Writing the Nation

Prob­a­bly the most famous line Pierre Berton never wrote was the def­i­n­i­tion of a Canadian as some­one who can make love in a canoe. The line is attrib­uted to Berton in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, as well as Colombo’s Canadian Quotations, but it turns out, at least accor­ding to Brian McKillop’s new biog­ra­phy of Berton, that the leg­endary British Columbia news­pa­per­woman Ma Murray may well have said it first. 

If Berton did not write the canoe quip, it was just about the only thing that he didn’t write. McKillop’s book, Pierre Berton: A Biography (McClelland & Stewart), makes clear that Berton was pro­lific to the point of incon­ti­nence. At one point dur­ing the 1960s, he was writ­ing a daily news­pa­per col­umn for the Toronto Star, star­ring in his own tele­vi­sion inter­view show, appear­ing weekly as a pan­elist on the quiz show Front Page Challenge and daily on radio with a brief opin­ion piece, as well as pro­duc­ing a book a year. The most aston­ish­ing exam­ple of his pro­duc­tiv­ity? He wrote the first draft of his rail­way his­tory, The National Dream, in a month, the time it takes most authors to orga­nize their thoughts. When the cbc turned his rail­way books into a his­tor­i­cal docu­d­rama, Berton him­self was the pre­sen­ter. He once had three books on the best­seller list at the same time, and peri­od­i­cally he dropped by Rideau Hall to pick up another Governor General’s Award. Just read­ing about his out­put left me exhausted, not to men­tion green with envy.

To be hon­est, until I read McKillop’s book I had never taken Berton very seri­ously. I con­sid­ered him faintly embar­rass­ing, in the way that fathers are often embar­rass­ing to their sons. The bil­lowy side whiskers, the flo­ral bow tie, the absurd safari jacket he wore to host the tele­vi­sion series, the corny repar­tee on Front Page Challenge: these were the affec­ta­tions of a self-satisfied old fogey. Or so it seemed.

What McKillop’s biog­ra­phy reveals is the activist side of Berton’s career. For exam­ple, his 1951 cov­er­age of the Korean War for Maclean’s was remark­ably crit­i­cal for the time. When he returned from the bat­tle zone, instead of cheer­lead­ing for the troops, Berton wrote an arti­cle that ques­tioned the whole basis of the war. “Can you win a war in this tragic year of 1951 as you win a prize fight, by brute force in the fif­teenth round?” he asked. His take on Korea reads very much as if he were writ­ing today about Afghanistan.

In 1963 Maclean’s dropped his col­umn, osten­si­bly because of his views on teenage sex (he did not con­demn it), but McKillop thinks the fir­ing had as much to do with Berton’s then-controversial views on pub­lic med­i­cine (he sup­ported it). Whatever the rea­son, Berton would not pull his punches to save his job. Later he co-founded the nation­al­ist Committee for an Independent Canada, a group of media and aca­d­e­mic heavy­weights who despaired at the country’s depen­dence on American cap­i­tal and American cul­ture, and he was a char­ter mem­ber and long­time sup­porter of the Writers’ Union of Canada. In other words, Berton was a pas­sion­ate guy who was unafraid to put his opin­ions into prac­tice. He used his celebrity — and McKillop argues that he was “Canada’s first mod­ern celebrity” — in the best way, in sup­port of causes in which he believed. (He also used it to bed the girls, but that’s another story.)

Berton’s rep­u­ta­tion as a “pop­u­lar his­to­rian” rests on his fine his­tory of the Klondike gold rush, the rail­way books and a shelf full of other his­to­ries of vary­ing qual­ity. He was not a deep thinker or a par­tic­u­larly fine styl­ist, but he was an ener­getic spin­ner of tales, and it was his abil­ity to cre­ate mem­o­rable char­ac­ters and weave them into robust, roman­tic sto­ries that won him so many readers. 

His pop­u­lar suc­cess earned him the resent­ment of many aca­d­e­mics, some of whom dis­missed his books as “mere sto­ry­telling.” I always con­sid­ered this snip­ing between pop­u­lar writer and aca­d­e­mic to be a sign of our cul­tural imma­tu­rity. Other coun­tries seemed to be able to tol­er­ate books by ama­teur his­to­ri­ans along­side books by their ivory-tower brethren. Not in Canada, how­ever, where a writer like Berton was attacked for mak­ing his books inter­est­ing (and, one sus­pects, for the size of his roy­al­ties as well). Happily, that debate has faded and the coun­try is full of post-Berton pop­u­lar his­to­ri­ans who feel no pres­sure to apol­o­gize for what they do. 

Still, the crit­ics had a point. The essence of “pop­u­lar” writ­ing in any genre is that in the end it does not chal­lenge accepted con­ven­tions. Berton was no excep­tion. He belonged to the “a nation is a group of peo­ple doing great things together” school of his­tor­i­cal writ­ing. He pre­sented his sub­jects warts and all, but in the end he wanted Canadians to feel bet­ter about their coun­try. “Even as he went about punc­tur­ing some Canadian myths,” writes McKillop, “he did so in a way that height­ened his­tor­i­cal aware­ness and bol­stered Canadian pride and spirit.”

I can’t imag­ine that any seri­ous his­to­rian, aca­d­e­mic or oth­er­wise, would be inter­ested in “bol­ster­ing Canadian pride” — at least I hope not. Perhaps this is why so many pop­u­lar writ­ers slip into obscu­rity within a gen­er­a­tion. Who recalls Thomas B. Costain, also an edi­tor at Maclean’s, or Frank Underhill, who in their day were every bit as pop­u­lar with book buy­ers as Berton? The sta­tus quo changes course, leav­ing the pop­u­lar writer awash in its wake. At least that is the argu­ment with which those of us who do not enjoy Berton’s sales fig­ures con­sole ourselves.