THE SUMMER OF 1995 was the last time I had a conversation with Pierre Berton on the lawn of his Kleinburg home. The occasion was the last Berton party—billed thus on the invitation. There were fewer of us than there used to be. Some of the regulars, including Pierre’s old birding friend and fellow newspaperman, Fred Bodsworth, had died.
Pierre was wearing a red apron and flipping burgers on the barbecue. He was still tall but his frame was thinner and he was bent over his cane. Even his voice had become softer, his steps less certain. But he was still eager to correct my version of the tale of Headless Valley, his first big breakthrough newspaper story. In that valley, east of the Yukon, fourteen men were said to have died in mysterious circumstances. In his series of articles, the young reporter’s—Pierre was in his mid-twenties—quest for the truth turned into an adventure up the mysterious South Nahanni River, where he finally found the source of the mystery: a lonely, desolate place that is haunted only by men’s imaginations. But the way he told the story established him as one of the best reporters the country had ever known.
I asked him whether his life would have been different had it not been for the Headless Valley story. “Why?” he asked.
“Because that story made you famous.”
Pierre gave me one of his withering looks. “I’d have found another,” he said.
Several of his seven children, most of whose first names started with a P, were in attendance, as was his wife, Janet, who had once told Barbara Frum that the family’s lives revolved entirely around Pierre. Often it seemed to me our lives at M&S had also revolved around him.
He was still lively and enthusiastic about his lifetime birds’ list, his annual trip to Point Pelee National Park in pursuit of some impossible-to-pronounce brown bird, and he was planning another book. He had already written fifty but thought he still had time to write a few more. He had won every prize that could be given to a writer, including “Man of the Century” from the Canadian Authors Association, and they were not exaggerating. Berton was, by both temperament and avocation, the man who embodied Canada’s twentieth century. That he didn’t share Bob Fulford’s view of feminism, that he seemed unaware of Canada’s Indigenous history, did not detract from his nationalism, his abiding curiosity, his passionate belief that we are a Northern people with more in common than what draws us apart. His fiftieth book, published in 2004, was Prisoners of the North. In the Preface he celebrates the fact that he was born in the Yukon. The North gave him all the inspiration he needed to become a writer. “It was my great good fortune, thanks to my father, the sourdough, and my mother, the journalist’s daughter, that I was born in what was then the most interesting community in Canada.”
Pierre Berton died on July 12, 2004. The Globe and Mail ran Sandra Martin’s long obituary above the fold with the headline, “A Voice of Canada Is Gone.” Even Farley paid him a compliment: “He was one of the real honest-to-God giants of the writing, not literary, scene.” All the other dailies celebrated his life on their front pages.
Elsa Franklin produced her last Berton show in the CBC’s Barbara Frum Atrium. Everybody who was anybody in the media, in publishing, in television, in political life was there, and many of them gave tearful eulogies. The only person missing was Barbara Frum herself. She had lost her battle with leukemia in 1992. I never go to that atrium without paying my respects to her.
At the end of the Berton eulogies, Elsa took the stage to say her own farewell.
Pierre’s home in Dawson City has been turned into a haven for professional writers. Lawrence Hill was the winter 2017–18 writer-in-residence.