Here Be Dragons : Telling Tales of People, Passion and Power

by NEWMAN, PETER C.

• ISBN13: 9780771067921
• ISBN10: 0771067925
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-11-09
• Publisher: Douglas Gibson Books

Summary

Now aged 75, Peter C. Newman at last tells the story of his stranger-than-fiction life. Try to keep up as we follow his many lives: as a pampered child in a Czech chateau; a Jewish kid in short pants being machine-gunned by Nazi fighter planes on the beach at Biarritz, en route to the last ship to escape from France in 1940; as a refugee on an Ontario farm; as an outsider on a scholarship at Upper Canada College; as aFinancial Postjournalist, then an author whoseRenegade in Powermade Canadian politics dramatic and disrespectfully exciting for the first time; as the man who revealed the secrets of the rulers of the Canadian business world inThe Canadian Establishment, and other huge business success stories, includingThe Establishment Man, on Conrad Black; or the millionaire who turned his back on business books and tackled Canadian history (Company of Adventurersand other triumphs), in a career where his work has dominated the bestseller lists in politics, business, history, and current affairs. In the midst of all this were his years at theToronto StarandMaclean'swhere, as editor, he took the magazine weekly a huge accomplishment. He is still a legend there, where his columns continue to run. He knew and wrote about every prime minister from Louis St. Laurent to Paul Martin and every prominent Canadian hero or villain in between. Yet his most interesting character is Peter C. Newman. Incredibly, this central figure known to millions of Canadians sees himself as a perennial outsider. In personal terms, the rich little Czech boy whose nannies never stayed talks frankly about his marriages and the women he has known before his ultimate marriage to his beloved Alvy. His enthusiasms from jazz to the Canadian Navy, not to mention his adventures on his beloved sailboat make for a rich portrait of an astonishingcharacter, one who never stops being controversial.

Excerpts

Here Be Dragons explains how I used my life, and what kind of man I am. Mine has been a solitary journey. My only constant companions were the sea, my music, and the blue iguana masquerading as my inner child. And I feel genuinely humbled by the numerous benefactors who threw me lifelines along the way. Their generosity, not always intended, created an immense debt that this book will in part repay.

The unexamined life is not worth living, as Socrates concluded, but the examined existence becomes real only when shared with others, in my case through the highly subjective act of writing. One problem is that while most biographers know too little, all autobiographers know too much. I have weeded out discussions of most of the issues, political and economic, that provided the context for my labours, since I covered that swampy territory in my books.

At the same time, I have attempted to write not just with my brain but also with my heart and my gut. I wanted to capture the fury and fear I felt when, as a little boy, I watched the Nazis invading Prague on the Ides of March, 1939. I wanted to recall the strangely comforting aroma of my mucker’s wetsuit and sweaty rubber boots at the end of the night shift as a teenage underground gold miner in northern Quebec. I wanted to recreate the pervasive odour of diesel oil aboard a Royal Canadian Navy warship at sea. I wanted to portray the palpable, acrid smell of raw fear as half a dozen political leaders I came to know faced their inevitable defeat by angry voters. I wanted also to catch the ocean’s salty aroma riding the shimmering waves of the Pacific under the glint of the crescent moon.

My previous books were fuelled by the energy of their protagonists. This time, I am the sole catalyst. It’s a daunting prospect. I approach the task as though I were sitting around a campfire telling my tale to cub scouts or retired sanitary inspectors, knowing they will ask impossible questions. Why, Mr. Newman? Why all those big fat books, Mr. Newman? Why all the marriages? Why all that travel, why all that ambition? Why all the bother pretending you’re a regular guy? Why indeed. To write a valid memoir, the author must confront difficult truths and reveal not just the facts and the plot line, but the story contained in a life. The most difficult issue when dredging up memories has to be the question: How do I quarry facts buried in the past in order to attain “the ring of truth,” in the service of my plot?

Having survived more than seven event­filled decades, I have structured this book in consecutive intervals, each covering an aspect of my life, with pauses in between to reflect on its most ardent passions. Hindsight gives our lives structure, but in the reality of daily living everything happens at once. We chomp a hard-boiled egg in a spacious Toronto townhouse on Saturday morning and play with a thought. By Wednesday afternoon we are moving to Vancouver Island, to live on a knapsack­jammed thirty­five­foot sloop. There is no telling which seemingly trivial incidents will set our lives on radical new paths while the nightmares that bedevil our sleep vanish with the dawn. Each experience led me to another, and the angle of my bounce determined the direction of my life.

I have found it unnecessary to raise an artificial barrier between my private life and public events, as they seemed so often to have happened in tandem. For example, I have never felt it was entirely coincidental that my marriage of twelve years to Camilla Turner foundered the same week as the Meech Lake Accord collapsed, both following long and difficult negotiations. If there appear to be parallels between the stories of Newman and Canada, it is not because I claim any exalted status. It just sort of happened, more or less that way.

After such a long run, I occasionally still feel as insecure as a one­album country singer. Success and fame have always been piranhas nibbling at my nerve ends. I could never get enough of either and thus missed enjoying both. The cost of success is the absence of a balanced life; the quest for fame takes its pound of flesh in the loss of reality. The latter exacts a higher price than the former. Neither brings genuine satisfaction, and all too often I have created the conditions that have contributed to my unhappiness, so that I found myself running ever harder in the pursuit of ever more elusive goals. Rebecca West, my favourite British essayist, observed that “there is nothing rarer than a man who can be trusted never to throw away happiness, however eagerly he sometimes grasps it.”

The animating current in this book has been self­revelation, its dominant tone, a wry, tentative sounding of my life so far, circumscribed by memory’s limits. In writing this book, I set aside glorification of the self, the ultimate heresy of any memoir. Objectivity was neither possible nor desirable. Only the dead can be truly objective. The sole claim I make for Here Be Dragons is that I have written it as honestly as I could, and that I left out as much self­justification as possible. It wasn’t easy.

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Excerpted from Here Be Dragons: Telling Tales of People, Passion and Power by Peter C. Newman
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