Spiritualist Statesman

THE INCREDIBLE CANADIAN (454 pp.)--Bruce Hutchison -- Longmans, Green ($5).

Mackenzie King, Prime Minister of Canada, sat down one day to thank the Greek city of Missolonghi--"where Byron once lived"--for naming a street after him. The draft returned from the typist with the phrase "where Byron loved." As King's pencil swiftly corrected it, he observed: "Perhaps he did, but we had better not say so."

Such primness characterized Bachelor King's whole public life. Only rarely did he make an open jest, as, when asked by an angry member of Parliament from the Doukhobor country what he would do if he faced a parade of naked women, he looked over at Tory Leader Richard B. Bennett, bachelor and lady's man-about-town, and blandly answered: "I'd send for the leader of the Opposition." But in private King was as eccentric as a three-dollar bill. In The Incredible Canadian, the best and liveliest biography yet written of King, Canadian Author Bruce Hutchison describes the inner & outer natures of the man.

A Cross for Mother. "As an actor," says Hutchison, "King was the superior of Roosevelt and Churchill . . . Roosevelt's chosen role as the Great Guy and Churchill's as the reincarnated Elizabethan were obvious and relatively easy. King's drab impersonation of the common man--the last thing he ever was--required the highest kind of histrionic genius. It succeeded so well that the people accepted a caricature which he had deliberately contrived for his own purposes."

His fellow Canadians considered him capable but colorless. They saw only King's "round little figure with hunched shoulders . . . the wisp of hair on the bald head . . . the bouncing, cautious gait of one walking on invisible eggs." King never chose to let Canadians know that he regularly consulted mediums, that he owned--and used--both a Ouija board and a crystal ball, nor that the voluminous personal diary he kept for 50 years is so appallingly frank in its appraisals of colleagues that his executors may decide to destroy a good part of it.

King did not seek political guidance from the spirits; he believed that he himself knew Canadian politics better than anyone else who ever lived. But he did enjoy spirit chats with his mother, whose portrait he enshrined in his study with a Celtic cross, constant fresh flowers and a perpetually burning light. King also gladly received spirit messages from his Irish terrier Pat, his old political mentor Sir Wilfrid Laurier, and his good friend and Harvard classmate Franklin Roosevelt, whose most urgent message was for King to retire before his health collapsed.

Ruins for All. Another of King's enthusiasms was the construction of "ruins" at Kingsmere, his country place in the Gatineau hills twelve miles from Ottawa. King gathered stones from Scottish abbeys, English public buildings, and various structures being demolished in Ottawa, and combined them with local stone to erect battered-looking structures with, he liked to think, a straight-out-of-the-Middle-Ages look.

All these concerns, says Biographer Hutchison, did not prevent King from working long hours for his country. In the half century from 1900, when King, at 25, became Canada's Deputy Minister of Labor, until his death in 1950 after nearly 22 years as Prime Minister (a British Empire record), he had a hand in every key Canadian development. At his death he gave his Ottawa residence, Laurier House, crystal ball and all, as a museum and place of historical research. He left the 500 rolling acres of Kingsmere, ruins and all, to be added to the adjoining Gatineau National Park. Tens of thousands of Canadians now visit the two places, learning to think of their colorless Prime Minister as one of the most colorful Canadians of all time.

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