B. W. POWE
B. W. Powe teaches at York University and is the author of five books, including Outage, a novel, The Solitary Outlaw, and A Canada of Light, a reflection on the country’s hopes and possibilities. He is a popular speaker and a frequent contributor to the Globe and Mail.
AT WHAT POINT do you become … enigmatic?”
Trudeau smiled—that tight Asiatic (Attic?) grin, at once mildly mocking and supremely amused at the complexities of life.
“Why do you ask?” He spoke slowly. It was, after all, a strange, probably self-indulgent question. “Why are you thinking about that?” Again the slow speech. I have observed, lately, how his speech has slowed. But then, he is an elderly man now, close to his eighties.
I explained: “I’ve been referred to as ‘almost’ enigmatic in a newspaper. Sometimes I puzzle over it. When do you go from being ‘almost’ to ‘completely’?” Those words had cried out for quotation marks.
Silence. Laser-blue stared across the desk. The eyes not blinking. The smile lingering. He was no doubt continuing to think, why am I being asked such a question? His Jesuit leanings would have taught him that there are always meanings within meanings. Finally, the shrug; and a reply:
“Just stick around.”
“Stick around?”
“Longevity. The longer you’re at it, the more of a mystery you’ll be.”
“Survival. That’s the key?”
“Just staying alive in this business is mystery enough. For most people, anyway. Or so it seems.”
The smile returned and didn’t fade. Nor did the blue stare falter. Another silence. His answer, naturally enough, had been more elusive than illuminating.
Time: May 1997, the Canadian spring late (as usual) in Montreal, one month before the federal election. Place: Trudeau’s office on the twenty-fifth floor of 1250 René-Lévesque Boulevard. Historians with a developed taste for ironic patterns and puckish synchronicities should take note of that street name. (A future scenario: A retired Lucien Bouchard, his separatist cause forever defeated, retreats to write his memoirs on the recently named Pierre Elliott Trudeau Boulevard in Quebec City … no, it’s unimaginable.) Day: Wednesday, with the wind carrying traces of ice, a blue light like a subtle aurora in the sky. Me: taking a break from a round of interviews and readings. PET: thirteen years out of power, deep in his implacable retirement. And yet for many people his resolute remove had become mythic—the persona of this former prime minister ever more impenetrable.
I had come for lunch, but I’d also come with questions. It is hard to visit a myth without having questions. And though I remember him that day as being kindly, receptive, almost serene, and certainly articulate, I had the sense of him being turned more inward than on other occasions when we’d talked. There was an intensity of inwardness about him. Day-dreamy or contemplative? I wondered. Or maybe an individual all too aware of ends, life’s narrowings? At any rate, if I’m remembering precisely, he wore a light blue suit with a tie; oddly formal, more so than some of the times when we’d met before.
His mood was unhurried, and he was willing to let our conversation wander. We talked of mutual acquaintances, books, trips we’d taken, and poetry—zeroing in on Yeats and Rilke, two poets he said he was reading closely. Their last poems, he told me. Unexpectedly he quoted a long section from Yeats’ “The Second Coming.” He stopped after the famous first stanza, almost daring me (so I thought) to complete the lines. They were lines from Yeats’ mid-career that (luckily) I knew, so I obliged. Before I arrived at that passionate arching query to time, he broke in and finished the poem: “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
He laughed quietly to himself—and I thought, abruptly, of how many citizens had sometimes thought of him as being monstrous long before the hazy, soft-focus light of myth had descended like a halo. But the “rough beast” of those lines meant many things—prophetic, ironic, allegoric, symbolic, literal. They also alluded to coming chaos. Maybe there was some other monster, another presence looming, in his mind? He gazed off, withdrawing, becoming thoughtful, then privately amused, that amusement gradually turning back into a reflective look.
I always entered his office with the mild sense that I was breaking into an utterly private domain. The room was welcoming enough. Large, angular, a wide bright view of the new hockey arena to the south, a clear aerial view to the east of the park between Peel and Cathédrale where the Rally for Canada took place during the 1995 referendum on separation. I wanted to ask him about watching that rally alone from this perch, but first I made a mental note of the haunting stillness that pervaded his space.
Books were stored precariously on top of other books, the stockpile threatening to teeter over like some personal Tower of Babel. Manuscripts and special advance reading copies. T.C. McLuhan, Andrei Sakharov, John Ralston Saul, Rilke; theology, philosophy, politics, history, memoirs. Little fiction anywhere. (“Old men read few novels,” said George Steiner. Why? Because reality and the imagination have fused for an individual who has lived with vehemence and keenness? Maybe at a certain point your own stories become vivid enough?)
His office seemed as removed as he himself had—mostly—been for the past years. No computer, no fax, no cellular, no typewriter, no TV, no gadgets of any kind. Pens and notepads only. The desk remarkably clear. Pictures of his boys—paintings, photographs, of the four together. Awards, medals. Not much to indicate his political life.
“This is where you stood during the rally in ’95?”
He rose from his cushioned chair, walked to the window.
“From here. Yes. I looked down that day at the people and the flags. I could see it all.”
“You weren’t asked to speak?”
(Note to myself: I was being too inquisitorial. Do most encounters with him turn into interviews? People wanting to ask, to know. Looking for a way inside. That ache for answers. Well, I did have many questions.)
“No, I wasn’t asked.”
“You weren’t asked to just show up?”
He looked off, then down into the park. The turning inward again. A look that seemed vaguely as though he was waiting, or searching, for something. Looking down from that spot in his office you can see the statue of Sir John A. Macdonald. When I’d passed that statue earlier, I paused to stare at the patch of graffiti, a white-paint smudge, streaked across the cenotaph’s base, FLQ, the letters had said.
“No,” he said. “The organizers felt they didn’t need me.” Strong emphasis on the word “organizers.” Pronounced implications of anger. “It was their show. They thought they knew what they were doing. What they really wanted to accomplish.”
“And with the referendum.”
“It was poorly handled. No backup plan. Looked like desperation in the end. Which I suppose it was. Giving everything away like that.”
“It’s quite an image. You standing up here, looking down at the flags, the celebration, the speakers, the crowds.”
He turned away from the window, and made a gesture with his right hand, like a farewell.
“I didn’t stay for long. I went out to lunch. And I walked in the other direction.” Emphasis precise, intention clear.
“It was cold,” he went on quietly, almost incidentally, it seemed. “I had a long lunch.”
Quiet. While he’d been talking I’d kept trying, precisely, to catch the mood of this room. Then it dawned on me: The mood was uncannily quiet. I was tempted to say quietist. Some absorption in contemplation, some surrendering to interior life. Despite his flashes of wit and anger, there was a calmness to him, a conscious unfastening from the affairs outside. His office located at the end of a long corridor. No one else nearby, except for his discreet assistant, Michelle. An office at the edge of a tower. Quiet in the way that certainly signalled, Be careful about disturbing the peace. Quiet in the way that also said, I’m thinking about things here. The carpeted corridors, the assistants in separated booths. A silence in these chambers. A place not quite part of anything directly. You had to walk up stairs; find your path down corridors; then find yourself in a place which was, while friendly enough, almost invisible, untraceable.
Turning to leave for lunch. (He: “Will I need my coat?” I: “You will. It’s cold out there.” He: “Still? It is May.” I: “I know. But it’s Canada.” He: “Did I need reminding?”) We went out into the tower lobby, then into the streaming street, the sudden shout and wind of crowds and traffic.
And our conversation changed to talk of our children. Mine, twins, a boy and a girl, still very young; his boys now young adults, so he was remembering his experiences. I almost had the impression that, chameleonlike, our exchanges were taking on the quality of our environment. Here we were among people—couples, groups, trios, soloists, all heading somewhere for lunch—and we had modulated into talk of connection. We talked of reading to our children at night before sleep, and of learning how to be fathers. Talked of watching our children grow, of missing them when you travel. We both remarked on how the scent of your young children, and their touch, lingered with you and sharpened your longing to return home. Talked of the questions children often ask, of the pleasure and difficulty of getting to know what it is they dream of, and what it is they want.
“When they were around ten, eleven, thirteen,” he said, “every Saturday night I would get away from my commitments and read to them. It was our Saturday night together. I read them Rousseau, history books, poetry, Victor Hugo. Later, Stendhal, and Tolstoy. We’d talk about what we read. Read out loud to each other. Every Saturday night for years … It was,” he paused, “one of the happiest periods of my life.”
He made it seem like this happiness was in the very distant past.
“It doesn’t sound like you’ve raised any of your children to be politicians.”
“It would be better,” he said, “if they were teachers.”
“No money in that,” I said, aiming for irony.
“No, maybe there’s a great need for people who can truly teach. Maybe now more than ever. With all the machines around. So many pressures … I still like to help my kids with their studies. Read what they’re reading.”
We stopped to cross René-Lévesque. Waited for the lights to change. And waited. And waited. Waited longer than I expected we would. A decade before I’d watched Trudeau sprint off into traffic—“Well, I guess we’re off,” he’d called over his shoulder—running against the light, impatiently jogging and halting cars, vans, trucks, and cabs, with drivers mouthing his name in a pantomime of surprise when they recognized who was dodging through, dashing to the other side, leaving me stranded while the cars picked up speed again. That day he ambled out when the lights finally changed, and I slowed my pace to stay beside him.
We were heading for a Chinese restaurant called the Chrysanthemum.
People emerged from towers, hurtling off to lunches of meetings, people leaning into the wind clutching spring coats to their necks, people out sidestepping others on the narrow sidewalks, people suddenly struck with the recognition that here was a well-known face passing them by, a face with scars and curves and gashes and prominent bones, so familiar to most people that, startled, they paused to say something but did nothing other than nod or smile or raise a hand or blink, no doubt gathering thoughts of what to say over a meal, back in a tower, on the way home, in the evening, to colleague or date or spouse or parent or child or friend, some registering in their faces an uncertainty about him—was it a ghost? an eerie lookalike?—maybe shocked at his aged appearance, people roaming off to liaisons and appointments, passing by a part of their history, each with a memory of the special intensities of that history—Trudeaumania in 1968, the War Measures Act, the election defeat of 1979, the election victory of 1980, the referendum battle with Lévesque, the patriation of the Constitution, the skirmishes with Bouchard after the second referendum—people passing and showing amazement, sometimes a touch of scepticism and even annoyance in their astonishment, because time and magic and unpredictability and the human presence had intersected.
“Do you ever miss it?”
“Miss what?”
I pointed to the people regarding him.
“Do you miss politics? Being prime minister?”
“No.”
“Not at all.”
“Not in any way.”
I inclined my head towards him to pick up the words that strayed away.
“What about the exercise of power?” I persisted. “Dealing with issues, with people. Finding solutions, or compromises. Finding ways to bring about justice.”
He spoke softly again, maybe answering more for himself than me. “Being in politics was a role I was content to play for a time. Now I’m content to play another role. To be away from it all. You have no idea. I miss nothing.”
I was tempted to ask what role he thought he was playing now; but I didn’t pursue it. Let this pass, I thought. Another time, another question.
We walked up steps to the doors of the Chrysanthemum and entered. We found a table, sat, ordered two plates (shrimp, chicken, with a bowl of hot-and-sour soup for me), and resumed our convenation—shifting to questions of government’s role, to representation from regions, to Thomas Jefferson, to the neoconservative movement in the United States. I noted to what degree Trudeau identified any stormy strain of nationalism with rabid tribalism or racism, how much he feared the encoding of tribal rights—ethnic rights—into the Constitution. While he applauded the debate of these issues through political symposia, he thought the encoding of such rights would be “a formula for tyranny.”
“Any elevation of collective rights—language rights, provincial rights, tribal rights, government rights—over the individual strikes me as a recipe for disaster. We have to watch.”
“It should be a tension between the individual and the collective?”
“Always. A balancing of rights and obligations. Too much liberty for the individual leads to anarchy—chaos. Too much power for the collective, for institutions, leads to oppression—to statism.”
His form of Canadianism—was it a kind of quixotic, rooted cosmopolitanism?
“Contrary to what Samuel Johnson said, patriotism is usually the first refuge of the scoundrel. Yet one must have a strong feel for where you are, be capable of seeing your own place, of wanting to make a place for yourself.”
This was his form of Canadian Liberalism: social conscience and universality mixed with native caution and a persevering, powerful ability to imagine one’s locale.
Shifting subjects, back to books. Trudeau told me he’d been reading Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (which happens to be one of my favourite novels), and that he’d returned to the Bible.
“The Bible?”
“I’m reading through it. Genesis to Revelation. And I’m reading it all … slowly. Studying different translations to see how certain words have been changed. I find it all fascinating, this question of translation. The differences in interpretation. The mistakes that were sometimes made over the translation of one word.”
I noticed his preference for classics. His readings seemed entirely centred in the past—works that had formed him when he was young. He mentioned few contemporaries. Was this another sign of withdrawal into contemplation? I still had the sense, nothing I could pinpoint, that his words carried levels, evoking inner concerns, worlds within worlds.
People in the restaurant sometimes surged towards him. Looks of hope, eagerness, irony, regret; a sneer here, a gaze of blunt fear there. Words passed, greetings.
I have often been asked where the security officers go when I have lunch with Trudeau. People gravitating, circling close. How do the RCMP guard him? How do they shadow him without intruding? My answer: I’ve never seen any security around. American ex-presidents travel with a phalanx of praetorians. Ex-PMS shuttle unattended in the relatively—temporarily?—civil streets of this country. (One exception to this unwritten rule is Mulroney, who, I’ve been told, never goes anywhere without the RCMP—no doubt to protect himself from an adoring population.)
We went on, talking quietly about large ideas that were surely passions while we finished our meal. He made a brief, affectionate reference to his toddler daughter, who lives in Toronto with her mother. Again he became lost in thought, maybe some faraway memory.
And back to books, and to ideas about society. He described his recent interest in the legend of Faust (Faust!), listing a few of the great works written on the scholar who sold his soul to know more, to have absolute power. He talked of the “redistribution of wealth,” that apparently taboo phrase, currently banished by our hardened political mood of remorseless self-interest. Fair distribution and a flexible constitution of the rights of all citizens—these were the touchstones of his dream of a just society. A crucial declaration, I thought. This dream still moved him.
Then he paid our bill (he always has), and we stepped back into the street and walked off to his office.
Last exchange in the law-office lobby.
I said, “Chrétien will no doubt win this election. By a reduced majority, I think.”
“Chrétien. He’s a survivor. But I’m not really following all that closely.”
A pause. I turned, getting ready to go.
“I am retired,” he said flatly. He’d added this—for my benefit, or to remind himself? Paraphrase: Stop asking me for punditry. I smiled at the ambiguities. The statement could have had several interpretations, depending on how you stressed each word.
Glimpses. Trudeau offering his hand to say goodbye. Wishing me well with my “charges,” he said, referring to my children. Saying come back, thank you for the talk. He turned and walked up the staircase, no bounding up steps or Till Eulenspiegel antics. (But there were no cameras around, either.) The only ones there to watch were receptionists and fellow lawyers—and they were clearly accustomed to his arrivals and departures. My last thoughts: He was an individual more and more eager to vanish, to disappear off the stage.
The taxi driver said: “Politics. People like to talk. With the election. Chrétien, Charest. Well, they come and go. I remember Trudeau best.”
“Why?” I asked. The name card taped to the back seat said, Angelo. An older man; in his sixties, I guessed. A heavy accent; broad gestures. Angelo steered his cab through the maul and mew of traffic, whisking me to Dorval and an early flight home.
“Trudeau? Never had him in my cab. But there’s no one like him now. And you know what? He was true to himself. Sure, he made mistakes. Plenty. But so do we all, right? He was different. When I first came to Canada, I thought about him all the time. But I never met him.”
I told him I had, and that I’d just had a long lunch with him. Angelo shot me a look over his shoulder, then nearly jerked his cab off the road. I told him it was the truth. He wanted details.
“What’s he like now?”
I described a gentler Trudeau than the one I’d met in other years. Lucid, aware, attentive, courteous, and yet—here came that word again—withdrawn. I described how this hadn’t been the bristly argumentative Trudeau I’d once faced off with; nor had it entirely been the quick-fire legalist and philosopher with whom I’d discussed Mackenzie King and Laurier, de Maistre and Dostoyevsky—though this time we had certainly ranged over politics and literature. I’d found a melancholy man, gazing into spaces few could enter or fathom. There had been something elegaic in his speech and manner. In his inwardness I’d detected a growing apartness.
I’d wanted to say to Angelo that, for better or for worse, we were still in the grip of Trudeau’s concept of country. No idea or concept, story or myth, had fully succeeded his dream. And I’d wanted to say that, despite my public utterances to the contrary, I was unsure about the destiny of Canada. Had we already stepped away from the difficulty of being here?
I’d found a complex man in Trudeau, of course, but absorbed now by loner reveries. He had seen a great deal. Maybe enough was enough. When the world one dreams begins to fade before reality’s limiting, when the imagination wears out because the need to transform reality has left the dreamer exhausted, maybe then the individual turns to introspection, and contemplations of loves and losses.
“Never his kind again,” Angelo said.
Some might say—this is good. The dream of changing the world can be too much to bear for people. The mood in politics has become more livid and overwhelmed than explorative, impassioned, transfiguring, or transcendent. Maybe Trudeau, and his kind, must pass. Maybe the concerns of country and identity, of selfhood and place, must pass, too. In the mingling of amped circuits and souls will come heated shapes to intrigue us, though I continue to believe that we need those who dream well first, then encounter some of the delusive configurations of the real.
Angelo hauled his cab up to a halt in front of the Air Canada doors at the terminal.
“Will you see him again?”
“I don’t know.” Who could say?
“If you do, tell him I remember him.”
I smiled, said I would. Made a mental note—remember this man, record what he said.
“You think he’ll come back?”
“I doubt it.”
“He’d win. Easily.”
“Maybe. But his time is finished. Could we bring him back like Sir John A. for one last campaign? The old warrior. Well, there are different players now. Trudeau knew when to get out. Someone else has to come up with an idea for this country.”
Angelo leaned over the seat, gazing back, while I climbed out to the curb. “I tell you I worry,” he said. “Things are not so good here. Sure, sure, I make a living. Sure, I have a good life, business is pretty good for me. Sure, but my children, their children. I worry. What will be here for them someday?”
I stopped, half in the cab, half out, and said, truthfully, that I didn’t know, but I hoped for the best. I had children, and often wondered about what they would inherit. Then I paid him, tipped him, thanked him, said goodbye, clambered out fully, entered the airport, joined the lineup for Toronto—a serpentine sprawl that looked like a queue for an urgent exodus elsewhere—and thought about the mystery of ourselves and the unexpected links we make with people, like Trudeau, who live such public lives, realizing how difficult it is to truly grasp anyone, thinking that trying to grasp someone’s mystery could be a wrong turn in thought because the self always slips away and tenderness must come from knowing you can’t hold on to anyone or anything, that we all pass one another, never quite knowing what it is we can or will make of ourselves or for ourselves, whether it is an identity and a place, a family and a home, a business or a venture into the wilderness, a grand unifying theory or a single clear perception, a poem or a country.