“ALL MORTALS ARE REPLACEABLE” runs the modern mantra, betraying the ethic of programmed obsolescence that has come to dominate North American culture. There are exceptions, and one of them, Robertson Davies, died recently, leaving a gap in the Canadian ethos that cannot be filled.
A society can afford to lose only so many voices of wisdom and civility before it feels cut loose from its spiritual moorings. In the past decade, that list of departed Canadian beacons of enlightenment has included Morley Callaghan, Marian Engel, Barbara Frum, Northrop Frye, Margaret Laurence, Bruce Hutchison, Roger Lemelin, Arthur Lower, Hugh MacLennan and Sandy Ross. The greatest of them was Robertson Davies. A writer of serious mien with a bespoke twinkle in his eyes, he left open the natural speculation by anyone he met: whether he resembled God or did the Supreme Deity sport a bearded countenance like his?
No matter. “Rob,” as he was known to his friends, championed mid-nineteenth-century thought and sentiment, describing himself as the most reluctant of patriots, finding Canada hard to endure yet impossible to flee. “God, how I tried to love this country,” exclaims a character in his play Fortune My Foe. “I have given all I have to Canada—my love, then my hate, and now my bitter indifference. But this raw, frost-bitten country has worn me out, and its raw, frost-bitten people have numbed my heart.”
In less lofty language, he once explained to me in private that while he had many chances to live elsewhere, he just couldn’t bring himself to leave. “I belong here,” he told me, with a pained expression. “To divorce yourself from your roots is spiritual suicide. I just am a Canadian. It’s not a thing you can escape from. It’s like having blue eyes.”
Well, not quite. The life Davies chose for himself hardly qualified him as one of your McKenzie-Brother, run-of-the-brew, prototypical Canadian hosers. After graduating from Upper Canada College and Oxford’s Balliol College, he created an intellectual haven for himself as founding Master of the University of Toronto’s Massey College. Inside its elegant, very un-Canadian walls, he moved among his Fellows in their gowned splendour, looking extraordinarily magnificent in his necromancer’s beard, living in the Master’s Lodge, the BMW in his private driveway, presiding at High Table, sniffing snuff out of an ivory horn, sipping claret and responding with supreme indifference to charges that the institution he headed was snobbish, sexist, anachronistic and perhaps even a little absurd. The place reflected perfectly his view of life and his genius for civilized eccentricity that he so brilliantly captured in his novels. They felt so authentic because they were, in spirit if not in detail, autobiographical with never a touch of plea bargaining.
All the while that he presided over Massey, stressing tradition over practicality, the Master was playing a splendid joke on his detractors. In 1970, after writing a stack of novels, plays and works of theatrical criticism that brought him mild approval at home and virtually no notice abroad, Davies published Fifth Business to universal international acclaim. Saul Bellow and John Fowles, then the English-speaking world’s leading fiction writers, were loud in their praises, as was the New York Times and just about every other reviewer except Mother Jones. Davies had finally found his place at the pinnacle of literary acclaim, which was only proper, since that was where he had always meant to be. That success was repeated with The Manticore and his six subsequent novels.
I spent much of an afternoon chatting with the illustrious author at his cozy Massey College digs, later attending one of his High Table dinners. He sat there at the head of the tableaux, theatrical in appearance, almost ostentatiously dated in his manner. You expected him to wear a Cromwellian collar while debating whether Thomas More, Lord Chancellor to Henry VIII, was a fanatical heretic or a saint. “I am very interested in the condition of sainthood,” he confided, presumably including his own. “It is just as interesting as evil.”
Unexpectedly, we moved to the subject of pornography. “It is a cheat,” he declared. “It is an attempt to provide a sexual experience by second-hand means—rather like trying to find out about a Beethoven symphony by having somebody hum a few bars. It’s not the same thing. Sex is primarily a question of relationships; pornography—a twenty-second best.” Davies hated nothing worse than what he called “young fogies”—those pretenders who everlastingly harped on the fact that they were young but thought and acted with a degree of caution that would be excessive in their grandfathers. “They are the curse of the world,” he thundered. “They don’t even know what they are conserving. “
While he had great respect for his craft, Davies categorized himself as a simple storyteller. “I think of an author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his rug and says, ‘I will tell you a story,’ and then passes the hat. When he’s taken up the collection, he tells his story, and just before the denouement, passes the hat again. If it’s worth anything, fine. If not, he ceases to be an author.”
Our conversation kept coming back to why he felt so alienated from and yet obsessed with being—and remaining—Canadian. “Canada demands a great deal from people,” he said, emphasizing each syllable like a preacher mouthing a benediction. “It is not, as some countries are, quick to offer in return a pleasant atmosphere or easy kind of life. I mean, France demands an awful lot from her people too, but France also offers gifts in the way of a genial, pleasant sort of life and many amenities.” “Canada is not really a place where you are encouraged to have large spiritual adventures,” he lamented.
“A lot of people complain that my novels aren’t about Canada. I think they are, because I see Canada as a country torn between a very northern, rather extraordinary, mystical spirit, which it fears, and its desire to present itself to the world as a Scotch banker. This makes for tension, and tension is the very stuff of art, plays, novels—the whole lot.”
Like his books, Davies’ conversation was peppered with the supernatural, and he ended the evening by returning to sainthood, almost as if he felt he should claim its halo. “Most saints have been unbearable nuisances in life. Some were reformers, some were sages, some were visionaries, but all were intensely alive, and thus a rebuke to people who were not. So many got martyred because nobody could stand them. Society hates exceptional people, because such people make them feel inferior.”
Robertson Davies was, if not a saint, certainly a genius. It was to his credit and to our gain that he was such a magnificent storyteller—and that he was ours.
—1997