A Celtic Temperament: Robertson Davies as Diarist

by Robertson Davies

  FRIDAY, MARCH 3, PETERBOROUGH: We worked in the afternoon and at last produced a workable scheme for the Library—working quarters and stacks under the Common Room and a Reading Room and treasure room upstairs by the Common Room. Ron Thom says it will take six months to produce working drawings and more than a year to build, so Vincent Massey’s notion of beginning in autumn 1962 is impracticable. But haste could only harm the building and if we could get in by January ’63, we could make preparation for our first group of Junior Fellows.

  Meanwhile I have a very generous letter from Claude Bissell about my appointment, which seems to have pleased the governors. Bissell also thanks me for smoothing the way with Vincent Massey, which I am not conscious of having done: he seems to me eminently reasonable, and when his imagination is aroused, truly a patron; but I suppose the university’s money men ruffled him. Both Lionel and Bill Broughall have said very kind things about my Proposals. Next tasks: to agree on the plan and the price and then try to arrive at some notion of Fellows and budget.

  WEDNESDAY, MARCH 8, TORONTO: Lunch at the York Club with Dr. Andrew Robertson Gordon, dean of the School of Graduate Studies. Explain the College idea to him as he knows little about it. Am surprised how many people who are vital to this plan are not kept abreast of developments. Bill Broughall tells me Raymond Massey is in the dark, and I have written to him. But Dr. Gordon likes all my ideas and is especially enthusiastic about the Examination Room. After lunch he took me to the present dingy quarters of the Graduate School, and their examination room is a squalid attic. From him I learn a good deal about how the Graduate School works and wish we could include more of its doings in Massey College, but I fear the effect of that would be to make it a university departmental building, and I would be, in effect, dean of residence.

  THURSDAY, MARCH 9, TORONTO: Lunch at the York Club with Claude Bissell, who is entertaining for Harold Clurman.17 Bissell welcomes me very graciously to the academic community. I get a taste of university spite when Norman Endicott18 tries to draw me about Massey College. Is it true, he asks, that it is to be called St. Vincent de Souls? A very good joke, but there will be a lot of them and I must not seem to enjoy them, nor yet to be huffy. Would Endicott make a good Senior Fellow? I am sounding out Gordon Roper as senior librarian and he is much attracted; the thought of building a collection, particularly of manuscripts, works on him like aqua vitae.

  FRIDAY, MARCH 10: We were to have met at the National Trust, but as Vincent Massey is unwell (a return of his prostate trouble), I drive to Batterwood in a grand hired Cadillac limousine with Lionel and Bill Broughall. In the study, VM in dressing gown and corduroy trousers, Hart, Geoffrey (who is like his father, Raymond, but handsomer), and Ron Thom, as low-spoken as ever. We discuss the plans and, without much difficulty, approve them in the form Ron Thom and I had reached. It is also clear that midsummer 1963 will be the time of opening, a long time to wait but not so long to me as to VM, I judge. He has hopes of getting a bell for the tower from England, the very one which rang the alarum in the Citadel at Quebec when Wolfe attacked; the English looted it, and it is now in a London church. My guess is that they will stick to it on the principle of “What we’ve stolen, we hold.” Hart raises curious objections: though no believer, he does not like the abandonment of the chapel; will the kitchen be able to produce a good sole meunière? These people have the most unworldly notions of what young Canadians with their careers to make want to eat and drink. VM read a letter from Raymond, who makes some minor objections to my Proposals (though on the whole is very favourable) and, like Hart, wants to play the True Believer. The Massey arms could well be adapted to the College; their motto Dum terar prosum19 I am not so keen on—nineteenth-century pretentiousness, I should judge.

  Brenda and Jenny came for me about 5:30. VM very friendly to Brenda, though he had not long before been inveighing against women as post-graduate students, a strange crotchet but not impossible to understand.

  Home, h.t.d. after dinner. Caught cold, I fear, and slept ill.

  SATURDAY, MARCH 11: Wrote a Star column on Montaigne. I feel ropey, sore throat. In the afternoon to bed and read a detective story and slept. In the evening with Brenda and Jenny to The Marriage-Go-Round, a bad film. Why am I ill? Not exhaustion: excitement, I should say, and psychological disturbance and meeting people.

  Now I know that the College will not be ready till 1963 I can organize some of my own work: first, find what I have to do at the university and prepare to do it well.

  FRIDAY, MARCH 17: Received a friendly letter from Sir David Lindsay Keir, master of Balliol, on my appointment, saying how pleased he is that the Founder and first master are Balliol men. This is rain on thirsty ground to me, for I have regretted losing touch with Balliol, owing to Roy Ridley’s20 being turfed out, and my lack of rapport with A.D. Lindsay.21 Must try to visit Keir when I am in England in May.

  SUNDAY, MARCH 19: My voice utterly gone: keep to the house all day and take steam and read Sinister Street by Compton Mackenzie and enjoy it greatly. The misery of this ’flu is dizziness: to bed early and more steam; wrote to Guthries in the afternoon.

  MONDAY, MARCH 20: I am wobbly and my voice still gone: do a fair day’s work and write to the master of Balliol. In the evening work on The Duchess of Malfi. The worst of this ’flu is the vertigo; but end of term approaches and spring can be sniffed in the chill air.

  I am ill almost every March. Exhaustion? Winter? This combination of Love and Libel, Trinity, Massey College, and the Examiner has made this the hardest winter I have ever known. God! Alas!

  WEDNESDAY, MARCH 22: To Toronto at 8:30 and lecture on The Tempest. To see Claude Bissell at 3. My suggestion that I give a post-graduate course in drama has been received with unexpected enthusiasm by Prof. A.S.P. Woodhouse, so I am to continue with undergraduates at Trinity in 1961–2 and begin such a graduate course in autumn ’62, and drop the undergraduate work. They think I may have several theses a year to oversee and this is considered taxing work. About the College, I inform CB of our progress and he assures me of all co-operation on budget and business matters from his staff. He thoroughly understands the Masseys’ attitude, and was so frank as to tell me that he resents Frank Stone, who is Eric Phillips’s22 man and apt to assume authority and by-pass CB. With Bissell’s help I feel certain all that is necessary can be done; as always when I have seen him I feel refreshed and have a renewed sense of the dignity and importance of the work I am undertaking. My natural gloom is rebuked. CB assures me that the university governors would not mind a yearly deficit of $25,000 on Massey College. He says also that the one governor who disliked the idea of the College was Irene Clarke23 of Clarke, Irwin, who was bitter because women could not be included in it. Her son Garrick has left the publishing house and is studying for the ministry. Religion has always been the brandy of the Clarkes and the Irwins.

  MONDAY, MARCH 27: In 1960 my income was $55,741 and my tax $16,192.16. I am surprised by how much I earn, for I always feel very modest with men who probably do not earn half what I do. It is something ingrained in me. In the evening we see the film Great Expectations on TV. Excellent.

  SUNDAY, APRIL 2, EASTER SUNDAY: To Communion at 8 and home by 9:30; breakfast, then heard Berlioz’s Damnation de Faust with girls and liked it. In the afternoon go for a walk in a snowstorm and the car goes crook—brakes fail. Notable dinner and Miranda goes to Toronto by train; read Evelyn Waugh ’til midnight.

  Lectures done, articles done, only Star columns left to do: how weary I am! What a fool’s life to work so hard, earn so much, and be weary! I am always at odds with myself and I think this is the mainspring of my character. (H.t.d. 18 to date.)

  MONDAY, APRIL 3: Am obsessed by sense of failure and despair; work hard all day: Star column on Compton Mackenzie’s Sinister Street in the afternoon. In the evening, read C.S. Lewis on words; Brenda to bed early and burns herself with the sun-lamp; Jenny to a dance and finds it a bore. Oh! woe, woe! When will the weight lift?

  FRIDAY
, APRIL 7: H.t.d. on waking; wrote a Star column on C.S. Lewis in the afternoon; evening with Brenda to Tunes of Glory, good Alec Guinness film; lichen planus very troublesome: am I really as low as this suggests? It always asserts itself when I am nervously exhausted and has been getting worse since Christmas.

  SUNDAY, APRIL 9: The cloud begins to lift and I think of Portugal with pleasure: our first visit to a southern land. Will Massey College make great travellers of us? I am incorrigibly provincial and want to know the world—but painlessly.

  Rob and Brenda travelled to Portugal and England from April 14 until May 24. They were tireless tourists, as these selections of the travel diary show. This was a holiday, but Massey College was much on their minds, particularly when they visited the old city of Coimbra with its university founded in 1290, the oldest in Portugal and one of the oldest in the world.

  MONDAY, APRIL 24, ÓBIDOS: A very good lunch at Leiria and bought some sugared almonds. Then made a by-jaunt to Milagres to see the great church built to celebrate the miracle of Manuel Francisco Maio. Well worth the trouble. A boy let us in and some charming children followed us; at parting, 2 escudos to the boy and a solemn distribution of sugar-plums. Thus on through Coimbra to Bussaco to the Palace Hotel, a former royal hunting palace built in late nineteenth century; tasteless Victorian Manueline, showing what this style may become when vulgarized. Ghastly, huge azulejos24 with naked women on them in the opera-singer taste of the time. Richly comic relief after the splendours of the day. Excellent dinner and we finished with glasses of Madeira from the Leacock firm, a reminder of Stephen’s ancestral business.

  TUESDAY, APRIL 25, BUSSACO: In Coimbra, ask two girls the way to the university and they prove to be English-speaking students who take us in tow most charmingly and show us the library, superb, and the examination room, splendidly dignified and the same general plan as I devised for Massey College, and the veranda, which gives a splendid view over the city. One of the girls explains to us that the black suits and capes are the student uniform of the university; the Prince Albert coats give a very solemn look to the young men, but love-making is as much in evidence as in Toronto.

  THURSDAY, APRIL 27, LISBON: After dinner to the Teatro da Trindade to see A Casa dos Vivos—Graham Greene’s The Living Room. Direful direction and acting ranging from mediocre to actionable. Afterward we asked directions of a student, who told us that the company was amateur—decidedly not skilled amateur. He walked back with us to our hotel, which was courteous, if a little embarrassing. How charming these European theatres are! How built for pleasure! But Graham Greene’s Papist humbug ill survives a stark and heavy-handed attack by people for whom Catholicism is the very air they breathe. It demands a certain Protestant resistance in the audience; here there was none, of course. The worst acting was that of a girl who played Tia Teresa; she seemed about nineteen and had got herself up to look like a poorly preserved ninety-five, and trembled, shuffled, and quavered with the vigour of hearty youth. Her great “collapse” was right out of an acting book; she looked into the flies, clasped her brow, gave at the knees, turned her body a little, and fell smack on her bottom, with such force that her feet flew into the air and came down like a couple of auctioneer’s hammers. And there she lay, dead as an amateur actress can be.

  In London Rob and Brenda’s days were filled with visits to old haunts and to old friends and they did some enthusiastic shopping.

  TUESDAY, MAY 2, LONDON: Collected our theatre tickets and went to the Folio Society gallery and saw some old Italian drawings, but none we wanted. To Liberty’s where I bought two madder handkerchiefs, a reversible jumper, and a silk dressing gown, at huge cost. Lunched at the Café Royal. Then to Mr. Franklin’s and bought a memorial ring, and a ring with a fine cut peridot, and a handsome eighteenth-century pendant of swans, and a George Washington memorial brooch for Jackie Davie at a cost of about £200, and three fine Stuart brooches. Mr. Franklin also presented me with a handsome ivory-handled paper-knife, as he insists I paid him £10 too much in 1959. Great good will shown on both sides; he grows old, and I thought we might not see him again. Then I went alone in search of Clunes, who is gone from Cecil Court; heavy rain came on, and the demon of diarrhea seized me, and I had to go to the public lavatory at the end of Tottenham Court Road, a disagreeable experience, for in the booths a notice in red warns against VD and on the walls are scrawled the obscenities of homosexuals—their wishes, their complaisance, their personal measurements all crudely phrased. Then to Foyles25 and got the Caldecott illustrated Bracebridge Hall; a German girl on the staff irritated me by her barbarous method of dusting the books—clapping them vigorously and noisily together. Tonight to the Old Vic to see the much talked-of Romeo and Juliet directed by Franco Zeffirelli. I did not like it: severely and maimingly cut; vulgarly spoken; no pace, but alternations of pause and frenzy; coarse insistence on physical sex, denoted by panting and gobbling kisses; too much of Romeo’s bum—yet it was more expressive than his face; everything sacrificed to an ingenious and beautiful set and lighting—“Old Master” effects. We felt that the Old Vic we had known under Miss Baylis26 and Tony Guthrie was quite gone. But we do not repine, for were we not there when some great things were being done? We were too out of sorts for grand food and went to a small Italian place on the Waterloo Road and were served by a girl with three large port-wine marks on her face—a lifelong misery, I suppose, and she had developed a somewhat haughty manner to make up for it.

  In Oxford Davies followed up on his exchange of letters with the master of Balliol College, Sir David Lindsay Keir.

  FRIDAY, MAY 5: From Paddington to Oxford in glorious sunshine. A good lunch at the Mitre and looked at All Souls, Queen’s, Magdalen, and Trinity, all fresh and beautiful. At 4:30 to Balliol to tea with the master and Lady Keir; very pleasant and Keir probing me in a very Balliol way, but did not catch me in any stupidities so far as I know. I would like to enlist his good will for Massey College. Lady Keir a great change from Lady Lindsay—a mondaine, humorous person. Left at 5:45 and took the 6:20 to London.

  TUESDAY, MAY 9, LONDON: This afternoon visited St. Paul’s Covent Garden and saw the tablets to many actors, including Macklin and Ellen Terry. I was most touched by that of May Whitty and Ben Webster; I shall not forget how good he was to me at the Vic when I was a beginner, and how he kept his dignity when Tony Guthrie humiliated and nagged him for his lapses of memory. How long kindness lingers in the mind! This evening to The Lady from the Sea at the Queen’s; the best acting we have seen in London. A perfect cast with Margaret Leighton and Andrew Cruickshank at the head of it, but Vanessa Redgrave, Michael Gwynn, John Neville, et al. to back them up. Deeply touching and moving to both mind and heart. Astonishing what a Jungian play Lady from the Sea is! Must look at Ibsen again with this in mind. Excellent supper at the Café Royal.

  THURSDAY, MAY 11, LONDON: Drive to Blenheim and eat our picnic in the grounds, then go through the palace, which is very crowded with visitors, mostly English. A magnificent place, but dead, and the guides have the refined, regretful accents, and the air of keeping up their spirits under difficulties, proper to undertakers. The grounds, too, are not really well kept up. So on, and get to Broadway, to the Lygon Arms, about 4:45. A rest, then to Stratford and see Much Ado about Nothing, which is mediocre, except for Christopher Plummer; a complex, fussy set, and too much movement and music; the result, supposedly, of Michael Langham being ill during much of the rehearsal time. Afterward I went to see Plummer, who was naked except for a kind of dancer’s corset-drawers; he gives off energy as a stove does heat. He was somewhat depressed by Stratford England and nervous about opening in Richard III. He told me of Langham’s illness, which worried him greatly. I think he was really pleased to see me. Lonely.

  SATURDAY, MAY 13: Up betimes and leave the Lygon Arms about 10 and motor at leisurely speeds to Henley and to Fawley Bottom Farmhouse to visit John and Myfanwy Piper.27 A pleasant place: met two of their daughters; the younger played some Beethoven for me, not we
ll. They live very much as artists are supposed to do, in comfortable mess. A very good lunch off a clean but bare table, no napkins. Mrs. Piper looks overdriven; he is youthful of face though white-headed. Also at lunch was the man who does his stained glass. He showed us the model for his great window at Coventry Cathedral. Piper says he likes working for the Church: “It is always worthwhile.” A delightful person. We looked at a lot of his pictures, including the original studies for the A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream sets and some of his stained glass sketches, and roof-bosses. But decided on two of his watercolours of Stowe, romantic and evocative—the Congreve monument in one. Got them for £60 and I call this a bargain.

  They returned on the Empress of Canada, sailing from Liverpool to Montreal.

  TUESDAY, MAY 16: We find we are at table 39 with the Parsonses, an English couple in their sixties, and the Bolgianos, Americans from Maryland, and with all the bumptious inquisitiveness, lodge rings, Rotary buttons, opinionativeness, and guileless good will of their race. Must study to get our meals at different times from the Bolgianos, who waken all the curmudgeon in me. Today I finished Boswell’s Tour of the Hebrides.