Heart Matters [Hardcover]

In 1941, Adrienne Clarkson was a three-year-old, carried in her father’s arms out of Hong Kong, a refugee from the Japanese. In 2005, she finished her sixth year as the 26th Governor General of Canada, a position she loved and filled with remarkable energy and involvement. Among all her twenty-five predecessors there had certainly never been one whose life’s trajectory was so unusual. Nor had there been anyone with her Chinese ethnic roots.
She was born Adrienne Poy to William Poy and Ethel Lam in Hong Kong, where her father had come as a young man. His family had emigrated to Australia from China two generations before, but he made his way to success through the Hong Kong Jockey Club, where he rode horses, then owned them, and made valuable connections with other members: “All his life my father did deals.” As a child she had no understanding of the significance of her father’s activities, but she and her brother, Neville, benefited from them. They enjoyed life, took servants and comforts for granted, until these privileges vanished suddenly and utterly with the ferocious Japanese invasion of December, 1941. Bill Poy hastened to join the British, becoming a motorcycle dispatch rider. Ethel and the two children took refuge with Ethel’s mother, who hid them and saved them from the all too common fate of rape and murder.
For six months they lived on the run, with Bill Poy writing to all the associates he had known while working on the Hong Kong Trade Commission. Finally, they were awakened one night by Japanese officers who told them that they were on a list to be exchanged by the Red Cross. They had only a few hours to get to the dock, with an allowance of one bag per person, before they boarded a Japanese ship bound for Mozambique, which would be only the first leg of a long voyage to North America. Their voyage was most unpleasant: they were given subsistence food in crowded, primitive living conditions, with minimal grudging care from their jailers. Their shipmates were a mixed group that included diplomats who had been stationed in Tokyo and American newsmen. Furthermore, it was just by luck, because of the chaotic situation and the overpowering need of those checking the passengers to get away fast, that as Chinese they were allowed to stay on board and sail. At Mozambique they walked down the gangplank of their ship and up the gangplank of the Red Cross ship, the Gripsholm, and then they were off to South America. Their final arrival in Canada, months after setting out from Hong Kong, began the steady climb that was to characterise Adrienne’s life.
Because of her father’s skill in making connections and forming friendships, the family was never in want again; in fact, in her early years in Ottawa they lived in a small triplex on Sussex Avenue, which she fully appreciates as giving her the first glimpse of Rideau Hall that she would inhabit as Governor General. She loved school and considers herself particularly fortunate in having attended Lisgar Collegiate, where Walter Mann, an exceptional teacher of English, encouraged her to develop her considerable academic talents. Sadly but quite understandably, her mother never recovered from the trauma of their refugee days, and she was never able to adapt fully to the realities of life in postwar Ottawa, so different and more difficult than her luxurious life in Hong Kong. Adrienne and her mother had radically different temperaments.
William Poy was able to finance his daughter’s Trinity College career, which extended to a successful MA and then on to Ph.D. work. (Many years ago, Gordon Roper, one of the Trinity professors she mentions as having particularly appreciated as a student, spoke of her in glowing terms, telling me that she had successfully written and published two novels, one of them while still an undergraduate.) However, before further committing herself to an academic career she decided that she was not suited to it: “There was nothing wrong with my abilities to analyze literature, but I felt that I shouldn’t do something that somebody else could do just as well or better.” That statement is a key to her entire story: more than most, she has a vivid sense of what she wants to achieve and an iron determination to go for it.
One of Adrienne’s earliest goals was to become thoroughly bilingual. She admired the French language and French culture, which she recognised as being very different from that of the Anglo-Saxon. She and Stephen Clarkson, a fellow Trinity student whom she married soon after her graduation, went to Paris, and there she began a rigorous course of study which gave her the total immersion she wanted and which has played a major part in her life’s successes. Since her early twenties she has been in the enviable position of being totally confident in French, but also totally informed about French culture in general. She has been a confident and competent advocate for it ever since. The break-up of her marriage to Clarkson, and the heartbreak that followed the crib death of her baby, Chloe, a twin and one of the three daughters from their marriage, are treated with restraint and obvious deep feeling. The sorrow of much of her life was her estrangement from the other two daughters, Kyra and Blaise, balanced finally by their happy reconciliation.
Clarkson’s name became recognisable to Canadians over many years of her working for the CBC. She began after a chance meeting with an old classmate, a script assistant who encouraged her to turn up at an audition. Her ease in front of the cameras was enchanting. In the early days of television, one could start a career at the CBC this way. (I can testify because I was peripherally involved with the CBC, and several of my friends subsequently succeeded in that burgeoning wonder of the ’50s and ’60s.) Such careers were often brief because conditions were always chaotic and coloured by intense rivalries, but Clarkson stayed at the CBC for 30 years, beginning in the popular afternoon show Take Thirty and then moving on to a major role in The Fifth Estate, the network’s most important public affairs programme.
In those early days, the talk show and public affairs people had a sense of mission about their opportunities and responsibilities. For some of them the sense of high calling was eventually tarnished. It never did for Clarkson. She remained totally convinced of the importance of her work and that conviction defined her every programme and her every career move. Her standards would not have been easy to meet for her coworkers, but the public watched with approval and enthusiasm. Basically, her great strength in doing anything she undertook has always been her habit of hard preparatory work, whether this meant learning about the Shah of Iran or doing research before visiting the Canadian North.
She was delighted to become Ontario’s Agent General in Paris, and her former immersion in French culture made her uniquely qualified for the position. By this time she and public intellectual John Ralston Saul were together, and since he had spent a great deal of time in France, the couple were a seamless fit. That the position was not without its frustrations is apparent from her account of those years, and the difficulties of constantly navigating with the required diplomatic tact are well described. Clarkson is a committed Canadian enthusiast and the French attitude, often slightly condescending, was hard to take. Typically, however, she finished her term on a high note: a Canadian architect, Carlos Ott, was chosen by President Mitterand in a competition for the design of the new Paris Opera House, a terrific coup for himself and his firm.
Clarkson returned to Canada to take the position as publisher and president of McClelland and Stewart for two years, but then went back to the CBC to successfully host Adrienne Clarkson Presents. Her reason for the change is admitted candidly: “I knew that I would never be able to bring McClelland and Stewart to where it needed to go. I had the knowledge but lacked the talent to bring the company to a healthy and viable state.”
Her appointment as Governor General was the climax of her career. Typically, when her coming appointment was still a deep dark secret, she and Ralston Saul both immersed themselves in research about the position at the Toronto Reference Library. There they read solidly for a week, studying all of the available constitutional literature about the position. Research is a major part of Clarkson’s lifelong recipe for starting any project; she works hard at preparing herself for office and she works hard in office. She was not the first woman to accept the position-Madame Sauvé has that honour, but she was the first woman with whom so many of her constituents could identify as a successful professional. “My feminism begins with Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and continues through the 1970s with Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch and Mary Jane Sherfey’s The Nature and Evolution of Female Sexuality.” Clarkson is definitely a woman of our time.
Clarkson’s account of her six years at Rideau Hall is fascinating, and also functions like a mini-course on the rights and responsibilities of the position. She is candid about her expectations and about the various persons or groups who did not come up to her standards, whether it be the Queen, who powdered her nose at the dinner table, or the people around Paul Martin, who arrived to be sworn in in casual clothes and running shoes. Mostly she writes about her travels and the pleasure she felt when meeting and greeting thousands of Canadians. Surely we have never before had a Governor General who enjoyed the experience as heartily or who subsequently shared the satisfactions of doing her work so thoroughly. She has been criticised for writing her book so soon after her term of office. Such critics have chosen to disregard the book’s opening sentence, “I have a tricky heart,” and the explanation of Clarkson’s health problems of the past two years. Finally, she pays tribute to her father, who lived until 2002 and was a constant encouraging force in her life from her earliest days in Canada. He made her feel that she was entitled to go anywhere, do anything: “And I have. Which is what he intended. Which is what he dreamed for me.”
Clara Thomas (Books in Canada)

'A memoir of Clarkson’s interesting and distinguished life'