“How does one explain this phenomenon?” Gotlieb asks. “The answer has to be found in Ritchie’s extraordinary sense of style, his gaiety, his delight as a companion, his joie de vivre, and in the impression he gave of being a grand Whig aristocrat from the eighteenth century transplanted into the twentieth.”
The Whig grandee comparison strikes me as very good. This, after all, was a man who in London chose to take his chances with the Nazi bombs raining from the sky, rather than protect himself underground because, he says, of “the insufferable conversation” in the bomb shelters. And, when he returned one morning to find his flat totally destroyed, he disarms the reader by lamenting the fact that he was left “with only one pair of shoes.” Later, in a busy elevator in the UN building in New York, he asks for assistance in pressing the button to his floor on the Whiggish ground that he had “no mechanical aptitude.”
Charm. That was what did it. In Nova Scotia, where he was born and raised, they say, “The third time’s the charm.” With Charles Ritchie it was every time. In international sport some people are said to “swim for Canada,” or “row for Canada.” Charles Ritchie could have “charmed for Canada,” and in a sense that was what he did.
His diaries make it clear that he was not only witty, and the cause of wit in others, he was always seeking out new excitements, trying to be at the centre of incidents about to happen. The Siren Years is full of tales of lounging around P.G. Wodehouse’s clubland, but also of hearing Churchill growling defiance in the Commons. Or T.S. Eliot dissecting a rival at a party. Or Charles himself, at one of the country-house weekends he charmed his way into, groping his way down midnight corridors, in pursuit of a bathroom, or my lady’s chamber. We read of his frustrating progress with an American ballerina (a mention that decided a starry-eyed young Colin Robertson on taking up a romantic career in the foreign service). And, on a larger scale, we read of his determined attempts — ultimately successful — to be one of the first civilians to arrive at the D-Day beaches, on the feeble pretext that he was bringing greetings from Canada. Yet he was there, in his civilian raincoat, getting only slightly in the way of the men wearing boots, and he was able to record his perceptions of Canadians at war, as opposed to the other Allied forces.
His extraordinary romance with Elizabeth Bowen, the famous Anglo-Irish novelist, is now common knowledge, and the subject of a revealing book of her correspondence, punctuated by his diary entries. The book, Love’s Civil War edited by Victoria Glendinning (with an assist from Canada’s Judith Robertson, daughter of the legendary Ottawa mandarin Norman), appeared in 2008, and laid bare a remarkable thirty-year love affair. Charles met Elizabeth in London in 1941. He was a charming, philandering bachelor, and she — a handsome, strong-faced woman ideal for the role of Coriolanus’s mother — was unhappily married. By the time her husband died, Charles had married Sylvia, a second cousin, in 1948. Yet through all those years, until Elizabeth’s death in 1973 (and Charles spent the last weeks of her life in England in order to be with her, visiting her in hospital and, as Glendinning puts it, “bringing champagne”), the two lovers wrote obsessively, sustaining a relationship that was only fulfilled in brief moments. They were never together for longer than a week at a time, meeting in hotels in Europe, London, New York, or at Elizabeth’s home in Ireland. The letters, and Charles’s self-revealing diaries reveal, in Jane Urquhart’s words, “most powerfully, a world of love.”
And Sylvia? In the heading of this chapter I described Charles as a “charming dissembler.” No one outside a marriage can truly know what secrets lie inside it, but questions certainly arise here. At a Toronto party to launch Love’s Civil War, a man who was in the Paris embassy when Charles phoned Sylvia to propose marriage in 1947 told me of a malicious joke that made the rounds there. In those days transatlantic phone calls were difficult, the line punctuated by crackles and whistles. So when Charles phoned Ottawa to propose marriage, the response that came from Sylvia, a woman not in the first blush of youth, was supposedly: “Yes (whistle), yes (crackle), I will! Er (whistle, screech), who’s speaking, please?”
Opposed to that unkind story there are the numerous diary entries where he speaks of his affection for Sylvia, or “Syl.” In December 1951, for instance, he wrote: “The most extraordinary phenomenon seems to be taking place in me. I seem to be falling in love with my own wife. It’s not the first time this has happened, but never before, I think, with the force of this time. I find her beautiful. I want to go to bed with her all the time, and don’t grudge her this hold over me.”
And yet Charles, the natural spy (and Glendinning quotes Elizabeth Bowen saying that as Irish and Canadian outsiders in England they were both in some sense “spies”) took better to a life of meeting “on street corners” than Elizabeth, who poured out her heart to him in an endless series of letters that make up the bulk of the 475-page book
In the summer of 1952, Charles deliberately left one of Elizabeth’s letters out where it would be seen by Sylvia. . . .
And so it went, a fascinating three-person drama that makes for a fine book, which, I must confess, I did not publish. Three final points about this grand, only semi-secret love affair. First, Elizabeth Bowen dedicated her most famous novel, The Heat of the Day (1949), to Charles. Second, in his anguished final note about their love, after her death in 1971, Charles wrote, “If she ever thought that she loved me more than I did her, she is avenged.” And finally, the affair took on the trappings of an international incident. Alan Sullivan, the recently appointed Canadian ambassador to Ireland, was accosted by a fiercely tweeded lady at the 1971 Dublin Horse Show. Having established his role she said abruptly, without mentioning any names, “Well. At least he was with her at the end!” and harrumphed away in her sensible brogues.
I never met Elizabeth Bowen, and Charles never raised her with me. In his role as godfather to Bob Rae, as “Uncle Charles” he once casually introduced Bob to the distinguished novelist. But to his godson he was happily married to Sylvia, and she played a full part in his life. Charles, I gather, was a fine, non-religious godfather; in fact, he told Bob of devilishly greasing his own hair before his confirmation, so that the priestly laying on of hands would be a memorable experience for the unlucky cleric. His godfather role consisted of useful occasional cheques in the mail, invitations to lunch, funny stories, and wise career advice. Since Michael Ignatieff was another godson, it was fortunate that the Rae-Ignatieff competition for the role of Liberal leader followed Charles’s death. When it came to career advice, even his charming diplomacy would have been hard-pressed by that situation.
I only met Sylvia in my role of visitor dropping in, and remember her as a charming hostess, her subjection in Paris to “Ritchie Week” presumably having prepared her for any conceivable social situation. My usual contact with Charles was by phone, and it began with my trying to persuade him that the success of The Siren Years demanded the publication of another volume of diaries. He was — or seemed to be — hesitant, but I persuaded him, with lines like “Just think of it, no work; you’ve already done the writing.” And we worked happily together as the conscientious Pat Kennedy helped him to bring out An Appetite for Life: The Education of a Young Diarist in 1977. Its reception proved that Ritchie was what the reading public craved.
The first part of the book is set in the same Halifax that his contemporary Hugh MacLennan saw as Dickensian. Certainly the old garrison city saw London as closer than upstart Upper Canada, and it did seem to embrace the Pickwickian characters that walked its streets. Charles himself had to look no further than his own Cousin Gerald (the subject of a whole chapter in a later book). When Charles’s mother, pulled by the London vortex, held her annual social gathering in the West End for her English friends, it was Cousin Gerald who startled the assembled ladies and gentlemen by calling very loudly across the room: “Did I tell you, Aunt Lillian, that I caught syphilis last Wednesday?”
Charles’s mother responded
magnificently. “That is not at all funny. Just sit down, dear.” But the party broke up very shortly thereafter, the conversational flow never quite restored.
Young Charles dreaded Cousin Gerald’s visits to their Halifax home, the Bower, which was kept with great difficulty by his impecunious widowed mother. I have twice made a furtive pilgrimage to the old mansion and been pleased to see it still standing. I wish all future occupants better luck than the Ritchies in the matter of household help. Their maid was known to serve porridge “with a pair of scissors in it.”
On such fare it is no wonder that our hero grew up concerned about being “angular, beak-nosed, and narrow-chested,” all adjectives that continued to apply. With his fussy little grey moustache and horn-rimmed glasses, to me he looked exactly like a mid-level bureaucrat, or a small-town bank manager sent in by head office to settle things down after too much excitement. Indeed, as the years went on, this wildly romantic writer with a novelist’s eye, and ear, and imagination seemed to grow thinner, literally “more tightly wound.” I remember seeing him near the end of his life, laughing aloud, head thrown back, with his old diplomatic colleague Douglas Le Pan in the lobby of the Château Laurier, and noticing that with his prominent nose he looked like a tightly wrapped umbrella.
In his dealings with women, it hardly seemed to matter. Conventionally handsome young athletes in his classes — at King’s College in Halifax, or at Pembroke College in Oxford, or at Harvard, or at Paris’s École Libre des Sciences Politiques — must have despaired at his success in attracting young women. It was not until his days at Oxford, where he occupied the room that had held young Samuel Johnson two centuries earlier, that he was relieved of the burden of virginity (a considerable burden, according to his diaries) by an older woman nom de plumed Margot Poltimer. She apparently made a point of conducting the same service, on (literally) an amateur basis, to deserving young Oxford men of her acquaintance.
According to An Appetite for Life, Charles had been left alone in a postcoital haze of delight (along the lines of “I’ve done it!”) when there came a knock on the door. It was the porter introducing an American Midwestern couple of Dr. Johnson admirers who were in search of the good doctor’s teapot. They excitedly roamed around the room speculating if the kettle, or the sofa onto which Charles and the willing Margot had so recently “subsided,” might have belonged to the old scholar. To Charles’s horror, the man approached the still-throbbing piece of furniture: “That sofa is a fine piece,” he said. “Did it belong to the doctor?”
“Oh, Buddy,” his wife cried, “that is modern.”
Apart from that intrusion, Charles never looked back. Women continued to swarm around him. Even when he was in his seventies, a visit to his publisher’s office would bring female staff tumbling out of their offices and turn gimlet-eyed proofreaders into giggling coquettes. Although he never actually kissed their hands, with a little bow, he gave the impression of having done so.
At Oxford he fell in with a Brideshead Revisited set. This involved him in high living and gambling that he could not afford. Worse, it involved him in friendship with upper-class twits who thought it amusing to fire a pistol from their college rooms into the street below, regardless of the danger to passing peasants. One young woman was hit in the leg. The magistrate took a lenient view.
There were specific Brideshead moments. Once Charles was invited by his friend Basil to spend a weekend at his stately home, which was “colonnaded like a Greek temple.” There was to be a ball, so Charles had hired a white-tie-and-tails dinner outfit. Dressing for dinner he was defeated by the tie. He panicked, deciding that he would send a message to his host Basil and his brother Lionel to explain that he had been taken ill. Then he noticed a bell, and rang for the butler. That Jeeves-like figure shimmered into the bedroom and offered to help.
He looked at my tie and said he could tie it for me, so he stood behind me tying the tie, both of us facing the mirror so that his arms were around my neck. He was chatting away about Mr. Lionel when to my amazement I saw in the glass that his hands had moved down from tying the tie and the next thing I knew they were under my hard shirt, stroking my body and feeling it. When I said, “Stop that at once,” he took his hands away and looked quite discomfited, and he said, “I am sorry, sir. It was a misunderstanding. Mr. Lionel’s friends always enjoyed it when I did that sort of thing for them” just as if he had handed me a delicious dish at dinner and I had refused it. Then he withdrew with dignity and a hurt expression.
Charles had come a long way from Halifax.
The success of each new book produced a successor, all under the wise editorial care of Pat Kennedy. Diplomatic Passport: More Undiplomatic Diaries 1946–1962 came out in 1981, delighting readers with the tale of the newly arrived ambassador to Germany at a formal dinner in Bonn entertaining the two unilingual ladies seated beside him with the only German he knew, a recitation of “Little Red Riding Hood.” This book was followed in turn by Storm Signals (1983) about his difficult years in Washington, when in his presence LBJ almost physically assaulted Lester Pearson, and finally by the book of reminiscences, My Grandfather’s House in 1987.
With Pat doing the actual work, my own role as publisher was to persuade him that each success was not an agreeable fluke, and to persuade him to send us more to publish. This was a very agreeable task, since it involved me in being in constant touch by phone. There, the English-accented voice, complete with Oxfordisms like “I say!” was unmistakable. He was always full of news, not all of it reflecting well on the character under discussion. He received similar stories with a high cackle-cum-guffaw and the delighted words “How frightful!” Every conversation ended with an invitation “to foregather” the next time I was in what he called “The Nation’s Capital.”
We foregathered once at his summer home in Chester, Nova Scotia, at the elegant waterfront house with thick white pillars in front, which made the word “cottage” impossible. While Sylvia busied herself with treats like lemonade for the two little Gibson girls, Charles took us for a stroll around Chester. If a libel lawyer had been in attendance he or she would have been salivating at the prospect of any of these stories making it into print. Every dwelling we passed housed a skeleton — a daughter run off with a spectacularly unsuitable companion, a father evading jail with difficulty, a sailing or a golfing dispute that caused a feud with next-door neighbours — and every yard of the walk was marked by past snubs and scandals.
I remember especially pausing by a very large house, where the wealthy American owner, a society lady, apparently had told Charles, a Nova Scotian for four or five generations, that her son had just got engaged. “She’s from Nova Scotia,” she said, of the fiancée, “but you can take her anywhere.” Charles was taken aback by this, and was still uncertain how he should have replied.
John Fraser, in his 1986 book, Telling Tales, recounts another time Charles was taken aback. The setting here was far from Chester, at a celebration of authors called the Night of 100 Stars at the Sheraton Hotel in Toronto. Charles, one of the honoured authors, was dressed in dinner jacket and “festooned with all the bric-a-brac (medals, orders, insignias) of his long years in high office.” This cut no ice with the callow desk clerk when the elderly Charles, tiring of the evening, tried to get back into his room, where unfortunately he had left both his room key and his identifying wallet.
“Listen, Buster,” said the desk clerk at one point in the altercation, and Fraser, an outraged passerby, stepped in to aid the distinguished diplomat in distress. It did not go well. Eventually Fraser snorted, “All right, my man, enough of this nonsense. Fetch the manager.”
When the manager arrived, confronted by an agitated young man and a nervous older one, he misunderstood the situation.
“What seems to be the problem, gentlemen?” he said, but it was not asked in a friendly manner. “Do you two fellows want a room together for the night?”
In the e
nd, hotel protocol was satisfied when Charles supplied a signature that roughly — but in the distress of the moment, only roughly — accorded with his registration card, and he was taken up to his room.
On another occasion, we did indeed foregather in Ottawa, and after lunch I made a pilgrimage with him down to the apartment at 216 Metcalfe Street, where so many of my letters and hot-off-the-press copies of new books had gone. We were greeted by Sylvia, but it was Charles who showed me around the comfortable old apartment, temptingly full of books. At the climax of the tour, he flung open his study door and said with full, deliberate irony, “And here is where the Great Work goes on!” I laughed and thought nothing more about it.
The scene moves now to Massey College at the University of Toronto on the evening of April 12, 2010. The head of the Quadrangle Book Club, an agreeable social organization that I have addressed in the past, is Ramsay Derry, a distinguished freelance editor, and he is talking about his work with Charles Ritchie. To my horror I learn that long before I and my colleagues at Macmillan saw the “diaries” to do the usual editorial smoothing before publishing them, he, and Charles had worked hard to “improve” them (my word). I had been aware, of course, that Charles, for libel reasons, if nothing else, had gone through the diaries removing incriminating (and possibly even boring) sections. I had been reassured by the sentence in the foreword to The Siren Years, where Charles wrote: “The diaries are as I wrote them at the time, save for occasional phrases which have been altered for the sake of clarity.”
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