My Life as a Dame by Stephen Clarkson

Author:Stephen Clarkson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO025000
Publisher: House of Anansi Press Inc.
Published: 2009-02-28T16:00:00+00:00

PART IV

The Drama of Politics

BEYOND ALL ELSE — beyond her perceptions of the wider Canada, beyond her insight into the unfolding urban scene, beyond her steely-eyed but compassionate feminism — Christina wrote about politics. Her dream had been to be a theatre critic, since she loved drama and knew writing was her destiny. But life took her to Ottawa when her first husband, also a writer at Maclean’s, was moved there to cover the federal government. While first feeling in exile in this remote city, she was bemused by the theatricality of federal politics, which, at that time, was enlivened by the pyrotechnics of John Diefenbaker’s doomed incumbency and then morphed into the dreams, debates, and soap-opera scandals of the Pearson years. Soon, she accepted that her fate was to write about the human exchanges taking place at what she often referred to as “the bloody crossroads where literature and politics meet.”

I have organized the selections around four topics: the Pearson years, Canadian nationalism, Quebec, and the Trudeau era.

Initially dismissive of Prime Minister Lester Pearson’s incumbency for its political bungling and administrative ineptitude, Christina later gave “Mike” credit for his progressive achievements — Canada’s distinctive flag and medicare, bilingualism, and the modernization of laws on homosexuality and divorce. For a conference of historians considering the era, she composed a bemused assessment of the unlikely Diefenbaker-Pearson combo: “The Unlikely Gladiators.”

Christina wrote about the present, but her perceptions were informed by a deep historical sense of conditions changing and eras ending. One such transition was the slow but sure decline of the Ottawa mandarin caste, which encompassed such figures as O. D. Skelton, Jack Pickersgill, and Mitchell Sharp, great civil servants who shaped the postwar liberal welfare state. Although the mandarinate’s decline was inevitable given the changing zeitgeist, she nevertheless recalled with wry fondness the ethos of this dedicated elite. The subtitle of her review of the memoirs of Michael Ignatieff’s father, George Ignatieff, “The End of an Era,” conveys her argument: “the story of a singular man, a remarkable generation, and Canada’s golden age of innocence in international affairs.”

As much a nationalist as a feminist, in “What Was Important About the Gordon Commission” Christina responded viscerally to the much-loved maverick Walter Gordon’s civil, intelligent, and devoted commitment to rescuing Canadian capitalism — and so Canada — from U.S. domination. Christina’s nationalism came naturally to her in the 1950s and 1960s, free from either paranoia or superiority. She loved New York for its cultural riches, enjoyed Washington for its political excitement, and took great delight in seeing an aging John Kenneth Galbraith shuffle into the Harvard Faculty Club to lunch with his cronies. She knew she was good enough to have written for The New Yorker, but was proud to have written for Canadians. “How Mel Watkins Brought Socialism to the NDP” plunges us into the fevered politics of the Canadian left at the end of the 1960s, and “Growing Up Reluctantly” gives her obituary for “the birth and brutal death of the new nationalism.

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