Last reviewed: June 2017
Author
August 28, 1913
Thamesville, Ontario, Canada
December 2, 1995
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Although beginning his career as a novelist relatively late in life, at age thirty-eight, William Robertson Davies became not only the best-known Canadian novelist of the twentieth century but indeed one of the leading writers of the world. He was born in Thamesville, Ontario, a small town about midway between Windsor and London; his father, William Rupert Davies, was a prominent publisher. After attending various local schools, Robertson Davies entered Upper Canada College, Toronto, and Queen’s University, Kingston, before taking a B.Litt. degree from Balliol College, University of Oxford, in 1938. Thereafter he joined the Old Vic Company in London as teacher and performer, leaving it to return to the publishing business in Canada in 1940. For two years, he served as literary editor of Saturday Night, a leading literary magazine, in Toronto; then he became the publisher and editor of the Peterborough, Ontario, Examiner for twenty years. He also was active in drama, writing plays, directing theatrical productions, and working with Tyrone Guthrie and others to resuscitate Canadian theater and establish the Stratford Theatrical Festival. In 1951, he began publishing fiction. Named professor of English at the University of Toronto in 1960, he became master of Massey College there in 1962 and remained until retirement in 1981; his annual college ghost stories were collected in High Spirits. He continued to reside in Toronto after retirement and to publish novels at regular intervals. Davies died in 1995, at eighty-two, as the result of a stroke.
{$S[A]Marchbanks, Samuel;Davies, Robertson}
Tempest-Tost, the first novel of the Salterton Trilogy, begins Davies’ presentation of life in a small Canadian university town. The choice of a Canadian setting is not accidental; from the onset of his career, Davies took it as part of his vocation to correct the shortcomings of Canadian culture by gently ridiculing them. Tempest-Tost also draws on Davies’ theatrical experience; its subject is the staging of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest by a local amateur company. Typical small-town tensions and animosities threaten to undermine the production, but Shakespeare proves capable of transcending petty rivalries and trivial antagonisms and of elevating some of the participants to new heights of awareness. Leaven of Malice extends the satire by deepening it: Local antagonism here springs from evil impulses, desires to hurt, rather than being merely casual eccentricities. A false engagement announcement inserted in a local newspaper on a malicious whim leads to open hostility between two families. Strangely, love grows out of this conflict; the couple, indifferent to each other previously, eventually marry. A Mixture of Frailties takes a young female singer from small-town Canada to the sophisticated world of European opera; it suggests that exposure to the wide world, while bearing risks, is necessary for full human development. Robertson Davies in 1984.[ph]Davies, RobertsonDavies, Robertson[ph]Literature
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The Salterton Trilogy gained international attention; the Deptford Trilogy raised Davies to the top rank of world authors. To the humor, deft characterization, and strong structure of the earlier set the successor added arcane anecdotal richness, religious mysticism, psychological depth, and expanded thematic range. These three novels all grow from a single event. During a quarrel between two ten-year-olds, Dunstan Ramsey and Percy “Boy” Staunton, Staunton loads a snowball with a rock. Dunstan evades the missile, which hits Mrs. Mary Dempster in the head, triggering a premature childbirth and eventually causing a complete mental breakdown. Each of the novels centers on one of the three male participants in this accident.
In Fifth Business, Davies’ most celebrated novel, Dunstan takes responsibility for the accident because he dodged and bears the burden of guilt. This guilt has driven him to religion for solace; he studies hagiography, the lives of saints, becoming the major Protestant authority on the subject. This study ultimately leads to his own salvation, obtained when Dunstan realizes that he was not intended to become a saint himself.
The same material appears from the perspective of Boy Staunton in The Manticore; it also is told in retrospect, following his mysterious death. He has been found in his car in Lake Ontario, his mouth stopped with the same rock that hit Mrs. Dempster. The novel traces the double mystery of the drowning and the rock. It leads to a performance by the illusionist Magnus Eisengrim (the stage name of Paul Dempster, the son born prematurely to Mrs. Dempster), during which a summoned brass head answers questions from the audience. Boy’s son David asks who killed his father. This question disrupts the show. David escapes in the confusion but suffers a breakdown. Eventually he is sent to Switzerland for psychotherapy, where he comes to accept his father’s life and death.
Paul Dempster takes center stage in World of Wonders. Kidnapped while a boy by a stage magician in a circuit carnival, he voluntarily joins the group to become a magician himself and to learn the secrets and the motives of his captor. After a sojourn in Europe as a stage double, he strikes out on his own as a master illusionist. In the course of these wanderings, he goes through several transformations of his own and ends with a transcendent comprehension of the way in which accident determines part of the purpose of human life. His experiences, paralleling in oblique ways the course of the protagonists of the other two novels, reveal the hidden affinities in the different yet related pilgrimages of three souls. He ends by gaining a superior understanding of the function of good and evil in developing the soul.
Davies went on to write the Cornish Trilogy. Whereas the earlier trilogies took their names from the fictional towns of Salterton and Deptford (based on Peterborough and Thamesville, respectively), the next trilogy took its title from the name of a prominent family named Cornish, whose lives are followed over several generations. In The Rebel Angels, Davies takes as subject the academic world, specifically a college of the University of Toronto. Francis Cornish, an eccentric art collector, has named a number of professors as executors of his estate. A subplot traces the affair between one of these professors and his graduate assistant, a beautiful woman of Gypsy descent. Another subplot explores the research of another professor, an expert in human refuse, who develops a remarkable theory of filth therapy. A third examines the unsettling effects on the faculty of the return to campus of a brilliant but unprincipled professor who had been dismissed for unethical activities.
What’s Bred in the Bone takes the form of a posthumous biography of Francis Cornish told by two angels, the Angel of Biography from the staff of the Recording Angel, called the Lesser Zadkiel, and Cornish’s personal daimon, Maimas. Both shape and influence the life they recount; both, in fact, are necessary for Cornish to live a complete life. The story follows Cornish from his boyhood in rural Ontario at the start of the twentieth century, through his training in art under the best restorer in Europe, his civilian experiences in Europe during World War II, and his work in detecting art forgeries after the war. By the end of the novel, both angels are revealed to be metaphors rather than actual spirits, emblems of the two spiritual forces implicit in the complete life. In general, Cornish’s object is to preserve the inner vision of the great artists of the past in a world that has replaced it with spurious sensationalism or empty reasoning. Like all of Davies’ works, this one abounds with incidental information on a cornucopia of topics.
The Lyre of Orpheus, which closes the trilogy, returns to Toronto and to the theater, specifically a performance of an unfinished opera by E. T. A. Hoffmann. Like World of Wonders, which ends the Deptford Trilogy, it moves the story onto a higher plane, allowing the reader to see members of the Cornish family in a new light.
Davies completed two other novels, which might have been intended as part of a fourth trilogy. Murther and Walking Spirits is told from the point of view of a murdered man, Conroy “Gil” Gilmartin. Gilmartin, formerly the entertainment editor of a newspaper, follows his murderer to a film festival. Instead of seeing what everyone else sees on the screen, however, Gilmartin sees a series of films from the collective unconscious, tracing his ancestors from Wales and colonial America to twentieth-century Ontario. He also manages to haunt his murderer sufficiently that the murderer confesses, twice.
The Cunning Man returns to the time of Gil’s childhood, being told from the point of view of his godfather, Dr. Jonathan Hullah, who suspects he may be the boy’s father. Dr. Hullah witnessed a mysterious event in Toronto in the 1950’s, when the saintly priest in St. Aidan’s Church died while celebrating communion. Gil’s new wife, who also works for the newspaper, wants to write a story about the event. Dr. Hullah remembers much more than he tells, going back to days at Colborne College, where he studied under Dunstan Ramsey (a principal character in the Deptford Trilogy) and was friendly with Jonathan’s father and the priest’s assistant, both natives of Salterton.