Blissful History

Michael Bliss turns the spotlight on himself in this incisive memoir. Using skills well honed with his earlier historical biographies, which are scholarly masterpieces and often bestsellers, Bliss deftly situates his own story in post-war Canada. Weaving his private life, politics, social movements, university affairs and his professional career into a unified texture, supported by decades of journal writing where he vented and recorded his life, Bliss offers an engaging memoir, fast paced and well written and very hard to put down.

Bliss asserts that “the biographer’s job is not so much to write a case history” in order to illustrate some great idea or event, “as it is to re-create a life.” In Writing History: A Professor’s Life, Bliss accordingly focuses on his personal motivations and situational contexts for doing what he did. He is rightly proud of his many accomplishments, but not pompous, combining many achievements with humorous self-effacement. He is starkly dismissive (usually with acerbic wit) of people and causes he believes wrong-headed, yet generous to many, sensitive to those who cannot defend themselves and not afraid to reveal his own self-doubts, false starts and darker family secrets. The result is indeed a life re-created for the general reader, as Bliss navigates a troubled childhood and the loss of his sureties of religious faith, through the major boomer public issues of the Vietnam War, free trade and Meech Lake, and the wars in Bosnia and Iraq, on to disillusionment with universities and the immense joy of grandparenting.

Bliss is a natural contrarian, which gives his life and this book dramatic tension. A historian of Canada, intent through his teaching and writing to explain its character to students and the public, he eschews the east-west unity of the country and sees merit in the north-south connections with the United States. This comes naturally perhaps to a cross-border person (born near Windsor in 1941, with continuing American family roots). An honoured historian at the University of Toronto (where he did all his degrees and taught all his life), he disparages the majority of his colleagues as lazy and unimaginative, producing little and complaining much behind the protective wall of undeserved tenure. By choice and conviction a very public historian, giving continual interviews to the media, writing scores of influential op-ed pieces and reviews for major newspapers and magazines, accepting invitations to give hundreds of lectures all over the world, Bliss became ever more shy and retiring, a loner uncomfortable in crowds, happiest when writing in the solitude of his study. An innovative social and intellectual historian before either field was fashionable in Canada, Bliss also—to much criticism—advocated (and practised) national history, interpreting the country to its citizens as a unified polity instead of conducting trendy micro-analyses of its constituent parts, paying little attention to the whole. Coming to maturity in the 1960s so formative for many of his generation, Bliss had little empathy for its sexual, drug or cultural tastes, and he bitterly scorns the radical student politics of the time, which came close to destroying his university and left a legacy of lower standards in a lingering environment of selfish entitlement among students (and no few professors).

Michael Bliss burst onto the historical scene at the annual conference of the Canadian Historical Association in 1970, when he delivered a paper on sexual ideas in pre-Freudian Canada. Chaired by Maurice Careless, who mused that the session might be termed “Careless Bliss,” the paper explored masturbation and “creative sexual tension” in the English-speaking world, based on the vast array of forgotten Victorian literature on human physiology. His university lectures entitled “Sex with Bliss” were very popular!

The session had an evident impact on Bliss, leading in time to his stellar writing about the history of medicine. Part of that was paying “homage to the family business”—for both his admired father and adored older brother were medical doctors before their early deaths—and part was embracing the intrinsic challenge of opening a new field of historical understanding. While his medical books are best known, he at first explored the intellectual history of Canadian business in two books and a much honoured biography of Canadian businessman Joseph Flavelle. Bliss was also founding editor of the multi-volume Social History of Canada series for the University of Toronto Press, producing so many volumes that the publisher told him to slow down. And he penned the bestselling Right Honourable Men: The Descent of Canadian Politics from Macdonald to Mulroney, with a chapter on each prime minister ranking their effectiveness for Canada. In public life as a “media professor” and behind the scenes organizing lobbying campaigns, he rallied with Deborah Coyne, Clyde Wells and an un-retiring Pierre Trudeau to fight what Bliss saw as the abominations of Brian Mulroney and the Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords: “I joked that for pleasant change from observing Canadian politics I was writing a book about the ravages of smallpox.” But it was only partly a joke, for his first love remained medical history, producing in two decades extensive studies of the discovery of insulin as well as the story of the Montreal small-pox epidemic, and internationally acclaimed biographies of Frederick Banting, William Osler and Harvey Cushing, as well as a shorter overview on The Making of Modern Medicine.

In his writing of his major medical studies and exploring their controversies, Bliss’s prose reflects the driving excitement he felt ploughing through archives, finding caches of letters still in private hands, making contacts with relatives and survivors to interview, and walking in the same far-flung places as his subjects. He watched an entire medical autopsy to understand Osler’s path-breaking work with cadavers and a nine-hour neurosurgery operation to grasp Cushing’s innovations—not unlike his earlier observation of every gory step in the hog slaughtering process to comprehend the nature of Flavelle’s meat–packing business. He makes us feel, as he did, “the delights” of such detective work being equivalent to “the thrills of an athlete’s championship season, or perhaps the perfect marathon.” Not surprisingly, Bliss rarely used research assistants with any success in doing the hard slogging through archival records, wanting the first-hand experience himself: to do otherwise, he muses, “seemed like employing a stand-in to do one’s sexual foreplay. When you took over you weren’t prepared, and if the assistant had done a good job then the assistant should go all the way.”

History for Bliss transcends unravelling the past to understanding the present, which is why his book should appeal well beyond those who are in the Canadian historical fraternity, or those many more who have taken courses in Canadian history. History replaces for him the loss of the religious faith an earlier church-going Canada, as he suspects it does for many others. How to deal with the meaninglessness of life absent the comforts of religious faith often troubled Bliss. In medical history and its discoveries, especially the impact of insulin on the death sentence of diabetes, Bliss found again the rhetoric and reality of “salvation” and “resurrection” and “miracle” as millions of lives were saved. Believing deeply in the universal need of the “human struggle to transcend,” Bliss asserts that, while rejecting “supernatural salvation or immortality,” he was especially drawn to medical history “about secular salvation and about scientific immortality.” History offers an affirmation of life over death, and a path beyond existential despair. Bliss sees the historian as a unique kind of time traveller coming to know past figures almost as personal friends, experiencing such a visceral connection when so deeply engaged with the human spirit “that cold shivers went up and down my spine.”

About his memoir, Bliss quips that “the default readership is, of course, the grandchildren, but the publisher bets there will be others.” So do I.