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The Book: A Backstory
by Christopher Dummitt
Why would anyone ever write a book? I first started thinking about the book that would become Unbuttoned in 2003. And yet it is only this spring, fourteen years later, that the book was published. I’m inclined to agree that delayed gratification increases pleasure, but that is one heck of a delay.
The trick is to be careful what you read. It was the summer of 2003 and I was taking a cross-country road trip from Vancouver to Ontario. I stopped at a used bookshop along the way and picked up a copy of a thin bestseller from 1976 – C.P. Stacey’s A Very Double Life: The Private World of Mackenzie King. This was the book that exposed our most successful prime minister’s odd and eccentric private life – with its tales of King’s relationships with the ghosts and the girls. It dished the dirt on King’s spiritualism and his many romances with different women over the course of his life. It showed King wooing wealthy American widows whom he thought he might marry. It had him befriending the wives of other men with whom he became personally (but seemingly not sexually) intimate. And finally it presented King guiltily seeking out the services of a series of prostitutes only to retreat afterwards to his room to scratch out guilty (if not definitive) confessions in his diary.
As a PhD student with a love of history but also a desire to escape the burden of my dissertation for a week, a book like this was just right. The perfect summer read.
At least, it seemed that way. Part way through reading I got to thinking about how odd the book was. It wasn’t only that Mackenzie King – or Weird Willie as he had come to be called – was strange. That much I could take for granted. What really struck me as odd was the book itself – the fact that it could have been written at all, and become a bestseller in the summer of 1976. A Very Double Life was written by Canada’s former official military historian who was a septuagenarian at the time. How did this man come to write this book? From my reading of the world of Canadian politics and books in postwar Canada, I didn’t think this book could have been written a few decades earlier. And this is what, I later found out, Stacey said himself. It made me wonder: what happened to Canadian culture in the 1970s that made A Very Double Life possible?
It was one of those moments I’ve now come to rely on as a historian: partway between a Homer Simpson “Doh!” and a texting “WTF”, it is a historically inquisitive “Huh?!” This is the kind of guttural reaction that usually means that there is a story here – a historical story – something that I and other historians can probably explain.
I tucked the moment away. The trip ended and so, eventually, did the dissertation. But over the next few years I kept coming back to that “Huh?!” moment of Weird Willie and A Very Double Life. Maybe there really was a story here.
That thought took me on a hunting expedition through archives across Canada and even to Ireland. I went looking to learn not just about King but about what others had said about King and what they had known about his oddities and eccentricities. When did they learn about them? How did they react? What publicity did they get? When did the public mood change to allow for Stacey’s book to become such a bestseller? And what kinds of decisions were made to allow access to Mackenzie King’s famous diary so that interested writers could find out these secrets.
The trick, then and since, has been to convince others that the book isn’t just another biography of Mackenzie King. It also isn’t just another exposé about all of the strange things Weird Willie got up to in his secret life. It is, rather, Weird Willie Plus. It is a book about why the reading public came to be interested in the nocturnal emissions of our most successful prime minister. It explains how the public sphere, the world of publishing, of newspapers, journalism, and several other things besides, changed so much between King’s own era and the 1970s in order to make A Very Double Life a bestseller in 1976.
In the end, it is all very meta. Unbuttoned is a book about a book and why people read it. It could have become rather abstruse and theory-laden. The book contributes to scholarly debates around public memory, about the decline of deference, and about the way historians “periodize” the era in Canada between the 1950s and the 1980s. There is even an implicit argument in the preface about the problems of how a concept like neoliberalism is sometimes used and misused.
But I also wanted to tell a good story.
Blessed with the comfort of tenure, I was finally able to write a book that I really wanted to write. My main concern didn’t have to be getting a job, or being sufficiently rigorous to have it count for my tenure file, or to impress someone who might write a reference letter on my behalf. In the end, I opted to deny the distinction between an academic and a trade press book – to insist that a historian can write a rigorous scholarly book, but to do so in a way that is intrinsically interesting. We always write with an audience in mind, and I wrote with the hope (as yet unproven) that someone who was just interested in history would like the book as much as my scholarly colleagues.
It’s unclear yet whether that part of the task was successful. Sales and citations and reviews will ultimately determine the book’s fate.
But the writing of it – from that initial moment of wonder to the crafting of sentences that, hopefully, a broader audience might find appealing – was a joy. Its publication this spring is a very delayed – and happily extended – kind of gratification.
For more information about the book, click here.
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