Stories About Storytellers

by Douglas Gibson

  All this, she notes, fails to include his lives as a playwright, and above all as a novelist, the life that brought him world fame.

  “Canada . . . the Home of Modified Rapture” — The Lyre of Orpheus

  Davies knew only too well that world fame was dangerous for a Canadian. He was all too familiar with the Canadian “tall poppy” syndrome, where those standing above the crowd are likely to be cut down; he had been a tall poppy most of his life, from the days when the Polish kids in Renfrew, a town he hated, used to beat up the smart kid who lived in the big house. One of his favourite stories was of attending a Vancouver cocktail party when the momentous news was shouted into the room that Lester Pearson had won the Nobel Peace Prize. The wondering silence that followed was broken by an older woman who rattled the ice in her glass fiercely as she declaimed, “Well! Who does he think he is?”

  Alice Munro understands these things well. In 1978, when I published Who Do You Think You Are?, a title that resonated with Canadians, the American and the British publishers (alarmed by the fact that Malcolm Bradbury had recently used the same title) preferred to publish the book with the meaningless title The Beggar Maid. Rob was amused by this, and sympathetic to Alice, whose work he admired. Later he was kind to his fellow author from Ontario at a PEN event in New York in 1986. Alice recalled him inviting her for a drink. “And,” she says in Val Ross’s book, “it was like being with a member of my family. It was very comfortable. I felt so relaxed! And he was making me relaxed, of course, by letting me have the sense of our being alike, from small-town southwest Ontario.”

  Then, the Alice Munro touch.

  “Yet we are not really alike. We come from different classes. I was the kind of girl who would have come to do his mother’s ironing . . .”

  “You can’t really form an opinion about somebody until you have seen the place where they live.” — The Cunning Man

  In July 2008 Jane and I went on a literary tour of Southwestern Ontario (designated “Sowesto” by Greg Curnoe, an artist based in its centre, the city of London). We first visited Alice Munro country, following the old pioneer Huron Line from Stratford to Goderich, and paying special attention to the stretch of flat farming country watered by the many-branched Maitland between her birthplace in Wingham and her current home in Clinton. We roamed around her father’s old haunts at Blyth, where we saw a play based on a Munro short story, and we had dinner with Alice and her husband, Gerry, in Bayfield, on Lake Huron.

  The next day our pilgrimage took us to Thamesville, where a plaque indicates the former home of the Davies family, the place young Robertson was born and spent his first, impressionable years. Not far from the modest house was “The Pit,” the gravel pit on the edge of town that was to feature in the early scenes of Fifth Business. Indeed Judith Skelton Grant’s chapter on Robertson Davies’ time in Thamesville contains a map of the little town that Davies produced for her from memory that is, in her words, “astonishingly accurate. There are simplifications, and a few minor errors, but one could easily use it to walk around Thamesville today.” To do so — even in a season far removed from snowballs — is to enter the world of young Dunstan Ramsay.

  Less than an hour away from Thamesville, closer to Lake Erie, lies the third point of the triangle that marks an astonishing concentration of small-town writing talent born in the first half of the twentieth century. The town of Dutton is the birthplace and family home of economist, diplomat, and towering writer John Kenneth Galbraith. The farm where he was raised doing chores lies just outside Dutton. These chores made even a prolific professor’s life seem easy by comparison. He wrote that when Harvard colleagues worried that he was perhaps working too hard, publishing too much, “back of the query lies their natural concern for union rules. Only with difficulty have I suppressed my reply: ‘The trouble with you, my friend, is that you’ve never worked on a farm.’”

  The farm in question is identified by an official roadside tourist site notice (apparently written by Galbraith himself, to good effect). It is further identified by an improbable Inuit monument, surely the only Inukshuk to be found on a Sowesto farm, and no doubt a useful landmark pointing the way for any off-course Inuit dog-team heading west on the 401. Davies, who set his play Question Time in the Arctic, has a shaman make a comment that applies perfectly here: “Not being serious is a civilized luxury.”

  Dutton and the nearby farming area is the setting for Galbraith’s classic memoir, The Scotch, a frank and funny account of growing up in an old-fashioned rural community, where “the formula ‘It was good enough for my auld man so it’s good enough for me’ combined a decent respect for one’s ancestors with economy of thought.” I was an abiding admirer of this book, Galbraith’s personal favourite, and I persuaded him to update it for a new edition that I brought out at Macmillan. Later, I was able to bring the book to McClelland & Stewart, where we published it with a cover showing a tartan-clad couple very like Grant Wood’s classic couple with a pitchfork outside a barn. A framed 2002 letter from Galbraith hangs on my wall as a result.

  Dear Mr. Gibson,

  I now have the latest edition of The Scotch with the wonderfully imaginative cover which should give the book a wide response in central Iowa or thereabouts. I can only assume that Grant Woods would be greatly pleased though not perhaps as much as I am.

  After a number of equally complimentary paragraphs this author of important books like The Great Crash and The Affluent Society concludes:

  I think this is the first time I ever wrote a publisher to tell of the elegance and intelligence of his creation. I do so here with both sincerity and enthusiasm. Do inform all concerned of my pleasure,

  Yours faithfully,

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Clearly, Galbraith could be generous. But he could also be merciless in his satire. The good townspeople of Dutton have now — just — forgiven Galbraith for his portrayal of their community in The Scotch (although Margaret MacMillan, who as a historian notes these things, tells me that a Dutton branch of her family has still not forgiven Galbraith’s slighting reference to their farming practices). But the local library, a fine modern building, is named the John Kenneth Galbraith Library, and each fall a JKG literary prize is awarded in town. In 2008 I presented the prize, having been roped in by fierce local whirlwind Jenny Phillips to head the jury for my old friend’s prize.

  That official visit allowed us to visit the Galbraith family farm, now in private hands and off the tourist trail. Accompanied by the three Galbraith sons and a granddaughter, we were shown around the old barn, where a childhood carving revealed that as a boy he was just plain “Ken Galbraith,” while a visit inside the farmhouse showed that the family who bought it from the Galbraiths have not made many changes to what was clearly the home of “A Man of Standing.”

  Any reader of The Scotch will soon see why Galbraith was such an admirer — indeed, such an influential admirer — of the works of Robertson Davies. His apparently relaxed writing is as honed and as carefully polished as that of his Thamesville-born contemporary, who warmly returned his admiration. Davies, I recall from conversations with him, especially enjoyed the story in the book that tells of the adolescent Ken smitten by the charms of a neighbouring farm girl. She comes to visit his (blessedly absent) sister, and Ken and she walk together through the orchard and sit on a rail fence, while “the hot summer afternoon lay quiet all around.”

  At this point their attention is drawn to the nearby herd of cows:

  As we perched there the bull served his purpose by serving a heifer which was in season.

  Noticing that my companion was watching with evident interest, and with some sense of my own courage, I said: “I think it would be fun to do that.”

  She replied: “Well, it’s your cow.”

  “Never neglect the charms of narrative for the human heart.” — The Cunning Man

  Galbraith continued to have an e
ye for a good story. Once I was chatting to him by phone, regretting that a recent Gibson family trip to Boston had not allowed us to meet at his office. I lamented the fact that at the start of the long drive back to Toronto I had announced to the car that I would exceed the fifty-five-mile an hour limit, and take my chances. All went well until the New York Thruway, when a dispute over an apple in the back seat distracted me, and I was pulled over. When the trooper asked if I was aware that I was exceeding the speed limit, I began to hum and haw, as you would expect.

  Whereupon four-year-old Katie burst out loudly from the back seat, “But you knew, Daddy! You knew you were going too fast. You told us you were going to speed because . . .”

  She was hushed into silence, but Trooper Swanker (for it was he) was not amused, and New York State became much richer. After a spell in Ottawa clerking at the Supreme Court, Katie is now a lawyer, still with a strict regard for truth.

  Galbraith loved that story, commenting, “Oh, the inconvenient honesty of our children!” He shared a similar story from the days when he, driving frequently between Boston and JFK’s Washington, had amassed so many speeding tickets, to the disgust of his wife, Kitty, that she had to take over the role of driver. On one journey, he told me, she was driving uncharacteristically fast, and in the front seat he was warning, “Kitty, slow down, you’re going to get a ticket.”

  She ignored his advice, with predictable wifely comments.

  So he was delighted when there came the wail of a police siren and she was pulled over. The traffic cop walked heavily to her window, flipping open his charge book. When he asked her if she was aware that she was speeding, Galbraith could not hold back. “She certainly was, officer. I’ve been telling her for half an hour, ‘Kitty, slow down. You’re going to get a ticket.’ And now this!”

  And he sat back, vindicated.

  The officer looked at him, then looked at Kitty. Closing his book with a sigh he said to her, “Ma’am, with a husband like that, you don’t need trouble from me.” Then he walked away.

  To his eternal credit Galbraith told that story against himself, and it entered Galbraith family lore. And, of course, for a tight-fisted Scotch-Canadian economist, it had the perfect ending.

  “Whose esteem is sweeter than that of an expert in one’s own line?” — Fifth Business

  It was because of his admiration for Robertson Davies that my path crossed Galbraith’s again just after Davies died. It’s important to understand that from the earliest Deptford novels (Fifth Business, The Manticore, and World of Wonders), Galbraith had been so impressed by the work of his Sowesto near-neighbour that he had made it a point of pride to do missionary work on his behalf, spreading the word about this marvellous novelist across the United States. Soon, to my great pleasure, it became predictable that each new Davies novel would be greeted by an enthusiastic lead review in an influential place like the New York Times or the Washington Post Book Review section. And since it was by Galbraith, it would be well written, and enticing, with that air of easy spontaneity that he once said he managed to acquire about the fifth draft. His missionary work — and of course he was not alone in his enthusiasm, so he was pushing at an open door — was very effective, and helped to create the huge audience that Davies enjoyed in the U.S.A.

  In 1982 Davies wrote about receiving an advance copy of a Galbraith review for the New York Times, one that called him, as quoted by the blushing author, “not merely one of the best writers of this time but of the century. A Puritan upbringing forbids me to believe this. But I am glad to have it said, and by a man with a loud voice.”

  At considerable personal cost, at the age of eighty-six, Galbraith travelled from Cambridge to Toronto to participate in the Davies Celebration at Convocation Hall. By then he was frail and old, and afflicted by deafness, but as he paid tribute to the other writer from his area, he still stood tall among the assembled authors. They included Margaret Atwood, Timothy Findley, John Irving, Rohinton Mistry, Jane Urquhart — along with the Massey College Master, John Fraser, and me; together we two had planned the event. It was a glorious evening, with the great historic hall well attended, and many thousands of others watching it live on CBC’s Newsworld channel. All of the speakers were invited to speak briefly about Davies, then to read a favourite passage from his work. To lessen the chance of overlap, I chose an unlikely passage in The Cunning Man where the aesthete priest Charles Iredale is punished by being sent to the country to board with Amos McGruder and his sister “Miss Annie.” The delicate urban sophisticate finds himself eating mush off an old oilcloth in a smelly kitchen where “too often there was hair in the butter.”

  Worse, Miss Annie wrote and performed hymns of praise, accompanying herself on a wheezing old organ.

  Her star piece, with which she concluded every Sunday-night concert, was set to the tune of the once-popular waltz song “Let Me Call You Sweetheart.” In Miss Annie’s recension it began —

  Let me call you Jesus,

  I’m in love with you —

  I sang this verse, very badly, in front of an amused audience. Learning that I had sung in public, on television, caused my daughters, safely off at university, more dismay than if they’d heard that I had taken my clothes off for the cameras. But the evening was a huge success, and as the platform party and the Davies family left the Hall, with our communal singing of “Adeste Fideles” still echoing from the walls, we were swept up in a great, roaring wave of affection. The celebration had done its work well.

  “Learn to enjoy the pleasures of talk for talk’s sake, without thinking you have to reshape your life every time a new idea comes along.” — The Cunning Man

  In private, Davies was a great storyteller, a collector of many pointed anecdotes. I was privileged to hear these stories in several venues: across the table in the semi-somnolent dining room at Toronto’s very traditional York Club (where he mischievously set an adulterous row in The Cunning Man); in the midtown apartment that he and Brenda, his devoted wife of fifty-five years, maintained for midweek visits from “Windhover,” their country home nestled among the Caledon Hills; and above all in the Victorian study that he created at Massey College, where the visitor sank gratefully into a comfortable chair surrounded by old theatrical prints and fresh, sometimes uproarious conversation until his secretary, Miss Whalon, intervened.

  Miss Whalon, known to her friends as Moira Whalon, was half of a remarkable working relationship that speaks well of both parties. A native of Peterborough, she was working for the local Lock Company when word reached her that the editor of the Peterborough Examiner needed a secretary. She was hired by young Mr. Davies and remained his secretary as he moved on to be appointed as the founding Master of the University of Toronto’s Massey College in 1963, and in time to become a world-famous author.

  Her dedication to duty became an affectionate joke between them. An American publisher once remarked that a just-arrived Davies manuscript was the most cleanly typed manuscript he had ever seen in a long career. This was a mistake. Miss Whalon’s passion for continuing excellence was aroused. In those days when typewritten errors could be erased only with great difficulty, she spent countless hours re-typing and re-re-typing thousands of pages, until the manuscript was indeed the cleanest in the world.

  Miss Whalon kept a protective watch on the time of the man she affectionately called “R.D.” How to address Davies was a problem that afflicted almost everyone. “Professor Davies,” although safe and somehow appropriate, was very formal; “Master,” while he held that position at Massey College, seemed vaguely Oriental and undemocratic, even obsequious; “Doctor Davies” was appropriate, because his string of honorary degrees began in 1957, and late in his life was extended, to his great pleasure, by honorary degrees from Oxford and the University of Wales, yet the title was clearly formal; “Robertson” seemed a form of very formal informality; “Rob” seemed positively impertinent.

  It took me m
any years to work up to “Rob.” This was a man who had been publishing books literally before I was born and somehow, despite his endless courtesy and kindness, it seemed presumptuous. So we worked away together on his books, he addressing me as “Doug” by phone and in person, and signing letters as “Rob,” while my letters went to “Professor Davies” and my phone calls began. “Hello . . . there.” I observed the same shyness in many others, including Peter Gzowski (“What the hell do I call him?”) over the years.

  Of course, his public persona was based on the fact that he looked God-like, if God had condescended to wear what Val Ross at that 1991 meeting in our offices called “full Edwardian rig of blazer and flannels.” The fact that he also could speak in fully formed oracular paragraphs left people awestruck. I remember on one occasion, in 1986, inviting him to address the Banff Publishing Workshop. Thirty-six bright, articulate young people who wanted a career in publishing formed the audience, their numbers swelled by Banff Centre administrators who wanted to hear Robertson Davies speak about author-publisher relations. Davies spoke wittily and well for half an hour. From the chair, I got the ball rolling by asking the first two questions, then threw the meeting open for questions. Suddenly, every one of these clamorous students, disrespectful rebels given to peppering all of our speakers with dozens of hard questions, fell silent, heads bent in shy study of their fingernails. When I complained later to them that this had turned me into an on-stage interviewer, which was damned hard work, the explanation was, “Yes, well [shuffle] but this was . . . Robertson Davies!”

  It astonished them to learn that behind the God-like mask was a kind man, no stranger to shyness, as the Art Gallery of Ontario story showed. If his shyness was at odds with his God-like appearance, so was his kindness. I recall a time of sorrow in my own life, when our conversation in his study went helpfully on for many minutes, and Miss Whalon was gently waved away when she tried to intercede on behalf of the next appointment. He was, as his readers know, a wise man, and his advice was sympathetic and good.