They’ll always have Provence
May 12th, 2010
The problem with elites is that they can be so well, you know, snooty. If they weren’t so superior to the rest of us, they’d have a lot easier time of it trying to be just folks. I couldn’t help thinking of that when reading this Maclean’s article about our late great Governor General, Adrienne Clarkson, and her itinerant-philosopher husband, John Raulston Saul.
One delights in the unintended humour that oozes from nearly every paragraph in the recounting of their life – as urban-peasant olive farmers – without irony. The gems about the Raulston-Saul-Clarksons’ slumming it in the south of France include Mr. Saul’s statement that, “I’m a great believer that food is about agriculture.” And about pruning the olive trees: “It works, I think the trees are happier” On the experience of farming: “I always wanted to be one; I think all Canadians come from farming backgrounds.” Love the “I think” concerning an objectively verifiable claim of fact.
The Maclean’s writer romanticizes the rural experience – again without parody or even scepticism – calling the harvest “a communal activity” and “a ritual” which, says Mr. Saul, “Takes you back to the idea that gathering fruit is a cultural event.” Said with a true depth of feeling that can be plumbed only by the transplanted urbanite.
The further one is removed from the toil and deprivation of actual peasant life, the more romantic its “rituals” seem. Like pickers receiving olive oil rather than money as payment for their labours: today it seems quaint. Back in the day, however, it was necessary because the subsistence economy was basically cashless and few actually had the money to pay their workers. Chances are, Mr. Saul and his help don’t get up hours before dawn to walk to the harvest, nor subsist on little more than bread and water like their forebears did.
One wonders also whether Mr. Saul ever thinks about the actual history of peasant life. What might he make of, say, the Vandals’ unique communal style of “gathering fruit” and what that illustrated about particular “cultural events” that kicked off back in the year 407, when they plus the Sueves and Alans rampaged through regions of France not so far from Mr. Saul’s current estate? Defenceless local peasants, with nowhere to jet off to when the ambience became uncongenial, were obliged to participate in the delightful rituals of mass slaughter, rape and the slave market.
Confinement to subsistence life for generations without end has a way of losing its earthy charms. Mr. K. once asked me why my own peasant ancestors in Hungary didn’t take advantage of their bounteous harvest of summer plums to make gallons of preserves and jams, the former to provide some nourishment during the long winter, the latter to bring some cash into the household. I replied that, lacking even the barest scraps of cash for sugar, glass jars or firewood, there was no way to turn the soon-to-rot fruit into a cash crop or pantry item. Nor, with virtually every collection of peasant dwellings boasting several ancient fruit trees, was there much of a local market. There was no foreign aid, no micro-finance, no “choices” – no way out. Mr. K. was dumbfounded but, it seems, now has one up on Mr. Saul.
However, Mr. Saul – described as “award-winning essayist and long-time environmentalist” – by now has long ago left his agronomic triumphs behind to dispense wisdom on the environment. He and the Missus don’t spray the groves “except for the minimal use of a copper mixture, traditionally considered organic”. Perhaps in the sense that copper comes from the earth and “food is about agriculture”. This spray, called Bordeaux mixture, is traditional (my family used it back in the old country) but isn’t exactly worthy of romanticizing any more than, say, DEET or PCBs (which actually consist of “organic molecules”, just not the kind you’d want on your olives).
Moving past the idyllic, pastoral retirement of Canada’s former vice-regals, one comes to the underlying irony, put best by one of their friends, a Toronto restaurateur: “When I discovered John was making olive oil, I thought ‘What a wonderful symbol. A celebrant of Canada, he is an internationalist at the same time’.” And that sums it up, doesn’t it? What, to the Iggy-Raulston-Clarksons, and scores like them, celebrates Canada more than living in the south of France?
Whether they like it or not, this does speak to a dilemma, a contradiction at the heart of the persona of Canada’s liberal elite, such as it is. How to be the embodiment of Canada and at the same time breeze effortlessly around the well-stocked buffet tables of internationalism? How to live abroad for 35 years and assume an automatic pass to a corner office in the Langevin Block?
Ironically, the crowd that strives to be au courant in Geneva and the countless UN summits, that strives for affirmation from their trans-Atlantic brethren, carries much of the old Canadian inferiority complex. By comparison, Canadian nativists generally appear more self-assured, not seeking outside approval nor seeking to emulate a foreign elite. Not do they carry the easy anti-Americanism of the left that has only slightly abated since the election of President Obama. Mr. K., for example, is unlikely to encounter the ex-GG’s at one of his reservoir-side walleye-fries in the Wyoming desert.
So it is that the international ambitions of that certain segment of affluent Canadians seems increasingly forced, unnatural and disconnected from the rest of us. Yet it continues in Mediterranean olive groves, Swiss private schools and elsewhere. Those whispered stories of senior federal bureaucrats retiring to chateaux on indexed pensions can’t all be apocryphal. On the plus side, if whatever you happen to be doing – whether it’s gracing Rideau hall or slumming at Stornoway – doesn’t quite work out, you’ll always have Provence.
