The Diaries of an Unforgettable Man

Robertson Davies: Never dull, but not always likable.

Discoveries: Early Letters 1938–1975
Robertson Davies
Selected and edited by Judith Skelton Grant
McClelland and Stewart
413 pages, hardcover
isbn 0771035403

n recent years, Robertson Davies's literary star has faded. Although his novels maintain their popularity, and the Deptford Trilogy has gained its share of international renown, both his skills and sensibility now receive a good deal of critical drubbing. Contemporary readers may find themselves agreeing with the most thorough and perceptive of Davies's critics, T.F. Rigelhof, when he states that Davies's fiction is “unevenly paced, implausibly plotted, shamelessly self-aggrandizing,” and “pervaded by condescending, complacent, nostalgic, mostly male intellectuals who aren't particularly intelligent but are single, solvent, cerebral and get very stiff contemplating the status quo of an Anglo Canada in which there is no room for most of us.” ?

In his day, Davies was the most eloquent proponent of the brand of anglophile conservatism that dominated in the better drawing rooms of English Canada—a perspective in which social class was conceived in terms of good manners rather than money, and relations between the sexes were governed by apparently unbridgeable gender difference. It is hardly an engaging political perspective in current times, yet this brand of conservative thinking has some lingering attractions—most notably in matters relating to taste. For example, Davies's own standards of personal correspondence put most present-day letter writers to shame. In the current age of barely literate e-mail messaging, a glance back at Davies's extensive correspondence is a revelation. His letters exhibited a scrupulous attention to detail, even in their physical aspect. Always written on embossed paper, they invariably included a personal salutation in his distinctive italic hand. Stylish, witty and engaging, their contents showed a writer who took care with every word. These were letters meant to be preserved.

In Discoveries: Early Letters 1938 – 1975 , Davies's biographer Judith Skelton Grant provides a wide-ranging selection of personal correspondence from his early years. This completes the task Grant began with For Your Eye Alone: Letters 1976–1995 , published in 1999 , which covered the last two decades of the writer's life. The present volume spans the years after his return to Canada at the start of World War II until the height of his literary career in the mid 1970 s. Grant has done the reader a service by including letters that show virtually all sides of Davies's character. The volume gives ample illustration of his eclectic learning and malicious wit, as well as sometimes contradictory dollops of pompous hauteur and questioning self-doubt. All of these features were an integral part of Davies the man, especially in his early years.

For those most familiar with the later Davies, after his achievement of literary fame, the occasional bursts of emotional insecurity that crop up in these letters are particularly noteworthy. It is easy to dismiss the challenges faced during his early adult years on his return from England in 1940 . But for Davies these challenges were real enough. After several years as an Oxford student and then apprentice dramaturge with Tyrone Guthrie's Old Vic Company, he came back to Canada uncertain as to his future career, except for his strong desire to continue his attachment to the theatre. His artistic ambitions were put on hold once he was hired by his newspaper-owning father to edit the The Peterborough Examiner . Sensitive to the accusation of nepotism, the younger Davies expended considerable effort to turn the Examiner into one of the most literate newspapers in the country. But the dullness of small-town Canada cast an ever-present pall. “I have been looking about in the streets,” he noted in a letter to his Australian-born wife, Brenda, just before she joined him in Peterborough, “and the people look crass and rough-hewn…but somehow more real than one has been used to.” Even once he was fully settled, his irritation with Peterborough's provincialism was a frequent com­plaint. “But oh! the dreariness of provincial life in Canada!” he wrote to an American friend. “Ibsen, living in that Pompeian atmosphere of 19 th century Norway, didn't know how lucky he was!”

At times, Davies was able to use his correspondence to play the ironic commentator on small-town mores. In one letter to Guthrie, he tells of a mealtime stopover during a country drive, when he enters a stall in a hotel bathroom Brenda assumes to be for “general, or heterosexual, use.” To his horror, three members of a local ladies club enter and proceed to talk loudly among themselves. Davies “tucked up my feet—the doors were half affairs—& froze like a rabbit” until their chairwoman “went into the next booth &…released her personal Niagara with thunderous enjoyment, while keeping up her conversation with her friends outside.” Finally the women leave, and Davies realizes with relief that he has escaped detection. “I, on spaghetti legs, dashed for the door, & was not myself until I had downed three Daiquiris.”

As is often the case with Davies's attempts at Rabelaisian humour, something rings a little false in this jovial burst. It is tempting to connect this artificial-sounding jollity with the artistic setbacks of his early years in Peterborough. His editorial job at the Examiner became less arduous after 1947 when he acquired a talented assistant. Meanwhile, he was able to gain some recognition as a book reviewer and column-writing humour­ist. Most importantly, he carved out a name for himself as arguably Canada's best-known playwright of the day. But his plays did not achieve the renown he thought they deserved, and his middling theatrical success sorely rankled. “I yearn, burn and churn to be a playwright,” he confessed to one confidant. One reason his playwriting abilities were not suitably rewarded, Davies decided, was sloppy execution by amateur companies. The average Canadian amateur actor, he became convinced, was “a clod untroubled by a spark.” But this was not the only problem, as he was forced to admit in a frank correspondence with Toronto theatrical director and drama critic Herbert Whittaker. “Thank you for your excellent advice about talkiness in plays,” he wrote to Whittaker in 1950 when his playwriting days were ending. “You have, of course, put your finger on a very weak spot in my equipment of which I am conscious but which I do not seem to be able to correct.”

To his credit, Davies accepted the legitimacy of the criticisms offered by Whittaker and others. The result was a bold artistic break, with a switch from plays to novel writing. The book he began working on in 1950 — Tempest-Tost —was a reworking of one of the plays that he and Whit­taker had discussed in their exchange of letters. But even after the popular success of Tempest made it clear that Davies had made an astute decision in turning to novels, he continued to be hounded by artistic doubts. These hit him most severely while he was completing his next novel, Leaven of Malice ( 1954 ). “I have had a kind of prolonged crisis,” he confessed to two friends, Graham and Joan McInnes. “I have set aside much of the destroying ambition which has possessed me for so long, and have recognized that I have a very limited talent, and that any really marked success as a writer is not for me.”

His mental crisis had physical manifestations as well: “exhaustion and a nasty skin disease called lichen planus ,” said Davies, describing his symptoms to the McInneses, “what the Bible calls a tetter.” If nothing else, this spell of self-­questioning spurred him to confront a serious character flaw. “His wife [of his publisher] favoured me with a lot of advice about my work, based on Leaven ,” he told the MacInneses, with whom he was comfortable baring such secrets. “I am harsh toward mankind, and this springs from the fact that my life has always been easy and I do not understand the troubles of less favoured people.” This piece of self-commentary contains more than a dash of truth. Davies's class-based snobbery had been a pervasive element of the first two Salterton novels, and still lingered in his next one, A Mixture of Frailties ( 1958 ). It was a trait that detracted from the depth of his writing, as his critics have long contended. “Davies seems to have seldom done a lick of physical labour, and it shows,” notes Rigelhof, in a statement that reflects widespread critical judgement. “He can't draw a detailed portrait of anybody who isn't of the managerial class, and workers are treated with remorseless disdain…Labour and poverty didn't interest Davies. They're drab, and Robertson Davies was the dandy son of a flamboyant man.” ¤

It was only in the Deptford Trilogy that Davies was able to deal honestly with the stultifying restrictions of the privilege into which he had been born. This burst of self-knowledge (which subsided in later life) went a long way in explaining the new creative powers he was able to harness during the subsequent period. It is not surprising that it was Brenda Davies who served as a catalyst. Certainly no one else could have made such a blunt criticism as she did at the time of the publication of Leaven . Throughout his life Davies continued his unwavering trust in her judgement. Whenever the two of them were apart, his letters to her were filled with romantic ardour. “I do not think I ever wrote you a love-letter before we were married,” he confessed in one of these private missives. “Now that you are away my thoughts are all one long love-letter to you.”

Theirs was a relationship that had not started in a burst of romance. Brenda had been the Old Vic stage manager, and had watched as Davies courted a Swedish drama student named Birgitta Rydbeck, before his attention finally rested on her. Rydbeck had not been the first of Davies's infatuations. His romantic life had got off to a particularly painful start when, as an undergraduate at Queen's in Kingston, he had fallen in love with a well-off Canadian girl named Eleanor Sweezy. The failure of his overtures toward Sweezy had an especially profound effect on the young Davies. Even half a century later, when Grant was preparing her biography Robertson Davies: Man of Myth ( 1994 ), Davies was sufficiently uncomfortable at his former vulnerability that he forbade her access to his letters to Sweezy, which had been returned to him years earlier. Instead, he typed up a summary and destroyed the originals.

As Grant diplomatically puts it in her editorial introduction to this volume, “The extant passages no longer have the shape of letters, and, what is worse, it is impossible to tell how much has been omitted, or whether he ‘improved' them.” As a result, she has not included any of these passages in this volume. Their absence is a serious gap, given how they might have helped reveal a side of Davies's character that is vitally important in coming to any overall judgement of his fiction—his ambivalent attitude toward women. Members of his immediate family (he and Brenda had three daughters) and his longtime secretary, Moira Whalon, were excepted from this ambivalence. So too were a few professional colleagues, including Canadian literary icon Margaret Laurence, for whom Davies had long-lasting respect and affection. But in private correspondence, when dealing in generic attributes rather than personal traits, he could sound like a downright misogynist.

Davies had a nasty habit of injecting negative female imagery in his personal writing—a satirizing tendency that is jarringly visible in some of his early letters. For example, when describing the cares of middle age to an academic friend named Horace Davenport, he noted, “The man in his forties is old enough to have lost some of his appetite for praise, but he is as sensitive as ever to blame. His glories seem mean, and his youthful dreams as, in the words of the Old Testament, but menstruous rags.” In a letter to fellow Canadian writer Earle Birney, he heaped scorn on the role of middle class women in the promotion of Canadian culture: “Dreadful, too, are the women's organizations which look upon culture in all its forms as ‘refining'—something which eunuchizes men & renders women barren. To hell with the whole bloody lot!”

Even more telling were his personal theories on the psychological makeup of women. His most wide-ranging explication occurs in a letter he wrote to Christopher Hill, the noted Marxist historian on English Puritanism, who as Master of Balliol College was dealing with the issue of whether or not the College should admit women. Davies wrote to him as a concerned Balliol alumnus:

Only rarely do women excel, and when they do it is at a cost that anyone who really likes women must regret—the cost of learning to think like men, and argue like men of the First Class Honours kind; it is a good and useful kind, but it is not the highest kind of man. The woman who achieves this sort of distinction does it by sub­duing qualities, especially in the realm of feeling, that might have made her the highest kind of woman.

These sentiments—it should be recalled, written in the 1970 s and not in the distant, benighted past—flowed from Davies's interpretation of Jungian thinking, as he made clear in the ensuing passage in his letter to Hill:

The strength of Balliol, over the past 150 years, has been its understanding of the Logos principle, and the typical Balliol man is a creature of Logos; this is admirable for many purposes, but it is a lucky thing for Balliol that some of its most famous sons have had other sources of inspiration. A first-class woman takes her psychological stand on Eros, and the better she learns the Logos-attitude (which in her case will be merely Logos-tricks) the less she is her best self.

One criticism that immediately springs to mind when reading such elegantly worded tripe is to note how Davies ignores Balliol's own history. It is indeed ironic—as Davies of all people should have known—to speculate on the supposed “Logos”-based inferiority of women and the resulting “tricks” of female academics when the best-known fictional example of the cerebral Balliol man was based on a woman. As anyone who is familiar with the life of Dorothy Sayers will know, her depiction of that epitome of Balliol savoir faire, the debonair Lord Peter Wimsey, was in all important mental aspects based on herself. Perhaps Hill and his Balliol contemporaries appreciated such literary ironies in a way that Davies could not. In any case, Davies's attempted intervention in Balliol's internal politics was summarily ignored, and women were admitted by the end of the decade. But Davies's views on women were to have a significant effect on his own career, especially after he left news­paper journalism in the early 1960 s.

Davies had experienced an exceptional turn of fortune when former Governor General Vincent Massey (a longtime acquaintance of both Davies and his father, and a fellow Balliol alumnus) decided to establish an all-male residential post-graduate college at the University of Toronto. Massey asked Davies to serve as founding Master, and for Davies, this offer was a godsend. Not only could he escape the psychological clutches of his father (those “fetters of gold,” as Davies put it in one early letter), but he was also able to give full rein to his formidable talents as an impresario. These skills had already been tested during the early seasons of the Stratford Festival, when Davies aided his old theatrical comrade-in-arms Tyrone Guthrie in helping establish the Festival's formidable artistic reputation. Now, under the loose direction of his new mentor Vincent Massey, he was able to unleash yet again a wave of creative energies in a setting tailor-made to inspire his imagination.

The result was a recreation of the 1930 s-­vintage Balliol Davies had known as an Oxford student, with an annual round of High Tables, Gaudy Nights and church services in the “ecumenical” (that is, middlebrow Anglican) chapel, each ceremonial detail slightly adapted to account for the passage of three decades, as well as the leap across the Atlantic. In a letter to his academic friend Davenport, he voiced his underlying mission as newly minted Master: “Out of a Grad. Schl. of nearly 3 , 000 we take roughly 100 of the best—half scientists and half humanists, and no mutts studying for degrees in pedagogy, library science or insurance selling admitted.”

Within the boundaries that he and Vincent Massey had set, Davies succeeded brilliantly. During his first few years at the college's helm, he derived considerable enjoyment from his new responsibilities (which included some teaching of the university's drama courses). Even the student protests near the end of the 1960 s did not stem his good humour. For a while, the college's monastery-like walls, in conjunction with Davies's firm directorial hand, ensured that outside dissent was kept at bay. In one letter from the late 1960 s, he could sound positively light-hearted in describing the wider campus turmoil: “you know what sheep Canadian students are; they want anything that promises a lark and a disruption of work, including grievances and strikes.”

But dissension within the college's walls was gradually growing, thanks to one of its own senior academics. William Dobson was an East Asian scholar (hence Davies's private nickname for him, Dr. Fu Manchu) who encouraged Massey's student residents to take umbrage at such matters as food service and college rules. Davies saw Dobson's increasingly vocal criticisms as spurred by nothing more than personal mischief and envy, and worked hard for several years to ensure that Dobson would be forced to leave the college. In his personal letters from this period, Davies's deep-seated antipathy toward Dobson and “Fu's” student supporters is evident. “We have a lot of unrest and cloak-and-dagger this year,” he confided to his close friend Gordon Roper, “and some of it is fomented by the Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu (Bill Dobson to you). But poor old Fu had better make the most of it, for by midsummer virtually all of his arse-lickers will have gone elsewhere.”

Dobson was not to be the end of Davies's problems. In 1973 , just months after Dobson's departure, Davies faced concerted pressure to admit women to the college. At first, he was able to fight off these demands, which included a formal student petition, with a well-worn argument that Vincent Massey (who by this time was dead) had explicitly intended the college should be a male-only establishment. But surviving members of the Massey family were canvassed by the reformers, and the younger Masseys made it plain that they agreed with the petition. Seeing that he had been outmanoeuvred, Davies relented. By 1974 his cherished notions of a Logos-centred male educational setting died with the arrival of the first female Massey residents.

While shrewd enough to make a tactical retreat once he realized he had been bested, Davies did not soon forget this incident. Increasingly disillusioned with his college responsibilities, he withdrew from his former participation in day-to-day activities, and limited himself to formal occasions. From this point onward, his irritation at any hint of student opposition was easily aroused. “The House Committee [of students] has demanded that the college books be made open to them,” he informed Gordon Roper around the time that the dissension was at its height. “They feel that their fees are not being spent to the greatest advantage. I wait gleefully for this encounter, because I hope to skin the hide off them. Pompous, ungrateful brutes! Most of them never ate so well in their lives, in the sod huts they inhabited out in Saskatoon or the fishy coves of Newfoundland. God, how I loathe the young!”

This college turmoil coincided with the completion of the third novel in the acclaimed Deptford Trilogy. But with World of Wonders ( 1975 ) behind him, the tone of Davies's novels was to change significantly. Gone were the partially successful attempts to rein in his snobbishness and downplay academic artifice that had marked the Deptford books. In his next novel, The Rebel Angels ( 1981 ), these traits are front and centre, with an inordinate emphasis on arid intellectualism (the novel's main scientist, Ozias Froats, is an expert in the study of human feces) and depravity (or, more accurately, Davies's rather antique imaginings of sexual license). The book's villain is none other than a thinly fictionalized version of William Dobson. Rigelhof calls this character “a particularly grotesque and excessive example of literary gay-bashing.” ‹ But this statement simplifies Davies's complicated stance towards homosexuality—a not unexpected psychological complexity given his High Church leanings, love of English-inspired high camp and intimate acquaintance with the personal workings of the theatre.

In his private letters, Davies could resort to conventional homosexual caricatures. For example, in bemoaning a Maclean's magazine article about him, he told Roper how much he hated being typecast as “a farcical Oxonian, sipping claret, snorting up snuff, uttering Latin jokes, and in general an Over-ripe Fruit.” But homosexuality is a recurring theme in the Cornish Trilogy. Though the Dobsonesque villain of Rebel Angels is hardly gay (using the sexual terminology of today, it would be truer to call Urquhart McVarish the ultimate catholic-minded accessorizer), the book's secondary villain certainly is. John Parlabane displays a fey brand of cerebral homosexuality that Davies knew well from his acquaintances in academe and the Anglican Church, and that he thoroughly enjoyed mimicking in literary form. In the later two novels of the Cornish Trilogy, What's Bred in the Bone ( 1985 ) and The Lyre of Orpheus ( 1988 ), the gay quotient expands further, with Bred in the Bone 's main character, Francis Cornish (loosely based on Douglas Duncan, the leading patron in Toronto's artistic community during the 1940 s and 1950 s), a bisexual, and the novel's central romance one between Cornish and Aylwin Ross (based on the onetime director of the National Gallery of Canada, Alan Jarvis, whom Davies knew personally and disliked). In Lyre lesbianism makes an appearance—in egregiously inauthentic fashion—with its romantic affair between two central characters with the outlandish monikers Gunilla Dahl-Soot and Hulda Schnakenburg. Meanwhile, the centre of attention in each of these two books is not on academic accomplishment, but rather on artistic taste and its acquisition. It is difficult not to conclude that in this last of his trilogies, Davies wished to highlight the primacy of the latter over the former, while focusing on alternative sexuality as a way to give these books a needed modern flavour.

If Davies was intending to project a mood of encroaching decadence in these works, then he succeeded admirably. At the same time as he was writing Rebel Angels , his last years as college Master were relatively placid. By the late 1970 s, Massey's student residents were little interested in overt criticism or protest. Besides, Davies was now an international figure, and his eccentricities were celebrated elements of Canadian culture. By this time, his infrequent attempts at personal interaction with students were so distant and contrived that these meetings gained their own mythic status in the life of the college. No new Massey member was fully initiated until he or she had been subjected to the requisite five minutes of meaningless banter with the Master. While the College had managed to maintain its distinction as an anachronistic version of Balliol, Davies himself had by now been able to transform himself into a latter-day Master Jowett—the legendary 19 th-century Oxford figure—with similar renown and Olympian detachment, even if more interested in oddball artifice than the original Jowett's more conventional classical pursuits.

In the years following his formal exit from the College in 1981 , Davies was still a frequent presence, keeping an office there. Even if the novels of this period were far from his best, he continued to complete them with admirable dispatch. (“Scribblo, ergo sum” was how he described his personal philosophy in one of his early letters.) After a creative nadir with the self-indulgent Murther and Walking Spirits , which appeared in 1991 , he then showed his capacity to confound his growing list of critics by proceeding to write what was arguably one of his best novels. The Cunning Man ( 1994 ) recaptures some of the power of the Deptford books, with a sympathetically drawn and memorable protagonist who manages to be significantly different from anything Davies had given his readers before.

After Davies's death in 1995 , there was to be one more artistic triumph. He had long been interested in writing an opera libretto, and in his last years produced one that dealt with that ancient tale of metamorphosis and redemption, The Golden Ass . It was a story that had long intrigued him, as he hinted in a letter to his Massey colleague Douglas LePan as far back as the 1960 s. “I sometimes feel that we are living in that sunless, moonless, starlit world that Apuleius gives us in The Golden Ass ,” he told LePan, “full of the vicious, the avaricious, the false prophets, the disingenuous magicians, and a sneaking pack of priests who don't know what they are priesting about. And we, the bemused men of goodwill, are the asses, looking for a metamorphosis that will enlighten us…The world that is coming is bound to look frightening to most of us, but that is the usual thing. I'm sure Christianity scared the daylights out of everybody in the Roman world who was not too broken to care.”

It is a provocative historical comparison alluded to in the final version of the opera, premiered by the Canadian Opera Company in 1999 . It is also a comparison that resonates in ways that perhaps Davies did not conceive. As in contemporary times, Apuleius's world was characterized not just by ill-willed religious rivalries, but also by superpower dominance and ongoing attempts at multicultural synthesis as well. For Davies, the world of The Golden Ass was comfortable territory—dramatically rich, psychologically charged and eerily magical—and the opera was a definite success. Ironically, almost half a century after his former switch from plays to novels, he had now made a strategic return to artistic interests closely allied with his initial love of the theatre. Unfortunately, this switch could not continue: mortality intervened.

If nothing else, this last burst of energy proved Davies's tireless exuberance and multifaceted fluency. Regardless of what we may think of his anachronistic political opinions, or class-­conscious anglophilia, he is one of those figures who—for anyone who came in personal contact with him—is impossible to forget. Despite being endowed with more than his fair share of character flaws, he had one overriding virtue: he was constitutionally incapable of being dull. Through the workings of an ever-fertile imagination, he showed how colonial mimicry, if managed with aplomb, could equal if not surpass its inspirational models. His life gives ample evidence that, when examining the eternal literary tension between authenticity and artifice, the power of the latter should never be underestimated.

Mark Lovewell

Notes

1 T.F. Rigelhof, This is Our Writing , Porcupine's Quill, 2000, page 46.

2. Rigelhoff, pages 49–50.

3. Rigelhoff, page 52.