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      — A ROOFTOP TOAST —

      I had a special mission, a private one, not connected to the question of French culture, when I arrived in Saigon. I wanted to honour a late friend of mine. When he died in 1997, I wrote in the Globe and Mail: “The fact that he was rich was the least interesting thing about Charles Taylor.” Charles was the son of E.P. Taylor, perhaps the most famous, feared, despised, envied, and editorially cartooned Canadian businessman of the 1950s. To say the least, Charles went off in a direction different from his father’s, becoming, to quote myself again, an “author, foreign correspondent, Sinologist, bon vivant [and] horse breeder.” When he died, after the most appalling nine-year struggle with cancer, he was sixty-two and had published five books. One of them, Radical Tories: The Conservative Tradition in Canada, which appeared in 1982 (and reissued in 2006), was later named by the readers of the Literary Review of Canada as one of the hundred most important Canadian books of all time.

      It’s a book as odd as it is delightful. As he confesses to the reader, Charles had paid scant attention to Canadian politics as a young man, because he was busy with international affairs. He put the Globe’s Beijing bureau on a permanent footing and covered wars, elections, and other excitements in fifty countries, armed with no other language than English, quick wits, a lively intelligence, and an attractive personality (which I seem to have described as “enormous well-scrubbed charm and bonhomie”). He had been everywhere and had known everyone. He once told me offhandedly, without the slightest affectation, that he couldn’t remember whether he’d met the queen or not.

      For Charles, as for so many people at the time, the American War changed everything. In his case, it had the effect of turning his attention homeward. In the common view, the war was waged by America’s blinkered technocrats and by MBAs who believed they had only a management problem they thought they could solve by throwing money at it; the moral dimension eluded them. Charles gradually withdrew from journalism to write seriously about the war and later, by extension, about moral (not moralistic) conservatism, whose ideas derived from Edmund Burke, “who saw the state as a partnership not just among the living, but among those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are yet to be born.” He became much influenced by Red Tory intellectuals such as the poet Dennis Lee (and non-intellectuals, too), the people associated with the deification of George Grant and the snootily superior brand of Canadian nationalism derived partly, and somewhat paradoxically, from the ideas of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, the one-time member of the Nazi Party who in Western academic life today is considered one of the three or four most influential thinkers of the twentieth century.

      I simplify outrageously, of course. The point is that Charles began to seek out some version of Canadian conservatism that he could feel comfortable with. Radical Tories and his closely related book Six Journeys: A Canadian Pattern (1977) were the result. Both are widely beloved for the grace and good humour of their prose.

      Radical Tories is a series of linked essays — appreciations really — of Donald Creighton, W.L. Morton, Al Purdy, Eugene Forsey, Robert Stanfield and David Crombie. Note that only Creighton was a proudly bigoted person, with his lifelong aversion to the Québécois. And note that most of them are historians, as was, in his heart, Al Purdy, whose work probably has never had a finer, more understanding or more stylish piece written about it. Charles called him “a folk tory,” using the lower-case T to make clear that he’s not talking here about the old Progressive Conservative Party, but rather a turn of mind.

      What distinguishes Radical Tories is first of all its felicitous writing (for example, John Kenneth Galbraith, at six-foot-eight, “moves with the awkward lope of a man in constant apprehension of upsetting the furniture”). It grudgingly has some fine things to say about individual members of the Liberal Party and occasionally takes individual Conservatives to task. In the end, it’s not a book about partisan politics in the least. Charles was rather like Dalton Camp (who was rather like Benjamin Disraeli): a Conservative simply because he hated the Liberals for their power. He was either a small-c liberal or a small-l conservative, I’m not sure which, and it doesn’t matter; and most of the figures he singles out for praise as Red Tories might just as easily be revered as Blue Grits.

      Charles’s intent needs no refreshing because it is timeless, despite the outdatedness of his examples. What seems to me to be his key statement falls near the middle of the book. He writes: “For most of this century, Canada has seen the triumph of the liberal levellers, secular Calvinists who despise anyone or anything which has claims to quality and finer feeling. Jealous and spiteful, they would cut everyone and everything down to their own level of insipid mediocrity. To survive in such a grudging milieu, those who strive for excellence often feel the need to mask their real intentions. Learned early, the impulse soon becomes instinctive.”

      Why do I go into all this now? Because I wished to honour his memory somehow now that I was in Saigon. He was fourteen years my senior, and was always trying to teach me lessons about journalism (a hopeless task, I fear). For example, he would tell me about how in Washington he would eschew the flashy presidential press conferences to spend days in a stuffy room where a subcommittee of a subcommittee of Congress was droning on about two sentences in a tariff bill that directly affected two hundred Canadian jobs. Or about how, when covering the war in Saigon, he refused to stay with all the other correspondents at the Continental or Caravelle hotels. Instead, he lived at the Rex, where the rooftop bar was actually owned and run by the propaganda arm of the American state department. At the Rex, you see, he got to talk with mid-level U.S. officers in the lift rather than simply people from Agence-France Press, or the BBC, even if this meant that he had to tape big Xs on the windows at night to keep shards of glass from flying onto the bed during the B-40 rocket attacks. Billeting there also put him closer to the scene of the dark comedy. Every day at the Rex bar an American “diplomat” named Barry Zorthian, standing next to an army captain, would unveil the latest “body count” figures. These proved with mathematical certainty (thanks to the help of a giant Univac computer somewhere) that the United States was winning the war. The daily numbers were so obviously spurious that the reporters ran a pool: the person whose number came closest to Zorthian’s wild projection won the jackpot. These briefings were known contemptuously as the “Five O’clock Follies.”

      Charles and I spent a good deal of time together when we were both living in Toronto.

      “Every time I see you two characters together I think of James and his brother,” a woman once told us.

      She was an English prof, so Charles said, “Ah, yes, Henry and his brother William.”

      “No,” she replied. “Jesse and Frank.”

      For indeed Charles and I rode together, so to speak, and raised some hell along the way.

      So now that I was in Saigon, I made a point of putting up at the Rex, which seems not to have changed one bit from Charles’s day. The lobby, the decor, the furniture — everything — was pure unadulterated 1965, neither retro nor preserved, but