bout de papier, Vol. 4, No. 4 (1986) — Winter 1986 // Hiver 1986, pp. 50–51
Both My Houses
by Sean O’Sullivan,
Key Porter Books, 235 pp., $22.95.
Sean O’Sullivan is an audacious, articulate, and impressively intelligent Canadian. Power, both sacred and profane, intrigues him, and his desire to participate in mainstream activities is a driving force in his character.
O’Sullivan’s Both My Houses is a book of considerable merit and avoids many of the toadying aspects that frequent autobiographies. It is a story of self-examination, tenacity, courage, and political criticism. O’Sullivan is someone who makes things happen simply because he is driven by inner instincts, and has been influenced at major turns in his life by mentors who fascinate
There are lots of ego-books on the Canadian book market at present. Some are pretentious like Eugene Whelan’s Whelan. (He really does care about world hunger, but green stetsons do not a leader make.) Some are cloying like Patrick Gossage’s Next to the Charisma (he hopes that some benefits might rub off from the extraterrestrial leadership of his former master, Prime Minister Pierre E.T.). Some are prickly like Sheila Copps’ Nobody’s Baby (she hopes we are interested in what her spleen has done for Canadian Parliamentary democracy). Some are condescending, like Senator Keith Davey’s The Rainmaker (he presumes Canadians don’t want “sunshine” in their politics). Some are a minor contribution to recent nonintellectual Canadian history like Jean Chretien’s Straight From the Heart, and some are benignly contrite like René Lévesque’s Memoirs. But most are half-baked and lack the depth and wisdom of Ron Graham’s One Eyed Kings, by far the best recent book on Canadian political life written in English.
Both My Houses is neither an apology for past political misdemeanors nor a trial balloon for a career path to higher office. It is a milestone at the beginning of a journey; a personal voyage into power, politics, pain, and priesthood. It is a valuable insight into the Canadian way of doing things, which is particularly useful in 1986 when a crisis of leadership in both major political parties has sent shock waves across the country, and threatens public trust in the institutions of our government.
O’Sullivan’s pert and self-assured mind can belie his ability to serve (sic) the major mentors in his life – John Diefenbaker, Roman Catholic Father Joseph Lupo, and Cardinal Gerald Emmett Carter. The author has all the potential sycophantic characteristics of a typical executive assistant, but his personal respect for his mentors tempers his obvious ambition and he remains a personality in his own right. At one point he talks of being a fan of John Diefenbaker rather than a friend, and the implications are many that Dief was a cussed man with a tendency towards vindictiveness. Yet throughout his years with the Chief, and particularly at Dief’s funeral, O’Sullivan sees himself as the protector of the Chief’s reputation and a combattant against his detractors. Diefenbaker, we infer, was a great Canadian because he instilled in a generation a pride in the traditional institutions of Canada without unnecessary fawning over Empire and Eurocentric history. His “Ides of March” at the hands of Dalton Camp and the conspirators was perhaps the main subconscious reason O’Sullivan left politics for a higher calling. But, in the spirit of reconciliation, which is the main ethical feature of the book, O’Sullivan, in the tradition of Mark Anthony, implies that Diefenbaker’s detractors were “honourable
O’Sullivan at first regards success in politics as a “badge of honour”.. He then, during his residence at the Irish College in Rome, admits to being a “victim of vaulting ambition”. He notes that most politicians he knew came to Ottawa “with good sound principles and good causes they want(ed) to forward”. The outward signs of power, like the expense accounts and the private jets, soon got the better of all but the most honest of men and women. “Politics can be a dirty business that treats people badly – even those with a strong inner core of decency.”
Both My Houses deals extensively and implicitly with personal and political ethics. Loyalty to mentors is born of a certain chemistry including greed, but service to country is an ethical decision which should sublimate personal ambition. Most Canadians remember Diefenbaker as a histrionic patriot. His smashing election victory in 1957, his jowls, his appalling French, his Western background, his dog Happy, and his Churchillian rejection at conspiratorial hands in 1963, all testify to his wholesome and slightly eccentric reputation. But, for those of us who do not remember William Lyon Mackenzie King, Diefenbaker was uniquely Canadian, reflecting in his bravado and his vulnerability a personification of his Canada. O’Sullivan’s description of Diefenbaker’s relative poverty at his death (in spite of a controversial trust fund) is very moving. Our Prime Minister did not even have a pair of matching socks readily available.
Diefenbaker was the last pre-television prime minister, the last of the whistle-stop campaigners before the electronic media replaced the railway as the east-west zip fastener of Canadian Confederation. O’Sullivan won his spurs during this sea-change in Canada’s technological (and cultural) awakening. There have been since then too few true leaders among the many pretenders to political management. For example, O’Sullivan says of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, whom he genuinely likes, that he is •.. so scarred by the political process that sometimes he lets paranoid advisors convince him to be mean-spirited” ’. Sadly, this book will not appeal to those who are naively: confident in the direction of Canadian politics today. But nothing in Sean O’Sullivan meteoric rise from young campaign worker to the youngest M.P. in Canadian history would compare to the trial that now faced him.
Cancer is surely the cruellest contemporary disease without a known cure. Cancer is the closest men and women can come to hell and survive. O’Sullivan’s chapter “To the Brink and Back” is a very personal and powerful exposé of despair, pain, and survival. He describes the devastating realization that his body has failed him and that he will probably die. But his lively brain continues to function and dream, creating hallucinations and doubts as the body chemistry contorted by cancer torments the balance of his life.
Sean O’Sullivan was the last person you would have thought might fall victim to such a disease. I first met him in Rome at the home of the Canadian Embassy’s RCMP Attaché. The young novice lived up to his reputation for tast wit and humour making me realize that if Canada had received more Irish immigrants in the past, our sense of humour might now rival that of Australia. He often came to our house on the Appian Way in Rome, and on many occasions, after a family dinner, I would drive Sean home to the Irish College in the small hours of the morning. It was long after curfew; I kept the car’s high beams trained on the gate of the College as Sean scaled it. He was always careful not to lose anything as he rounded the spiked top, and he would disappear into the shadows with only one more obstacle —a very alert dog with a loud bark.
On one occasion Sean was not himself and complained of being tired and weak. He booked into a retreat run by the Blue Nuns at Fiesole in the hills overlooking Florence. Ten days later he returned to Rome refreshed but still not up to scratch. We recommended our Canadian doctor, Rosemary Harris, who was much sought after by the diplomatic community, and is a woman of extraordinary grace and professional acumen. Her diagnosis was privy to her patient, but I don’t think she suspected cancer at this point.
Sean returned to Canada to become a parish priest and later to run the priest vocation programme in Toronto for Cardinal Carter. The billboard depicting Christ on the cross with the caption “Dare To Be A Priest Like Me” became a topic of much conversation and controversy. It was classic O’Sullivan. His political days had helped to make the beaver Canada’s national symbol. He now captured the imagination and the devotion of a new constituency, and today his cancer is in remission.
Both My Houses is a voyage from youth to adulthood, and from politics to priesthood. It is a view of Canada through a personal prism with all the subjectivity and omission that that entails. But it is worth every page because, together with the personal pronouncements and recollections, there is a refreshing magnanimity that prevents the kind of Monday morning quarter-backing which often tarnishes autobiographies. The author shares his own weaknesses and, by doing so, shows that he has surmounted them. His vignettes of Canadian personalities are refreshing and enlightening, critical but without bitterness.
It is a powerful book of ecstasy and agony, and it ends with the Christian pronouncements of a man committed to his Faith and to his Church as a centurion in the Pope’s Divisions. His political knowhow will be essential as he stickhandles the ecclesiastical bureaucracy as capably as he did the political one in Canada, and his stubborn personality will be the great strength for future challenges.
In St. John’s Gospel is written, “ … In My Father’s house are many mansions, if it were not so I would have told you”. With his future now dedicated to the preaching of Christian mystery, we can safely predict that there are more mansions to be built in Sean O’Sullivan’s house.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 4, No. 4 (1986) — Winter 1986 // Hiver 1986, pp. 50–51. Read the rest of this issue →
