Robertson Davies

Canadian novelist, dramatist, and critic

• Born: August 28, 1913
• Birthplace: Thamesville, Ontario, Canada
• Died: December 2, 1995
• Place of death: Toronto, Ontario, Canada

As journalist, social and literary critic, dramatist, and novelist, Davies was among the first and most influential writers to posit a sense of Canadian national culture, and he helped develop a theatrical culture in Canada. His criticism convincingly showed the importance of popular culture to Canadian nationalism.

Early Life

Robertson Davies (DAY-veez) was the youngest of three sons of William Rupert and Florence McKay Davies. His father, then editor and publisher of the Thamesville Herald, would acquire with a partner other newspapers and media interests. In 1942, William was appointed to the Canadian senate. Robertson’s mother shared her husband’s interest in literature, music, and theater, but the marriage was an unhappy one. She concentrated upon her youngest son, alienating him with her demands. In 1919, the family moved to Renfrew, Ontario, where William edited and published the Renfrew Mercury until 1925.

In this isolated town, family members were outsiders. Davies had little in common with other children and was distressed by glimpses of bigotry and cruelty. He escaped into music, reading, and films and developed an interest in magic. At age nine, he published his first piece of journalism, a review of a lecture about English playwright William Shakespeare, in his father’s paper. In 1925, the family moved to Kingston, Ontario, where his father created the Kingston Whig-Standard from two older newspapers. Davies attended Upper Canada College in Toronto and Kingston’s Queens University. Unable to master the mathematics required of degree-seeking students, he took classes but did not graduate.

Entering Balliol College, Oxford University, in England, Davies was active in the Oxford University Dramatic Society, where students mingled with professional actors such as Vivien Leigh and John Gielgud. Despite a period of deep depression that led to psychiatric help and intense study of psychologists Sigmund Freud and Georg Groddeck, Davies’ thesis won him a literature degree (1938) and was published in London (1939) as Shakespeare’s Boy Actors. By then, he had written his first known play, Three Gypsies. He attracted the attention of noted director Tyrone Guthrie, who invited him to join the Old Vic Company in London. There he met Australian-born Brenda Mathews, the Old Vic’s first woman stage manager. With the beginning of World War II and the closing of theaters, they all lost their jobs. Davies and Mathews married on February 2, 1940, and left for Canada. Miranda, the first of their three daughters, was born in December, followed by Jennifer (1942) and Rosamund (1947).

Life’s Work

Rejected for military service because of his poor eyesight, Davies briefly worked with his father at the Kingston Whig-Standard. He became a columnist for that paper and for his father’s Peterborough Examiner, inventing the persona of a curmudgeon named Samuel Marchbanks. These columns continued until 1953 and were collected as The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks (1947), The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks (1949), and Samuel Marchbanks’ Almanack (1967). They were revised and then appeared in a single volume, The Papers of Samuel Marchbanks (1985).

From 1940 to 1942, Davies served as literary editor of Saturday Night, returning to edit from 1953 to 1959. Among his first publications was Shakespeare for Young Players: A Junior Course (1942). In 1942, his father appointed him editor of the Examiner. He became co-owner in 1946, remaining with the Examiner until 1963. From 1959 to 1962, he wrote a syndicated column for the Toronto Star. His various essays, lectures, and interviews led to many collections, including A Voice from the Attic (1960), One-Half of Robertson Davies (1977), The Enthusiasms of Robertson Davies (1979), The Well-Tempered Critic: One Man’s View of Theatre and Letters in Canada (1981), The Mirror of Nature (1983), Reading and Writing (1994), The Merry Heart: Reflections on Reading, Writing, and the World of Books (1996), and Happy Alchemy: On the Pleasures of Music and the Theatre (1997).

Simultaneously, Davies’ activities in the theater brought him recognition in Canada. His many published plays include Overlaid: A Comedy (1948), Eros at Breakfast and Other Plays (1949), Fortune, My Foe (1949), At My Heart’s Core (1950), A Masque of Aesop (1952), A Masque of Mr. Punch (1963), Hunting Stuart and Other Plays (1972), and Question Time (1975). Davies and his wife were involved in numerous productions, and he participated in the development of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, coauthoring three works about the festival, primarily with Guthrie, and serving on the board from 1953 to 1971. However, Davies was frustrated by his inability to achieve productions outside Canada, by bad amateur productions, and by reviews based on flawed productions. Relatively few professional productions could yet be staged in Canada outside summer stock. Furthermore, in professional productions, the author’s voice could be stifled by the demands of stars, director, and producer, as happened with the unsuccessful Broadway production of Love and Libel, a dramatization of Davies’ novel Leaven of Malice (1960).

Writing novels, Davies found independence and a highly original voice. Novels allowed a larger cast of richly developed characters and gave more scope to atmosphere and a sense of place than did drama. Davies’ first novels were satiric treatments of his newspaper and drama experiences. Tempest-Tost (1951) focuses on an outdoor, amateur production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Leaven of Malice (1954) displays a newspaper editor battling small-town malice. A Mixture of Frailties (1958), the third novel in The Salterton Trilogy, envisions what would happen if a talented girl were lifted from her provincial, narrow environment and allowed to develop her potential freely.

By then, Davies had immersed himself in the writings of psychologistCarl Jung, whose theories, with their sources in myth and spirituality, offered him a richer vision of human behavior than did Freud’s rigid thought. Davies had long believed in a world potential with wonders; Jung gave him the tools to explore the meaning of behavior in that world. Davies’ evolving beliefs are evident in the three novels of The Deptford Trilogy, Fifth Business (1970), The Manticore (1972), and World of Wonders (1975). These explore the consequences of a single malicious act: A child puts a stone in a snowball, throws it at another child, and injures a pregnant woman by mistake. Fifth Business encompasses the consequences to the intended target. The Manticore is the Jungian analysis of the snowball thrower’s son, an alcoholic who has never escaped his successful, but ultimately tragic, father’s shadow. World of Wonders traces the history of the boy who was prematurely born as a result of the incident. These novels brought Davies international recognition.

Davies’ final completed trilogy was The Cornish Trilogy: The Rebel Angels (1981), What’s Bred in the Bone (1985), and The Lyre of Orpheus (1988). These develop the limitations of pure intellect and the chaotic mix of mind, myth, pain, emotions, and intuition from which true creativity and culture arise. Davies finished two final novels. Murther and Walking Spirits (1991) describes the early days of Canada as seen through the eyes of a murdered entertainment editor who begins to understand history only after he has become part of it. The Cunning Man (1994) focuses on an unconventional physician, based loosely on Groddeck, who stands outside his culture as an observer of life’s activities that range from an unexplained death to larger issues of medicine and religion. Davies left only notes for a third volume.

From 1960, Davies taught as a visiting professor of English at the University of Toronto’s Trinity College, and, in 1961, he became first master of the university’s new graduate center, Massey College, involved in everything from teaching to planning buildings and creating a college culture. He retired in 1981 and died in Toronto on December 2, 1995. By then, he had received honorary degrees from many institutions, was a Companion of the Order of Canada, and was the first Canadian to become an honorary member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

Significance

Davies was internationally honored as one of the most distinguished novelists of his time. He helped develop Canadian theater, was a journalist and social and literary critic, and contributed to Canadian higher education.

Davies’ many essays and published lectures are marked by clarity and lucidity, as well as by intellectual range and depth. With The Deptford Trilogy, he broke new ground in the use of fiction to reveal the mythic and spiritual basis of everyday events. As professor and first master of Massey College, he made an important contribution to Canadian higher education.

Bibliography

Davies, Robertson. Discoveries: Early Letters, 1938-1975. Edited by Judith Skelton Grant. Toronto, Ont.: McClelland & Stewart, 2002. A slim volume of letters by Davies. Includes useful headnotes.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. For Your Eye Alone. Edited by Judith Skelton Grant. New York: Viking Press, 2001. Provides Davies’ correspondence from the years 1976 to 1995. Headnotes cover the period between the end of Grant’s biography and Davies’ death.

Davis, J. Madison, ed. Conversations with Robertson Davies. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989. Includes interviews and radio and television transcripts from 1963 to 1988, offering valuable insight into Davies’ writing.

Grant, Judith Skelton. Robertson Davies: Man of Myth. New York: Viking Press, 1994. Definitive, 787-page biography that includes essential facts about people, events, history, and places that Davies drew on for his novels. Ends its discussion in 1993.

Jackson, Sabine. Robertson Davies and the Quest for a Canadian National Identity. Frankfurt, Germany: Peter Lang, 2005. English-language doctoral dissertation. Closely examines Davies’ works through the last novels in terms of Davies’ concern with Canadian cultural identity. Useful bibliography.

La Bossière, Camille R., and Linda M. Morra, eds. Robertson Davies: A Mingling of Contrarieties. Ottawa, Ont.: University of Ottawa Press, 2001. Essays deal with the humor, drama, novels, magic, and medical information presented in Davies’ final novels. Useful bibliographies.