The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks

by Robertson Davies

  THE POST-CHRISTMAS dullness persists. There is a curious hush in the air, which puzzles me until I realize that it is caused by the cessation of the carol-singing which, until Christmas Eve, was launched upon the ether by loud speakers in shops, offices and municipal buildings. From time to time Scotsmen hail me, and want me to join them in celebrating the New Year which is, they explain, the great festival of their homeland. But although I appreciate their kindness, I am a Welshman by descent and in spirit, and for me Christmas is the great day, and when it is gone I cannot work up much enthusiasm for what is, after all, a purely chronological event.… I dined yesterday with some friends, who have a large bowl of holly in the middle of the table. This gives me an idea; could holly, toasted, be launched upon the world as a new breakfast food? Its effect upon the intestines might be quite miraculous. Eat Marchbanks’ Holly for breakfast: You Pick It and It Picks You!

  • OF HIS ETERNAL SALIVATION •

  I BEGAN MY HALF-YEARLY seance with my dentist this afternoon, and as usual, cost him a fortune in cotton wads. It is my good fortune to have splendidly robust salivary glands, and at the mere sight of a dentist my mouth waters as though he were a steak or Hedy Lamarr. Before he can begin his work he has to make a kind of Holland of my mouth, draining elaborately and erecting dikes of cotton wads to stem the sea which threatens to engulf him. He must then work quickly before my levels rise to the point where all his work is washed away, his tools rusted beyond reclaim, and his hands drenched to the elbow. Most of my dentists have been very nice about this peculiarity of mine. They understand that I do not do it to vex them, but because I cannot help it. Nevertheless, there are times when I can see a shadow crossing the dentist’s face and I know that he is wishing—without malice—that I would drown in my own spit. Little does he know how near, sometimes, his wish is to being granted.

  • PREPARATIONS FOR A FEAST •

  THERE WAS A great deal of sense in the medieval custom of fasting before a feast. Today I ate lightly and drank a lot of water, in order to give my insides every possible advantage, in the approaching conflict with turkey, plum pudding, mince pies, hard and hot sauces, chocolates, nuts, candied fruits, cheeses, lemon custards, butter tarts and similar seasonable indigestibles. Nobody expects a boxer to do a day’s sewer-digging before an important match; why expect our gizzards to meet such an onslaught in a condition of fatigue? I just put this question to the lady on my right who said, “La, Mr. Marchbanks, you are always considering your stomach.” “Madam,” I rejoined; “that is true, and I expect my stomach to return the compliment.” Rather a neat retort, I think.

  • OF MUSCLE AND CHARM •

  I WENT TO THE movies last night. The newsreel contained some pictures of a female weight-lifter, a girl who tossed 250 pound barbells around with great ease. For some reason I found the sight of her depressing; I cannot decide why this was so. Obviously it is a good thing for a girl to be strong, but it is not becoming for her to look strong. The Ideal Woman, I suppose, would have the deliciously languishing, aristocratic appearance of a du Maurier beauty, and the physical constitution of Mammy Yokum. She would then be able to do a full day’s work at home or in the office, dance until midnight, and refuse or accept proposals of marriage (and whatnot) until 3 A.M. every night in the year. But she would never permit her muscles to show; really beautiful women should look as though their skins were stuffed with nice firm blanc-mange.

  • OF HOUSEHOLD MARTYRDOM •

  THIS AFTERNOON I listened to an act or so of the most laughable of all operas, Gounod’s Romeo et Juliette. A great deal has been written about the power of music to ennoble words; I think it is high time something was said about the undoubted power of music to render fine words trivial.… Then I went out to struggle with the week’s accumulation of snow. In no time at all three children appeared to help me, and as fast as I threw snow aside they tumbled it back into the path. There are men who endure this sort of thing philosophically, but I am not one of them; I made a short but passionate appeal to my helpers to go elsewhere and help my worst enemies, and they went. Then I settled down to the back-breaking job of heaving snow which had achieved the texture and weight of plaster. My spectacles fogged, my hat fell off at every fifth heave, and my overcoat twisted around until I seemed to be wearing it back to front. But by dint of Herculean effort, Job-like patience, and Franciscan spiritual abasement I shifted enough of the nasty stuff to make it possible to get from my house to the street, and at every heave of the shovel my heart yearned for flower-crowned Spring.

  • A SLICE OF LIFE •

  I HAD MY SHOES shined in a Saroyanesque emporium manned by a dreamy Greek youth and his uncle this afternoon. The lad lounged over the counter in a deep Mediterranean ennui, staring at me as though I were good to eat but as if he were too cloyed with sweetmeats to eat me. Two girls came in, and he came to life at once. “Say, Moxy’s been lookin’ for you,” he said, “an’ yuh better watch out, ’cause he’s got a couple o’ guns.” “Aw, bull,” said one of the young ladies, exploring her back teeth with a scarlet fingernail. “Yeah, that’s the God’s truth,” said the boy; “he sez he’s gonna getcha for standin’ him up las’ night; he’s real mad. Jeez, I wouldn’ wanna be you.” “Joe, you talka too much,” said the uncle, slapping my shoes and blowing garlic up my trouser legs. “Yeah, you talk a lotta bull, Joe,” said the girl who had affronted Moxy; “What I mean—bull!” “Okay, you see,” said Joe, leering engagingly at her. “Joe, he’s alia time kid da girls,” said the uncle.… I yearned to stay and see Moxy, and the guns, but my shine was finished, and as I did not want my hat re-blocked, I had no reason to remain.

  • STREET SCENE •

  I WATCHED A PASSAGE between an elderly woman and a garbage man this afternoon; she was a little late in putting out her rubbish, and he would not back up his cart to get it; in consequence she was pursuing him down the road with two full cans imploring him to wait, while he drove stolidly onward, shouting something about municipal “rules” and his “rights.” It was obviously a case for the wisdom of Solomon, and I had no desire to interfere. When people begin to roar about their rights, I have an irrational desire to run in the opposite direction.

  • OF THE GIFT OF SONG •

  LAST WEEK I went to hear Susan Reed, the ballad singer, give a recital, and was ravished to hear a singer whose object was not to shriek her head off and who did not deport herself like an eighth-rate actress playing the part of Marie Antoinette. I know precisely what Coleridge meant when he wrote:

  Nor cold, nor stern, my soul! yet I detest

  Those scented rooms, where, to a gaudy throng,

  Heaves the proud harlot her distended breast

  In intricacies of laborious song.

  These feel not Music’s genuine power, nor deign

  To melt at Nature’s passion-warbled plaint;

  But when the long-breathed singer’s uptrilled strain

  Bursts in a squall, they gape for wonderment.

  You are going to sing after dinner, madam? … The “Jewel Song” from Faust? What a coincidence!

  • OF POVERTY IN PROFANITY •

  I WENT TO SEE A play last evening—a play which contained a measure of profanity. Not the rich, refreshing, imaginative profanity of Shakespeare, but just ordinary swearing. I noticed several members of the audience swallowing their Adam’s apples and distending their nostrils at this, but as the play was a highly moral work, directed against divorce, they made no serious complaint.… This caused me to ponder on the crying modern need for new and more ferocious oaths. The few tattered old rags of blasphemy and obscenity which we have inherited from our church-going ancestors are insufficient to deck out the tremendous angers of the Atomic Age. An era of new terrors, amplified treachery, vastly extended political cynicism, and starvation on an undreamed-of scale surely demands an extended gamut of objurgation to cope with it. But our age is uncongenial to poetry, and swearing, at its best, is a kind of diabolic poetry.

 
• OF MEALINESS OF MOUTH •

  I WENT TO SEE AN English movie last night, called The Notorious Gentleman which was very good indeed. In Britain it was called The Rake’s Progress, and when I asked why the name had been changed I was told that it was done to prevent unsophisticated audiences from imagining that the film depicted the evolution of the popular garden tool. But I don’t believe any such thing. I think it was to spare our movie theatre employees the distasteful task of spelling out a dubious word like “rake” in electric lights. In movie circles on this continent they have a rooted objection to calling things by their right names. In the newsreels, for instance, Eva Braun is referred to as Hitler’s “good friend,” although everybody knows that she was his mistress, and later (for a few nasty moments) Mrs. H. But “mistress” is a Dirty Word, and may not sully the chaste lips of a newsreel commentator, or befoul the antiseptic ears of a movie audience. What will be the result of this nonsense? In a few years the words “good friend” will have achieved a lewd secondary significance, and will be unusable by those who do not wish to be misunderstood. “Do you love John?” the Canadian Mama will enquire of her Innocent Daughter. “No, Mumsie, I am merely his Good Friend,” the I. D. will reply, and will then be surprised when Mama locks her in her room with bread and water, shrieking the house down as she does it. Nothing but evil comes from mealiness of mouth.

  • OF VILE PHRASES •

  FROM TIME TO TIME I hear a word or an expression which I mentally resolve never to use myself—not if entreated to do so by wild horses on their bended knees. Today, for instance, I heard a man refer to a motor car as a “transportation unit.” A vile phrase! It might mean anything. A horse is also a transportation unit, and so is my wheelbarrow. Even my degraded old carpet slippers are transportation units.… Could a romance between Civil Servants blossom in an immobilized transportation unit, possibly resulting in a little vital statistic?

  • OF THE DOUGHNUT •

  AFTER SEVERAL MONTHS of abstinence, I indulged moderately in doughnuts at lunch today. It is odd that so much has been written about food without any discerning gourmet having paid an adequate tribute to this noble confection. Beautiful to the eye, arresting to the tooth, and ravishing to the palate; fit for the table of a Lucullus, and yet capable of being prepared in the humblest peasant’s abode; made from the simplest ingredients and yet a challenge to the art of the subtlest chef; delicious at bedtime and superb in the picnic or “al fresco” repast; adequate to the needs of the famished ploughman yet tempting to the vacillating appetite of the queasy convalescent, the doughnut rises above all common foods with the effortless superiority of a Rhodes Scholar trying the entrance examinations of an Infant Class.

  O Doughnut, who outsoarest

  Our shadow and our pain

  Descend into the forest

  Assuage the pang that borest

  The nymph that for thee roarest

  Her long, sick cry in vain—

  Again and yet again.

  The verse I have just quoted was originally one of the choruses in Swinburne’s Atalanta; it was suppressed by the poet’s friend, Theodore Watts-Dunton as being too shamelessly erotic in content.… Yes, I agree with you; Swinburne was at his very best when writing about food.

  • OF HERPETOLOGY •

  A FRIEND OF MINE killed a snake at his summer cottage today. He is not one of those irrational creatures who kills every snake he sees, but this snake showed fight, which is not the custom of our Ontario snakes, and furthermore, it rattled quite audibly. Now here is a mystery; the snake was not a rattler, but when a dog went near it the snake lifted up its ultimate six inches and rattled. I was shown the corpse, and I examined it scientifically from a distance of six feet. I find that I see snakes best at a distance. When I am close to them my vision clouds, and the snake is magnified enormously. Some herpetologists like to hold snakes, peep into their mouths, and tickle their stomachs, but I regard such fellows as quacks. I can form an opinion about a snake without going near it. Indeed, my attitude toward snakes is that of those eighteenth century physicians who never approached the sick, but diagnosed their ailments from the descriptions of the apothecaries who had seen them.

  • OF HOLIDAY PREPARATIONS •

  PRE-HOLIDAY PROSTRATION has overtaken me. Today I tidied my desk, mowed the lawn, hid the hose, collected my shirts, packed my bags, shot the iceman, poisoned the breadman, drowned the milkman, ripped out the telephone, pushed chewing gum in the keyholes, broke the electricity meter open with an axe, and hid the silver in a hollow tree. To frighten away robbers I have prepared two cunning wax images of myself, and have laid one of them in a deck chair on the verandah, and posed the other one over the garbage box at the rear door. Having thereby complied with all the newspaper advice to people about to go on vacation, I am waiting for the dawn to break, and my yearly respite from slavery to begin.

  • OF THE FOUR DOLDRUMS •

  EVERYBODY I MEET these days seems to be suffering from one or more of the Four Doldrums which are guaranteed by our Canadian Way of Life—Doldrum from Want, Doldrum from Fear, Doldrum of Religion and Doldrum of Speech. A great many of them are still victims of post-vacation coma; they have been out in the sun too much and their brains have dried up. I am no better myself; I have been dull at many periods of my life, but never so dull as now. My dullness is so complete and all-embracing that it constitutes a kind of mystical experience—the merging of the Null with the Void. Shall I found a new religion? A Cult of Blaa? So much of modern religion is imbued with a busy dullness that the world might welcome a nice, passively dull faith, specifically designed for the poor in spirit.

  • OF THE TRIVIALITY OF APPENDICES •

  A MAN MENTIONED casually to me this afternoon that his brother was in a hospital, having his appendix removed. This operation is now undertaken without qualm; surgeons regard it as a pastime, something to keep the hands busy, like knitting or eating salted nuts. But I can remember the day when a man whose brother was undergoing such an ordeal would have been at the hospital himself, probably accompanied by a robed choir and two or three powerful evangelists. When my brother Fairchild had his appendix out, in the early days of anæsthesia and antisepsis, it was customary to refuse water to those recently relieved of their appendices, and the poor fellow was reduced to drinking from the flower vases near his bed. When he left the hospital, he was given his appendix in a jar of alcohol, and after a few months as a mantel ornament this relic was thrown out. Dogs drank the alcohol and cats ate the appendix, and so for a night Fairchild brought joy to the animal world.

  • OF HIERARCHY AMONG MAGAZINE READERS •

  DESPERATE FOR Christmas gifts I have been driven to giving subscriptions to magazines this year to many of my friends who deserve something better. The tragedy of magazines is that nobody has any time in which to read them; only those who are condemned to lonely vigils in doctors’ waiting-rooms are able to wade through those pungent comments on world affairs, those brilliant disquisitions on married happiness, those tales of adventure, for which magazine publishers pay so much. But most of us like to have a few magazines coming to the house, if only to proclaim our intellectual status. Thus readers of the New Yorker and the Atlantic curl the lip at those whose living-room tables boast only Life, Time and the Reader’s Digest; and these too are given the sneer of contumely by readers of Horizon and Partisan Review; and all of the foregoing suffer embarrassment in those homes where Country Life, The Tatler and Punch lie beside the chairs, though I cannot quite explain why. So all week I have been tearing those hard little cards out of magazines, and accepting the Special Offer whereby I can give subscriptions at bargain rates. It is a coward’s way out, but what am I to do?

  • OF DENTISTS FAR AND NEAR •

  I HAD A TOOTH filled today. My dentist wears a tasteful white smock with a high collar; I can remember the first dentist whom I visited in my childhood, who wore a morning coat, and worked his drill with a foot pedal. His operating room was as dark as
a church, and he had not been trained to stand any nonsense from children; my recollection is that he knelt on my prone form while drilling, and that every now and then he drilled a piece out of my tongue, just to learn me.… In odd corners of the world strange dentists still lurk; an Irish friend of mine told me recently of visiting a dentist on the West Coast of Ireland who had no running water, and bade his patients spit into a potted fern which was conveniently placed by the chair.… The fanciest job of dentistry I ever saw was done on a Welsh farmer; a travelling dentist pulled all his teeth in the kitchen one afternoon, and sold him a false set to be inserted at once. The total service cost just under five dollars. The man was wearing the teeth when I met him, and there was a rugged grandeur about the lower part of his face which suggested the Sabre Tooth Tiger in the Royal Ontario Museum.

  • OF PLEASURE TOO DETERMINEDLY SOUGHT •

  EVERY YEAR, about this time, I take a vacation, as a result of social pressure. I do not really like vacations; I much prefer an occasional day off when I do not feel like working. When I am confronted with a whole week in which I have nothing to do but enjoy myself I do not know where to begin. To me, enjoyment comes fleetingly and unheralded; I cannot determinedly enjoy myself for a whole week at a time. A day’s work when everything goes smoothly, or an evening when I am thoroughly happy and at ease, or an unexpected stroke of luck—these are the things which I enjoy. But when I go after the coy nymph Pleasure with a blunderbuss, determined to make her my mistress for a whole week, she vanishes into her fastnesses, and hurls ordure and makes rude noises at me whenever I approach.