Peter liked Montreal immensely, he told Mordecai Richler, but was getting tired of saying so. While he didn’t like Montreal smoked meat, Peter informed Richler that he was fond of chopped liver and fresh bread, as well as Quebec’s gallon jugs of wine, which helped him, he joked, “to stay drunk all the time.” Peter may even deserve some of the credit (or blame) for Richler’s articles and books critical of Quebec nationalism. While it was Richler’s idea to write something trenchant about Quebec, it was Peter who encouraged the idea. “Whyinhell,” he wrote to Richler on December 15, 1961, “don’t you write a piece called Why I don’t like French Canadians?”
During his year in Montreal, Peter revelled in the freedoms of the lively, cosmopolitan city. Since the Montreal International Film Festival, founded in 1960, wasn’t allowed to cut films, according to agreements with the films’ international directors, the festival helped to change censorship laws in the province. One night, at 1:00 a.m., Peter was able to view an uncut version of François Truffaut’s Jules et Jim. The city’s bar scene was vibrant, too. One weekend Cathy Perkins, on assignment with Chatelaine, joined Peter for dinner, after which they drifted into a bar where the great rock-and-roller Bo Diddley was performing. With the filmmaker Donald Brittain, Peter attended horse races at Blue Bonnets Raceway.26 While Peter explored, observed, and wrote, Jennie was at home tending to three preschool children: three-year-old Peter C.; two-year-old Alison; and Maria, born in August 1961.
A tender moment shared by Peter and his daughter, Alison, in 1964 as captured by photographer Lutz Dille.
(Courtesy National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa)
Like most of his articles published in Maclean’s, the score or more articles written while Peter was Quebec editor are as relevant today as they were when he first wrote them. They are among the best portraits in English about the province/pays/nation during its Quiet Revolution. Peter’s only challenger for the title of best anglophone eye on the rising Quebec was Scott Symons, who had already written extensively in French in La Presse about the post-Duplessis political and cultural revolution he had witnessed between the autumn of 1960 and the summer of 1961. 27
Having gained that insight into Quebec, Peter considered writing a book about the province. He signed a contract, and once back in Toronto, carried out more research. The book was never published, and probably never written beyond an introduction. A good thing, too, for it is his Maclean’s articles, so lyrical, so insightful and sensitive, that have stood the test of time.28
— 5 — “You’re Taking Too Much Goddamn Time,” 1 1962–1964
Journalists become ordinary when they decide that the job isn’t hard....
All his life, [Peter] had the courage, and the wisdom, to be scared.
— Robert Fulford in Edna Barker, ed., Remembering Peter Gzowski: A Book of Tributes
So successful was Peter as the Quebec editor that upon his return to Toronto the magazine’s editor, Ken Lefolii, who had replaced Blair Fraser in July 1962, appointed Peter managing editor. At twenty-eight he was the youngest person to reach that important position. According to Harry Bruce, he was often brutal and sarcastic. When the magazine’s journalists sat around a long table trading story ideas, the red-rimmed eyes of the managing editor remained expressionless. As more and more ideas were thrown out for discussion, Peter would silently push his hand through “his lank hair” and look sideways. A “shadow of distaste would cross his pock-marked face.” Nevertheless, like most journalists who ever worked for Peter, Bruce deemed the new managing editor the best he ever knew, for he created a “yeasty office spirit” that brought out the best in writers.2
One of Peter’s tasks was to solicit articles. On December 16, 1962, he wrote a newsy letter to Mordecai Richler. Peter wanted to hire Richler to do a regular television column for Maclean’s, perhaps at $150 per piece, with a guarantee of twenty columns per year. Maclean’s managing editor also thought he would be able to buy several of Richler’s feature articles. Richler talked to Peter about going to Warsaw to do a story, and Peter encouraged him, for in that city lived several members of the Canadian Communist Party, including Fred Rose. The article might also deal with the intellectual and artistic life in Warsaw, Peter suggested, and he urged Richler to “come down pretty hard” on it. Too much of Canada’s writing, Peter added, was the product of three men: Hugh MacLennan, Bruce Hutchison, and Pierre Berton. Canadian letters needed Richler’s hard-hitting style. Meantime, he confessed to Richler that, after only a month back in Toronto, the city was getting him down. He would much prefer the Laurentian Mountains or anywhere else where he could write what he wanted to write and not have to spend his day purchasing pencils and “goosing the secretaries” at Maclean’s.3
Richler was considering a move to Toronto. Finding a suitable home might be a problem, Peter warned, especially in downtown Toronto, though he and Jennie had managed to rent a three-storey house at 16 Washington Avenue, a short street running between Spadina Avenue and Huron Street, one block south of Bloor. All twenty-one houses on the street were owned by a man described by Peter as “one old kook” who was using several of them for storage. Once the “kook” discovered that Peter was a member of an old Toronto family (Peter must have told him!), and that he could afford to pay $175 per month for rent, he cleared out number 16.4 Unfortunately for Jennie, the “son of a bitch” (Peter’s phrase) failed to keep his promise to fix up the house, and Jennie had to scrape off old wallpaper. The “unhandiest man in town,” as Peter described himself to Richler, was free to explore the area, which included the rooftop bar at the Park Plaza. He concluded his letter to Richler by announcing that it was time to go home. To help Jennie mind the children? No, to watch a football game. He sounds selfish, but Peter wasn’t untypical of husbands, fathers, and bosses of the period.
Peter’s year in Montreal had left a lasting impression. Although he was back in Toronto, his mind and heart remained in Canada’s only cosmopolitan city at that time. His first feature article after his return was called “How I Nearly Learned to Ski in a Week,” published in December 1962. The article reported on his attempt to learn to ski at Mont Tremblant. The first time that Peter fell, his sunglasses and, even worse, his cigarettes went skittering down the slope. Nevertheless, his powers of observation were keen. Young women wore stretch pants so tight that “if the girl has a dime in her hip pocket, you could tell if it was heads or tails.” The French translation of the article, “Comment j’ai failli apprendre à faire du ski,” appeared in Le Magazine Maclean in January 1963.
On April 6, 1963, Maclean’s published Peter’s “Young Canadiens Speak Their Mind.” To research the article, Peter had returned to Montreal where he observed a panel discussion chaired by Gérard Pelletier. Ranging in age from mid-twenties to mid-thirties, the panellists were all federalists who demanded changes in the Canadian political system. Businssman Robert Demers predicted that French would soon become the language of business in Quebec. On English Canadians, journalist Jean David announced that he would be “bored to death to be an English Canadian.” Madeleine Gobeil, a close friend of Pierre Trudeau, asserted that les Anglais were really not “good conversationalists.”
In “Conversations with Quebec’s Revolutionaries,” an examination of the province’s youthful and angry nationalists and separatists (Maclean’s, September 7, 1963), Peter expressed surprise at the increased intensity of Quebec nationalism. Men such as Jean Lesage, Gérard Pelletier, René Lévesque, Léon Dion, and André Laurendeau, who had unleashed the Quiet Revolution only a few years earlier, were losing control. “It is now an inescapable fact,” Peter wrote, “that we are headed toward separation into two countries.” Accompanying the article