bout de papier, Vol. 8, No. 2 (1991) — Spring 1991 // Printemps 1991, pp. 43–44
Radical Mandarin: The Memoirs of
Escott Reid, by Escott Reid. University of
Toronto Press: Toronto, 1989. 405 pp. $37.50.
The Canadian “mandarins,” that remarkable group of public servants who came to prominence in the 1940s, have greatly enriched Canadian historiography and public debate since the 1970s. I suppose no-one has counted the number of books, articles, lectures, and essays that External Affairs officers of the “golden age” have written, but my suspicion is that the number is greater than academics of the same generation have written. They were usually literate, and their lives and their talents made what they had to say particularly interesting.
Escott Reid would probably have ranked among Canada’s two or three political scientists had not prospects for an academic job been so poor when he arrived with an Oxford first in the depressed Canada of the 1930s. His early academic work on political parties was being reprinted in books of readings that undergraduates used in the 1970s. His eye for detail was acute; his intelligence formidable; his intellectual boldness commendable. Since he left Glendon College in 1969, he has written five books, numerous essays, and now these memoirs. His written work has been marked by crisp judgments and lucid prose. Taken together, Reid’s work represents a contribution of inestimable value to future historians of Canadian foreign policy and international relations.
While historians of foreign policy may find the sections dealing with Reid’s public career of greatest interest, I recall most vividly the chapters on his youth and his education. Reid was the son of an Anglican rector, and his account of his childhood and youth provides the richest portrait of Canadian Anglicanism in the early twentieth century that I have read. The Anglican tradition, like the British Empire, was at the core of the Canadian identity as it was publicly defined in the first decades of this century. Both now seem part of a world that is lost. The Britishness of his upbringing, the formalism of Canadian public life, and the shock of modernism pervade Reid’s early chapters. Reid’s sharp intelligence penetrated the shadows and obscurities of the world around him allowing him to see poverty which others avoided and to develop doubts which others feared to have. His Oxford chapter, which has the flavour — and not an artificial one — of Brideshead, reveals a self-confident young man who had developed the radical temper which he never lost.
He was not always easy to work with although his personal charm allowed most to forgive him his apparent sins. In Radical Mandarin Reid describes the numerous battles he waged against the executive of the Canadian Institute of International Affairs in the 1930s, against foreign policy “realists” in the 1940s, against those who could not see Third World problems in the 1950s, and against Cold Warriors and university bureaucracy in the 1960s. In most of these struggles, he seems to have been, in the eyes of historians, on the side of the angels. At times, however, he discusses the old battles in too much detail. Few readers will know who called out the troops, what formations they took, and what the climate was. His treatment of the 1930s is too long and too defensive, and he traverses battlefields where only antiquarians now tread.
Although Reid has written before on the 1940s and 1950s, there is little repetition in this book. This absence of repetition is a reflection of the range of Reid’s intellect and the diversity of his activities. He saw before others that decolonization was the significant event of post-1945 history and that the cold war had taken on a life of its own beyond the real differences between democracy and dictatorship which gave birth to NATO in the late 1940s. His radicalism, in fact, derived from his ability to plumb below the surfaces, and he had that quality of “beyondness” that the greatest radicals in the British tradition possessed. In the grey shades of international diplomacy, Reid’s radicalism was iridescent. And so in many ways is this memoir.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 8, No. 2 (1991) — Spring 1991 // Printemps 1991, pp. 43–44. Read the rest of this issue →
