Matt's Books and Music

When I do my end-of-year recaps, it’s important to me that they be representative of my reading year. That’s a big reason why I started doing ‘Bookish Superlatives’ in addition to a Best of the Year list last year. But as I was preparing these posts for this year, I noticed that one author wasn’t featuring as much as I’d have expected, considering how much of his work I read this year and how much I loved it, almost without exception. And so I thought I’d take some time to write a special post to honour my author of the year, “Canada’s Man of Letters,” the late, great Robertson Davies.

Over the course of his fifty-year career, Davies published an award-winning small city newspaper, was an active playwright, essayist, and novelist, and a founding father of both a major international theatre festival (The Stratford Festival) and a graduate residential college (Massey College, in Toronto). This is a career out of a different, distant age. Davies was among the last of a certain type of figure, representing a monocultural literary canon and set of ideals that were growing increasingly passé throughout the course of his life and career. For example, he takes time for extensive dialogues on the nature of modern art (What’s Bred in the Bone (1986)) and what makes music good (A Mixture of Frailties (1958)). He indulges in reflections on such concerns as the difference between Classical Greek and that of the New Testament (The Rebel Angels (1981)), and makes ready allusions to Homer’s Catalogue of Ships (Tempest-Tost (1951)). Such concerns and references were unfashionable even in his own day. This was a fact of which Davies was very aware, and it was a common theme in his writing, from his earliest plays in the 1940s through to his final novel, published in the early 1990s. Yet, while he was aware of the cultural ground shifting beneath his feet, one never gets the sense that he opposed it, and to me that’s what makes him such a fascinating figure. It takes a special person to see and understand that a world they love is passing away and not resent the world that is coming.

Nowhere is Davies’ (perhaps surprising) lack of nostalgia clearer than when it comes to the question of Canada’s national identity. This has always been a bit of an obsession in Canadian literature, and remains so to this day. (That questions of the tension between personal identity, cultural heritage, and national identity, the promises and struggles of multiculturalism, and the question of belonging are actually long-standing parts of the Canadian literary tradition and not revolutionary attacks on it is often lost on today’s writers; the names and cultures of origin have changed, but the themes have not!) When Davies addressed such themes in his writing, his starting point was the society of small town ‘Old’ Ontario, a particular brand of Victorian society that was already fading when he was growing up. But there is no nostalgia at work here: The towns and small cities of Davies’ Ontario are filled with self-important and self-righteous people, driven by a combination of religious prejudice and the syrupy sentimentality of the Victorian age. They are oppressive, stultifying, tasteless, and almost proud of their myopia and parochialism. This passage from Leaven of Malice (1954) about the architecture of Canadian towns, says a lot about Davies’ perceptions of the culture in which he was raised:

[The offices] partook largely of that special architectural picturesqueness which is only to be found in Canada, and which is more easily found in Salterton than in newer Canadian cities. Now the peculiar quality of this picturesequeness does not lie in a superficial resemblance to the old world; it is, rather, a compound of colonialism, romanticism and study defiance of taste; it is a fascinating and distinguished ugliness which is best observed in the light of Canadian November and December afternoons. (Leaven of Malice)

This is a Canada still tangled up in Britain’s imperial apron strings, basking in fading second-hand glory, and either unable or unwilling to forge its own path. Yet, from the very start, we also see the slow emergence of a new, more diverse Canada. His 1949 play Fortune My Foe revolves around the prospects of a refugee who finds his expertise and family legacy undervalued in his new home (a sadly perennial theme in Canadian literature and lived experience). His later writings (especially The Rebel Angels) include characters struggling with the double consciousness of first generation Canadians, caught between the values of their Canadian context and the expectations of their parents. In The Lyre of Orpheus (1988), Davies writes buoyantly of this new, emerging, multicultural Canada:

A Canadian can be anything. It is one of our very few gifts. Because, you see, we all bring something to Canada with us, and a few years won’t wash it out. Not even a few generations.(The Lyre of Orpheus)

So, engaging as fully as he does in the old, disappearing Western literary canon, Davies isn’t suggesting it’s the only or even best way. He simply loves it and doesn’t want it to disappear. It seems clear he thinks there is much to be gained in bringing in new voices and experiences, but he also cautions against abandoning the wisdom of the past either. The past wasn’t a Golden Age, but neither is the future. In what turned out to be his final novel, he wrote: “All eras of history are an equal distance from eternity” (The Cunning Man, 1994). And he was concerned that the abandonment of the Arts as a valued part of education would leave us unprepared to cope with an increasingly complex and diffuse world in a humane way:

Live in the spirit of your time, and that spirit alone, if you must. But for some artists such abandonment to the contemporary leads to despair. Men today, men without religion or mythology, solicit the Unconscious, and usually they ask in vain. So they invent something and I don’t need to tell you the difference between invention and inspiration. (What’s Bred in the Bone)

Or, to put it more plainly:

Be sure you choose what you believe and know why you believe it, because if you don’t choose your beliefs, you may be certain that some belief, and probably not a very creditable one, will choose you. (The Manticore, 1972)

I think the key to understanding how Davies related to the past, present, and future is that he was a man for whom the arts were better understood by their older name, the humanities: they are the things that teach us how to be human, how (and not what) to think. He wrote not only about the theatre (Fortune My Foe, Tempest-Tost, The Lyre of Orpheus), philosophy and literature (The Rebel Angels), visual arts (What’s Bred in the Bone), and music (A Mixture of Frailties) in this lofty way, but also about journalism (Leaven of Malice), biography (What’s Bred in the Bone), psychotherapy (The Manticore, 1972), medicine (The Cunning Man), and even esotericism and the occult (e.g., saints in Fifth Business, magical illusion in World of Wonder (1975), ritual in The Manticore, Tarot in The Rebel Angels, and astrology in What’s Bred in the Bone) — all of these are modalities and media for the expression of the divine, and before them all we must bow with all due humility: “Forgive yourself for being a human creature,” he writes in Fifth Business, “… That is the beginning of wisdom; that is part of what is meant by the fear of God; and for you it is the only way to save your sanity.” The whole world is a theophany waiting to happen.

In this, Davies reveals a significant debt, if not rigid adherence to, Carl Jung’s thought, particularly in his works of the 1970s and ‘80s. This reflection on the meaning of Christianity by Simon Darcourt, the protagonist of The Rebel Angels, is right out of Jung:

Gradually it came to me that the Imitation of Christ might not be a road-company performance of Christ’s Passion, with me as a pitifully badly cast actor in the principle role. Perhaps what was imitable about Christ as his firm acceptance of his destiny, and his adherence to it even when it led to shameful death. It was the wholeness of Christ that had illuminated so many millions of lives, and it was my job to seek and make manifest the wholeness of Simon Darcourt. (The Rebel Angels)

But beyond the breadth and profundity of Robertson Davies’ thought, what I still love most about him is simply his writing. He wrote in gorgeous prose, and was an absolute master of characterization, literary detail, and the witty bon-mot. His early novels Tempest-Tost and Leaven of Malice, are small-town satires that remain hilarious seventy years after they were published. Where other mid-century writers like Arthur Miller, Joseph Heller, J.D. Salinger, and Kurt Vonnegut saw the horrors and hypocrisy of the world and responded with a kind of smug, cynical humour that has not aged well (to say nothing of the airless despair of French existentialism!), because he never gave into the spirit of the age — precisely because of his connection with the larger Western canon of literature, religion, and philosophy — Davies’ humour avoids the cyncism and misanthropy we associate with mid-century literature. “Cynicism,” he wrote, “is just another kind of illusion” (The Manticore). It isn’t that he wasn’t aware of the horrors of the world (His narrator in Fifth Business describes coming back from the War “like a piece of meat that is burned on one side and raw on the other”), but that he refuses to give them the last word.

In all of this, Robertson Davies is a bit of a guiding light for me. We too live in a frightening socio-political moment in which the worst of humanity is on display all around us. Cynicism and despair are so tempting. But if Davies could maintain his beliefs in humanity, the necessity of making meaning, and good humour in his time of world wars, McCarthyism, and the spectre of nuclear annihilation, and remain all the more relevant because of it, that means that we — that I — can too. (That he did it in beautiful prose is a wonderful bonus.)

I’m going to end this with some of my favourite of his wise and witty turns of phrase:

• “Money, it is often said, does not bring happiness; it must be added however, that it makes it possible to support unhappiness with exemplary fortitude.” (Tempest-Tost)
• “One can’t love somebody in cold blood.” (Tempest-Tost)
• “Wisdom may be rented, so to speak, on the experience of other people, but we buy it at an inordinate price before we make it our own forever” (Leaven of Malice)
• “Experience is wine, and art is the brandy we distill from it” (A Mixture of Frailties)
• “Every man who amounts to a damn has several fathers.” (The Manticore)
• “Freedom does not come suddenly. One has to grow into it.” (World of Wonders)
• “A boy’s first recognition of hypocrisy is … more significant than the onset of puberty.” (World of Wonders)
• “A powerful conscience and no sense of humour — a dangerous combination.” (The Rebel Angels)
• “The art of the quoter is to know when to stop.” (What’s Bred in the Bone)