The Temptations of Robertson Davies

“Robertson Davies: Man of Myth”

By Judith Skelton Grant

Viking

787 pp.; $35

When a man has character, the hardest temptation to resist is the temptation to become a character, and the Canadian novelist Robertson Davies was never a man to resist the temptation very strenuously. Indeed, Judith Skelton Grant’s biography makes clear that Davies set out early in life to become a character and to fashion himself into a type of the Edwardian eccentric–complete with broad-brimmed hat, monocle, and walking stick. “Unless someone pretty desperate comes along,” declared a 1937 Oxford student magazine about his time at university in England, “Robertson Davies looks like being the last of the real undergraduate ‘figures.’ ” Davies’s death (on Dec. 2, 1995, at age 82) makes only harder the task of distinguishing the man from his persona–and in some sense, one doesn’t want it done. What his many admirers want to remember just now is the outrageous anecdotes and theatrical poses that made his life as fascinating as his fiction.

Judith Grant, one of Davies’s most devoted admirers and the editor of two collections of his newspaper work, is happy to oblige. Her biography contains little critical analysis of Davies’s fiction. Indeed, the kind of strong mixture of literary criticism with biographical fact that we expect from definitive biographies of writers is missing from Grant’s account, with the odd result that his novels come to seem like things that happen to Davies rather than things that both derive from and explain his life. What Grant has included in her biography, however, is an abundance of good stories from Davies’s many careers: as the last of the Oxford aesthetes, as a stage manager at London’s Old Vic theater, as the newspaper columnist who created and popularized the curmudgeonly Canadian commentator “Samuel Marchbanks,” as a hopeful young playwright, as a disappointed middle-aged playwright turning to novel-writing, as a relentless practical joker, and, finally, as the colorful Master of Massey College, brightest ornament of the University of Toronto and Canadian letters.

And yet, it is of course on his novels that Davies’s reputation must ultimately rest. He was a world-class comic writer, and after his 1951 “Tempest-Tost,” a hilarious but somewhat plotless first novel about an amateur production of Shakespeare’s “Tempest,” he created a classic. “Leaven of Malice” (1954), the second book in the Salterton Trilogy, recounts the events that follow when a false notice announcing the wedding between two children of professors from the local university is maliciously placed in the newspaper of a small Canadian city. Wise and witty, it is simultaneously Davies’s funniest novel and his kindest–a nearly Dickensian work that exposes the foibles of its characters but refuses to leave them shamed beyond redemption.

After “A Mixture of Frailties,” a transitional novel and the last to be set in Salterton, Davies produced what seemed at the time (the end of the sixties) a major advance in his writing: “Fifth Business.” The story of the endless consequences that unfold from a single snowball thrown by a schoolboy in a small village before World War I, the novel follows through life a pair of boys as they advance in the Canadian social world. With “Fifth Business”–and “The Manticore” and “World of Wonders,” the books that completed the Deptford Trilogy–Davies found a way to incorporate into the novel both his lifetime reading in the mythological researches of Carl Jung and whatever happened to interest him at the moment of writing.

In the seven novels that followed “Fifth Business,” he managed to convert into Jungian archetypes a seemingly endless number of topics: hagiography, prestidigitation, psychoanalysis, gypsies, violin repair, Rabelaisian sexuality, academic rivalry, art forgery, genealogy, Wesleyan preaching, cinematography, homeopathic medicine, and much more besides. One constant in Davies’s fiction is the intrigues in the closes of Episcopalian cathedrals, and a fascination with high Anglicanism appears in all his novels.

Raised as a Presbyterian, Davies was received into the Church of England while an undergraduate at Oxford in the late 1930s. In later years, he distanced himself from Christian belief, striking a Shavian attitude. As he told an interviewer for the “Paris Review” (Spring 1989), Christianity was not sufficiently discriminating:

Salvation is free for everyone. The greatest idiot and yahoo can be saved, the doctrine goes, because Christ loves him as much as he loves Albert Einstein. I don’t think that is true. I think that civilization–life–has a different place for the intelligent people who try to pull us a little further out of the primal ooze than it has for the boobs who just trot along behind, dragging on the wheels. This sort of opinion has won me the reputation of being an elitist. Behold an elitist.

In 1981 Davies published “The Rebel Angels,” the first in the Cornish Trilogy that would come to include “What’s Bred in the Bone” (1985) and “The Lyre of Orpheus” (1989). Telling the story of a rich young man’s courtship of a graduate student from a gypsy family, “The Rebel Angels” is regarded by many of Davies’s admirers as his finest novel–as indeed it almost certainly is, with its blending of two distinct narrative voices, its clever portrayal of the many levels of Canadian society, and its surprising (and scatological) ending. And yet, fine as it is, “The Rebel Angels” may at last come to be seen as the novel with which it became clear that Davies’s turn down the lane of Carl Jung was ultimately a wrong turn (whatever the immediate improvement it brought to his fiction), the novel with which it became clear that Davies would never fulfill the Dickensian promise of “Leaven of Malice.”

The distance necessary for making such judgments, however, is not yet at hand. Judith Grant’s research was completed not only before Davies’s death but even before the publication of his last novel, “The Cunning Man,” in 1994. Still, what she has given us is considerable: the most substantial account we have of the artfully contrived character who was Robertson Davies.

July/August 1996, Vol. 2, No. 4, Page 13

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