Free The Great Depression by Pierre Berton Page B

failed. “Some fiendish influence seems to have taken hold of me … and makes it impossible for me to think.” Fiendish influences were always at war with King’s soul. Was it fatigue, he wondered, or “passions”? That word recurs in the diaries. He wrote of feeling, one evening, a “sort of internal fever, fighting passions.” And again: “I have been consumed by a sort of inner fire, partly over-eating I fear, but mostly passions which will not let me rest as I should.”
    The celibate could not rid himself of guilt. He dared not utter the terrible word “masturbation” even to his secret self, but it is clear that, in common with most men of his time including a good many doctors, he believed the practice to be not only evil but also debilitating. “If I could only get over the feeling that there was something wrong in these desires & realize they are natural & all that is necessary is to control & subdue them I should be much happier.” But he could not conquer them or rid himself of the burden they imposed. “To be married would have, of course, be best of all but that will have to come or not as may be ordained. I have given up worrying about it.” Yet his worries continued.
    The most terrifying occasion of the year for Mackenzie King was the night of the Press Gallery dinner in Ottawa. There, politicians in general and political leaders in particular were supposed to sit still and applaud while the members of the Fourth Estate poked fun at them. Even worse, from King’s point of view, they were expected to deliver a witty, self-deprecating address.King, who had little sense of humour, was not up to that. He resented what he considered the “vulgarity of the affair.”
    It wasn’t dignified, nay, it was downright unworthy. He felt indignant at “the course [
sic
] nature of the references to myself and many others. The whole proceeding was wholly unworthy … [of] thoughtful & serious minded men. As a matter of fact it gives to the press an idea of their power to destroy & make reputations such as they should never be permitted to have.”
    Vulgarity and ostentation disgusted him, especially where the British upper classes were involved. Canada was just beginning to emerge from the long shadow of the mother country, and King was in the forefront of those nationalists who couldn’t abide the pomp, circumstance, and out-and-out grovelling that accompanied royal and vice-regal occasions.
    Back in 1927, during the country’s Diamond Jubilee, he had been irritated by the Governor General’s request for five thousand dollars to entertain highly placed visitors from England, including the Prince of Wales and Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin. “I am beginning to be ‘fed’ up with the English invasion,” he wrote. The fawning over high dignitaries in Ottawa social circles disgusted him. At one lavish dinner, at which both he and the Governor General were guests, he was dismayed to find that a marionette show had been hired for their amusement, complete “with cartoons which were lampoons … and this in the presence of a lot of foolish young people and empty headed old ones.” It was unworthy, King thought, considering the high position of the guests, “a children’s party for grown ups.” He was very conscious of the dignity of his position as the prime minister of an imperial dominion that would soon become an autonomous member of the new Commonwealth. He disliked being patronized and sometimes unconsciously snubbed by those British peers who reigned but did not rule from Rideau Hall. Once on a drive with the vice-regal party from the Quebec Citadel to luncheon thirty miles distant, he found himself relegated to a little side seat in an ADC capacity. “It shews,” King wrote, “what a wrong sense of proportion people come to have.”
    That led King to muse that the whole business of having a governor general from the old country was getting out of date. “It is perfectly absurd for two