A.B. McKillop’s decision to write a biography of Pierre Berton took some nerve. Berton is, after all, a Canadian icon. Indeed, Charles Templeton in 1979 called him “Mr. Canada.” To tell Berton’s life runs the risk of either giving excessive praise or deflating a source of national pride.
There is also such a thing as too much material. Berton published hundreds of newspaper columns and more than forty books ranging from Cats I have Known and Loved through The National Dream. His life revolved around publishers and writers, all of whom loved to keep every piece of correspondence they wrote or received. He was on television for years and many of the programs were preserved.
Most of all, though, McKillop required some nerve because he is an academic historian writing about a figure who challenged academics about the purpose of history and the necessity of readability. The author must have been conscious of the tension between academic analysis and the importance of a good narrative. Fortunately, McKillop succeeds superbly in this daunting task. Pierre Berton: A Biography is thorough, analytical, and yet a tremendously enjoyable book to read. It should become a benchmark for future Canadian biography.
Throughout his life, Pierre Berton seemed to move at a higher than normal speed. After completing a degree at the University of British Columbia, he worked for two Vancouver newspapers, served in World War II, was hired away to Toronto by Maclean’s, and then from Maclean’s to the Toronto Star, was a war correspondent in Korea, served as a panellist on Front Page Challenge for decades, had his own television shows, won two Governor General’s Awards in his thirties, and published more than forty books!
Berton was Canada’s best-selling author through the last half of the twentieth century, and the mainstays of his success were the unlikely area of non-fiction publishing and the even more unlikely subject, in many minds, of Canadian history. Along the way, he and his wife Janet raised an ever-growing brood of children.
As McKillop takes us through this fascinating life he ably conveys the complexity and contradictions that make up his subject. Berton was born in 1920 in the Yukon to a father who was a failed gold prospector and a mother who had a dash of Victorian snobbishness in her. Both parents were highly intelligent, but less than successful on their own terms. His northern childhood and the contradictions in his parents’ lives were instrumental in shaping Berton’s complex mixture of impudence, insecurity, and drive.
In his younger years he had difficulty fitting in socially. He tended toward brashness and was insistent on being the centre of attention. This “arrogance,” as many saw it, could have been a fatal flaw, but was countered by his obvious brilliance, wit, and hard work. His insecurities also drove him to succeed. From the time he first wrote columns for the UBC newspaper through to his final years, Pierre Berton always seemed to be working, always looking to the next project.
As his career developed from successful journalist to author and television personality, Berton’s complex character continued to shape his life. On the one side, there is no doubt that the drive toward success and fame was calculated. As McKillop well demonstrates, Berton was aware very early of the potential of “the Berton brand.” One anecdote sums this up well. In 1952, soon after the CBC began television broadcasting, Berton appeared on a panel. He disliked the experience and resolved never to go on TV again. The next day, however, a taxi driver recognized him from the broadcast. Berton instantly absorbed the lesson. Television, he said, “was the greatest marketing tool yet devised.” Over the next decades he would use it to maximum effect.
Yet Berton was also a man with genuine principles. There is no doubt that he loved the North and loved Canada. He was also a strong crusader for the underdog, especially in his Toronto Star years.
Perhaps the best way to view his career is to see its aspects as symbiotic. His commitment to Canada and to the underdog reinforced the Berton brand, while that brand gave power to the causes he supported. McKillop captures all of this in his definitive biography of the man who is so strongly identified with all things Canadian.
— Doug Owram (Read bio)
Doug Owram is a professor of history at UBC Okanagan, a member of the Royal Society of Canada, and author or editor of nine books on various aspects of Canadian history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.