by John English
In Kabul, time seemed frozen. The bazaars stood “as they have stood for centuries, all selling the same spices, silver jewellery, colourful silks, beautiful cloths, artistically worked shoes with pointed upturned toes, heavy woollens and brightly designed skullcaps, to wear under turbans, as they have done for centuries.” But he could see clearly that the twentieth century would bring changes as no other century ever had.
Later in December he returned to India, where he took a boat through the twisted bayous at the mouth of the Ganges. He passed through “lush jungles where tigers hunt the deer and gazelle, betwixt banks with their many villages of grass houses, whence primitive natives drive their sacred bulls and water buffalo towards rich prairies.” Surrounded by Hindus and some Muslims, Trudeau spent a pious Christmas Day: “I read the masses, sang the hymns and generally spent the day in deep meditation.” It was, he claimed, “good for the inners.” Then he discovered a priest from Quebec who had been in India since 1922 and was overjoyed, he told Suzette, to encounter a young guy from Montreal—a “petit gars de Montréal.”53
“Do you remember the song we used to sing around you at the piano?” Trudeau wrote to his mother from Bangkok on January 18, 1949. The song included the lines “North to Mandalay … South to Singapore,” and, thanks to the Dutch and “their outrageous imperialistic policy” in Indonesia, Trudeau was forced to go north to Mandalay and, then, to China. Bangkok beckoned, because Trudeau believed it was the best “listening post” in the area. In Indochina, too, French colonial policy was “undergoing a very critical test,” though Trudeau was more sympathetic to it than to the British brand. He quickly passed through Burma, where “armed bandits” were everywhere. “I have seen no country,” he told his mother, “where chaos, bribery, looting, smuggling, insurrection and political assassination have been so prevalent and to so little avail. There is perhaps no weaker government in the world today; but there is no more divided and purposeless opposition, so the government still stands. But that is all it does, it stands … at a standstill.” He stayed, as so often, with priests and even gave a lecture to Catholic girls in a convent.54
Then he arrived in Siam (now Thailand), a country that bewitched him and from which he drew important lessons. “If anyone ever called upon me in argument to give him evidence of the beneficial effects of Freedom upon the evolution of a nation,” he wrote to his mother on January 28, “I should suggest that he settle in Siam awhile.” There he found cordiality, grace, and a basic truth:
Practically alone in the East, this country ignores the vicissitudes of domination by an imperialistic power (the Japanese stay was too short-lived to have left an imprint). In consequence, hate, suspicion, envy and arrogance, which follow from the inferiority complex of colonies, or former ones, are entirely absent from the psychological make up of the Siamese; instead you find a good-natured curiosity and a genuine desire to live and let live—at worst, add a dose of disguised condescendence. The spoken word is superfluous here, you can smile and gesticulate your way to anything, bow, clasp your hands before your face and you are at peace with everyone.
As an added benefit, he said, “tipping, soaking the foreigner, begging, shoe shining, ‘guiding,’ and other forms of disguised servility are practically unknown here.”* In Siam, he admired the way everyone went his own way in a population that was “hybrid, part Thai (ancient Chinese), part Laotian, part indigenous (of the same ethnical branch as the Polynesian).” He regretted that he had brought no camera to record the “fairy-like splendour, the stupendous colour, the tireless worship, the unthinkable shapes,” though the “very abundance of exotic form could not possibly fit into a camera.” Oh, he exclaimed to his mother, “that I could blindfold you and instantly transport you within some sacred precinct, and leave you sitting on the matting of some pagoda; you would find no single familiar form with which to gauge reality, and you would swear you were dreaming.”55 Pierre, truly, had become his mother’s son; there is a warm, settled, and satisfying quality in their banter.
He also took a trip to the old Siamese capital of Chiang Mai with an unexpectedly distinguished group, including a Thai prince and princess, the American cultural attaché, the French military attaché, and assorted judges, bankers, and other dignitaries. His own attention, he admitted, was fully diverted between “a pretty fraulein and a jolie demoiselle,” although he did manage to talk to some missionaries and one of the “rare Communists” for the purposes of his thesis.56 From Thailand he went to French Indochina, then in the first battles of a thirty years’ war. In Saigon he found “hate, strife and inevitable waste of men, money and morals.” Once again the youth of France were in uniform, fighting a war that was going “nowhere fast.” Soldiers were everywhere, and people could travel only in convoys. The French held the towns and main highways, the rebels ruled the countryside, and “nobody holds the peace, though on both sides men die, [are] wounded, suffer and atrocities are committed in the name of elusive righteousness and honor.” On the one side were patriots, “coupled together with cynical Stalinists and bloodthirsty thieves.” On the other side, “you find bewildered idealists joined together with greedy Imperialists and disgusting knaves.” Politics, Trudeau concluded, “thy name is mud.”
He managed to find a bus to the legendary Angkor Wat, but he thought it such “a disgusting trip” that “at times [he] was hoping that the convoy would be attacked and a few of us killed off, to make room for the rest.” Angkor, by chance, proved to be safe thanks to the presence of a Life photographer for whom French troops cleared out the beggars and bandits who normally lurked nearby. The grandeur and scale seemed to Trudeau to represent the “confused aspirations of an awesome builder, obsessed by the need to accumulate idol upon idol, height upon height, hallway upon hallway, in endless and fearful mountains of stone.” Surrounded by French troops, the photographer and sundry others toured the ruins by torchlight and listened to an aged conservator tell the history of the monuments and how, among other things, the French novelist and future culture minister André Malraux, against whose “Communist” presence in Montreal Trudeau had protested in 1937, had stolen some of the artifacts.
Trudeau returned in an all-day convoy to Saigon, where he managed to get an admission card to an elite private club. There, enjoying the swimming pool, were women whose “bathing suits have gone one better” than those in France. At this “Club sportif,” Trudeau sipped the forbidden absinthe and supped in regal splendour. The city itself was crammed, and he dwelt “in a makeshift dormitory, hot, noisy and crowded, only bearable because there are a few other shifty fellows like myself, foreign legionnaires, etc.” He asked his mother to tell his friends that he would eventually write, but, he concluded, “when I settle down on a side-walk café, I don’t seem to get much work done.”57
From Saigon, Trudeau went to China, just as Mao’s Long March was ending in triumph. At the edge of chaos and conflict, he saw a society and a polity in the throes of death. From the safety of British-ruled Hong Kong, Trudeau went to Canton, a city crammed with “all types,” from “the escapists to the hard-boiled sewers of mankind.” Then he set out for Shanghai. Refugees and wounded soldiers were everywhere, and the value of money changed by the hour. There were still many missionaries, and they frequently gave the wandering Canadian refuge. The devout Catholic also found welcome in the Protestant YMCA, and, thereafter, he always had great admiration for it as an institution. The road to Shanghai was unforgettable:
I saw something of the real China; rambling mountains, wide rivers, endless rice fields in tiers along the hillsides or into gulches, poor villages, walled hamlets. I shivered at the poor peasant plowing his paddy fields with water buffalo, knee deep in the cold water. I slept in a tiny Chinese hotel and helped the daughter of the house with her English home work. I sat on a stool at a round table with many other famished travellers and learned to warm my fingers, numbed, on the boiling teacup, that I might be more agile with the chop sticks. Indeed, agility was an essential if I
were not to go hungry; for there is no time to lose when everyone begins digging in at the common bowls.
When Trudeau left the crowded bus for a final journey by train to Shanghai, he noticed signs of a brilliant spring all around:
A warm breeze rolls through the mountain gaps, and sweeps along the broad valleys, carrying the fragrance of the exquisite peach blossoms. Flooded paddy fields alternate with Yu-tsai crops in flower. The shimmering silver and pure gold squares form a heavenly checkerboard. Broad rivers and swift streams chase wildly through lush green expanses, young wheat under quaint, steep, Chinese stone bridges. Peasant women in bright blue pajamas stand on the threshold of their mud or brick houses. Old men in their long blue gowns and silver chin beards, smoke their silver pipes. Coolies with conical straw hats bustle along with that quaint gait, synchronized with the oscillation of a double load dangling at either end of their bamboo yoke. Rolly-polly children in their over stuffed clothes look as wide as they are high. With mitigated attention, the sun beams benevolently on the glistening world. Yes it is truly great to be alive!58
He told Grace on March 10 that he dreamed of being home for the three great events the next month: “your birthday, Easter and the sugar shack—la cabane à sucre.” China, however, delayed him. The ancient city of Hangzhou, the “noblest city in the world” to Marco Polo, so intrigued him that he decided to return to it one late afternoon by climbing a mountain rather than following the valley. With the earth drenched by rain, he climbed into the dark towards a Taoist monastery but, on reaching it, he discovered its entry heavily barred:
I pounded on the doors, exchanged foreign words with voices inside, but to no avail. They would not risk unbarring their gates to any weird devil of the stormy night. So I turned away, quite downcast. However I had discounted oriental curiosity, and when they heard my heavy boots begin to clang down the steep, flag-stoned path, a monk and several servants opened the gates to get a peep at the marauder. I brazenly (but with appearance of dignity) walked through the monastery, caught a glimpse of the Taoist monks in black silken gowns and silken cornered head-dress, sipping their tea, made my way to the temple where I was guided by the pounding of a drum. There I stood, shielded by a few candles against impending, incense laden darkness, and as I peered through the shadows towards the eerie idols, the drum beats quickened and suddenly gave away to a weird rhythm tapped out on loud gongs, against a background of howling wind and beating rain. I stood there as in a trance, feet together and hands joined, with a feeling of many eyes peering at me, hardly daring to bat an eyelid. Slowly the realization came to me that my hands had begun to tremble, and I awoke to the thought: enough of this foolishness. I hastened (walk, don’t run) through the halls and courtyards to the door of the domain, and out into the rainy but familiar night.
After this disturbing escape, Trudeau met the dean of the law faculty at the university in Hangzhou and discussed “politics at great length with the professors,” some of whom had attended Harvard or London in earlier and better days. He then left for Shanghai, where he immediately got into a fight “with a gang of rickshaw coolies.” He soon learned how to deal with the throng of “swindlers, pimps, coolies, rickshaw coolies, shoe-shine boys, down-and-outers, thugs and pests” that abounded in that city. Refusing to speak French or English, he broke silence only to shriek a few “ominous Russian words,” to which they immediately responded by slinking away.59
In Shanghai he once more sought the company of Jesuit priests, with whom he had “several jolly get-togethers.” Refugees from nearby battles were flowing into the city with tales of the Communist army’s approach. “I sure would like to be here for the kill and see their operations first hand,” Trudeau wrote, no doubt to his family’s despair. As hundreds of thousands fled the looming battles, space was scarce on the ships leaving Shanghai, but Trudeau managed to find passage to Yokohama in Japan. There the Canadian government official* initially barred the bearded backpacker from leaving the ship and further increased his animosity towards Canadian diplomats. Once released, Trudeau asked Grace if she wanted to join him on a tour through Japan, as she had the previous spring, when they travelled through Provence and the French Riviera on his motorbike. She apparently declined, so he left Japan on a ship crowded with refugees, most of them Eastern Europeans, who were once again fleeing Communist revolution.60
At the age of twenty-nine, Trudeau returned to a home that he anticipated with uncertainty and ambivalence. He wrote much later in his memoirs that his return “threatened to be a nasty shock. It was.”61 In this respect he was referring to politics in the province of Quebec, but to others he also emphasized the personal doubts he had at the time. “But what did the wanderlust correspond to? Was it a basic loneliness? … I think the best answer would be that I was really completing the pedagogy of Pierre Trudeau, the growing up of Pierre Trudeau.”62 But had he yet grown up? Did Trudeau finally know who he was?
George Radwanski speculated that the trip and its deliberate “risk-taking” and “self-imposed hardships” reflected, on the one hand, his asceticism and, on the other, his desire to experience poverty, a “reality” that had eluded the wealthy young man.63 Gérard Pelletier credited Trudeau’s travels with developing an “international” sense that others then lacked. He deliberately sought out political ideas that could be applied to Canada and Quebec.64 Trudeau’s own letters and documents provide new answers to some of these questions. He did “miss” the war; and, during his political years, he expressed some regrets; he had told Thérèse Gouin in 1945 that he was too lost in his books as the war ended to understand the great “cataclysm” that had exploded around him. Yet there is little in his writings of 1948–49 to confirm that he regretted he had not fought in the war. In Notre Temps on Valentine’s Day, 1948, he wrote a scathing attack on the policies of the King government in wartime, indicating that his views had not changed since the war. There he listed the multitudinous sins of the King government:
Government by decree; suspension of habeas corpus, the Arcand, Houde, and Chaloult incidents. The lies of [Ernest] Lapointe. The joke of moderate participation. The farce of bilingualism and French-Canadian advancement in the army. The forced “voluntary” enrolment. The Drew letter and the scandal of Hong Kong. The fraud of the plebiscite, featuring the king of the frauds, Mackenzie King, the intimidating propaganda, and the no that meant yes.
The war, he said, had brought “the end of civil liberty” in Canada, and he vigorously denounced the wartime incarceration of fascist leader Adrien Arcand. This support led Arcand to write to Trudeau’s mother praising the article and asking for Trudeau’s address.65 Probably shocked, she appears not to have replied. If some old grievances endured, others vanished, however, as Trudeau completed what he perceptively termed his “pedagogy.”
What is striking is how deliberately and systematically he sought perfection in himself. The Jesuits and the classics rightly received credit for this emphasis on excellence in all parts of his person. He was demanding of himself and, very often, too demanding of others. In terms of education, he was fully “grown up” by the third decade of his life. Whether on the steps of the ziggurat at Ur, where he hurled unending stanzas of poetry at bandits, or on the streets of Shanghai, where he shouted abusive Russian phrases to repel street thugs, or in Harold Laski’s office at LSE, where he defended his views, Trudeau demonstrated that he had an extraordinary range of knowledge. Fluently bilingual in French and English, comfortable in Spanish, understood in German, and with reading and writing knowledge of Latin and Greek, he knew the classics of Western thought in literature, economics, political science, and history. His travel writing drew on a deep understanding of historical and societal change, and his learning derived from his diligence in the classroom and in his private study. His receptive mind, with its unusually good memory, contained a deep reservoir from which he could draw as few others of his time could do.*
But to what end? In the late 1940s, Trudeau was still not clear about hi
s destiny. Rather, he was wrestling with the direction his erudition and experience would lead him in and what his future public career might be. His article in Notre Temps illustrates the contradictions that existed in his understanding of the future of Quebec. The journal was a conservative and nationalist publication, and Trudeau’s bitter attack on the wartime policies of Mackenzie King undoubtedly pleased most of its readers. At the same time, he also maintained some of his friendships from the days when he and others, enraged by the incarceration of Camillien Houde during the war and the betrayal on conscription, mused about revolution and separation. To two such friends, François and Lise Lessard, he sent a postcard on October 19, 1948, from Mesopotamia. Striking a strongly nationalist note, he wrote: “Here is a place which has known a bit more history than the island at the confluence of the Ottawa and the St. Lawrence. But what’s five thousand years; perhaps the next five thousand will belong to us. Mesopotamia, the birthplace of the human race; Laurentie, the birthplace of the new world.” He ended with a request that best wishes be sent to other nationalist friends.66 It was a strangely discordant note for one who styled himself a “citizen of the world,” but it was a reminder of how much had changed since Lessard and Trudeau had dreamed of revolution in the streets of wartime Montreal. His chords were not yet in tune.
Some friends and themes persisted, but much had changed in Pierre Trudeau during his absence from Quebec. His Notre Temps article uneasily combined a defence of the rights of fascists and nationalists with a strong defence of liberal and popular democracy, one that had rarely been heard earlier. He argued that the governors believed in government for the people but not by the people. Some might object that, in wartime, democratic rights can be suspended. “Quite the contrary,” he asserted; “if there is any law upon which the individual citizen has the right to pass judgment, it is one that would expose him to death.” What is more important in the article is evidence that he had rejected the corporatism that he had learnt at Brébeuf in favour of popular democracy. Similarly, he had rejected the formalist approach to law in favour of the emerging American positivist approach: that law must express changes within society, “for the world marching forward continuously creates new needs.”67 Among those needs in Canada was a more explicit understanding of human rights—a term that was becoming increasingly current in the postwar world.68 These rights were to be grounded in a democratic society—“no other form of government safeguards those values better”—where the dignity of the individual person was most completely fulfilled.
