He once admiringly ascribed to Stephen Leacock a “sense of a large world in which the minds and passions of men are unchanging but ever-renewing,” and he was armed with the same cool, classical approach, always fascinated by the things that human beings get up to. Sometimes, as you would expect of a man who wrote thoughtfully about Jung, his speculations were deeply psychological; he was intrigued, for instance, by the fact that his admired friend Hugh MacLennan had twice married women older than himself. He saw this as significant.
But above all, he loved funny stories. I cherish the letter to me where he recounts with joy the tale of how English author Michael Holroyd broke the news to his mistress of long standing (if that is indeed the right phrase) that he was getting married, then was amazed when she took it badly. “But I thought you would be delighted to be on the periphery of my happiness!” said he, in hurt surprise.
Few authors came back with more stories from the compulsory relay race to which we subject our authors that is called “the promotional tour.” Pride of place goes to a U.S. publicity director’s mistake that saw Davies sent to promote The Rebel Angels on a radio station in Washington, D.C., that specialized in black Christian speakers and soul music. Davies, introduced, he claimed, as “a cat who’s written a book called The Rebel Angels,” chose to have fun with the deeply religious audience, breaking the bad news that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John could not be reliably classed as Christ’s contemporaries. The phone lines lit up with devotees protesting that “They walked with Him!” “They talked with Him!” while the hip interviewer punched the air with glee. A close runner-up was the tale of the Ontario municipal official at a Stephen Leacock Award ceremony who, letting his oratory flow, described Davies as a “man of many faucets.”
“It has long been a contention of mine that if you truly value a book you should read it when you are at the age the author was when he wrote it.” — One Half of Robertson Davies
Davies came late to fame. It was in response to Val Ross’s question that he suggested that the animal he most resembled (when we might have expected a lion, or a phoenix, or even a manticore) was the Ugly Duckling. “You see,” he went on, “no one thought much of him when he was a duck. But when they found out he was a swan, opinion changed. I may not be the world’s foremost swan, but I am not a duck.”
I suspect that behind this surprising statement lies an even more surprising fact. The fact that in mid-life, despite a series of successful careers behind him — as a book reviewer at Saturday Night magazine, where he was called “the best in North America” by New York’s Alfred A. Knopf; as a columnist and editor at The Peterborough Examiner, where he was a long-running, very prolific success; as a respected professor teaching drama at the University of Toronto; as the founding Master of Massey College; and as a successful family man who had married well and happily, and raised three healthy daughters — he saw himself as a failure. He may have written and published a number of books and plays, but he had been disappointed in his great ambition — to become an internationally renowned man of the theatre.
The transformation into a swan — which may have surprised even the Ugly Duckling — came when he published Fifth Business in 1970, when he was fifty-seven years old. It was such a leap forward from his previous Salterton novels, which were lighter fare, that he was often asked what had changed. “People died,” he would reply, darkly. Val Ross has shrewdly pointed out that the whole book is the retort of a retired schoolmaster who feels that his life has been undervalued.
While he did not wake up to find himself famous, like Byron, he found that something had changed. Now he was regarded as a serious novelist, and that was the route he chose to follow. He wrote some further plays, for adults and for children, and he even wrote a grand old opera entitled The Golden Ass. But it was clear that now this was a side interest. The swan was fully launched on a career as a novelist that would make the world sit up and take note as the elegant white shape glided by.
“You might as well ask a spider where it gets its thread as ask a writer where he gets his ideas.” — One Half of Robertson Davies
We can see that his life provided R.D. with much of the material that he spun into novelist’s gold. We see the influence of Thamesville and Upper Canada College on Fifth Business. Renfrew, for all of its horrors, gave good material to What’s Bred in the Bone. Kingston, of course, pervades the Salterton novels. I remember that the excellent John McGreevy made at least two fine films about R.D. In one he has Davies borne in a horse-drawn carriage around the elegant streets of Kingston, telling tales of the town. Once he recalls the Queen’s professor of English who gave an idealistic course for inmates at one of Kingston’s flourishing prisons. The apparently innocent course title was “Literature as a Means of Escape.”
“And that,” says Davies, facing the camera,“is true!”
His time at Oxford and at the Old Vic gave him not only a lasting accent, but also an awareness of the wider world. Above all, it gave him a wife.
“There is more to marriage than four bare legs in a blanket.” — A Jig for the Gypsy
Entire books have been written about less interesting figures than Brenda Davies. The Australian granddaughter of a Scot from Shetland who amassed a fortune, she rose swiftly to become the stage manager at the Old Vic. There she met the young Canadian from Oxford, and slowly a romance developed. When they married and came to Canada she found his family less than warm. (R.D.’s mother was such an old-fashioned character that he once told me that he remembered as a boy having to kneel before her to deliver an apology.) But Brenda soldiered on, raising their three daughters, running the household, and doing all of the practical work, like driving — in effect organizing his home life.
It can’t all have been easy, because we know that R.D. lost a year at Oxford to depression, which Judith Skelton Grant discovered to her surprise, after he had tried to conceal it from her. Brenda tended to speak of his ups and downs as examples of Welsh temperament, inherited from his father, but Davies himself wrote about the Black Dog of depression. But through all of the sturm und drang, the moves attendant on the career changes (and only a former stage manager could have adapted so swiftly from life in Peterborough to the juggling role of Master’s Wife at an all-male residential college in the heart of Toronto), she was a reassuring presence, a constant source of support to him, and a good friend to many.
Among them was Shyam Selvadurai. He has written about the unlikely pairing that we, his cunning publishers, put together, whereby he, a young, slim Sri Lankan–born first novelist, would (like a lesser rock group) “open for” the sturdy establishment figure of Robertson Davies at a number of promotional reading events in Ontario. I was among the minibus passengers the night that we “hit” Hamilton, and I was pleased to see that the contrast between the readers intrigued the audience, helping to launch Shyam’s career. Unlike him, I was not surprised to see the warmth that arose between him and Rob and Brenda Davies.
“One must visit a wise man from time to time to discover what one already knows.” — The Cunning Man
Davies knew his city and his province in his bones, and I once suggested that he and his alter ego, Samuel Marchbanks, were perhaps the Last of the Upper Canadians. One of his most perceptive and provocative statements was that the great Canadian dramatists were Ibsen and Chekhov. Once, speaking of change from the Ontario of old, he described a Chekhovean scene in Cobourg, an old town on what used to be called “the Front,” where pioneer settlers arrived by boat. In the years after the Second World War, as tides of new immigrants were sweeping in to utterly change the old rural province of his youth, the local establishment in the town had turned up for a production of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. In accordance with tradition they were dressed, he liked to recall, in dinner jackets “green with age.” At the end of the play, these people stood around in the lobby confessing that they really did not see what this fellow Chekhov was getting at .
. . while the metaphorical sound of trees being felled echoed symbolically outside, across the Ontario countryside.
As he aged, some of the advice he gave to others was notably practical. Don Harron, the broadcaster, writer, and comedian, was inspired by R.D.’s ability to continue with his creative work; so as a hard-working writer eleven years younger than the Master he earnestly asked him what to expect with advancing age. “Frequent urination,” sighed Davies.
His last completed novel, 1994’s The Cunning Man, was, he told me, an attempt to reveal the way that the city of Toronto had changed over his lifetime. He watched that development, and the changes in his province and his country, with a keen, caring eye (he once joked that Canada was not so much a country to love as “a country to worry about”), continuing to work hard into his eighties. In that, as in all of his work, delivered in polished form, he was a total professional.
“It is men’s work, rather than their recreations, which create trouble.” — Samuel Marchbanks’ Almanack
But what was it like to edit Robertson Davies? Here, after he moved to follow me to McClelland & Stewart, is a very frank letter he wrote to me about the process, giving the author’s point of view:
Herewith the typescript of Murther & Walking Spirits which now embodies many of your suggestions and alterations. Not all, for I thought some of them needless, and some inadvisable, because I sense that your notion of the novel is different from mine; you have edited always for a rigorous clarity, and I feel that a certain fuzziness is essential to the nature of the book, which is, after all, about a man whose perceptions are not those of ourselves . . . Kicking and screaming as I wrote, I have shoehorned another generation into the Gage-Vermeulen family, to meet your objection that everybody lived too long; I did not feel when I was writing that a statistical realism was needed, but you do, and now you’ve got it, though it creates a lump in the narrative that I do not like . . . Because I have incorporated all the changes directly on the pages, the typescript is not as tidy as I — or Moira Whalon, who takes great pride in such things — could wish. But I think it is clear, and if you or anybody concerned finds my writing difficult, I can explain by phone. Here and there, my comments on your criticism are a little saucy — a protest against a too-literal reading. Do not take it personally.
I have altered a couple of chapter headings.
I welcome enquiries, protests, loud screams, or whatever.
The saucy comments in the margins included a reference to my role as a “Scotch dominie,” but of course the process simply shows both of us doing our jobs as professionals. I would raise frank questions about the manuscript, and he would accept or reject them. That was our unvarying practice, and it worked.
What is perhaps equally interesting is what went on at the start of the editorial process. I was aware (and his letters confirm this astonishing fact) that after spending years writing his latest novel, Davies was always gripped by self-doubt. Was this new book a falling-off, even a failure? Had he been wasting his time?
Knowing this, I made a point of setting to work as soon as I picked up the manuscript, and reading it straight through, deep into the small hours if necessary. This meant that the next morning he received a couriered letter giving my reassuring response to the new book, possibly indicating a few areas that struck me as needing more work. But the main implied message was “Relax, this is very good.” And, incredibly, he needed that sort of fast reassurance.
“Those who find a Master should yield to the Master until they have outgrown him.” — What’s Bred in the Bone
It has often been said that Charles Dickens was the great inspiration for the Davies novels. The comparisons are obvious. The swirling cast of characters, often with Dickensian names and speaking with distinctive accents. The witty, formal descriptive language, suitable for declaiming aloud. And the elaborate plots, in which coincidence often played a role. No criticism angered Davies more than the suggestion by some reviewers that his coincidences were unlikely. “Those boobs!” he exclaimed. “Can’t they see what’s going on around them?”
I once found myself in a Dickensian scene with him in the middle of Toronto. In my formal dark blazer and my full beard I picked him up from Massey College (similarly attired, I noticed) to take him downtown to speak at a book industry event at the Convention Centre. Approaching our destination, I started to pull into a parking lot — and the attendant at the lot next door went mad, shouting and gesticulating fiercely at us. Rob and I were amazed by his behaviour, but ignored him, and parked the car and started to get out. And he came after us, yelling.
I had visions of a Pickwickian street scene with me in the role of Sam Weller, defending my elderly companion when it came to fisticuffs. I slammed the car door and set off towards our assailant. He backed down instantly, waving his hands appeasingly. What he said was this: “I’b sorry. I t’ought you were Greek priests.”
Too late, we realized that we had missed the chance of getting the Greek priest special parking rate, instead of the orthodox one.
“We all need to take aboard so much rubbish to keep ourselves human.” — Murther & Walking Spirits
It seemed to me that, for all his great artistry as a novelist, in a sense Davies remained a newspaperman. From 1942 until 1963 he lived in Peterborough, a town of 30,000, and as the editor of the only newspaper in town he got to know almost everything that went on. Judith Skelton Grant gives details of battles over birth control editorials with the local Catholic bishop, and a scandal over a local judge’s attempt to influence the police commission. And that, of course, was only the material that made it into print. For a future novelist, the constant stream of events, tragic and comic, must have been inspiring. All human life was there.
Even more important, it taught him to write, and write, and to do research. Every reader of his novels knows that they are full of arcane knowledge — from the care of Gypsy violins, to magician’s tricks, to the medical knowledge to be gained from excrement — and that knowledge was hard won. In the days before computer searches, it represented an enormous amount of reading or consultation with experts. He worked extremely hard on the facts, true to his journalist origins.
His old Peterborough colleague, Ralph Hancox (whom I got to know well when we were part of the group setting up the Simon Fraser University Masters in Publishing Program) tells of his playing hard, too. As a prank the two newsmen invented a scandalous story about one of the town’s revered founding fathers. They even carefully aged the fake supporting document, then brought the matter to the local historical society, which promptly suppressed it.
“If you want to attract real, serious attention to your work, you can’t beat being dead.” — A Mixture of Frailties
Since his death in 1995, I have been involved in publishing four posthumous books by Robertson Davies. The Merry Heart, where I provided the introductions; two volumes of letters selected by Judith Skelton Grant (For Your Eye Alone, Letters 1976–1995 and Discoveries, Early Letters 1938–1975); and Happy Alchemy: Writings on the Theatre and Other Lively Arts. There have been many academic articles about him, and an academic conference where a young speaker talked learnedly about the role of a character named Doug Gibson, and was surprised when this figure from the distant Davies past rose at question time to announce, “I am Doug Gibson.”
At that conference Judith Skelton Grant told a story, repeated in Val Ross’s book, of how at the end of an easy, relaxed dinner party at her house, she discovered that Davies’s paper napkin had been ripped to nervous shreds.
There will be more books about Robertson Davies, and even other books by him, since his daughter, Jennifer Surridge, is preparing selections from his voluminous diaries. A treat in store.
When Robertson Davies died, the newspapers of the world were full of tributes. I even contributed one for the Globe and Mail. But the best, of all those that came to my attention, was another Globe piece, this one
written by Robert Fulford.
It began:
The death of Robertson Davies on Saturday night was like the abrupt disappearance of a mountain range from the Canadian landscape. Perhaps there’s something ungrateful about grieving over the loss of a great figure who lived among us for eighty-two years, but when the news came over the telephone it was hard not to feel a sharp sense of loss. Though his reputation went around the world, it was in Canada that he occupied an enormous space, now left sadly empty.
After singling out his last novel, The Cunning Man, as “like a magnificent farewell tour, a revisiting of the many places and themes he had taught us to love,” Fulford sums up his achievement: “As always, he mixed wild imaginings with the hard facts of our past. Our leading fantasist was also a realist whose baroque tales rested firmly on Canadian reality.”
After speaking of Davies as “a show that ran longer than any other in the history of Canadian letters” he concludes by quoting the final paragraph from The Cunning Man.
The narrator answers the phone to find that it’s a wrong number, with a voice asking if this is the Odeon theatre.
No, this is the Great Theatre of Life. Admission is free but the taxation is mortal. You come when you can, and leave when you must. The show is continuous. Good-night.
“Donnelly Family Exterminated!” was the 1880 headline. News of this most un-Canadian crime quickly spread from Lucan, Ontario, along with the details of how a group of vigilantes in that farming community had attacked a local family by night and wiped them out. Although some relatives survived the “extermination,” there were five deaths, three men and two women. Horrible deaths they were, too, thanks to “Pitchfork Tom” Ryder, and two other members of the mob who used their spades on a victim’s head. Although there was a witness, a boy hiding under the bed, no one was ever convicted.
Stories About Storytellers Page 16