Читать книгу Peter Gzowski - R.B. Fleming - Страница 8

Introduction: “Never as Simply Heroic as We’d Like Them to Be” ¹

The only biographies worth writing are those whose subjects resemble fictional characters.

— Peter Conrad, The Guardian Weekly, September 9–15, 2005

For most of his restless, anxious life, Peter Gzowski lived inside his imagination. Inside that imagination, Peter was happiest. Right up to his death, his enthusiasm and curiosity were intact, as if the child in him had never completely grown up. Small wonder that two of his favourite guests on radio shows were W.O. Mitchell, whose most memorable character is a boy; and Paul Hiebert, whose poet-of-the-plains, Sarah Binks, exhibits a childlike naïveté. The naïf lives on the margins of society, from which vantage point he or she may observe and comment on the adult world. Small wonder, too, that throughout his adult life Peter identified strongly with Holden Caulfield, the rebellious, highly imaginative hero of J.D. Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye, which Peter had read soon after its publication in 1951. In 1997, near the end of his long radio career, the sixty-two-year-old Peter said, “I’m still Holden Caulfield.”²

Peter’s imagination developed at an early age. He grew up in Galt, Ontario, a small city an hour or so southwest of Toronto. There, it was a park that sparked his imagination. Dickson Park, named for William Dickson, the founder of Galt, was located across the street from the upper duplex where Peter, his mother, and his stepfather lived. He loved to tell the story of a hockey game played on what he called verglas, the French word for fields of ice created when sleet covers snow, following which the temperature plummets overnight to create fields of ice. The tale usually began with one of his young pals firing the puck over the boards of the outdoor rink in Dickson Park. When the boy scampered to retrieve it, he discovered that his skates didn’t pierce the surface of the ice-encrusted snow. Peter loved to recount how he and the other players followed the leader and fired infinitely long passes over the frozen snow as they soared “across roads, across lawns, racing down hills like skiers who never had to stop and out, out, into the country, by this time followed by every boy from our side of town who had skates — forty of us, fifty of us, soaring across the farmers’ fields, inventing new rules to allow for fences in the middle of the playing area, and goals that might be half a mile apart: free, free as birds.” In another version of the same story, as they skated miles and miles, the boys were “as untrammelled as birds in the clean crisp air.” Peter concluded that version with a lament: “It is the freedom I remember, the freedom and the laughter, and I sometimes wonder if I, or my sons, will ever be that free again.”³

“Where have all the fields of ice gone?” the adult Gzowski wondered, and added, in a burst of Gallic enthusiasm, “Où est le verglas d’antan?”⁴ Where had all that carefree happiness gone? The story, in all its variations, owes a great deal to Peter’s imagination, and therefore the listener or reader dare not ask how the boys managed to reach the fields surrounding Galt, since the park is today, and was when Peter was young, surrounded by streets of solid brick Victorian homes and wooden fences.

Peter once confessed that he never let “reality stand in the way of a good story.”⁵ In April 1982, shortly after the CBC announced he would be the next host of Morningside, Peter was interviewed by a reporter from the Toronto Star. He talked about his first summer job at the golf club in Galt. At age thirteen he sold cigarettes and illegal beer in the canteen, and he cleaned up the locker room. It was a terrible job, he told the reporter, and the hours were long. In fact, he said, it was exploitation of child labour. However, he told the reporter, picking up other people’s wet towels had taught him a lesson. “I’m probably a little better about picking up my own towels in the locker room of the golf club so some kid doesn’t have to do it.” And he added, probably with a grin, “But I’m probably telling you a lie right now.”⁶ One of his favourite games on Morningside was called “Lie Detector,” an idea lifted from Radio-Canada’s Détecteur de Mensonges. Two panellists and Peter each made three statements, one of which was pure invention. The other two tried to guess which statement was the lie. One day, among his three statements, was the fiction that he had once scored a goal on Andy Moog, goalkeeper for the Edmonton Oilers.⁷

Because Peter lived inside his imagination, he was happiest in print and radio, which owe their existence to the imaginations of creator and audience, journalist and reader, broadcaster and listener. Peter always claimed to be a writer on radio. He thus combined the two most imaginative methods of mass communication.⁸

Radio is particularly magical. With words and voice, the broadcaster re-creates a world that exists in his or her mind. That world is transmitted to the listener by invisible waves. Once the waves reach a radio in a home, car, or office, each listener’s imagination re-constructs the scene, not exactly the one imagined by the broadcaster, and not exactly the one imagined by fellow listeners next door or on the other side of the country. On radio Peter imagined the whole of Canada as one large field of ice. Each weekday morning the game began anew. On Radio Free Friday during the late 1960s, on This Country in the Morning during the early 1970s, and from 1982 to 1997 on Morningside, listeners, “as untrammelled as birds in the clean crisp air,”⁹ happily followed Peter as he skated over those fields of ice that stretched across his frozen country.

Listeners loved Peter’s persona, its mystery, its childlike curiosity, and its dark humour that hinted at vulnerability and anguish. He was a brother, a friend, or a helpful neighbour who chatted amiably over the backyard fence. He was the best kind of neighbour: there when you needed him, but never intrusive, for he rarely talked about himself. When he did, it was usually in a carefully crafted personal essay — a bulletin or billboard, he called it — which he read at the top of his radio shows. He was a great listener, and the questions he asked of guests seemed to emerge from the preceding answer, thanks to good scripts written by loyal producers, and thanks also to his agile, creative mind that never allowed the “greens,” as they are called in media parlance, to dominate an interview. He even mumbled in half-sentences, as most of us do from time to time. His stammering, which was a carefully developed characteristic of his radio style, made him all the more human.

Born in 1934, Peter grew up listening to radio. He came of age during the 1950s, the decade in which CBC Television was founded. His career spanned the last half of the twentieth century, which was arguably the most creative fifty years in Canadian history. During that period, Canadians acted, painted, and sang as never before, and they wrote novels, poetry, histories, and biographies in great abundance. Publishing houses and art galleries sprang forth and flourished. The Canada Council for the Arts was founded in 1957. In the last half of the twentieth century, many Canadians grew interested in viewing, hearing, and reading about themselves.

Because of Peter, Canadians, or at least those who listened to him, watched him or read his articles and books, felt that they understood this country, so vast that it must be imagined to be real. Peter imagined his country into being, and he transmitted that country to his community of listeners, viewers, and readers. For francophones who listened to Peter, admittedly not a great many, (English) Canada was no longer a darkened stage without characters. Peter liked the expression, “As Canadian as it is possible to be under the circumstances.”¹⁰ And he saw himself as a creator and defender of that identity. Just as his ancestor, Sir Casimir Gzowski, had overseen the building of Canada’s defence systems in the nineteenth century, Peter built his own Martello Towers at the CBC to ward off American cultural imperialism. Peter was so convincing that listeners wrote to him when he was leaving Morningside in 1997 to tell him he was the glue holding Canada together. When he died in January 2002, many Canadians shed a tear as if they had lost an old friend. He personified all that was good about Canadians, his mourning fans claimed. In a review of Peter’s first Morningside Papers, Bronwyn Drainie noted that Peter’s “radio persona seems to embody just about everything we like about ourselves as Canadians: humble but not grovelling, patriotic but not jingoistic, athletic but not superjock, cultured but not egghead.”

Sir Casimir Gzowski in his Toronto mansion, “The Hall,” at Dundas and Bathurst Streets. Especially in the eyes and nose there is a resemblance to Peter Gzowski, his great-great-grandson.

(Courtesy Trent University Archives, Gzowski fonds, 92-015-19, box 3, folder 6)

Because his career covered most of the last half of the twentieth century, a biography of Peter Gzowski is a memoir of his country during those decades. His journalistic career, beginning with The Varsity in September 1956, and ending with the Globe and Mail in January 2002, covered the period of eight Canadian prime ministers, most of whom he interviewed. It was also the second Elizabethan Age, and Peter even managed to interview Her Majesty. Or so he imagined. He was witness to the Quiet Revolution in Quebec and the growth of economic nationalism in the West. From the rise of state medicine to the decline of the patriarchy, Peter was there to comment, to resist, and to participate. Here was a man who was proud to call himself Canadian and who made millions of other Canadians realize that Canada was, in what he claimed was a Canadian expression, not a bad place to live.

Even though, in his memoirs, Peter twice hinted at a darker side, most of his fans, and a few of his colleagues, rejected the idea that behind that carefully honed persona, there was another Peter, an actual human being who was, as Sylvia Fraser wrote shortly after his death, a “troubled and a troubling man.”¹¹ There were as many Peter Gzowskis as there are people who remember him. In fact, one person close to him admitted that there were days when she encountered a different Peter each time she ran into him. He was unpredictable. Michael Enright remembers being warmly invited to Peter’s cottage at Lake Simcoe. “He had been very insistent that I go and very attentive in giving me the right directions,” Enright noted. However, once Enright arrived at the cottage, Peter ignored him, preferring instead the company of eight or nine members of his inner circle.¹²

Peter was a complex man, full of contradictions. His affairs and flirtations with women were legendary, and thus his rather ambiguous notion of physical beauty is puzzling. Peter’s eye was attracted to the naked male physiques of athletes, particularly hockey players such as Mark Messier, whose perfect body, which Peter had observed at close quarters in the Edmonton Oilers’ dressing room, he described several times. On the opening page of The Game of Our Lives, Peter took note of the “handsome” Messier “with head thrown back, his eyes closed, his Praxitelean¹³ body naked, one hand cupped over his genitals.” In December 1981, Peter wrote that Messier had a body that “sculptors would kill for,”¹⁴ and in 1984, on Morningside, he likened Messier’s body to “a Grecian statue.”¹⁵ In The Game of Our Lives, Peter’s descriptions of other Oilers players are sensuous.¹⁶ None of this would be worth noting were it not for the fact that, in all his books and articles, there isn’t a single description of a nude female body. In fact, he said once that he didn’t enjoy looking at Playboy bunnies, whom he called “bovine.” Instead, he preferred the rather wholesome models posing in Eaton’s catalogues, models whose breasts and genitalia were suitably sheathed in bras and girdles.¹⁷

On air Peter was open and welcoming; in private he was carefully guarded. While most people considered him a success, Peter enjoyed dwelling on failure. Although he made it his life’s work to reveal the inner workings of the Canadian political system and to uncover the psyches of writers and politicians, he thought it an act of high treason if a friend even hinted at his ruthlessly competitive nature. He was a man who loved giving advice on recipes, books, and politics, yet he loathed taking advice, and the few friends who dared to suggest that it was time to stop smoking were given the silent treatment for days. Peter sympathized with the downtrodden and the illiterate, yet only rarely did he associate with members of this lower stratum of society.

Although he played the role of Father of His Nation and Captain Canada, guiding his listeners through one constitutional crisis after another, he found it difficult to be a good father. One afternoon in 1983 his daughter, Alison, discovered Peter watching a television game show called Family Feud, a program that blended fact and fiction.¹⁸ Peter’s imagination was racing. He announced that he wanted to drive his family to Los Angeles where they could participate in Family Feud. Peter even imagined, according to Alison, “how we would learn to jump up and down with enthusiasm.” Alison wasn’t impressed, for she had already seen her father’s imagination at work. When his wife and children objected, he “slammed a door in anger.”¹⁹ Peter had difficulty dealing with the real world.

On air Peter was usually a paragon of fairness. However, if a radio guest was of the wrong political stripe, and therefore didn’t agree with Peter’s definition of country or nation, he could grow petulant. He loved playing the part of the gregarious and generous host of golf tournaments that raised millions for literacy, yet in private he wasn’t above cheating at golf and swearing at an opponent. Peter loved to direct and manage, but he had trouble dealing with managers at the CBC, and with Cabinet ministers in charge of the network.

How did this shy, awkward, sometimes mean-spirited man who sought, indeed required, constant encouragement from producers, partners, and friends manage to define and refine, sculpt and weave a vision of Canada so powerful that many people still believe in it? How did he gain the confidence of hundreds of thousands of Canadians to such an extent that they often poured out their hearts to him in letters? It was, in fact, these very contradictions, these conflicts, these ghosts, that made him one of Canada’s best broadcast journalists. As psychotherapist Alan McGlashan once observed, “The depth of darkness into which you can descend, and still live, is an exact measure … of the height to which you can aspire to reach.”²⁰

Truman Capote put it another way: “Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavour.” In fact, without failure, real or imagined, can there be success? Without darkness, can there be light? Without that acquaintance with the night, an artist risks producing books or paintings, radio shows or theatre, that are superficial. Peter was well acquainted with darkness, and that is one reason why many of his radio programs are still worth listening to, and why many of his longer magazine articles are worth rereading.

Why a biography? After all, surely Peter told the whole truth in The Private Voice, his memoir published in 1988. Ah, the lovely treachery of memoir! Had he intended that memoir to stand as definitive, why did he carefully preserve his personal papers which, after the publication of the memoir, he deposited, with no conditions attached, at Trent University Archives? Would he approve of a truthful biography? Probably, for he was always opposed to censorship of any sort. On June 1, 1963, in Maclean’s, he damned managers and owners who forbade players to write about the darker aspects of hockey and baseball. In September 1981, he told students at the University of Guelph, “I oppose censorship absolutely. I don’t want anyone else telling me not only what I can and cannot write or publish or broadcast, I don’t want anyone else telling me what I can read or buy or attend — and I don’t want them telling my children either.” Publication of anything, even kiddy porn, was a right, he insisted.²¹

Furthermore, Peter loathed idealized figures such as Pa Cartwright in the television series Bonanza, the most popular TV western of the 1960s. Cartwright, played by Canadian Lorne Greene, was impossibly flawless, “kind, wise, courteous, strong, rich, loyal, honest, and fair to his sons,” who, as Peter pointed out with a wink, never left home. The real West, Peter added, wasn’t populated exclusively by courageous and heroic characters dressed in clean, well-pressed clothing. He preferred Dr. Ben Casey, the main character in a television series set in a hospital, for Casey was “rude, arrogant and believably human.”²²

In March 1984, during an interview on Morningside with Michael Bliss, Peter and Bliss discussed the latter’s biography of Dr. Frederick Banting, whose private life was somewhat tortured but whose public life was full of honours, including a Nobel Prize for the co-discovery of insulin. “Are you at all troubled for taking this great Canadian figure … and showing that he had feet of clay?” Peter asked Bliss. There was pain in Peter’s voice. And wasn’t to do so a Canadian phenomenon, Peter continued, to denigrate our own accomplishments? Above all, Bliss explained, biography must be honest. Peter agreed, and the two men concluded that they continued to admire Banting, warts and all. In no way, Bliss and Peter concluded, did exposing this less attractive part of Banting remove him from the pantheon of Canadian heroes. Nor should this biography of Peter Gzowski.