The Captive Reader

When I started this blog in January, the first book I reviewed was Canadians by Roy MacGregor, noting that “I have a particular weakness for navel-gazing books about Canada and the elusive Canadian identity.”  While MacGregor wrote eloquently on the topic, there is no author who has done more to articulate the Canadian experience than Pierre Berton.  Indeed, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a home library in Canada that doesn’t have at least one of his history books, usually The Last Spike (personally, I’m partial to Vimy and Marching As to War).  In most of his books, Berton examines what it means to be Canadian and where that sense of national pride originates but, to my knowledge, Why We Act Like Canadians is the only volume entirely devoted to this study.  Now apparently out of print, it’s an eloquent and surprisingly undated analysis of those myths and experiences that shaped the national character.

The book takes the form of letters written to Sam, an American friend with little knowledge of his northern neighbour.  For a book written in 1982 (the first letter is dated April 17, the day the Constitution Act was signed), it’s amazing how much of what he says still resonates.  “…why did we let the Mounties get away with all those crimes?” he asks, referring to a scandal of the day.  Almost thirty years later, the RCMP is still scandalizing us with their behaviour but we’re as happy as ever to take no action.  Berton’s explanations as to the national weakness for redcoats still holds true:

The frontier Mountie was actually a solider, disguised as a policeman by a shrewd prime minister who didn’t want to annoy you Americans; had soldiers chased the whiskey traders back to Montana it might have been considered an act of war.  But the Mountie quickly became more than a solider.  Over the years he took his place as a father figure in a nation that adores father figures.  Incorruptible, adaptable, courageous, courteous, kind (he had all the Boy Scout virtues, as well as the hat), the Mounties comforting presence prevented our west from going wild.  The Indians called him ‘father’ to his face, but it was not only the Indians who appreciated his paternal qualities. (p.28-29)

“A nation that adores father figures.”  I can’t get over that description and how much it still resonates.  So much of the Canadian identity revolves around being secure, being cautious.  We love institutional authority, though hold significant contempt for the individuals who wield it – the very opposite of the American ethos, with its passionate reverence of the President.  We love authority because we love order – the one cannot exist without the other, certainly not in a country as large and as sparsely populated as Canada.  For this, we have been called socialists (still are, in fact, even by the mainstream American media) but it remains as staunchly Canadian value:

…historically, Canadians put order first, individual freedoms second.  I think it’s fair to say that for most of our history we have tended to look askance at what we considered to be a permissive society below the border.  ‘Liberty,’ in our northern view, is alarmingly close to ‘libertine’. (p. 40-41)

Immigration and nature are favourite topics in Berton’s writing and his most eloquent passages are devoted to them.  For those unfamiliar with Canada’s rather amusing nation-building attempts, Berton provides an excellent summary of our approach to immigration:

What we really wanted were well-to-do, right-thinking, English farmers.  Unfortunately these had no intention of leaving so we settled for those Europeans who came to Canada to escape intolerable conditions at home; and we lured them, in our stolid Canadian way, not with romantic slogans but with the promise of free homesteads and rich farmland.  Canada was advertised not as the land of the brave and the home of the free but as a place to make money.

            Thus, the much-touted mosaic is the result of good old Canadian compromise, an adjustment to the kind of tensions produced when reality doesn’t match up with the ideal.  We wanted proper-thinking Brits; we got Slavic peasants.  So we made a virtue out of ethnicity; and ever since we’ve gone along with those groups who want to retain something of their original culture, language, and dress – like the Quebeckers.  It’s said, for instance, that more Gaelic is spoke on Cape Breton Island than in all of Scotland.  The onion-shaped domes of the Greek and Ukrainian Orthodox churches are as familiar to our prairie landscape as the grain elevator.  In Canada, where Italian flags can outnumber maple leafs and half the short-wave radios in the Dufferin area of Toronto are tuned to Rome, the babushka is almost as familiar as the kilt. (p. 71)

And like any book about the Canadian identity, Berton takes the time to mention the Scots.  Even in the 21^st Century, when our greatest waves of immigration come from Asia and not Europe, the hard-working Scot is still the ideal that so many strive for.  I remember in school how those of us with no Scottish ancestors (a large proportion, since most of my schoolmates were from Hong Kong) longed for at least one red-headed great-great-grandparent.  But why?  The Scots were hardly the first group to come to Canada and though their culture may have come to dominate certain regions, they remained concentrated, staying mostly in Eastern and Central Canada.  For whatever reason, we revere the Scottish settlers, even those of us who came relatively recently and have no Scottish background of our own:

If we are a sober people who sometimes equate ‘fun’ with ‘sin’, and liquor with the devil; if we feel guilty when we succumb to distractions; if we squirrel away our money in banks at twice your per capita rate; if we are canny to the point of overcaution – some of these qualities are traceable to the Scottish influence and the Scottish example.  For of all the immigrant cultures that form the Canadian mosaic, the most admired is the Scottish. P. 79

And as for nature?  What Canadian can’t go on for hours about the awesome beauty of our country, and of the danger it contains?  I am half convinced that it’s this theme alone, man versus nature, that drove many Canadian authors to write in the first place – it’s certainly well-represented in our literature.  But it’s inescapable.  “We are a wilderness nation; it has not been easy to come to terms with a harsh environment.  Geography has been our enemy more often than it has been our friend” (P. 104).  Wherever you are in the country, there are moments when you feel humbled by its size, its emptiness, its power.  Perhaps it is this omnipresent foe that keeps us humble, that instills in us the deferential attitude that so amuses foreign visitors:

Dwarfed by nature, we Canadians have every reason to feel like lesser creatures in a Brobdingnagian world.  Few have seen the cliffs of Baffin or the eskers of the tundra but we all live cheek by jowl with the wilderness; and all of us, I think, feel the empty and awesome presence of the North.  If we are not as cocky as we might wish to be, if we are more sober than those who live by placid, sunlit waters, it is party because of an uncanny environment that beckons even as it repels, seductive in its beauty, fearsome in its splendour. P. 109

Bowties are cool

As with all of Berton’s works, it is beautifully written.  No other author has ever captured the romance of our history as he could.  In these letters to Sam the American, he does an excellent job of praising Canada without belittling the States, no easy task and a show of restraint certainly not expected by his target audience.  And because the style is such that he looks to parallel or contrast Canada and the States, I think that makes this much more accessible for non-Canadian readers.  He gives the necessary historical information in his typically engaging way, so readers really shouldn’t need any specific knowledge of Canadian history of culture to thoroughly enjoy this. 

I can do no more to praise this than to report, truthfully, that it is the most perfect book I have ever read about the Canadian identity.  But one would hardly expect less from Berton, the undisputed authority on the history and legacy of the people who have made Canada what it is.