tailor Restitched] (1836), Carlyle insisted on the utility of clothes, by which he meant literature and art, government and social machinery, philosophies and creeds. Clothes make us human, but they must be sacrificed or changed according to the ideal behind them. “The beginning of all wisdom” argued Carlyle, “is to look fixedly on clothes … till they become transparent.” Five years later in Heroes and Hero-Worship, writing very much against the democratic, scientific, and evolutionary trends of his time, Carlyle presented his great-man theory of history: history is the history of what man has accomplished.
There is a connection between the raging prophet Carlyle and the cool analytic Trudeau. Carlyle demonstrated that heroic biography goes hand in hand with the conscious presentation of the self in public life. Apply this union of idea, social rituals, and tailoring to photographs of Trudeau descending the steps of the bleachers in Toronto at the Grey Cup Game in November 1970. He seems the very model of a dandy, a Beau Brummel. His hat is set at a jaunty angle, he holds a cape over his shoulders, and his trousers are cut from cloth of a brash checkered pattern. In his buttonhole is his trademark boutonnière. On his right, a man in a Stetson hat gazes at him as he descends. The steps become a runway. The prime minister becomes for that moment a vedette, a model existing in the gaze of the gazing man.
Any reflection on Trudeau and Fashion moves effortlessly into Trudeau and Style. He was the first of our prime ministers to aim the F-word at reporters and hecklers and critics—along with the F-finger. This diction and this body language confirmed earlier public projections and mythologies about Trudeau—observations that mimic the life pattern of the culture hero as outlined by both Joseph Campbell and Northrop Frye. Both critics write of the perilous journey, the conflict, the crucial struggle, the pathos, and the exaltation of the hero. Each also charts the social relation to the mob, and human society’s search for a ritual scapegoat. And each discusses the tearing apart of the sacrificial body.
The periodical indexes immediately make clear the intense tracking of Trudeau’s fortunes by the media and the public, with such article titles as “Quebec’s new face in Ottawa,” “Trudeau up front,” “Chains of office bind PET to loner’s role,” “Trudeau can afford to be cool to the press,” “M. Trudeau: nouveau Messie,” “Who says Pierre Trudeau is all that hot,” “Whom should he marry?” “man of moods,” “Pierre’s hush-hush soirées,” and “Why they can’t burst the Trudeau balloon.” He was the new Messiah, cool, distant, a loner. Imaging also began early in his political career, and they never let up. He was portrayed, photographed, and drawn, in eveything from the Financial Post to the Last Post, from World Affairs to Chatelaine to Weekend magazine.
Certain Canadian journalists seem to have staked Trudeau as their special territory, in a way that went beyond their function as parliamentary reporter or whatever. They became interesting barometers, their opinion of him waxing and waning with his popularity: Alan Fotheringham, Peter Newman, Denis Smith, Walter Stewart—and there were many more.
Intriguing subtexts begin to emerge. By mid-career, there were complaints about his lack of decorum, his autocratic behaviour, the way he made people edgy. People began to call him the president of Canada, suggesting that he saw himself above parliament. He was no longer the “philosopher king,” just the “king.” He was a dilettante, a priest with a catechism. There were also frequent ascriptions of aloneness, solitariness, isolation, an exotic mindscape. He was a boxer, and the press had a ringside seat at his matches. He was Machiavelli, a Napoleon IV in the making. He was a fugitive from reality, a prince of darkness, a prince of light, a wizard in Ottawa who wowed the élite.
As silly as all this labelling seems, it was deadly earnest, a real sociopolitical indicator. In his last few years in office, when many commentators argued that his idealism had changed to cynicism, the analogies continued, and they focused on his shape-shifting and his enigmatic personality: the Phantom, the Man in the Iron Mask, the master-manipulator, the betrayer of family and marriage, Big Brother, Houdini, the Shadow. Yet the portrait photographs, many in colour, continued. Only one writer, Anthony Westell in Canadian Business in April 1981, attempted to blow the whistle on the mythologizing: “Mysterious evil genius of the North?” he asked. “Nonsense. Trudeau’s magic is of our own making.” But the fact that we are the makers of the myth is exactly the point.
The descriptions were larded with biblical analogies to both the Old and the New Testament: to the Messiah; to a negative version of the God portrayed in the Psalms, one who does not deliver us from evil; to the three wise men (the magi) from Quebec, not Iran; to the biblical Samson, as in Milton’s Samson Agonistes. Later, Trudeau fell from Grace. He was the healer whose recipe of Reason over Passion had failed. Biblical analogues were counter-pointed, and occasionally reinforced, by extensive references to the characters and life stories of American culture heroes, from Frank Sinatra (Old Blue Eyes is back, 1977) to the Lone Ranger, and to narratives in American popular songs: “Some echanted evenings,” “After the ball was over,” “Shall we dance?”
Virulent but engaged, the press was unrelenting: his “shrug is beyond compare”: he is a master with minions; he is “lip-deep Pierre” who lays a “New Year’s egg,” going through a male menopause, cranky and costly. And yet, when he left, there was a profound sense of loss: Peter C. Newman bid farewell to a “man of mystery,” Maclean’s extolled “The man in the mask who was true to himself,” and the Financial Post called him “Marathon Man.” The Alberta Report asked rhetorically if he was “Hip-Shooter or Analyst,” knowing he was both. Cast by the media as the leader “with a thousand faces,” “the new Ulysses” making his “journey of destiny,” the guru who aspired to Olympus, Trudeau’s mythic allure has survived his resignation.
In 1993 Trudeau published his Memoirs, accompanied by 253 photographs, 106 of them in full colour. The dust-jacket photograph is a head and shoulders shot of Trudeau wearing a buckskin jacket and an open-neck shirt. At the end of the book that informal shot appears again, only now Trudeau is full-bodied, in jeans and buckskin, striding through a forest. And the text itself is framed by two portraits, Trudeau elegant and serious, looking off to the left, red rose in his lapel, the Canadian flag behind him. The publisher’s blurb estimates that, in his sixteen years in office, Trudeau was snapped, posed, or ambushed, hundreds of thousands of times. In one Trudeau file alone in the National Archives of Canada there are 160,000 photographs. And to such figures can be added news photos, amateur snapshots, and family photos. Together they create the public man, a man of many faces: Trudeau smiling, Trudeau arrogant, Trudeau enraged, Trudeau laughing with friends, Trudeau athletic (on a trampoline, skin-diving in Cuba, swimming, doing handstands, skiing, canoeing, doing judo), Trudeau as elegant bachelor, Trudeau in love, Trudeau as husband, Trudeau as father—a national single parent, the New Male.
The Memoirs themselves are words for pictures, for this was our first television prime minister. The project began as a film, and the book is a kind of “novelization.” Reading the Memoirs is picturing the Memoirs. The real text is the pictures; the words are the shadow reality. The Memoirs result as responses to interviewers’ questions. Trudeau does not initiate the view: the frame is created for him, and he enters to fulfil the frame.
The Memoirs are intimate, and yet they are somehow unsatisfying. They might leave the reader/viewer craving more, craving deeper knowledge, yearning to be trusted. A foolish desire, perhaps, but a yearning nonetheless. The informality of many of the pictures, and the casualness and apparent candour of the captions, leave us wondering what we are missing. Is he really just a “beautiful guy,” as his ex-wife was given to saying? We believe he is sincere, we believe in his integrity, we know he is intelligent, but this is the crux of the enigma. Somehow the northern magus eludes the text and the photographs. What appears, instead, is an all-round nice guy. The moments of rage, even of obscenity, seem to be justified, even irrelevant, and what emerges is almost the ideal “man next door,” whose priority is his children, who juggles parenthood with an important job, who loves his country, who is curious and adventurous. In every way he appears as a role model—impossible to imitate, but an inspiration.
We are left feeling there is no secret behind the mask, the personae. The facial features are not eloquent. Do they just appear to be masklike, to allow us a ground for projection? It is a face that lends itself well to cameras and to events. It is handsome, but not offensively so. The trim body maps an active world. The simulacrum is rich in friends and family. Is all this enigmatic? Not apparently, except in the sense that each human being is ultimately unknowable.
In the preface, Trudeau asserts that the Memoirs are his version of the events in which he was involved. On the dust-jacket, the McClelland & Stewart marketing department gives them an alliterative half-dozen characteristics: personal, philosophical, political, personality-filled, patriotic, and pertinent. But what underlies the document and gives it its shape is its governing idea—passion. Robertson Davies once said that in his works he had tried to chart the secret, passionate life of Canadians. These fabricated Memoirs provide a similar map. Trudeau speaks of his national dream of a unified, peaceable, proud, vibrantly individualized, free, and just society. Whatever moment we focus on, we find passion. How appropriate, too, that they are Memoirs that were first oral, then transcribed, for Trudeau’s own best speeches were those that seemed extempore, impassioned.
Trudeau is our only prime minister who made his retirements glamorous international events. For his first retirement, which many political commentators characterized as a signal defeat, he was photographed in triumph, scarf flying, driving away from Parliament Hill in one of the most beautiful sportscars ever created, a late 1950s gull-wing Mercedes. For his second retirement, he acquired an elegant art-deco house by architect Ernest Cormier in one of Montreal’s most attractive, historic, and expensive neighbourhoods. These images would fit easily into the Hollywood of Nathaniel West’s Day of the Locusts, and the international press was quick to catch the aura. Trudeau’s physical charm, wealth, sexual appeal, and taste in cars added to his pop-star glamour. He was seen quite simply as “one of the most charismatic leaders on the world stage.” That image has not changed.
In World Leaders Past & Present, Thomas Butson and Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. comment that “he created passion where there was dullness, elegance where there was drabness, spontaneity where there was artifice, mystique where there was ordinariness.” Although Trudeau’s politics and personality angered many people, he was adored by the very media he affected to dislike for its intrusiveness. Much of the language in which the media clothed him carried with it an American pop aura. On his retirement, a Canadian MP from Alberta seemed to echo these Hollywood western myths: “After almost sixteen years of riding tall in the saddle, our Prime Minister has decided to hang up his spurs. He leaves us his footprints all over the nation.”
One cold winter evening in Toronto I was flipping through a few days of accumulated newsprint on my kitchen table. As so often happens, I came upon photographs and caricatures of our ex-prime minister. Once again, I was struck by his ongoing presence. A large advertisement in Now magazine, showed an actor dressed in buckskins, sitting in a canoe, wielding a feather paddle. The copy was instructive: “Trudeau returns to political stage. Trudeau and the FLQ return to the Toronto theatre scene … This spectacular comedy noir features the VideoCabaret Ensemble playing everyone who was anyone between 1963 and 1970.” The cut line under the photograph read: “Monty Python meets Pierre Trudeau, says Toronto Life.”
I turned next to the University of Toronto Bulletin, where I found a picture of Trudeau himself, pen in hand. The caption noted that he was in Toronto to attend the inaugural Senator Keith Davey Lecture hosted by Victoria University. The address had been given by the renowned Canadian economist John Kenneth Galbraith, an Emeritus Professor at Harvard University. Although Galbraith’s speech was featured in the Bulletin, it was Trudeau’s photograph that appeared.