A Celtic Temperament

by Robertson Davies

  SATURDAY, OCTOBER 28: Brenda, Jenny, and I to Batterwood by 4. The other guest was Vincent Massey’s goddaughter Sarah Butler from McGill (daughter of Rab Butler), about Jenny’s age. Brenda and I walk with VM, who seems weary and old. But excellent dinner and conversation cheers him. Early to bed and h.t.d. twice, very jolly.

  SUNDAY, OCTOBER 29, BATTERWOOD: To church and Father Fairweather of Trinity preaches well. In the afternoon a sleep, then solid talk from tea till 9 when we leave. Vincent asks Brenda and me to call him Vincent. We are charmed by VM as a host, and complimented by the freedom with which he speaks of his experiences in public life, especially with Mackenzie King. For the first time we feel real affection for him, as distinguished from admiration. We spoke often of the College but do not talk shop. A delightful experience of hospitality on a high level.

  THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 9, TORONTO: At 4:30 I meet Bill Broughall at Osgoode Hall, where we have an appointment with Judge Wilson, who thinks the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation might do something for us. (When investigated this proved not to be so.) He showed us the hall, a fine old building with a handsome law library. A portrait of Broughall’s great-grandfather as, I believe, chief justice—“an unforgiving eye, and a damned disinheriting countenance.”53

  FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10: Very busy: marked first-year English essays on Richard II: illiterate donkeys who patronize Shakespeare because they are too stupid to understand him. O Canada, thou arsehole of middle-class complacency! In the evening work until Brenda returns from badminton; excellent h.t.d.

  MONDAY, NOVEMBER 13: Worked on Saturday Night piece “Pleasures of Love.”54 In the evening looked over old MSS of novels and plays and reread diary of Love and Libel a year since: still painful, and it might have succeeded: useless to repine.

  FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 24, TORONTO: The second meeting of the Master and Fellows, in the Senate Room in Simcoe Hall, at 3:10. I am not as prompt as I had hoped and meet all the Masseys on the stairs, moving at a snail’s pace, the snail being Vincent. He acts the old man, I think: Raymond, whom I met for the first time, is nine years his junior and moves with the light step and high head of an actor. He was very pleasant. Eayrs, Finch, Roper, and Wright are with us for the first time and I change the agenda to vote them in at once, as I think we should be above the Masonic nonsense of keeping men hanging about in the hall while we vote on them. I was apprehensive, but VM gave us splendid news: seven tenders on the building, all below Ron Thom’s estimate, but all close, and they have given the job to Eastern Construction Co., who will begin as soon as they can. This takes a great load off all our minds. So $25,000 has been voted for the Library, about which Gordon Roper spoke well and carried his point about the Canadian collection. The discussion about our arms and motto was amicable, and Raymond likes Sapere aude so that is fixed at last, thank God! Finally I brought up the question of the academic status of the College; we must not be a mere residence. But both Bissell and Gordon are sure our non-resident Senior Fellows’ rooms will be much in demand for tutorial work, and the Round Room and small dining-room will also be available for small groups. I am eager that the place be a teaching college in its own fashion.

  From Thursday, November 30, to Monday, December 4, Rob and Brenda were in New York for Alexander lessons, shopping, and theatre.

  SATURDAY, DECEMBER 2, NEW YORK: Good lesson, then to Zolotnitskys and buy three fine ikons, and are well pleased.55 To the matinée of Daughter of Silence by Morris West, bad, old-fashioned, and Emlyn Williams wasted. Dine at the Astor and to the Metropolitan Opera: Lucia di Lammermoor with Joan Sutherland. Superb and a really great reception: thrilling to be at something on this scale. Rarely does one experience something splendid in its kind like Sutherland in Lucia: unmistakably first-rate, and when it happens, what exaltation!

  MONDAY, DECEMBER 4: Fly back from New York, arriving at Malton at 7 p.m. in heavy rain. Drive to the Park Plaza by 8 and spend three hours with Ron Thom and Bill going over the final plans. They are exciting and beautiful. Vincent wants me to see them in case there is anything unworkable. We agree that the Upper Library should be returned to its former proportions and a music room built on top of the Round Room. Also some arrangements for filing space, a lavatory for the secretaries, and a safe for the bursar. To Hawthorn Gardens and sleep ill.

  WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 6: Busy at the Examiner but happy to be home and among all my handsome conveniences. Wrote VM about changes in the College. Arnold Edinborough wants me to do a monthly piece for Saturday Night. Chat with Brenda in the evening and unusually fine h.t.d. and early to sleep.

  THURSDAY, DECEMBER 7: To Toronto in the Alpine. Graduate students at 11. Lecture on The Way of the World at 12. Lunch with Lionel Massey. VM calls me at University College very testy: he and Hart veto the music room as being too expensive. I do not argue, but am not pleased: why waste my time if my opinion is not wanted? See the museum with Lionel. Home through snow. Brenda has a painful left leg. Look at plans.

  FRIDAY, DECEMBER 8: Two calls from Bill, very angry. He feels his time is being wasted. He calls Vincent and, I gather, is angry with him. Result, VM calls me and is all compliance: the College must be as I wish it, but he and Hart thought, etc. So after some palaver this results: the Upper Library to be large and have a dais or pulpit, or something for lectures; no music room (which I do not regret, for the Junior Fellows can listen to music in their own rooms if they wish, and won’t miss what they’ve never had); and the chapel is to be completed. I am pleased, for Thom’s chapel design looks interesting and if we do not have to relinquish anything else to get it, I am for it.

  Hart may be a nuisance: he has been an obstructionist and a Doubting Thomas all along, concerned only for sole meunière, the wine cellar, and a “gentleman’s library.” None of the Masseys appear to have any real notion of scholarship. At 4:45 to Toronto with Brenda and Jenny to the UCC Prep56 to see A Masque of Aesop well done. Train was slow and home at 2:30.

  SUNDAY, DECEMBER 17: Lay late, then bathed and dyed my beard. In the afternoon we shift furniture for the party next Wednesday, then for a walk in the dusk, very beautiful. In the evening heard some of Boris Godunov.

  A very full week and needed rest. I have promised the UCC Prep a new play; cannot undertake Saturday Night work as next year is sure to bring many duties and great detail.

  On Thursday evening Hugh MacLennan called to say my “Pleasures of Love” in Saturday Night was the finest essay he had read in many years: such praise revives my shaken faith in my ability to write.

  MONDAY, DECEMBER 18: A pleasant day and work not heavy: get away more Christmas cards to Massey College Senior Fellows and revise a Star column. In the evening read The Tempest. Relief of term end very pleasant.

  TUESDAY, DECEMBER 19: To Toronto in soft weather. Final fourth-year class at University College. Leave Toronto at 3: car breaks down, limp to Oshawa, two hours’ repair and home in bad storm. Brenda wonderful. Music.

  WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 20: Quiet day: make a timetable for next term and write a Star column. In the evening Miranda’s twenty-first-birthday party: many guests from Toronto and great merry-making. Brenda and I to bed at 2 and uproar continues ’til 3:30. A success, but parties overwhelm me.

  THURSDAY, DECEMBER 21: I write Vincent Massey about the “honourable augmentation” of his arms;57 in the evening see the film The Holly and the Ivy on TV, admirable. Then Cecilia Anderson and Miranda play and sing lieder and some English songs. Cecilia plays the first movement of the great posthumous Schubert sonata.

  MONDAY, DECEMBER 25: H.t.d. on waking. The tree, and everyone very happy about gifts. In the afternoon hear records, then a walk and a nap, an admirable dinner, and hear Ruth Draper and Hal Holbrook as Mark Twain. A delightful family day, and am very grateful therefor.

  SATURDAY, DECEMBER 30: Quiet morning at the Examiner. In the afternoon to bed and h.t.d. In the evening, look at the College plans and try to form a notion of its appearance and workings. I feel the benefit of rest: ideas for my novel and
the servant book58 crowd in upon me.

  SUNDAY, DECEMBER 31: Up betimes for Sunday and dye my beard and bathe; in the afternoon look at old photographs and walk at Chemong Lake. In the evening, to the Curriers’ till 11:30, then home for champagne with the girls, then all on to the Porters’ and sing rounds and make merry till 2, very pleasant.

  This year I have made some progress with my metamorphosis from an editor to a professor, and remain obstinately a writer. I am doing quite a lot of undergraduate teaching, both honours and pass, and a couple of graduates. Next September it will be all graduate work on courses covering English drama from 1660 to 1925 or so, a splendid “field.” But I must swot for it, because my knowledge though varied and curious is not “scholarly.” Nor is it likely to be, if scholarship means the barren pedantry some of my new colleagues evince. But I feel release and enlargement, getting shut of the Examiner, grateful to it though I am.

  Work on the College building is now begun. Prince Philip is to lay the cornerstone in May: by this time next year we should see much of it completed. There is criticism and opposition, of course, but less than I had thought.

  My personal work has meant some concern about my Star column, “A Writer’s Diary”: I was so discouraged and out of temper with it I considered dropping it, but was persuaded not to do so. The novel 5B59 continues to shape itself in my mind, and also the servant’s memoir suggested by Warburg.60 And I have promised the Upper Canada College Prep a new play about Punch.

  All goes well domestically, though as the girls grow older, new and inevitable problems arise. I think the change in our prospects has meant much to Brenda and we are very happy though we scrap more than we did. We can afford to do so: our relationship will bear it and we are both more determined and opinionative than we were.

  Financially we have never been so well off: we have upward of $70,000 in savings, apart from this house and my holding in the Examiner. Can afford luxuries, and bought $4,500 worth of paintings in December, and I have been acquiring some really fine books.

  In health the Alexander Technique serves us well, and I have lost about ten pounds since returning from Portugal, and hope to do as much or better in the year to come. We are both clearly middle-aged and our sexual life is not so active as it was—74 times in 1961—but I think we take a deeper pleasure in it than ever. Have been rummaging through this book and I am struck by the repetitive pattern of these yearly entries: I suppose one’s life does have a pattern and that character is destiny. But I want to reform myself, at whatever age!

  1 The College was to consist of Junior Fellows, who were post-graduate students in the School of Graduate Studies, and Senior Fellows, who were leading university professors and other men of particular distinction.

  2 Arnold Edinborough was editor of Saturday Night magazine.

  3 A wooded area near Peterborough.

  4 Davies achieved a B.Litt. from Oxford in 1938 with his thesis, Shakespeare’s Boy Actors. He did not succeed in getting a D.Litt at this time but was given an honorary D.Litt. from Oxford in June 1991.

  5 Actor and opera, drama, and film director who directed many productions for Benjamin Britten at the Aldeburgh Festival; he came to Canada in 1954 and worked at the CBC in Toronto. He was a student with Brenda at the Old Vic and remained close to all the family until his death in 2013.

  6 Ron Thom, the architect of the College, had won the competition to design the building and begun work before Davies was appointed Master.

  7 The Ontario Grade 13 Senior Matriculation Exams at the time were essential for admission to an Ontario university.

  8 Speech for a Hart House Debate on February 9, on the resolution “Canadian Culture Is a Mixture of Frailties.” It was reported in the Globe and Mail, the Peterborough Examiner, and the Varsity.

  9 Non-contagious skin condition producing bumps that are shiny, firm, and reddish purple. Davies’s seemed to get worse when he was nervous.

  10 Bill 115, incorporating Massey College, was given royal assent on March 29, 1961.

  11 A.S.P. Woodhouse, long-time and eminent chair of the University College English Department and Milton scholar.

  12 Davies was to teach a fourth-year undergraduate course at University College.

  13 Thomas was a leading Toronto psychiatrist.

  14 Actress and daughter of British actors Philip Merivale and Vita Birkett, and stepdaughter of Gladys Cooper.

  15 Metcalfe was equerry and a close friend of Edward VIII. In fact, Metcalfe and Lady Alexandra had divorced.

  16 A misapprehension, soon corrected.

  17 American theatre director and drama critic.

  18 Long-time member of the English Department at University College.

  19 “Though I am trodden down, I am of service.”

  20 Davies’s tutor at Oxford.

  21 Master of Balliol College while Davies was there.

  22 Chairman of the board of governors of the university since 1945.

  23 Clarke, Irwin had been Davies’s publisher for nearly all his books until 1958, but he had found the firm, which was run by Irene Clarke after the death of her husband, W.H. Clarke, increasingly unsympathetic. The Clarke and Irwin families were Methodist and teetotal.

  24 Painted, tin-glazed ceramic tilework.

  25 W. & G. Foyle Ltd., bookstore.

  26 Lilian Baylis, a major figure in British theatre, managed the Old Vic from 1912 until her death in 1937.

  27 John Piper was an artist, known for watercolours, theatre sets, and stained glass. His wife, Myfanwy, was an art critic and opera librettist.

  28 Scottish-born Canadian writer. His most popular novel was Geordie (1950).

  29 English author of The Cruel Sea (1951), who had been living in Canada.

  30 Lorne Pierce was the long-time editor of the Ryerson Press. The medal was first awarded in 1926 and recognizes “an achievement of special significance and conspicuous merit in imaginative or critical literature.”

  31 Wilf Gregory was president of the board of governors.

  32 The Arthur Meighen Gardens in front of the Festival Theatre were named for Canada’s ninth prime minister and funded, in large part, by the Meighen family foundation.

  33 Internationally renowned geophysicist at the University of Toronto.

  34 Governor of the Bank of Canada.

  35 “Love God, and you may do as you please.”

  36 “As sparks in the reed bed.”

  37 T.H.B. Symons, dean of Devonshire House, a University of Toronto residence for engineering students across the street from the land on which the College was built.

  38 “Party of One: Book Collecting,” Holiday, May 1962.

  39 Given on August 31 at the convention of the Royal Canadian College of Organists in St. Catharines, Ontario.

  40 On August 13 East Germany had started building the Berlin Wall.

  41 Traditionally a Visitor has a right or duty of supervision over a university or college. The description of the office at Massey College reads, “The Visitor is the College Ombudsman and fulfils important constitutional and ceremonial functions.”

  42 Dean of women at the Whitney Hall residence, University of Toronto.

  43 “According to Cocker” means absolutely correctly (from Edward Cocker, seventeenth-century author of a math textbook).

  44 Robert Finch was a long-time professor of French at the University of Toronto, and also an artist, musician and Governor General’s Award-winning poet. He was a resident Senior Fellow at Massey College for many years, living in the suite of rooms above the main gate.

  45 Also known as Baron Corvo, English writer, artist, photographer, and eccentric.

  46 Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1923.

  47 The act incorporating the College said that all Junior Fellows should be men registered in the School of Graduate Studies. However, in 1963, three of the new residents were in the University of Toronto Law School, which was not part of the School of Graduate Studies. At first they were known as sizars, but in 19
64 they were accepted as Junior Fellows.

  48 Hugh and Mary Waddell. Their daughters, Sara and Ann, were friends of Jennifer and Rosamond.

  49 “Dare to be wise.”

  50 Now a condominium, it was a hotel at the time.

  51 Rupert Davies and his family lived in Thamesville, Ontario, from 1907 to 1919, and Robertson Davies was born there in 1913. The village is the model for Deptford in Davies’s Deptford Trilogy.

  52 It hung in the sitting room of the Master’s Lodgings from 1963 to 1981.

  53 Sheridan, The School for Scandal, Act 4, Scene 1.

  54 Saturday Night, December 23, 1961.

  55 The gallery was called A la Vieille Russie. The icons hung in the sitting room of the Lodgings from 1963 to 1981.

  56 The junior school of Upper Canada College. Davies wrote the play for the school’s jubilee year in 1952.

  57 The Masseys wanted to use their coat of arms over the gate of the College but sought an augmentation to the arms in acknowledgement of Vincent Massey’s service to the Queen as governor general.

  58 Davies never developed the “servant’s memoir,” but, as pointed out by Judith Skelton Grant in Robertson Davies: Man of Myth, he used some of this material in his 1991 novel, Murther and Walking Spirits.

  59 Fifth Business (1970).

  60 Fredric John Warburg of Secker & Warburg, which published The Personal Art in the U.K. in 1961.

  1962

  —

  ROB AND BRENDA CONTINUED TO live in Peterborough, and he remained editor and publisher of the Peterborough Examiner. But they spent more and more time in Toronto as Rob became increasingly involved in the planning of Massey College, continued to lecture to undergraduates, and began teaching graduates at the University of Toronto. From January to March they rented a furnished apartment on Charles Street, then stayed variously at the Lord Simcoe, Royal York, and Park Plaza hotels or at Hawthorn Gardens. They frequently lunched and dined at the University Club on University Avenue. Miranda was at Trinity College, University of Toronto; Jennifer was working at the Examiner and living at home; and Rosamond was at Bishop Strachan School in Toronto.