The Cunning Man

by Robertson Davies

  “Jim, if you’re going to side against me I’d better go to my room before somebody says something they’ll be sorry for.”

  “Ma, what’s the trouble? What’s chewing you, for God’s sake?”

  “Don’t speak to me in that cheap, common way. And don’t take God’s name in vain. You know what the trouble is—that book—”

  “But what in the book, Ma?”

  “Yes, Lil; I haven’t come on anything yet that I can’t put up with. What are you talking about?”

  “Look where I’ve put in that big bookmark, The Oedipus thing. Read it, if you can without gagging.”

  “No, I won’t read it. You tell me. Oedipus. He was a Greek, wasn’t he?”

  “He was a Greek dogged by a dreadful fate. He killed his father and married his mother. And this filthy German says every man wants to do the same thing. And he carries on about it. That’s what our son has brought home from school.”

  “Oh, come on, now. He’s just somebody in an old story. What’s it got to do with anything?”

  “Now who’s passing opinions about the book without reading it? Ask your son what it has to do with anything. Anything and everything, according to this man.”

  “Ma, let me explain. Oedipus is the hero of a story—a play, as Freud uses him—who acts out in dramatic form something that has its tremendous impact—because the play is famous, and has been for centuries—because it is rooted in a primary experience of the growing child.”

  “Incest! Is that an experience of anybody except some of the riff-raff and hooligans out here in the woods—”

  “Wait, wait, wait! Give me a minute to explain. Everyone recognizes Oedipus and feels for him, because they have been through his trouble themselves—but as children—as mere babies—”

  “The innocence of children abused! Sex imputed to tiny babies. Innocent little souls!”

  “Ma, are children really innocent? This stuff is supposed to happen even before they can speak! It’s a very simple thing, and when you think of it coolly, it looks inevitable.”

  Here my mother burst into tears and made loud, frightening sounds, and looked very unlike herself. Since then, in practice and in personal experience, I have come to know those orgasmic cries. My father went to her and mopped her eyes, and soothed her, and suggested that she would be better off in bed.

  “And miss this?” she cried. (A Freudian slip, Mother; if it was really intolerable, or unbearably offensive, you would surely want to get away from it. But nothing would budge you from centre stage in this great scene, and it is not until now, so many years later, that I see it fully.)

  “What’s this all about?” said my poor father. “You’ll drive me crazy between you.”

  “Dad, it comes down to this, in its simplest terms: the infant depends utterly on its mother, and her face is the only face it has learned to recognize; she is food, warmth, coddling, and love. She is the Beloved because she is the whole of the universe and of life. But another element intrudes; an element with a deep voice and a different smell who wants to summon the Beloved of the infant’s life away from it. So this second element becomes the hated one, and the infant wishes, with all the power of a single-minded, egotistical creature, that it could get rid of the Intruder. And there you have the tragedy of Oedipus as it is lived and acted out in every life. Before the child can speak the whole thing has pretty well cooled down, but it lies at the base of the child’s experience. Babies are passionate little buggers, you know; just listen to them scream when they want something; there’s bloody murder in every howl.”

  “You mustn’t use words like that in front of your mother, or me, if it comes to that. But I see what you mean. I’d have to have time to think that over. It’s pretty steep, looking at babies that way. But you hear what he says, Lil. It’s just a medical theory.”

  “Not medical, Dad. Psycho-analytical.”

  “What? Well, whatever you call it. Just an idea. Can’t hurt anybody!”

  “Oh no? That’s stupid even for you, Jim. Can’t hurt anybody! Don’t you see what it does to me?”

  “You’re overwrought. You’ll see it differently tomorrow.”

  “That I will not. Don’t you see?”

  “See what, Lil? I see what everybody else sees.”

  “You don’t see what position it puts me in with my own son?”

  “What position? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “The mother and son—as lovers! Do I have to spell out every word? Aren’t you disgusted? Can you stand there and have me involved in such filth? Your own wife? And his mother?”

  “Now, Lil, we won’t get anywhere talking like that. Let me help you upstairs. Then you have some of that stuff Dr. Cameron gave you, and get a good night’s rest. You’re worn out.”

  Up the stairs they go, my mother sobbing, my father being as gentle as he knows how, but rather plainly thinking the whole business is a bore and he wishes to get out of it as soon as he can.

  I was badly shaken, and for the first time in my life I had serious resort to my father’s whisky. I had furtively pinched little nips before, but now I gave myself a good three fingers and poured in some spring water. My attempts at reflection took me nowhere, for my mother’s outburst had quite unmanned me and I had no power of rational thought left in me. Those were the days when mothers had unbelievable mystical muscle, and the whole notion of motherhood was of a religious significance. All I knew was that I had created the worst row in our family’s history, so far as I knew, and I had affronted my mother’s modesty and sense of propriety, and worst of all I had unexpectedly revealed that my mother thought her husband stupid, and thus shown a rift in the family of which I had not previously had any knowledge. I wallowed in this morass of feeling for not less than an hour, making it worse with unaccustomed whisky. Meanwhile, upstairs, my father was doing his best to be understanding of his sobbing wife as he waited for Dr. Cameron’s prescription of chloral-hydrate to send her to sleep.

  It was on the fourth day after this scene that I took the train to Toronto to get myself ready for the university. The house was very still during most of that time, and we all kept up an icy politeness. I suppose my mother wanted me to grovel, and burn Freud. But I saw matters otherwise.

  My father did not refer to the matter again, except once, as we sat one night by an early September fire when my mother had “gone to her room.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that business, you know. That Oedipus business. I suppose in the terms that fellow is using to discuss it, it makes a kind of sense. I can see that. You look at babies—babies in the reserve, for instance, and you can catch a glimpse of what he is talking about. But one thing puzzles me: what about girls? Do they want to kill their mothers and marry their fathers? Doesn’t really make sense because the father doesn’t feed them and cuddle them and sing to them; he’s still the Intruder, isn’t he? What about girls? Are they so utterly different?”

  I wasn’t able to help him. “I don’t know,” I said. “I believe he discusses that in a later book, and I haven’t read it yet.”

  “So you won’t know what to think till you’ve read it in a book,” said my father. And I knew well and truly that he was not stupid.

  (4)

  The university very sensibly insisted that anybody who wanted to study medicine must have a B. A. as a starter. There were eager young medicos who thought that was a waste of time; they had no idea of medicine as a learned profession and perhaps they should not be blamed, because who would have told them that it was so? The genteel tradition was on its last legs in Canada; its legs had never been particularly strong, but there was a lingering notion that some professions went with stiff collars and wives who employed maidservants and sometimes drank tea in the afternoon, and that aspirants to such splendours ought to have some dash of cultivation. The B.A. could not confer cultivation but it was a nod to a great tradition.

  The B.A. gave me no trouble at all. At Colborne I had been taught ho
w to learn (which most of my contemporaries from the public schools had not) and so I romped easily through the good but not demanding requirements and had lots of time to pursue my real education. Because real education, as I had already discovered, meant things you really wanted to know, rather than things other people thought you should know.

  I read as much of Freud as I could lay my hands on, buying the books rather than getting them from the university library. At that time such borrowing might have attracted undesirable attention, for the prejudice against the great Viennese doctor was strong in Canada, and I was told that the medical faculty, and such psychiatric practitioners as then existed in Toronto, had decided that he was a flash in the pan—“a flash in the bedpan” as one witty neurologist had put it.

  It was not that they were unaware of Freud. Those who had been in the university before the First World War remembered that one of his disciples had, for a time, been of their number, and they had not liked him. He was not a companionable man, and was apt to say sharp things. He could not conceal that he thought Toronto a backwater and its pretensions to culture risible. He made sour jokes about the word “provincial,” which occurred so often in our governmental system, and defined his own appointment to the Government Hospital for the Insane; too much of what was said and done, he hinted, was provincial indeed. But there was more to it than that; he lived in Toronto with his sister and another woman, and who precisely was she? Suspicion gave way to certainty; and the portcullis of respectability dropped.

  I quickly heard of this, and made my own enquiries, and often after that I would make my way to Brunswick Avenue, which was then on the outskirts of the city, and gaze in awe at the house in which Dr. Ernest Jones, whom time would reveal as the most loyal of Freud’s lieutenants, had written his classic study of Hamlet and his splendid monograph on The Nightmare. What if Jones did have a mistress? I would have had one myself if I could have found one, but the kind of girls whom I met at the university were not of the mistress type—or perhaps I was not as dashing as I hoped I was.

  I was severely bitten by the bug of psychoanalysis, and read everything I could find about it, and was for several years wholly under its spell. Indeed, it took my service in the Second World War to lower my fanaticism and point me in the direction I have followed ever since. But during my university years and through my medical training I was a Freudian fanatic, though a muted one.

  Time has changed the attitude of the heeding world toward Freud from hatred or fanaticism to something like patronage or indifference. I say “the heeding world” but perhaps it is on the unheeding world that his mark is clearest. Everybody now talks about “complexes” and “inferiority complexes,” and attributes adult disasters to infant experiences, thinks dreams contain cryptic messages and understands a vocabulary of inexact gibble-gabble derived from Freud, Jung, Adler, Klein, and God knows who, and thus far—not really very far—Freud’s great aim is achieved. Because, it seems to me, from the beginning of the twentieth century Freud sent a loud wake-up call to mankind, to become aware of what lay beneath the surface of the mind, and to mend its ways accordingly. And mankind, as always through history, has half-heard the call of the prophet, half-understood what he says, and vulgarized and cheapened whatever of his teaching may come its way. But something has been achieved. A few holes have been thrust through the wall of human stupidity and incomprehension.

  As for me—? I suppose my moderation of my earliest Freudian faith—the first religion I ever espoused—must be the matter of what I write in my Case Book, if I am ever, at my present advanced age, to see anything coherent in my personal and professional history.

  One thing I did learn from Freud, which has never diminished and has indeed grown with the years, is a habit of careful observation, of heedfulness, in my relationship with the rest of the world. To learn to see what is right in front of one’s nose; that is the task and a heavy task it is. It demands a certain stillness of spirit, which is not the same thing as dimness of personality, and need not be partnered with a retiring, bland social life.

  My social life in my student years was lively, and was fed by two enthusiasms which might at first seem irreconcilable, but are not so: religion and the theatre.

  As a half-baked psychoanalytical zealot I was of course a doubter and an infidel in religious matters. I had not been brought up in a strongly religious household, though Christian precepts and values were at the root of both my parents’ behaviour. But to live in Toronto in my student days and be unaware of religion was out of the question. It seemed to me that the campus swarmed with chaplains and Christian Unions and undergraduates bent on saving souls, and this was a reflection of the spirit of the city. Churches abounded, and every sort of religious fare was offered to the religious shopper. Baptist zeal, Methodist self-satisfaction, Presbyterian Scots certainty about everything, Anglican social superiority, and a horde of evangelists and back-street messiahs to suit every taste, as well as an undertow of prohibitionists, anti-tobacco crusaders, and warriors against prostitution, who were linked with the churches though not actually a part of them, seemed to dominate the mores of the city. The imperceptive, unselfconscious city prospered under its soggy blanket of shallow middle-class morality and accepted prosperity as evidence of God’s approval.

  Armed with my shallow understanding of Freudian doctrine and my youthful egotism I set about studying as much of this spirit of Toronto as I could, went to church twice on Sunday—a different church, to get as much of the flavour as I could—and had a high old time laughing and jeering at the faithful as the Baptists whooped; as the Methodists leaned forward in prayer, resting their heads upon the back of the pew in front, as though suffering from hangover; as the Presbyterians listened to their highly literate, carefully argued, and quite incomprehensible “discourses”; and the Anglicans met with the vicar at the church door, for reassurance of a superiority and not being as other men.

  Of course I did not neglect the Catholics, and saw the excellence of a faith which permits its believers to behold God’s flesh and blood every day of their lives, if they choose, and to find solace in unfathomable devotions. And all at the trivial price of psychological peonage. Do as the Church tells you, and all will be well. You need not stir an independent finger.

  I did my best to miss nothing. I even ventured into the single Orthodox Church, and stood stolidly among people who seemed all to be under a Dostoevskian depression, and stared at me with feeble hostility. They did not positively tell me to leave, but spiritually they shoved me toward the door. The famed Orthodox liturgy was impressive, but often out of tune, and I was amazed when the priest produced a large yellow comb and arranged his hair and beard in mid-service. There I felt most strongly that Christianity is not the all-embracing faith that it is said to be. You must find the church that suits you, that you can stand and that can stand you, and stick with it.

  (5)

  Inevitably amid all this temple-hopping I found churches that appealed to me more than others, and my favourite was soon established; it was St. Aidan’s, Anglican and very High. So High, indeed, that sometimes it seemed that the Roman Catholic Mass was a simplified version of their sung Eucharist.

  It was a case of a strong-minded tail wagging a far from reluctant dog; the tail was Dr. DeCourcy Parry, the organist and choirmaster, and the dog was Father Ninian Hobbes, who knew nothing about music and had a tin ear, but who sensed a splendour in Parry’s services that was appropriate to his ideas of Divine worship. For Father Hobbes, the humblest of men himself, thought nothing too fine for the acts of worship over which he presided, and he acquiesced in everything Dr. Parry suggested. Dr. Parry was a composer of gift, and he wrote a lot of music specifically for St. Aidan’s, and thus brought it a distinction unapproached by any other Toronto church. He had a fine gallery choir of men and women who sang out of sight at the back of the church where the organ was and where Dr. Parry was free to exhort, signal, and do all that a choirmaster must do, without being seen. I
n addition there was a plainsong choir of eight men who sang in the chancel, robed and solemn, led by Darcy Dwyer. The combination of Dwyer and Parry was unbeatable as a source of magnificent accompaniment to the services, but there were many (outside St. Aidan’s, of course) who thought that these two elaborated the services beyond what was defensible in terms of mainline Anglicanism and the spirit of the Thirty-Nine Articles.

  The elaboration of ritual originated chiefly with Dwyer, and Parry was happy to agree to anything that made for a more splendid musical service. “Surely God must weary of this perpetual serenading,” said one archdeacon at a clerical gathering, and the remark sped around the Toronto Anglican community. There were Low Churchmen who spoke of the splendid vestments as “millinery.” But no Bishop quite liked to gainsay the formidable Dr. Parry, who had proof and example for everything he did, and foisted on Father Hobbes. Dr. Parry’s talent and the money he sacrificed to remain at St. Aidan’s made him a privileged person. Dwyer also managed to secure for himself considerable privilege, and he did it by his agile wit.

  He was a student of church ceremony and tradition and he wanted to include in the St. Aidan’s services everything that he could discover that was picturesque or merely unusual. Lots of incense, of course; clouds of it whenever an excuse arose. Holy water, sloshed about lavishly, especially at funerals. Processions with banners, and these were no innocent advertisements for the Women’s League or the Infant Band but handsomely embroidered depictions of the Instruments of the Passion, of the Virgin as Rose of the World, of the IXθYC symbol, and anything else that a devout adherent of the church could be persuaded to pay the Sisters of St. John to work, with infinite patience, on a silken background. Ornaments abounded: chasubles, of course, with splendid orphreys to enrich them; copes, it seemed, without number; dramatics, humeral veils, and tunicles whenever possible. And who said when it was possible? Darcy Dwyer, of course, and he could produce handsome and often rare books to prove it. It was he who pointed out that a candle should never be lit except with flint and steel, and a cigarette lighter filled the bill, infallibly. It was he also who persuaded the priests to wear soft slippers at Mass, so as not to kneel and show the dirty soles of their boots. Sometimes it was thought that he went just a little too far. When he suggested, for instance, that the deacons and subdeacons veil their eyes with their sleeves at the Elevation of the Host, as if they were blinded by the nearness of the Body of Christ, Father Hobbes vetoed it. Then, being an amiable man, he permitted it at certain high feast days, though he hinted that he thought it somewhat theatrical.