A Celtic Temperament

by Robertson Davies

  TUESDAY, OCTOBER 15: The much-touted March on Massey took place, 9:30 to 10 a.m. About twelve or fifteen girls, and one or two male sympathizers, shuffled back and forth outside the gate with signs. I accosted them and they came in and paraded around the quad, and I walked with Rosemary Speirs. Decent girls, and their complaint seems to be that they have to pay a lot for lodgings, and want a college. At least, that is what they told me. But they made it clear they have no hatred for Massey College as such. As a demonstration, a feeble thing, but they got lots of publicity. At lunch the Southam men, Jack Sword, and St. Clair Balfour were here and we ate in Hall. This is a part of my work here to which I bring no relish. The food is well enough but I am pernickety. But it went well and the men like the College, and Robin Green says the College Conversation is indeed discussed.

  WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 16: Jenny is twenty-one: we give her money and sundry gifts. She is to have an evening party on Friday.

  SATURDAY, OCTOBER 19: The Varsity continues its weak harrying: the danger in this lies not in anything it can do to the College but in the impression these amateur journalists get that manufactured incident and one-sided reporting is news. The Star makes me a flattering offer to resume “A Writer’s Diary”; they offer at least $110 weekly as my share—which means the income tax would not leave me more than $55. But I have looked over the column for the thirty months or so I wrote it, and though well done it is thin stuff; if I take it on again, in fairness I ought to do it for at least five years, and the hack nature of the work, the mass of reading entailed, and the association with a paper I scorn all persuade me to refuse.

  Bill Broughall returns to the attack on an endowment for the College and this time he may succeed, for he has convinced Lionel of its necessity, and has also discovered that Hart virtually cannot resign as a trustee, so his threat to do so is empty. Thinks $1,250,000 might be the figure.

  Some Junior Fellows agitate for a coin-wash machine. What penny-pinchers they are! And there are thirty-seven private phones in College! How dare they bleat of poverty? Our Russian Junior Fellow, Vitaly Korsun, arrives Friday night about 10 with a camera and a paper suitcase and is astonished by the size of his quarters: “So many metres for one person?” he said. I have been asked to write for the Varsity and suppose I must, but only once.

  MONDAY, OCTOBER 21: Last night I put it to my father—should I write for the Star? Immediately came the answer: “Certainly not; it would be belittling”—and a lot more about money never being the best reason for doing anything. So I shan’t, and today as I sat in some Ph.D. orals, ideas began to occur to me for my novel, as though released by this decision.

  Tonight Junior Fellows Bob Alden and Stewart Goodings came to me to discuss College affairs and talk about calling a meeting to work out some things with the Junior Fellows. Welcomed them warmly; this was what I wanted—for some proposals to arise from the College rather than being imposed from the top. They say that all but a few are very well pleased and now is the time to pull things together before the notion of the place as a convenient hotel gains ground. I am greatly pleased by this development.

  TUESDAY, OCTOBER 22: Talked with Bill Dobson this morning about the establishment of the College character. We shall have to educate the Junior Fellows, he says, as they do not understand Common Room life. He says Toronto’s notion of an academic is pompous and aloof—non-Oxonian. Interesting.

  My Casanova play returned by CBC: Basil Coleman tried to interest them in it. But it is not their thing, and it seems to be an unlucky play. I should heed the finger of fate and abandon the writing of plays. Mine are not quite good enough, and much too good to be despised by the boobs of the CBC.

  SUNDAY, OCTOBER 27: Week goes well and Alden and Goodings’s circular has caused great discussion. Thursday Saint Catherine was rung for Jock (Tuzo) Wilson’s birthday. Vincent Massey in on Thursday afternoon and is very well pleased with the way things are going. We discuss the baroque organ and decide to move slowly, which pleases me, for an organ is a solemn and somewhat limiting instrument for such a place as this: but we agreed to cherish the choir. No word of the endowment, but Lionel tells me it is much in mind and it is not a thing to be rushed; Colin Friesen has given Lionel budget figures to work on. Friday I spoke at Prize Day at Upper Canada College and thus missed a Foundation meeting here, but Friesen tells me Ron Thom is now bored with this place, and vexed because his light fixture in the chapel was rejected in favour of Norbert’s development of Vincent Massey’s original idea. Ron also made a scene in the Round Room, which was arranged for an exam and was, he said “a travesty of itself.” Sad that he should leave this fine building in so sour a mood, but he is not a man to yield on anything and has a desire to freeze into forms of his making types of activity he does not comprehend.

  Saturday a very long talk with Bill Dobson: met him in the quad at 11—he stayed to lunch and left at 4:30. Learned, sensitive, witty, and far more fastidious in character than I. Saturday evening we dine with the Sirlucks: other guests, the Bissells, Bora Laskins,55 and Robin Rosses.56 Very good wine. Their children undisciplined and rude, and Sirluck plays that silly game of telling them they are nuisances without either sending them away or including them in the conversation. Sirluck much coarser at home than elsewhere: one sees what Dobson means. Claude Bissell talks very freely: he wants to get the stadium moved out of town and use that land more profitably. He grows more hawk-like, drives and pounces. I talk to him of an endowment for the College and he is keenly interested, as why would he not be?

  Today (Sunday) my father and Margaret and my uncle Percy lunched with us to see the College, though the two old men did not go up to Hall as the stairs are many. My father offers to give some type for use with our Albion press. He stumbled on the steps leading from the quad to the Round Room, and I recognized for the first time that he is really an old man.

  TUESDAY, OCTOBER 29: To Hamill in the afternoon to fill out new applications for a liquor licence, which have been required on the grounds that our first one was filed too long ago. I do not like this: is someone playing with us? Bill Broughall thinks so but he is professionally pessimistic. I am to appear on November 21 to represent the College. Hope this is a formality as we want as little publicity as possible.

  Dine at the York Club with the Stewarts and to Grant Macdonald’s exhibition of pictures, then home with the Stewarts. Excellent h.t.d.

  THURSDAY, OCTOBER 31, HALLOWE’EN: This morning there are bearded pumpkin-heads and one with McCracken’s moustache on the tower and on each staircase; also a beard on the bull and a carp in the pool. Good! We have a sense of community here, it seems.

  To a dull lunch given by Oxford University Press to mark the publication of A Masque of Mr. Punch: kindly meant but Ivon Owen, the editor-in-chief, has no talent for merry-making. Vincent Massey was here when I returned: his delight in the College grows; he talks very freely of an endowment, is sure it will come, and bids me not to worry. Meanwhile I must devise an order of service for opening our chapel. At 5:15 we have five men in for drinks and for the first time it was a bit sticky. Three talked well, but one, a surly mathematician, was rude and uneasy and another, poor fellow, who came wearing a sweater, never opened his mouth for shyness. We refreshed ourselves by going to the Pro Musica concert afterward.

  SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 2: This morning Goodings, Beer, and Pross came to see me to report that their Junior Fellows’ meeting on Thursday was a failure: nobody wants organization. But I already had heard this earlier as I had been in the Common Room talking to Rump, Levene, and Horn, who say the men are contented and do not like the Conversation, and I think I shall give it up, but perhaps not till Christmas. They are content with their association as they have it. Well and good—but I still want to pull the College a little closer together and will find ways to do so.

  Must be careful not to take the College’s rejection of an organization as a rejection of me personally: must make my influence felt by subtle means; the trump card is always in my hand.r />
  TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 5: Curious and somewhat embarrassing incidents arise from the visit of Professor Richard Sterling, who professes “government” (of all things) at Dartmouth, a very American type, ruggedly handsome and noisy, who is the guest of Jim Eayrs. Invades my study on Monday and makes a fuss about Quebec secession, which he declares to be imminent; he has been in Canada three days, “fallen in love with it,” and had visited a nightclub in Hull where “Le Grand Tex” sang “God Save the Queen” and other subversive songs. On Tuesday he gave a seminar in the Upper Library: about seven attended because the lecture was a failure. Sterling attempts to discredit any contrary opinion by alluding to the racial background of the speaker—thus Gregor is a Czech, and a Jamaican is anti-U.S., and I am Ontario and thus a United Empire Loyalist Tory. Talks maudlin trash about “Mr. Lincoln”; declares politics, poetry, and religion are one, then regrets the U.S. did not arrange the assassination of Batista ten years ago. When I ask him to reconcile this with his loudly trumpeted Christianity, he says, “I distinguish between murder and tyrannicide!” Made a fool of himself in College: hugged Oragwu, that shy Nigerian, and urged him to make Lincoln his hero. When crossed by Silcox and asked to give facts to support his extreme views, he became huffy and said, “I have a B.A., an M.A., a Ph.D., I am a full professor at forty-two, etc.”—quite discrediting himself. Discuss it after dinner with men in the Common Room and they are wickedly amused: Adler says, “We don’t have to read about the Ugly American—we’ve seen him.” Could hardly have believed this man if I had not seen and heard him. Later, Eayrs told me he had been warned Sterling had become very odd, but had not heeded because he owed Dartmouth a debt of gratitude for hospitality it had shown him.

  MONDAY, NOVEMBER 11: Claude Bissell tells me he has had a letter from the secretary of the Ontario Temperance Federation, one Royal F. Moulton, warning him that the College is applying for a licence, thereby bringing liquor to the campus, and advising Claude that they might make a protest. I do not like this, naïve though it is, and hope it does not create some difficulty on November 21.

  SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 16: Robin Green goes on optimistically with his plans for a Christmas dance, and I gently warn him that the College must have a hand in it.

  I have some conflict with Campbell Russell, the university Anglican chaplain, who does not like my “Prayer for the College” and wants to substitute some very conventional tosh of his own; my prayer may be Gnostic, but his is the old “It takes no brains to be a Christian and knowledge is dross” stuff.

  Friday night Abra, a Southam Fellow, had a woman in the Common Room, though two notices call attention to the rule forbidding it. Was very angry but determined to sleep on it. This is my problem here: I have to control my irascibility and try to see reason. Probably he did not see the notices; he is a decent man and would not, I think, try to encourage anyone to break a rule. As the soothsayer told me, I must listen and learn—the hardest things for me to do, with my irritable, morose temperament. And so it proves: the woman was his wife, and she and their two children are here for the weekend and are enchanted with the College. How unjust it would have been to trample him. I wrote him a decent note, for a rule is a rule. But I am always at war with my urge to humiliate, dogmatize, thunder, and bash at people. My lifelong fault, a tempestuous, suspicious, resentful nature, and at fifty I am worse than I was at twenty.

  WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 20: On Friday engineers raid the College, as they have found that the lock on the East Gate is useless—can be opened with a pen-knife; they play tricks with Brenda’s potted tree. But what is serious is that they—or someone at the same time, for we have no evidence—stole the barometer from our hallway, a handsome $75 one of which I was fond. Hateful to have to cope with such things but I phone Dean Lennox of Devonshire House, who is very decent and promises to investigate. John Ower, a gowk from Alberta, on Saturday lent his keys to some girls and threw McCracken into a fit. He has a suspicious mind about girls anyhow, and in justice, it is his job to maintain security. Had Ower in and scolded him, but not too much. Monday evening to Hart House to talk about the College to their graduate association—middle-aged men who play games there. They were intelligently interested. Then a chat with Joe McCulley, who is somewhat patronizing, but I can cope with Joe; he is not so bad a warden as Vincent Massey thinks, but he is a coarse bounder.

  Tuesday, Sir Basil Spence, architect of Coventry Cathedral, visits the College and is extremely complimentary about it. I should note that on Monday, November 18, the long-awaited Polanyi child was born, to be named Michael, and at 1:30 p.m. we rang Saint Catherine nine times for him—the first child to be born to a Senior Fellow.

  THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 21: At 9:20 pick up our lawyers Gow and Hamill at the Bank of Commerce Building, and by 9:30 to LLBO offices on Front Street and to a room with about 125 people in it, all prosperous and well-dressed but of greatly varied type. Judge Robb and his train ten minutes late. He enters; we rise with the abject courtesy of suitors; he gestures that this is needless, but not until we are on our feet. Hearings very rapid and conducted in an undertone as each group is called forward. We are the third called. He says, “There have been no objections made to your application. Is there anything you wish to add to it?” There is not, so we are smilingly dismissed, and I presume we are now a “licensed outlet” though this was not said, and I suppose we must await official confirmation. A reporter from the Telegram present, especially because of our hearing. Hope they do not make a great thing of it.

  FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 22: John F. Kennedy assassinated and everyone stricken in their characteristic mode; very depressed and chilled; dine with Grant Macdonald and the Stewarts at the Westbury. Grant stays with us.

  SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 24: This has been a strange week strangely shadowed by death: the mayor of Toronto, Summerville, died playing hockey on Tuesday; on Friday President Kennedy was assassinated; on Saturday Aldous Huxley died of cancer. C.S. Lewis also died at this time. The mayor came to our garden party—a decent fellow. The news of JFK’S awful death came just as I was about to begin my graduate lecture, and we had our work cut out to go on about mid-nineteenth-century drama in the face of such a brutal blow to the whole concept of civilization and order. Huxley’s death affects me deeply. He was my favourite among living writers: reading Antic Hay when I was sixteen or seventeen changed my attitude to life, and I have read all his work since. His combination of a strongly religious feeling with a great and astringent wit appealed to me without wearying, and his last thing, Literature and Science, was in his best vein. Such a death makes one feel lonely, though I never saw him save once on the street in New York beside the garden wall of the Museum of Modern Art.

  MONDAY, NOVEMBER 25: The university sobered, as the world is, by the assassination and the savage shooting of Oswald by Ruby; this is our civilization! The Kennedy funeral on TV, a vulgar affair in which Cardinal Cushing snarled the Mass in a voice like a Yankee auctioneer, while a tenor sobbed out the Schubert “Ave Maria”: how do Catholics of taste stand it?

  TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 26: Gow phones: Judge Robb has called and says some of his men may call to make some inspections and perhaps recommend some structural changes! Colin Friesen tells me that not a month has passed since February in which some inspector from the licensing board has not been here. A fortnight ago a fire department man and an RCMP man were here. I think we are being given the runaround by bureaucrats (1) to spite the Masseys or (2) to show Frost and Phillips that they will not be dictated to. I loathe the whole affair; it disgusts me to be “inspected” by these boobs who have no notion what a College is, and refer to it as “an outlet.”

  This evening to a reception at Derwyn Owen’s for Miss Melinda Seaman, now principal of St. Hilda’s and previously an English teacher at BSS. Owen tells Brenda “nobody lives on campus now”—one of his characteristic remarks, the wonder of which is that one cannot decide whether they are calculated affronts or inadvertent stupidities. I was cornered by George Edison, who vapoured about
the Kennedy business, about which Canada had not shown enough national concern to please him: we are ruled by little men, Churchill would have done better, blah, blah, blah. He keeps shop as a philosopher at Trinity but I fear he is just an Irish rhetorician. Last night Professor K.E. Bullen of Sydney, one of the world’s great seismologists, lay here: a quiet wee man with a wise monkey face and a hearing-aid, very pleasant.

  SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 30: On Wednesday to a buffet dinner at the president’s; about fifty guests. Such affairs, with ill-assorted guests, are not much fun. Poor Brett, head of textiles at the ROM, there in his wheelchair looking ghastly—a skeleton at the feast: how fortunate one is to have health! How dismal the women! One is not surprised if a man is a dowdy bore but somehow one always has hopes of women.

  The College of Heralds writes to Vincent: we may not have the augmentation on the College arms; it is personal to him. But we have it, in stone, over the East Gate. VM thinks they have seen it in the Illustrated London News and are teaching us a lesson. I suggest we simply say the arms over the gate are the Founder’s arms, and grind the hart off the chevron. Vincent thinks this an ingenious solution.

  Brenda and the girls are helping Robin Green and his group with the floor show for the dance on December 13. I have written the girls some words for Mendelssohn’s “Lift Thine Eyes,” as a College song.

  In the evening to Congreve’s The Double-Dealer, done by the University Alumnae in the Coach House Theatre, which I believe used to be a synagogue, seats about 120, and has a good atmosphere, and one of those three-quarters round stages. Intelligently directed and well understood, but suffered from acting which was quite inadequate, though pain was taken to speak it as well as they could. Costumes dreadful and wigs seventy-five years out of period, and horrible on top of that. Restoration comedy is for the finest of professionals only. But in justice I must say this production gave us a good evening, not embarrassing or angering: what good amateurs could do, they did, and that is vastly better than not seeing the play at all.