Two months into his new role as cohost of CBC Radio's This Morning, I'm sitting with Michael Enright in Fran's diner near Yonge and St. Clair. His trademark bow tie and suspenders have been replaced by a grey pullover, with a crisp blue and red plaid collar peeking over the top. As he speaks, he fidgets-with his collar, with his goatee, with his filterless cigarette.

Grudgingly, he has begun talking about himself. But when I'm halfway through my questions about the many jobs of his checkerboard career, he stops talking and leans dramatically toward me. "You have to understand something," he says, his eyes narrowing. "On the scale of things, what I do now is very unimportant." At first, I think he means that being a cohost on This Morning is insignificant, except then he says that what he did before was unimportant also.

"But don't you have the power to change things?" I ask. "God, I hope not," he replies, his trombone of a voice filling the room. He sits back and locks his eyes on mine. "Because I'm such a swell guy, I'd only change things for the better, right?"

While Enright talks he often stops mid-sentence to tell me how boring he is and how he would much rather ask questions about me (he does). I'm not sure if he's being modest or just wants me to think he is, but I do know that he hates reading about himself and has never saved a copy of anything he's written. He's not without ego altogether, but self-aggrandizing doesn't seem to be his thing. There's also something distinctly bad-boyish about him in person-like an ageing James Dean-that doesn't come across on the airwaves. He's playing with a jackknife.

As he edges away from my personal questions, I find myself thinking of a poem called "Alone," by Edgar Allan Poe (From childhood's hour I have not been / As others were -I have not seen / As others saw-I could not bring / My passions from a common spring...). Only, I'm not yet sure why. Maybe the answer can be found in something said to me earlier by Enright's friend, Ernest Hillen, author of The Way of a Boy. When I asked him why Enright is so respected for his writing and yet hasn't written any books, he said, "You need to become fairly quiet inside to write a book, and I don't think he's a quiet man inside." Hillen also said that with friends, Enright is often introspective but with other people he's usually on, like an actor, with one-liners coming around the corner very fast.

If this is true, then Enright is treating me like a friend, because the man I'm having coffee with is more philosophical than funny. And when he does say something funny, there is never laughter in his eyes. His wit "is a very serious wit," says Jack McLeod, a university professor and an old friend of Enright's, "in the sense that humour usually comes from some deep culture or sadness." And this is one of the most striking things about Enright. He seems to wear torment like a heavy coat of armour.

Three hours after sitting down to coffee, we are standing in a posh specialty store around the corner from Fran's. Enright needs to buy a replacement martini shaker. He's just taken one off the shelf and he's explaining to me with self-taught erudition that a real martini should be served in a shot glass. A slender male clerk, who has been lurking in Enright's shadow, steps forward and slips it out of his hand. "Let me get you one without fingerprints," he says, heading for the back room. "I don't need the box," Enright calls out after him, then strolls over to the counter. The cashier, a polished blonde, demands his name and phone number. "Why, will I win a car?" he drawls, and avoids giving his name.

As he's paying, he asks her why there's a whole shelf dedicated to martinis. "Where are you from, another planet?" she asks. "Martinis are in."

"That's unfortunate," Enright sighs. "I'll have to find myself a new drink."

If there's one thing Enright can't stand, it's being like everyone else. While writing this piece I often wondered if his sole purpose in life is just to go against his notion of the status quo. Enright has spent his life questioning things and, through his career, questioning people. In the late 1950s he even questioned his own religion, dropping out of a monastery in Dunkirk, New York, after his first year. "He's determined to see through the bullshit and you can relate that back to his abandonment of the Holy Mother," says John Gault, a former journalist and fellow disaffected Catholic, who worked with Enright at Maclean's back in the mid-'70s. "He's a deep questioner in a society that doesn't begin to question enough, in a media that's become embarrassingly homogeneous." Gault says that it is this suspicion and cynicism that enables Enright to question everyone-from celebrities to world leaders. And George Jamieson, a senior producer at As It Happens for the past 10 years, says Enright becomes cynical the minute "he smells the aroma of going along to get along." Enright calls this brand of journalism approaching things on the bias.

"He loves controversy," says Cate Cochran, who worked with him as a producer at As It Happens for more than five years. "He was impish in many ways about saying things that were deliberately provocative. Bratty is what he is." But, more often than not, there's value in Enright's brattiness.

For example, in 1988, while Enright was the host of As It Happens, three whales became trapped in the ice off the coast of Alaska near a village called Barrow. It quickly became a media zoo with more than 150 journalists from at least 26 TV networks worldwide. But while everybody else was talking about saving the whales, Enright was thinking about eating them. So he did an interview with a native from the village-the man who first told the community about the whales-who said if he had known there was going to be such a fuss, he would have killed them and hauled them out for food.

"If it doesn't have a little grit in it, it's not for him," says Jamieson. "This makes him endlessly entertaining to be around. It can also make him a horrendous pain in the ass if he gets on a tear about something." At As It Happens, the tedious issue for Enright was the environment. He thought the topic was boring-producers had to fight hard to get their stories aired. Tensions exploded behind the scenes on occasion because producers believed that the show's listeners were interested in hearing about environmental stories, even if Enright wasn't.

But Enright says he now regrets the times he's taken a stand just to be stubborn-a curse he says that comes with being Irish. "I sometimes oppose things for the sake of it. Just for the crack of it. You'll say it's black, I'll say it's white. You'll say it's up, I'll say it's down. Just for the hell of it. I like a good fight," he says. "That's cost me a lot." Surprisingly, one of his biggest regrets is the stance he took in an argument he had back in the late '60s with Michael Valpy, about the war in Vietnam. "It was stupid," Enright says, shaking his head. When I spoke to Valpy, he was touched that it had stayed on Enright's mind-after all, it was almost 30 years ago. Then he said he had felt very hurt and put down at the time. "Michael got into a spirited defence of the Vietnamese war," Valpy later explained, "but we were at a bar and there was lots of drink." In an earlier interview, Valpy had mentioned Enright's rapier wit. "If you were on the wrong end of it," he had said, "it could be painful."

Enright's contrary nature may also have cost him his diploma in high school, where he was always in trouble. And where, he jokes, his only ambition was "to fall in love with a beautiful woman whose father owned a bar." He failed Grade 12 twice and it still seems to bother him (when I bring it up he immediately mentions that Robert Fulford didn't finish high school either, "but he's a very smart man"). It also bothers Enright that he didn't go to university. Instead, he taught himself about politics, history, literature and art, and tried to cram a degree's worth of education in Chinese history and law into a Southam Fellowship he was awarded in his 30s. He is currently taking an opera appreciation course at night with his best friend, Joey Slinger, a Toronto Star columnist. (Slinger and Enright are so close they have been referred to as an old married couple, and Enright once told me that if he writes something and it makes Slinger laugh then he knows it's good.)

When I mention this self-taught knowledge to him, he peers at me through a veil of smoke. "Christ," he says, "I've been doing this for 35 years and I don't know anything. I know how to saddle a horse, I know how to push cattle and I know how to ride a motorcycle. That's about all." Then his lips curl into a boyish grin. "I'm probably the only radio host who knows how to cut a cow out of a herd," he says. "Gzowski couldn't do that."

Gzowski seems to be Enright's only real competition; the media have been comparing the two for years. They're both frustrated writers, their career paths have been similar and for 10 years the two of them anchored the CBC day-the sun rising just before Gzowski's Morningside and setting with Enright's As It Happens. Then Gzowski left, and because he was so closely identified with the show, the CBC couldn't just replace him. Morningside was dismantled, fused with Sunday Morning and reproduced as This Morning-a show with faster-paced interviews and two hosts. Enright cohosts the show with Avril Benoit, a newcomer from a private radio station in Montreal, but he is considered the heavyweight of the two.

Enright has played this role before. Twenty-four years ago, Gzowski stepped down as the host of This Country in the Morning, Morningside's predecessor, to try television, and Enright stepped up to give it a shot. His ratings were good, but he was given the boot at the end of the season. Enright likes to say it was because he wasn't "warm," but John Gault believes it was because the job was tailor-made for Gzowski. "Michael was a triangular peg in a hexagonal hole," Gault says. "He was stuck." I ask Enright about this and he nods. "You have to reconfigure a program according to the strengths of its host," he says, "and they didn't change the program at all. The whole thing was just a nightmare." So why, then, has he come back to give it a second shot? Gault thinks it's to prove that, on his own terms, he can do it as well as Gzowski. "It is a long-held suspicion on my part," he says, "that Peter is Michael's Moby Dick. He's hunting his great whale and he won't be satisfied until he achieves the kind of status that Peter achieved."

"Is Moby Dick supposed to be the guy or the whale?" Enright jokes, when I work up the nerve to ask him. There's an uncomfortable silence. "It's an interesting point," he says slowly. "We've done so much that is in parallel, even down to the places we worked." These included The Toronto Star, Maclean's, the CBC and small-town papers. "But I'd never want to copy Peter on the radio. I'd never want to copy him in any way but-" Enright's voice trails off. "It's like one of those things where you turn around and there he is. I don't know the answer. I haven't thought about it."

While it's doubtful that Enright's identity is at all influenced by Gzowski, This Morning's identity still seems torn between the two. Enright's appeal lies in his wicked wit, and so far he hasn't been given enough elbowroom to really be himself. Anyone who listened to him on As It Happens knows the CBC gurus must be reining him in. But Ian Brown, the former host of Sunday Morning says that "given the strength of Enright's points of view and his unwillingness to air bullshit or be any part of it, I think you'll see the show mutate more than you'll see Enright mutate."

Brown also says there are some people, maybe including Gzowski, who believe that taking on the job as host in the same time slot where Gzowski performed for 15 years is a suicidal act. Gzowski was deified for his warm, fuzzy, rambling interviews with everyday Canadians. Enright is famous for his edgy, in-your-face interrogations of world leaders and his pseudo-serious interviews with bizarre guests on As It Happens. "He can take the clothes off an emperor without the emperor even knowing they've been taken off," says writer David Cobb, who worked with Enright at Maclean's. "And he can also ring the notes of pathos until you're virtually weeping into the set." But, unlike Gzowski, he doesn't exactly have a morning-cup-of-coffee personality. It's more like an interesting scotch.

The biggest difference between Enright and Gzowski seems to have more to do with personality than anything else. Gzowski's exterior may be soft and Enright's exterior may be tough, says Brown, but he suspects that, in private, Enright is the more sentimental of the two. McLeod agrees. "Michael has a much wider and deeper circle of friends than Peter ever had," he says. "There's a bunch of feeling there-a whole bunch of heart."

"It's like that old New Yorker cartoon about life in New York and life in L.A.," Brown says. "In New York, the guy walks down the street and says to somebody OEDrop dead,' but he's thinking OEHave a nice day.' Then, there's life in L.A., where the guy says OEHave a nice day,' but he's thinking OEDrop dead.'"

Whether these personal comparisons are true or not, I don't know. But as far as the Moby Dick theory goes, even if Gzowski is Enright's great white whale, he isn't the driving factor behind his radio career. The driving factor is the frenetic pace that keeps him anchored securely in the present. When Enright's in the studio, time is measured in adrenaline-pumped broadcast minutes-five minutes to this, two minutes to that. Live radio is almost a high, Enright tells me, and he often crashes for awhile once the show is over. Now that he's at This Morning, his friends worry about him keeping up this pace-he gets up at 5 a.m. and often works well into the afternoon, taping segments for future shows or reading the books of featured authors. Enright, who's 55, isn't a morning person. George Jamieson is concerned that, with the intensity of getting a new show up and running, "his brain is going to turn into guacamole." He says there are times in the year when Enright gets really tired and starts to get a string of colds. "I think at some point he's going to have to take a sabbatical-just shut down and read 20 books in a row or something."

Sleet gushes down as Enright and I walk along Yonge Street. He looks as if he wants to get rid of me and I don't blame him. It's dinner time and we've been together all day. Walking next to him, I feel like a midget. He's over six feet tall and his black trench coat flutters behind him like a cape. Collar-length grey hair sticks out from beneath a black cap and his goatee is carefully trimmed. He looks like a jazz musician. But his feet make it hard for me to take him seriously. Beneath the smartly ironed cuffs of his slacks he's wearing Birkenstock sandals with mismatched grey socks.

He's too polite to tell me to get lost, and now he's talking about the fallacy of security-the way people take their vitamins and worry about getting the right job. He often jokes that the reason he's had so many jobs is because he can't hold one. But mostly it's because he bores easily. Paul Rush, the former chair of the School of Journalism at Ryerson Polytechnic University, says Enright's mind "hops around like a frog on a griddle."

When he was a teenager, Enright had thought it would be "neat" to write novels. While clerking for an insurance company (his first full-time job), he took a creative writing course in night school. "I loved Faulkner," he says. "He was a white-haired old guy who smoked a pipe and drank a bottle of scotch every day. He had an understanding of human weakness that I thought would be fascinating. That's why I went into newspapers. It was amazing someone would pay me money to write, because it was so much fun."

His first writing jobs were at the Times & Conservator in Brampton and the Kitchener-Waterloo Record; then he took off to England for a year, soul-searching. When he returned in 1966, he landed a job at The Globe and Mail. Enright was considered one of the best writers at the paper, and there he met many of the people who are still his closest friends, including Slinger. All he remembers about that time is laughing and writing-which isn't surprising, considering the Globe was at the corner of York and King and was surrounded by bars. Drinking was synonymous with journalism in the late '60s.

After he left the Globe in 1971, Enright jumped around a bit: in Montreal, he was a writer at Time and a morning host on Daybreak; in Ottawa, he was the "official press guy" for Keith Spicer (then the first commissioner of official languages); and after that he moved again to take a reporting job with The Toronto Star. In 1974, he did his stint hosting This Country in the Morning, then after he was fired, licked his wounds as a senior writer, then the assistant managing editor at Maclean's. In 1980, he became the celebrated editor of Quest-an award-winningcontrolled-circulationmagazine that folded in 1984. D. B. Scott, who was the managing editor for the final months following Lynn Cunningham's five-year stint, says that Cunningham and he did the same job-sweeping up behind Enright. "He put out a heck of a bow-wake," Scott says. "He was then one of the least organized people I had ever met, and didn't make any apologies for it."

Maybe this is one of the reasons Enright's been so successful in radio. It's a team effort. Enright's ideas and dramatic ability are supported by the producers' attention to the bow-wake.

Enright seems to have always followed his interests, without a minute's thought to climbing the career ladder. Well, maybe a minute. In 1985, after walking out on Report on BusinessMagazine during its launch (he lasted two weeks), he did try on the job of managing editor of CBC Radio News. He ditched it two years later to take on the troubled current affairs program As It Happens-the show had floundered after losing its star host, Barbara Frum. By then, he felt he had screwed up every opportunity he had had at radio and wanted to find out once and for all if he had what it took to make it. He did. As It Happens turned out to be his showcase. Like Enright, the show was edgy and restless. His sardonic humour was celebrated and it allowed him to do what he liked best-argue-and get paid for it.

Where are you going now?" Enright asks, in his world-weary voice. I tell him I'm looking for a subway. "God," his voice booms, "you're freezing. Come to my house and I'll drive you to one." Soon, we turn down a street lined with maple trees. "It's a pretentious street," he says. But his house is not. Daniel, Enright's 20-year-old son, is there and they go into the kitchen to chat. I take a quick look around the main floor. The carpets are well-worn and the white paint above the door is cracking. I peak into the front room. It's small and scattered with toys. There's a fireplace, a bookshelf, a rocking chair and three couches that don't match the walls or each other. But it doesn't look trashy, it looks comfortable-lived in.

There is nothing in the house that reflects the tragedies that Enright has endured. In 1990, Janet, his wife of 16 years, died after a long, difficult struggle with cancer. He was left to raise their three children-Daniel, Anthony and Nancy-on his own. Nancy, who is 15, has Down's syndrome and lives in the house for two weeks out of every month. Now, Enright has another son-two-year-old Gabriel-with his partner Karen Levine. He met Levine at As It Happens where she was a senior producer; she now works with him at This Morning.

This house is not far from the place where Enright spent his teens (around Bathurst and St. Clair). When we were talking at the diner, he told me that he used to run with a gang of kids for protection. The Toronto of the '50s was very different from the Toronto of the '90s, he explained. There was a lot of conflict between Protestants and Catholics then. It wasn't just in his teens, either. When he was around 10 another boy hit him in the head with a stone. "I've got a scar right here," he said, pointing to a small scar on the side of his forehead. He then went to a jock high school, St. Michael's-known for its hockey players-and he wasn't a jock. "I think I was pretty wild," he said. "I hated high school. I hated every second of it." He spent more time at pool halls and in the Rosedale ravines around the Don Valley than he did in class. Whatever his rebellion was about, Enright says it was an awful experience-more for his parents and teachers than himself.

At home there were problems. "The Irish don't get along with each other," he explained darkly. His father came from a huge family, eight boys and two girls. He worked for the Liquor Control Board. "He was outgoing and a very funny guy," Enright said. "My mother was different. She was sort of like a character in a Tennessee Williams play-very retiring and gentle, easily hurt." He wasn't close to her, but he was crazy about his grandmother, whom he described as "tough as Kelsey's nuts and Irish to the bone." She raised her family alone after her husband died in his 50s. She lived to 96. "I loved her a lot," Enright said. "She taught me about surviving."

The next time I see Enright it's at This Morning's bright, spacious home on the third floor of the CBC building-where a wall was knocked down to accommodate the roughly 30 staff. I'm in his office. It's small but it has a window, the sunlight illuminating his packed bookshelf. His desk isn't nearly as messy as I expect it to be, though there are lots of papers and three folders-one for each hour of the show. Taped on the wall next to the desk is a list of voice mail instructions scrawled in red magic marker. Enright is a self-admitted technophobe. He also says he can't add double digits.

It's 7:15 a.m. and he's checking his e-mail. "I love Michael Enright and miss him on As It Happens," he reads aloud. "But is it really necessary for him to swear so early in the morning? He said 'hell' twice before 10 a.m." Enright seems pleased with that one, but then he stops typing and looks at me over the top of his black-rimmed glasses. "Sometimes I get e-mail that says: 'Bring Gzowski back,'" he says. "That really sets me up for the day. It's terrific."

His walls are plastered with pictures of horses and cowboys. There's one of him on a horse named High Topper on a hillside in Montana, where he has taken part in a couple of cattle runs. He first started going there soon after Janet died and fell in love with the people. "Cowboys are disappearing from the face of the earth," he says. "They're like Borneo tribesmen or something." In the picture, with his hat, boots and suede chaps (pronounced "shaps," Slinger had warned me earlier, with an impressive rendition of Enright's baritone voice), he looks as if he were born on a horse.

Many of the people I interviewed thought that Enright had taken up riding in the past 10 years just to be different-which wouldn't be out of character-but he's been riding horses all his life. When he was a kid, he mucked out the stalls at a riding stable that used to be where the Don Valley Golf Course is now. In return, he got to ride for free. He likes riding for the same reason he likes cattle herding and his Kawasaki 1500 motorcycle and all forms of risk, including live radio. "It keeps you in the present," he says. "And since all fear lies in the future, you can't be afraid. So you're moving fast in order to run away from fear." What happens, then, if he's left alone with himself and he has to think? "I usually pick up a book," he says. "I don't know myself very well. I don't think I spend a lot of time trying to figure out if I'm this or that."

He avoids introspection but admits that he worries a lot-especially about his kids. He also says that, growing up Irish, you go through life covered in guilt. He always seems to be feeling guilty about something-about not writing or even about not feeling guilty. So when Enright starts to think too much about the things that have happened in his life, or the things that could happen, he turns to a book or he gets up and does something. "If I sit around and brood," he says, "I will go into a complete funk." But self-pity isn't in his repertoire. In the time that I spent with Enright I never once heard him lament the bad fortune that has shadowed his life. As one friend of his put it: Enright is a man who endures, both on a personal and a professional level.

Avril Benoit has the day off, and Enright is alone in the studio. The five-minute countdown is on. He bends forward and puts his lips close to the mike. "Are you sure the reverend is going to show up?" he asks, referring to Bill Phipps, the controversial new moderator of the United Church of Canada.

"Yes," the associate producer replies calmly from the control room, smiling at him through the glass.

"You have faith, my child. Has he arrived in the building yet?" She shakes her head no. He takes a big swig of water and pops vitamin C tablets like candy.

In the control room, Marika, the studio director, reads the greens, laughs, and asks Enright if he's seen the opening. He nods, stonefaced. It has him saying that he spends all his money on booze and handguns, the latter probably a reference to a running feud Enright once had with hunters after saying on the radio they were all "bombed." As the countdown continues, Enright complains about the yellow stickies left behind from a show that used the studio the night before and mutters, "I'd rather be bowling." With one minute to air, Bill Phipps breezes in. "Watch your language, everyone," Enright jokes. He is starting to look nervous, swallowing and taking deep breaths. (He tells me later that he always gets nervous one minute before the show. "It's panic time," he says. "It's like the moment between when the pilot says, 'Holy Christ' and the airplane hits the mountain. That's what it feels like.")

After Phipps comes the "Unconventional Wisdom" panel; one of the guests, Harvie Andre, a politician from Calgary, keeps calling Enright "Peter." The second time he does it, Enright says, "There you go again! I want you to write it down on a piece of paper M-I-C...." Andre apologizes by saying that it's early in Calgary. "It's 1957 in Calgary," Enright jokes, then begins calling Harvie "Ralph."

After two more hours, Marika signals the end of the show. Enright takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes. They're bloodshot. He stretches, cracking his back and rolling his shoulders. "I think I had too much horse on the weekend," he says. Following the show there's a story meeting. The entire staff gathers together on couches and chairs in the centre of the room. Ira Basen, This Morning's executive producer, sits in the middle. He rolls up his sleeves and asks what they thought of the day's show. "I could actually hear Michael thinking today," says one producer. A compliment, as Enright tends to sound bored when he's not interested in a subject. Basen agrees, then says that a caller complained that Enright cut off the financial expert in one of the segments. "It's because of the cutaways," Enright explains; he ran out of time. He takes the rest of the examination in stride, but to an outsider like me it seems a humbling experience to have to go through every day.

After the story meeting, Enright walks with me to the subway. As he leads me through the underground labyrinth of corridors, he tells me that no matter what the profile says about him, he won't like it. "I take criticism better than compliments," he says. I'm not sure if he's assuming I'll be complimentary or inviting me to be tough on him. When we get to the station he shakes my hand, then heads for his train. I watch him as he steps through the doors, his imposing figure moving gracefully, and there's one thing I can't get out of my mind. It's something that Enright said over coffee that first time at Fran's. He had gone up to his friend's farm near Shelburne the day before, to help him move 120 head of cattle. And he told me about his favourite horse there, Mooney, who is 15 or 16 years old.

"He's getting on," Enright said, "but he likes to run. And he runs with the idea that he hasn't got much speed left in him, so he wants to use it up." And when he said this, his eyes flared with passion-and what I realized later was sadness.