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— 4 — The Dangerous Temptation of Prediction, 1958–1962

It is now an inescapable fact that we are headed toward separation into two countries.

— Peter Gzowski, “Conversations with Quebec’s Revolutionaries,” Maclean’s, September 7, 1963

Soon after the twenty-four-year-old Peter bounded into the offices of Maclean’s, the day after Labour Day 1958, he boasted to June Callwood, and to anyone else at Maclean’s who noticed him, that he would be a published novelist by age thirty. He may have been attempting to emulate Ralph Allen, the magazine’s editor, who had written several successful novels.¹ Allen had taken note of Peter when he was editor of The Varsity. While in Moose Jaw and Chatham, Peter had bombarded Allen with short pieces and story ideas. During the summer of 1958, Allen had called Peter in Chatham to offer him a job as one of eight assistant editors at Maclean’s at $6,000 per year.²

Allen soon became Peter’s “most important idol,” and long after Allen’s death, Peter wrote almost nothing, he claimed, without feeling that Allen was peering over his shoulder.³ As editor of Maclean’s from 1950 to 1960, Allen insisted on detailed outlines and multiple drafts before he accepted an article for publication. Delete the writing of which you are most proud, he used to tell his staff, for pride was a sure sign of self-indulgence. He required his writers to adhere to his formula: a lead or introduction followed by a sub-lead or hook that captured the reader. A series of anecdotes and expositions were to follow. If the article was a profile, at the halfway point the writer provided details such as the subject’s birth and childhood. The conclusion of all articles, Allen told his staff, should be “succinct and tangy.”⁴ Allen was ruthless. “This is bullshit,” he often scrawled beside a flatulent sentence. However, there was one piece of advice that Peter didn’t absorb from his mentor: “Never stick your pecker into the payroll.”

Peter began as a researcher for and contributor to the brand-new “Preview” section, which was printed in “the yellows,” the outer section that wrapped around the much larger “white” section where the “feature” articles were published. Much in the manner of a newspaper, the yellows allowed the magazine to report and comment on current events and to speculate about the future. These short pieces usually bore no byline. In 1958 and 1959, “Preview” topics included a piece about the benefits of a four-day work week, and news of a new granting program to make films based on Canadian novels such as Mordecai Richler’s Son of a Smaller Hero. The Alaska Highway was to be extended to Fort McPherson, Northwest Territories, and golfing was the coming rage. Velcro would replace the zipper, and faster skates might speed up hockey, a piece that bears the Gzowski style in lines such as “The blistering speed of Howie Morenz has long been a cherished dream for red-blooded Canadian boys.”

At Maclean’s, Peter was working with some of the best journalists in English Canada, including Peter C. Newman, June Callwood, Trent Frayne, Farley Mowat, and Bruce Hutchison. Soon Peter was promoted to Ken Lefolii’s old job of copy editor, following which he became “Preview” editor. He made use of his wide array of friends across the country, including Harold Horwood from Newfoundland; Murray Burt from Moose Jaw; Don Gordon, son of the president of Canadian National Railways; Charles Taylor, son of tycoon E.P. Taylor; and Fred Kerner, a publishing executive in New York who had once been a reporter in Saskatoon.⁵

Peter used the telephone to keep in touch with his stringers, and occasionally met them in person. For instance, in September 1959, he attended Murray Burt’s wedding in Regina, which coincided with Peter’s first trip to the Mackenzie Delta. Peter flirted with one of the bridesmaids, and he and the bride entertained guests with piano duets.⁶ In the “Preview” section, the first short article to bear Peter’s name was published on October 11, 1958, on the subject of a beer strike in Ontario.

He challenged the contention of teetotallers that if alcohol were prohibited, money spent on booze would flow to better causes. Not true, Peter argued. Money not spent on beer would gravitate toward spirits and wine. He also wrote feature articles for the white pages. His first, published on January 31, 1959, was called “The Gay and Gusty World of the College Press.” Canada’s twenty-three university newspapers, among them The Varsity, were, he noted, among “the last outposts of a flamboyant, crusading brand of journalism.” His second feature, published on May 24, 1959, was called “What’s It Like to Have a Famous (but Forgotten) Ancestor?” Its subject was, of course, Sir Casimir. On October 10, 1959, in “How Innocent Card Players Become Bridge Fiends,” Peter wrote about bridge, one of his passions. “A million Canadians play a game called contract bridge,” he wrote. “But it’s much more than a game to a few thousand addicts, some of whom have thrown up promising careers to concentrate on one of the trickiest, most demanding mental exercises man has ever devised.”

In the November 7, 1959, issue, “Preview” included several short speculative pieces on the 1960s. June Callwood predicted a decline in moral standards and an increase in both materialism and public displays of emotion. Ken Lefolii predicted that Polynesian could replace Chinese as the “ethnic” food of choice, while Barbara Moon foresaw flat-screen televisions mounted on walls showing up to ten channels. Peter wrote on cities of the 1960s. Winnipeg would experience a “controlled boom,” and Ottawa would become a “modern Athens.” On November 21, 1959, “Preview” predicted that automation would cause job losses in the postal system, and that in all provinces except Quebec, movie censors would allow more overt sex and frank language such as bastard and bitch.⁷ On December 5, Peter Newman predicted that Canada would have both a national anthem and a flag by 1967, and that either Toronto or Montreal would host the world’s fair in 1967. “Preview” also predicted that E.P. Taylor’s colt “Victoria Park” would soon be an all-time great racing horse. (Did Charles Taylor send that one to Peter?) Two weeks later “Preview” notified anyone with a distinguished ancestor to get in touch with George W. Brown, who was collecting names for the first of up to twenty volumes of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography. In the issue of December 19, 1959, in the “Backstage” portion of the “yellows,” Peter wrote about religion. Did the recently discovered Gospel of Thomas throw doubt on the four gospels, and on the “truth” of the pronouncements of Jesus Christ?

On January 16, 1960, Peter’s first profile, “Ross McLean, the TV Star You Never See,” was published. It was the first of Peter’s long articles to venture away from familiar topics like family, student newspapers, and card games. One of the most acclaimed executive producers of his day, McLean worked in the CBC’s Public Affairs Department. McLean, Peter wrote, “has brought the flair of show-biz to the often-dull realm of televised talks and public affairs.” In shows like Close-Up and Tabloid, McLean had made stars of Max Ferguson, Joyce Davidson, and Pierre Berton.

By using code words, Peter’s article hinted at a closeted side. McLean was a bachelor. His conversation was “spangled with epigrams of the Oscar Wilde school.” His voice seldom lost “its hesitant, prepared quality or its wit.” He dressed “meticulously” in a well-tailored dark suit; he carried his tall frame “stiffly”; he lived in a “swanky” area near Avenue Road and St. Clair Avenue; and he drove a shiny black Thunderbird. McLean was a “very complicated man,” to use Peter’s phrase.⁸ Quite clearly, Peter was uncomfortable with McLean. In the 1980s, he was still trying to come to terms with the man. In a draft of his memoirs, he described McLean as “shy … and easily wounded, but like a lot of shy people he seemed curiously insensitive to the effect his barbed words could have on others.” The line is a good one, but it never made it into the published version of the memoirs, for Peter crossed it out, perhaps because he realized that the description suited not only McLean but himself, as well.

Throughout 1960, Peter remained as “Preview” editor and continued to keep in touch with his stringers across the country, urging them to come up with breaking and slightly unusual stories. Peter often called Murray Burt in Moose Jaw. “Got anything today, Murray?” Peter would ask. Peter was especially pleased if the news came from an unusual-sounding place like Elbow or Bienfait, pronounced Beanfate. In the “Preview” of Saturday, April 9, 1960, Burt predicted that if the CCF government of Tommy Douglas were to win the upcoming Saskatchewan election, it would embrace the British model of health insurance. In the same issue, “Preview” published a short piece, no doubt by Harold Horwood, on the growing reputation and price of Cape Dorset carvings and prints. On May 21, 1960, “Preview” included a paragraph on the dangerous rise in smoking, its link with cancer, and the worrisome fact that 80 percent of adults started smoking in their teens. (Did the “Preview” editor write this piece?)

One spring weekend in 1960, Peter and Jennie flew to New York. In an article that appeared in the July 2 issue, Peter began by claiming that Jennie and he had known the city for years by way of photographs and movies.⁹ They posed for photographer Frank Wolfe, a New Yorker hired by Maclean’s to record the visit. Several of Wolfe’s photographs were published with the article, including one of Peter and Jennie looking down into Central Park from the balcony of their hotel. Another photograph shows them inside the Guggenheim Museum. Peter had his photograph taken while lighting a cigarette in Times Square, which he thought “garish and sleazy.”

On the Thursday evening, Jennie and he arrived early at the Broadway production of A Thurber Carnival. In the lobby, they tried to guess the professions of fellow patrons. One distinguished grey-haired man they took to be an unsuccessful author. Next day they window-shopped at Tiffany’s, after which they had lunch with Fred Kerner. In the afternoon, they headed over to the Algonquin Hotel to see the Round Table made famous by, among others, Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley. They had already had a Dubonnet for lunch. At the Algonquin they ordered gin and tonic. Later, at a seafood restaurant on Third Avenue, they drank a “dreadful” rosé from Ohio. That evening they declared The Threepenny Opera so dull that they left early, hand in hand, to stroll through Greenwich Village. At the White Horse Tavern, once a favourite drinking spot of Dylan Thomas, they drank a stein each of beer and porter, followed by draft beer in another bar. At a bookstore that was open until 4:00 a.m. they bought two volumes of Irving Layton’s poetry, and a book of East Indian recipes.

On Saturday they rode to the top of the Empire State Building, and that evening, they took in The Miracle Worker starring Anne Bancroft and a young Patty Duke, playing Helen Keller. Peter declared the play “an evening of wonder.” On Sunday morning, they spent an hour at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Fifth Avenue on the east side of Central Park, where they viewed Rembrandts and El Grecos, as well as Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker, whose “rippling back” Peter admired at such length that Jennie had to nudge him on. They walked the short distance north to the Guggenheim. Peter declared that only two paintings, a Paul Klee and an Amedeo Modigliani, were worth their time.¹⁰ He dismissed the Guggenheim’s collection of Abstract Expressionists as nothing but “great gobs of brown on black and little burned things or bold, bare patterns of primary colors that bored us at a glance.”¹¹ Afterward, they headed for Idlewild Airport. Their taxi driver happened to be the father of Jerry Orbach, one of the stars of The Threepenny Opera. Orbach senior labelled Canadians “cheapskate” tippers. Although Peter seems to have enjoyed New York in 1960, eight years later he declared the city rather dull.¹²

Back at his desk at Maclean’s, Peter continued to work on “Preview.” On July 16, he chose to include another article about attempts to ban smoking in public places in Vancouver. Meantime, according to the same “Preview,” Canadian Robert Goulet was scheduled to join Richard Burton and Julie Andrews in Camelot in October at Toronto’s new O’Keefe Centre. One section in “Preview” was called “The Mailbag,” which on August 27, 1960, printed a poetic letter whose first two lines, inspired by Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees,” read “I think that I shall never see / A sadder sight than my MP.” It was written by a twenty-one-year-old from Baie-Comeau, Quebec, who signed his name M. Brian Mulroney. He was responding to an article by Peter C. Newman, in which Newman had argued that $10,000 was too low an annual salary for MPs.

During the last four months of 1960, three feature articles by Peter appeared in Maclean’s. In October, “The Prisoner of Bordeaux,” based in part on the book Scandale à Bordeaux by Jacques Hébert, focused on Robert Sauvé, a twenty-year-old who had spent three and a half years without trial or treatment in the mental wing of Montreal’s Bordeaux Prison, a wing that was infested with cockroaches and rats, and homosexuals who, according to Peter, brazenly committed “unspeakable acts.” In the second part of the article, Peter did a short profile of Hébert. After working at Le Devoir from 1951 to 1953, Hébert had founded and edited the weekly tabloid Vrai, in which he defended underdogs. Hébert concluded that Sauvé’s greatest crime was daydreaming. He assembled a committee of nine lawyers, including Frank Scott and Pierre Trudeau,¹³ who managed to free Sauvé.¹⁴

Peter’s article, “The Raffish Tradition of the College Football Weekend,” appeared in the last issue of Maclean’s of 1960. Its subject was the championship game of the university football season.¹⁵ In 1960, McGill played against the University of Toronto. Much of the article was written in half-sentences such as “One girl knitting and chewing gum.” And “Band comes through leading conga line. Very Scott Fitzgerald … Band leaves. Car grows quiet.” Perhaps Peter was attempting to imitate the speaking style of university students. He travelled to Montreal so that he could return to Toronto on a special train with the McGill players and fans. Along for the ride was the McGill soccer team, one of whose members, Peter noted, looked like Robertson Davies, who had just been appointed lecturer at the University of Toronto’s Trinity College. As students sang “When the Saints Go Marching In,” Peter spotted a politician necking with two students.

Next day, at the pre-game parade, Peter stationed himself behind Claude Bissell, president of the University of Toronto and recently appointed chair of the Canada Council. Immediately in front of Bissell, four soldiers in nineteenth-century uniforms fired an antique cannon. “I hate bangs,” Bissell muttered as he moved backward toward Peter, who later slipped over to the Park Plaza for a beer. At the tea dance following the game, photographer Tom Davenport snapped Peter dancing with a baton twirler whom Peter described as “a pretty blonde in blue and white with bare legs and high white boots with tassels.” When the music grew agitated, Peter went home “for dinner.” At 1:30 a.m.! “Decide I should have brought my wife,” Peter later commented. Obviously, Jennie wasn’t amused.

Meantime, the “Preview” of October 22 dealt with topics of great interest to the editor. Would Toronto vote in favour of Sunday movies on Monday, December 5, when the question would be included in the municipal election? The same “Preview” predicted that wealthy golfers would soon be building private clubs, now that golf courses were being inundated by ordinary people. And Native reserves, according to the “Preview” of October 22, would soon be losing their “slummy look” thanks to a government-sponsored housing scheme of mortgages and two-bedroom bungalows easily assembled for $3,000.

With Peter C. Newman, Peter contributed to a four-section report on rising young Canadians. “The Stiffening Spine of a Soft Generation” appeared on March 25, 1961. Among the fourteen successful young people were M. Brian Mulroney and Adrienne Poy, whose short story “Ring Around October” was included. Their generation, Peter noted, suffered from malaise and boredom brought on by too much comfort.

The second week of July, Peter flew north “to tell all our readers what forest fires are,” or so he informed Mordecai Richler, who, from London, England, was sending Peter the odd piece for “Preview,” including one on the cartoon figure Huckleberry Hound. Richler had also mailed the Gzowskis a used crib. In the shipping, “someone — a Jew, likely — lost the hardware,” Peter joked.¹⁶ On September 9, Maclean’s published Peter’s “1961: Summer of the Angry Forest Fires.” He described the dramatic progress of a fire near Sioux Lookout in northwestern Ontario. “A fire can cross water,” explained Peter, “jump the firelines, cut across its path and kill who or what is standing where the end of its moving blowtorch touches the earth.”

In early 1961, “Preview” included an article on Dominion archivist W. Kaye Lamb and the fifty-two miles of history at the National Archives in Ottawa (January 28). There was also a piece on Bruce Kidd, the young runner who was resisting offers to attend an American university (February 25). On March 25, 1961, “Preview” mentioned Bell Telephone’s problems with metal slugs replacing nickels at pay phones. In April the “Background” section published a short piece on art. The University of British Columbia had just purchased a collection of Native art and artifacts for $10,000, and the provincial government had paid the astronomical sum of $70,000 for a collection that included a hundred paintings by Emily Carr. In the issue of June 17, 1961, now that birth control pills for women were coming onto the Canadian market, “Preview” predicted an oral contraceptive for men.

In July, in the “Background” section, Peter reported on a recent survey that found that Quebec teens were far more individualistic than their Anglo counterparts. In August, “Preview” featured an interview by Peter C. Newman with the head of environmental research of Atomic Energy of Canada. Was the disposal of atomic waste a problem? Newman asked. Not really was the answer. In September, “Preview” published Michael Sheldon’s tongue-in-cheek article suggesting that all of Canada should speak French and that a new flag should feature a large fleur-de-lis with the Union Jack in one corner. The same “Preview” contained an article with no byline, but it was surely Peter’s. A doctor in Windsor, Ontario, had discovered that tolbutamide, a drug for diabetes, reduced the curse of acne. “Though acne neither kills nor cripples,” the writer noted, “it can leave mental and physical scars for life.”

Peter’s last article (November 4) as “Preview” editor was on a Montreal subject. Earlier in 1961, McClelland & Stewart had published William Weintraub’s Why Rock the Boat, a raucous satire of the newspaper business in Montreal. The reviews were flattering, except in Montreal. What really upset one city editor, even though he admitted that the practice was widespread, was Weintraub’s observation that editors often suppressed stories unfavourable to advertisers. Peter liked the novel.

“Preview” had been a good experience for Peter. It showed him how to condense a story and forced him to look for stories of interest to readers. “Preview” may also have provided a model for his radio shows, which usually opened with a short, pithy essay or bulletin, often personal. In feature articles, Peter was developing into a mature writer. While he had begun with articles on The Varsity and Sir Casimir Gzowski, as 1961 drew to a close he was casting his net farther afield to catch topics such as prison reform and the rising generation. In November 1961, Peter was posted to Montreal as the first Quebec correspondent for Maclean’s. By that time, Le Magazine Maclean,¹⁷ the French-language version of Maclean’s, founded in the late spring of 1960, was beginning to raise the hackles of Quebec nationalists. It was already clear that the French version wasn’t a voice of Quebec, in spite of a top-notch staff that included Pierre de Bellefeuille, Jacques Guay, and André Laurendeau, who was also editor of Le Devoir. In August, Premier Jean Lesage called the new magazine a mark of respect for Quebec culture, but pointed out that it wasn’t really representative of Quebec culture. Peter’s office was on Peel Street, where the French-language version was produced.

A short piece for the entertainment section of Maclean’s called “The Bike Race That Has More Fans Than the Grey Cup” (December 2, 1961) was Peter’s first article written in Montreal. Le Tour du St-Laurent, modelled on Le Tour de France, was in its ninth year. It attracted more than a half-million spectators along the route from Quebec City to Montreal and through the Eastern Townships. It cost about $15,000 annually, and its founder was Yvon Guillou, a Frenchman whose greatest concern was an infestation of performance-enhancing drugs! Almost a year later, in the issue of October 6, 1962, Peter’s expanded article on the race appeared in Maclean’s under the title “Ohé, les Gars du Tour du St-Laurent!” In translation it was published that same month in Le Magazine Maclean. Each evening the riders and their fans were entertained by stars such as Dominique Michel, who, Peter pointed out, was the wife of Camille Henry of the New York Rangers. The overall winner of the race was Aleksei Petrov, who, Peter claimed, was as handsome as Bobby Hull.

On December 16, 1961, A.J. Newlands “with Peter Gzowski” penned a feature called “What It’s Like to Drive a Buick to Moscow,” in which Newlands described a road trip from Great Britain to the Soviet Union where his wife and he were surprised to discover good roads, friendly people, and clean sidewalks. Peter, it seems, edited the article and probably rewrote it.

Soon after the Gzowski family settled into a house on Snowdon Avenue in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce (NDG), Peter took the train to Quebec City to learn French. While Peter’s French improved only marginally, he began to understand the resentment created each time that French Canadians/Québécois were forced to listen to and speak English. He concluded that if he had to live in a second language “in order to compete on equal terms with everyone around me,” he, too, might become a separatist.¹⁸ The resultant article, told with good humour and humility, was published in Maclean’s on January 27, 1962.

Peter quickly picked up the currents of change in French-speaking Quebec. In the “Background” section of the December 16, 1961, issue of Maclean’s, he wrote a short piece called “Why the Separatists Aren’t Ready to Separate — Yet.” The month before, he had attended a Laval University Conference on Canadian Affairs where panellists André Laurendeau, René Lévesque, and Gérard Pelletier, seated next to Eugene Forsey and Doug Fisher, complained about the absence of bilingualism in Ottawa and the fact that federal government cheques were issued only in English. At one point Lévesque told the young, enthusiastic audience that English Canada needed French Canada more than the latter needed English Canada. While surveys concluded that only a minority of Québécois opted for independence, Peter warned that if grievances were allowed to simmer, more and more French Canadians would support the idea of an independent Quebec.¹⁹ The article was translated and published in Le Magazine Maclean in January 1962 as “J’ai découvert les racines du séparatisme.”

On February 24, 1962, Peter’s “Quebec Report” dealt with the move to secularize education. The leading organization pushing for a more “neutral” education was Mouvement laïque de langue française, composed mostly of francophone parents who were worried that their children were learning too much about the Church and not enough about modern, secular society. To examine the issue, the Lesage government had established a commission. “Things don’t change that fast in Quebec — even in the ‘quiet revolution,’” Peter noted. This was his first printed use of the phrase. The term was in the air, and good listener that he was, he picked it up. Years later he was credited with inventing the phrase, which he denied. It was coined by Brian Upton, a reporter for the Montreal Star. After Upton and Peter talked in Montreal in 1961, Peter had absorbed the phrase.²⁰

In March 1962, Peter used the term again. Prime Minister John Diefenbaker was perceived by Québécois as unsympathetic to their aspirations. He massacred the French language; he refused to establish a royal commission to study bilingualism; and he didn’t appoint a Quebec lieutenant. Peter understood that Diefenbaker failed to understand the Quiet Revolution and the determination of Québécois “to take a full share in Canada’s future.” Hence, the politician to watch, Peter advised, was Réal Caouette, the leader of the Créditistes, a party that had won safe Liberal seats in the 1958 election and that threatened now to take seats away from the Conservatives. Even though Liberal leader Lester B. Pearson wasn’t much more popular in Quebec than Diefenbaker, Peter predicted that, in the next federal election, the Liberals would win as many as sixty seats in the province. He was right. In the federal election of 1962, the Conservatives’ huge majority was reduced to a minority, in good part as the result of the rise of the Créditistes. To explain the Créditistes to English Canada, Peter interviewed Caouette. “A Strongman’s Road to Power” appeared in Maclean’s on July 28, 1962. There was no French version in Le Magazine Maclean. Quebec already understood the Caouette phenomenon.

For the “Quebec Report” of May 5, entitled “The Astonishing Success Story of French Publishers: Now They Can Make Money on Books They Don’t Sell,” Peter talked to Jacques Hébert, whose Éditions de l’Homme published bestsellers that were helping to inspire the Quiet Revolution, a term Peter used twice without capitalization in the short article. Hébert’s stable of books included Jean-Paul Desbiens’s Les insolences du Frère Untel, which attacked the public school system run by the Roman Catholic Church; and Marcel Chaput’s Pourquoi je suis séparatiste.²¹ The annual Salon du Livre de Montréal, which had begun modestly in 1959, boasted eighty-eight exhibitors in 1962. Québécois were eager to read about themselves.

In his “Quebec Report” of June 2, 1962, called “GOING: The Supporters of the Separatist Movements,” once again Peter predicted the decline of separatism, whose principal leader, Marcel Chaput, was becoming more and more isolated. The previous April, Peter pointed out, Cité Libre had devoted an issue to separatism, including an article by Pierre Trudeau, who derided the totalitarian spirit of some separatists, the anti-semitism of others, “and, in all of them, the worship of generalizations and economic incompetence.”

On April 7, 1962, in the “Background” section of “Preview,” Peter’s short piece focused on the St. Lawrence Seaway. In “To Open an Ice-Bound Seaway, Just Blow Bubbles,” he discussed the possibility of extending the navigable period of the seaway by using an air compressor to force the warmer bottom layer to mix with the top colder layer, thereby melting some of the ice. On July 28, 1962, Peter’s article “Are New Dailies Impossible? Le Nouveau Journal’s Short, Sharp Life Says Yes” dealt with the demise of a rival to La Presse. And on September 8, 1962, his “Progress: Twelve More English Canadians Are Learning French” praised l’Université de Montréal’s new course designed to make a dozen anglophones and the same number of francophones bilingual.

Peter also dealt with the arguments for and against the nationalization of hydro companies. On August 11, 1962, he reported that “Lévesque promised to make all of Quebec’s power public.” Peter predicted that René Lévesque might form a new party of the left. In his last “Quebec Report” (October 20, 1962), Peter continued to deal with the topic of the possible nationalization of eleven hydro companies. The issue was central to the upcoming provincial election, called for November 14. Once again he used the term quiet revolution, by now a cliché, he admitted, but an apt one to describe “the change that has swept through every facet of Quebec life from movie censorship to education, from the Church to the daily press, from high finance to the consumption of alcohol.” And the mainspring of this change, Peter argued, was the provincial government. Of course, as he pointed out, by reforming the corrupt methods of former Premier Maurice Duplessis, Jean Lesage had denied his Liberals the spoils of office such as liquor licences and road construction contracts. Alienated Liberals, Peter predicted, might turn to Daniel Johnson, leader of the opposition Union Nationale.²²

It didn’t take Peter long to realize that one of the sore points among French-speaking Montrealers was Westmount. In “Westmount,” Peter wrote about the wealthy city within a city. The article appeared in Maclean’s in September 1962, and the month following in Le Magazine Maclean, where its title, “Westmount l’immutable,” emphasized the seemingly permanent nature of the Protestant-Jewish enclave whose thirty-two thousand residents, less than 1 percent of the population of Quebec, controlled a good portion of the province’s economy. Taxes were low, while services and political integrity were high. But don’t look for The Catcher in the Rye in the Westmount Library, Peter warned, at least not on the open shelves. “It deals with homosexuality,” a librarian had quietly explained.

Peter was one of the first English-speaking journalists, perhaps the very first, to write profiles of rising stars such as Pierre Trudeau, newly appointed as a law professor at l’Université de Montréal. In English Canada in 1961, Trudeau wasn’t much known. While working on his article on Bordeaux Prison, Peter had encountered Trudeau’s name, though perhaps not for the first time, for Trudeau and Blair Fraser had covered the March 1958 federal election for the CBC. Although Peter never wrote about that coverage, he had no doubt watched the results on television in Chatham.²³

On December 15, 1961, when Peter arrived at the art-filled Outremont home of Grace Trudeau, Pierre poured Peter a triple Scotch while the abstemious law professor opted for mineral water. The resulting article, “Portrait of an Intellectual in Action,” shows Peter at his best. The style is lyrical, the research meticulous, and the explanation of the complex nature of Quebec politics impeccable. “In a civilization where the influence of the thinking man is generally confined to his advice on filters for cigarettes,” the article began, “Quebec stands out as a place where the intellectual had some part in a recent and vital political victory — the toppling, in June 1960, of the Union Nationale regime.” Peter quite correctly gave some of the credit for the victory of Jean Lesage’s Liberals to the small group of intellectuals who had been publishing Cité Libre throughout the 1950s. He also admired Trudeau’s sense of fun, his mischief, his daring. Trudeau had thrown snowballs at Stalin’s statue in Moscow in 1952, he had performed a somersault in Shanghai in 1960, and he had once tried to row from Florida to Cuba. Peter wrote that Trudeau enjoyed challenging flawed ideologies such as that of Premier Duplessis, or Quebec nationalism and separatism. Perhaps in some countries, Trudeau explained to Gzowski, separatism was an option, but not in Canada, which for most of the twentieth century had been creating a multinational state. “The hope of mankind,” Trudeau added, “lies in multinationalism.” ²⁴ The article was published in Le Magazine Maclean as “Un capitaliste socialisant: Pierre-Elliott Trudeau.” In English, Trudeau’s intellectual qualities were underlined by the title; in French the contradiction in ideologies was more important.

Peter’s third profile of an important figure in the Quiet Revolution was called “The Cardinal and His Church in a Year of Conflict.” Published on July 14, 1962, it dealt with Cardinal Paul-Émile Léger and the changing role of the Catholic Church in the new Quebec. Peter knew how to hook the reader. “The French and Catholic people of Quebec,” the article began, “in their by now famous quiet revolution, are changing faster than any group of people on this continent.” One of the leaders of this change was the archbishop of Montreal, Cardinal Léger, who was supported by bishops in Ottawa and Quebec City but opposed by bishops in Quebec’s smaller cities. To advise him, Peter pointed out, the cardinal had surrounded himself with bright, well-educated young priests who were connected with universities and the labour movement. While he wasn’t in favour of dissolving the Church’s role in education, Léger encouraged greater lay participation. The article won Best Magazine Article of the Year. As usual Peter was prescient. Only decades later did historians understand how the Quiet Revolution marked “a sustained attempt to enhance and strengthen, rather than weaken and ultimately sever, the relationship between Catholicism and Quebec society.”²⁵

While living in Montreal, Peter also wrote about non-Quebec topics, including a couple of short pieces on television. On April 7, 1962, he turned to a medical topic of relevance to him. In “Why Doctors Now Study Your Mind to Treat Your Body,” Peter wrote about psychosomatic medicine, which was a new approach to healing the body by treating the mind. Accidents, some doctors claimed, can be caused by inner turmoil, and so, too, venereal disease. Peter explained that “indiscriminate promiscuity is symptomatic of emotional disorder and therefore VD has clear psychic components.” And “diseases of the skin,” he added, “provide the most straightforward examples of the psychosomatic effect.” He quoted a doctor who claimed that “eczema is a disease which occurs in emotionally insecure individuals.”

Two weeks later Maclean’s carried Peter’s “The New Women in Politics,” a study of Judy LaMarsh and Pauline Jewett, two rising females. On August 11, 1962, Peter’s topic was John Turner, a “man to watch.” In the federal election of June 18, 1962, the thirty-three-year-old bachelor, who had danced with Princess Margaret in 1958, had won the Montreal riding of St-Laurent–St-Georges. Turner would, Peter predicted, be a candidate for prime minister “sometime after 1970.” Peter’s last feature article written and published while in Montreal (Maclean’s, November 17, 1962) was focused on Canada’s young athletes such as Harry Jerome and Bruce Kidd, who would soon be competing in the next Commonwealth Games in Australia.

Peter liked Montreal immensely, he told Mordecai Richler, but was getting tired of saying so. While he didn’t like Montreal smoked meat, Peter informed Richler that he was fond of chopped liver and fresh bread, as well as Quebec’s gallon jugs of wine, which helped him, he joked, “to stay drunk all the time.” Peter may even deserve some of the credit (or blame) for Richler’s articles and books critical of Quebec nationalism. While it was Richler’s idea to write something trenchant about Quebec, it was Peter who encouraged the idea. “Whyinhell,” he wrote to Richler on December 15, 1961, “don’t you write a piece called Why I don’t like French Canadians?”

During his year in Montreal, Peter revelled in the freedoms of the lively, cosmopolitan city. Since the Montreal International Film Festival, founded in 1960, wasn’t allowed to cut films, according to agreements with the films’ international directors, the festival helped to change censorship laws in the province. One night, at 1:00 a.m., Peter was able to view an uncut version of François Truffaut’s Jules et Jim. The city’s bar scene was vibrant, too. One weekend Cathy Perkins, on assignment with Chatelaine, joined Peter for dinner, after which they drifted into a bar where the great rock-and-roller Bo Diddley was performing. With the filmmaker Donald Brittain, Peter attended horse races at Blue Bonnets Raceway.²⁶ While Peter explored, observed, and wrote, Jennie was at home tending to three preschool children: three-year-old Peter C.; two-year-old Alison; and Maria, born in August 1961.

A tender moment shared by Peter and his daughter, Alison, in 1964 as captured by photographer Lutz Dille.

(Courtesy National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa)

Like most of his articles published in Maclean’s, the score or more articles written while Peter was Quebec editor are as relevant today as they were when he first wrote them. They are among the best portraits in English about the province/pays/nation during its Quiet Revolution. Peter’s only challenger for the title of best anglophone eye on the rising Quebec was Scott Symons, who had already written extensively in French in La Presse about the post-Duplessis political and cultural revolution he had witnessed between the autumn of 1960 and the summer of 1961. ²⁷

Having gained that insight into Quebec, Peter considered writing a book about the province. He signed a contract, and once back in Toronto, carried out more research. The book was never published, and probably never written beyond an introduction. A good thing, too, for it is his Maclean’s articles, so lyrical, so insightful and sensitive, that have stood the test of time.²⁸