Burn before reading
Unbuttoned: A History of Mackenzie King’s Secret Life By Christopher Dummitt McGill-Queen’s University Press 352 pp; $34.95
Irecall years ago interviewing the late Texas journalist Molly Ivins, a liberal from the Lone Star State who j ust doted on Canada. Some of her praise, however, was not entirely pleasing. Canadians are the only people who eat up all their oatmeal, she said, as if that was the most endearing trait you could imagine. We were just that boring.
I thought at the time that I might mention our famous Prime Minister, Pierre Trudeau, cuckolded (we all assumed) by one of the Rolling Stones – I forget which one. That was not eating your oatmeal. But really it was Mackenzie King who put all the American presidents to shame in the weirdness department.
I’m pleased to note that, in the pages of Professor Christopher Dummitt’s Unbuttoned: A History of Mackenzie King’s Secret Life, others are additionally grateful to King for providing an answer to Molly Ivins. Dummitt, for example, quotes from an article by the political scientist Reg Whitaker who ends his candid portrait of Mackenzie King “on a note of pride.” Whitaker writes, “There is more to Mackenzie King, and to Canada, than meets the eye.” Dummitt also quotes an early biographer, the renowned journalist Bruce Hutchison, who declares of King that “outwardly the dullest, he was inwardly the most vivid.”
It is a character in a Robertson Davies novel, however, who best articulates the contradictory nature of the man. “Mackenzie King rules Canada,” this character states, “because he himself is the embodiment of Canada – cold and cautious on the outside, dowdy and fussy in every overt action, but inside a mass of intuition and dark intimations.”
That should have made Molly Ivins think twice about characterizing this nation of oatmeal eaters.
By now the outlines of King’s personality and career are well known – chronicled in everything from scholarly, multi-volumed biographies to sensationalized exposés such as C.P. Stacey’s bestselling A Very Double Life. Enough has been written, indeed, to spare us another Mackenzie King study for quite a long time. Everyone knows the story of King, lifelong bachelor devoted to his mother, nighttime stroller in Ottawa enjoying the conversation of prostitutes – with some of whom he may have had sex. Especially well known is King’s affection for Pat, his Irish Terrier, and how King suspended a meeting of the cabinet War Committee so he could be with his beloved companion in the dog’s dying moments. King was ever after sensitive to Pat’s presence – he could feel the wag of his ghostly tail signifying emotional support.
About all that can be said about such behaviour has been said, which is why Dummitt informs the reader that the book is not so much about King as about the eventual release of his diary – a fantastic document. “Every day, for almost fifty-seven years,” Dummitt writes, “King recorded his life.” By the time he wrote his last words, King had filled thousands of pages. It was the dream and the nightmare of a biographer.
King’s stated desire that this diary should not be exposed to the public – that it indeed should be destroyed – complicated matters. To cope with this legacy King’s estate selected four literary executors – all upright men of the civil service who took their obligations to King’s shade seriously. They appointed an official biographer, a man named MacGregor Dawson who set to work in late 1950, the year of King’s death, with the hope that he could complete the task in two years. By the time Dawson died in 1958, however, there was still the mountain known as the diary to cope with, with no end in sight despite the employment of numerous research assistants and stenographers. The question remained of how to handle King’s desire to do away with the diary, a wish that at least one of the executors believed should be respected.
Another official biographer was duly appointed, who eventually produced two further volumes of his life. In the meantime other biographers jumped in, notably Bruce Hutchison, whose 1952 The Incredible Canadian was a well- written narrative that mentioned King’s double life, including his spiritual practices. The book was generally received positively, though some were put off by the author’s candour. It was the pre-Peter C. Newman era, where a certain deference towards the subject was held to be proper for the biographical enterprise. We had to handle delicately the character of our public men – or else who would enter the government?
Outrage was expressed by the publication of a King biography in 1955 entitled The Age of Mackenzie King; The Rise of the Leader, by two left-wing academics, Harry Ferns and Bernard Ostry. Unlike Hutchison, who aimed for a certain balance and sympathy, Ferns and Ostry wrote with undisguised hostility. Their account had little to do with seances and messages from the beyond, but portrayed King as a toady of capitalism.
Even before publication, Ferns and Ostry, who had let people know of their intentions, ran into obstacles. A pile of research papers was surreptitiously removed from Ostry’s desk while he took a lunch break, and Ostry had to make a fuss to get them back. Upon publication of the book, an initial wave of sales was quickly followed by oblivion. A former minister in King’s government, who took umbrage at what he called “Communist venom on every page,” successfully pressured the CBC into cancelling a program on the book. Displays of the book on bookshop windows quickly vanished.
Such resistance was futile in the long run. King’s changing reputation, from respectability to scandal, mirrored changes in social mores, including a rising tide of individualism and self-revelation. In 1975 the diary was finally opened to the public. It seemed a fitting surrender for the forces of deference and respectability. But King’s reputation, after an initial nosedive in the ’ 60s and ’ 70s, has rebounded. Who would not be astounded at the political longevity of such an unprepossessing man? There was surely wizardry and art behind that awkwardness and hypocrisy.
I hope in the afterlife, Mackenzie King is duly grateful to his mother and his dog for their support.