Robertson Davies

Robertson Davies: The Snowball He Carried for Ten Years

An image arrived and would not leave: two boys on a village street on a winter night, and one of them throws a snowball. Davies sat with it for a decade before he wrote a word. "The kernel is something that recurs to me over and over and over again," he told the *Paris Review*, "that will not be escaped." When he finally gave in, the snowball became *Fifth Business* — a novel about a stone hidden in a snowball, a woman driven mad, and sixty years of consequences — and a provincial Canadian newspaperman in his late fifties became a major novelist.

Thamesville and a Senator's House

William Robertson Davies was born on 28 August 1913 in Thamesville, Ontario, the third son of William Rupert Davies, a Welshman from Welshpool who would sit in the Canadian Senate from 1942 to 1967, and Florence Sheppard McKay. Both parents read voraciously. Newspapers were the family trade, and small-town Ontario — its gossip, its Presbyterian severity, its buried cruelties — became the raw material Davies mined for fifty years.

Upper Canada, Queen's, Balliol

He went to Upper Canada College in Toronto from 1926 to 1932, then to Queen's University in Kingston from 1932 to 1935 as a special student, an arrangement that spared him a degree. Oxford finished the job. At Balliol College he took a BLitt in 1938 with a thesis on the boys who played women's roles on the Elizabethan stage, published the following year as *Shakespeare's Boy Actors*. It is a revealing first book: a scholar's study of illusion, disguise and performance, which is what all his fiction would be about.

The Old Vic

In 1940 he was at the Old Vic Repertory Company in London, acting, writing, and teaching the history of drama, and working with the director Tyrone Guthrie — the association that later drew him into the founding culture of Canada's Stratford Shakespeare Festival, on whose board he sat until 1971. He also met his wife there. Brenda Mathews was an Australian stage manager at the Oxford theatre; they married in 1940 and had three daughters, Miranda, Rosamond and Jennifer. Davies never learned to drive. Brenda did the driving for the rest of his life.

Marchbanks and the Examiner

Back in Canada he became literary editor of *Saturday Night* magazine from 1940 to 1942, then joined the *Peterborough Examiner*, first as editorial writer and eventually as its editor and publisher, a position he held into the 1960s. Under the pseudonym Samuel Marchbanks he wrote a comic column of splendid crankiness that made him locally famous long before the novels did. He was writing plays too: *Eros at Breakfast* took the Dominion Drama Festival Award in 1948.

The condescension he was working against never entirely faded. Davies liked to quote a British review that opened by observing that "to speak of a good novel from a Canadian writer sounds like the beginning of a bad joke."

Salterton

His first fiction came as a trilogy set in a thinly disguised Kingston: *Tempest-Tost* (1951), *Leaven of Malice* (1954), which won the Stephen Leacock Award for humour, and *A Mixture of Frailties* (1958). They are social comedies about amateur theatricals and small-city snobbery, expertly made and modest in ambition. Nothing in them predicts what came next.

Massey College

From 1960 to 1981 Davies taught literature at Trinity College in the University of Toronto, and in 1963 he became the founding Master of Massey College, a post he held until 1981. He did not merely occupy the office; he invented its culture, including an annual tradition of reading a ghost story he had written himself at the college Christmas gaudy. Those stories were collected in 1982 as *High Spirits*. Few novelists get to design an institution's rituals from scratch, and Davies — bearded, ceremonious, High Church Anglican in his taste for vestment and rite — was temperamentally built for it.

Deptford and After

*Fifth Business* (1970) rebuilt him. Saturated in Jungian psychology and hagiography, it was followed by *The Manticore* (1972), which won the Governor General's Literary Award and is structured as a Jungian analysis, and *World of Wonders* (1975), which turns on stage magic. The Cornish Trilogy followed — *The Rebel Angels* (1981), *What's Bred in the Bone* (1985), shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and *The Lyre of Orpheus* (1988) — pulling in art forgery, medieval scholarship and opera. *Murther and Walking Spirits* came in 1991 and *The Cunning Man* in 1994; a third Toronto novel was left unfinished, and a libretto, *The Golden Ass*, appeared posthumously in 1999.

His method was architectural rather than intuitive. "I make very, very careful plans and a great many notes," he said, "so many notes indeed that sometimes they are as long or longer than the eventual book."

Why Robertson Is Called a Genius

The specific faculty is synthesis. Davies took bodies of knowledge that ordinarily repel one another — Jungian depth psychology, the technical craft of stage illusion, saints' lives, Renaissance painting technique, the mechanics of grand opera, the sociology of a small Ontario town — and fused them into comic novels that lose neither the learning nor the jokes. *The Times* put it as well as anyone: "Davies encompassed all the great elements of life... His novels combined deep seriousness and psychological inquiry with fantasy and exuberant mirth." Add the sheer institutional imagination: he ran a newspaper, wrote plays, taught, helped shape a national theatre festival, and built a college's traditions from nothing.

The counter-case is real. Davies was 57 when *Fifth Business* appeared, and the twenty years of fiction before it are pleasant and minor — this is not native brilliance but slow accumulation, learning converted into art very late. The honours skew national: one Governor General's Award, a Leacock, a Booker shortlist that did not become a win. And the Jungian scaffolding, which readers either love or find intolerable, can look less like insight than like a system imposed on characters from above, sorting them into archetypes rather than discovering them. There is also the matter of the persona — the white beard, the modulated voice, the sage on the lecture circuit — which did real work for the books. Davies himself was uneasy about it: flattering as the demand was, he said, "you really ought to be home working at your desk."

Legacy

He died on 2 December 1995. The recognitions had piled up by then: the Lorne Pierce Medal in 1961, Companion of the Order of Canada, an honorary Doctor of Letters from Oxford in 1991, and status as the first Canadian elected an honorary member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. John Irving, a close colleague, read scripture at his funeral. Toronto named a park for him in 2007. But the durable monument is the Deptford books, which took the bad joke about Canadian novels and quietly ended it.

Achievements

• Companion of the Order of Canada
• Order of Ontario
• Lorne Pierce Medal — 1961
• Notable work: The Deptford Trilogy