Biography Jackpot
Behind Brocade Curtains

A new biography explores John A. Macdonald’s domestic world.
MARK LOVEWELL

Private Demons: The Tragic Personal Life of John A. Macdonald
Patricia Phenix

McClelland and Stewart
328 pages, hardcover
ISBN 9780771070440

n an age when politicians make such concerted efforts to project an image of bland conformity, it is refreshing to be reminded of a time when political achievement and public eccentri-city could comfortably coexist. Perhaps no politician in Canadian history had eccentricities that were as publicly acknowledged and celebrated by his contemporaries as did John A. Macdonald. In Private Demons: The Tragic Personal Life of John A. Macdonald, Patricia Phenix sheds light on the more private aspects of these foibles and their effect on those closest to the man.

As Phenix makes clear, one important influence on John A.’s character was having been singled out so early by his family for political greatness. His father’s lacklustre business acumen meant that the Macdonalds had little choice but to hope for the best from their obviously talented son. Phenix also presumes another important influence during John A.’s early years: unspoken guilt over the accidental death of his only brother, after a brutal beating by a drunken child minder—an act that John A. himself witnessed. Whatever the exact reasons for his ambition, the family’s sole remaining male heir wasted little time in making his mark, first as a small-town lawyer. This success quickly catapulted him into the role of family breadwinner. It was a part he would play for the remainder of his life. The financial burden associated with this responsibility was a significant one. Not only did he narrowly escape bankruptcy on several occasions, but he also occasionally abused the trust of his legal partners through surreptitious withdrawals of joint funds to pay for personal expenses.

Such questionable behaviour was soon complicated further by an ill-considered marriage. Introverted and sickly, John A.’s new wife, Isabella, developed a deep-seated dislike for the female members of her husband’s family. For their part, the Macdonald women seem to have grown increasingly frustrated by what they saw as Isabella’s manipulative streak—a perception with which Phenix, in her account of the marriage, evidently agrees. Gradually the medley of mysterious ailments that Isabella suffered from grew worse. With a barrage of excuses, she spent a good portion of the early years of her marriage at a strategic distance from Kingston. She was finally coaxed back home, then bore John A. two sons, although the first died soon after birth. Meanwhile, she receded into a netherworld fuelled by the opium she took to relieve her symptoms.

As for John A., he was increasingly away from Kingston, cultivating his legal and political careers, while engaging in frequent alcoholic binges. There was also a good chance, says Phenix, that his loneliness led to a regular acquaintance with some of the prostitutes of Montreal. When in Kingston, he forged a friendship with a married woman named Eliza Grimason, a devoted Conservative supporter and manager of a tavern located in a building she rented from John A. According to one contemporary, her tavern became “the shrine of John A.’s worshippers with Mrs Grimason as its high priestess.” The significance of their friendship was hinted at in the baldest terms when, in the last months of his marriage, John A. chose to pass his visits to Kingston staying in rooms set aside for him at the hotel above Eliza’s tavern rather than at his own home.

Isabella’s death in 1857 was a release—probably for herself, and most certainly for her husband. For their seven-year-old son, Hugh John, though, it was a different matter. He had already spent the bulk of his existence shuttling back and forth between his ailing mother on the one hand and the care of John A.’s sisters and mother on the other. Now he was a permanent boarder with the extended Macdonald clan, hardly seeing his distant father, who managed little more than to pay the boy’s living expenses.

John A. was by this time a formidable political figure, and now also a highly eligible widower. In the years that followed Isabella’s death, he had several romantic affairs but chose to wait a while before entering into a formal courtship. Extroverted and energetic, Agnes Bernard was fascinated by the lure of power, and easygoing about John A.’s frequent carousing and spells of reclusiveness. The couple finally tied the knot in 1867. A few months later, when John A. officially became the Dominion’s first prime minister, he also received a knighthood—an honour that provided Agnes the chance for some celebratory gloating: “I was an insignificant young spinster & what I might write did not matter,” she confided in her diary soon after the great day, “now I am a great Premier’s wife & Lady Macdonald & ‘Cabinet Secrets & Mysteries’ might drop or slip off unwittingly from the nib of my pen.”

But there was far more to the new Lady Macdonald than social climbing. When a daughter named Mary arrived on the scene, her proud parents’ joy turned to dismay on discovering that she was physically crippled and hydrocephalic. Agnes was able to give eloquent expression to her sadness in a stream of letters and diary entries in the months that followed, but John A., as usual, was less transparent. With a manufactured air of joviality, he did his best to amuse his daughter and wife while carrying on with his political career. Given the onset of the Pacific scandal in 1873, when the government was charged with accepting illicit funds from Sir Hugh Allan in return for the contract to build the transcontinental Canadian Pacific Railway, this was no easy task. What was worse, the scandal brought an abrupt, if temporary, end to John A.’s time as prime minister. But the ensuing years that he and Agnes spent away from Ottawa allowed them—Agnes in particular—to adjust to the unique demands they faced as parents.

By the time the political tables had turned and John A. was back in power, he and Agnes had reached a state of relative tranquility in their domestic relationship that was to continue until his death. In these final years, they even enjoyed a few carefree diversions—most notably a trip on the newly completed CPR. From this journey comes the most enduring image of the two of them—John A. sitting at the rear platform, idly reading a magazine, while Agnes clasps the railing of the engine’s cowcatcher, hanging on with sheer exhilaration on the steep descent through Kicking Horse Pass. It was an episode that led to a nearby mountain being named in Agnes’s honour.

In Private Demons Phenix portrays John A.’s emotional distance and tactical use of others with a subtle colouring that few previous biographers have matched. Her portrait also leaves one with a grudging respect for John A.’s adroitness in his machinations—never mean-spirited, if at times blatantly self-interested. In addition, this is an account of the constraints faced by the women who surrounded him—constraints that were all too common in their day. A lucky few, such as Agnes, managed to achieve emotional fulfilment, but others did not. John A.’s spinster sister, Louisa, for example, seems to have led a life of querulous discontent. So too the deeply unhappy Isabella, who, whatever the exact nature of her ailments, passed her final years in what must have been an excruciating drug-induced haze. In many ways, it is these women’s varied stories that are the real subject of Phenix’s insightful book.

Mark Lovewell is the Director of Ryerson University’s humanities-based Arts and Contemporary Studies program. He is the co-publisher of the LRC.