All our yesterdays

By WALTER YOUNG

Vancouver Sun October 1, 1976.

Legend has it that inside every journalist a writer is struggling to get out, and inside every reporter's desk lies a manuscript that one day . . . Bruce Hutchison is obviously not your ordinary journalist, his books have appeared with great regularity and been most successful — two even won the governor-general's award. In fact in this as in many things, Hutchison has not only had his cake but he has eaten a good deal of it too. This is one message that emerges from his memoirs, The Far Side of the Street. (the Shawnigan Lake Museum has copies of this book available to read in our Community Living Room)

Blessed with a clear notion of what he wanted from life and blessed with the self-assurance to stick with it once he found it, he was able to turn down offers most newspapermen would have given up black coffee and strong drink to get. Moreover, Hutchison was able to stay at the top of the heap while doing so. It has been a remarkable achievement. After all, can anyone imagine Charles Lynch retaining his post as eminence gros of the press gallery while sending most of his time chopping cordwood and hoeing cabbage at some rustic haven on the Miramichi?

Hutchison interviewing Zsa Zsa Gabor in Los Angels

But this is what Hutchison has done. His remarkable facility for making friends with those in high places and his equally remarkable facility with prose — indeed there are times when it is clear that with Hutchison the problem is not how to start, but rather how to stop — combine to make him a hot property as a writer and editor. So much so that he was asked to succeed John Dafoe as editor of the Winnipeg Free Press, invited to be publisher of the Vancouver Sun and editor of the Victoria Times; he did become editor of the Free Press in tandem with G. V. Ferguson, he did edit the Times and he became editorial director of The Vancouver Sun and all without having to forsake his Victoria garden and his Shawnigan Lake woodpile for longer than any sensitive Islander could tolerate.

It is clear from this book and from his many columns that Bruce Hutchison's success as a journalist and writer is due in large measure to a sense of wonder that has remained unjaded over almost 60 years of reporting and to an unshakeable conviction of his own political and economic naivete. This has enabled him to write of weighty matters with a direct simplicity that not only appealed to a vast readership, but informed them as well.

It also enabled him to form vast friendships with many of the great and near-great in power for they found in Hutchison a good listener and a singularly adept reporter of their views. He was able to convert the language of the political sophisticate into the homey prose the readers of the Victoria Daily Times or the Winnipeg Free Press enjoyed. Not that Hutchison's style is spare and economical, it is more like an English country garden: somewhat overgrown, filled with simple blossoms and ancient roots and quite Victorian in its flavour.

However much he found his own heaven in Victoria, perhaps more than any other newspaperman of his generation

Hutchison is a North American. While The Far Side of the Street contains much that will intrigue the student of Canadian politics it records a great deal about Hutchison's fascination with American politicians and members of the American intelligentsia.

It is interesting that Hutchison's involvement with Canada and Canadian politics did not appear to bring him into contact with any Canadian intellectuals, at least with none sufficiently memorable to find a place in his memoirs beside Christopher Morley, J.K. Galbraith, or George Ball. And clearly he was more at home in Washington, D.C., than in London and in his later years even than in Ottawa.

When he said his last goodbye to Mike Pearson he seemed to be saying goodbye to Ottawa as well. While Bruce Hutchison is a man of almost inexhaustible charity, his enthusiasm for Pearson's successor is distinctly limited. For Hutchison politics and political reporting are very much a matter of personality.

Hutchison is very much a Liberal. Seeing the two nations of North America inextricably entwined and feeling no remorse over those matters that exercise Walter Gordon and continue to exercise the members of the Committee for an Independent Canada. For Hutchison Gordon was "a fervid nationalist and true believer in protectionist Conservative policies." In fact he was the exact opposite of Mike Pearson and unlike John Dafoe of the Free Press who, Hutchison writes, moved decidedly to the left in his latter years, believing that "the basic wealth of the nation belonged to all the people, not a few rich proprietors."

‘Hutchison has not only had his cake — he has eaten a good deal of it too’

Hutchison remains a dedicated Liberal in economics as well: "To me, ignorant of economics and totally inexperienced in business, the market is a useful and for the most part inescapable mechanism under any social system because the law of supply and demand must prevail in the end, no matter what the State or any power does to obstruct it. There, in the invisible millstone of the market, most collectivist theories like socialism are ground exceeding fine by the millstone of a rapacious human nature."

As the recollections of a newspaperman who moved with ease through the corridors of power in two capitals, charming to the mighty with his rumpled insouciance, this book will send many to the standard text of Canadian history to look again at such events as the 1926 crisis and Mackenzie King's handling of Conscription during the Second World War. As the memoirs of a journalist and writer whose life is an engaging chronicle of adversity, good fortune and good sense this is a fine and gentle book that will be particularly appreciated by the generation that shares with Bruce Hutchison the bittersweet recollections of the past 60 years.