My own relationship with him was almost uncannily close. Let me give two examples. When we decided to publish the short story collection According to Jake and the Kid (1989), we agreed on the sixteen stories to be included. We knew that the tough part would be arranging them in the best order, so when he next came to Toronto we set aside a whole afternoon in his room in the old Four Seasons Hotel on Jarvis Street to shuffle and deal the stories in order on to the bed. We were done in under twenty minutes, both of us in total agreement: “Yes, now this one!” “Okay, then this would be next!” “Right, so we’d need this more serious one next!”
And so on. Bang, bang, bang.
This was so extraordinary that much later his biographers asked me to account for it. I could only give a feeble answer about trying to give a short story collection an overall shape, starting off with a strong story that establishes the character and the setting, then trying for a trajectory that mixes serious with humorous, blends long stories with short, and you know, um, er, ends on a strong story . . . I trailed away. Barb and Orm looked disappointed, hoping for an overarching principle. The truth is that W.O. and I knew what it was — even if I, for one, couldn’t explain it.
And I certainly can’t explain the matter of the title change to the novel that we had always called Trophies. Since it concerned a university professor, with framed degrees on his wall, who goes after a grizzly bear hide on a hunt that goes so badly wrong that he is seriously mauled, the title always seemed perfectly fine, and we had both accepted it as final. Until one morning, at home, I started to think that the place where he encountered the grizzly, Daisy Creek, was too good a name not to use in the title. How about, let’s see, After Daisy Creek?
I rushed in to the office and tried the new title idea around. Everyone liked it, especially the all-important sales people. Great. Time to call Bill.
“Bill, I was thinking that Trophies is a good title, but it occurs to me that maybe we can do better . . .”
He cut me off, excitedly. “Yeah, and I’ve got a great title, a real doozy of a title. It’s just perfect!” (Oh, great, I thought. Now I not only have to talk him into the title that everyone here likes, I’ve got to talk him out of this new one. Ah, well.)
“So, Bill, what’s your new title?”
“Since Daisy Creek!”
I felt an eerie ringing in my ears.
“Bill, that’s pretty good. Um. When did you think this one up?”
“Oh, just this morning.”
Talk about an author and editor being on the same wavelength.
We were not on the same wavelength when Bill was rushing to deliver a new novel in time for fall publication. The final chapter had to be in my hands by the end of May. Through the winter he would deliver chapters, and I would rush to call him back to tell him the new stuff was really good, well done, keep going!
At the end of May he called to say he had done it, the book was finished, and the final chapter was in the mail. At great, congratulatory length I told him what a pro he was, and how delighted I was.
Until I read the final chapter.
It was terrible. Sloppy, slapdash, with a vital scene recounted “offstage.” How do you tell the legendary W.O. Mitchell that his work is no good? Carefully. With great difficulty. I lost sleep over having to make the phone call, which eventually went like this.
“Bill, you know I’ve been very pleased with all of your chapters as they came in?”
“Yeah.”
“And you know I’m no use to you if I don’t level with you?”
“Yeah.”
“Well . . . I have to tell you that this final chapter is no good.”
Pause.
“I know.”
“What do you mean you know?”
“Oh, hell, I was just rushing something off to you by the end of the month because I promised I would. But it’s no good. I’ve started rewriting it already.”
“Why, you son of a . . .”
I expressed myself vigorously, and he laughed, and I put it down to working with a wonderful, terrible, larger-than-life character.
Later, when we published Roses Are Difficult Here in 1990, I was responsible for a spot of censorship that he teased me for at readings across the country (and he loved, in his biographers’ words, “to wind me up”). He would interrupt his tale of the arrival of Santa Claus in Shelby to confide to delighted audiences that in his original version, the runaway horses in Rory Napoleon’s team of “reindeer” were originally roared at by Rory as . . . well, let’s just say the term Bill used resembled “sock-kickers.” I was the villain identified as “Dougie” Gibson, his normally sensible editor and pal. Shamefully, I had said, “There goes the library market” and had insisted on changing the instructions to the runaway horses to read “Whoa, you bay bastards!” In his readings — and even sometimes in his signings, for God’s sake, as his fan and heir Stuart MacLean tells me — Bill insisted on restoring the original and in poking fun at me.
We were more than just a good, professional author-editor team. We were friends. That became clear when I left Macmillan in 1986 to set up Douglas Gibson Books at M&S. W.O. was a very loyal man who had stuck with Macmillan since 1947, but he decided that his primary loyalty lay with me. “I’m comin’ with you,” he said. And to my delight, he did.
He was, of course, only half a person. The other half was the redoubtable Merna Mitchell, known to most of us by the full appellation “Fercrissakesmerna.” As his loving, caring, and remarkably tolerant wife for more than half a century, she deserves a book of her own. She was more than a glasses finder and a snuffbox retriever, she was the organizing principle in his life, to the extent that any arrangement made with him was worthless unless entered into the agenda by Merna.
Their relationship — sustained by what I called “the power of mutual recrimination” — was a constant delight to their many friends. No phone call to their house was ever complete until the phone had been wrested away so that the previous speaker could be joyfully contradicted by his or her spouse. Orm and Barb quote me in Mitchell, saying: “I remember there was one wonderful incident that went on for two, three minutes while I sat there looking at the ceiling while the phone was being passed from one to the other and they were having this spirited debate, grabbing the phone from one another, as to whether they were wasting my time by passing the phone. It was always two for the price of one. I always came away laughing and delighted.”
When that stopped happening, I knew that he was losing the long battle against prostate cancer. Confirmation came the day he was too tired to recount a juicy anecdote and simply said, “You tell Doug the story, Merna.”
The last time I saw him was on a cold October day in Calgary. Opposite his house, in the park where we had once walked and talked about plot twists, the last cottonwood leaves were falling. Inside the house a hospital bed was set up in the family room, where he received twenty-four-hour-a-day care. Merna, Orm, and Barbara had warned me that the morphine produced good days and bad days, but this was a good day, so he would recognize me.
To cover my predicted dismay at his appearance, I had prepared an opening joke: I praised Merna’s gallant reading of one of his stories at the previous night’s tribute, suggesting that all these years we had had the wrong member of the Mitchell family performing his work in public. He snorted at that, and we were briefly back to the affectionate insults that marked our relationship. He complained at one point, however, that the drugs were taking away his memory. There was not much to say in response.
But like a great comedian he had prepared his punch line. When I announced that it was time for me to go, the others tactfully disappeared. I stood by his bed saying my goodbyes, trying to tell him how much he had meant to me, and not doing a good job of it. Merna returned to say, “Bill, he really has to go now, the taxi’s here.” A few more words from me, then he turned, look
ed me in the eye, put out a hand to shake, and said, “Well . . . goodbye, Jimmy.”
This was awful.
But the alarmed noises from Merna and the others were cut off by the mischievous grin spreading across his now-boyish face. And I blundered out of the room, marvelling at the grace that had turned a hard farewell into a brave joke.
Goodbye, Bill.
“I feed my fires with quotations.” — Murther & Walking Spirits
World of Wonders was the first book by Robertson Davies that ushered me, a young editor, into his world. Its title provides a neat summary for that world in 1975, where to me everything was a little brighter, a little more surprising, and much more interesting than the everyday world offstage. It was a larger-than-life place, fully floodlit, and Davies was at its centre, ideally cast for the role of Man of Letters.
For a start, he looked like Jehovah. Not since Alexander Graham Bell — or, a mischievous thought, Karl Marx — has there been a head where flowing white locks and well-shaped beard combined so artfully to produce a leonine look, perhaps the look of the bust of Mendelssohn that adorned the piano of the house where he grew up, learning how a true artist should appear. It is impossible to think of Robertson Davies without that trademark beard.
Then there was the voice. Elderly ladies who as girls in Kingston took part in theatricals in 1932 that were directed by young Rob Davies still talked more than seventy years later about his marvellous voice, and how impressively he could use it. Over the years thousands have heard that voice resound around theatres and lecture halls all over the world. He not only performed readings from his work, he gave so many speeches that I was able to publish a fine selection from them entitled One Half of Robertson Davies (1977). He provided the title, based on the old Chinese proverb that “The tongue is one half of a man: but the other half is the heart.” (I believe that quotation is genuine; he was not above inventing scholarly origins for his titles, such as Fifth Business, for the pleasure of misdirecting academic researchers.)
Within the limits I later discovered at the Art Gallery of Ontario, he enjoyed exercising that voice. In the 1980s I once saw him use it to great effect from a stage lectern, to dispel the friendly, avuncular effect he had chosen to create at the outset. He had just begun to give a literary talk when a news photographer bustled to the front of the house and started to scuttle around his feet, popping up like a gopher to flash shots from below that were certain to be revealing nostril shots, and were blindingly distracting. Davies stopped his reading and took off his glasses. His normally beguiling voice snapped out, “Would you please not do that!” and he beamed down a terrible smile. The photographer, a member of a profession not renowned for its shyness, leaped away as if scalded, as indeed he had been.
From a surprisingly early age, even during his teenage years at Queen’s, that voice had chosen to adopt an English accent. Introducing her selection of interviews with those who knew Davies, Robertson Davies: A Portrait in Mosaic, Val Ross recalls meeting him in the McClelland & Stewart office in 1991: “He spoke with an English inflection to his vowels — remarkable for someone born in Thamesville, Ontario, who had spent seven of his eight decades on this side of the Atlantic.”
Remarkable, indeed. But then this was the boy who at Upper Canada College briefly sported a monocle, and at both Queen’s and Balliol College, Oxford, dressed in a floppy-hatted way that seemed designed to attract attention. He carried everything off with style, every stride, every gracious turn to meet an acquaintance, every introduction, every bow, and every raised eyebrow. More than one literary critic has suggested that perhaps this fine novelist’s greatest character creation was himself, the iconic figure who strolled in an old-fashioned tweed overcoat through Toronto’s Queen’s Park or the nearby campus, brandishing a cane. After his death his daughter, Jennifer Surridge, suggested that “one of the reasons he developed his personality, one of the reasons he developed a character [her word] at Upper Canada College, was he didn’t like people to learn things about his personal life.”
“Charisma embraces; style excludes.” — Question Time
Certainly it seemed to me that later in his life, as the beard grew snow-white, he used the Jehovah image as a protective shield. It failed miserably (blew up in his face, you might say) on the opening night of the Stratford Festival — he was a perpetual member of the board, and took his supportive duties seriously — when a bold woman emerged from the crowd outside the theatre to give his beard a tug, turning to report happily, “Yeah, it’s real!”
I was partly to blame for a later incident in Winnipeg. He had been reluctant to undertake the full national tour to promote his latest novel. Was it really necessary? he wondered. I found myself forced to point out that his friend and rival, W.O. Mitchell (who loved touring) had been setting the country — and his new book sales — on fire, while his own sales languished in comparison. So he gamely agreed to go on a pre-Christmas cross-country promotional tour, and, as luck would have it, at the end of a tiring day of interviews he ran into a waitress (evidently not a student of the best Canadian writing) who received him raucously: “Hey, are you Santa Claus?”
“No, madam,” he responded. “But I have sharp claws!”
Novelist Timothy Findley was a friend who watched the public performance over the years. At the grand celebration of Robertson Davies’ life that we held in Convocation Hall in Toronto the week of his death, he perceptively suggested that perhaps only the Davies family knew how much it cost him in emotional energy to keep up the role of Robertson Davies.
Very early in our working relationship, which deepened over the years into a friendship as we worked on eight books together — my copy of The Cunning Man is inscribed in his fine italic hand “For Douglas Gibson (‘my partner frequent’) Sairy Gamp a.k.a. Rob Davies.” — I caught a glimpse of this, a peek behind the costume. We were together in a side room at the Art Gallery of Ontario, about to face a crowd of perhaps 400 people assembled to hear him read from his new novel, World of Wonders (or possibly The Rebel Angels). I was to introduce him, and was pacing nervously around the room where he and I waited, as the hum of the assembling audience rose in our ears. My twitchy pacing took me close to the stolid figure of the author, and I was astonished to hear that composed, Jehovah-like figure uttering low, shuddering breaths.
I stopped pacing, and looked at him in disbelief.
“Butterflies?”
“Oh, yes,” he said, mournfully.
“Still? After all these years, and all the hundreds of speeches?”
“Yes,” he added, gravely. “Always.”
This was a revelation, and a very encouraging one. Even Robertson Davies got really nervous before a speech! Further questions revealed that he thought it essential to be keyed up before a performance. And for him, the ultimate professional, every reading or lecture or speech was just that, a performance. He had too much respect for the craft of the performer — lecturer, actor, singer, musician, or magician — to wander on unrehearsed and unprepared and unexcited. But those shuddering breaths! Who would have thought it, or even believed me, when he swept confidently onto the stage, like a galleon under full sail.
“How fully does one ever know anybody?” — Murther & Walking Spirits
The quotations that punctuate this essay, like the one above, come from James Channing Shaw’s selection, The Quotable Robertson Davies, which I published with pride in 2005. That wide-ranging book, with comments from “Academia” alphabetically all the way to “Youth,” seems to me to provide two very important lessons about him. First, that he wrote a great deal, on many subjects; a book full of selected quotations from a slim, narrowly defined body of work would make little sense. Much more important, it shows that from his early years as a writer Davies sprinkled his plays, essays, and novels with witty epigrams and shrewd comments on the strange ways that human beings behave. A writer who is striving to produce epigrams (such
as the apposite line “A great writer must give us either great feeling from the heart or great wisdom from the head”) is very different, I suggest, from a writer who just gets on, unambitiously, with telling the story or making the case. Davies liked to aim at the role of oracle, and the selection of quotations show how often he hit the mark, giving the readers of his novels memorable flashes of wisdom to ponder.
“Whom the gods hate they keep forever young.” — Fifth Business
From his earliest years, many of his friends were aware that he was exceptional. Some even tended to store his letters, confident that a great future — of some sort — awaited him. They were not to know that he had several lives to live before he found his greatest role.
Robertson Davies: Man of Myth is the title of Judith Skelton Grant’s masterly 1994 biography. Her opening paragraph gives the perfect summary of his career — or, more properly, his careers:
While he was growing up, his father, Rupert, a newspaper owner and editor, moved the family from the village of Thamesville to the town of Renfrew and later the city of Kingston, all in Ontario. Davies was educated at Upper Canada College in Toronto, Queen’s University in Kingston, and Balliol College in Oxford. A brief career as an actor was followed by more than twenty years as a journalist (he was both a columnist and editor of the Peterborough Examiner), and for another twenty years he was master of Canada’s first graduate college and a professor of drama at the University of Toronto.
Stories About Storytellers Page 14