A Storyteller’s Story

“Who is this Pierre Beartawn I keep hearing about?” The Globe and Mail’s editor, Englishman Richard Addis, is reputed to have asked early in his tenure (1999–2002). The response is unrecorded, but the question indicates that the newcomer had plenty to learn about the society he was to join. Pierre Berton, by the turn of the last century, arguably was one of English Canada’s best-known public figures. When he died, on November 30, 2004, at age 84, of a combination of heart disease and diabetes, he had authored some 50 books, written countless newspaper columns and articles, and appeared thousands of times on television and radio. Bruce Hutchison, an author he greatly admired, had earlier and famously written of Canada as “The Unknown Country.” By the time of his death, Berton’s untiring efforts conclusively had made it, at least in popular historical terms, much more of a Known Country.

But how much was really known about the man himself?

A.B. McKillop, himself not unknown to savvy Canadian readers, has written an undeniably massive biography of Berton—at nearly 800 pages as large as the larger-than-life character he is pursuing. McKillop, author (amongst many scholarly tomes) of the non-slender and much praised The Spinster and the Prophet: Florence Deeks, H.G. Wells and the Mystery of the Purloined Past, has done a brilliant job with this new Berton bio, which simply asks who was this Pierre Berton. And since this is a “life and times” in the grand tradition, how was he shaped by the era during which he lived? En route to the not particularly surprising answer, we learn, also not surprisingly, that there was more than one Pierre Berton—and that the Canada he experienced and eventually influenced had many guises as well.

The bare bones of Berton’s career have often been told—not least by the man himself. At least four of his books, Drifting Home (1973), Starting Out (1987), My Times: Living with History, 1947–1995 (1995) and the strange and revealing Cats I Have Known and Loved (2002), are in the first-person singular, as is the transparent guide for writers, The Joy of Writing: A Guide for Writers, Disguised as a Literary Memoir (2003). So to use the journalese he understood so well, had he already covered the waterfront? Well, certainly in terms of a basic chronology most of it has been said before, but what is really revealing are the shading and perspective, and that is where McKillop is at his best.

Pierre Berton was born July 12, 1920, in Whitehorse. Within a year his family had moved to the isolated, near ghost town of Dawson City. Here was something of a “boy’s own” dream, redolent with an exciting past and a town whose abandoned buildings and contents were open to exploration and imaginative speculation. If ever there were a seedpod for a romantic imagination, Dawson encapsulated it, but to child Berton the effect was subliminal. When his father, Frank, lost his job as a mining recorder in the government retrenchments of 1932, the Bertons retreated to staid Victoria, another place where little of interest occurred. It was in Victoria that Berton grew into an impressionable, shy and gawky young man. Then, suddenly, his father found himself recalled to Dawson in 1935. But this time he went alone, and father and son were isolated from each other at that teenage stage when intimacy is so necessary.

Emotional longing for people and places—nostalgia—would play no small part in Berton’s professional and personal life. Berton was too intelligent to be overwhelmed by it, but he exhibited a life-long curiosity about the nature of the past, and the separation from his father and Dawson may well have kindled it. Not a little of Berton’s life would be spent not so much coming to terms with Frank, but trying to understand him, and in so doing trying to comprehend the society that had motivated him to move to Yukon at the century’s turn. It was more than mucking for gold that took Frank there and, since he was not particularly lucky, it was something more that kept him there. McKillop writes beautifully and meaningfully of Frank’s departure and the decisive impact it had on his 15-year-old son: “These were confusing and bitterly sad days for him, and they became the most painful ones he was to suffer in a very long life, searing deep and leaving an emotional scar that never did fully heal.”

He then relates Berton’s own writing of the incident in Drifting Home and notes how, “for once” Berton “managed to plumb depths in his own dark waters,” in “a book very much about Pierre’s understanding of his father” and “raw with love and despair, possibly the closest he could come to an emotional self-reckoning.”

The passage McKillop is referring to describes the leave-taking in Victoria, his father “talking in low tones” behind a closed door to his mother and then coming out “and his eyes were red and I could see my mother crying softly into her pillow and I felt I had never in my life been so miserable.” A friend, Bob Allen, then takes Berton and his crying sister down to the ferry dock, where he had “to fight back the tears for, having turned fifteen and now being the man of the house, I was determined not to cry then or ever again.” He concludes:

A lifetime later, when Berton was talking in an interview with McKillop, still “tears welled up in his eighty-two-year-old eyes and words failed him.” For this reviewer the incident and its impact seem central to understanding Berton. After this incident, in spite of spending teenage summers working in Dawson and living with his father, he erected a wall against the world, a shield forged with bravado and braggadocio and sheer talent that insulated him from emotional exposure.

After high school, where he did not excel, Berton attended Vic College, as it was known, essentially a two-year feeder for the University of British Columbia. Victoria in the 1930s was not exactly a place to cut loose and send postcards from the edge, but Berton grew intellectually there. In 1939 when he settled into UBC, he was ready for new challenges and the autonomy that comes with going away to university.

The UBC years, or more appropriately the Ubyssey years, were the making of Berton. Here he became a cub reporter extraordinaire, in his eyes,“Scoop Berton,” living out a university version of the hit play and movie The Front Page. And arguably he was good—very good—snaring such personalities as then-neophyte explorer Thor Heyerdahl for the paper before the Vancouver dailies did, but also acting as UBC stringer for Vancouver’s News-Herald. The News-Herald was more than sophomoric enthusiasm; it was a real, if struggling, serious paper and it was there that Berton essentially learned his trade. When the war came to Vancouver after Pearl Harbor, the place came alive and Berton “had found [his] niche.”

But Berton was also eager to do his bit and joined the Canadian army. He did not have what some recall as “a good war”—at least in his view. Berton was a consummate and conscientious trainer of men and only made it overseas for the grand finale and then never got further than the United Kingdom. But he continued writing—in army papers he helped found and develop—all the time honing his reportorial and narrative skills.

Back in Vancouver he landed a job with the Sun, which was then locked in a circulation war with the grander Province, and he unleashed his flair for the dramatic. McKillop is particularly good at showing Berton’s wild ride through these years— and suggesting that he often had moral lapses of judgement in pushing family members too hard in reporting a murder story, in engineering crazy stunts calculated to embarrass and, in one case, faking a politician’s photo. He came to national—and even international notice—with a breathless tale about the Nahanni Valley, christened “Headless Valley,” where in a grand trek north, reported daily, he exploded the myth of “head hunting savages and pre-historic monsters.” The tale caught the notice of Maclean’s magazine. Berton had grander dreams and thought Toronto would be a way station on a triumphant tour to New York to work at Life or the Saturday Evening Post. As it was he would spend the rest of his life centred in Toronto.

But Berton would not be alone, although it took him much time to settle down. One of the bonuses of the Ubyssey had been working with Janet Walker—but seven years passed before he could commit to her and marry her in 1946. Janet would provide him—besides a bumper crop of children whose names all begin with “P”—the stability he had craved since his father’s death. He would later say there were three key career moves in his life: to the Ubyssey, then to Maclean’s and, finally, becoming a daily columnist for the Toronto Star. He should have added marriage to Janet, as she provided the carapace that made it all possible—including tolerating his occasional fidelity lapses.

Berton—through bylines and behind the scenes —made Maclean’s necessary reading in the Canada of the 1950s. As writer and editor he was relentless in getting the news behind the news, and through good writing, and recognizing and sponsoring good writing in others, he became a national figure. His fame was enhanced further when he joined the Toronto Star as a columnist tackling sympathetically all the great social and political issues of the day in a sharp, punchy style that enraptured readers as much as it annoyed his targets. Appearances on radio and then television, including 38 years as a regular panellist on Front Page Challenge, only enhanced his impact (although he was awkward in both media at first), but he still wanted more. And one senses through McKillop’s lens that what he wanted was less applause, less razzle-dazzle and more thoughtful respect.

The route to this respect was storytelling, which he had always been good at, but now developed on a national scale and on national themes. Beginning with his monumental account of the Klondike gold rush, really an exploration of his own backyard and his father in many ways, he became a creature rare in Canada: the popular historian. Decades later critics would still call this his best book—and it certainly is a candidate with its fast-paced style and engaging detail. It might be safer to say that he set the bar high—for himself.

The relation of, and reflections upon, Berton’s role as Canada’s popular chronicler is the centre point and attenuated climax in McKillop’s account. McKillop knows the territory very well, being, himself, that academic oddity, a professional who can write for all audiences. It takes one to know one and although McKillop’s scholarly bona fides are beyond doubt, he knows that the historical academy too often is inbred and protective of its turf—its self-appointed mission to protect and interpret the national past. Beginning with the publication of Klondike in 1958 and continuing for decades, Berton would butt up against this academic intolerance. In the end, in no small part because he could recognize and absorb justified criticism of his work, he would triumph and academe would recognize his value. It seems so simple—surely an idea is only as good as its successful communication. And unlike so many of his scholarly contemporaries, Berton was—in many media—a superb communicator.

Berton the great storyteller dovetails in this biography with Berton the celebrity writer and TV personality. One fed off the other, of course. Canada in the 1950s and ’60s was ripe for both—storytelling and celebrity. The country was no longer a British appendage and wanted to be something more than America Lite. Berton was a bridge between an old dominion and a new nation—and he was eager to make sure that the place would not become a new colony of its powerful, magnetic southern neighbour. Berton was not alone in his self-appointed task—writers such as Farley Mowat and Peter C. Newman, publishers such as Jack McClelland, TV impresarios such as Ross McLean and Patrick Watson, magazine and newspaper editors such as Arthur Irwin and Ralph Allen, built a national basis for the emergent talents that give substance and credibility to our current resilient national cultural consciousness. McKillop’s narrative is frequently as much their story and the tale of the Canada they fashioned as it is a biography of Berton—and it is none the less for that.

A word about Berton and his histories. I was briefly interviewed for this book because decades ago I defended Berton and lamented that too many of my contemporaries, in a misplaced rush to endow history as a social science, had forgotten the significance of style in their support of methodological substance. Much of the criticism of Berton’s work was deserved—he would choose the romantic over the mundane, the exciting over the humdrum, passionate character over tedious circumstance. But his research was always thorough. He did find the evidence for what he wrote, but he always added a prospector’s thumb to the weighing scale to tip it in the direction of readerliness. In so doing he occasionally was high-handed, but McKillop shows how well he considered professional criticism. The proof of Berton’s success is that our contemporary historical output again values synthesis as being as creative as specialized research—and celebrates good writing overall. No better example can be found than A.B. McKillop.

And a final word on Pierre. What did make him run? I think the answers are in Dawson and the Klondike and that is why it is so significant to emphasize the early parts of his life. What his father, Frank, found there was the excitement of the unknown, and he had the curiosity to follow it up long after the drama of the gold rush was over. His son, Pierre, had the same sort of curiosity and he found inspirational gold through his writings—especially his histories. The emblematic moment of departure from his father at that Victoria dock necessitated a lifetime of rebuilding, a search for personal stability satisfied by his marriage, and then a linking with the land and the people in it. We all profited when he struck his brand of gold.