The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks

by Robertson Davies

  • MONDAY •

  Visited some people today who had just moved into a new house. They were leading a circumscribed life, not walking where the varnish was tacky, not leaning where the paint was wet, and not falling too often into buckets of decorators’ paste. They had moved in, driven by necessity, before the workmen had finished, and the workmen resented it, as they always do. There is nothing a party of painters and decorators likes better than a large house, all to themselves, in which they can lead an ample and gracious life, occasionally doing a little work. The only way to oust them is to move in on top of them, and let the children play with all their more valuable tools after they have gone home at night.… This unhappy couple had only two points at which they could light; one was bed and the other was the verandah. All things concurring, they should have the workmen out before the snow flies.

  • TUESDAY •

  Received a letter written on Reform School stationery from a little girl who takes me to task because I spoke slightingly of Gregory Peck; she tells me that Photoplay Magazine esteems this Peck highly. I do not care a fig for Photoplay Magazine; I write for a highly exclusive public, subtle and pernickety in its tastes, and they are not to be bamboozled by any such pretentious tripe, nor by the antics of Master Peck, either. She concludes, “you better apologize.” The day I apologize to you, you contumacious mammothrept, there will be two moons in the sky.

  • WEDNESDAY •

  To the movies tonight to see The Song Of Bernadette, which opened with these words: “To those who believe, no explanation is necessary; to those who do not believe, no explanation is possible.” This seemed a very fair statement of the case, calculated to please all the Catholics, Orangemen and nullifidians present. The audience seemed to find Bernadette amusing at times. Up in the gallery something stirred; was it a bird, was it a bird? … I wonder what the Church of Rome thinks of Hollywood, its new ally? With so many Catholic films appearing, and a firm hold on the Hays Office, things are looking up for the Propaganda Fide. But I warn the hierarchy that Hollywood is fickle; five years ago it was whooping it up for the Jews; any time I expect a series of films extolling the spiritual grace and mystical fervour of the Continuing Presbyterians, in which Gregory Peck, Bing Crosby, and Jennifer Jones will all be pressed into service as pawky Scots, hooting and skirling the granite pieties of the Auld Lichts.

  • THURSDAY •

  Circumstances have made a movie fan out of me this week. Tonight was haled to see Gypsy Rose Lee in a drama which told of the reclamation of a crook by a tavern entertainer who held him in lubricious thrall; this palsied theme, handled with pleasant irony, made good entertainment.… I was especially impressed by Gypsy Rose Lee, and hereby publicly announce that she is my movie queen and, in my view, the most lovely and accomplished of all Hollywood’s lallapaloozas. She has elegance, wit and a charming voice, and if I were a younger man I should write to Hollywood and offer her a half-interest in my chicken farm.… It was a similar upsurge of emotion which led my uncle, the Rev. Hengist Marchbanks (author of the popular theological work Scatology and Eschatology) to offer marriage to Miss Lottie Gilson, known professionally as “The Little Magnet” in 1888. Needless to say she refused him, but he kept a picture of her (in red silk tights) pasted in the front of his copy of Cruden’s Concordance until he was called to his long rest in 1902.

  • FRIDAY •

  I see that the French are abandoning the guillotine as an instrument of execution, and are going to use electric chairs just as soon as they can generate enough electric power to fry a yegg. This depresses me. The guillotine had one great virtue in my eyes; it was picturesque.… As long as we maintain the essentially barbarous custom of capital punishment we might as well perform it in the most barbarous ways. Hanging is disgusting enough for anybody; the guillotine is deliciously messy: these methods of public vengeance have a kind of noble savagery about them. But frizzling a man in a chair until he looks like a piece of toast and the fillings in his teeth hum like tiny radios is just modern gadget-worship gone wild. Why not burn a criminal at the stake, if you want to give him a roasting?

  • SATURDAY •

  Painted a fence today. Passersby greeted me with remarks like, “Doing a little painting, eh?” or “Well, I see you are painting your fence.” A short-tempered man might have replied, “Oh, you’re quite mistaken; I’m making a fretwork watch-cosy for my Aunt Minnie,” but I am not short-tempered. Such remarks, stressing what is obvious, are not meant to be taken literally. They are what psychologists call “phatic communion”—that is to say, talk intended to establish a sense of fellowship rather than to convey any intelligent meaning.… There are a lot of people whose entire conversation is composed of phatic communion; carried to excess it earns them a reputation for phatheadedness.

  -XXXIII-

  • SUNDAY •

  A sticky dull day; I awoke with the bedclothes sticking to me, my clothes stuck to me all day, and whenever I arose from a varnished chair there was an audible sound as my trousers tore themselves from the seat. Bathing and fanning were futile; the only thing to do was to keep still and suffer, but this palled during the afternoon and I climbed a hill and looked down over the town; steam rose from it and here and there church spires and factories rose shadow-like above the vapour bath.… What I always say about the Canadian climate is that it saves us millions of dollars in travel; we can freeze with the Esquimau, or sweat with the Zulu, or parch with the Arab, or drench with the Briton, and all in our own front gardens. Sometimes we even have some really beautiful weather, but not often enough to spoil us.

  • MONDAY •

  To the movies this evening and saw a double feature—the first part of which was good, and the second part so bad as to be hugely entertaining. It contained, among other things, the briefest conversion ever witnessed on stage or screen; a priestess of the Sky Goddess (who performed her religious duties by wriggling her caboose in a provocative manner and tossing gardenias to handsome strangers) was told about the Fatherhood of God by an aged beachcomber in 30 seconds; she immediately rushed to her co-religionists, who were preparing to roast the hero, and shouted “Big Ju-Ju him say no kill”, and at once all the amateur cooks knelt, while a shower of rain fell and put out the sacrificial fire. I laughed myself into a serious state of debility during this exhibition, which involved the services of some of the worst actors to be seen anywhere, even on the screen.

  • TUESDAY •

  A man was asking me for information about Dr. Guillotin. I know little about him, except that he was a physician; that he was 51 when he came into prominence in 1789, and that he persuaded the French Constituent Assembly to adopt the killing-machine which we connect with the Revolution. “My machine will take off a head in a twinkling, and the victim will feel nothing but a sense of refreshing coolness,” he said to that body. Contrast the humanity of Guillotin with the malignity of the inventor of the electric chair, who causes his victim a sudden sense of intolerable heat; rightly is the chair called “the hot squat.” … Death by the guillotine was not immediate, by the way; several of the bodies struggled and attempted to rise after the knife had fallen, and there is a horrifying and well-authenticated account of the head of one nobleman which was seen to wink as it lay in the basket.… A Russian scientist, I see, has had great success in reviving men who have been dead for some time; this is going to mean a serious revision of our notions about death and the hereafter.

  • WEDNESDAY AND ST. EMMA THE STEATOPYGITE •

  A day of intense heat and demanding work coincided, reducing me to a condition of dripping exhaustion, and furious rebellion against the clothes the male is expected to wear under such circumstances. I am forced to the conclusion that ours is a Lost Age, a period of transition between one great historical epoch and another, and that one of the surest proofs of our moral, spiritual and æsthetic inadequacy is the sartorial thralldom in which men are held. Women—the fattest, oldest and most repulsive—strip for the heat; men—how
ever emancipated they may be in other ways—continue to wear a collection of hot, foolish and ugly garments, designed to bind and chafe at every possible point. These are mad, bad, degenerate days, and no good will come of them, mark my words.

  • THURSDAY •

  Hullabaloo today about the results of the British General Election, which is interpreted in some circles as a mighty triumph for the Common Man. I suppose it is, for it has turned out of office Winston Churchill, who certainly ranked high among the Uncommon Men of our times. I confess that I find the modern enthusiasm for the Common Man rather hard to follow. I know a lot of Common Men myself, and as works of God they are admittedly wonderful; their hearts beat, their digestions turn pie and beef into blood and bone, and they defy gravity by walking upright instead of going on all fours; these are marvels in themselves, but I have not found that they imply any genius for government or any wisdom which is not given to Uncommon Men.… In fact, I suspect that the talk about the Common Man is popular cant; in order to get anywhere or be anything a man must still possess some qualities above the ordinary. But talk about the Common Man gives the yahoo element in the population a mighty conceit of itself, which may or may not be a good thing for democracy which, by the way, was the result of some uncommon thinking by some very uncommon men.

  • FRIDAY •

  Papers full of the British election. For the first time, so far as I know, mention is made of Mr. Attlee’s “attractive, blue-eyed, youthful wife.” It is a continual source of astonishment to me that prominent men always seem to be married to exceptional and attractive women. I recall how attractive Mrs. Baldwin seemed to be to the press when Honest Stan went to Downing Street; Mrs. Chamberlain, also, was a woman in a thousand. The charitable conclusion, of course, is that these wonderful women make their husbands great, and keep in the background while the simpleminded fellow enjoys all the fun.… I wonder if the day will ever come when the wife of a new prime minister or president is described thus: “Mrs. Blank is a dumpy, unattractive woman, who dresses in the worst possible taste, and has frequently embarrassed her husband by her inept remarks in public places; it is generally recognized that he would have achieved office years ago if she had not put her foot in it on so many important occasions.” … But no: it is a cherished legend that the wives of eminent men are composed of equal parts of Venus and Juno.

  • SATURDAY •

  To a picnic this afternoon, and had a lot of fun with an echo. There is nothing to compare with an echo for making a man feel god-like; he shouts to the skies, and a great voice returns from the distant hills. But do men ever shout god-like remarks at echoes? No! They shout “Phooey!” and “Boob!” and such-like vulgarities. Once, when I was a mere youth, I belonged to a choral society which rendered an echo-song by Orlando di Lasso, dating from the 16th century, and which consisted wholly of one part of the choir shouting Italian equivalents of Phooey and Boob at the other, with an occasional Ha Ha thrown in to give an air of gaiety. Man’s treatment of echoes is continued in his treatment of radio; having conquered the air to a point where the precepts of the great prophets, and the music of the supreme musicians, might flow over the whole earth, man devotes his invention to elaborations upon the Phooey and Boob theme, with an occasional mention of breakfast food and soap. I dread the day when the First Cause, disgusted with man, will Itself shout Phooey and Boob, and throw our whole Universe down some cosmic drain.

  -XXXIV-

  • SUNDAY •

  Visited some people at a summer cottage today and, as often happens on these occasions, arrived just as there was a lot of hard work to be done. This time it was shifting a bathing float from the beach to the water, and we did it by the method used to build the Pyramids—slave power. After an hour of heaving and straining the accursed thing was in the water and I escaped with nothing more than a cut thumb and a great deal of mud on my person; some of the other guests were in far worse condition. We had earned our tea many times over, and the obvious jubilance of our host did little to cheer us.… A summer cottage can be a lovesome thing, God wot! but not unless it has proper plumbing. I am no lover of those old and picturesque privies which have assumed the gravity-defying obliquity of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Employing a special form of Yoga I transcend the physical side of my nature and avoid them utterly.

  • MONDAY •

  An extremely hot day, which I spent on the train surrounded by fractious children, prostrate old ladies and all the usual victims of a temperature of 92 degrees. Nature has endowed me with a magnificent cooling system, and if I could go naked in hot weather, I could bear anything; but convention demands that I swathe myself in layer upon layer of cloth, and as a result I feel as though I were in a cold compress which had unaccountably become lukewarm; the sensation is uncomfortable but not unbearable.… Had a two-hour wait at a small junctional point, so I strolled about, viewing the town, and musing idly on the architectural hideousness of Ontario. This town had tried to smarten itself by hacking down most of its trees, giving an indescribable impression of ravagement, like the skull of a woman who has gone bald through a fever.

  • TUESDAY •

  Even hotter today, a fact which was drawn to my attention by several boobs who asked me if it was hot enough for me? I enjoyed the heat, and took three tepid baths; sometimes I think that I might do well to move to a semi-tropical country; people who do so are said to become lackadaisical, losing their initiative; but I lose my initiative in cold weather, so perhaps it would work the other way for me, and I would become a demon of energy.… Every man I met today was perspiring so grossly that I may risk the indelicacy of using the word “sweaty” to describe their collective condition. But I did not see a single woman who appeared to be suffering in this way. Why? Why are women dry when men are wet? Why don’t women ever sweat? It is this characteristic, more than any other, which led our ancestors to put woman on a pedestal.

  • WEDNESDAY •

  Bruce Hutchison, I see, hotly denies the charge which someone has made that Canadians have no sense of humour. Canada, says he, invented the story about the little boy who got his head stuck in a chamber-pot and had to be taken to a tinsmith to get it off. I wonder what makes him think so. I have a book which quotes the story, at great length, from an English work published in the 1860’s and I have seen it in at least one American collection.… But Hutchison may be right about our national sense of humour, for when once we take up a joke, we never let it go. Old, crippled jokes, worn out in the Barren Lands and the outermost stretches of the Antipodes come to Canada at last, sure that they will have a happy home here for at least a century, and will raise a laugh from affectionate familiarity, if for no other reason. “Not Original, But Faithful To Death” is our motto in matters of humour. We like a joke to go off in our faces, like an exploding cigar, and then we can laugh heartily and get back to glum platitudes again. This characteristic is particularly noticeable in Parliament.

  • THURSDAY •

  Did some painting this afternoon; this is one household chore which I really do well. I admit that I have no skill fixing doors which stick, or repairing the cords of electric irons, or opening choked sewers, but I can paint anything and make a better job of it than most of the greenhorns who are to be found working for professional decorators these days; “No Bubbles Marchbanks” I am called in amateur painting circles. Ability as a housepainter and a passion for musical comedy are two characteristics which I share with the late Adolf Hitler—the only two, I believe.… What is more, I can paint without drinking milk; most professional housepainters seem to live entirely on milk; and I believe that they regard it as a potent charm against painter’s colic. I once painted a whole building (a two-storey henhouse) without consuming any liquid beyond a glass or two of water. But last time I had professional decorators in my house they left 18 milk bottles in it. They were especially fond of chocolate milk and every now and then, in hot weather, a bubble in my paintwork breaks, and emits a long-imprisoned belch of chocolate.


  • FRIDAY •

  This evening a friend of mine, who has recently become a keen amateur of astrology, attempted to cast my horoscope. According to his calculations, I have missed my vocation; I should either have been a postman or a real-estate agent. He also told me that in order to be in tune with my astrological influence, I should dress in pinks, pale blues and yellows; he warned me against over-indulgence in food and drink and a tendency toward diseases of the digestive machinery; he told me my lucky gem and my lucky flower; he told me that if I worked hard (either as a postman or a real estate agent) I should eventually enjoy a measure of success. I treated him with the derision he deserved.… Although I have no use for people who try to draw up astrological charts with a little knowledge gained from popular books on the subject, I cannot see why astrology should not be given a measure of credence. To believe in it demands an act of faith, but think of all the other things, no less improbable, we believe on acts of faith! If we believe in the findings of astronomers and theologians and physicists, who are always proving each other wrong, I don’t see why we should not believe astrologers, who are quite often right.