The poems of William Henry Drummond, whose main characters were caricatured habitants speaking in fractured English, were on the curriculum at Galt Collegiate. In his memoirs, Peter claims that when he was in grade nine, Drummond spoke to a school assembly and read some of his poetry, which the adult Gzowski disparaged as “racist doggerel.”63 Since Drummond died in 1907, whoever it was who came to Galt Collegiate that day in 1947, it wasn’t Drummond. At Galt Collegiate, Peter studied French, but like most Anglo-Canadians of his generation, and too many succeeding generations, he soon discovered that writing and reading a language didn’t prepare him for the spoken version.
Peter’s earliest extant piece of writing appeared in the 1948–49 edition of the Galt Collegiate Institute yearbook. In grade ten, he was a member of the junior basketball team. “When Kitchener came here unbeaten,” reported Peter Brown, who stands in the front row of the accompanying photograph,
[T]he juniors held them to a 28–26 game. Galt was beaten only when Kitchener scored with nine seconds remaining. In the season’s finale, Guelph came to Galt. In one of the most thrilling games seen here in a long time, Galt came from behind to almost tie the score but did not have quite the remaining drive to overcome a one-point lead. The score 22–21. The final analysis showed Bob Hoffman high scorer with 35 points, followed by Peter Brown with 26, and Jim Chaplin with 16. Jim Chaplin, a newcomer to the school, proved himself both an able captain and an excellent pivot man. Peter Brown — 10B.64
Puberty wasn’t kind to the beautiful, olive-complexioned lad. Around the time of his short article, Peter developed bad acne, not only on his face but also on his back. The sores sometimes festered, and his nickname at Galt Collegiate was “Pus.” Just when his hormones were beginning to rage, he became unattractive to females, especially at the beach. In his memoirs, he hints that he had sex for the first time in a barn somewhere near Park Avenue. Toward the end of his life he provided details. “The apple-cheeked daughter of a farm family on the edge of town” pinned Peter “to the barnyard sod and brought a hitherto unknown — well, unknown in someone else’s company — feeling” to his loins.65 There may have been few such encounters, and even that one sounds more like a scene from a short story.
Perhaps because of the acne, or maybe because he was a normal teenager, he began to rebel. In the fashion of post-war teenagers, he took to slicking down his hair with Brylcreem, possibly in emulation of Marlon Brando’s anti-establishment characters, whom he probably observed during “wild nights,” his phrase in an article in Canadian Living, at the local drive-in theatre. He also took to smoking clandestinely, though he didn’t fool his mother. When she confronted him, he confessed. She pulled out her Winchesters, offered him one, and warned him not to smoke so slyly. At age fifteen it was, and is, not uncommon for a teenager to question standards and patterns and to challenge parents, teachers, and anyone else who upholds those standards.
Although Peter claimed in his memoirs that he was an abysmal failure at Galt Collegiate,66 a decade after the publication of those memoirs he painted a more optimistic picture. In 1998 he was interviewed by a staff member of Professionally Speaking, the magazine of the Ontario College of Teachers. In “Peter Gzowski’s Remarkable Teachers,” Peter recalled two remarkable English teachers. Helen Rudick “had a naughty turn of mind,” Peter told the interviewer from Professionally Speaking. She loved to embarrass the boys in her classes with double entendres. The other remarkable teacher at Galt Collegiate, Peter added, was “a wonderful man named Frank Ferguson.... He so obviously loved the works he taught, that you would put your own natural aversion to Shakespeare aside and say, ‘If he can get this enthusiastic it must be something.’”67
When Ferguson first heard Peter’s voice on radio in the late 1960s, he wrote several of what Peter called “wonderful, erudite, funny, and occasionally scolding, hand-written letters done in fountain pen on small white stationery ...” In 1984, Ferguson told Cambridge’s Daily Reporter that Peter had been an “an excellent debater” who always enlivened a dull discussion.68 Ferguson was still alive in December 1989 when Peter was in Cambridge to sign copies of his latest Morningside Papers. At that time Ferguson told a reporter with the Cambridge Times that Peter had been “one of the most interesting students,” full of ideas and arguments, and “bent on keeping things stirred up. He was outgoing, bright and friendly, interested in sports, interested in politics, interested in darn-near everything.”69
Too often Peter suppressed happy memories. He even admitted as much concerning his period in Galt. “Under the scar tissue of the memories I’ve tried to shut out are happy times,” he wrote near the end of his life.70 Throughout his life, happiness was often snuffed out by unhappy memories, as if he preferred it that way.
Ernest Hemingway once told John Dos Passos that an unhappy childhood was often a precursor to a writing career. In the preface to The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant, Gallant notes that the impulse to write, and the stubbornness to keep going, may be due to “some drastic shaking up, early in life.” In Peter’s early life, there was much shaking up, real and imaginary. To the normal insecurities of childhood were added unstable adult relationships, shifting domestic arrangements, adjustments from big city to small town, and the curse of acne: in other words, the very sort of instability that, according to Gallant, “unbolts the door between perception and imagination and leaves it ajar for life.” Childhood flux, Gallant adds, often fuses “memory and language and waking dreams.”
The novelist John Le Carré explains creativity in a slightly different manner. Le Carré’s father was, like Harold Gzowski, charismatic and unreliable. “If you’ve been brought up in that anarchic situation by a maverick dad,” LeCarré once mused, “as a boy it deprives you of your self-pride, it makes you conspire in your mind about getting even with society.” LeCarré chose to get even by using his imagination.71 So did Peter, it would seem.
In August 1968, in his hurried, almost illegible, handwriting, Peter quoted the novelist Jean Rhys: “If you want to write the truth, you must write about yourself.” To underscore the absolute necessity of being true to oneself, he underlined must.72 Two decades later, in his memoirs, he argued that “the only honest writing anyone can do is about himself.” If the child is father of the man, then it was almost inevitable that the man who grew out of that highly imaginative childhood in Galt would be creative, curious, and constantly in need of encouragement from friends, colleagues, and lovers as well as from brandy, Scotch, and Winchester cigarettes.
— 2 — “Don’t Try to Be Something That You’re Not,” 1950–1956
Though acne neither kills nor cripples, it can leave mental and physical scars for life.
— Maclean’s, June 17, 1961
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