The Friendship That Taught Me Community Can Transcend Politics

THE MIND OF my friend Gerald Owen was a labyrinth lit by the torches of the many languages he had mastered. In his last sad decade, as he succumbed to early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, his mental world grew dim. Yet even in this evening fugue, one peculiar linguistic ember unexpectedly reignited. Remarkably, his brain settled not upon any of the languages that he knew—among them Ancient Greek, Latin, Aramaic, and French—but rather one of the invented tongues of Elvish, found in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.

As a child, Gerald was an avid Tolkien aficionado, teaching himself how to speak and write Elvish. That was the start of his lifelong autodidactism in languages. At the end of his life, “there would be occasional episodes of delusional-like psychosis,” his widow, Kathy, explained to me. “During one amazing event, Gerald awoke in the middle of night and started stomping around the house speaking Elvish, with a fluency like it was his first language. I was mesmerized.” It was both paradoxical and fitting for a dying man to return to the language of Elves, Tolkien beings who embody, like the angels, the promise of life untarnished by the diminishment of time. Like Tolkien, Gerald took his Catholic faith seriously, so perhaps his turn to Elvish was his quirky mind’s preparation for the afterlife.

Since Gerald’s death in November 2023, his many friends have been left pondering the mystery of this contradictory man. He had a scholar’s mien, but never held an academic post. His manifest talents allowed him to thrive in journalism, rising to the editorial boards of two national newspapers in Canada. Yet while he flourished in the field, he never truly belonged to it. Every fibre of his being bridled at the journalistic vices of simplification, haste, and cliché. He often seemed like a professor who had inadvertently walked into a bustling newsroom, with one part of his mind always elsewhere.

I first got to know Gerald when I joined him as a colleague at the National Post in 2000, although I had long been familiar with his byline in publications such as The Idler and Books in Canada. We were quite different in background and world view. A doctoral student in history moonlighting as a writer to earn some money, I was born in India, obsessed with popular culture, and politically very much on the left. Gerald was steeped in European classical culture and decidedly conservative. Our mutual friend, retired journalist Peter Scowen, noted that Gerald was “definitely prone to supporting the Conservatives, even during the post-PC Harper era.”

At the same time, Gerald had many attitudes that were at variance with any simplistic definition of conservatism. He was wary of right-wing partisans, big-business domination of society, and the militarization of foreign policy. His mixture of traditionalism and openness to social reform made him seem like an avatar of Red Toryism, an important Canadian tradition, although one that has faded in recent decades. Characteristic of his persnicketiness, Gerald quarrelled with the label Red Tory. His conservatism was built on a respect for history, an awareness of the merits of prudence, and a mindfulness of institutions. His wide reading in both the classics and contemporary literature gave me a goal of encyclopedic erudition (a truly impossible one) to aspire to. It delighted me that he was well versed in the works of Marxist writers like Walter Benjamin and Eric Hobsbawm, whom he talked about with intelligent respect.

With Gerald, as with other close friends I’ve lost over the years, I’ve discovered that death doesn’t end one’s conversations with the deceased. Rather, a new dialogue opens up as we start asking what their lives meant, and what they meant to us.

DAVID WALMSLEY, editor-in-chief of the Globe and Mail, once described Gerald as “Toronto royalty in a hush-hush kinda way.” His family mixed with a conservative literary set in the city. Gerald’s paternal grandfather, Eric Trevor Owen, taught Greek at the University of Toronto and wrote studies of Homer, Aristotle, and Sophocles. He died in 1948, five years before Gerald was born, but the old professor’s bequeath of a library of Greek and Latin texts—long neat rows of bilingual Loeb editions in red and green dust jackets—made him a presence in the life of his grandson.

Gerald’s parents, Ivon and Patricia Owen, were semi-bohemian intellectuals. An editor of the Canadian division of Oxford University Press, Ivon was also, in 1956, a co-founder of The Tamarack Review, which until its demise in 1982 was the most important Canadian literary journal of its time. The magazine showcased some of the early writings of Mordecai Richler, Leonard Cohen, and Alice Munro, defining the canon of the first generation of Canadian writers worthy of international attention.

Even before Patricia joined The Tamarack Review as an associate editor in 1960, the magazine was a family affair, with much of the editing done in the Owens’ midtown Toronto home. The residence was awash in manuscripts and proofs. When a new issue came out, Ivon and Patricia would gather up Gerald and his older brother, Kenneth, five years Gerald’s senior, along with friends and neighbourhood kids to stuff envelopes, imprinting on Gerald the idea that sociability and intellectual life went together.

Gerald’s preciosity became the stuff of family and neighbourhood legend. I recall his cousins telling me at Gerald’s memorial that their parents would always marvel that Gerald, a friendly but unclubbable boy who stood away from family games, taught himself Ancient Greek as a child. In 1967, the teenage Gerald assisted his father with the translation of Deux innocents en Chine rouge, by Pierre Elliott Trudeau and Jacques Hébert (1961).

Gerald’s childhood was initially idyllic: a preternaturally bookish child nurtured by fond, literate parents. Kenneth, although more socially outgoing than Gerald, was equally scholarly and won a Commonwealth Scholarship to do graduate studies at the University of York in England. Gerald attended high school at University of Toronto Schools (UTS), a private school affiliated with the university.

But in the late 1960s, simmering tensions in his parents’ marriage boiled over. The mild-mannered, wry Ivon was depressed and drinking, while Patricia, much more gregarious than her husband and popular for her liveliness and beauty, had drifted from the marriage. Gerald told Kathy that during the Christmas break in 1969, Patricia walked into the dining room one evening and announced she and Ivon were separating. Kenneth asked, “Why’s that, Mom?” Patricia responded, “Because I’ve fallen in love with another man.” The two brothers went to their rooms and said nothing more. They didn’t try to console each other or find ways to express any feelings of sadness they might have had.

His conservatism was a reaction against that period, when the world seemed to be spinning out of control.

In December of 1970, Gerald and Ivon travelled, for Christmas, to Rome, where they expected Kenneth to show up. But Kenneth never met them. No one ever saw him again. For the rest of their lives, the family was plagued with uncertainty: Did Kenneth go into hiding, commit suicide, or was he killed? False hopes would flare up every few years as people contacted the family claiming to have seen Kenneth, but their information always proved unreliable.

The following December saw another tragedy. With Kenneth gone, Ivon and Gerald had given his bedroom to Gerald’s high school friend John Palmer. While living with Gerald, Palmer became ill with leukemia and died. As Michael Kieran, one of Gerald’s oldest friends, recalls, it was “another brutal psychic blow. Gerald lost one of his closest friends instantly over Christmas that year.”

Gerald was very guarded about the grief he carried inside him. The one time he talked to me at any length about his brother, he associated Kenneth’s disappearance with the chaos of the 1960s. He suggested that his own conservatism was a reaction against that period, when the world—both his personal life and the larger cultural upheavals of the time—seemed to be spinning out of control.

In the 1970s, when Gerald was an undergraduate at the University of Toronto, Ivon lost his job at Oxford University Press. Divorced, with a missing son, and now unemployed, Ivon came to lean on Gerald, who continued to live at home with his father. “He felt his father, after all the tragedy in his life, would fall apart without him,” Kathy recalls. “He was the only family left.”

After divorcing Ivon, Patricia married John Irwin, a public relations man at Exxon Corporation, and moved to New York. She wrote a dissertation on Thomas Carlyle at the City University of New York (in her acknowledgements, she thanked Gerald for translating Carlyle’s Greek epigraphs and discussing Jean-Jacques Rousseau with her).

Reviewing an Alice Munro short story collection in 1987, Gerald noticed that the stories didn’t portray how “separated parents hear about each other through their children.” Gerald, by contrast, seems to have been a conduit between his parents as he carried on an extensive correspondence with his mother. Ivon never stopped loving Patricia, and she could be nostalgic for her Toronto life. Gerald became the linchpin of the surviving family, the go-between who kept lines of communication open.

Ivon mended over time and found other work as a freelance writer, editor, and fact checker. Gerald would occasionally assign his father book reviews to write, and they lived together until Gerald was forty-eight. Kathy was a caregiver for Ivon when he developed dementia in his seventies. He eventually died in 2010.

GERALD’S NEED TO care for his father perhaps explains his odd decision to get a law degree. With his scholarly bent, he could have become an academic like his grandfather or his mother, but he may have felt that practising law was the more practical choice. He was called to the Ontario bar in 1981. Although he had uncles at high-powered law firms, he set up his shingle in a small private practice.

While Gerald was diligent about looking after his clients, his heart was never in the law, and he developed a side hustle as a writer and editor. In the early 1980s, he was dating the experimental artist Judith Doyle, who created works of media-inflected art using new technologies such as fax machines and the personal computer. Doyle recruited Gerald to join the editorial board of Impulse, a glossy square-format Toronto art magazine (in the mode of Artforum or Avalanche).

While working on Impulse, Gerald was approached by the writer David Warren, who was then brainstorming a new magazine that would eventually be called The Idler. Gerald quickly became the managing editor, saying goodbye to law. Warren and Gerald assembled a formidable team that included associate editor Paul Wilson, publisher Wodek Szemberg, and art director Mitzi Hamilton. The novelist Russell Smith, whose first published work was an essay about his South African family in The Idler in 1989, would later remember the magazine as “an elegant, brilliant and often irritating thing, proudly pretentious and nostalgic, written by philosophers, curmudgeons, pedants, intellectual dandies.” The magazine published other notable Canadians at the beginning of their careers, including the writers Patricia Pearson and Douglas Cooper and cartoonists such as Seth and Maurice Vellekoop.

The Idler published essays opposing reproductive freedom and sexual liberalism. But it also championed the writings of novelist Scott Symons, who was openly gay, a celebrator of sexual freedom, and (closer to the publication’s heart) a monarchist and celebrator of the Loyalist tradition.

Gerald’s own conservatism was most evident in his tenure at The Idler. He was an incisive book reviewer, covering the latest novels by Robertson Davies and Margaret Atwood as well as academic studies of medieval chivalry and sociological accounts of the glamour of criminality. He wrote mock-learned philological essays that were half Borges and half Heidegger, tracing the shifting connotations of words like “person” and “vision” in many languages over centuries. He reported on political conventions, noting tensions within the Liberal and New Democratic parties. One essay was a provocative defence of duelling as a way of settling disputes.

It seems to me that his critical writing at times reflected the complexity of his feelings about those he was closest to. In a 1988 review of John Updike’s novel S., Gerald’s mother may have been on his mind. He noted that the heroine, Sarah P. Worth, who leaves her family for a faux-Hindu guru, the Arhat, “never gives up her prudence, affection, and cattiness; or her bossy good advice to those she seemed to have deserted. Her loved ones do not lose her insights or her gardening instructions. The Arhat rightly names her Kundalini: the serpent of female energy.” In Hindu iconography, in contrast to Christianity, serpents can be morally admirable.

Gerald was the workhorse who kept The Idler going. When the magazine folded in 1993, Gerald had been managing editor for most of its run. In 1991, the year The Idler won Magazine of the Year at Canada’s National Magazine Awards, Gerald was editor.

In 1998, he moved on to the National Post, where he was a member of the editorial board from 2004 to 2007 (he had the same job at the Globe and Mail from 2007 to 2017). But in truth, he was a jack of all trades: he could fact-check, proofread, line-edit, propose story ideas, report, write a weekly column on ideas (as he did at the Post for several years), and even act as a liaison with libel lawyers. He was much loved at the National Post.

IN THE MID-1990s, Gerald met Kathy Anderson, then a writer for Frank, an insider-journalism gossip magazine along the lines of the UK’s Private Eye. They married in 2000 and converted to Catholicism that same year. Gerald’s Catholicism was culturally infused. He attended church regularly and organized a men’s faith group that had theologically themed discussions. I didn’t share his religious faith but respected how he integrated it in his private conduct and his intellectual life.

Gerald and Kathy moved into a duplex apartment, which had been in the family since 1910, on Alcina Avenue near Wychwood Park. The property backed onto a ravine, perfect for the famous events Gerald and Kathy liked to put on (described by the arts writer John Bentley Mays as “parties with a purpose”). For me, these gatherings always produced the same vertigo that Alice experienced when she tumbled down the rabbit hole. I never knew who was going to show up. Gerald and Kathy were catholic in their social life, variously inviting priests from their church and a lawyer who wore a kilt. Sometimes there were monarchists present, and also people like Margaret Cannon, a refugee from the Deep South whose stories of the struggles of the Civil Rights era made a deep impression on me. The parties provided a lesson in building a community that transcended the political spectrum.

Gerald pushed me to be fair in summarizing ideas I disagreed with. His respect for accuracy made me a better writer and a better person.

My own friendship with Gerald offered a parallel lesson. On social issues, we rarely saw eye to eye. After reading Moby Dick and other works by Melville, I mentioned to Gerald that I found the queer interpretation of the novelist’s work to be utterly persuasive; he thought I was applying modern standards to the past. But we were both, rare in the newsroom where we worked, skeptical of George W. Bush’s foreign policy. My perspective was a standard anti-imperialist one, and Gerald’s approach was as a George Kennan–style realist, skeptical of the rhetoric of a purported crusade for democracy launched by people who had little understanding of the culture and history of the region they hoped to rule. Where Gerald’s Toryism met my socialism was in our common distrust of liberal individualism.

Our shared interests led to many discussions of the work of Leo Strauss and his students, the Straussians. Gerald wasn’t a Straussian himself, but at the University of Toronto he had studied under Clifford Orwin, who belonged to a coterie gathered around the leading Straussian, Allan Bloom. In 2003, I wrote an article for the Boston Globe about the impact of Straussian ideas on the American right and American foreign policy (Paul Wolfowitz, among others, had studied with Bloom). Gerald’s fact-checking notes pushed me to separate out what was valuable in the philosopher’s work from the dubious uses to which it was put by some of his students, and more generally to be fair in summarizing ideas I disagreed with. Gerald’s bracing respect for accuracy made me a better writer and a better person.

The key to Gerald’s conservatism was the affinity he felt for the philosopher George Parkin Grant, one of the most profound political thinkers in our country’s history. Grant was, like Gerald, a truly anomalous thinker: a Christian Platonist—someone who tried to effect an impossible reconciliation between ancient Greek abstraction and the specificity of the religious ideal of an incarnate God—who was always mindful of Canada’s Loyalist heritage, and who engaged with a diverse array of thinkers. Grant’s radical critique of modernity put him outside of conventional politics. He supported robust social democratic economics and was a fierce critic of imperialism (becoming a hero of the Canadian New Left for his unvarnished denunciation of the Vietnam War as “evil”). He was also an opponent of reproductive freedom and euthanasia (which made him a hero on the Canadian religious right). Grant was sometimes called a “Red Tory” but, like Gerald, he rejected that label.

Gerald’s best piece of writing was a long essay in the academic volume George Grant and the Subversion of Modernity, published in 1996, which examined how Grant could admire two very different figures: Simone Weil (the saintly anti-fascist mystic) and the novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline (the despicable antisemite and Nazi collaborator). Eschewing the simple evasion that Céline’s great prose makes him worth reading, Gerald zeroed in on the fact that in his final novels the French writer conveyed, even from the point of view of the wrong side of history, the experience “of weakness, of defeat, of tragedy, of losers.” This intense sensitivity to “the frailness of things” united Céline, Weil, and Grant.

During the Second World War, Grant lived through the Blitz in London on the south side of the Thames, which likely contributed to his opposition to the Vietnam War and his responsiveness to Céline’s unforgettable account of France under Allied bombardment. In a powerful passage testifying to his own literary skills, Gerald distilled the experience of aerial bombardment: “Under the relentless RAF, everything is vibrating, trembling—everything ordinarily solid: the earth, the walls, the floors and ceilings—and everything liquid but ordinarily still: the soup in one’s bowl, the water in the pond, the muck in the pigsty.”

Grant loved Weil and Céline because the world of hardship they described resonated with his particular brand of Christianity. It was not a Christianity of triumph but a Christianity of fragility and comradeship in shared suffering, a Christianity aware of what Grant called “the helplessness of God.”

The “frailness of things” was something Gerald knew in his bones. He could never forget we lived in a shaky and uncertain world, full of trap doors and snares, where a father could need lifelong tending, where a brother could one day disappear.

The frailty of life includes the frailty of Canada. Grantian conservatism was a real force in Canadian culture in the 1960s, but fell into abeyance in recent decades as continental integration, free trade, and globalization became the order of the day. With the rise of Donald Trump, Grant’s unique legacy deserves a revival. Grant was not categorically devoted to capitalism or anti-liberalism. His loyalism was no mere antiquarian hobby, but an inspiration for maintaining sovereignty in the face of empire. He taught us that conservatism could mean loving our particular national traditions as living guides. And Gerald taught me that this noble traditionalism was no mere abstract ideal but a living value embodied in character and memory.

A DEEPER AND MORE personal lesson in cherishing the frailty of life came in Gerald’s last years. We don’t know when his Alzheimer’s started. In 2017, Gerald left his job at the Globe. That was the year I first noticed, while talking to Gerald at a party, that he wasn’t fully present. A once lively figure became strangely wraith-like. Kathy suspects the disease had taken root years before, though the official diagnosis came in 2021.

Even with the loss of memory, essential elements of Gerald’s personality remained. When I speak to people about him, the most common word that crops up isn’t “smart”; it’s “kind.” Elaine Evans, who worked at The Idler, told me after his death that she started “drilling down into Geraldness. And everybody says ‘kind.’ And I’ve been thinking, What do people mean when they say ‘kind’? In Gerald’s case, as in so many others, they mean vulnerable. They mean gentle. They mean humble.”

As Gerald’s memory decayed, his gentleness and empathy persisted. A few years before he died, Kathy took Gerald on a trip to Nova Scotia, where both had family. Gerald’s Alzheimer’s was well advanced, so it was an exhausting trip, and the flight back was humiliating. When they arrived home, Kathy recalls, “We were sitting on the chesterfield together, and I started to cry. He had no language left, just the sounds of words, but he was the one comforting me, with love and reassurance.”

After Gerald’s death, Kathy donated his brain to the Tanz Centre for Research in Neurodegenerative Diseases, at the University of Toronto, eager to study it because of his rare condition. In death as in life, Gerald’s brain remains a gift.

From the editors
Belief is treated like branding: pick a side, stick with it, never blink. There’s something quietly radical about admitting you were wrong, or that the world changed and you did too. And in media, as in politics, we need more of it. That’s why The Walrus is launching—in generous partnership with Gail Singer, and with support from Joshua Knelman—an annual essay series that invites writers to explore moments of reconsideration and reversal. We’ve named it after Bernard Schiff, a former associate publisher and a foundational figure in The Walrus’s early days, who loved to wrestle with hard questions. Jeet Heer’s essay is the first in the series.

Jeet Heer is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation and author of two books, In Love with Art and Sweet Lechery.

Kyle Scott (kjscott.com) is a Vancouver-based artist and illustrator.