bout de papier, Vol. 10, No. 2 (1993) — Spring 1993 // Printemps 1993, pp. 41–42
One Woman’s Journey: A Portrait of
Pauline Vanier by Deborah and George
Cowley, Novalis, 1992, 175 pp., $14.95.
This is a fascinating little book concentrating like a Hilliard miniature on the features of a fascinating woman. It is a reflection of Pauline Vanier, largely in her own words, from a series of taped interviews which Deborah Cowley and George Cowley recorded some twenty years ago. They have edited the material effectively and have provided sensitive interpretive passages to present a readable miniature biography of an outstanding person.
In the foreword, Jean Vanier remarks that his mother’s recollections are selective “recalling certain realities and forgetting others.” They are told lightly with appealing touches of self-deprecating humour. We learn a lot about Mme Vanier, but a lot is left out. We get glimpses of her relationship with her children and can feel her dedication to her husband’s work wherever and whatever it might be. Her great interest in people, whoever they were, emerges strongly. She tells of meeting “coal miners, music hall performers, garbage collectors, tram drivers” when she was visiting a London hospital during the Vaniers’ posting to Canada House in 1939-40. Clearly, as her doctor told her, “she had a real gift with the sick.” This gift she used lavishly, then and later, during the war. It was a matter of satisfaction to her that many kept in touch with her long afterwards giving her the feeling that she had really done something useful.
By contrast, Mme Vanier gives little attention to the prominent personalities whom she encountered and only ten are named (eg. Lord Byng, Kipling, Pope John XXIII, Haile Selassie, and de Gaulle). Byng was Governor General when Vanier was first posted to Rideau Hall. He became a friend and supporter. Kipling is described as “such a warmhearted imaginative person.” A private audience with Pope John XXIII was “the most wonderful experience of my life” but the account tells us nothing of the man who, as Cardinal Roncalli, had been Papal Nuncio in Paris and was an old friend of General Vanier’s. It was the Pope, rather than the man, who made the event outstanding. Haile Selassie, is briefly, but perceptively, described as someone whose dignity and intelligence made him seem tall and commanding despite his small stature. However, for Mme Vanier, it was the strength and simplicity of his Coptic Christian faith which distinguished him. General de Gaulle, whom the Vaniers had known throughout the years in London and Paris, appears several times and most tellingly in the account of a private luncheon at the Elysée after General Vanier had died. This shows Mme Vanier at her feisty best when she takes issue with de Gaulle’s pro- Quebec attitude. She was in no way awed by her host’s position or reputation.
How personal her world was both in regard to those who surrounded her and as to the direction of her influence. Anyone who met Pauline Vanier in her hey-day at the Paris Embassy or at Rideau Hall experienced her talent for making people welcome. Yours was the arrival she had particularly awaited; yours the presence that gave her particular pleasure. This was not just a matter of professional obligation as a hostess, although duty played its part, but arose from her genuine interest in people and a desire to be useful and to do her duty as well as possible.
This sense of duty was sustained and sometimes challenged by a strong religious conviction. Toward the end of her life, her search for identity would lead her to complain that in Canada, she was always Georges Vanier’s wife and at l’Arche, Jean Vanier’s mother and then, in a near contradiction, to confess her “foolish self-reliance” and the need “to put her trust in God rather than in her own abilities.”
There is another portrait of Pauline Vanier that deserves attention. When Mme Vanier finished her years at Rideau Hall, she chose to leave behind to represent her among the collection of portraits of the wives of Governors’ General, a stunning full-length portrait by deLaszlo, the leading society painter in England in the inter-war years. This had been done in 1928, when Mme Vanier was thirty years old and at the height of her beauty. She is shown in a décolleté evening dress looking at the viewer over her bare shoulder with a fleeting and slightly disdainful smile; a woman’s poise and confidence. It is arguably the best portrait in the collection, unsurpassed by any of those of the English vice-regal ladies who had preceded her as chatelaine of Rideau Hall. It is also arguably that in that role Pauline Vanier was herself unsurpassed.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 10, No. 2 (1993) — Spring 1993 // Printemps 1993, pp. 41–42. Read the rest of this issue →
