Birthday: "To be a book-collector is to combine the worst characteristics of a dope fiend with those of a miser."

William Robertson Davies (1913-1995)

Author, critic, journalist, playwright, editor, academic

He spent his life straddling the growing gap between modern, evolving Canada and its British heritage. A one-time actor who turned his commanding presence into a packed-house lecture draw, Davies was a small-town editor, a Shakespeare scholar, a man whose greatest joy was the sixteen plays he wrote but whose greatest success lay in his eleven novels.

Robertson Davies inherited printer's ink from his father, a journalist who rose to be a Canadian senator. The Davies household was filled with books, and after getting his undergraduate degree, Davies read English literature at Balliol College, Oxford. As soon as he could do it for himself, he abandoned his Calvinist Presbyterianism for the more cushy seating of the Anglican Church. Decades later, he explained the move:

I was certainly brought up a Presbyterian. In my childhood I acquired by heart a very valuable document that was called The Shorter Catechism. It was accepted by the Presbyterian Church and the Parliament of England in, I think, 1647. It contains 107 questions, the first of which is, “What is the chief end of man?” If you memorize The Shorter Catechism you have a kind of theological skeleton to work on. Later on this led me away from Presbyterianism, which I didn’t like because of the predestination doctrine that goes with it. But that early doctrinal training still remains with me and I am grateful for it. When I became interested in Jung, I became interested in his attitude toward Christianity—which was a very honest one because he was the descendant of a long line of Lutheran pastors; so he was not an enemy of Christianity, though he recognized certain restrictions in Christianity that I think are becoming more and more apparent as the present century moves on. One is the rather meager place it seems to have for women and all that women imply. I don’t mean women as adversaries or as people different from men, but women as people who have extraordinary things to contribute to the great mass of civilized thinking, feeling, and living. Unless Christianity can reconcile itself to women as it has not done up to now, I don’t see how it can continue to maintain its hold over thoughtful people. As for gnosticism, I was once accused by the chaplain of Massey College of being a gnostic. He was very angry with me indeed. But part of being gnostic was using your head if you wanted to achieve salvation or even a tolerable life. That is something that the Christian church tends rather to discourage. 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.

After graduating in 1938 (his thesis was on boy actors in Shakespeare), he spent two years as a supporting player at the Old Vic, married, and- as the war got serious- returned home with his new wife and a posh RP accent.

He spent two years editing an arts magazine, then embarked on nearly a quarter century as editor, then publisher, of The Peterborough Examiner. He wrote three volumes of humorous essays for the paper under the pseudonym Samuel Marchbanks; the bachelor blowhard from Skunk's Misery, Ontario had an  opinion on everything, and gave Davies space to vent his frustrations at life in a small-town, cultural wasteland.

As the 1950s progressed, Davies not only combined with friends to acquire a string of other papers and radio/TV stations but produced a steady flow of plays, articles, scholarly studies, and novels. He was a co-founder of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival and sat on its board for years.

In 1960, Davies was invited to take a teaching post at the University of Ottawa’s Trinity College; three years later he was named Master of the university’s new graduate college, Massey. He was a central-casting Oxford don, his hair and flowing beard having gone white; his gait aswirl in his trailing B.Litt black gown over a leather waistcoat wrapped by a well-cut but out-of-date suit. He became famous for his revival of the Victorian tradition of composing a Christmas ghost story for reading to the assembled members of college.

His fame as an author grew, resting mostly on his novels of Canadian life. The Salterton trilogy (1951-58) anatomized small town life, small town papers, and -in the second, Leaven of Malice- brilliantly traced the corrosive journey of a malicious rumor through Salterton and the lives of his residents. There’s the news you print, he said of being an editor, and the news you don't:

I had to deal with not only the recorded news, but the news I knew about that might be supportive of the recorded news but some of which could not possibly be printed because it was so extraordinarily damaging and often wounding. You find out what people are like, and how they live, and what they’re up to at night, and what goes on behind the lace curtains. The world you report is rarely more than half the world you know.

INTERVIEWER

Presumably you also learn something about people’s interest in these matters and how they respond to news.

DAVIES

Yes, and how disagreeably they gloat over the misfortunes of their neighbors, and how they wince and scream when some folly of their own has to be reported in the paper. Oh, you can find out a lot about people running a newspaper.

Davies’ Deptford Trilogy (1970-75) traced the multigenerational effects of a snowball missing its target, and reflected Davies’ fascination with Jungian analysis as one of the second-generation characters tries to sort out his father’s and his own lives. Studying Freud as a student, Davies became curious why Freudians so reviled Jung and became a convert: "Jung's thought is very expansive, a sort of opening out of life, whereas so much psychoanalytical thinking is reductive: getting you back to the womb and a lot of trouble."

The Cornish Trilogy (1981-88) wove its way through the life and death bequests of a wealthy art historian and painter, Francis Cornish, and features medieval themes in art rising back to life in the modern world. Cornish, who was also an art forger and a spy, was a sort of fictional Sir Anthony Blunt, whose simultaneous ability to insist on the most scrupulous accuracy in art authentication while trading in secrets was immortalized in George Steiner’s famous essay, “The Cleric of Treason.”

Throughout the nine novels characters recur and intertwine, making the set a larger, more richly-patterned whole to which Davies had added two novels of a fourth trilogy when he died in 1995.

His work is the sort readers tend to adore or despise. One obituarist noted,

Mr. Davies once said the theme at the core of his work was "the isolation of the human spirit" and mankind's growth "from innocence to experience." Characters' actions are carried out "on their own volition and usually contrary to what is expected of them," he remarked. "The characters try to escape from early influences and find their own place in the world but are reluctant to do so in a way that will bring pain and disappointment to others."

Other concerns in Mr. Davies's work were evil as an expression of suppressed fears and wishes, the irreversible consequences of actions, and myth, sainthood, ambition, love, vengeance and death. With disarming ease, he could fuse a comedy of manners with Gothic melodrama, blend realism with illusions, and juxtapose low humor and lofty abstractions. Satirizing bourgeois Canadian provincialism was a favorite sport.

Critics, mostly realists, assailed his mystical style as schematic and accused him of overstressing and overanalyzing the cerebral at the expense of emotions. He was also at times accused of being pedantic, repetitious, vague and antifeminist.

A most clubbable man, Dr Johnson would have called Davies. He gathered literary and academic friends and kept them for decades; among his closest familiars were John Kenneth Galbraith and the American novelist John Irving. Davies piled up honors over his long career, including a Booker Prize shortlisting and becoming the first honorary Canadian member of the American Academy and the American Institute of Arts and Letters.  

He was a one-man cultural attache to his own nation. The Paris Review noted,

Throughout these years, in countless lectures, articles, and public appearances, Mr. Davies continually urged upon his sometimes unwilling, unready, or unable countrymen the delights, rewards, and indispensable glories of art. “What does Canada expect from her writers?” he asked. “Canada expects nothing from her writers. But what may Canada expect from her writers? She may reasonably expect what other countries get from a national literature. First a sense of national character. Second, vigilance on behalf of intellectual freedom and moral vigor. Last, we may expect a true depiction of the essence of what our life in Canada is.” And what kind of literature is that? “Works with completely irrefutable power to convince,” he continued, “works that cause the reader to be visited, dimly, briefly, by revelations such as cannot be produced by rational thinking. Works in which you can see not yourself but, for one second, the inaccessible. Ah, but to have glimpsed the inaccessible is, however imperfectly, to have gained access to it. That is what your writers can give you, if you want it, and let them know that you want it. The decision rests with you.”

Five years retired, at 73, Davis described his life to a New York audience:

It’s difficult to manage public engagements particularly when you’re retired. When people ask me what I’m doing, I have to tell them that I’m doing very much what I did before I retired, except that now I have secretarial assistance only one day a week. People deluge me with things to be done and when I say I am busy, they fall into extravagant mirth and shout: “You can’t be busy, you’re retired!” I have been wasting my time doing things which seem to be imperative without being in the least important. I think you know that it is very unfortunate for a writer to spend too much time jaunting about talking, for although that is flattering, and it is delightful to appear before audiences and to meet people directly in this way, you really ought to be home working at your desk. Quite honestly, if you wanted to, you could as a writer spend twelve months of the year at conferences, pep groups and ginger sessions, talking to students and doing all kinds of things except your proper work. You just simply have to get down to it. Meanwhile, I have sat in a sort of pen at the Booksellers’ Fair, autographing copies of bound proofs for supposedly eager booksellers, and otherwise making myself a motley to the view, as Shakespeare, who knew all about it, says. My publishers are anxious that I should rush about and talk to people, but I have laid down a few ground rules: I will not drive wildly fifty miles at dawn in order to breakfast with fourteen librarians in a cellar somewhere, nor will I speak to schools. My agent is anxious that I should be on something called The Today Show, which is apparently big magic, but I daren’t tell him I have never heard of it. I recall once being “cased” by one of Dick Cavett’s underlings to see if I would be any good on his show, but I was found unworthy. Ah, if all this brouhaha had happened thirty years ago, when I had energy and appetite for it! As I once said of George Bernard Shaw, he bloomed at twenty, but nobody smelled him till he was forty. My scent has been even later in catching the breeze. The BBC also wanted a film about me for its Authors and Places series, so I had to hie me to the beautiful old city of Kingston where I grew up—a very beautiful Loyalist place, full of domes and towers and looking altogether more like Bath than a place on this continent—and revive my childhood and youth for the camera. Great fun; we had horses, and soldiers, and all sorts of gaudy delights. And the weather was good to us.

He didn’t much care for critics, recalling a Times of London review:,

But the review began with these chilling words: “To speak of a good novel from a Canadian writer sounds like the beginning of a bad joke.” With friends like that, who needs enemies?

For his part, Davies called critics “the bastard children of Scotch parents,” the elaborated:

Yes, critics have this nanny quality, but they vary enormously. Some are friendly and kindly, and are interested in your work and take it seriously, but the ones who get under my skin are the academic critics whose whole training is to detect faults. They call them “flaws.” I call them “flawyers,” which they do not like. I one time nailed one of these people and said, “Tell me of a novel that you know that is free from flaw. Now how about War and Peace?” “Oh, infinitely flawed.” “What about Remembrance of Things Past, Proust’s great novel?” “Oh, a mass of flaws.” I think it would be splendid if we could get a committee of these wonderful people to write a flawless novel, but they won’t do it and I question whether it would reach publication. The opposite sin is the creation of meaning or intent where none was planned. A Ph.D. candidate wrote of World of Wonders that its hero was christened Paul, and that his life story exactly paralleled that of Saint Paul! I said mildly that this had not occurred to me. He replied, with an indulgent smile, that many things appear to the critical reader of a book which have eluded the attention of the author, and that this gave the book “resonance”—for me, the resonance of a dull thud. It is extremely disagreeable to be treated as a sort of idiot savant who must be explained to himself and to his readers.

He was a witty, quotable writer, The New York Times wrote at his death:

A frequent composer of epigrams in his work, Mr. Davies once wrote about marriage: "People marry most happily with their own kind. The trouble lies in the fact that people usually marry at an age where they do not really know what their own kind is." Of the future, he wrote: "The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to an idealized past."