“To me,” Donald Creighton wrote near the end of his illustrious career as the dean of English-Canadian national and political historians, “history is the record of an encounter between character and circumstance.”
So a letter-writer to the Walrus quotes the man whose biography of John A. Macdonald remains the high-watermark of biography in this country. Reacting to Jeremy Krehn’s review of prime ministerial biographies and memoirs, the letter-writer complains that “elite biography no longer possesses cachet in the academy,” and have been replaced with the “little narratives.” “Such ideas has overtaken the Canadian historical profession,” the letter-writer continues. But the power of personality persists. “Some people,” the letter writer quotes Michael Bliss, “have much more opportunity than others to make a difference.”
I find much to agree with in the letter-to-the-editor, but the Granatstein-fuelled complaints about small-scale social history’s prevalence at the cost of “great man, big events” history, or what is supposedly “real” history, gets more than a little bit tiresome. As Creighton’s quote suggests, no individual acts in a vacuum without the influence of outside circumstance, and external forces alone cannot determine the course of events. So why the insistence on propping up social history projects as straw men just to prove that your preferred style of history is hard-done-by? Both are valid and a full picture cannot be understood without both. After re-reading Jeremy Keehn’s original essay in the June 2008 issue of The Walrus, I think the letter-writer misses some of the subtlety of Keehn’s observations.
Jeremy Keehn begins his essay by questioning the role of politicians in society and history: “Politicians, the manager-actors of democracy, typically escape the responsibility of trying to express an era–but they are often held up as the expression of one.” Keehn sees political biographies and memoirs as “road maps” of leadership, as guides for finding the “pivotal leaders” an era such as ours require. He argues that “we look to biography in order to understand how a person and a people aligned during a given era.”
Donald Creighton’s unmatched success with John A. Macdonald: The Young Politician/The Old Chieftain is such that “the work has become a canon of one, and by unspoken law no one is permitted to publish a prime ministerial biography in Canada without acknowledging it in the introduction.” Creighton’s greatest contribution as a biographer was that his “historical imagination” gave readers “a vivid sense not only of who Macdonald was, but who they once were.”
Creighton sees Macdonald as a great pragmatist, “out not to capture people’s imaginations with grand historical sweep, but to find practical solutions to problems.” Instead, Keehn sees the grand sweep and emotional appeal of thinking of Canada “as something greater than the sum of its parts” came from Macdonald’s colleague Thomas D’Arcy McGee. In this he echoes Richard Gwyn’s John A.: The Man Who Made Us. While Macdonald appealed to the public as a pragmatic, small-scale problem-solver, D’Arcy McGee pulled on their heartstrings. Keehn argues:
This oft-declaimed posture, Gwyn says, reassured Canadians that Macdonald was just like them. And indeed, leader who downplayed bold ideas as a basis for leadership were the preferred fashion for decades afterward. It would be some time before Canada was ready for a prime minister who embodied both Macdonald and McGee.
That prime minister, of course, arrived in the form of Pierre Trudeau. Love him or hate him, Trudeau, Keehn says, “demonstrated not only that he was in tune with the evolving morals of the age, but with its evolving media as well.” Trudeau biographer John English writes: “The times appeared to be perfectly tailored to fit Pierre Trudeau.” This comment echoes something Keehn opened his essay with:
Obama, [Andrew] Sullivan argued [in The Atlantic], is the right person for the times, not so much for his abilities or his rhetoric, but because of his identity as a sincerely spiritual black man who opposed a war most Americans regret and the world loathes.
Next, Keehn turns to the biography’s lesser cousin, the memoir and hits on a couple important points that subtly distinguish the two genres. He concludes that “Brian Mulroney’s Memoirs: 1939-1993 is more insufferable than most. The offence is all the more grievous because, as Peter C. Newman’s formidable counterweight, The Secret Mulroney Tapes, shows, the man is one of the country’s most psychologically compelling prime ministers ever.”
Keehn offers perhaps one of the better definitions of political memoir: “No political memoir is designed to offer a ready and open account of a life, of course. It is an argument for a legacy, a celebration of allies and an excoriation of enemies, and a recounting of a few good yarns–all, ideally, in brief.” Most often than not, the author forgoes “the writer’s task of acknowledging and exploring complexity.”
What makes Mulroney interesting, Keehn argues, is the Mulroney formula for politics: “encounter a political problem, be affected by it, and then respond fast. Then, once finished, argue loudly and at length that you’ve done the right thing–even when you haven’t.”
His “bull-headed ambition,” Keehn writes, “allowed Canada to confront a difficult moment in history.” Keehn argues that Newman understands Mulroney well: “his approach seemed to arise not just from a desire to govern well, but from deep inner drives that carried with them a tragic flaw.”
Whether entering the national political stage out of pragmatic ambition, or a sense of philosophical mission, politicians past and present are a perfect example of history remains an encounter between personal character and external circumstances.
The letter-writer also mentioned a few of the best political biographies out there: Maurice Careless, Brown of the Globe; Peter Waite, The Man From Halifax; Robert Craig Brown, Robert Laird Borden; Michael Bliss, Right Honourable Men. I was aware of these–though I haven’t read any of them in depth–and can include notes on these volumes that I’ve taken from various sources over the years.
