by John English
So I will say very little of [propaganda], else that I always feel a touch of hypochondria when I see how propaganda of a stupid sort can succeed in making people swear by absurdities one day, and die for the contrary absurdities the next day. “The sacred and worthless Atlantic Charter. The impossibility and necessity of conscription. Roosevelt for peace and for war too. Our friend Russia, the arch fiend. Beloved, execrable Finland Etc.” Where mendacity in former times had to be whispered from mouth to ear, now that it is coupled with propaganda, every one in the land can be made to change his mind quicker than his shirt.
On the returned paper, Trudeau wrote beside this paragraph: “Probably the reason for my mark ‘B.’”49 Surely it was, but only in part. There were other reasons too. The essay, apart from its eccentricities, is weak. It drips with contempt for Elliott’s anglophile views and for the man himself. Elliott was pompous but not entirely a fool. The paper merits his complaint that “it misses the systematic analysis and application of concepts.” Too often it prefers the quip and the rhetorical flourish to the sustained development of its thoughts.
In Harvard’s inflated mark system, the B meant trouble for Trudeau just before his general examinations, which, if passed successfully, would permit him to continue for a doctorate. He had done well in other courses, notably Merle Fainsod’s course on Russia. Typically, he responded to the challenge. In May 1946 Trudeau passed his examinations with distinction—and left with an “A.M.,” as Harvard eccentrically abbreviates its master’s degree.
Trudeau did not like Harvard, even though he recognized that the experience and the education were intellectually valuable. Several of his classmates from his Harvard years have described him as “holed up in his room at Perkins Hall [the drab graduate residence], working ceaselessly to master the mysteries of economics and to cope with the heavy readings and essay assignments prescribed by his professors.”50 Unlike earlier student days, he did not participate in extracurricular events, and he made few friends. Traces of his Brébeuf flamboyance remained: the sign that he posted on the door of his room read “Pierre Trudeau, Citizen of the World”—though at Harvard its meaning was very different from what it would have meant at Brébeuf. His values were now increasingly cosmopolitan, a concept shunned by many of his teachers in the 1930s. His outlook changed. In many ways, Trudeau later minimized Harvard’s influence. In an interview for the New Yorker in 1969, he spoke barely of Harvard but said, “I have probably read more of Dostoevski, Stendhal, and Tolstoy than the average statesman, and less of Keynes, Mill, and Marx.”51 The statement is absurdly modest and untrue.
Politics or, more accurately, the relationship between political action and political thought preoccupied him at Harvard. In his letters to Thérèse Gouin, he spoke almost never of literature but frequently of politics and, obsessively, of himself.* Trudeau, as Camille Corriveau earlier sensed, considered himself a loner and found intimacy difficult. Whether consciously or not, he took her advice that he must find someone he could trust and, with her, share his fears and hopes. He and his friends were invariably flirtatious in their relations with women, a trait that was common among young males at the time. Trudeau himself had become congenially flirtatious, much like Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart, the current movie stars. Yet proprieties were still often rigorous. After Tip’s marriage, his wife, Andrée, wrote to Trudeau: “Pierre you are not supposed to write Xs to me because I’m married. They are for your girlfriends. Besides, they make me shy.”52
In his isolation at Harvard, Thérèse Gouin seemed the ideal answer to his prayers. She had an eminent political lineage. Her great-grandfather Honoré Mercier was the founder of the Parti national and had become premier of Quebec in 1887 after a nationalist campaign that followed the hanging of Louis Riel. His son-in-law Sir Lomer Gouin, Thérèse’s grandfather, became premier in 1905 and steered Quebec through the difficult war years; he opposed conscription in 1917 but then, in 1918, eloquently defended Confederation in a historic debate on a Quebec legislative resolution which stated that Quebec should leave Canada. After retiring in 1920, he became a minister in Mackenzie King’s federal government from 1921 to 1924. His son Paul Gouin formed the radical Action libérale nationale in the thirties, the party that was popular with Brébeuf students, including Pierre Trudeau, at the time. Pierre had heard him speak at the college in 1937, where he told the students and priests that he thought it his duty to battle Communism. He ended with the words “We are the sons of heroic Canadians and do not retreat before the sons of Stalin.”53 Lomer Gouin’s other son, Léon-Mercier Gouin, a prominent Montreal lawyer and Thérèse’s father, accepted an appointment to the Senate as a Liberal in 1940 and served as a deliberate Liberal contrast to Paul, who opposed the war and became associated with the Bloc populaire canadien in 1942. Rich, brilliant, attractive, and a student of psychology, Thérèse responded to Pierre’s loneliness. She was a godsend to him during his two years in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
In the spring of 1945, just as his despair about Harvard deepened, Thérèse replied to a despondent letter from Pierre by telling him that she would see him in Boston on a study trip in early June. He was always careful when he wrote to her and sometimes produced multiple drafts of his letter. In his letter of response, he told her that, although he could speak to her more honestly than to other women, he had hesitated to write openly for several months.54 That summer in Montreal, Pierre’s springtime invitation to become “a friend” deepened into love. “Forgive me,” he wrote on July 5, 1945, “for having slipped away without a gesture, Thursday evening. You appeared to be sleeping, and why should I awaken you?”55 The formal vous became the personal tu by September, when he wrote from Boston, “this city of strangers,” asking her for a photograph or a letter. He even attended some lectures on psychology so he could report to her on Harvard’s Psychology Department.56 She turned twenty-two that September; Pierre, twenty-six in October.
He began to write letters of remarkable intensity to her. The previous year, he wrote on September 26, 1945, he did not wish her happy birthday because of his natural reserve. But in 1945 he would wish her happy birthday knowing that she was ready to accept the joy and the worries and this strange being that was called Pierre Elliott Trudeau. And that was how he ended this early love letter.57
They soon became deeply affectionate, but the price for Thérèse was bitter complaints about his Harvard life. All was going badly, he wrote in October:
I’m a misanthrope. I hate the Americans, their jazz, their cigarettes, their elevators.
For almost three weeks now I’ve been trying to learn the virtue you recommended: flexibility.
One has to be as flexible in life … Well, damn it, madam! I’m now in a room where you can hear all the neighbours’ noises, the radios across the hall, the pianos downstairs, the elevators next door, the bands in the nightclub, the kids in the street, the pacing upstairs, and the racket of the garbage men.58
The complaints continued: his work was “going to hell.” In restaurants, thoughtless women sitting beside him blew hated cigarette smoke; in seminars, there were the abominable pipes. “I embrace you,” he concludes this very long letter of complaint. A few days later, on the eve of his birthday, his mood was better: “And so I am Pierre, I am 26 years old, I have passed my quarter-century, and for the first time [on a birthday] I have received an extraordinary and almost frightening gift.” Her love had saved him from the arid and lifeless atmosphere in which he was imprisoned.59 Yet, he protested, she did not write as often as she should. And there was the matter of the photograph. It was rather strange, he wrote on November 15, 1945, that almost everyone had a photo of his girlfriend except for him: “I who is—or you pretend is—one of your favourite admirers.”60 In reply, she playfully dismissed his doubts and declared her love. In their letters, she became “Tess”; he, “my love” or, sometimes, “my little one.”
He was demanding, complaining in one letter that she did not care enough about her physical hea
lth and that she should “work out” and not breathe the bad air on St. Catherine Street. Among his laments about his work and school, there were boasts about his own physical prowess, such as when he noted that he alone at the Harvard pool could do the swan half-twist.61
Despite his doubts about Harvard, he encouraged Tip to study architecture there with the German exile Walter Gropius. Tip, who clearly deferred to his older brother, took his advice after his marriage in June 1945.62 The many contradictions in Pierre sometimes troubled Thérèse, and she chastised him often for being evasive. Their caution and Catholicism mixed oddly with the Freudian psychology that Thérèse studied and Pierre found intriguing. In planning their Christmas together in 1945, he wrote: “It would be so charming if we could celebrate the Nativity side by side.” He dreamed of a midnight Mass together in the northern countryside, “but such plans perhaps assume an intimacy that is not appropriate or correct for us in the circumstances. Alas!”63 He asked that his mother be involved in their plans together. And so she was.
Grace was, probably, present too often. Trudeau would later say that she “was a great respecter of the freedom of her children and was always prepared to take a chance.” She allowed them to make their own decisions and did not impose her wishes.64 Yet we sense in the letters how powerful her presence was to Pierre and how he yearned for her approval. Clarkson and McCall comment astutely that Thérèse “seemed eligible even to Grace Trudeau, who was notoriously sniffy about her son’s female friends.”65 The freedom she granted created its own constraints. And she could be so intimidating. Thérèse told Pierre that she found Grace formidable. She said they talked often on the telephone, but “in front of your mother, I’m always afraid to show affection and to tell her how much I like her.”66 Yet neither her presence nor the eminence of Thérèse’s father (whose Liberal politics Trudeau certainly did not share) inhibited the growth of their love. After he returned to Boston, he yearned for her presence:
I’ve read your letter which had been waiting for me [in Boston] since before Christmas. I’ve found new reasons to love you, and thus to be even sadder. I don’t yet dare take out your photograph because your real face is still freshly imprinted on my memory. But I think despairingly that just a few days will erase these ineffable features, that the taste of your mouth will elude me, that your heartbeat will vanish along with the soft warmth of your body. And so will begin my meditation before your image.
In conclusion, he quoted Walt Whitman:
Passage, immediate passage! The blood burns in my veins
Have we not darken’d and dazed ourselves with books long enough?
Sail forth—steer for the deep waters only
Reckless O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me.67
Trudeau desperately wanted to see her in the latter half of January, but his schoolwork was overwhelming; moreover, his mother wanted him to join her, Tip, and Andrée in New York at the end of the month. Thérèse also had school work, but he told her not to worry so much about her thesis. It was a means, not an end: “I want you to be a woman, Thérèse,” he pleaded; “I don’t want you to be an intellectual.” Moreover, he was jealous of her associates at the psychology clinic who were allowed to dissect her soul, who knew more of “my Thérèse” than he, who talked with her about sex, masturbation, and other matters that he and she did not dare to raise. He was jealous of the way she turned herself over to “those who didn’t truly care about her,” while to him, who loved her, she pretended to “pacify” him with the assurance that he was “not neurotic.” And she, he continued his rant, carried the blood of the daughter of a senator “and of the great Mercier! O shame, shame, shame!”68 The tensions in this exchange—about her career, his ambitions, psychology, politics, and sex—intruded on the deep affection developing between Thérèse and Pierre. The strain reflected their place and their era.
Despite his desire for her presence, Trudeau had already begun applying to European universities for the fall term in 1946. He would attend classes abroad while continuing to work on a dissertation for Harvard, although he had not established a supervisor there for the work. In the end, he won two scholarships, one from the Quebec government to go to Oxford and one from the French government to study in Paris. With the war’s end, the plans he had long ago made for study in Europe could finally be fulfilled, and he chose Paris. The French capital attracted him because he believed, correctly, that its spirit was markedly different from Harvard. Just before his general examinations, he complained to Thérèse: “The method of instruction at Harvard is the worst you can imagine. Everybody complains but nobody rebels. The teaching staff is recruited nearly exclusively of tyrants or megalomaniacs, with the result being a servile student body. Everyone simply follows the course because otherwise the professors will punish you. One does not study to learn something useful but simply to get the grades.” He admitted that many of the professors were brilliant but deplored the fact that equally brilliant students were so servile.69 Happily, his close friend Roger Rolland was also heading to Paris.
Thérèse and Pierre had begun to dream of touring the world, of transforming Quebec, of spending their lives together. She told him she would come to Boston at Easter with a friend. Her letter, with its news and its vision of a shared life, delighted him, “for [he wrote in English] it was not the letter of the intellectual, nor of the psychologist, nor of the mystic, nor even of the childish romanticist; but that of the woman I love.” He found a place for the two girls for thirty-five cents a day, near Perkins Hall, and warned her that if she arrived with any of her “far-fetched, incongruous, high-sounding and unconvincing complications of the soul,” he would have no patience.70 At Harvard he showed her off, and she was “wonderful advertising for Canada.” Her sweet presence still graced Harvard, the restaurant where they dined, and his room after she left. Yet there were some problems among the rush of expressions of love. It seemed to him that there was a part of her that remained closed to him.71 He admitted he was often rude, complaining about her supervisor Father Mailloux, snapping at her over dinner, but, then, “Thérèse, understand me, I ask you on bended knee and with wet eyes to stop me from becoming someone ‘who loved not wisely, but too well.’ I love you too much to love you wisely.”72
In May, after successfully passing his general examinations, Trudeau delayed his return to Montreal for several days because his mother had decided to come to Boston, which meant that Thérèse and Pierre would see each other for but one week in June. He had to return to Boston to receive his degree on June 26, and she had to leave on a study trip. Although both their schedules caused the problem, he said she was too caught up in her psychology courses.73 Just before he went to Harvard for graduation, he and Thérèse went to the annual meeting of the Quebec bar, which was held, serendipitously, at the Manoir Richelieu, close to the Gouin summer home. Along with her mother, they all dressed up for the grand banquet. He returned to Montreal on his fabled Harley-Davidson late on a Sunday night.
Surprisingly, after graduation, he went to work in the Sullivan gold mines at Val d’Or, Abitibi—the company Charles Trudeau had invested in after he sold his garages to Imperial Oil. There Pierre truly went underground for a short time, and emerged with stories of hard labour that he used thereafter as the occasion arose, particularly with his sons.74 His pay book indicates that he began on July 9 and ended on August 2, sufficient time to dirty his hands. “The work is hard,” he wrote Thérèse, “the men tough, the food plentiful, the night cold, the flies bad … and,” he added suggestively, “my arms are empty every night.”75 His pay was $5.65 for an eight-hour day, more than he had been paid as a very junior lawyer. His fellow miners probably did not know that the Trudeau family owned many shares in the company.76 He concluded that, despite his hopes of getting to know and understand the workers, he remained different from them: “I am not assimilable. I don’t speak like them, I don’t think like them.” Their drinking habits bothered the young ascetic, but he was more trou
bled, he said, by the emotional distance between him and the other men.77
The brief and solitary experience of hard manual labour does not seem to fit with the young intellectual he had become. What took him underground as a miner in the summer of 1946? He gave no answers then or later, but we can surmise that the purpose was similar to the journeys to the wilds of earlier summers. He possessed a profound desire to know “the other,” and in the postwar world where labour and socialist parties thrived, the “worker” was an “other” that Trudeau believed he must know. In this instance, his disappointment was keen when he discovered that he stood apart.
That summer, before he left for Paris, Thérèse and Pierre talked often about marriage and about going to Paris together. Thérèse’s mother whispered in her ear that Pierre was “a strange man,” but Thérèse reassured her that even though he was, she still loved him madly. Moreover, the mother had come to adore her daughter’s brilliant and rich beau, however strange he sometimes could be.78 Pierre tried to get Thérèse more interested in politics, and he gave her a recent book by Harold Laski to read—agreeing, in return, to read one on psychology.79 While he worked in the mine, she travelled to the Gaspé. In the end, they spent only a few weeks together in this summer they had long dreamed of sharing.