Monday 18 January 2016

Dispatches from the Front: The Life of Matthew Halton, Canada's Voice at War


Matt's wartime broadcasts for the CBC were regularly used on the BBC; his dispatches from the front were widely published by British newspapers as well as the Toronto Daily Star and Maclean's. In 1944 the Association of British Publishers named him one of the five best war correspondents of World War Two. He won one of the most prestigious broadcasting prizes in the United States and was admitted to the Canadian News Hall of Fame. King George VI awarded him the Order of the British Empire. Today though, more than five decades after his death, Matthew Henry Halton is a more or less forgotten name for all but survivors of the war-time generation.
In order to correct his once-famous father's drift into obscurity, David Halton (also a journalist for the Toronto Star and the CBC like his Dad) spent four years conducting interviews, combing over his father's letters and diaries, reading the estimated four million words of Matt Halton's journalism preserved in the national archives, and writing the first biography of this remarkable Canadian. In his time, Matt Halton was every bit as famous as Edward R. Murrow – an estimated 80% of Canadians would gather around the family radio to hear Halton's nightly battlefield reports during WWII – and I'd agree that it's a shame that I'd never heard of him before. This biography was long overdue; but while it's a thoroughly researched and fact-filled tome (there are 32 pages of footnotes, over a hundred titles in the “Select Bibliography”), I didn't think that the writing was quite up to the subject. I learned a lot about Halton's career and writings, but very little about the man himself; unfortunately, Dispatches from the Front reads like a really long wikipedia entry.

I wish there had been more about Halton's childhood: As lower-class Brits (his father started coal-mining at 12), the senior Haltons took advantage of a late 19th century program to emigrate to Canada; receiving 200 acres in the wilderness in exchange for “improving” it. After a harrowing trip halfway across the globe, the Haltons arrived in the foothills of Pincher Creek, Alberta and were never able to make a living off the miserable land. Despite hunger and poverty and a necessitated move into the town-site (where the senior Halton was obliged to become the “honeyman” cleaning out privies), Matt Halton spent his entire life romanticising the beauty of Pincher Creek (and having been there myself, I'd agree it's one of the most beautiful landscapes I've ever seen). I appreciated that later in life, when Halton would once again go on about Pincher Creek, his colleagues would point out the irony of the tuxedo-clad bon vivant becoming wistful about riding on the back of that honey-wagon; I was left wanting more about these years and their life-long hold on Halton's imagination.

I marvelled that the young and impoverished Halton would need to work a year as a teacher in remote one-room schools in order to afford the next year at the University of Alberta, going back and forth between the two lives until finally receiving a scholarship to study in London. From here, his education and early career skip briskly along until Halton is suddenly the top foreign correspondent for the Toronto Daily Star; with a fat expense account and the editorial freedom to traipse around Europe in search of the next big story. While in Munich in 1933, Halton attended a Hitler rally and was alarmed by what he saw:
Using all the tricks of oratory with the most patent disingenuousness, the little Austrian house-painter in his ugly brown uniform described the “degradation” of Germany in searing phrases and a thundering voice that turned his hearers into maddened, moaning fanatics.
In the era of appeasement, it seemed that Halton was the only journalist warning about Germany's war preparations, and over the next two decades, he was often perceptive and prescient; warning about events that came to pass, even as he was pilloried for his pessimism in other Canadian news outlets. He was also always at the vanguard of history – riding along with the Republican army at the outset of the Spanish Civil War, Halton was urgently called back to London to cover the abdication of King Edward VIII (I love this as a snapshot of Canadian priorities at the time). Halton attended the 1936 Munich Olympics (apparently the only journalist not hoodwinked by Goebbels' propaganda machine), rode along as Germany invaded the Sudetenland (as the only journalist who wrote that the Nazis wouldn't stop there), and when full-out war did erupt, Halton was embedded with the army in Africa and Italy, landed with the Canadians on D-Day, was the first Allied soldier greeted by the Resistance during the liberation of Paris, and was at the forefront as Belgium, Holland, and Germany itself were liberated. Along the way, Halton was a pioneer of written journalism (anticipating the New Journalism of the 1960s by inserting his own voice into his reports), a pioneer of radio journalism (recording actual battlefield sounds to blend into his later newscasts), and participated in early television journalism (which he didn't much care for). 

David Halton tries somewhat to round out his father's story by including tales of his extravagant living, hard drinking, cockeyed risk-taking, and overt womanising, but it doesn't quite add up to a satisfyingly complete picture of a life. And while I appreciate that David might have been trying to preserve a journalistic impartiality, he doesn't even include much in the way of his own memories of his father. As for the writing, I find that whenever a biography has frequent paragraphs with multiple footnotes in them, it can't help but read as a listing of information instead of a flowing narrative. And what about this: While trying to explain why his mother would have been ambivalent about his father's infidelities, David writes, Was this the proverbial “open marriage”? Well, what proverb are we talking about exactly? I expected much better writing from a successful journalist like David Halton.

In the end, I am glad that Halton wrote this book: His father deserves to be remembered and I learned a lot from it. (Why had I never before heard that the Vichy government of France had their army fighting on the side of the Nazis; that the Vichy French army held faraway Syria and Lebanon and that the British were actually fighting the French on those battlefields during WWII? Cheese-eating Surrender Monkeys is one thing, but...) Overall, I'm happy to have read Dispatches from the Front despite its shortcomings.


I can only imagine that it was the important subject matter and not the actual end-product that put Dispatches from the Front on two prestigious Canadian nonfiction literary awards lists. As the RBC Taylor nominees were just released last week, that's what spurred my interest in reading this book, and I hope to get to all the shortlist before the winner is announced.


2016 RBC Taylor Prize Nominees
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