Speech -- Peter C. Newman

on Receipt of the 2000 Pierre Berton Award, February 19, 2000

Thank you and good evening. These Lifetime Achievement Awards are a little bit tricky, because they sort of imply that’s your life and there it is and that’s it.

I would like to accept the medal and the cheque in the spirit of Duncan McPherson and some of you might remember him, he was probably one of Canada’s greatest political cartoonists and when I was editor of the Star he was the editorial page cartoonist. The reason I mentioned him is because not only was he a great artist, he was a great warrior and when he got a little bit of alcohol in him he would start a fight. He was barred from the Toronto Men’s Press Club for life, three times!! So that’s the spirit in which I accept this.

I want to say a word about Pierre. You know the word icon is used far too loosely but if there is one, I say it is Pierre. I first met him at Maclean’s as he said and I remember actually quite an abrupt introduction to him. I was waiting to see him, my first day on the job. I was waiting in the office of then a very funny Maclean’s essayist called Robert Thomas Allen, a very mild fellow. Berton burst through the door in his usual sort of Bertonesque way and said that his last story was not very good. When Berton left the room, Allen looked at me with sheepish eyes and said, "who does he think he is, Pierre Berton?"

Writing, I find is like being a sculptor, you have this huge rock, you have this huge mound of material and so like a sculptor you get rid of the material you don’t want and out of it comes a figure, a book, a piece of art hopefully. It’s not easy and the other part that’s not easy is promoting the book, which is so much a part of publishing now.

You know it’s so exciting going through the archives, it sounds like a great oxymoron but I’ll never forget, I was going through the York factory archives, and was looking at documents from sometime in the 1730s and the factor at that time James Ishum was complaining about this plague of mosquitoes that had descended on his post and there in the middle of the page was this squashed mosquito.

I want to talk about the differences between academic and popular history. There is a vital difference in the two, professors write to be published and journalists write to be read. The late Barbara Tuckman, I think, defined popular history best and she was one of the best popular historians. She compared popular history to the ancient Kipling days of India where there were story tellers who went village to village to village and people gathered around camp fires to hear them and if it was a good story and kept people’s attention they stayed and would pass around their rice bowl and get enough rice for dinner. If it wasn’t, people would drift away into the night and they never ate. So she was making the point that if you’re going to tell a story it has to be hypnotizing. It has to get people’s attention, it doesn’t necessarily have to be amusing but it certainly has to have some passion in it. I think that is one of the differences between academic and popular historians. I would never attack academic historians, that would be silly, everything we as popular historians do depends on everything they have done.

There are the two approaches to history and let me take the example of war, which is the most obvious example. There are the war correspondents who are in the trenches, who smell the smells, feel the gunfire and have the fear and know what the war is like at that very instant. That is very important to the history of that war but equally important are the academic historians that resurrect the documents and tell us why it happened and why one side won and the other didn’t. But the two reinforce each other. It is not a contest but there are two different realities and two different approaches and the case that I’m trying to make tonight is to negotiate a truce between them.

Events must be remembered and recorded by contemporaries and not merely resurrected. T.S. White, the American journalist/historian once said that history written later is not necessarily better it’s just different. Each generation rewrites history in terms of its own preoccupations and progress. I don’t think that popular history and academic history compete, I think historians perform the invaluable functions of recording the past while reporters or popular historians interpret the present, in the hope of casting some light on the future.

I like to take an example from my life, the 1962 election which was really a non-election, nothing happened, very few seats changed and in terms of the history of that period it will not be remembered at all. But I was on the Diefenbaker train, on the back of the train–that was the last campaign fought from the back of a train. It was a very poignant kind of campaign because the people that came out in those stations, especially the prairies, knew that they were bidding good-bye not just to Diefenbaker but to their way of life, to the whole idea of trains and rural life and I cried and so did most of us and they had these little bands playing The Thunder or Rule Britannia, just amateur bands with five or six people. It was incredible in terms of society changing and watching Canada being transformed. This was the last good-bye. I remember writing about it and thinking how important this was and yet historically nothing really happened in terms of large trends. None of these station stops lasted more than five minutes and yet without those tiny slivers of insight on those shabby platforms you missed the essential mood of the country and that campaign.

There was a canary aboard Diefenbaker’s private car and he got it into his head that if only the canary would sing that he would win the election. Well this was a wise canary, he never sang. The porter knew how to imitate the canary and one day he imitated the canary and Diefenbaker thought that it was the canary singing and it gave Diefenbaker new energy. Little stories like that tell you a lot about him and the time and the event it was and I think that’s important.

E. P. Taylor on his 77th birthday, said that "history is not a catalogue but a convincing version of events" and I like that. Convincing versions of events include the small and large events, and once an event has happened it disappears in the mists of the past and can never be replayed. Both popular and academic historians are faced with a welter of facts from which they must choose. That selection forms the framework in which they write and is an interpretation, and interpretation implies a scale of values, a sense that some things matter more than others. And I think in that context, popular historians will always pick character over circumstance, I think that is one of the important differences between us. Any pivotal event, the downfall of a government, the disintegration of society, the triumph of an ideology or the rise and fall of the fur trade, can best be portrayed through the personalities of dominant individuals working out their fates.

Another difference between popular and academic historians is the whole notion of objectivity. I don’t believe there is such a thing. If objectivity means fairness and accuracy, then of course that is essential. But if objectivity means being totally devoid of passion and not being subjective at all, being totally neutral, being totally compromising this way and that, I don’t believe it’s interesting or a good thing to do. Truth must be based on an interplay of fact and opinion; the two are inextricably linked. Strict neutrality is as undesirable as it is impossible.

The historian should not try to be a human transmission machine and in a real way history is no more than memory refined. A friend of mine, he told me before he died, about talking to his grandfather during the 1930s about things that had been witnessed by his grandfather in the early 18th century, and here you had the history of Canada spanning three generations of memories. That’s how young of a country we are and it was possible and it is possible. I think you cannot simply project history through books, you have to go out in the field and talk to people and get not just their thoughts but their feelings and again that’s a difference. Academic historians work with documents. We, popular historians, I like to think, work with feelings and feelings are unreliable, but they are also important. Feelings colour facts, they certainly colour truth.

Popular historians attempt to recreate situations as opposed to listing dates, trends and events. Recreation is a literary device which implies the use of novelist techniques which I think really marks, I believe, a good popular historian; someone who can use the techniques of the novelist, I mean suspense and dialogue and all the devices that make a novel interesting, without of course straying beyond the bounds of what is factual. This is difficult but can be done.

Despite all of the unrelenting academic attacks on my work and the work of other popular historians I continue to believe that mine is a legitimate format. I think the reason that it’s legitimate is the same reason that the National History Society exists. If a people don’t know their history, don’t understand their history, don’t appreciate it, don’t live their history, then history really has no meaning. History can’t just be a bunch of journal articles–it has to be a living history. Anything that makes that history more accessible as Pierre does, or as I try to do is essential. I’m not trying to exaggerate, I’m simply saying that’s the way it is. It is essential that we have heroes and villains of our own, not import them and part of my motivation has been to help nurture these national myths and legends and indigenous casts of historical characters. One of my favourite quotes is one by Steven Shiff who is a writer for Vanity Fair and he wrote, "at the heart of good history is a naughty little secret: good storytelling. A history that isn’t implicitly as colorful as a twist of yarn is at best fodder for other specialists." A historian’s richest insights generally come when he asks himself what would it have been like to be there–that’s a good test.

In compiling the documentation, historians both academic and popular know about this. They’re defining their themes, organizing their narratives, setting scenes, dramatizing conflicts in both characters and atmosphere. In this process there are limits to the capacity for invention but there need not be any limits to the capacity for insight. It’s getting harder, all of you who have worked in the field of history must be a little frightened these days because history is accelerating so fast. It changes not just by the year, but by the month, by the week, by the day, by the hour. The whole country has become a huge whispering gallery with people’s triumphs and errors flashed from coast to coast as they happen, and with the internet it has become instantaneous.

I believe that the greatest contribution popular historians have made, are making and will make, is their passion–they write with passion. They write with feeling, they write with something approaching a sense of duty. Well, with my Hudson’s Bay books I really got into it. I spent 10 years of my life doing nothing else. I had this feeling all the time, even when I was alone in my study with my computer, that over my shoulders were these guys, these fur traders saying "get it right" and I tried to get it right. I don’t know if I did, but you get into that kind of frame of mind, that what we are doing is important. Their legacy is in your hands because nobody else at that moment and time is keeping that legacy alive, so I think that’s really pretty important. I hope that in the course of time as more and better popular histories are written the academics will realize that there is some usefulness here. So I would like to propose a truce tonight between the two disciplines, not that one is better than the other, it isn’t, not that one is more essential than the other, it isn’t, but I do believe that they are both important and that one is incomplete without the other. I truly believe that and I hope you do too. At least, I hope I’ve made you think about it.

I wanted to end not talking about history, not talking about the fur trade but talking about our country. Charles Montegue, the French essayist once said that Frenchmen never talk about their wives, in case the listener knows more about the subject more than they do. We are always talking about the Canadian identity. You know Pierre Berton once said that Canadians are any two people that can make love in a canoe. Stu Keets said that Canada is the vichyssoise of all nations, its cold, half-French and difficult to stir. Dave Broadfoot says that the world needs Canada because if it didn’t exist the Chinese could sail right across and invade Denmark. Some people think the Canadian Shield is a birth control device.

All men and woman are sons and daughters of their landscapes but no where is this more true than in Canada where the dominant gene of nationhood has been possession of the land itself. We laid claim to this large land by planting settlements, settlements on the shoulders of our shores, the elbows of our rivers and the laps of our mountains. In this way always testing nature rather than trying to conquer it. It is a wonderful country. As Pierre said, I came here and didn’t know a word of English and didn’t know anybody. Now I’m being attacked by the Globe & Mail-what a great country!

Canada was built on dreams as well as appetites. This country was put together not by bloodlines, kin or traditions but by waves of newcomers of every seed and stock arriving dreaming big dreams. It’s different when somebody says they are Swedish or Japanese, it’s a statement of fact. But when somebody says they’re Canadian, it’s a condition because so much of our potential is yet to be realized. Only seven percent of this country has been settled. So, I believe it’s time we began to sing some songs in praise of our selves. Despite our fruitless and sometimes tedious questions to define our national identity, Canada is no mere accident of history or some valedictorian’s hazy dream. What we’ve got here is a daily miracle of a country. Ever since 1867, we have lived it. We have lived out successfully the dictum that a nation is a body of people who have done great things together-we have and we will again. We are always talking about being a nation in trouble and we are. We are, until you look at other nations in trouble and if you go anywhere around the world and look at Canada, whatever problems we have, they will look small compared to the problems of whatever country you are in. There are a million people trying to come in here every year, what do they know that we don’t? That’s the only quarrel I have with Canadians, those of us who weren’t born here really appreciate this country and too many Canadians take it for granted and I think it’s time to stop doing that. Too often as a nation and as individuals we decry what we lack instead of celebrating what we possess. Because, to most people around the world Canada is blessed with the mandate of heaven.

I want to end my remarks with a story which has to do with going to Richibucto in New Brunswick. It’s a good story because it illustrates the way I feel about Canada. When a journalist goes somewhere he has never been before, you try and look for somebody who’s been around for a while and can tell you what’s happening. So I saw a fisherman sitting on the wharf, puffing his pipe. I went up to him to strike up a conversation with him, so I said, "have you lived here all of your life?" I will always remember his answer because it did reflect how I feel quite often about Canada. When I said "have you lived here all of your life?", he said "no, not yet."

Thank you very much.