Pierre Elliott Trudeau (6 page)

If there was a true original in the Trudeau family, it was not Pierre but his father, Charles. Charles had indeed trained in the law but quickly grew bored with it and turned his mind to other pursuits. Correctly predicting the great future that lay ahead for the motor car, he started the Automobile Owners’ Association, a sort of loyalty program that for a small membership fee offered discounted gas and repairs at Charlie’s growing string of service stations. In 1932, by which time he had thirty stations and fifteen thousand members, he sold the business to Imperial Oil for $1.2 million. Then he took the money and made such clever investments—in mining, mostly, but also in an amusement park and the Montreal Royals baseball team—that in the very heart of the Depression he quickly managed to turn a small fortune into a much larger one.

Whatever hardships, then, Pierre may have endured while his father was establishing himself, by the time he was thirteen the family finances were such that money would not be a concern for him for the rest of his life. By then Charlie Trudeau,
a hard-living bon vivant who dominated any room he was in and was forever holding late-night gatherings and jetting off to parts unknown, had apparently taken on a godlike status for the young Pierre, having managed by sheer force of will to pull the family up from the common lot into the upper crusts of Quebec society. Trudeau’s take on his father in later life was usually as this exalted figure, slightly distant and unknowable, but all the more godlike for that. Yet the sheer energy of the man must have put a fright in him. It was Charlie’s irritation at his son’s frail, sensitive nature as a young boy that had started Trudeau on the path of the athleticism he was constantly parading in later life. In home movies of the time, Pierre was always mugging for the camera or engaging in antics that foreshadowed the ways his own sons would one day behave around him in an effort to get his attention. In any event, Charlie, in between his late nights and his business trips, set high standards for Pierre, and Pierre, whether in worship or terror, always did whatever it took to live up to them. Though by nature almost his father’s opposite—retiring where his father was the consummate extrovert and tending toward the refined where his father tended toward the crude—much of what he became could be seen as a kind of offering to him, a re-channelling of his father’s irrepressible energy and will through his own, very different character.

“My father was gregarious, outgoing, expansive,” he told Gale Zoë Garnett years later. “I am not. Never have been. I am a solitaire, really. When I do something big and playful, like that pirouette behind the Queen, I am, I believe, pretending to be my father.”

Just a few short years after he made the family rich, Charlie, never one to slow his pace for the sake of his health, fell dead from a heart attack. He was in Florida for the Royals’ spring training when he came down with pneumonia. Pierre’s mother and sister went to tend to him, though the next news Pierre and his brother Tip had in Montreal was of their father’s death. Fifteen at the time, Trudeau said afterwards, “His death truly felt like the end of the world.” His other reaction, however, was to think that “all of a sudden, I was more or less the head of a family; with him gone, it seemed to me that I had to take over.” It might be simplistic to read an Oedipal wish-fulfillment in this thought, though over the next years—when he wasn’t off at Harvard or the Sorbonne or chasing revolutions—Trudeau would come to fulfill this role as the family’s head mainly with regard to his relationship with his mother, Grace. When Charlie died, Grace came out of the shadows to become a dominating presence not only in the family but on the Montreal social scene, and the man who was invariably
on her arm when she was out and about was her son Pierre, who kept rooms in the family home into his forties and didn’t marry until his mother had passed into senility.

Clarkson and McCall, in their own speculation about the impact of Charlie’s death on Pierre, extensively mined exactly this Freudian vein, seeing the sudden disappearance of “the most powerful presence” in Trudeau’s life as the source of a “psychic imbalance” Trudeau could never get beyond. “The day would never come … when paternal dominance would be replaced by the father’s acknowledgement of the son’s achievements as a grown man.” Later biographers have been skeptical of this analysis, taking Trudeau’s reaction to his father’s death somewhat more at face value, as the normal grieving of an adolescent at the loss of a beloved parent. But whatever twist one gives it, the death would surely have marked Trudeau profoundly, and likely in ways which neither his own comments on it nor the comments of those around him would have plumbed the depths of. Clearly it was something that hung over Trudeau all his life—forty years later the memory of it could still bring tears to his eyes—not least for the fact that the tremendous freedom he enjoyed throughout his life to do as he wished rested largely on the fortune that Charlie had almost literally killed himself to amass.

In the short term, at least, the death may have brought some feeling of liberation along with the trauma. Suddenly Trudeau was free of this larger-than-life figure he had been trying to please all his childhood. This was the period in which a so-called anti-authoritarian streak began to come out in Trudeau at school, the elite Jesuit
lycée
Jean-de-Brébeuf, which had opened its doors in Montreal just a few years earlier. The streak manifested itself, however, mainly in a prankishness that seemed more calculated to call attention to Trudeau than to overthrow the established order. Even in the year of his father’s death, Trudeau managed to win awards and keep up his high academic standing. The evidence, in fact, suggests that far from becoming a maverick in these years, Trudeau, like most adolescents, was instead doing everything he could to be accepted and to fit in, tailoring himself to his differing environments in a way that went very much with the current rather than against it.

At home, where the reign of Grace had now replaced the reign of Charles, the atmosphere had grown increasingly English and refined. Gone were the late nights, the physicality, the coarse language and jokes. “When my father was around, there was a great deal of effusiveness and laughter and kissing and hugging,” he told biographer George Radwanski. “But after he died, it was a little bit more the
English mores which took over, and we used to even joke about, or laugh at, some of our cousins or neighbours or friends—French Canadians—who’d always be very effusive within the family and towards their mothers and so on.”

But while he was becoming increasingly English at home, at school, in an almost Zelig-like compartmentalization, he was becoming increasingly French. There, his father’s death seemed to have had the effect of leading him to seek out father figures among his Jesuit teachers, men whose difference from his father prompts the question whether Trudeau was trying to fill a lack or rather explore a new freedom. Some of these teachers were to exercise an enormous influence over him, in ways that were not generally known until Trudeau biographer John English and former
Cité libre
editors Max and Monique Nemni were granted access to Trudeau’s archive after his death. What these researchers found was a portrait of Trudeau’s formation substantially at odds with the standard, accepted version during his life.

In their groundbreaking book
Young Trudeau: 1919–1944,
Max and Monique Nemni use materials from the Trudeau archive to show how, far from learning at Brébeuf, as one of his teachers was to claim, the values of “federalism, democracy, and pluralism” that would become the bedrock of Trudeau’s beliefs in later years, he was instead
initiated into a brand of reactionary nationalism very much at odds with these values but quite common in Quebec in the years preceding the Second World War. Trudeau was in the habit of keeping thorough records, even going so far as to save drafts of his letters, and his archive contains a treasure trove of notebooks and journals and papers of every sort. Using these, the Nemnis have shown that the Trudeau who emerged from Brébeuf was one who subscribed not only to the widespread anti-Semitism of the day but to the church’s disdain for democracy.

In Quebec, the church’s preferred model of governance in that period was a so-called corporatist one, in which the state acted as a sort of benevolent parent, governing citizens who couldn’t be trusted to govern themselves. This was the very model that lay behind the fascist dictatorships then gaining ascendancy in Europe. The church’s ultimate goal in Quebec was an independent state that functioned as a kind of theocracy, Catholic and ethnically pure. In an essay Trudeau wrote at Brébeuf about his hopes for the future, he imagined just such a prospect. After establishing himself as an international war hero, he would return home “around the year 1976” just in time to lead the charge in the establishment of an independent Quebec that was “Catholic and
canadien
.”

Canadien,
in Quebec, was always a term that referred not to Canadians as a whole but only to the “real” Canadians, the descendants of the pre-Conquest French
habitants
. Putting aside the unintentional irony of Trudeau’s reference to 1976—the year René Lévesque’s Parti Québécois would come to power—the swashbuckling tone of the essay was decidedly tongue-in-cheek. But this was not satire: however much Trudeau might have been indulging in a flight of fancy, he was doing so within terms that would not only have been accepted at Brébeuf but encouraged. The point comes through more starkly in a play the Nemnis quote that Trudeau wrote for the college’s tenth-anniversary celebrations. Originally titled
On est Canadiens français ou on ne l’est pas,
a popular nationalist saying of the day, but then changed to
Dupés,
“duped,” the play’s apparent message was that Jewish merchants were stealing the livelihoods of French Canadians. The idea echoed a buy-from-our-own campaign being championed at the time by the outspoken cleric and nationalist leader Abbé Lionel Groulx.

If Trudeau was rebelling against anything at this age, it certainly wasn’t the narrow-minded nationalism that later made Quebec seem “a citadel of orthodoxy” to him. Yet his writings of the time were full of the
language
of rebellion. In
Dupés,
a character named Ditreau, who claims a diploma in
“commercial psychology,” advises the French-Canadian tailor Couture to pretend to be a Jew to improve his business. French Canadians, Ditreau says, prefer to buy from Jews, “firstly because they don’t want to enrich one of their own and then because they believe they will get a better price.” Couture goes along at first, then rebels. “Now it’s my turn to teach a lesson: the
Canadien
people is a sleeping lion. It will soon awaken.” Perhaps this was exactly the appeal of nationalism to someone of Trudeau’s disposition, that it allowed all the rhetoric of rebellion without costing him the approval of his superiors. One almost senses even in
Dupés,
which had the same tongue-in-cheek tone as his essay on his hopes for the future, that the actual content was just an excuse for indulging a certain irreverence. Ditreau—his name was an obvious play on “Trudeau,” who in fact played him in the production—can’t help but strike us now as offensive, but there is also a mischievousness to him that cuts in both directions.

Trudeau noted on his copy of the script that the play was presented “before parents and students with great success.” Success seems to have been the point for him. A few days earlier he had taken it very hard when he had lost a student election to his friend and great rival at Brébeuf, Jean de Grandpré, the same man who would later come to advise
him not to run for the Liberal leadership. By now, as if to reconcile the double life he had begun to lead, Pierre had taken to including his matronymic, Elliott, as part of his name, but he had cause to wonder if it had cost him the election. In
Citizen of the World,
John English describes how Trudeau learned of an accusation made behind his back that he was “mediocre, Americanized, and Anglicized, in short, I would betray my race.” For Trudeau the accusation was “a profound shock.” “I would never betray the French Canadians,” he wrote in his journal. But he was also determined to retain his own Englishness, which he thought—not entirely correctly, it seems—helped give him the strength to resist simply following “the popular spirit.” “I am proud of my English blood, which comes from my mother. At least it tempers my boiling French blood. It leaves me calmer and more insightful and perspicacious.”

This kind of reflection on a dual heritage is very familiar to the children of immigrants, who grow up fighting dual claims in almost every arena. What is surprising with Trudeau is how seldom the issue seems to have come up for open discussion, not only in his youth but also in his later political life. Even though his doubleness formed an important part of his public image, there always seemed a taboo around any actual allusion to it. One infamous breaking of
this taboo was René Lévesque’s snide and ill-considered reference to Trudeau’s “Elliott” side just days before the 1980 referendum, in much the same terms as the anonymous accusation levelled at Trudeau back at Brébeuf. This time, Trudeau was able to give as good he got, in a rousing speech at Paul Sauvé Arena that cost Lévesque the high ground and may have cost him the referendum. Back at Brébeuf, however, Trudeau, for all his self-reflection, showed little understanding of the essentially irreconcilable conflict between his own Englishness and his growing allegiance to an anti-English ethnic nationalism.

As a young man, in an apparent compromise, Trudeau came to refer to his mother not as English but as Scottish. At Brébeuf, however, what may have helped him to abide his contradictions was that his mother had inherited French blood from her own mother, along with an ardent Catholicism that was always to remain a strong point of contact between her and her son. When Trudeau was at home, he never missed a Mass with his mother, and their shared faith may have served as a sort of bridge for him, a point of reconciliation between the English world of home and French one of Brébeuf, where he attended Mass as often as three times a day. Trudeau, for all his aura of rationalism and secularism, was to remain a staunch Catholic the rest of his
life, faltering briefly in his faith, according to friends, only at the time of the death of his son Michel. One reason, perhaps, that his Catholicism remained so central to him was because of this unifying role it had had for him as an adolescent, holding together his disparate selves.