by John English
When Pierre first began to ask, “Who am I?” at Brébeuf, he turned to his clerical teachers, notably Fathers Robert Bernier and Marie d’Anjou, for guidance. After many intense conversations, he took their advice very seriously and began to read the classics, to learn about art, and to listen to the finest classical music; in short, he immersed himself in the Western canon, though with a strongly European flavour. When he left Brébeuf for the Université de Montréal, he brought an extraordinary foundation of linguistic skills, knowledge of philosophy and religious thought, and, above all, intellectual discipline. At Montréal he quickly discovered that he was bored by law. He studied only what was “barely necessary” and despised lawyers but not his classmates. Instead, he devoted his time to politics and the arts and immersed himself in culture: reading books, attending concerts, studying the piano, painting in oil, and learning ballet, his favourite art. Still he stood first in his class. More than anything, he wrote to Camille earlier, he felt that his task in his early twenties was to “master” Pierre Trudeau.9
The correspondence continued mostly in English despite Camille’s Parisian stay, and in March 1941 he reiterated that he was “still aiming to be accomplished in every field.” This enormous goal meant constant challenges and tension, introspection, and even isolation as he tried to figure out his future:
I seem to be slowly, surely and peacefully drifting away from the human world. I have forsaken every possible organization which might rob me of my time, and although I make an effort once in a while to go to a dance or a movie they profoundly bore me for the most part. Most of my law professors nauseate me, so I just study as much as is barely necessary …
These different circumstances cause me to envelope myself in a world apart, where I crazily read and wrote, and dreamt about music and beauty and revolutions and blood and dynamite. It was most contradictory this combined desire of action and thought.10
His intensity frightened Camille, who, now in love with another man, warned him that he had fallen into “a terrible rut … You have shut yourself up in a room, and you are brooding and meditating on the future, and wondering how it will all come out.” He should learn patience, she wisely counselled: “My dear Pierre, do you realize that 99% of the people with whom you will come into contact will be much more stupid and unintelligent, and you shall have to be patient with them because they will be the people on whom you will depend. You want and shall be successful, and whatever you do, either in law or the political field, you will find that people are not of your mental caliber.” Still, she advised, he must learn to be patient with those “who are less fortunate and less endowed than you are.”11
He infuriated her and others when they tried to grow close, yet at the same time he worked constantly to make himself ever more intriguing and attractive. In his notebooks, complaints about his appearance became fewer as excitement about women glancing his way grew. His graduation photograph captures the deep blue eyes and the fashionably parted dark wavy hair. He claimed that it was “brown” on a passport application in June 1940 and that he stood 5 foot 10—probably an exaggeration. At the university he honed the acting skills he had first developed at Camp Ahmek and Brébeuf and became a brilliant debater. He kept reminding himself that he must lose his timidity and always seek originality. He knew that humility was a virtue, but, he admitted to his journal, it was “sometimes difficult to reconcile ambition with such humility.”12 He practised different ways of relating with others, carefully noting their reactions to him. He committed himself to the healthy life, engaging in a variety of fitness exercises and testing his physical prowess on ski hills and, even more ambitiously, on wilderness trips.
In his confessional correspondence with François Hertel, he responded to the priest’s observation that the “man of action” was a special and valued type.13 Hertel ended an October 1941 letter with the words “Long live the France of Pétain. There was a man of action”—one who was undertaking challenging but necessary deeds even though he was over eighty years old. “Act, act, act,” he counselled, advice that the young Trudeau believed he must heed.14 Already acutely aware of his physicality, his presence as an actor and athlete, his attraction to women and beauty, he desperately tried to efface the acne blemishes on his face. His mother urged him to go to a chiropractor in the hope of finding a cure.15 Time did end the acne, but the youthful affliction left him with mild scars that did not detract from the compelling intensity of his narrow face, piercing eyes, and remarkably high cheekbones. When he graduated from the Université de Montréal in the spring of 1943, he was very much an original and, to a large extent, his own creation.
But what to do? The war had disrupted all his plans to study abroad when he graduated from Brébeuf. Now, as he was completing his law degree, he applied to Harvard, Columbia, and Georgetown universities. The law school, apparently unaware of Trudeau’s opinion that the professors were idiots, tried to secure a scholarship for its best student. He was, the dean wrote, “particularly outstanding, not only by his academic excellence but also by his assiduity and application.”16 Trudeau, however, could not get permission to leave Canada and his military obligations.
Fearing correctly that the practice of law would bore him, he sought other escapes, ones that suggest his revolutionary activities of 1942 were somewhat more playful than seriously considered. He wrote to a friend who had become a Canadian diplomat in South America and asked if he could get a diplomatic position in Rio de Janeiro: “I will be a lawyer within two months, old friend; that is to say, I’m almost a diplomat.” The friend offered him little hope. He applied to the Experiment in International Living for a study trip to Mexico, but once again permission was denied. He spent part of the summer at a military camp in the Maritimes, after which he went on a trip “with his moto,” telling his worried mother that, whatever happened, “be reassured, I will be prudent.”17
The motorbike liberated him from the routine of practising law and released a side of him that his friends knew well—his playfulness and love of adventure. His close friend Jacques Hébert says that these were his most endearing qualities and that they redeemed his seriousness. In his article “Pritt Zoum Bing” in Le Quartier Latin, Trudeau claimed that the human species was made for the motorbike: “Man was conceived with the motorcycle already in mind: the nostrils open towards the back, the ears push back against the head, allowing the greatest acceleration without being overwhelmed by wind and dust.” Above all, the roar of the bike as it swept through the countryside and crowded city streets served to “liberate the spirit; the body is turned over to its own resources and you think new thoughts again.”18
Indeed, Trudeau was thinking new thoughts once more.
On his return to Montreal in the fall, he became a lawyer at 112 St. James Street West. He joined the firm of Hyde and Ahern, where he was paid $2.50 a day. For those apprentice wages, Trudeau handled simple files, most of them involving car accidents and evictions from apartments. As a landlord himself of a property at 1247 Bishop Street in central Montreal, which earned him $50 a month, Trudeau had no fondness for deadbeat tenants. He pursued one particular delinquent mercilessly through the courts that year.19 Gordon Hyde and John Ahern were both King’s Counsel, and Ahern was the grandson of Charles Marcil, a Liberal MP for thirty-seven years. In typical bicultural fashion, he was a member of the Reform Club as well as the francophone Club St-Denis, Charles Trudeau’s old favourite.20 Trudeau’s rough files, still retained in his personal papers, reveal him to be a careful lawyer, extremely attentive to detail and thorough in his approach to cases. But however much his work pleased his employers, his politics in 1943–44 surely did not.
Trudeau remained active in politics, still firmly opposing Canadian war policy and the possibility of conscription—as did his friends.21 The whiff of revolution quickly passed in 1943, leaving behind the nationalist and anti-conscriptionist Bloc populaire canadien. Trudeau participated in Bloc affairs, as did many of the other activists from Jean Drap
eau’s by-election and the conscription plebiscite. He sat on the organizational committee of the Bloc and agreed to be the secretary of the committee on education and policy. He even saved his badge from the Bloc Congress at the Windsor Hotel on February 3–6, 1944. It was signed by André Laurendeau, the man chosen because of his earlier role in the anti-conscription campaign to lead the Bloc in the upcoming provincial election.22 Laurendeau denounced the federal and provincial Liberals and took his stand on the left. The Liberals, he declared in his inaugural speech, “gave us hypocritical governments which taught the proletariat much more effectively than any Marxist that the only way to triumph over a liberal capitalist state is through revolution.”23 The term “revolution” was used frequently by Quebec nationalists at this time, including Trudeau. Its meaning was broad and remarkably imprecise. So was the Bloc, which included right-wing Catholics, social reform Catholics, and others who simply despised both the Liberals and the Union nationale. Trudeau did not run in the election that summer, but he contributed financially to the impoverished party. Despite early hopes, however, it won only four seats. Maurice Duplessis used the nationalism card effectively during the campaign and defeated the Liberal government.
Trudeau remained loyal to the Bloc, but the fires of nationalism had begun to burn less intensely for him. Unlike Jean Drapeau, Michel Chartrand, and others who cast themselves energetically into the summer 1944 provincial election, Trudeau disappeared. He had applied again to the Mexican program of the Experiment in International Living and had spent the year studying Spanish. When he learned of certain restrictions the Experiment faced, he attached himself to a group of Canadian students who left Montreal on June 15 on a forty-day “goodwill” trip to Mexico. On June 7 Trudeau gave notice to his law firm and to the National Service registration. On the National Service form he first wrote “lawyer,” then stroked it out and wrote “avocat,” and provocatively added that the reason he was leaving was “La Bohème.”24
Bohemian life in Montreal revealed itself to Trudeau in the late 1940s, mainly through Hertel. A mutual interest in the arts had initially brought him close to the Trudeau family, and he began introducing Grace and her children to some of the leading young artists of the time. Grace’s brother Gordon Elliott had long been a friend and neighbour of the great French painter Georges Braque, and the Trudeau home already possessed one of his works. When the Canadian abstract painter Alfred Pellan returned to Canada after fourteen years in Paris, determined to break the shackles of traditionalism in Quebec artistic circles, Hertel became his champion. He arranged to hang a few modern paintings in the Trudeau home, which became, in effect, a salon where artists mingled with potential patrons in a time of political and artistic ferment. Pierre himself purchased three paintings—including a Pellan—from Hertel, who acted as an intermediary for some of the artists. He told a friend to pick up “a very fine [Léon] Bellefleur … from Pierre’s room” which, he confirmed, Madame Trudeau would give to him.25 Hertel, who occasionally wrote art critiques for Le Devoir, enthusiastically welcomed the European influences that Pellan brought back with him. He also encouraged Paul-Émile Borduas in 1941 as he moved from religiously centred representational art and portraiture to abstraction, when “the echo of an ideology more global” was first heard in Montreal salons—and in Pierre’s bedroom, where the walls became adorned with modernism.26
Trudeau met Borduas through Hertel, and, in 1942, he often visited Paul-Émile and his wife, Gabrielle, and mesmerized them—especially Gabrielle. She apparently went to a performance by Pierre in a play and was captivated by the younger man’s comic sensibility and dramatic presence. Like her husband, she saw Pierre as a young revolutionary, albeit a peculiar one who signed his entirely proper letters, addressed to “Madame Borduas,” with “Citoyen.” The following year her attraction moved to a different level. “Good evening, my dear Pierre,” she wrote most familiarly on December 14, 1943, offering him “le plus grand amour de la terre,” the greatest love on earth. She was jealous, she told him openly, adding that she hoped other women “would know how to love you as fully as I could.” She would not write more for several reasons, one truly essential: “I deeply fear that I would trouble your mother and, through her, Hertel, who is probably her counsellor.” She loved Grace because Pierre was her son, because her son had her qualities, and because she had allowed “an almost impossible friendship between us.” However bohemian he aspired to be, such a love affair—or such a future for the two of them—surely was impossible. The relationship remained platonic yet adoring.27
As Gabrielle knew, Trudeau had to take other paths. He applied to Harvard, got his military service deferred, and went off to Mexico for most of the summer. Camille had married Bill Aubuchon Junior, a Franco-American businessman, in May 1943. His family business was hardware, and the stores were found in most cities and towns in the American Northeast. She invited Pierre to the wedding. He did not go but replied, elegantly, that he hoped “the man with whom you have agreed to share your destiny … will show you all the concern that your tenderness deserves.” Over the years, he and other members of the Trudeau family kept up some connection with the Aubuchons. Still, although they had parted ways, Camille understood Pierre and, as early as 1941, she had told him that he, too, needed to find someone he could confide in and trust.28 Obviously, Gabrielle Borduas was not the answer, but, as she had recognized, he had begun to fall in love again.
Pierre had met Thérèse Gouin, the daughter of the eminent Liberal senator, Léon-Mercier Gouin, in 1943, when his friend Roger Rolland brought her to one of the classical music gatherings which Grace Trudeau held during the war years. Sometimes there would be a pianist; most often, young friends of Pierre, Tip, and Suzette would come to hear the best records on the expensive phonograph. Four years younger than Pierre, Thérèse, with her quick mind and glowing face, immediately caught Pierre’s competitive eye, and he began to court her. When he left for Mexico in the summer of 1944, she was in second place on the list of people with whom he intended to correspond. There he wrote his first missive to her, in which he posed a question: Which was the greater civilization, the one Cortés founded or the one he destroyed? The brief postcard ended, “Amitiés du citoyen,” Regards of the citizen. The language of revolution still persisted; so did Pierre’s pranks.
In the late summer of 1944 as Canada faced a conscription crisis, the impish Pierre tried to attach a “No to conscription” label to the back of her father’s jacket, just before he went off to his office. Thérèse stopped Pierre before he comitted this possibly fatal joke very early in their romance. That same summer, when Thérèse and Pierre were out together in a rowboat, he suddenly bolted to his feet and proclaimed, “I want to be the prime minister of Quebec.”29
As Pierre courted Thérèse, he was attending plays and concerts and reading books in an eclectic fashion. Although his proposed course of study at Harvard was Political Economy, he read mainly literature, notably Paul Claudel, Stéphane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud, Feodor Dostoevsky, and G.K. Chesterton. He also read and enjoyed James Hilton’s Lost Horizon, whose exotic Shangri-La intrigued the adventurous Trudeau. Law practice interested him little, military training irritated him, and political passions had waned despite his continued association with the Bloc populaire. In response to drift, Trudeau wrote a brilliant and revealing essay in 1943, “The Ascetic in a Canoe.”
First published in the journal of the Jeunesse étudiante catholique, the essay was profoundly biographical and is a wonderful blend of descriptive writing and cultural analysis:
I would not know how to instil a taste for adventure in those who have not acquired it. (Anyway, who can ever prove the necessity for the gypsy life?) And yet there are people who suddenly tear themselves away from their comfortable existence and, using the energy of their bodies as an example to their brains, apply themselves to the discovery of unsuspected pleasures and places.
A canoeing expedition is a beginning more than a parting, he said. Rec
alling his own search for the trails of the voyageurs between Montreal and Hudson Bay, Trudeau declared that “its purpose is not to destroy the past, but to lay a foundation for the future.” He insisted that a canoeing expedition purifies one more than any other experience: “Travel a thousand miles by train and you are a brute; pedal five hundred on a bicycle and you remain basically a bourgeois; paddle a hundred in a canoe and you are already a child of nature … Canoe and paddle, blanket and knife, salt pork and flour, fishing rod and rifle; that is about the extent of your wealth.”