16

Victorianitis

Even in the late 1940s when Mackenzie King retired, he had come to seem like a relic from a different age. Harry Ferns, who would go on to write The Age of Mackenzie King, wrote a series of short articles about the retired prime minister in the Canadian Forum, describing King as a gentleman of the old school. He was, claimed Ferns, a “respectable gentleman of no pretensions” and without any “wasting passions.” This latter mattered a good deal. “In the honored tradition of the old-fashioned Protestant middle class, [King] husbands his money, husbands his energy and works hard.” He didn’t smoke, nor was he a drinker – though he wasn’t an outright teetotaller. Ferns slyly joked that the prime minister’s closest staff were part of King’s image. They were also “non-smokers and non-drinkers.” Indeed, “his most effective principal secretary was one who even shunned coffee and liked his tea extremely weak.”1 King was, in other words, a Victorian. It might have been an odd assessment of someone who didn’t become prime minister until 1921, almost two decades after Victoria’s death, were it not for the fact that the term Victorian meant much more than simply the long reign of a single monarch.

In the years immediately after King’s death, Canada could still appear, at least on the surface, to conform in part to some of the respectable Victorian virtues. Sunday observance remained the norm, and even though the temperance movement was no longer active, the issue of drink continued to divide Canadian families. Further, in his book introducing Canada to outsiders, the journalist Ernest Watkins admitted that, while a majority of Canadians could not “accept without question the whole dogma of some Christian church … there is a majority that has faith in the values of the Christian civilization of this last five hundred years, of which the core is the conviction that the individual is accountable in the sight of God for his actions, that there are absolute standards of value against which every individual, be he commissar, general, priest or salesman, is to be judged.”2 Parents of Baby Boomers raised their children according to these principles.

Over the next two decades, the old moral certainties disappeared, replaced by a much more raucous maelstrom of competing ideas of what was fit and proper. In the process, to call something Victorian increasingly came to mean not just a little old-fashioned but also repressed and repressive. While much of this social revolution centred on youth – on rock’n’roll and sex and drugs – it’s also clear in retrospect that the cultural revolt was widespread and involved people of all ages. The parents of the Baby Boomers may not have always liked (may have violently objected to) the degree of change that they saw among some in the youth culture. But many older Canadians, those who were already adults at the start of the 1960s, had already been loosening up in the kinds of ways that the ’60s young radicals would push to extremes.

By the early 1970s, the Victorian values that had only so recently seemed common sense and powerful were, for many, the subject of ridicule. Canadian writers made names for themselves by shocking their readers with just the right kind of daring rebellion. In Margaret Atwood’s Edible Woman, the young female main character who breaks with convention does so while living in a rented apartment above a prim landlady simply called “the lady down below.” In the novel, the landlady stands in for the socially conventional – peeking out from behind velvet curtains or listening for the sound of men’s steps on the stairs. Certainly, it wouldn’t be respectable to sully the backyard by anything so private as the hanging of laundry. If Atwood subtly mocked the lady down below, other writers eschewed subtlety. The 1976 Governor General Award for fiction went to Marian Engel’s Bear, a novel that imagined an erotic and romantic relationship between a middle-aged female archivist and a bear.

It wasn’t just fiction. Canadians came to appreciate a book like John Glassco’s Memoirs of Montparnasse, his slightly fictionalized memoir that was a tale of the sexual and social anti-Victorian revolution lived by one young man in 1920s Paris. In the 1970s, literary Canada was willing to celebrate, en masse, exactly the kind of social daring and turning away from the past that Glassco presented as part of his coming of age. The Canadian diplomat Charles Ritchie became a literary sensation with the publication of his artful, witty, and anti-puritanical diaries. Ritchie’s life story just happened to coincide with the recent past of international high politics – London in the middle of the Second World War, negotiations over the creation of the United Nations. But what Ritchie revealed was a world where what happened on the surface was not at all what happened underneath. We learn of his multiple sexual affairs, his drinking, and mostly his skeptical and intelligent critique of his political bosses. All was not at it seemed behind the curtains, either in Margaret Atwood’s Toronto or in Charles Ritchie’s diplomatic London.3

In 1975 Christina Newman wrote a series of articles in Maclean’s on how the old Ottawa Establishment of the Mackenzie King and St Laurent years had been replaced in the Trudeau era. She referred particularly to the federal civil service, but she also meant the culturally closed world of the Oxbridge-educated, old-boy network that Blair Fraser and Jack Pickersgill and Bruce Hutchison and others had inhabited. The social centre of the new Ottawa under Trudeau could be found at the annual New Year’s party of a dynamic middle-aged Jewish couple, both of whom were deputy ministers in the Trudeau government. They also had a unique connection to Mackenzie King. For the article presented the brilliant statistician Sylvia Ostry and her husband, Bernard, as the symbols of this new Ottawa. From his time as a slightly too risqué critic in the 1950s, Bernard Ostry had risen far. The Liberal Party ruled again in Ottawa in the 1970s. But it was not your grandfather’s Liberal Party. This time, that critic of Mackenzie King who had been too controversial for the 1950s now represented the new guard.⁴

The publication of C.P. Stacey’s A Very Double Life fitted perfectly into this context of a belated revolt against Victorianism. The public pounced on news of King’s sexual exploits in the 1970s. Partly this was because Stacey had finally given them the evidence. The newly released diaries served up details of King’s private life which had previously been hidden. Even though the evidence that King had sex with prostitutes was tentative and unclear, Stacey’s argument was logical and convincing. King’s references to nights and money being “worse than wasted,” especially when buttressed by his self-flagellation and guilt, certainly sounded like evidence of a young man succumbing to his sexual desires. There had always been a keen interest in King’s private life and now Stacey seemed to show that there was a great deal that had previously been concealed.

But it’s one thing to be interested in King’s romantic or private life, and quite another to be willing to embrace this curiosity openly and unreservedly. In the 1950s, there was still a culture of restraint (and perhaps shame) about being so avowedly voyeuristic. By the mid-1970s, in the midst of the sexual revolution, the fascination with Freudianism, and the quest for more authentic, real, frank expressions of all aspects of human desire that was being promoted throughout the culture, there were many willing to consign shame and restraint to the past. The anti-Victorian cultural revolt involved not just the young but also middle-aged professors and journalists, members of the “over thirty” crowd who only so recently weren’t to be trusted. These critics saw in stories of King’s secret sex life a confirmation that everything they had thought about the recent past was true. Earlier generations really had been repressed, and when they hadn’t, they had covered it up. The fact of King’s excessive guilt and odd self-flagellation only fit more perfectly into this sense of the inevitable progression away from the repressive Victorianism of an older Canada.

The differences between King’s day and 1970s Canada were obvious and frequently emphasized. Even when a reviewer sympathized with King, it was often because of how naive King and his era seemed in retrospect. “Poor old Mackenzie King!” wrote one critic. “Here we all are, in this easy age of whooping around on water beds, snickering over his diaries because they indicate how often he was tempted as a young man to find unholy beds on King Street … His diaries really tell us nothing. Our 1976 minds write between the lines.” Allan Fotheringham earned plenty of laughs when he joked about the state of Canada in the 1970s. Here Canadians were in 1976 with the Governor General’s Award going to a novel that imagined an erotic relationship between a woman and a bear “and 30 years ago we have a prime minister who was getting it on with his dog.”5 Of course, Stacey’s book said no such thing about King and his dog, but the details didn’t matter. The laughter that greeted Fotheringham’s quip underlined how Canadians could now joke openly about the bizarre desires and actions that earlier generations had hidden.

Commenting on Stacey’s book, a Toronto Star book reviewer quoted from Marian Engel, author of Bear, about the secrets and hidden lives of previous generations. “The Canadian tradition was, on the whole, genteel,” she argued. “Any evidence that an ancestor had performed any acts other than working and praying was usually destroyed.” The Ottawa Journal devoted its main editorial to the issue, arguing that “part of the shock of the revelations about King comes from a peculiar Canadian tradition that a prime minister – especially a prime minister such as King – is an office, not a person. The country now knows that public men do have private lives.” With these new revelations the public could see what resulted from “the pressures of Victorian morality.”6

Not all celebrated this outing of what had previously been hidden. But in writing to decry Stacey’s book and the publicity journalists gave it, they only reinforced the notion that society was changing – away from the values they held dear. One critic complained that the outing of secrets was something that American and not Canadian journalists did. It was Americans who wanted to “hang their dirty linen on the line.” “Is nothing sacred anymore?” he asked. Though, of course, that was just it. Dirty linen, including undergarments soiled with bodily secretions or the stains of sexual intercourse, is exactly what those who were overturning Victorian notions of privacy were so keen to expose. Perhaps these parts of normal human existence could simply be spoken about openly.⁷

Some critics saw that C.P. Stacey was himself a product of an earlier age. Even though Stacey exposed King’s private life in ways that he wouldn’t have done twenty years earlier, his views were decidedly old-fashioned. How else could he see in the diary evidence that King was a “ladies’ man”? In Saturday Night James Eayrs gave a more worldly reading of the evidence. King was no “victim of satyriasis,” Eayrs wrote. Indeed, the diary is full of entries of King returning home, having defeated “temptation” and having not “fallen.” For a real account of a “voluptuary,” one could peruse the diaries of the “American composer Ned Rorem, with its bodycounts of buggery, its checklists of orgasm, its tales of nights of orgy at the Continental Baths.” Surely, thought Eayrs, “King’s libido, so far from flaring like an oil-well, flickered rather briefly.”8

Reg Whitaker, perhaps the most observant critic of all things Mackenzie King in these years, agreed. For those living in the “jadedly permissive age” of 1970s North America, especially if “one’s tastes run to Deep Throat and Penthouse,” Whitaker wrote, there wasn’t much in A Very Double Life to titillate. Instead, “the question of sex and the Canadian Prime Minister recalls Dr. Johnson’s quip about the dog walking on his hind legs: it is not that the thing is done well, but that it is done at all.” ⁹

The assuredness with which some critics labelled King’s Victorianism as backward came from a switch in moral language in the 1970s. The Freudian-infused age of psychology from the 1950s had spread outward in various directions but with the ultimate effect of locating claims for truth in the self. Even though psychoanalysis itself became largely discredited within official psychiatry in the 1970s, its influence in the wider culture continued. But even more so, a hodgepodge of psychological ideas, often mixed together in confusing and contradictory ways, pushed forward a therapeutic culture of self-fulfillment and authenticity. These ranged from the spread of self-affirming psychotherapeutic methods to the widely discussed Esalen Institute and the human-potentiality movement. Even the anti-psychiatry movement was itself rooted in a wider trend to find truths in the self. Anti-psychiatry intellectuals – from Michel Foucault to R.D. Laing – argued that it was society itself that was sick, not the mentally ill. They criticized the treatment of those in mental institutions and the very idea of sanity itself. Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest became a popular movie of the same name. Ironically, although the movement railed against uncaring psychiatrists, its own ideas could be traced back to many of the key themes of post-war psychoanalysis, rooted as they were in the view of mental health as existing on a spectrum. For different reasons, and with different intentions, the popular culture of 1970s North America was suffused with references to the need to find truth in authenticity and the self. When Canadians looked back on an earlier era, these therapeutic insights helped them to label entire historical periods as being not only backward but almost deranged.10

Writing in Maclean’s magazine, the political scientist Paul Fox borrowed Freudian language to diagnose the image of Mackenzie King that Stacey revealed in A Very Double Life. The book showed King to be “a genuine neurotic whose anxieties were produced by the double standard of Victorian puritanism and the muddy sentimentality of the Sir Galahad complex.” The difference between King and others of his age was only, wrote Fox, the “severity of his Victorianitis.” Others made the same diagnosis. The Vancouver Province reviewer labelled King “the troubled product of the senseless sensibilities, prudery, morals and attitudes of the Victorian Age as it prevailed in Canada.” Victorian-era morality had become a mental illness. The therapeutic shift in the wider culture had invited Canadians to consider openly what was more naturally human and by the 1970s it was a mix of psychological notions that provided the language by which they could distance themselves from earlier generations.¹¹

Many people in the 1950s raised the issue of Mackenzie King’s psychological particularities but the comments had remained tentative. When Bruce Hutchison had interviewed Liberal Party grandee Norman Lambert, Lambert let loose a long stream of anecdotes “on the machinations and the Freudian mysteries of King.” While Hutchison found this “very interesting and impassioned,” he concluded that it was of “no use for publication.” By the early 1970s, what had once been only brief references to new exotic terms like “complexes” and “Oedipus” and “mother cult” had morphed into a much more mainstream, widespread, and serious way of thinking.¹²

The power of this language is perhaps best found in the novels of one of the most influential Canadian novelists of the decade, Robertson Davies. In his Deptford trilogy, Davies poked and prodded the dark and hidden underside of Canadian life, the kinds of people who in the United States would have been called WASPs. This is nowhere more obvious than in The Manticore, the second volume in the trilogy, all of which is devoted to the extensive session of Jungian therapy undergone by the main character, David Staunton. The readers follow Staunton’s investigation of his own personality, unravelling his idiosyncracies as well as those of Canadian culture and the recent Canadian past, both fictional and real.

16.1 Robertson Davies

Davies assumes that readers will be as interested as he is in the inner workings or shadow side of life. Individuals need to know themselves – what they want others to see, what they themselves want to see, and even what they might prefer to hide. Staunton’s therapist explains that one’s “Shadow” is “that side of oneself to which so many real but rarely admitted parts of one’s personality must be assigned.” Even if the “Shadow” was dark and unpleasant, still it must be known and acknowledged. “Can you imagine a man without a Shadow?” she asks. “No … But you must recognize him, you know, your Shadow … accepting this ugly creature is needful if you are really looking for psychological wholeness.” 13

It isn’t long before Davies turns to Mackenzie King. As elsewhere, in the novel King stood for an older Canada. Staunton recalls that “there was something terribly stuffy about Canada in my boyhood – a want of daring and great dimension, a second-handedness in cultural matters, a frowsy old-woman quality.” For Staunton’s father, the reason was obvious: “It was the Prime Minister.” Davies goes on at length about King’s oddities, his hypocrisy, and his “conjuror-like ability to do something distracting with his right hand while preparing the denouement of his trick unobtrusively with his left hand.” But still Davies ultimately thinks that there was more to King than simple trickery or hypocrisy. “Mackenzie King rules Canada,” another character announces, “because he himself is the embodiment of Canada – cold and cautious on the outside, dowdy and pussy in every overt action, but inside a mass of intuition and dark intimations.” In this novel, and increasingly in the Canada of the 1970s, it is the dark intimations that matter. Others would later gleefully quote Davies’s statement that Canadians were secretly a “bizarre and passionate people.” “Accept the bland, quiet, rather dull Canadian for what he seems to be,” Davies warned, “[and] it’s just like putting your hand into a circular saw.”14

By the mid-1960s, a group of Canadian psychiatrists, led by one at the University of Toronto, urged that all acting politicians undergo psychiatric evaluation. An editorial in the Globe and Mail explained that “candidates would not only have to appear to be suitable, they would have to be suitable right to the very bottom of their psyches.” The idea matched the growing concern about what was being hidden in politics and in the individual psyche. Still, the proposal did raise skepticism. The paper wondered “how many statesmen of the past would have gotten past the examiner’s couch?”¹⁵ But this was just the point. The psychiatrists met with Blair Neatby, King’s official biographer, to speak to him on the subject. They saw King as the perfect test case, someone who clearly had been hiding a good deal of his life from the public, and perhaps an instance of just the kind of psychologically damaged leader that could be avoided in the future. Of course, the fact that King also was the most successful Canadian prime minister raised the issue of whether it took mental instability to succeed in politics.¹⁶ In any event, no politicians are on record as accepting the psychiatrists’ advice.

By the end of the 1960s and moving into the 1970s, a number of scholars came to start thinking about King from a psychological and psychoanalytic perspective. Some of them were historians and political scientists who were taking up this increasingly respectable science to see what its uses could be in the social sciences. Dawson had toyed with the ideas very loosely. But others wanted to apply the new concepts methodically. A young scholar, Joy Esberey, requested and was granted access to King’s family papers and correspondence in 1970. She wanted to explore whether a study of King’s childhood and family relations could explain his later political leadership. If psychiatrists told us that people’s personalities were formed at such an early age, why would this not be true of politicians? Esberey wasn’t alone. Another young graduate student wanted to study the same kind of thing – applying a psychological model outlined in studies of American foreign policy to the idiosyncratic Canadian prime minister. By the mid-1970s, Esberey was waging an academic debate with the political scientist John Courtney on the question of prime ministerial self-image and personality type and how these shaped decision making.17

Even Blair Neatby argued that biographers could no longer simply write a story of the political life while “drawing a decorous veil over [the subject’s] private idiosyncrasies.” As Neatby put it, “Sigmund Freud destroyed this convenient dichotomy between public and private life.” Given all that Freud had explained about the impact of early childhood experience and sexual repression on personality type, “it seems almost unscholarly not to look to a man’s relationship with his parents and siblings for enlightenment.” Yet Neatby had to admit that, as of yet, there was no good model of exactly how this should be done.¹⁸

Erik Erikson had written psychobiographies of Martin Luther and Mahatma Gandhi, yet, for historians, these works weren’t useful, revealing almost nothing about the wider historical context. Still, the psychological quirks of the individual had to be accounted for, especially in the case of Mackenzie King, where the evidence was so abundant. Even if King’s diary was often nothing more than “naïve rationalizations” of his behaviour, that still could be valuable. After all, “few exercises can be more revealing than daily self-justification over a period of fifty years. It might even be as informative as adult revelations during hourly sessions on a psychiatrist’s couch.” King described his dreams in great detail, “in a simple non-Freudian way.” Neatby pointed out that, when King saw “his mother in a red dress, it is enough for him that she is making her presence known; when he dreams of smashing busts of Laurier, he interprets this as a reminder that he should learn French.” Yet those coming later cannot accept King’s interpretation as sufficient: “A psychiatrist would surely arrive at a different interpretation.” 19

Even if the proper way forward wasn’t clear, it seemed necessary to go deeper and deeper inside the psyche of political leaders. This is one of the things that the revelations about King did: they provided the best case study to confirm that successful politicians needed scrutiny. Several months before the publication of A Very Double Life, the political scientist Reg Whitaker was already giving readers of Canadian Forum an account of the revelations in King’s diary, calling King the “dingbat in the Canadian belfry” but also citing the antipsychiatry icon R.D. Laing and arguing that there could be “method in madness, and lessons in lunacy.” For Laing (and for Whitaker here), the seemingly mad had stories to tell – insights to offer.

Whitaker took readers with him as he sat down to read the Mackenzie King diary in the reading room of the Public Archives in Ottawa. At first, he claimed that it seemed like “strange territory, not like other matter-of-fact diaries I have read before.” King appeared “an odd gentleman.” He believed that his dead loved ones, his ancestors, literally hovered around him. A small bump or rub from his dog could be a message from beyond. Any coincidence – the hands on a clock, the design in shaving foam – could be a sign of divine providence, a confirmation that King was destined for greatness. The more Whitaker read, the odder King seemed: “I read on and then realize that I am losing my moorings,” Whitaker wrote. “The man is quite crazy. The contradictions become noticeable, then significant, then insurmountable. The inner world of the public man begins in incongruity and ends in hallucination. The stream runs faster and wilder, the light darkens, and the shore is lost from sight.”²⁰

Still, Whitaker felt compelled to go onward. If King were alive in the 1970s, Whitaker thought, he might be found “browsing happily in the occult section of the paperback racks among the Lapsang Ramas and Tarot primers.” Yet this was a prime minister of Canada in the first half of the twentieth century. King’s love of his mother was almost too obvious. “A crude Freudian could have an endless picnic in the King diaries,” Whitaker exclaimed. “The Oedipal evidence abounds.” It is fitting that Whitaker ends the article on a note of pride. When Canadians bravely went inside themselves or inside the diary and the psyche of their most successful prime minister, they ultimately found something fascinating. Here the psychological journey inward matched the quest to do away with Victorian restraints, with respectability’s insistence on the surface of things. King may have been odd. But he also confirmed that Canadian politics, and Canada itself, wasn’t as dull as many had previously thought. “A strange man, a strange age, a strange country,” is how Whitaker put it: “There is more to Mackenzie King, and to Canada, than meets the eye.” 21

The “Weird Willie” phenomenon that exploded in the mid-1970s, and especially around publication of C.P. Stacey’s A Very Double Life, partly grew out of the mainstreaming of a kind of “loose Freudianism” that, by the 1970s, was very loose indeed. Stacey benefited from the increasing acceptance of poking at the dark innards of private life. This is one reason why Stacey could publish this book in the mid-1970s when, as he admitted, he couldn’t have imagined doing so twenty years earlier. Yet Stacey, a septuagenarian and a retired historian by the time his book came out, was prepared to go only so far. He referred to psychiatrists and to psychological concepts many times in the book. He explained King’s keeping of a diary by saying it was a form of “psychological relief.” He wrote of King’s “tendencies and susceptibilities.” He attributed his “obsession” with the Chicago nurse Mathilde Grossert to the fact that he saw her as a “mother figure,” and he noted the “element of fantasy in the attachment.” All of this shows that old historians can learn new tricks. But Stacey remained content mostly to point out the oddities. Other scholars could investigate King’s intentions more systematically. Stacey concluded: “I am content to let the psychologists and psychiatrists resolve these riddles, if they can.”²²

In fact, others did want to solve these riddles. One of the criticisms of Stacey’s book was that it wasn’t rigorous enough in the way it investigated King’s inner life. If one was really going to go down the rabbit hole, then it needed to be done professionally. David Lewis of the New Democratic Party complained that he finished the book wanting “some intellectual probing into the character that the diaries revealed.” Still, he had to admit that Stacey was “a historian, not a psychiatrist or psychologist.” The Financial Post reviewer admired the book but concluded that “the deeper psychological bases of both his public and private life … remain to be explored.” This was, perhaps not surprisingly, also Joy Esberey’s conclusion. “All historical biography need not be psychobiography,” she wrote, “but surely any study that purports to deal with the personality of the political actor, rather than the political office, must have a base more scientific than the personal opinion, no matter how perceptive, of the author.”23

After reading A Very Double Life, a University of Toronto medical student wrote a psychobiography of King that she published with her professor. What is striking is that, although they used a more scientific language, their overall assessment of King followed the same general direction set by Stacey. They spoke of how he led a “double life,” divided between his carnal lusts about which he felt abnormally guilty and the opposing sense of nobility and idealism rooted in a “childlike” moral code. There was no doubt that “King’s idealization of his mother is a classical case of the Freudian Oedipus complex – that is, failure to resolve the Oedipal conflict which psychoanalysts have associated with heterosexual loss of libido and in King’s case, impotence, except with debased women.” ²⁴

The psychobiography essentially found that King took too seriously the ideals of his own age. He was born in what it called the “hypocritical Victorian era” and was “crippled by guilt,” especially after he yielded to his sexual desires with prostitutes. Still, the study concluded that this guilt, and therefore King’s psychological state and formation, directly shaped his career choice. He “sublimated” his sexual urges, turning his energies instead into a passion for social reform. So to those who might say that the story of King and the prostitutes was nothing more than a private matter, the psychoanalytic answer was to show how profoundly these private urges and psychopathologies ultimately shaped King’s public decisions. The public and the private could not be so easily separated.

Joy Esberey’s book similarly took the language of morality and turned it into science. Where others – including the old-fashioned Stacey – saw King’s hypocrisy, Esberey pointed out the signs of neurosis. Esberey insisted that to speak of the importance of King’s “neurotic tendencies” did not imply condemnation or judgment: “The clinical label is useful only in so far as it is a key to identifying complex and interrelated set of interactions and defences, which had political as well as personal repercussions.” Again, she claims that King was “essentially a Victorian,” suffering from the Victorian need to catalogue his own sins. In this, his mother shaped King for the future. Esberey’s assessment of the mother-son relationship mirrored what many said about the Victorians in general. His mother’s love was “characterized by form rather than substance … Church going was more important than Christian service to others; people who could be helpful should be assiduously cultivated and companions selected from among their offspring; attainments should be pursued for financial rewards and enhanced status rather than for their own sake.” In this kind of assessment, King was the victim of a kind of society – its privileging of surface respectability and not authenticity.25

Only a few serious attempts were made to psychoanalyze King retroactively.²⁶ The task demanded a kind of scientific rigour that was difficult to achieve. And it wasn’t always necessary in order to gain wider insights. Yet, even if psychobiography ultimately did not become a dominant form of writing, the general thrust of scholarly study, especially in the historical profession, pushed ever more toward the complexities of identity. Beginning in the 1970s, historians came to complicate the nation’s past by emphasizing the many different kinds of Canadians whose stories were supposed to be told (but often weren’t) – highlighting the role of class, region, gender, sexuality, race, and religion in the process. The psychologizing of King was an early example of this trend: insisting on the need to explore rigorously the previously hidden and shameful parts of private life, and doing so out of a certainty that real answers could be found.

Canadians in the post-war decades, and especially in the 1970s, looked back increasingly derisively on the repressive moral codes of an earlier era, labelling them Victorian and out of date. A loose mix of psychological ideas, with their insistence on poking into the private, on using science to overturn taboo, provided one of the main justifications for this view. Critics could draw on a range of somewhat contradictory psychiatric languages – picking up Freudian terms one moment and then mixing them with the arguments of the antipsychiatry movement. The consistency of the approach was not the issue. Instead, the general thrust was to allow Canadians to reflect on an earlier era and a leader like King and see how the values of that time had created a kind of mental illness. What better way to do away with old moral codes and ways of behaving and thinking? To talk openly about King’s secret life wasn’t prurience, it was mature frankness. And, once one looked openly and clearly, the conclusion was obvious: these earlier generations of Canadians and their leaders had been hiding something all along.