I WAS IN QUEBEC CITY yesterday morning when I heard the CBC announce that Ralph Allen, who was the most influential of the postwar editors at Maclean’s and my most memorable mentor, had died in the night.
When that cool voice delivered this stunning news, I thought, How can they presume to sum him up in a hundred words? Now I am trying to sum him up in a thousand and that, too, is an impertinent presumption.
I cannot write about Ralph the war correspondent or Ralph the fisherman or Ralph the raconteur. In the decade I knew him, we had what he once called “the tough relationship between editor and writer”; and we were very different men, of different generations, different backgrounds, different personalities. But I don’t expect ever again to know a man I can so implicitly trust and so unabashedly revere. It was he who formed the sensibilities and attitudes that allowed me to view Canadian politics “with a mind cleared of cant.”
When I first went to Maclean’s in 1956, Ralph Allen was its editor, and he made all of us who worked for him seem special, bigger than we were, better writers than we knew how to be. He made us feel part of an admirable adventure. He sat, fat, freckled, red-headed, quick-tempered—and irreplaceable—in a corner office, and the world outside looked manageable. When I look back on those heady times, I realize we were only basking in his reflection and the world was not manageable; we were not golden and never again thought that we were.
As an editor he was no hot-eyed radical but a man of reason, a man of civility and no pretence. His natural enemies were poseurs of every description—war correspondents who hadn’t gone to the front lines and journalists who talked better than they wrote—mediocrity in all its aspects.
He sought excellence relentlessly. He was a hard and exacting editor. In some ways he did not fit the temper of his times; he was something of a puritan (although no prude) and, for a journalist, uncharacteristically dedicated to defending the individual’s right to personal privacy.
His sense of integrity and instinct for fairness were such a large part of his character that it was easy to overlook his personal courage, his sensibilities, his wit and his vitality. He could transform the banter of a ten o’clock coffee break into a memory you would savour for a decade.
Even his interoffice memos were graceful, and as he got older, he overcame more and more of his natural shyness and began to talk as he wrote, in flawless cadence and metaphors that ought to have been bronzed. His most serious writing went into his novels. They were autobiographical only in the sense that in each of them there was one character vainly standing up for reason in a mad world. (His evocative Peace River Country curiously portrayed a patch of little-known Canadian geography that later turned out to be the home turf of Alvy, my last, most endearing and most enduring wife.)
Ralph’s secret was that what he really wanted to be and what he had been best at—like Roy MacGregor, who I think of as his natural heir, both stylistically and ethically—was sports writing and, specifically, hockey: “For 27 glorious minutes last Saturday night Canada came close to rediscovering the only unique part of its inheritance. In spite of what they’ll say in the commission on culture and the proliferating expositions and festivals and aids-in-grant to anybody who knows anybody else, the only true Canadian invention is a game called hockey.”
Ralph found uncharacteristic joy in his books, and I remember that on the heady day after he finished his last novel, he phoned me and said that it was “damned good.” When a volume of mine was published, he sent a note in which he said that “writing a book has always struck me as a very close parallel to going to a war; a great place to have been and a great place to be back from.”
“God bless” was how he wished goodbye to friends, and somehow it was a benediction worthy of a pope—although Ralph himself had a Presbyterian conscience and took great pride in claiming he was a lapsed Unitarian.
Ralph Allen was a good man. When I met him first, I was very young and I thought there were lots of good men, that my world would be full of them. But now that I am not young, I know two things: that there are not many good men and that I am forever lucky and forever different because I knew one. God bless.
— 1966