Today I am engaged in some creative procrastination, delaying the production of the syllabus for my upcoming class. I am thumbing through one of my favorite novels, Fifth Business, by the great Canadian author Robertson Davies (1913 — 1995).
One of the central characters is Boy Staunton, one of Canada’s richest men. There are a couple of passages that struck me. One of them describes Staunton’s lifetime characteristics:
“As a boy he had been something of a bully, a boaster, and certainly a bad loser. As he grew up he learned to dissemble these characteristics, and to anyone who knew him less well than I it might have appeared that he had conquered them. But I never thought that traits that are strong in childhood disappear … they do not vanish [and] very often they make a vigorous appearance after the meridian of life had been passed. … Boy Staunton had reached a point in life where he no longer tried to conceal his naked will to dominate everybody and was angry and ugly when things went against him.”
A bit earlier in the novel, the narrator Dunstan Ramsey describes Staunton’s time in politics (Canadian readers will understand more of the context, naturally):
“The Conservative party found him an embarrassment because he was apt to criticize the party leader in public, the Liberals naturally wanted to defeat him, and the newspapers were out to get him. It was a dreadful campaign on his part, for he lost his head, bullied his electors when he should have wooed them, and got into a wrangle with a large newspaper, which he threatened to sue for libel.”
Remind you of anybody in the news lately?