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Old Boys' News
A leader among men: remembering Alexis Troubetzkoy
By Jonathan Kay ’85
With each passing year, my memories of grade school get compressed into an ever-smaller cluster of scenes. Alexis Troubetzkoy, who passed away in January, features in perhaps half a dozen of these memories, always as a protagonist. He tended to dominate every room by virtue of being tall and handsome and confident. Alexis was descended from Russian nobility, and looked it. His most famous early ancestor was Prince Dmitry Timofeievich Troubetzkoy, who helped take Moscow back from Polish forces in 1612, thus ending the “Time of Troubles,” and ushering in the Romanov dynasty.
Alas, my experience with Alexis at Selwyn House coincided with my own Time of Troubles. I was not a well-behaved student, nor one who applied himself academically. Some of my indiscretions were truly outrageous, and would have given Alexis a reasonable basis for sending me packing to Westmount High. But though he commanded great respect (and even some measure of fear) from students, I found Alexis to be fair-minded and humane when I was dispatched to his office for a disciplinary infraction. He had a habit of ending our encounters with some word or gesture indicating that, against all evidence, he had faith that I would end up a success.
Which is to say, Alexis could be good cop and bad cop, all rolled into one. Thirty-five years later, now that I find myself leading others within my professional organization, I find myself falling back on the lessons in leadership he taught me in this accidental way.
One episode from a school-wide assembly in 1979 stands out clearly. I remember being on the east side of the gymnasium at 95 Côte St Antoine, sitting with the other Grade 7 students near the emergency exit that led to Argyle Avenue, and directly under the wooden pull-up bars that Peter Govan and David Cude then used in gym class as a baseline to evaluate our upper-body stamina. (William Black was by far the strongest in my class, but I digress.) As Alexis addressed us from the stage at the front of the room, a wise-ass standing a few rows in front of me thought he would impress us all by flipping Alexis the bird while the headmaster was looking the other way. I remember thinking that this was a fantastically reckless stunt, even by my own loose standards.
Alexis was a gifted speaker, and was very much possessed of himself during orations. He did not hunch over the podium and read from notes, but would engage the room energetically, casting his eye about to determine who was paying attention and who wasn’t. So it was entirely predictable that this poor, foolish student would suddenly fall under the basilisk’s gaze, with his middle finger still at full mast. What Alexis did next is something I remember clearly: He pointed at the boy, raised his voice in a loud but not unmeasured way, and declared: “I will see you in my office as soon as we’re done here.” Then without pausing to draw breath, Alexis continued with his prepared remarks as if nothing had happened.
Through the balance of the assembly, I noticed, Alexis took pains not to glance at the miscreant again—much as you wouldn’t pay notice to a fly you’d just flattened against a rock with a rolled up newspaper: It was understood that a swatted insect is more or less what the boy now had become. I also noticed that Alexis took care not to throw the boy out of the room. He was made to just sit there, appropriately shamed and anxious, an object of pity for the rest of us. (We couldn’t stop staring at him, both horrified and titillated by his agony.) Popular culture sentimentalizes kindly old educators who never raise their voice. But in real life, a leader can’t always be Dumbledore. He or she must occasionally exhibit streaks of Snape if they hope to earn the respect of the people around them.
Six years ago, after Alexis had retired and moved to Toronto, I became reconnected with him through our shared love of the written word. As an editor at the National Post, I would regularly scan the catalogs of Canadian publishers, looking for material to excerpt in my pages. A title that caught my eye in 2011 was Arctic Obsession: The Lure of the Far North, which told the extraordinary 18th-century tale of four Russian walrus hunters who were stranded for six years on a remote Arctic island. It was only after I’d contacted the publisher to arrange commercial terms that I noticed that the author was listed in the catalog as one “Alexis S. Troubetzkoy.”
From that point on, Alexis and I met regularly to discuss our respective writing projects, and the trajectories of people we’d both known at Selwyn House. Our last meetings took place last year at Brownes Bistro on Yonge Street, where we would dine with some of Alexis’ old friends. I could not help but notice that even as an old man eating cream of carrot soup, Alexis was still a leader among men, guiding the conversation to current events and upcoming vacation plans—while sunnily steering his contemporaries away from the sort of cranky, backward-facing fare you sometimes get from once-powerful men put out to pasture. Whether alone with me, or in small groups, Alexis had a habit of giving structure to a conversation by proactively introducing new topics, like a seminar instructor in an advanced placement course—often by way of an amusing anecdote or a clever observation. He would then sit back and watch the discussion unfold.
I began meeting with Alexis for lunches in part because I was anxious to show my old headmaster that I had made something of life, and that his faith in me all those years ago was justified. But in short order, I began appreciating these outings for their own sake. I am now old enough to anticipate the day that I, too, will be put out to pasture, and (God willing) will have to manage the long days of my retirement. If I am half so active as Alexis—who kept writing books, engaging lovingly with friends and family, traveling the world, and supporting important philanthropic causes, till almost the last days of his life—I will count my last chapter as a success.
Even in my Time of Troubles, during which I stumbled around half-blind in a fog of adolescent narcissism, I knew, on some level, how lucky I was to receive a Selwyn House education. Alexis Troubetzkoy never taught any of my classes, and my only truly substantive childhood interactions with him came after I had done something abominable. Yet despite this, he managed to inspire me in a way that (I hope) will endure until I am old and gray. And I would be surprised if hundreds of other Selwyn House graduates would not report much the same.
