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Reviews / Comptes Rendus
| J.E. Hodgetts, The Sound of One Voice: Eugene Forsey and His Letters to the Press (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000) |
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I HAVE OFTEN WONDERED if Eugene Forsey ever slept. I picture him, late into the night, typing yet one more letter to a friend, a colleague, a prime minister, or an editor. As vast as it is rich, his personal and public correspondence covers a remarkable variety of topics with an even more remarkable intelligence. He once opened a letter to Donald Creighton with an apology for not having more time to write a proper note but then proceeded to write a four-page treatise. When a publisher suggested that he compile his letters to the press, Forsey responded that he would rather be sentenced to penal servitude. "I couldn't do this job if I lived to be two hundred." (vii) This cautionary tale did not reach J.E. Hodgetts until he was well into precisely that project; if it had, he confesses, he might never have attempted to collect and edit Forsey's letters to the press. Fortunately he did, and the end result is a fun-to-read collection of letters, missives, and epistles. |
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In his memoirs, A Life on the Fringe, Forsey recalls that when he first began to write letters to the newspapers as a McGill undergraduate in the 1930s, both his family and his friends were mortified: "Everybody knows that people who write letters to the papers are crazy!" they told him, "but I persisted." And over the course of the next 6 decades, he would publish something like 800 letters to the editor. But even this, Hodgetts reckons, is a conservative estimate. No one really knows how many letters he wrote. Nor does anyone really know what drove him to fire off letter after letter. Hodgetts speculates that a deep and abiding commitment to participatory democracy and a profound sense of obligation and service compelled Forsey to enter the fray on matters both trivial (the misuse of the apostrophe, for example) and weighty (the Meech Lake Accord consumed Forsey "even as it threatened to overwhelm his frail physique." [16]) Of course, none of this explains Forsey's success: it is one thing to write a letter and quite another to have it printed almost as a matter of course. But Forsey had a unique mind that combined a steel trap — his encyclopedic ability to recall facts and details and quotations was uncanny — with a lively and never mean-spirited sense of humour. Anticipating a correction, journalists opened his letters with caution. "I received your letter yesterday," confessed John Fraser in 1985, "and you will appreciate that I had to wait a full 15 minutes before I could summon up the courage to open it." (34) |
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Although Forsey wrote letters to nearly every major newspaper in the country, his preferred target was the Globe and Mail. According to Hodgetts's best count, it received 375 letters. And although Forsey's interest ranged widely and changed over time, his constitutional expertise inevitably brought him back to the prerogatives of the governor general, the future of the Senate, the role of the judiciary, and the place of Québec in Canada. Hodgetts's decision to arrange Forsey's letters thematically is defensible but ultimately disappointing. If you want Forsey's opinion on the past tense of the verb "to fit," then it is easily enough found in the chapter dealing with his ongoing defence of the English language. But at the end of the day, after reading letters arranged by theme, you do not get a sense of change over time. And that's too bad. Because an understanding of change over time is necessary to a deeper and fuller understanding of Forsey and of the country. For example, Forsey started out a socialist and ended up a Liberal senator, for his part, Frank Underhill founded the League for Social Reconstruction in the 1930s and went on to become Curator of Laurier House in the 1950s. Reading Forsey's letters chronologically might have cast light on what was really part of a larger pattern among members of the Canadian left: their tendency to migrate to the centre over time. Moreover, Hodgett's running commentary throughout the letters provides useful context but it also distracts. At times I wanted less Hodgetts and more Forsey. |
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Still, the letters themselves are wonderful. In them Forsey comes alive, ready to do battle with those who would harm the things he loved. At times he is a genial crank, defending in 1976 the British imperial system against the introduction of the much superior metric system. |
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The foreigners have taken over!
They've leapt across the Straits of Dover
And robbed us of our simple pleasures,
Our good old English weights and measures. (102) | |
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At other time he is deadly serious, fully prepared to "vanquish and overcome all his enemies." For example, he consistently and relentlessly attacked the two nation thesis and its various incarnations, including sovereignty-association, special status, associate state, and distinct society. In one 1967 letter to the Globe, Forsey unleashed his pen: |
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Unless we can get into our fat "English" heads an understanding of the fatal ambiguity of the unqualified phrase "deux nations," and the ease with which a skilled performer can use it to mean, at his convenience, either cultural or sociological "nations" like Scotland, Wales, England, French Canada (and perhaps Brittany?); or political nations like the United Kingdom, France and Canada, we shall be sitting ducks for every separatist, or hemi-demi-semi separatist, in the country. (185) | |
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He was right. |
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But he was not perfect. As a CCF candidate in the 1940s, Forsey supported the abolition of the Senate. He later changed his mind and accepted an appointment from Trudeau. As he told the Globe in 1977, the Senate is essential to provincial representation in Ottawa. "It took me a disgracefully long time to realize this." (135) He should have stuck to his CCF guns. As honest and hard-working as he may have been, the institution itself is the longest running joke in Canadian history and every Senator the punch line. Home to rejects, retreads, and has-beens it is a house of ill-repute and, when all is said and done, an embarrassment to the very democracy that Forsey valued. |
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The Sound of One Voice marks only the beginning. There will be more collections of Forseyana because, as I said earlier, I do not think the man ever slept. |
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Donald Wright
Brock University
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