Books&writers Burn before reading

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 prePeter 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. said to obsess earthbound humans. Instead he makes this above all an account of husbands, wives, children and what they do to each other. This is what attracted him to the subject, the idea that the whole world is spellbound by feelings that originate in bedrooms and nurseries.

At the beginning we learn that Agamemnon’s wife, Clytemnestra, has decided she hates him. In hopes of winning a war, he wants the winds to blow in a way that will take his ships and soldiers to the battlefield. His oracles advise him that a god will change the winds if he sacrifices his daughter. He believes the oracles, in fact he’s forced to believe them: His soldiers pressure him to make the sacrifice. He allows the ritual killing of his 16-year-old daughter, Iphigenia, beginning the sequence of murders that destroy his family.