Allan Levine remembers the legendary Canadian writer and editor, and his prickly relationship with Canadian historians
Details are Unprintable: Wayne Lonergan and the Sensational Cafe Society Murder.
did not appreciate. By 1983, he had also been married three times – there would be one more, his fourth wife, Alvy Newman – which added to the sniping and whispers about him among Canada’s allegedly beleaguered scribes, who lived in fear of Peter’s red pencil markings on their copy. For Peter, however, the HBC was at its core an adventure story of explorers, traders and wealthy aristocrats. It was a natural subject for him to pursue after his two sensational-selling volumes of his Canadian Establishment series . As he had done with political writing withFrom my home in Winnipeg, I had read in Maclean’s about Peter’s plan to tackle the HBC story. It intrigued me. At the time, I was completing my PhD in Canadian history at the University of Toronto.
As fate would have it, I had to be in Toronto for other work in June, and that’s how I found myself on Peter’s couch in sweltering heat. He finally descended from the second floor and we spoke briefly about what researching the HBC archives for him would entail. He was friendly, yet all business. We agreed that I would prepare some research on a few topics for him and then we would see what would be.
Some weeks later, Peter was in Winnipeg. We agreed to meet. I brought the memo with me. His hotel room had a living room and a bedroom. He took the research memo and retired to the bedroom to examine it. I waited nervously for him to pronounce the verdict. Fifteen or 20 long minutes later, he emerged with a hint of a smile. “Excellent,” he said. To paraphrase John Lennon after the Beatles’ famous rooftop performance, I had passed the audition.
Peter did generate a lot of hostility among academic historians, and never more so than after the 1985 publication of the first volume of the HBC trilogy,. In a harsh assessment in the Canadian Historical Review that was typical, W.J. Eccles, a curmudgeon who taught at the University of Toronto and was an expert on French Canada, deemed the book “thoroughly bad” – a judgment held then and later by many, though not all, Canadian specialists.
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