Peter Gzowski. R.B. Fleming

country’s best swimmers.⁴⁴ Peter’s topic in May 1966 was golf, and in June, baseball. Now he was down on the sport. “Poor baseball!” he opined, “It’s become the cricket of the 1960s — a marvellous game to play, and an achingly boring one to watch.”⁴⁵

      Peter’s final sports column for Saturday Night, published in July 1966, was on volleyball. Two years earlier, soon after Jennie and he had purchased their Toronto Islands cottage,⁴⁶ a group of volleyball aficionados, friends, colleagues, and mostly fellow islanders had organized weekend volleyball tournaments. The court was located near the cottage of Harry and Penny Bruce. Among the players was a bank clerk who was also, according to Peter, “one of Canada’s finest and most subtle poets” (Raymond Souster). There was a literary critic (Robert Fulford) who, according to Peter, never used his wit to demean a writer of little talent; a gentle, young mother (Elizabeth Amer); and a “devilishly handsome young writer, thought of by his friends as the sweetest and most evenly dispositioned of men” (probably Liz Amer’s brother, Victor Coleman, poet and editor at one of Toronto’s small publishing houses). David Amer was also one of the players. The Amers were so good-looking that the players assumed their marriage would last forever.⁴⁷ Although Peter doesn’t describe a character who sounds like Harry Bruce, Bruce was indeed one of the regulars. Peter simply had to win. “Peter was one of those who, if the competition was good, wanted to play on till the stars shone and the ball disappeared in the face of the moon,” recalled Bruce. After a poorly played or boring game, Peter skulked off, head held down in sulking disapproval. David Crombie, who was also one of the players, remembered Peter’s zealous need to win.⁴⁸ In his article in Saturday Night, however, all that Peter recalled were “some highly enjoyable Saturday afternoons,” and fellow players “leaping around in the sunshine … arguing about what the score really was.”⁴⁹

      In April 1965, Harry Bruce promoted Peter to the position of contributing editor of Saturday Night, where he joined the likes of Nathan Cohen, Robert Fulford, Ken McNaught, and Philip Stratford. The new position allowed Peter to write occasional feature articles in addition to his sports columns. In April 1965, his first feature was called “The B and B’s Desperate Catalogue of the Obvious.” In it Peter excoriated the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, established in November 1963 by Prime Minister Lester Pearson to examine the perilous state of French-English relations in Canada. Chaired by newspaper editor André Laurendeau and university president Davidson Dunton, the commission was, according to Peter, a waste of $1.5 million dollars. The commission’s first published report, which Peter called nothing but “committee think,” informed Canadians what Peter believed they already knew — that French Canadians weren’t happy with Confederation, and that English Canadians couldn’t understand why. “The committee has laboured to design a horse,” Peter concluded, “and has brought out the rough outline of a very expensive camel.”⁵⁰

      Peter’s next feature in Saturday Night was “The Awesome Cult of the Utterly Trivial,” which began with “I wonder if everyone would mind not talking about homosexuals for a while,” for he was becoming bored with “the homosexual problem.” Every media outlet, he harrumphed, was discussing what was new with “the flits.” An American magazine had even published a glossary of homosexual slang, and, especially irritating to Peter, the good, old word gay had been co-opted by homosexuals. He poured scorn on Susan Sontag, whose “Notes on Camp,” published the year before in Partisan Review, had noted homosexual influences on camp, whose purpose, the New York writer pointed out, was to puncture middle-class artifice and pretension. “Homosexuals are in the vanguard of the fashionable, we’re constantly being told,” Peter went on, “and life for heterosexuals is just one constant struggle to keep up with what’s new with the flits.” The article was published in Saturday Night in June 1965, which was, ironically, the same issue in which Peter had boldly and admirably voiced his complaint about the Masters’ banning of African-American players. Blacks, yes. Gays, no. For years to come, well past the time when intelligent people had begun to show some modicum of respect for sexual variation, Peter’s mind remained firmly closed.