A Celtic Temperament: Robertson Davies as Diarist

by Robertson Davies

  TUESDAY, AUGUST 28: To Toronto, buy Purcell records, and in the afternoon to the CNE from 2:30 to 5. Dine at Lord Simcoe, Brenda’s treat—shrimps, Caesar salad, filet mignon, and crêpes Suzette and cheese, and to Harold Lloyd’s World of Comedy. I am forty-nine: delightful birthday and charming gifts. How lucky I am in Brenda and the girls!

  WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 29, TORONTO: Brenda and I spend two hours in the morning with Young and Gwillim of Commercial Caterers and see the cafeterias at British American Oil, the Board of Education Building (which has a vulgar special dining-room for the trustees, replete with glassware “cut” within an inch of its life, and costly, nasty china), and the Board of Trade Building. Again was impressed by their good sense and thoroughness: both men are master chefs (a seven-year apprenticeship). I brought away some glass to show VM.

  In the afternoon to Simcoe Hall to Ken Edey’s office: I like him, and his worn, kind, witty face like a French man of letters. We discuss the College brochure with Allan Fleming and the man from University Press whose name I forget. We decide to use no pictures, and rely on fine type, heraldry, and paper. Return to Peterborough.

  THURSDAY, AUGUST 30: Bill calls twice: he thinks matters may go well about money. VM has written six pages of, he says, eloquent good sense to Raymond, putting all the points very cogently. Bill advises me to be cautious when VM speaks of money, and not seem happy about talk of $65,000. I must persuade VM that this autumn the Senior Fellows must be told the facts about the College finance.

  SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 2: Brenda and I to Batterwood at 11:30 and at once with Vincent Massey, Lionel, and Lilias to the pool, where we sit in very hot sun and discuss College matters. First Vincent tells me of the Foundation’s intention to guarantee $65,000 in early years. I am not enthusiastic, and point out that this sum probably will not cover the deficit. He assures me it is “just a beginning” and that he has it in writing from the trustees (even Geoff, I wonder) that the College is the last work of the Foundation, which will exist in future to nurture it. Then we discuss china and silver and agree the latter should be of good eighteenth-century design. I have sinus from dust, and the sun gives me a tiresome headache. Lunch, and after, Brenda and Lilias go to bathe with the girls and VM and Lionel and I go into a session about glass. I show them the pieces we brought away from Commercial Caterers and they like them, which is a triumph for practicality. One way or another we spend all afternoon on College work, and get many things settled preliminary to the meetings of September 11 and 12, which promise to be bloody.

  Lionel discusses Frank Harris’s My Life and Loves, which he and VM have been reading with goggle eyes; they are both amateurs of pornography in a modest way. Lionel lends the book to me. For the first time he speaks of his wartime prison camp experience: I gather he read a good deal there, and thought poorly of those who never thought of anything but escape, which, he said, made them neurotic. Dinner, after which pleasant conversation, and VM tells of Victor Rothschild, the scientist and magnate, and Lionel recalls Michael Erleigh,55 and VM reads Kipling. Home about 11 very weary and headachy, but pleased with the day’s work. Dr. Dobson says I have low blood-pressure and I certainly felt a want of energy today. Brenda and I have put off our journey abroad as the College and the threatened strike at the Examiner have made me too tired for the exertion of a holiday. But if we can get the College well launched it will be worth many sacrifices.

  MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, LABOUR DAY: H.t.d. on waking. Take lunch to Bryn Camlas. The girls go swimming and Brenda and I read and doze on the hill. Read a lot of Dr. Johnson. A pleasant evening and good talk. Read Frank Harris’s Life and Loves and am amazed at his tireless lust.

  TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 4: Delightful letters from my father in Wales and Nevill Coghill. To Toronto: shop, and lunch at Eaton’s. In the afternoon put Miranda on the ’bus for Stratford. Take Brenda, Jenny, and Rosamond to see the Moscow Circus at Maple Leaf Gardens. The best circus I ever saw: European style—one ring and the emphasis on skill rather than spectacle. The only animals were dogs and some wonderful bears. Superb acrobats of all kinds. What gave it a great air was an artistic concept of a circus, which pervaded everything and expressed itself in ease, good humour, a grave courtesy to the audience and the other performers, and a “throw-away” style. The direct contrary of the feverish strenuosity of Ringling’s, as I saw it in Madison Square Garden; no vulgarity of costume. Of course some vulgarity of conception: it began with a foolish “astronaut” tableau, followed by some trapeze people who were to perform on a “sputnik” which fouled its cable and would not work. But how astonishing to be given a form of catharsis, and left well contented, by a circus!

  WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 5: Lionel Massey has lent me Frank Harris’s My Life and Loves. Why does he say loves? He has lain with many women, but nothing he says suggests that he loved any of them. He sought variety and sensation, and found them. His masterpiece seems to have been buggering a Japanese girl as she rubbed another Japanese girl’s clitoris with her own, and they all achieved orgasm together. This when Frank Harris was about forty-five. But I cannot call that love. I have never desired or sought physical intimacy with a woman I did not love and do not think I could have borne it if I had. Now, I am sure I could not perform. Have never been given to lust, and copulation without love is no more.

  FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 7: I think I have a librarian. Douglas Lochhead,56 whom I met last night at the Trent University dinner, is now librarian at York and, like so many at that ill-starred institution, wants to get away. Tom Symons wants him for Trent and will pay $12,500 (so he says), but Lochhead does not want the imperial pomps of a university library, in which he would be primarily an administrator, but a place he can do scholarly work; he is a bibliographer. Massey College excites him and he would accept $10,000. More than I had foreseen, but we cannot afford to have less than a first-rate man and he could save us money by expertise. The librarian at Cornell thinks Douglas Lochhead one of the two or three best men he ever had. He came at 10:15, stayed to lunch: I think he is the man. I called Gordon Roper, who will take a look at him next week.

  Tanya Moiseiwitsch writes from Ireland: she will do the chapel if she can. That was September 1; she is now in Stratford. I called her at 6 p.m. and tentatively arranged a meeting for next week. Tyrone Guthrie is urging her to do it. Vincent Massey has sought her out in Stratford and, she says, was very stern in demanding that she do it, but this is her fun: he is too smooth to bully her yet.

  Brenda and I have read VM’S Frank Harris book and agree that it is flatly and cheaply written. VM thinks the style good but perhaps he expects pornography to be full of dirty words. There is a vein of simplicity in us all: if VM objects to women near his College, perhaps it is to be expected that he should be taken in by a book by a ruffian who uses women as things, and not fellow-creatures, which I think detestable. Brenda and I agree that one of the signs of true cultivation is an ability to talk and write of sexual and scatological things with some grace (e.g., Fanny Hill) and not with vulgar gloating or tumescent solemnity. The Masseys lack this.

  TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11: To Toronto. Meet with the Foundation in Eaton’s fifth-floor board room at 11:30. Everybody late but me and VM, and he begins in a bad humour. Hart and Geoffrey are obstructive, and our arms are still delayed and decisions are havered over for hours, it seems. The battle of the silver is fought again. We adjourn for lunch to the University Club and do ourselves well, but I already have a headache. At it again the whole afternoon—chairs and rugs. At 6 to Lionel Massey’s house on Dunvegan Road. Brenda joins us and we dine. Get away about 9:30. A dreadful day.

  WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, TORONTO: We meet at Eaton’s 10:30. I walk from Hawthorn Gardens and so arrive refreshed and exercised. But everyone else was in bad temper and quarrelling begins at once. Hart and Geoffrey accuse Eaton’s of stealing Scandinavian chair designs and righteously refuse to be party to such doings. Russell says Eaton’s pay royalties to all designers and is understandably tough. Hart and Geoffrey want to rev
erse yesterday’s decision to have low-priced glass: they want Orrefors at $2 each. I say I cannot go to Simcoe Hall with a budget and deficit caused by breakage of such things and warn them that the College will be a white elephant if it costs too much to maintain. This is gleefully supported by VM and Lionel and received with sour faces by Hart and Geoffrey. I also become crusty when VM is petulant about the carrels: “I’m not even slightly interested!” Marie Antoinette!

  Lunch at the York Club. Great excitement! The plates there are crested in gold and green and we have been told cresting cannot be fired on china in gold and a colour! I get away and have my hair cut as they want to talk family secrets. Rejoin them at 4 at Dunvegan Road.

  Bill tells me the family meeting was a knock-down-drag-out. Geoffrey does not want “family money” put at the disposal of professors who may use it in ways the Masseys might not like. Bill is brutal, and tells them the Massey Foundation is the smallest of the many that National Trust administers. A bloodbath. We discuss typographical matters with Allan Fleming. Hart does not like “A merry heart doth good like a medicine but a broken spirit drieth the bones” (Proverbs 17:22 KJB) for the Hall. He thinks it frivolous, that we should have something with more “weight,” i.e., gloom. I lecture him on the text. Then stamp on Bill for anti-Semitism. We are all edgy and I am glad to get away and dine with Brenda at the Club and go to the movie Lolita, which I thought very moving in places.

  THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, TORONTO: I had C.E. Friesen to lunch at the University Club—a possible bursar, now working in Peterborough for the Bank of Commerce. Liked him: a dedicated, conscience-ridden man who was the accountant at the bank when the manager committed suicide. I hope he may come to us. At 5 with Ron Thom and Lorimer57 to the College and go over it thoroughly. It looks dreadful but full of promise. Nothing can ever change the fact that the sun will never shine in my study, which is a cave. At 6:30 Brenda and Tanya Moiseiwitsch join us, and Tanya sees the cement box where the chapel will be. Then to the University Club to dine (trailing the burr-like Lorimer, who is dog-like toward TM) and talk about the chapel, not very successfully, as Ron Thom will not throw out ideas and encouragement, which is what the very feminine Tanya needs. I try to do this, but I am no architect so it is not very helpful. At 10 Brenda and I leave them at the Park Plaza and drive home. A tornado hit Toronto at 8:30 and our conversation went on to sounds of thunder and torrential rainfall.

  FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 14: Bill calls at 4:30: at last the skies clear and the Masseys are—not perhaps willing, but agreed—to support the College in toto for five years. God be praised! Bill explains that he feels unhappy about betraying so many confidences, but does it from enthusiasm for the College, and I believe him, though Irish fondness for gossip and intrigue enters into it too. But without his breaches of confidence I would have resigned or gone mad months ago. Bill is as much the architect of the College as Ron Thom, and I hope some day to be able to tell him so in some fitting manner. He says I will be summoned to Batterwood this weekend for the great dénouement of the money drama. Sure enough, at about 7:30 this evening the summons came. I think we now see daylight at the end of the tunnel.

  Gordon Roper is much impressed with Lochhead and thinks we should do all we can to get him. I suggest Claude Bissell might use him in the Graduate School, thus helping with his salary.

  Bill says he and Zoe were guests at Batterwood late last year and VM showed them his Christmas cards: very grand for royalty and such, a good one for the quality, and a cheap one for hoi polloi. When the Broughalls got theirs at Christmas it was—no. 3. How can anyone be so tactless? Yet I wrote to him some weeks ago, asking him to support my nomination for the Athenaeum58: he has never referred to it. Is Bill right when he calls him “a selfish little bugger”? This has been a week in Cloud-Cuckoo-Land.

  One must admire Hart Massey; if ever a man was short-changed by Nature or Fate, it is he. Not so pitiful as to provoke easy compassion, but handsomely formed—and nearly a midget. A bad head wound in the war—to which he would go. He has striven to play a man’s part and succeeded. But he is cold, minatory, and suspicious. And all his store of wisdom and philosophy is of the naysaying kind. He brings chill with him in the dog-days, and because of the exaggerated attention that we all pay to what he says, he has much more than one man’s influence. Lionel responds to Vincent’s egotism by knuckling under, Hart by a firm, calm intransigence.

  SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 16: To Batterwood. After lunch Brenda persuades VM to have a nap, and we walk in the gardens. Then a long talk with VM, who tells me plainly that the Foundation will guarantee (1) that the College will be its main concern from now on, and (2) that it will pay the deficit for five years. This is splendid, and I say so in what I hope are adequate terms. Now we can go ahead free of university supervision, and establish our way of work before we ask them for a cent. We talk about the Eaton’s estimate, much of which looks like guesswork, for $205,597.60 to furnish the College. We also talk about Ron Thom’s desire for a Japanese garden in the Quadrangle and damned ferns and palms in the building. VM is a fine host and a delightful companion and we had a splendid day, quite apart from the good news. He hopes to finish his book in two months. We agreed to ask Vincent Bladen to be a Senior Fellow.

  VM told us that he had been entertaining American guests, enemies of the present administration, who assured him solemnly that President Kennedy is unappeasably lustful and has to have a new girl every morning, and does not care if they are the most degraded prostitutes, and Mrs. Kennedy is inured to this. What mythomaniacs Americans are!

  Davies took a holiday from work at the Examiner from September 17 to September 30.

  MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 17: I take a holiday. In the morning go with Brenda to Buckhorn and walk. Afternoon sleep, chuck wood into the basement, and mess about. In the evening, to the film Bird Man of Alcatraz directed by John Frankenheimer, very good. We took Jenny, who is more friendly to us now, and I hope this will grow. Rest does wonders for me!

  WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 19: Lionel calls me to offer advice, viz.: that I see that the College is very well equipped now, with all it may need, so that these things will not appear during the next few years as expenses. He has seen Tuzo Wilson and Bill Dobson, who express great enthusiasm for the College and are determined to take their Senior. Fellowships very seriously. God keep them long in that mind!

  SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 22: To Toronto and get Rosamond, who is very jolly. We shop, buy wine for winter, lunch at the Club, get new specs, go to film Phantom of the Opera, hammy but restful. Chat at Hawthorn Gardens, dine at the Lord Simcoe. Home by 10:40, a very pleasant day.

  SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 23: Dismal misunderstandings are inevitable with daughters. One so wants them to have all that is happy and delightful, which is in fact to be inhuman. For whose life is all good, all free of pain?

  THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 27: Get away to Toronto at 2 and to BSS sports day. Rain and disorganization. Chat with Miss Nicks, the headmistress. Rest at Hawthorn Gardens. Dine at the Lord Simcoe and to the O’Keefe Centre for the sophisticated London revue Beyond the Fringe. It was undoubtedly clever but not so deeply satirical as I had been led to believe. Jokes about God, the royal family, and Jews do not cut very deep; a skit on the sentimentality of war recollections was partly good satire, partly “bad taste” of an adolescent kind. The best things were the nonsense—“Groves of Academe,” “Little Miss Britten,” “Sitting on the Bench.” A good evening, not fire from Heaven but very lively and restoring. Return to Hawthorn Gardens. H.t.d. in library.

  FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, TORONTO: To an appointment with Claude Bissell at 11 and am with him until 12:30. I tell him of the Foundation’s financial plan and he is very pleased. I ask him for an academic appointment for Lochhead and he promises to do what he can, and I think it is safe. As always when I see him, my confidence is strengthened. He asks me to serve on a committee to investigate the museum, if it should be necessary.59

  In the afternoon to Eaton’s with Brenda and we choose some mund
ane things—mattresses, pillows and the like—that the Foundation will not trouble with, helped by Sedgwick and Howard. They are worried about Ron Thom’s domination of the furnishing. So I tell them Vincent Massey thinks they are not doing enough, and they are startled. I urge them to write to VM and suggest more, and they are going to do so. I think this is necessary and my indiscretion justified, both with them and with Claude Bissell. Indeed, where would this College be without indiscretion?

  SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 29: To Stratford for a governors’ meeting and closing performances of the season. Lionel Massey corners me and pours into my ear the tale of his troubles at the museum. They are grievous and real. I ask him, will he continue at the ROM when his father is dead? Yes. His Masseydom stands in the way of his being appointed director, which is hard lines. During the day I discussed the College with Erwin Schuller, who is a wise fellow. He was astonished that we are charging fees and cannot give fellowships, like All Souls. He suggests the Ford or Gulbenkian Foundations or Sydney Hermant, the owner of Imperial Optical, might help. He says I must develop “controlled irresponsibility” in ruling the College or I will get no fun out of it, and will do it less good than I could. Wise counsel.

  Cyrano: Christopher Plummer better but still far from chivalry. Toby Robins poorer, thinner, and more artificial. The production has grown and ripened. A standing ovation, which I fear has become a mannerism of this production. A party afterward: the governors give it, but nobody seems to know this. All the excitement and sentiment of the close of a successful season. At lunch Michael Langham tells us about Sir Laurence Olivier visiting Stratford and his interest only in technical things: “Where do you put your hands when you climb down those pillars?” etc. Also about the new Chichester theatre Langham says, “Toilet accommodation awful. Men queue and enter by fives; women queue, five go in and never come out!” The buzz is that ML is taken up with Pat Galloway, but cannot get any real confirmation. Last year it was Bill Needles, who brought her fresh eggs from his farm. She is a beauty, but has a very English lack of taste in dress.