A Celtic Temperament

by Robertson Davies

  THURSDAY, DECEMBER 6: Vincent Massey phones, very angry with Ron Thom, who has given him no information about the Combination Room. I broach the cocktail party idea and he is enthusiastic about it. I received an application from a man born in Bountiful, Utah, who writes enthusiastically that he has had “intimate relations with men in many fields.” Sancta simplicitas!

  WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 12, TORONTO: Much crippled with lumbago. I meet Lochhead and Eric Clements, the English silversmith, at the College at 11 a.m. and show them through the cold, resounding, cheerless place for an hour. Then take Clements to lunch. He is an English sensualist—fine, rosy skin, a moist eye and red, pouting lips. Good at his job, but rather a bore otherwise. Talks about silver as if he personally discovered it.

  THURSDAY, DECEMBER 13, TORONTO: At 3 to Eaton’s and meet Vincent, Hart, and Lionel Massey and the three Eatonians and Clements. He persuades them to buy a lot of silver I don’t think they need, by pouting and looking superior when quizzed; the Masseys are very open to this sort of bullying from Englishmen. So now we have some “contemporary tableware” (i.e., squared off) and a Founders’ Cup, which will be very handsome, and is the sort of thing Clements does, I suppose, as well as anybody in the world.

  This morning met Young and Irwin from Commercial Caterers and took them over the College. Young has a dicky heart and the cold got him; he with his heart and I with my lame legs were a queer pair. They have things well in hand.

  Lionel Massey’s Christmas card is of his daughters being presented to Prince Philip at the airport. Bill says Lionel sent one to the man at National Trust who looks after his affairs, who said, “Next year I must try to send out a picture of my kids with the Holy Family!” Vincent Massey’s card is of himself with Prince Philip, Lionel, and Lilias at Batterwood. Innocent snobbery, but it will not make it easier to establish the College as a place where intellect is the chief desideratum.

  To Oliver at the O’Keefe. A fine production by Peter Coe of a very mixed musical. The boys sang distressingly—choirboys shouting. The notion of Dickens’s London was Olde Englyshe. But much of the atmosphere of menace, of desolation, of innocence at the mercy of vice and squalor that makes the book great was conveyed by brilliant designing and good ensemble work. Two revolves, the inner fairly solid and the outer a rim of scaffolding, and these served for everything except one book-flat for Brownlow’s house, and a platform for London Bridge. Clive Revill a fine comic Fagin—the movements of a rheumatic rat, and a feverish rapacity when counting his treasure. The horror was not stressed: Sikes’s murder of Nancy not very dreadful, and Fagin thinks he will “go straight” at the end. But they did it with great gusto and charm. Now—what will New York make of it? Too intellectual? Not enough sex? (Not a leg seen above the knee.) No catchy tunes?

  FRIDAY, DECEMBER 14, TORONTO: H.t.d. on waking: like rejoining the human race. Home by 12. In the afternoon work on letters and on museum committee reports. In the evening work with Brenda on Christmas packages and hear the Christmas Carol record by Ralph Richardson and Paul Scofield.

  SATURDAY, DECEMBER 15: Busy at the office with memos to Ralph Hancox and Wilson Craw about salaries and positions next year.

  SUNDAY, DECEMBER 16: Gradually disentangling from Examiner work and feel a deep sense of release. But university work? I am not a scholar nor an administrator: will I survive? What am I?

  WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 19, TORONTO: Minor bothers: car goes crook; parcels get mislaid, etc. Rosamond is out of school at 12. Give a good lecture at 2. We call on the Edinboroughs and have mince pies and rum punch. In the evening to Kind Hearts and Coronets, my favourite film.

  THURSDAY, DECEMBER 20, TORONTO: At 9:30 meet Vincent, Hart, and Lionel Massey and Clements at Eaton’s. Clements has everything well organized and about $30,000 in silver is accepted with no demur. Then to the College and look over it thoroughly. Ron Thom is there, somewhat weary and bleary from the wrangle he had with the Masseys last night, when, I gather, blood flowed about his tardiness and his extras and his unbusinesslike methods. VM was bullying him badly today about the position of the Foundation plaque. The College looks better but our house is still a mess. The Masseys have vetoed Ron’s plan for a quad full of shrubbery. Lunch at the York Club, and I suggest we eliminate the pool, and Hart says, wisely I think, that any further major changes now might trouble Ron Thom too much and harm the building. I like the idea of a pool, but don’t want the place to look like a motel.

  In the afternoon we are back to choosing furniture, and there is all the usual haggle and bad temper. VM is angry because each carrel will cost about $925 for cabinetwork—he wants the cost cut. So much for silver, so mean about whatever pertains to scholarship! I shall fight this parsimony quietly. What annoys me is not their desire to keep expense down, but VM’S petulant references to the Library as if it were a tiresome whim of mine and Bill Broughall’s. A gruelling, maddening day. Glad the holiday season brings me some respite from all this nonsense.

  Home by train and Tom Symons in at 9:30 for a chat. Very tired and sleep poorly.

  FRIDAY, DECEMBER 21: Work on Examiner affairs and arrange that Wilson Craw be executive editor and Ralph Hancox editor. Both are well pleased.

  I have a vivid dream that I am a helper and server of some sort to two young English people, a boy and a girl, of noble blood, somehow related to Churchill; I too am young, about twenty-one. The girl is very attractive, dark, with a beautiful voice. At last I help them into a barouche on the drive of UCC. I move toward the girl, who puts forward her cheek to be kissed, but in a way that displeases me—as if I were not a man. “I won’t kiss you while you’re eating,” I say. “Damn you!” she says, but I know she recognizes me as a man and is attracted.

  MONDAY, DECEMBER 24: In the morning do public relations and give out gifts at the Examiner. In the afternoon rest and wrap presents and to the Thompsons’ for drinks before dinner. In the evening, music and bustle and we put out the gifts after the girls are in bed. An odd feeling Christmas has stolen on us unawares.

  TUESDAY, DECEMBER 25: Up at 9:30. The tree is a great success; WRD gives us a superb wine cellarette. Afternoon, sledding in Jackson Park. A fine dinner (goose) and Tokay.

  THURSDAY, DECEMBER 27: Back to work and I get everybody’s troubles at once. In the afternoon Tom Symons in with a tale of woe. In the evening read WRD’S privately published Far-Off Fields: it is well done and a charming nature emerges, but what a lot of misery, despair, and discouragement he has left out!

  SUNDAY, DECEMBER 30: This week a delightful respite in the bustle and worry of the present time. Will I be able to stand the unremitting quality of life at the College?

  H.t.d. 56 in 1962; Brenda absent five weeks.

  1 Because Davies failed to complete his Ontario Senior Matriculation, he attended Queen’s University as a special student, so he could not take a B.A. degree.

  2 Toronto businessman and Stratford governor.

  3 The new stage was the first reconstruction of the original Festival Theatre stage designed by Tanya Moiseiwitsch in 1953.

  4 Brenda wrote her privately published autobiography, Beads in a String, in 2001.

  5 E.H. Shepard, the illustrator for The Wind in the Willows, wrote two books of memoirs of English country life.

  6 Sirluck had returned to the University of Toronto from the University of Chicago at the urging of Claude Bissell to become the Graduate School’s associate dean of humanities and social sciences, with the understanding he would succeed Andrew Gordon as dean. He was the first Jew appointed to a senior position at the university.

  7 Theodore Heinrich, director of the Royal Ontario Museum, which at this time was part of the University of Toronto.

  8 “Letters in Canada: 1961: Drama and Music,” University of Toronto Quarterly 31, no. 4 (July 1962); review of Gratien Gélinas, Bousille and the Just.

  9 A Jungian archetype.

  10 Now the Robert Gill Theatre at the University of Toronto.

  11 Allan R. Fleming, influenti
al graphic designer, later chief designer at University of Toronto Press.

  12 American Roman Catholic priest, teacher, and calligrapher.

  13 Timothy Findley, Canadian novelist and playwright. He began his career as an actor.

  14 Davies had a very distinctive, carrying laugh; actors always knew when he was in the audience.

  15 Nineteenth-century Canadian poet. In Leaven of Malice, Solly Bridgetower was studying his work.

  16 Novelist and art historian; brother of Tom Symons.

  17 John Robarts, premier of Ontario from 1961 to 1971.

  18 Miranda had been waiting to hear if she would return to the Stratford Festival company for the 1962 season.

  19 In September 1961 Davies was invited to serve on the selection committee for the new Southam Fellowships for journalists, established by St. Clair Balfour of the Southam Company Ltd. Since September 1963 the journalism Fellows have been based at Massey College.

  20 Vincent Bladen, British-Canadian political economist, long-time leading figure at the University of Toronto.

  21 “Men and Books: Literature & Medicine,” in Canadian Medical Association Journal 87, no. 13 (September 29, 1962).

  22 John Genest: Some Account of the English Stage, from the Restoration in 1660 to 1830, 10 volumes, 1832.

  23 Roy Britnell of the Albert Britnell Book Shop, which is now a Starbucks.

  24 English author, clergyman, and eccentric, known for scholarly works on seventeenth-century drama and idiosyncratic studies of witches, vampires, and werewolves. Davies saw him at Oxford and found him fascinating.

  25 Osgoode Legal and Literary Society lunch, October 18, 1961.

  26 W.A.C.H. Dobson, head of the Department of East Asiatic Studies.

  27 The ornate silver and gilt staff that is the traditional symbol of the chancellor’s authority.

  28 François Charles Archile Jeanneret, 22nd chancellor.

  29 “The Deadliest of the Sins,” in One Half of Robertson Davies (1977).

  30 A late seventeenth-century Russian work created for the devout to carry on their travels.

  31 American author and publisher, and follower of William Morris.

  32 Trent University opened in Peterborough in 1964. Several of the buildings were designed by Ron Thom.

  33 John Polanyi, professor of chemistry; he won a Nobel Prize in 1986.

  34 Davies was again giving public lectures on the plays in the Stratford season.

  35 Now known as Lakefield College School. The headmaster was G. Winder Smith, and Davies was on the board of trustees.

  36 Literary critic and dean of arts at Trinity College, University of Toronto; founding general editor of the New Canadian Library series.

  37 English composer.

  38 An earlier version of the play, author unknown.

  39 Hugh Webster, member of the company; Howard Hemphill, member of the board of governors; Victor Polley, administrative director.

  40 Davies often sent appreciative notes to actors or others in a production. One of these letters was an elaborate spoof sent to Tanya Moiseiwitsch, purporting to offer her the ingredients of the witches’ brew in Macbeth that was missing in the Stratford production. It was published in the collection Happy Alchemy (1997).

  41 In A Tale of Two Cities.

  42 “A Writer’s Diary” was syndicated to the Philadelphia Evening and Sunday Bulletin and the Providence Journal as well as the Ottawa Journal, the Winnipeg Tribune, and other Canadian newspapers.

  43 Davies’s eldest brother, Fred, with whom he did not get on, had died in 1954.

  44 Published by Macmillan of Canada in 1963.

  45 Jungian dream analysis.

  46 Symons was now the president designate of Trent University, but still dean of Devonshire House.

  47 “Changing Fashions in Shakespearean Production.” Published in B.W. Jackson (ed.), Stratford Papers on Shakespeare (1963).

  48 Harry Griffith was the long-time headmaster of Ridley College in St. Catharines, Ontario. The Gooderhams were a wealthy family of distillers.

  49 All contrary to principles of the Alexander Technique.

  50 Sir John Martin-Harvey, actor-manager of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, much admired by Davies and the model for Sir John Tresize in World of Wonders.

  51 Davies’s Oxford thesis, Shakespeare’s Boy Actors, became his first published book in 1939.

  52 English novelist associated with the Angry Young Men, writers of the 1950s.

  53 Lewis wrote A Grief Observed in response to the death of his wife, Joy Davidman, and first published it in 1961 under a pseudonym. The film Shadowland (1993) was based on this story.

  54 The Brae Manor Playhouse at Knowlton, Quebec, was an important summer theatre from 1935 to 1956. A number of leading Canadian actors including Christopher Plummer and John Colicos performed there before going on to Stratford. Both Rob and Brenda Davies were with the Brae Manor company as actors or directors in 1952 and 1953. The company was led by Madge Sadler and her husband, Filmore.

  55 Likely Michael Alfred Rufus Isaacs, Viscount Erleigh.

  56 Douglas Lochhead, Canadian poet, founding librarian at Massey College, 1963–75, and Senior Fellow. Later he became the Davidson Professor of Canadian Studies at Mount Allison University, Sackville, New Brunswick.

  57 Alan Lorimer, representative of the local supervising architects, Hancock, Little, Calvert Associates.

  58 Davies was elected to the Athenaeum Club in London in 1964.

  59 The director of the museum, Theodore Heinrich, was a flamboyant figure but erratic financially. The museum board, concerned with the situation, had appointed Lionel Massey as administrator and then established a special committee to look into the question of Heinrich’s successor. Davies had a conflict of interest on this committee as it concerned the position of Lionel Massey, who was both Davies’s friend and his patron as a member of the Massey Foundation.

  60 The Garter King of Arms is the senior heraldic authority for England.

  61 Irvine, the Toronto interior decorator who had worked on Rob and Brenda’s house in Peterborough in 1960, was advising on the interior of the Master’s Lodgings at Massey College.

  62 Vincent Massey presented this cup to the College at the opening ceremonies and it has been used every year since 1964 at the Founders’ Gaudy.

  63 The Roman Catholic Basilian Fathers owned the Chapel of St. Thomas Aquinas, adjoining the Massey College property.

  64 English and later Canadian physician, conductor, and academic; dean of the Royal Conservatory of Music.

  65 An excerpt from this speech was published January 19, 1963, in the Toronto Star, titled “The Artist Looks into Himself.”

  1963

  —

  AS HE CHANGED CAREERS, Davies maintained all his diaries: his daily personal diary with cryptic entries; his “big diary” with occasional, more contemplative entries; the Massey College diary, in which he wrote extended daily entries as he began to devote himself full-time to the College; a travel diary covering the European trip he and Brenda took in July and August; and his theatre diary, with entries for many but not all of the plays and operas he attended. Altogether he and Brenda saw about three dozen productions during the year, as well as over two dozen films. Selections here are drawn from all the diaries, with the Massey College diary increasingly carrying the main narrative. The family moved into the Master’s Lodgings in mid-June.

  TUESDAY, JANUARY 1: I begin this year with considerable misgiving, having given up the editorship of the Examiner,1 which I knew, for headship of a college where I have no defined duties and must therefore make the job myself—this in the academic world, for which I am by no means well qualified. I can easily become an ornamental hermit, or a lodging-house keeper, or an inferior pedant. Or I can make my work, and especially I can write my books. I am gaining some practice as a diplomat, dealing with the whims of the Massey Foundation. I begin to get something of the feel of the university and its division i
nto able men who would have commanded respect anywhere, and the men swamped in detail, or muddled in some branch of pedantry, who are not scholars but who cumber the preserve of scholarship. I do not regret leaving the Examiner, only its security. I have outgrown it. As for the future, I am not quite a fool, and some men who are in no way fools think I can do the job, so I shall.

  In the home, peace, and Brenda changes in anticipation of the move: we squabble about unimportant things, which I take to be a sign of greater freedom of spirit. We have quite a bit of money now—security if not wealth, and if we sell this house to T.H.B. Symons we should be well set.

  Obedient to the words of the soothsayer,2 I read my diaries for ’54, ’55, and ’57, and what emerges is this: I am not successful as a playwright and I do rather well as a novelist, critic, and speaker—a good lecturer in a formal, rather carefully considered style. This chimes with my falling out of love with the theatre since Love and Libel. And two novels persist in getting notes made about themselves. Must think carefully about this.

  WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 2: To Toronto at 8:45 a.m. To the O’Keefe to see the D’Oyly Carte company in Iolanthe and enjoyed it; many of the chorus movements precisely as they were when Daddy Stewart3 taught them to us at UCC in—was it 1932? He had them from the Company, of which he was stage director for years. But the effect of being a charming fossil was weakened by a permanent set upon which very good extra pieces were mounted. How much was my enjoyment a re-creation of past devotion? And am I wrong in thinking that Henry Lytton, Bertha Lewis, and Darrell Fancourt had greater impact than these moderns? One can never know, of course, but I hate to think that at forty-nine I am a fogey, hoicking up the past to rebuke the present. Conducting was Isidore Godfrey; has he really been with them over thirty years? Can a man do that and keep any sort of artistic conscience? Apparently he can, for he conducted with great charm and sensitivity, and by and large the piece was better played than sung. The entry of the Peers in Act 1 had all the charm, satire on chivalry, and theatrical power that Camelot aimed at and missed.