by John English
Trudeau brought from France his interest in the reconciliation of Christianity and Communism. But as the Labour Party under Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin joined the Western alliance against the Soviet Union, Laski became a critic of his own party, believing that it was Labour’s first interest to come to terms with Soviet Communism, which, even though corrupted by power, represented the ideal of economic equality and justice without which there could be no true democracy. These views influenced Trudeau deeply, and he quickly moved outside the North American liberal mainstream represented by men such as Arthur Schlesinger and Lester Pearson, both of whom argued that Soviet Communism represented a fundamental threat to the principles of individual liberty and the practice of democracy. Laski’s views on the Soviet Union and his later writings have aged badly; indeed, critics at the time said that his work seemed “very old-fashioned,” especially in his insistence, after the Nazi catastrophe and the evidence of Soviet imperialism, that capitalism was the greatest enemy of human freedom.34 Still, Laski’s views found echoes on the French Catholic left, where Communism was a political force, and they resonated with the young Trudeau, who followed those debates closely.
Laski also influenced Trudeau’s interest in federalism, a topic of paramount importance in his later writings. He was a major theorist on federalism who argued, much like the later Trudeau, that authority should reside where “it can be most wisely exercised for social purposes.” Later he shifted to the view that the central government should have primacy because of broader social needs.35 In this respect, trade unions have a fundamental obligation to become directly involved in political activity, both for the workers as individuals and for the working class in a pluralist democracy. Laski lamented the fact that American unions stood apart from the political process.
Trudeau had demonstrated little interest previously in the Canadian labour movement, which had advanced quickly in wartime, but in France and now in Britain he was witnessing first hand a different model, one he came to believe could be adapted to the political circumstances of Quebec. When he eventually returned to Canada, he immediately sought out labour leaders and spoke to the leaders of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, Canada’s socialist party, which was slowly moving towards a close embrace of the Canadian labour movement.36
The impact of his work with Laski was already evident in an article he wrote for Notre Temps in November 1947. He followed his professor in emphasizing that a system of law bestows “a certain order of things that guarantees sufficient justice that no revolution occurs.” Similarly, he criticized the previous Liberal government of Joseph-Adélard Godbout because it had relied on the federal government to correct social and economic abuses, but in a way that abused the distribution of powers set out in the Canadian Constitution. The present Duplessis government, in contrast, abused the people of Quebec by refusing to enact social reforms, arguing that the Constitution prevented it from acting in these areas. Still, there was a chance for Quebec to act. It was not too late if Quebec rejected orthodoxy and if the people showed their disgust for the elites and their rigidity. If they did not, he would not hold much hope “for our Christian and French civilization which our ancestors created with so many hopes.” However, if Trudeau came to agree with Laski on the importance of a politicized and active trade union movement, he disagreed on one major item.
Unlike the atheist Laski, Trudeau was very active in Catholic circles in England. In early January he attended a conference on “Existentialism and Personalism” in which the French intellectuals Emmanuel Mounier and Gabriel Marcel participated. It was also at this time that he began to study the works of Cardinal Newman and to participate in Catholic youth discussion groups. He joined the Union of Catholic Students and helped to collect books to ship to Catholic universities in Germany.37
Otherwise, he fraternized little with other Canadian students, who mostly lived in crammed student rooms. He, in contrast, could afford better accommodation—he lived at 48 Leith Manor in the tony Kensington section of London, met with the great names of academic life,* and raced his motorbike around the city and through the narrow trails of the British countryside.38 On the Harley-Davidson, he travelled 1,725 miles through England and Scotland, apparently following the shoreline as much as possible and staying in youth hostels when he could. On some weekends he disappeared to Paris, memorably when his wild, good-looking friend Roger Rolland married there on March 20, 1948. Suzette, who had a taste for gossip, reported to her brother that Madame Rolland had told her she was astonished at the marriage because she did not know her son was interested in women.* Pierre, the best man, was overcome at the wedding and could not find the words he wanted to say at the reception afterwards.39 It was an unusual lapse, but, given his own recent loss of Thérèse, completely understandable.
The spring brought uncertainty and illness. In February, he contracted a virus, accompanied by diarrhea, which led to several trips to a Harley Street doctor and a stay in the Charing Cross Hospital. He thought about returning home, and his family, particularly Suzette, who fretted about Pierre as older sisters often do, urged him to do so. He wrote to a “Monsieur Caron” about a teaching position at the Université de Montréal, adding in his letter that he had always aspired to be in “active politics one day or another.”40
At the same time, unknown countries far away from home still beckoned. Trudeau had dreamed of a world tour while at Brébeuf, had tantalized Thérèse with the romance of travelling together around the globe, and had developed contacts with diverse people in several countries who might assist his passage. He had met the young Jacques Hébert at a Catholic gathering in the summer of 1946, and the two quickly became friends after Hébert regaled Trudeau with tales of his travels to exotic locales. A rebellious student like Trudeau, Hébert, four years his junior, had been sent by his father to Prince Edward Island to learn English after he was expelled from a classical college. Hébert then began a life of travel, and his tales intrigued Trudeau.41 After he had recovered from the intestinal illness in June, Trudeau went to Harold Laski and asked for a letter of recommendation, telling him he wanted to finish his thesis on Christianity and Communism by travelling through Communist lands as well as the birthplaces of the great religions in the Middle East and Asia.42 Jules Léger, later the Governor General of Canada but now a first secretary at the High Commission in London, and Paul Beaulieu, the Canadian cultural attaché in Paris, provided Canadian government letters of reference for Trudeau’s wanderings.43
He was only twenty-eight, but his family remained troubled about his failure to “settle down.” Suzette had complained to him even before he went to Paris in 1946 that he “had enough studying for one lifetime: that’s what your friends and I have decided anyhow!” He should, she warned, not force himself to occupy every minute of his life with a “studied program—Learn to live and let yourself go,” she advised, “otherwise it will soon be too late.” More than two years later, in the fall of 1948, Tip gave the same message to his brother, urging him to settle down as he and Suzette had done earlier. Trudeau replied candidly, mildly rebuking his younger brother for the criticism:
You have chosen marriage, a home, the quiet life, the work you enjoy, and moderation. I’m a nomad by inclination, but also by necessity, for academic pursuits alone haven’t brought me wisdom. As I discover the world, I discover myself. This no doubt seems terribly trite, but I now accept the trite along with all the rest.44
Trudeau wanted to strip down to the essentials. He would travel like “Everyman: on foot with a backpack, in third-class coaches on trains, on buses in China and elsewhere, and aboard cargo boats on rivers and seas.” Then, he would rebuild, taking the strongest materials he had found in his education and experience, and bonding them to the enduring pillars of his heritage.45
Trudeau left London on a fine summer day in 1948 and headed east, determined to pierce the darkness that had fallen over Eastern Europe. Despite letters of introduction from Canadian officials, he encou
ntered sullen border guards, machine guns, and barriers as he passed through Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria. Soot darkened the elegant mansions of the Hapsburg Empire, and the remains of war were everywhere. In Poland he saw Auschwitz, where, he wrote not entirely accurately, “5 million were killed by the Nazis (1/2 being Jews).” He seemed not to ponder then what Auschwitz meant, but he had long ago left behind the casual anti-Semitism of his adolescence.46
What he retained was his intense curiosity, his sharp blue eyes that scrutinized all he encountered, and his lean, muscled physique. He sometimes shaped himself to his environment, wearing a full, albeit thin beard through the Middle East and donning native garb when appropriate. At other times, he was defiant, wearing North American shorts where none had been seen before. When he failed in his plan to visit the Soviet Union, he passed in the company of some students from Bulgaria into Turkey and the Middle East, where stability had been shattered first by war and then by the establishment of the State of Israel. In May 1948 five Arab armies had attacked Israel, but the better-disciplined Israelis defeated them and seized most of the lands the British had held as Palestine under the League of Nations mandate. When Trudeau came in the fall of 1948, the war had not officially ended, and tensions and suspicions abounded. Borders were in doubt; gunfire sounded throughout the nights.
After he was told in Amman, Jordan, that all the roads to Jerusalem were closed, Trudeau joined a group of Arab soldiers and crossed over the Allenby Bridge to Israel, making his way up to the Old City of Jerusalem. Through gunfire, he sought refuge in a Dominican monastery. As he left, however, the pale-skinned, bearded Trudeau attracted the attention of Arab Legion soldiers, who promptly arrested him as a spy. He was briefly imprisoned in the Antonina Tower, where Pontius Pilate supposedly judged Christ. Fortunately, a Dominican priest, who, like most Arab Christians, probably sympathized with the Arab cause, convinced the jailers that Trudeau was simply a Canadian student, not a Jewish spy. A group of Arab soldiers returned him to Amman, no doubt convinced that the peculiar Canadian student was certainly a spy. In Jordan, where the government remained closely linked with Great Britain, the British passport that Trudeau had wisely procured in Turkey convinced the local authorities that he should be released.47
In the turbulent Middle East, Trudeau constantly encountered new adventures and troubles of one sort or another. From Jordan he travelled to Iraq to visit Ur, Abraham’s birthplace, and the fabled Babylon. When he stepped off the train, he asked to be directed to Ur and was immediately sent to the great ziggurat. He left his baggage at the station and wandered through the ruins of the city, collecting a few shattered tiles inscribed with Sumerian characters before climbing to the top of the ziggurat. As he did so, he encountered some bandits:
They made it clear that they wanted money. One of them indicated by gesture: “Let’s see your watch.” Since I wasn’t wearing one, I replied, “Let’s see your knife”—and snatched it from his belt. They persisted: “We want whatever you’ve got. Hand it all over.”
But Trudeau now had the knife, and he persuaded them to go down the stairs to discuss matters. Meanwhile, he tricked them and stayed at the top, shouting down: “Now come and get me.” They stood transfixed while he began to scream “to the skies all the poems I have memorized, beginning with Cocteau’s verse about antiquity. I spewed octosyllables and alexandrines by the dozens. I accompanied them with dramatic gestures.” They quickly and understandably concluded he was “dangerously deranged.” He descended the stairs, “still yelling.” As the brigands disappeared into the desert, Trudeau suddenly realized that his study of poetry had brought him unimagined benefits.48 He was alone in Ur, which was surprisingly pristine. After seeing the vast mausoleum, he climbed the ziggurat once again and reflected on the history that surrounded him and what it meant. To be sure, he wrote to his mother, some of the greatest treasures were now in the museums of the many conquerors:
But digging will always obsess archaeologists, and the compulsive ritual of the dig will continue to reward them mainly with frustration. Every bump may hide treasures, but every pit may also. Nothing is ever finished, even if you have to keep digging another six inches. And by removing soil, they make other mounds, and forget a shovel here and there, leading archaeologists of the year 10,000 to establish that 20th-century man had made little progress since his Paleolithic ancestor …
Having reached the top of the ziggurat, I saw an enormous black bird fly slowly away after defecating on the column whose offerings had once been made to the moon goddess … Vanitas vanitatum, et omnia vanitas.
Alone, five days after his twenty-ninth birthday, he saw the burning sun create his shadow, the only human form where once a great civilization had thrived.49 He felt mortality.
With his prized British passport, Trudeau set off on the fabled Silk Road that carried him through Samarkand to India and Afghanistan. He had already developed a lifelong dislike of Canada’s Department of External Affairs, whose representatives, he claimed, had treated the bearded backpacker with disdain—in sharp contrast with the friendly reception given by British diplomats. He wrote to his mother and sister on December 2 that, in India, the “people at the Canadian High Commission were quite nice for a change.”50 In general, however, he sought out priests when he needed counsel and refuge, and they welcomed the ascetic of New Testament appearance who knocked on their doors. Curiously, although he had made no formal arrangements with any Harvard professor to supervise his proposed thesis on Communism and Christianity, he used the pretext of thesis research for Harvard to gain entry to political offices and to journalists and professors.51 As a result, the letters he wrote to his family from Asia present a remarkable portrait of a continent in turmoil and a young man in the process of finding himself.
Although Trudeau gloried the scantness of possessions and in the meagre cost of his trip ($800, he later claimed), he mingled with the mighty as well as the derelict and the desperate as he passed through the Middle East and on to India, China, and Japan, before returning to Canada in the spring of 1949, after almost a year on the road. He wrote several letters to his family as his adventure progressed. What they reveal is his fondness for his mother, whose travelling passion he inherited; his keen eye for the variety of human experiences; and his passion for understanding the basis of political action. In their own right, the letters are important as descriptions of Asia at this critical time, as the British Raj dissolved, India divided violently into separate pieces, and a new united China bloodily emerged.
He wrote from Kabul in early December, having passed through the Punjab, where he saw the Golden Temple at Amritsar. There he discovered few who spoke English and concluded that the Indians “seem to be getting even against all foreigners for 150 years of foreign domination.” Imperialism became a constant theme in his writings home. Stranded with only his knapsack, Trudeau found himself in the no man’s land between India and the new state of Pakistan. He was rescued from a walk of twenty miles to the Pakistani frontier by “a Muslim Punjab Police Captain,” who whisked him through police cordons in a private car. That night he went “to bed with a huge glass of sweetened warm buffalo milk” and “slept like an angel.” The next morning, he continued, “I bid this hospitable family good-bye, despite the invitation to remain longer; for the wife had to remain in purda all the time a foreign man was in the house, and I couldn’t bear keeping the man from his wife all the time I was there.”52
He moved on to Peshawar in new Pakistan, which had a fascinating bazaar, “by no means pretty, and a hopeless jumble, but [with] the atmosphere of a frontier town, various races seem to mingle, the Mongolian with the Indian and with the white.” As he watched, “a troop of frontier tribesmen marched down the street, beating their tumtums obviously on their way to the fight in Kashmir, blowing their bagpipes and shooting in the air, something out of a movie.” Trudeau said he “wandered about at random,” and “dusk found me lost in the maze of lanes. I was too
enchanted to be disturbed, except that my eyes stung with the heavy acrid smoke which hung about the place, smoke of that particular kind which comes from cooking over cow dung fuel.” Once again, the police picked him up, but his British passport secured his release.
He finally managed to get a ride with an American diplomat who took him through the Khyber Pass, where he saw on the mountainsides the plaques commemorating British battles long ago in the great game to win Asia. He reported the stories of refugees who were fleeing their ancestral homes as Hindus and Muslims set upon each other in the bloody aftermath to Indian independence:
We had a welcome breakfast at the outpost of the famous Khyber Rifles, high up in the pass. Wild honey was on the menu. Then on to Jahalabad: all along the way we passed endless caravans; these were the nomads of the heartland which I had thought had ceased to exist, but here they were, hundreds, thousands of them, men, women and children, all trekking south into Pakistan, through the Khyber Pass, coming from way beyond Kabul, whence the cold of the winter had driven them. The newborn babes ride on top of the camels with the chickens, perched high up on top of the huge load. I could write a book on these people, so much was I impressed by their features, their dress, their behaviours, their beasts of burden, their history, their inner mind; however I won’t write it now for I would never get you to Kabul, the city a mile above sea level … We crossed the final pass at sunset and the pink and purple mountains, stretching away to infinity, is something to behold. And as a cadre, on either side, higher mountains snowcapped and formidable. Then the descent into the valley of Kabul, where the crisp winter air and smell of wood fires awakened many longings within me; despite my crude room in the only hotel in the place, I slept happily. Here was a taste of winter, and of Laurentian air, a change from the six months of summer I had enjoyed by going gradually south all the way from England, as I went east.