MEMORIES OF FRANK HOWARD
The last time I saw Frank was over breakfast at the Elgin Street Diner. It had been quite a while. Living then in Toronto, I was only an occasional visitor to Ottawa. But he was the same old Frank I had always known, ablaze with righteous indignation over the ruination of everything we had ever held dear in public life and newspapering.
I had turned aside by then onto quieter paths, my own small fire reduced to a flicker, and so we drifted apart.
It was not the first time we had done so. Our footloose ways had always been a factor. From the mid-60s until the mid-90s, we saw a lot of each other when our jobs brought us close but little if any between times. It never seemed at all hard picking up where we’d left off.
I’m sorry now, of course, that we weren’t in touch in the closing years of his life. What a fine afternoon we might have spent together just weeks ago, when our mutual friend Boris Celovsky died. How we might have shaken our heads between laughs, straining to believe our recollections of all the improbable adventures and misadventures, great and small, we shared with Boris ’way back when.
Boris was with us the winter’s day we trekked though deep snow to the cottage, packing giant sausages that we boiled up in melted snow and ate in giant buns. Jennifer, then aged 10 or 12, was with us and so was the family dog . . . Comet by name? Boris discovered that Comet had an acquaintance of sorts with terms like “heel” and “stay.” Tail wagging at the double, head cocked, wearing as perplexed an expression as the bone structure of a dog’s face allows, Comet clearly recognized these as words of deep meaning. Equally clearly, she had no idea what that meaning might be. When we all went onto the frozen lake for a stroll after lunch, Boris, with his restless energy, set out to get Comet back up to speed
“Never a dull moment with Boris,” I remarked to Frank as we walked apart while Jennifer played nearby in the snow.
“Never a quiet moment,” said Frank.
It wasn’t the first time he had found occasion to correct me. John Gray has written about Frank’s life’s works in journalism, first to help francophone and anglophone Canadians know each other better – hoping perhaps that tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner – then to make all of us all more attentive to the part that bureaucrats and bureaucracy play in government.
But Frank had at least one other life’s work. It was to complete the education I abandoned when I became a reporter at age 17. Can it really have been mere chance that the Globe posted Frank to the press gallery in Quebec City so soon after I joined the Montreal Gazette bureau there? I can’t shake the belief that a kindly Providence had a hand in the Globe’s decision, for it gave me the chance to sign up at the University of Frank.
At a succession of small newspapers in the previous five years, I had learned much about the likes of snow removal and zoning bylaws. But I was sadly ill-prepared for big-picture reporting at the provincial and national level. Frank detected, one after another, the gaps and outright deformities in my understanding and he was quick, sometimes in tones just a hair short of exasperation, to explain what he thought should be obvious to any dimwit.
It was these occasions that so often led this particular dimwit to the “Lit and His” (Literary and Historical Society of Quebec library) on rue Stanislas or to the English-language bookstore that still clung to life on the rue St. Jean, eager for supplementary reading to be absorbed in utmost secrecy so that next time I could enter the conversation with a more plausible semblance of knowing a thing or two. Though much un-read of late, a dog-eared copy of Wheare’s Federal Government is with me still, a reminder of the time Frank set me straight on the principles of federalism. Henri Pirenne’s Medieval Cities and Crane Brinton’s Anatomy of Revolution were assigned reading.
It may be that the beard I’ve sported since the summer after I met Frank is also a legacy of his influence. At the time, my rationale for the beard would have been a hope of looking older. But my bureau chief, who seemed to regard Frank as a rival for pre-eminence in Anglo-Quebec reporting on the Quebec scene, very poorly disguised his suspicion that I grew it in emulation of the bearded Frank. In retrospect, I can’t honestly say he was wrong.
As the years passed, our conversations took place on a more equal footing, always remembering that Frank’s intellect was more equal than mine, and sometimes we had to agree to disagree.
Politics and the bureaucracy were, of course, bottomless pits of subject matter. We both had experience in both spheres to draw on besides the ever-changing scene unfolding around us. But the educational content always remained high. We commonly read the same books, sometimes two or more on a single theme over a period of weeks. I remember especially a long bout with paleoanthropology when we exhausted the popular literature of the day and dipped our toes in a little of the less formidable scientific press. If I remember nothing else in my dotage, I will surely remember how to distinguish the jaw of an ape from that of our own kind (on paper, at least . . . we never got hold of any actual jaws), and I don’t doubt that Frank cherished this special knowledge to the end.
Paul Johnson’s History of Christianity set off another one of our “seminars.” Frank was interested in religion though he had little patience with its claims. His faith was in science. It was from him I first heard the idea that by the times science had made this planet uninhabitable, science would have found the means of colonizing others. I like to think I took him aback with the observation that room might be found on the getaway rocket only for a self-appointed elite. If so, it served him right . . . he’d always encouraged me in critical thinking.
Apart from righteous indignation, grim determination was one of Frank’s characteristic stances. It was never better shown than the day when, fighting a mind-numbing cold in the head, he followed de Gaulle’s progress along the Chemin du Roi from Quebec City to Montreal in 1967. Driving the faithful “Bug” while I flew ahead to be on hand for the speech at City Hall, Frank had ample opportunity to observe the stage management behind the acclaim that greeted the General at every stop. No doubt there has always been a measure of stage management in politics and it now seems to be accepted as la bonne guerre, but in those innocent times it was still regarded as a bit of a dirty secret. Needless to say, Frank was outraged. It didn’t help that the perpetrators were people he considered closet separatists. It was some satisfaction when they let him know afterwards that they didn’t think it was very nice of him to share their secrets with readers of the Globe.
The de Gaulle visit was only one of many stories that Frank and I double-teamed as colleagues at the Globe and the Citizen. The first would have been the burial of Georges Vanier at the Quebec Citadel early in 1967. The last was the night of the 1980 Quebec referendum . . . the next day’s line story in The Citizen was a Howard-Seale collaboration.
In between came the death and funeral of Daniel Johnson. Frank did not like Daniel one little bit and the first reports of his death launched Frank on a writing marathon. The implications for constitutional negotiations, for Quebec’s political landscape, for its drive towards an independent role in foreign affairs, for the Union Nationale and its leading lights . . .on and on. Frank’s typewriter must have grown hot to the touch as he banged out copy right up to the last deadline, in the wee hours of the next morning.
His editors were astounded, not only by the quality of his work but by its sheer volume. “He can’t keep it up at this pace,” they said – “send Seale down from Ottawa to lend him a hand.” But by the time I got to Quebec City there was nothing left to do. Frank had completely exhausted the subject in a day. The Star and the Telegram also sent in extra bodies, and they were still catching up to Frank days later while he rested up and I loafed.
The Star did steal a march on us during one of the constitutional conferences. I don’t remember the exact terms of the Star story, but it was something like “Daniel Johnson’s four-step plan to gain associate state status for Quebec.” It was a speculative piece that might have been equally at home on the op-ed page, but the Star gave it the full treatment on the line, leaving us looking a little flat-footed. “What we have to do now,” said Frank through gritted teeth – “What we have to do now is think of the thing so obvious that no one’s written it yet.”
At this conference or another, the day’s task Frank set for the two of us was to chat up all our contacts to get a handle on the federal proposal, which was being kept under the tightest of tight wraps. At the end of the day we found that, taken together, the hints we’d gathered added up to a reasonably full and coherent package. And so, throwing caution to the winds, we wrote it the way we saw it and the Globe ran it on the line. Next morning, it was our story that was the talk of the town – well, the talk of the media corps at least. I think that may have been the occasion when Pierre Trudeau, mobbed by reporters as he entered the conference room, deflected questions about the federal position by advising us all to “go home and have a bath.”
Leanings to righteous indignation and grim determination notwithstanding, Frank could also be funny, not in a thigh-slapper way but with a dry, penetrating wit. He once described an up-tight bureaucrat as the sort whose shoelaces were always neatly pressed. When someone or other failed to take the disagreeable course that reason seemed to dictate, Frank speculated that the argument for this course was flawed by the fallacy of the unwelcome conclusion.
This has been slow in the writing; time grows short before I must get on then road. I must not close without adding an “amen” to the observation in other tributes that Frank was the most loyal of friends. More than once he gave me a hand up in the most practical way. It was through him that I went to the Globe and later, when, in a second round at the Gazette, I quit in the proverbial huff with no alternate employment in prospect (it’s only fair to say that the Gazette was as huffed with me at that time as I was with them), Frank had me working at the Citizen in no time.
But more than anything he was among my best teachers. What he succeeded in teaching me will live as long as I do.
Lewis Seale
March 5, 2008
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