by John English
In the world of the later 1930s, as Pierre contemplated the question of his identity, Brébeuf created the context where he found most of the answers. It differed from some of the other classical colleges, which concentrated on producing priests, and self-consciously viewed itself as the vanguard of intellectual Catholicism in Quebec. It already stood at the apex of a structure of classical colleges that Maurice Duplessis regarded as “our fortresses, indispensable bastions that are essential to preserve our patriotic and religious traditions.”15 As he remarked in one of his school essays, the “fortress” of Brébeuf was a closed world where daily rituals and duties defined his days.16 Among his teachers, Father Robert Bernier, a Franco-Manitoban, was important in inspiring Pierre’s literary interest, and they certainly had great respect for each other. At one Easter retreat, the priest advised him to develop a broader cultural interest, which, he said, most Canadians lacked. Above all, he added, “you must avoid all contact with the vulgar, even if it is under the pretext of a distraction.” Pierre apologized for raising the subject but told Bernier he had no intimate friend who could give such advice.17
Bernier continued to counsel Pierre so long as he was at Brébeuf, but he was traditional in his views and self-effacing in manner. Gradually, Father Rodolphe Dubé, better known as the author François Hertel, became the greater influence. Hertel, Trudeau wrote later, “naturally gravitated towards everything that was new or contrary to the tastes of the day” and carried his students far beyond the thick stone walls of the fortress and the classroom.18 In the words of one of Pierre’s closest Brébeuf friends, Hertel was “a truly revolutionary force” among the sons of the bourgeoisie who predominated at the college, and he saved them from “the mediocrity and congenital folly of our condition.”19 Hertel’s biographer has argued convincingly that the success of this charismatic and humorous priest derived in large part from the solemn atmosphere and rigorous discipline of Brébeuf in those times. A brilliant teacher and a clever comedian, he would begin his classes with a joke that often shocked the students and dramatically pierced the greyness in the classrooms.20
Deeply anti-capitalist, profoundly distrustful of the influence of Britain and the United States, but also a critic of racism in Germany and of “British imperialism,” François Hertel admired the nationalist interpretation of history put forward by Abbé Groulx. In a 1939 article in L’Action nationale, the Abbé, in turn, responded with enthusiasm to Hertel’s novel, Le beau risque. He said it provided a penetrating exposé of the empty soul of bourgeois French Canadians, who had cut themselves off from their nationalist roots, and he focused on one short passage which noted that the francophone bourgeoisie always raised the “national question” hesitantly with their children. In his view, the new generation had to break away from the compromises of earlier generations if the national question was to be seriously addressed.21 Then a true democracy could exist, one based on a national faith that resided in the hearts and minds of the people.22
Pierre made no mention of this article in his journal, but his school writings contain similar anti-bourgeois and nationalist sentiments. Although there are several references in his papers to works by the Abbé, he seems to have had only one personal encounter with him during his Brébeuf years. On February 18, 1938, he went to a lecture Groulx gave on the intendant Jean Talon, who, in the latter seventeenth century, had tried to consolidate the prosperity of New France, and he reported: “The subject is interesting and was treated well, but the poor Abbé does not have a good voice or oratorical talent.” Moreover, whether or not Trudeau was the model for the character Pierre Martel in Hertel’s Le beau risque, the message of the novel—the dangers of Americanization and Anglicization, the obligations to the past, the limitations of bourgeois capitalism, the importance of national sentiment among youth—resonated loudly for him, despite his later denials in interviews that they did.*
Like Hertel and the other Brébeuf teachers, Pierre Trudeau shared the excitement that came from the reinvigoration of French Catholicism in the twentieth century, especially after the First World War. France, so secular and revolutionary in the nineteenth century, had become the centre of a remarkable revival of Catholic faith in the twentieth century. Leading Catholic thinkers and theologians such as the liberal Jacques Maritain, the “personalist” Emmanuel Mounier, and the conservative, elitist Charles Maurras came to dominate French intellectual life in the interwar years and began a process of seeking to “bare the human condition utterly.”23 Among the subjects they bared was the relationship between the citizen and the state. “Personalism”—a philosophical approach to the Catholic faith that emphasized the individual while linking individual action with broader purposes within society—would have a profound impact on Trudeau and on Quebec intellectual life.
Son of a bourgeois father and an English-speaking mother, rich, charmed by the New York theatre, at ease with American wealth, intrigued by American women, and infatuated with the movies, Trudeau’s words and convictions as a Brébeuf student seem to belie his own past, present, and future actions and beliefs. And it is precisely these contradictions that shape the emotional and intellectual growth of Pierre Trudeau. He had internalized deeply the death of his father, but the source of his inquietude seems to have been the tension between the Catholic nationalism of Brébeuf and his own personal experience and developing convictions. Brébeuf was immersed in nationalism from the mid-thirties on. The college priests detested the Liberal government of Premier Louis-Alexandre Taschereau, who had compromised with the Americans and the capitalists, and they welcomed the rise of the Action libérale nationale—a rebel group that expressed the nationalism and social action which they and the Catholic youth groups found attractive as a response to the Depression and the discontents of the time. However, after the ALN formed a coalition with the Conservatives to form a new party, the Union nationale, the ALN’s leader, Paul Gouin, lost the leadership to Maurice Duplessis, a conservative nationalist tied to rural Quebec. And, in 1936, the Union nationale won the election. In Dupés, Pierre had revealed his politics and those of the play’s audience when he mocked Duplessis as Maurice Lesoufflé. Nationalism in itself was not enough.
In 1938 Pierre Trudeau began a journal, which he continued through his last two years in school. It is detailed, frank, and extraordinarily revealing. It is the only diary in his papers, apart from less personal travel diaries and an agenda for 1937 that contains some commentary, and it expresses his own need to chronicle the moments of late adolescence as he tried to find his identity. It begins on New Year’s Day 1938 with the intriguing advice: “If you want to know my thoughts, read between the lines!”
The lines themselves tell a great deal about this tumultuous time in his life. He recounts how he lamented his father’s absence on the third anniversary of his death; at other times, he says that things would be different and, presumably, better if his father were still with him. He does not mean that the Trudeaus would be wealthier. Here the pages abound with evidence of the Trudeau family’s considerable wealth—a Buick for Suzette, who enjoyed bourgeois pleasures; a grand Packard that bears Pierre, Tip, and some priests to a retreat; the chauffeur, Grenier; the tickets for friends and teachers for Royals’ games and the Belmont amusement park; and the good hotels and restaurants the family frequented when they visited New York City. Above all, the entries reveal two aspects of his character: first, his goals, as his ambition for a public life at the highest level becomes a constant refrain; and, second, his extraordinary intellectual curiosity and commitment to hard work. On February 17, 1938, the eighteen-year-old student even thanks God for the good health that allows him to work to midnight almost every night on his studies. Rarely does God receive such thanks from schoolboys.
His mother encouraged but did not direct. Grace Trudeau continued to spend summers at Lac Tremblant and Old Orchard Beach in Maine, while travelling frequently to New York in the fall and spring and to Florida in the winter. Grace, though a strong personality
, gave her children surprising freedom. In his journal, it is the “eyes” of Brébeuf that watch the young Trudeau throughout these pages. He complained about this constant attention not only in the diary pages but even in an article he wrote in May 1939 for Brébeuf, the student newspaper, where he suggested that the departing class will rejoice at the end of the constant “surveillance” and the need to ask, “Father, may I …?24 There were endless permissions, perpetual denials, and eclectic censorship. In March 1938 the censor forbade the presentation of a play after Trudeau and others had rehearsed it many times. And a few of the priests used the threat of expulsion for even trivial misdemeanours. Pierre was always diligent and fundamentally shy, but he sought popularity and gained attention by clever, rebellious distractions that infuriated some of his teachers. After a snowball fight and a couple of other incidents, Father Landry warned him in a menacing fashion that he was a millimetre from being kicked out of the college: the rector would no longer tolerate the “insolence of Pierre Elliott Trudeau,” he said, and the next offence would mean a trip to the rector’s office. Throughout the reprimand, Pierre smiled, to the certain annoyance of Landry. The next day the clever student found “an excuse” to call upon the rector, and there he discovered that everything was fine so far as the top man was concerned. Pierre already possessed political wiles.
Landry continued to pester him, but Pierre found allies in other teachers, notably Fathers Bernier, Sauvé, d’Anjou, and Toupin. Despite their counsel to avoid jazz, movies, and American popular culture, he travelled to New York in the spring of 1939 in his sister’s Buick, which his mother agreed he could drive after an excellent academic year. Suzette had spent four months in France and, very much the young sophisticate, was returning on June 16 on the art deco gem the Normandie. Grace and the boys stayed on Central Park South at the elegant Barbizon Plaza, attended the New York World’s Fair, and, with a friend of Suzette’s, Pierre danced the night away at the Rainbow Grill on the roof of Rockefeller Center. The fair initially disappointed Pierre: “The first good effect is spoiled by all the common people, the crowd, and especially because nearly all the buildings are made of beaver board and the columns are of cardboard. And inside you see only a bunch of merchandise.” It was, he concluded in best Brébeuf fashion, too vulgar. He found the Soviet pavilion an impressive exception with its marble, but he deplored the “marvellous Communist propaganda” it represented. He approved of the monumental Italian pavilion, however, though he made no political comments about it or Mussolini. On another evening he was deeply moved when he saw Raymond Massey star in Abraham-Lincoln in Illinois. The aspiring politician was no doubt assured to discover that young Lincoln had been “troubled, timid, overwhelmed, and a misanthrope.”25
The world beckoned, yet Brébeuf’s pull persisted. There, Pierre increasingly wrestled with questions of faith, nationality, and vocation. Outside the college walls, he enjoyed experiences that his school notebooks often condemn. The tensions between experience and education, belief and practice, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, ambition and timidity created the dynamic that drove his personal growth in these critical years. As the international situation worsened and nationalist currents flowed more strongly, he built up his own internal protections against the pressures that suddenly confronted him. The eminent psychologist Jerome Kagan has explained that adolescents tend to categorize people and endow them with certain characteristics. If an adolescent who believes he belongs to a particular category suddenly behaves in ways that violate those expectations, he experiences considerable uncertainty.26 Discontinuities compel resolution. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Pierre Trudeau sensed such discontinuities, and he, too, sought their resolution.
One huge discontinuity occurred when Grace Trudeau registered both her sons at Camp Ahmek, the Taylor Statten summer camp on the shore of Canoe Lake in Algonquin Park, which was a favourite of the Ontario English elite. When he arrived on July 2, 1938, Pierre discovered that he had four English-Canadian roommates. Since he had left Querbes, his companions had been almost exclusively French. Sensing the foreign environment, he promised his diary that he would seize every occasion to declare that he was a “French Canadian and a Catholic.” He quickly made his mark, not least in boxing, where his skills and well-developed body resulted in bloody noses for several of the other campers. He also excelled in acting, receiving the highest marks for performances that were, of course, entirely in English. In the sole English entry in his diary that summer he wrote: “It’s good to hear ‘He is Pierre Trudeau, the best actor in camp!’”27
The Brébeuf priests would also have been upset to learn that their prize eighteen-year-old student had fallen in love. Camille Corriveau, one year older than Trudeau, was a student at Smith College, and photographs indicate she was very pretty, with a full figure. Certainly Trudeau found her as attractive as Vivien Leigh and Jean Harlow, the actresses he admired in the movies. He was annoyed when the photograph she sent did not catch her stunning beauty. As he opened the envelope, he wrote in reply, the radio began to play the song “You must have been a beautiful baby.” He wanted more than this unsatisfactory photo, he complained, “so I keep thinking of the beautiful soft hair that was left out of the picture, the delicate ear [he stroked out ‘I am kissing’], a feminine shoulder, a graceful arm, a few charming curves, here and there [stroked out ‘a lovely leg’], and so many other things I am missing. Truly, you have been holding out on me, you little iconoclast you!” We cannot be sure Camille received exactly the words in this draft letter, but it does convey the allure she held for him.28
A Franco-American, Camille vacationed in Orchard Beach every year with the many other francophones who gathered on the Maine beaches. Although a good dancer, Pierre was still shy with women, and he often turned down invitations thrust at him by his sister. When Suzette was presented as a debutante at Rideau Hall in Ottawa on January 28, 1938, he described himself, as he reflected on the occasion, as a bit of a misogynist. Still, he admitted that, for “esthetic” reasons, he could admire a beautiful woman. That would suffice for now, he concluded. It didn’t.29
A few days after they met, Camille sent him a warm letter that stirred him despite his “coldness and … independence.” At least, he opined, Camille was more serious than the majority of women he encountered in Montreal. The memory of her lingered and he was soon looking forward with anticipation to their coming summer meeting. There was a moment of doubt in April when he went to a religious retreat. Father Tobin, the American priest for whom he had procured Montreal Royals tickets, took him aside to talk about universities in the United States. Pierre had been considering American schools for graduate work himself, but Father Tobin was firm in rejecting this option. The universities, he declared, were mostly co-educational and had become veritable dens of immorality. The male-only universities were equally bad because students would sneak women into their rooms. Worst of all were women’s colleges such as Vassar and Smith, which were “schools of immorality.” Indeed, the mother of a Smith student had confessed to Tobin that contraceptives were to be found everywhere at the school. The reason—the immoral cinema. But even more influential were the professors who openly professed free love.
A shocked Pierre apparently did not argue with Tobin, who was his “guardian angel” for the retreat, but in his diary he wrote: “I am convinced that my Camille is an exception. However, the atmosphere can have an influence.” Fortunately, “she is Catholic,” a commitment that was, in his still innocent mind, an impregnable shield against the forces of lust and the availability of condoms.30
The conversation lingered in the recesses of Pierre’s conscience as the summer of 1938 and Camille’s presence approached. Unfortunately, Pierre and Camille had not connived to make their stays coincident, and he went off to Camp Ahmek again in July. After lamenting to his diary that Camille was in Old Orchard while he was in the wilds of Ontario, he broke down in tears when he finished reading Edmond Rostand’s 1897 play Cyrano de Bergerac. Cyr
ano spoke to his sense of romance and became his model. The greatest compliment, he wrote to Camille, would be to hear someone say, “You have won because you are Cyrano!”31 Throughout his life Trudeau identified with Cyrano, who appealed to his romantic spirit. The daring seventeenth-century swordsman believed that, because of his ugly nose, the beautiful Roxane would never accept him—and, in the end, his handsome but dull friend Christian won her heart.32 Pierre, who constantly worried about his acne and thought women did not find him appealing, clearly identified with the brilliant poet but tragic lover Cyrano. Four decades later, Trudeau also recalled the importance for him of Cyrano’s famous “tirade” about walking alone to the heights: “I found there an expression of who I was and what I wanted to be: I don’t care if I don’t make it, providing I don’t need anyone else’s help, providing what I do make I make alone.”33
Pierre enjoyed Camp Ahmek, but when the month was up on July 29, he was impatient to get to Old Orchard Beach.34 The family chauffeur immediately drove him and Tip to Maine to join Grace and Suzette. Camille had agreed to stay a few more days. Alas, when he arrived, he discovered that she had not been able to find a room and might have to leave. Grace and Suzette quickly responded to the crisis with an invitation for Camille to stay with them. For Pierre, “utopia had arrived!”35 They had five glorious days in which, like Cyrano with Roxane, he read poetry to Camille, they watched the stars at night on the pier, and they went to confession together. Then they parted sadly on August 6, vowing to stay in touch.
They met again the next year in August at Old Orchard Beach, and the external world that was falling apart was far distant from the young lovers. Camille had spent part of the academic year in France, and Pierre found her aloof at first, but soon enchantment returned. They went to Hollywood films almost every night, then walked on the pier and talked—he about law school, which he had begun to consider, and she about becoming a schoolteacher. On the 17th they had their first fight, when he wanted to pass the evening reading and she wanted him to spend it with her. He finally agreed, and, the following night, they went dancing with Suzette and her boyfriend to celebrate the second anniversary of their meeting. Afterwards, the moon over the water was especially bewitching and, for the first time, they kissed.