I HAD EAGERLY read his 1970 book, Gentlemen, Players & Politicians, but in those early days I was still too much a newcomer at M&S to have an editorial opinion for Dalton Camp. In any event he had shown little patience with editorial comments and even less with copy editing. He said he knew best what he wanted to say and he would be the best judge of how to say it. An intellectual, a witty and acerbic speaker, an astute political commentator on both radio and television, a columnist, a strategist, Camp was the kind of guy who could have given Pierre Trudeau a fair challenge for the leadership of the country. But given his controversial role in ending the John Diefenbaker era, he had no chance to win a seat in Parliament.
I didn’t really get to know him until about his seventy-fifth year. He was a bit lonely in Toronto over Christmas, so we asked him for dinner on Christmas Eve, the traditional time for Hungarians to celebrate Christmas. He was warm, genial, considerate of my mother, but what our daughters remember most is how Dalton lay on the living room carpet with them, playing board games in front of the fire.
In the summer we were invited to spend a few days at Linda Camp’s cottage at Robertson Point on Grand Lake, New Brunswick. It’s the biggest body of fresh water east of the Great Lakes, brown, muddy, slippery on the rocks, but there are cottages all around, many of them belonging to the Camp family. Linda and Dalton had met while they were at Acadia University, been married very young, and had five children in quick succession. They remained friends after their divorce.
When Dalton came to visit the cottage, he sat in his “usual” chair; Linda poured him his “usual” vodka, nominally a martini, just the way he liked it; and we talked late into the evening.
The next day he drove me down to Saint John to meet with the authors of our K. C. Irving book, K. C.: The Biography of K. C. Irving by Ralph Costello and Douglas How. Dalton had little regard for the Irvings. He was convinced that our book would be a whitewash, leaving no blemishes on the gigantic reputation of one of the richest men in the world, who had been involved in virtually every aspect of New Brunswick business, industry, and politics. “There would not be a mention of the Irving WhaleI in that book,” he said with confidence. And he was right.
* * *
THE LAST TIME I was with Dalton, he was eighty-one years old. I had gone to New Brunswick to talk about the book he thought he might be writing—his reflections about Canada and its political life.
He picked me up at Fredericton airport at around nine a.m. The people around the luggage carousel were all looking at him. “Hey, Dalt, how ya doing?” and “Whatdya make of those eejits in Ottawa?” The commissioner in charge of handing out parking tickets told him, “It’s a good thing you write better than you park, eh Dalton,” and gave him no ticket. We drove to the Sheraton. The doorman leaned in to shake Dalton’s hand. “We missed you last week. Hope there’s no truth to the rumour you’ve been ill.” We parked near the entrance in disabled territory. “What the hell, I am likely disabled,” Dalton said. “The air force thought I was, the buggers, that’s why they wouldn’t send me to active duty.”
In the restaurant there was a corner with a plaque that said Dalton’s Corner, and his old typewriter was on display on the shelf just above the table.
We sat and Dalton talked politics. He had been thinking about the state of the nation. There were too many “eager no-talents” seeking office, and the good people who should be serving chose to make money instead. “The world is upside down. Our system of values gone, no one wishes to give of themselves anymore unless well rewarded.”
“And how is your friend Conrad?” Dalton asked. “Does he still think he can escape being one of us?” Back then, Conrad was spending most of his time in London. He had been appointed to the House of Lords and he was still the proud owner of the Telegraph. I think Dalton admired Conrad’s independent spirit but was not sure about Conrad’s Canadian loyalties.
All the way to Jemseg he talked about the past. He drove his too-large car as if the highway belonged to him. His older brother, Dalton said, had died years ago, never making peace with him. He had been Dalton’s childhood hero, an alcoholic, living off old times, borrowing when he could. His younger brother was now in an institution. “Couldn’t leave him in the house alone while I had my heart taken out. Might have set fire to things.” Dalton had had a heart transplant.
He’d lost his best friend in the war and felt guilty about that still. I asked him why still, when most people had buried their dead long since. His friend was a pilot, shot down over the Channel, and his body was never recovered. For decades Dalton had believed that the story was not yet finished.
Why guilty? “They wouldn’t take me into the air force because of this wandering eye. I had perfect vision, really. But I couldn’t convince them. And later, when my regiment shipped out, I was on leave. With Linda. Somehow I just missed out on the war.”
The wandering eye had failed him years ago, now the other was playing old-man tricks, barely able to focus. A few weeks earlier, searching for a car repair shop, Dalton had crashed his car when he hit a hole in the narrow highway, banged his head, broke a rib, clambered out of the car, and started walking in the heat, surrounded by blackflies, barely noticing a thunderstorm. Eventually he walked into a farmhouse and he was rescued.
Though he denied it, Dalton was somewhat deaf. Signs of aging, he said, were annoying but hardly important. What he feared was losing his memories.
We looked at pictures. Young Dalton, a blond, insecure kid. His brother strutting. Maybe that’s what happened, Sandy (his name was Sanborn) took independence too far, hated their father: who wants to be a minister’s son? Dalton was a mother’s boy, still struggling to understand who his mother really was. The photographs don’t do her justice, he said. After she died, he found these sexy, passionate, romantic poems hidden in the false bottom of her box of letters. “What do you make of these? Could she have had a lover? Did she write them herself? Or were they written to her? Why keep them for more than sixty years?” Though he remembered so much about her, loved her so much, perhaps he barely knew her?
She had been good at everything, but all along something had been missing from her life. Dalton thought it had been all about his dad, the preacher who travelled too much and maybe found some solace with other women, less demanding than his wife. He used to listen to their arguments when his father was home. Dalton had disliked his father. Though there was the time, in California, when young Dalton was hospitalized, and his father brought him books, encouraging him to read and find things out for himself. Every day, there would be more books and sometimes the preacher read to him, but never preached.
I held his mother’s tiny leather-bound diary in my hand for a few minutes and let it breathe. Dalton was watching to see whether I noticed it was haunted.
At sunset we sat on his wooden porch, drinking dreadful Mouton Cadet and talking about his next book.
He showed me a photograph of his second wife. He had been quite besotted with her beauty, vivacity, and youth. It had been a wonderful late-life love affair—he was fifty-two and she only twenty-six when they met—then a short-lived marriage of six good years and, he said, a tempestuous divorce. She loved company and entertaining; she had found living in the big, isolated house too lonely. Their son, Christopher, was about twenty now. So much younger than the other Camp kids.
He searched in the fridge for something to eat. When he came up with nothing, he decided we would visit Linda at Robertson’s Point. She received us graciously, eighty years old and still in love with her ex. Various children and grandchildren trooped by to see Dalton. One of them brought warm fish chowder. She knew Dalton would have forgotten to buy food. We ate in the dark as he tried to recall the words of the Browning poem “My Last Duchess.”
On the way to the airport, along the road past Jemseg, Dalton saluted a lay-by. He said he did it to remind himself of who he really was. Wouldn’t explain what he meant. Then we passed a church where he had slept one night after he drove off the road. He didn’t salute the church. He said he was still working on whether there really is a God.
Though he tried, he never did write the book we had talked about. Too little time, still too much living to do.
After Dalton died, I signed Geoffrey Stevens, one of the best political writers in Canada, to write the biography. I think The Player: The Life and Times of Dalton Camp was a much more revealing book than one Dalton would have written. There were thousands of people all across Canada who wanted to know the inside story of the Diefenbaker debacle in the late 1960s, many more who were curious about Dalton, and there were those who had loved him.
I wonder what has happened to Dalton’s mother’s little leather-bound book.
I. The Whale, a cargo barge carrying oil and PCBs, was reputed to have been leaking for twenty-six years before it was salvaged by the Canadian Coast Guard in 2000, at a cost of $42 million (of which the Irvings, as determined by an out-of-court settlement, paid only $5 million).