Love among the ruins: the King of Kingsmere

American Review of Canadian Studies, Autumn, 2007 by Dennis Duffy

William Lyon Mackenzie King often said that he'd have made a good landscape architect (Hardy 1949, 344). No longer in power by October 15, 1949--his final term as Canada's prime minister had ended the preceding year--he happily graced an Ottawa gathering of the Society of Landscape Artists and Town Planners, speaking about his landscaping achievements at Kingsmere, his country estate in what is now Ottawa's Gatineau Park. He accepted an honorary membership in the Society, and listened with pleasure while General Francis Wilby commended him as "a Romanticist" and praised the artificial ruins that he had over many years arranged on his property (King Diaries, October 15, 1949). (1)

Landscaping is about the redefinition of space with the aim of altering our perspective on it. Through this, world imposes meaning upon earth. To deflect and distract the viewer's gaze in a way that raises the perception of a site above the demands of its physical limitations, to dot a prospect with surprises that instill an impression of expansiveness rather than of contraction, to beguile curiosity through diversion, to employ all the resources of nature in the service of an art that requires decipherment and submission rather than evaluation and demarcation: these are the marks of genius in a landscape architect. These qualities could also describe the political style of Canada's longest-reigning prime minister.

King relished this happy conjunction of life with art. An unidentified correspondent ("WHM") delighted the PM in 1928 when he compared (in one of those parallels that preoccupied Mackenzie King throughout his life) the triumphs of King's career with the progress of his gardening: "It occurred to me that Kingsmere epitomizes the events of the last year or two, in that you have gone from the shadows and depression of the woods into the bright, warm sunshine of a wider horizon" (King Fonds, Sept. 8, 1928).

A seer who always sought meaning in random happenings--the positioning of hands on a clock face, the coincidental anniversaries that paralleled and harmonized diverse events, the dreams to be interpreted prophetically rather than psychologically, passages gleaned from the random opening of Scripture--King sought in his worldly estate a confirmation of his spiritual integration. The progress of the seasons underlined the unfolding of his destiny. More than a hobby, the Kingsmere property blossomed into the outward sign of King's inward and spiritual grace. Using sacramental diction allows us better to understand the inner disposition that Mackenzie King brought to a far larger arena: his symbolic ordering of Canadian public experience.

Mackenzie King's orientation toward the symbolic took a number of forms. The spiritualism that he practiced may strike many now as risible, as it seems to have C. P. Stacey in his A Very Double Life. When, however, we position King within the culture of his late Victorian birth, much of the strangeness disappears. His wordy evangelical disposition and rhetoric, his egocentric sentimentality (which masquerades as self-examination), and his lurid devotion to the memory of his mother can be found elsewhere (Cook 1985, 196-213; Esbery 1980, 8; Granatstein 1975). Even his spiritualism, Robert Keyserlingk informs us, involves a number of respectable antecedents and associations (Keyserlingk 1986). After all, his was a kind of sensibility that could employ evangelical rhetoric but which gloried in a kind of Catholic sacramentalism in its reverence for hallowed objects. It was he who hallowed them, rather than some hierarchical church, but King's sensibility was an amalgam of traditions. As would any artsy, English-speaking person in the early 1900s, King had to have been aware of the Romantic Catholicism of ruins and gorgeous objects that so fascinated the Victorian world. Popular culture, as in Dracula, had appropriated Catholicism's most sacred objects as Gothic paraphernalia. King's churchless, idiosyncratic amalgam of high-minded sensibility and spiritual yearning set him at home in a world of magical thinking and loaded objects. Everything, especially the matter of everyday life, bore a symbolic intent. No material object needed to register its full moral weight by and of itself. Within this charged universe, the prime minister of Canada obsessed over the structuring of a personally landscaped property that--as we shall discover--could resonate with a public meaning as well.

Our voyeuristic fascination with King's inner life can blind us to the public import of that experience. On King's shoulders is where the blame for some of this misunderstanding rests. He overexposed himself, and by this focused our attention too strongly upon his eccentricities. We know too much about what he considered his inmost thoughts--or at least his verbalization of them--as they surface from his voluminous diaries. Egotism, the sense of his own personal significance, led him to write and preserve a record as rich in irony as the boastful inscription on the statue in Shelley's "Ozymandias." The vainglorious pharaoh could not see that time would dissolve his empire; the self-absorbed prime minister failed to notice that cultural change would deflate every aspect--especially the rhetorical--of his self-expression. Many a lesser man has used the fireplace (forerunner of the shredder) to preserve his future. However, Mackenzie King furnished us with what we know of him. Can we fairly scorn the analysand for serving up such rich material to the analyst?