at it; the moral dimension eluded them. Charles gradually withdrew from journalism to write seriously about the war and later, by extension, about 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 and the snootily superior brand of Canadian nationalism derived partly, and somewhat paradoxically, from the ideas of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, the 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 twentieth 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 his closely related book Six Journeys: A Canadian Pattern (1977) were the result. Both are widely beloved for the grace and good humour of their prose.
Radical Tories is a series of linked essays — appreciations really — of Donald Creighton, W.L. Morton, Al Purdy, Eugene Forsey, Robert Stanfield and David Crombie. Note that only Creighton was a proudly bigoted person, with his lifelong aversion to the Québécois. And note that most of them are historians, as was, in his heart, Al Purdy, whose work probably has never had a finer, more understanding or more stylish piece written about it. Charles called him “a folk tory,” using the lower-case T to make clear that he’s not talking here about the old Progressive Conservative Party, but rather a turn of mind.
What distinguishes Radical Tories is first of all its felicitous writing (for example, 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 outdatedness 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.”
Why do I go into all this now? Because I wished to honour his memory somehow now that I was in Saigon. He was fourteen 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 the 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 two hundred 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 and run 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 lift rather than simply people from Agence-France Press, 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. Billeting there also put him closer to the scene of the dark comedy. Every day at the Rex bar an American “diplomat” named Barry Zorthian, standing next to an army captain, would unveil the latest “body count” figures. These proved with mathematical certainty (thanks to the help of a giant Univac computer somewhere) that the United States was winning the war. The daily numbers were so obviously spurious that the reporters ran a pool: the person whose number came closest to Zorthian’s wild projection won the jackpot. These briefings were known contemptuously as the “Five O’clock Follies.”
Charles and I spent a good deal of time together when we were both living in Toronto.
“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.
So now that 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 — was pure unadulterated 1965, neither retro nor preserved, but simply unaltered and unalterable. Staying there was like sleeping in Jackie Kennedy’s rec room. I made repeated pilgrimages to the rooftop bar where over dinner with M I’d look out over the quiet city and propose toasts to Charles’s memory.
— GONGS AND OTHER REMNANTS —
The first time I ever set foot in Saigon (many residents still don’t call it Ho Chi Minh City), I was astonished to discover that I already knew my way around much of the city centre. How could that be? Was I experiencing déjà vu? No, it was simply that, like so many others of my generation, I once had been so deeply involved in the movement protesting the American War that my imagination had taken on some strange geographical understanding of the place that my contemporaries and I constantly read, wrote, talked, agonized, and obsessed about and just as often despaired of.
There, in Nguyen Hué Street, District 1, across the way from the Rex and right where I knew to expect it, was the former South Vietnam government’s National Assembly. The French had built it as the Opera House, and these days it’s known as the Municipal Theatre (where I was tempted to see a Saigon production of Miss Saigon). Next door: the Continental Hotel where much of Graham Greene’s novel The Quiet American is set. And so on. Greene knew the Continental as being in the rue Catinat. During the American War the street became Tu Do — Freedom Street. After the war, it was changed again, to Dong Khoi — Uprising Street. In fact, it sometimes seems that most place-names in Vietnam have changed at least twice in my lifetime.
For the city and the country are made up of people who have moved on. I don’t mean those who were too young to have known the war if indeed they were even alive. I don’t mean only those who were adults during the war, with all its death, destruction, and hardship. I mean rather that the nation as a whole had shoved the entire period behind because that’s what one does if one is Vietnamese. Through my subsequent stays there, I have come to admire their resilience. It is the kind of resilience that cannot be separated from patience and perseverance, though these qualities are mixed with anger.
An obvious symbol of this cocktail of stubborn virtues is the country’s great military hero, General Vo Nguyen Giap, the hero of Dien Bien Phu, who, at the time of this writing, is still alive, age ninety-nine. His staggering victory was the dramatic conclusion to decades’ worth of ambushes, bombings, skirmishes, harassments, and guerrilla actions. When, following the French withdrawal, the Americans decided to step in themselves and take on the self-commissioned task of defeating communism, the result was years of war between the northern Vietnamese on the one hand and southern Vietnamese, Americans, Australians, and New Zealanders on the other. The fight may have
