Robertson Davies

Robertson Davies in 1984

William Robertson Davies, CC, FRSC, FRSL (born August 28, 1913 at Thamesville, Ontario, and died December 2, 1995 at Orangeville, Ontario) was a Canadian novelist, playwright, critic, journalist, and professor. He was one of Canada's best-known and most popular authors, and one of its most distinguished "men of letters", ironically a term Davies detested. Davies was the founding Master of Massey College, a graduate college at the University of Toronto.

Biography

Early life

Growing up, Davies was surrounded by books and language. His father, Senator William Rupert Davies, was a newspaperman, and both his parents were voracious readers. He, in turn, read everything he could. He also participated in theatrical productions as a child, where he developed a lifelong interest in drama.

He attended Upper Canada College in Toronto from 1926 to 1932 and while there attended services at the Church of St. Mary Magdalene [1]. He then studied at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario from 1932 until 1935. At Queen's he was enrolled as a special student not working towards a degree. He left Canada to study at Balliol College, Oxford, where he received a BLit degree in 1938. The next year he published his thesis, Shakespeare's Boy Actors, and embarked on an acting career outside London. In 1940 he played small roles and did literary work for the director at the Old Vic Repertory Company in London. Also that year Davies married Australian Brenda Mathews, whom he had met at Oxford, and who was then working as stage manager for the theatre.

Davies' early life provided him with themes and material to which he would often return in his later work, including the theme of Canadians returning to England to finish their education, and the theatre.

Middle years

Davies and his new bride returned to Canada in 1940, where he took the position of literary editor at Saturday Night Magazine. Two years later, he became editor of the Peterborough Examiner in the small city of Peterborough, Ontario, northeast of Toronto. Again he was able to mine his experiences here for many of the characters and situations which later appeared in his novels and plays.

Davies, along with family members William Rupert Davies and Arthur Davies, purchased several media outlets. Along with the Examiner newspaper, they owned the Kingston Whig-Standard newspaper, CHEX-AM, CKWS-AM, CHEX-TV, and CKWS-TV.

During his tenure as editor of the Examiner, which lasted from 1942 to 1955, and when he was publisher from 1955 to 1965, Davies published a total 18 books, produced several of his own plays and wrote articles for various journals.

For example, Davies set out his theory of acting in his Shakespeare for Young Players (1947) and then put theory into practice when he wrote Eros at Breakfast, a one-act play which was named best Canadian play of the year by the 1948 Dominion Drama Festival.

Eros at Breakfast was followed in close succession by Fortune, My Foe in 1949 and At My Heart's Core, a three-act play, in 1950. Meanwhile, Davies was writing humorous essays in the Examiner under the pseudonym Samuel Marchbanks. Some of these were collected and published in The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks (1947), The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks (1949), and later in Samuel Marchbanks' Almanack (1967). (An omnibus edition of the three Marchbanks books, with new notes by the author, was published under the title The Papers of Samuel Marchbanks in 1985.)

Also during the 1950s, Davies played a major role in launching the Stratford Shakespearean Festival of Canada. He served on the Festival's board of governors and collaborated with the Festival's director, Sir Tyrone Guthrie, in publishing three books about the Festival's early years.

Although his first love was drama and he had achieved some success with his occasional humorous essays, Davies found greater success in fiction. His first three novels, which later became known as The Salterton Trilogy, were Tempest-Tost (1951), Leaven of Malice (1954) (which won the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour), and A Mixture of Frailties (1958). These novels explored the difficulty of sustaining a cultural life in Canada, and life on a small-town newspaper, subjects of which Davies had first-hand knowledge.

The 1960s

In 1960 Davies joined Trinity College at the University of Toronto, where he would teach literature until 1981. The following year he published a collection of essays on literature, A Voice From the Attic, and was awarded the Lorne Pierce Medal for his literary achievements.

In 1963 he became the Master of Massey College, the University of Toronto's new graduate college. During his stint as Master, he initiated the tradition of writing and telling ghost stories at the yearly Christmas celebrations. His stories were later collected in his book High Spirits (1982).

The 1970s

Davies drew on his interest in Jungian psychology to create what was perhaps his greatest novel: Fifth Business (1970), a book that draws heavily on Davies' own experiences, his love of myth and magic and his knowledge of small-town mores. The narrator, like Davies, is of immigrant Canadian background, with a father who runs the town paper. The book's characters act in roles that roughly correspond to Jungian archetypes according to Davies' belief in the predominance of the spirit over the things of the world.

Fifth Business also implicitly asks the question: What would happen if a true saint appeared, and tried to live, in small town Canada early in the 20th century? How would she be received?

Davies built on the success of Fifth Business with two more novels: The Manticore (1972), a novel cast largely in the form of a Jungian analysis (for which he received that year's Governor-General's Literary Award), and World of Wonders (1975). Together these three books came to be known as The Deptford Trilogy.

The 1980s and 1990s

When Davies retired from his position at the University, his seventh novel, a satire of academic life, The Rebel Angels (1981), was published, followed by What's Bred in the Bone (1985). These two books, along with The Lyre of Orpheus, became known as The Cornish Trilogy.

During his retirement he continued to write novels which further established him as a major figure in the literary world: The Lyre of Orpheus (1988), Murther and Walking Spirits (1991) and The Cunning Man (1994). He also realized a long-held dream when he penned the libretto to an opera: The Golden Ass, based on The Metamorphoses of Lucius Apuleius, just like that written by one of the characters in Davies' 1958 A Mixture of Frailties. The opera was performed by the Canadian Opera Company at the Hummingbird Centre in Toronto, in April, 1999, several years after Davies' death.

Davies was a fine public speaker: deft, often humorous, and unafraid to be unfashionable. Often asked if he used a computer, Davies said in 1987: "I don't want a word-processor. I process my own words. Helpful people assure me that a word-processor would save me a great deal of time. But I don't want to save time. I want to write the best book I can, and I have whatever time it takes to make that attempt."

Awards and recognition

*Won the Dominion Drama Festival Award for best Canadian play in 1948 for Eros at Breakfast.
*Won the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour in 1955 for Leaven of Malice.
*Won the Lorne Pierce Medal for his literary achievements in 1961.
*Won the Governor-General's Literary Award in the English language fiction category in 1972 for The Manticore.
*Short-listed for the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1986 for What's Bred in the Bone.
*First Canadian to become an Honorary Member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
*Companion of the Order of Canada.

Bibliography

Essays

*Fictional essays
*The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks (1947)
*The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks (1949)
*Samuel Marchbanks' Almanack (1967)
*The Papers of Samuel Marchbanks (1985) (an omnibus of the three Marchbanks books, with new notes by the author)
*Criticism
*Shakespeare's Boy Actors (1939)
*Shakespeare for Young Players: A Junior Course (1942)
*Renown at Stratford (1953) (with Tyrone Guthrie)
*Twice Have the Trumpets Sounded (1954) (with Tyrone Guthrie)
*Thrice the Brindled Cat Hath Mew'd (1955) (with Tyrone Guthrie)
*A Voice From the Attic (1960)
*A Feast of Stephen (1970)
*Stephen Leacock (1970)
*One Half of Robertson Davies (1977)
*The Enthusiasms of Robertson Davies (1979) (edited by Judith Skelton Grant)
*The Well-Tempered Critic (1981) (edited by Judith Skelton Grant)
*The Mirror of Nature (1983)
*Reading and Writing (1993) (two essays, later collected in The Merry Heart)
*The Merry Heart (1996)
*Happy Alchemy (1997) (edited by Jennifer Surridge and Brenda Davies)

Novels

* The Salterton Trilogy
** Tempest-Tost (1951)
** Leaven of Malice (1954)
** A Mixture of Frailties (1958)
* The Deptford Trilogy
*Fifth Business (1970)
*The Manticore (1972)
*World of Wonders (1975)
* The Cornish Trilogy
*The Rebel Angels (1981)
*What's Bred in the Bone (1985)
*The Lyre of Orpheus (1988)
* The "Toronto Trilogy" (Davies' final, incomplete, trilogy)
*Murther and Walking Spirits (1991)
*The Cunning Man (1994)

Short stories

High Spirits (1982)

Plays

Overlaid (1948)
Fortune My Foe (1949)
Eros at Breakfast (1949)
At My Heart's Core (1950)
A Masque of Aesop (1952)
A Jig for the Gypsy (1955)
A Masque of Mr. Punch (1963)
Question Time (1975)
Brothers in the Black Art (1981)
Hunting Stuart (1994)
The Voice of the People (1994)

Libretti

Jezebel (1993)
The Golden Ass (1999)

Letters

For Your Eye Alone (2000) (edited by Judith Skelton Grant)
Discoveries (2002) (edited by Judith Skelton Grant)

Collections

The Quotable Robertson Davies: The Wit and Wisdom of the Master (2005) (collected by James Channing Shaw)

References

*Grant, Judith Skelton, Robertson Davies: Man of Myth, Viking, Toronto, 1994. ISBN 0670825573 (hard cover); ISBN 0140114521 (paperback)

External links

*1989 Audio Interview with Robertson Davies - RealAudio
*Massey College in the University of Toronto