- Radical Tories: The Conservative Tradition in Canada
- House of Anansi (2006)
Editor’s Note
[The sixth Charles Taylor Prize will be awarded February 26 in Toronto. The $25,000 award, which is given annually to a Canadian author of literary non-fiction, is named for the late Toronto journalist and author Charles Taylor. In this essay, which originally appeared in Geist magazine, Taylor’s friend George Fetherling explores the career and intellectual development of the man who chronicled Canada’s Red Tory tradition.]
Just as there were two George Woodcocks -- the Canadian man of letters and the British trade-union leader -- so there were two Charles Taylors: the McGill philosopher, who is fortunately still with us, and the late Toronto journalist, author and sinologist for whom the Taylor Prize for non-fiction is named. The last of these, who was a dear friend, is in the news again, because of one of his books, Radical Tories: The Conservative Tradition in Canada. The first edition appeared in 1982, and readers of the Literary Review of Canada recently named it one of the hundred most important Canadian books of all time. Accordingly, a second edition was published by House of Anansi in 2006. Like nearly all of his works, it came about in reaction to the great political tragedy of his time.
Charles was the son of E. P. Taylor, perhaps the most famous, feared, despised, envied and editorially cartooned Canadian businessman of the 1950s. In 1980, when his father suffered a stroke, Charles had to take over the family's thoroughbred horse business, Windfields Farms (which had given the world Northern Dancer, a winner of the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness). So it was that when Charles died of cancer in 1997, his obituary in the New York Times was headed "Charles Taylor / Journalist and Horseman, 62." At least the journalist got top billing. He was one of the signal Canadian reporters of his day. Speaking no other language than English but armed with quick wits, a lively intelligence and an attractive personality, he put The Globe and Mail's Beijing bureau on a permanent footing and covered wars, elections and other excitements in 50 countries -- including Vietnam.
For Charles as for so many people at the time, the Vietnam War changed everything. In the common view, it was waged by America's blinkered technocrats and by MBAs who believed they had only a management problem, which they thought they could solve by throwing money at it; the moral dimension eluded them. As he confesses in Radical Tories, Charles had paid scant attention to Canadian politics or even Canadian society in his younger days, because he was busy with international affairs. But the war turned his attention homeward. He might have taken the easy path and lapsed into punditry as a Globe columnist. Instead he began to withdraw from journalism in order to find himself as an author. In 1966 he had published Reporter in Red China, the kind of book that returning foreign correspondents usually write. By 1974, with the war still going on, he produced Snow Job: Canada, the United States and Vietnam (1954 to 1973). It bravely critiqued the way Canada supported America's war aims through its foreign policy even while keeping its distance militarily (except in the sense of selling arms and equipment). The book was received with coolly polite incredulity. Radical Tories followed, and then Six Journeys: A Canadian Pattern, a suite of six Stracheyean essays on an assortment of Canadian eccentrics.
Moral, not moralistic, conservatism
As he retreated into authorship (becoming the innovative chair of the Writers' Union of Canada), he became interested in moral (not moralistic) conservatism, whose ideas derived from Edmund Burke, "who saw the state as a partnership not just among the living, but among those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are yet to be born." He became much influenced by Red Tory intellectuals such as the poet Dennis Lee (and non-intellectuals too): the people associated with the deification of George Grant, the Christian nationalist who wrote Lament for a Nation, and the snootily superior brand of Canadian nationalism derived partly, and somewhat paradoxically, from the ideas of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, a one-time member of the Nazi Party who in western academic life today is considered one of the three or four most influential thinkers of the 20th century. I simplify outrageously, of course. The point is that Charles began to seek out some version of Canadian conservatism that he could feel comfortable with.
Radical Tories and Six Journeys were the result: books widely beloved for the grace and good humour of their prose.
Radical Tories is a series of linked essays -- appreciations, really -- of the historians Donald Creighton (a lifelong hater of Québécois and a general bigot) and W. L. Morton, the politicians Eugene Forsey, Robert Stanfield and David Crombie, and one poet, Al Purdy, whose work probably has never had a finer, more understanding or more stylish piece written about it. Charles called Purdy "a folk tory." The lowercase t makes clear that he is talking about a turn of mind, not the Progressive Conservative party.
What distinguishes Radical Tories is first of all its felicitous writing (John Kenneth Galbraith, at six foot eight, "moves with the awkward lope of a man in constant apprehension of upsetting the furniture"). It grudgingly has some fine things to say about individual members of the Liberal party and occasionally takes individual Conservatives to task. In the end, it's not a book about partisan politics in the least. Charles was rather like Dalton Camp (who was rather like Benjamin Disraeli): a Conservative simply because he hated the Liberals for their power. He was either a small-c liberal or a small-l conservative, I'm not sure which, and it doesn't matter; and most of the figures he singles out for praise as Red Tories might just as easily be revered as Blue Grits.
Charles's intent needs no refreshing because it is timeless, despite the datedness of his examples. What seems to me to be his key statement falls near the middle of the book. He writes: "For most of this century, Canada has seen the triumph of the liberal levellers, secular Calvinists who despise anyone or anything which has claims to quality and finer feeling. Jealous and spiteful, they would cut everyone and everything down to their own level of insipid mediocrity. To survive in such a grudging milieu, those who strive for excellence often feel the need to mask their real intentions. Learned early, the impulse soon becomes instinctive."
Found news in subcommittees and stuffy rooms
Charles was 14 years my senior and was always trying to teach me lessons about journalism (a hopeless task, I fear). For example, he would tell me about how in Washington he would eschew flashy presidential press conferences to spend days in a stuffy room where a subcommittee of a subcommittee of Congress was droning on about two sentences in a tariff bill that directly affected 300 Canadian jobs. Or about how, when covering the war in Saigon, he refused to stay with all the other correspondents at the Continental or Caravelle hotels. Instead, he lived at the Rex, where the rooftop bar was actually owned by the propaganda arm of the American State Department. At the Rex, you see, he got to talk with mid-level U.S. officers in the elevator rather than simply people from Agence France-Presse or the BBC, even if this meant that he had to tape big Xs on the windows at night to keep shards of glass from flying onto the bed during the B-40 rocket attacks.
We spent a good deal of time together when we were both living in Toronto, before his second marriage.
"Every time I see you two characters together I think of James and his brother," a woman once told us. She was an English prof, so Charles said, "Ah, yes, Henry and his brother William."
"No," she replied. "Jesse and Frank."
For indeed, Charles and I rode together, so to speak, and raised some hell along the way. The statute of limitations not having run its course, I coyly withhold the details.
A couple of years ago when I was in Saigon, I made a point of putting up at the Rex, which seems not to have changed one bit from Charles's day. The lobby, the decor, the furniture – everything -- is pure unadulterated 1965, neither retro nor preserved but simply unaltered and unalterable. Staying there is like sleeping in Jackie Kennedy's rec room. I made repeated pilgrimages to its famous bar, where over dinner I'd look out over the quiet city and propose toasts to Charles's memory. I was recalling, among other fine qualities, how splendidly unpretentious he was, especially for a wealthy person who had known just about everyone. "To be honest," I once heard him say with no affectation whatever, "I can't remember if I've met the Queen or not."
This story originally appeared in issue 63 of Geist magazine.
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