Writing History: A Professor’s Life (review)

Jack Granatstein pronounces this book, in a short dust-jacket blurb, ‘the best memoir we have by a Canadian scholar,’ and that makes one ponder just how many others there are. Certainly in Canadian history the list is short, and this rarity alone makes the book a welcome contribution. But its value goes well beyond that. This is a well-crafted, candid, and highly engaging piece of work. And with Michael Bliss perhaps the only academic Canadian historian in recent years to be anything close to a public figure, not to mention something of an intellectual non-conformist, his view of his own life naturally has some relevance – and likely a market as well.

‘The highest praise for my books and articles was that they were sometimes hard to put down’ Bliss writes in his introduction” (12), and this book, it must be said, certainly is that. Like nearly all his work, it is a pleasure to read. The man has an exceptional knack for creating readable prose. And his skill serves a double purpose here, for not only does it move the author’s story along briskly and engagingly, it also places the author’s craft on vivid display. ‘I worked hard at trying to write well,’ Bliss asserts, and the book itself makes his point.

Michael Bliss was born and raised in the small southwestern Ontario town of Kingsville in 1941, the child of a busy family doctor and his intelligent but rather disenchanted wife. Bliss’s childhood memories are of a not especially warm family life – ‘Flawed Family’ is the chapter title – but he was nurtured well enough; by late high school he was excelling at school and sports, and upon graduation in 1958 he won a scholarship to enter the University of Toronto’s Honours program in Math, Physics, and Chemistry. After some false starts he ended up in Philosophy and History, from which he graduated, by no means atop his class. He immediately secured a high-school teaching job, largely in order to marry his longstanding Kingsville-area girlfriend – having not yet been liberated from the convention that a young man must be a provider before becoming a husband. These early chapters, of a world bridging the austerity of the interwar and the liberality and affluence of the postwar, are themselves a moving and revealing childhood memoir.

A deepening interest in history led to a decision, after a few years of teaching, to return to University of Toronto for graduate studies, and he elected to specialize in Canadian history under the supervision of Ramsay Cook, a ‘short, fiery, but friendly red-headed historian from Manitoba’ (109). At this point young Mike Bliss begins to excel. He was given permission to complete his PhD examinations early, was invited to spend a year at Harvard as a teaching assistant to University of Toronto president Claude Bissell, who was about to serve as Harvard’s inaugural visiting professor of Canadian Studies, and with his thesis barely begun he heard via the grapevine of an offer, quite real as it turned out, to become the University of Toronto’s next professor of Canadian history (114, 119).

So begins the professor’s life, the details of which comprise the final two-thirds of the book. It is a life bound to interest Canadian historians, for Bliss tells his story freely, revealing details probably unknown to anyone outside his personal circle. We learn of his editorial involvement in projects like the Social History of Canada series and Canada’s Illustrated Heritage, of how his own books – like A Canadian Millionaire, which won the Macdonald Prize, and The Discovery of Insulin, which he thinks should have – were conceived, researched, and written. He tells of his magazine journalism, his evolution into a media pundit, prompted largely by his passionate opposition to Meech Lake, of how and why he came to have certain views, and of his experiences crossing paths with various colleagues and public figures. Though he does not dwell on his own style and...