The latest DBC biography -- of Fernand Rinfret, journalist and politician, brother to a chief justice of Canada, and Mackenzie King's Secretary of State in the 1920s and 1930s -- is a tease. We learn King appointed him to the cabinet despite deploring Rinfret's "bad habits" which would destroy him -- but the biography will not even speculate as to what the habits were.
A reader may notice that Rinfret is reported to have literary tastes and abilities, loved the opera, holidayed in sunny California (where he died at 56), and had a brief and childless marriage in his youth. Are we supposed to take a hint here? I know nothing of Rinfret, but I've wondered in the past about the DCB's seemingly nudge nudge wink wink approach to possibly gay subjects. Is this another?
