If a boy can’t have a good teacher, give him a psychological cripple or an exotic cripple to cope with; don’t just give him a bad, dull teacher.
(Fifth Business)There are no great performances without great audiences.... Great theatre, great music-drama, is created again and again on both sides of the footlights.
(The Lyre of Orpheus)
“You sowed the seeds of Robertson’s interest in books and theatre,” Zadkiel spoke. “But did you have to make him miserable, in school and with his mother?”
“A man won’t get far if he doesn’t take a few knocks. I would have thought you knew that about humans,” Maimas said, snuffling slightly.
“But good relations with one’s mother are crucial, Maimas. When this bond turns sour ...”
“You’re quite right, Zadkiel. Davies will suffer because of his mother, but this suffering will inspire him. An artist is like an omelette, old boy. You have to crack his eggs if he’s going to assume the right consistency.”
“But surely you didn’t keep him in that hovel Renfrew for long?”
“It wasn’t such a bad place. Still, it had served its purpose and I shoved Robertson on, as you’ll see for yourself.”
Fred, Florence, Arthur, Robertson, and Rupert Davies. Kingston, 1926.
Always on the lookout for new business opportunities, Rupert decided to purchase the Daily British Whig in 1925. This meant moving the family to Kingston, Ontario, which was a more attractive place of residence than Thamesville or Renfrew. As Upper Canada’s chief administrative and business centre in the mid-nineteenth century, Kingston was home to Queen’s University and the prestigious Royal Military College. It was also nicknamed the Limestone City because of the limestone architectural gems it contained. All in all it was a sophisticated town, by Canadian standards, and would introduce Davies to rich offerings of theatre, music, and art. Down the road, too, it would serve as the setting for Davies’s Salterton Trilogy.
When Rupert decided within a year of his arrival to purchase the city’s second paper, the Kingston Daily Standard, and amalgamate it with the Daily British Whig to produce the Kingston Whig-Standard, the prosperous Robertson household became an even wealthier one. Rupert moved his family into Calderwood, a large villa-like house that was equipped with all the modern amenities and surrounded by an immense, well-tended garden (the latter would figure prominently in Davies’s first novel, Tempest-Tost). The property was even haunted: the ghost of Dr. Betts, a former owner who allegedly drowned his daughter in a bathtub, paraded itself before a group of guests. And the witch from his childhood continued to dog him.
“You’re here!” he muttered in fury one night as the witch’s malevolent form assumed a position near his bed. “I thought I left you behind in Renfrew, you bitch!”
Davies attended early high school at the Kingston Collegiate Institute. As would be his practice in later years, he startled his peers with his unusual mode of dress: outlandish ties, an old-fashioned jacket, and a purple handkerchief. He also entered his school’s numerous writing contests for poetry, fiction, and historical essays, and frequently walked away with first prize. And then there were the school’s theatrical productions, which Davies now could not get his fill of — plays such as The Merchant of Venice and R.B. Sheridan’s The School for Scandal — and in which he worked exceedingly hard to get his “technique” perfect. Theatre had become his greatest passion since he had travelled to Toronto and seen the famous D’Oyly Carte Opera Company’s production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado. For the first time in his life he grasped how brilliant staging, inventive set design, and magnificent costumes could transport an audience.
“What part did you like best?” Rupert asked as he and his son left the Royal Alexandra Theatre. Oblivious to the chill winter air, Davies was humming the song “Three Little Maids.”
“I liked all of it. One day I want to live in a world like that.”
“In Titipu, Japan? I’m afraid that’s quite impossible ...”
“I meant in the theatre. There can’t be anything finer than to be an actor.”
“Let’s not get carried away. I like theatre too, Bobbie, but there’s the real world to consider and a living to be made.”
“But the theatre is real. It’s what the world is like when adults stop pretending and show their true behaviour. In fact, the stage is more real than the real world itself.”
“I see. And what about your future salary?”
“You saw the crowds lined up at the doors. You also said how beastly hard it was to buy tickets for the show. Some actors must be making an excellent living!”
Now that Davies was fifteen, Rupert wished to set him on the path to success and pressed him to write the entrance exam for Upper Canada College in Toronto. Founded in 1829, UCC was modelled on English residential schools like Eton and Harrow and was itself Canada’s foremost private school. Its mandate was to provide its students with a rigorous mental and physical education (and has produced a long roster of distinguished Canadians, including Ted Rogers, Galen Weston, Michael Ignatieff, Conrad Black, and, of course, Robertson Davies himself). Not only did Davies easily pass the exam, but he qualified for a handsome entrance scholarship; the headmaster, W.L. “Choppy” Grant, however, decided to give the award to a less fortunate student, much to Davies’s distress and indignation.
The school posed certain challenges. First, there was the chronic lack of privacy: bathing took place in a common space, the toilets sat in booths with no doors on them, and it was strictly forbidden to spend time on one’s own. The discipline, too, was tough and confronted students with innumerable rules which they, as future gentlemen, were obligated to observe: standing when a master entered the room, raising one’s hat when passing a master, observing the dress code, avoiding slang in one’s speech, and other limits on “vulgar” practices. Finally, in contrast to Davies’s detestation of physical exercise, the school took great pride in its athletics program.
On the other hand, the faculty consisted of well-educated and experienced gentlemen and scholars, many of whom had peculiar quirks. Mr. Darnill always kept a boxing glove handy, which was filled with a heavy substance. If a student acted up, he would toss this glove at the culprit, deliver him a thorough bruising, then draw the glove back by a string on its end. Commander de Marbois, the geography teacher, had sailed around the world and was rumoured to have practised cannibalism with the natives of Tierra del Fuego (he would figure later in Davies’s novel The Cunning Man as the philosophizing Jock Daubigny). Mr. Parlee and Mr. Potter had both served with distinction in the Great War and been gravely wounded — occasionally Mr. Potter would climb the pipes in his classroom. Students knew far better than to laugh.
The school would later figure in Davies’s novels as the ubiquitous Colborne College, of which Davies would write the following in his last novel, The Cunning Man, through his character Jonathan Hullah:
I am sick to death of writers who whine about their school-days. Let’s get it over with: the food was dreadful and the living accommodation was primitive, but we knew we weren’t there to enjoy life, but to be prepared for its rigours, and on the whole I think it was a good program.... A boy who can go through a first-rate boarding-school and emerge in one piece is ready for most of what the world is likely to bring him.
Certainly Davies found his niche in this environment. Repeating his flamboyancy from his days at Kingston Collegiate Institute, Davies stunned his peers by dressing up in jackets and collars that deviated from the norm. He even took to wearing a cape and monocle, and studied recordings of a distinguished English actor to shape his Canadian accent into a mid-Atlantic one — he would speak with this same accent for the remainder of his life. With training, too, his manner of speech grew polished, as if each utterance had been rehearsed many hours in advance. Normally he would have been mocked for these eccentricities, and his utter disregard for anything athletic, had he not been a formidable student, a keen speaker, and a more than able participant in the school’s drama society. Obsessed with the world of theatre still, he won leading roles in a series of UCC Gilbert and Sullivan productions.
“How are you enjoying our version of Iolanthe?” Headmaster Grant asked Edward Wodson, drama critic for the Toronto Evening Telegram.
“I have to be truthful, Choppy,” Wodson replied. “I loathe high school theatrical productions and consented to attend tonight only because you twisted my arm. But ...”
“Yes?”
“Well, I can’t take my eyes off that student who’s playing Major-General Stanley.”
“His name is William Robertson Davies. He’s quite good, isn’t he?”
“Remarkable, I would say. His diction is faultless and his timing is superb. He will earn his bread and butter in the liberal arts, if he is so minded.”
Davies was gifted in the humanities. He was much more widely read than the typical UCC student, and every day only furthered the gap. Besides his fascination with Dickens, whom he read and reread, he was powerfully attracted to the novelist Aldous Huxley (best known for his dystopian work Brave New World) and the British playwright George Bernard Shaw. Within the English and History classroom, at least, he was regularly given assignments that far surpassed normal curriculum requirements. Understanding that his words would not be wasted on young Davies, Headmaster Grant took him on a private walk one day and recounted to him the ins and outs of the late-nineteenth-century Oscar Wilde scandal. And of course, Davies contributed regularly to the school paper, the College Times. Here is an example of his writing — a poem that was written at the age of seventeen:
For school masters, in fairness it be told Must pander to young fools instead of old, Yet old fools too, they must perforce assuage For parents plague the poor, distracted sage; “Is Willy well?” “How long is Nolly’s bed?” “Is Dick a favourite?” “When is Percy fed?” While boys, like hogs, spurn each scholastic pearl Which in their path the febrile ushers hurl. O Masters, men born free, but self-enslaved Upon your mossy tombs this verse be graved; “Restrain thy tears, whoe’er shall tread this sod Here lives a man who tried to be a god; God-like, but human he employed his years Trying to make silk bags from porcine ears.”
His efforts, so precocious and outstanding for their literary sparkle, attracted the notice of B.K. Sandwell, a UCC graduate and editor of Saturday Night, Canada’s foremost weekly paper about public affairs and the arts; down the road he would hire Davies to work for his publication.
Despite his talents and success in literature, however, Davies still proved hopelessly inept in mathematics, much to his frustration. His weakness in this area was only compounded by the impatience of his teacher, Mr. McKenzie.
“All right. Who can provide us with the slope for the line described in the linear equation, y= -3x + 16? Davies, we haven’t heard from you in a while.”
“I have no idea, sir.”
“No idea? The answer’s staring you in the face, man, and you have no idea?”
“It’s all a great big muddle, sir.”
“I sometimes think you’re hiding your ability, Davies. Because if you aren’t, you’re the most blundering student I’ve ever encountered. Your average in this course can best be expressed by a negative number.”
“No doubt, sir.”
“Very well. I’ll ask someone else. But be warned, Davies. Without your math matriculation, you cannot attend university.”
“I’m aware of that, sir.”
“That means you’re doomed to navigate the ignorant masses, Davies.”
“I’ll do my best to prove you wrong, sir.”
But Mr. McKenzie was partially right. When Davies graduated from UCC in 1932, he did not have sufficient high school credits to be accepted into a university program, and all because he had failed mathematics. To distract him from this educational impasse, and always happy to have his youngest son around him, his father brought him on a trip to Europe that summer. Unlike many businessmen whose investments had faltered in the wake of the stock market crash in 1929, Rupert had been able to preserve his wealth through the course of the Depression. In fact, his principal reason for travelling abroad was to procure himself an estate in Wales, which he was now rich enough to visit on an annual basis. With Davies’s approval, he wound up purchasing Fronfraith Hall, a sizeable estate some ten miles distant from his place of birth, Welshpool. In England, Davies had other concerns.
He gorged himself on theatre. Every night he attended plays at Stratford and Malvern, maximizing his enjoyment by reading the script in advance. He also attended lectures on the theatre and began collecting Victorian plays and books on theatrical production — over his lifetime he would amass a library on this subject of over four thousand volumes. By the time he returned to Canada, his appetite for the dramatic arts, far from being satisfied, was near insatiable.
There still remained the problem of acceptance into university. Convinced his son belonged in a university setting, Rupert made full use of his many connections and finally met with success. Davies was admitted into Queen’s University for a three-year course of study as a special student, with the proviso that he would not receive a degree on graduation.
“So, I won’t be navigating the ignorant masses after all,” he whispered to himself on receiving the news.
Despite his “inferior” ranking, Davies created an impression on campus. Articulate, immensely well-read, with his crisp, British intonation and unusual mode of dress — expensive tweed jackets with leather patches on the elbows, purple ties, and a lavish cape — he was often taken by students to be a faculty member. His course of study was obvious. He continued with his English studies, read a lot of history, and immersed himself in German and Russian literature. At the suggestion of a psychology professor, George Humphrey, he also familiarized himself with Havelock Ellis’s monumental Studies in the Psychology of Sex.
“What’s that book I see you toting everywhere?” his mother asked when he came home late one evening. His brother Fred was sitting with her.
“It’s part of a series that was written by a psychologist and medical doctor, Havelock Ellis.”
“I’ve heard of him,” Fred broke in. “He writes a lot of smut.”
“I believe a more accurate description is that Dr. Ellis has written compendiously on the diversity of sexual relations among humans.”
“He writes about queers,” Fred jeered. “He thinks such horrible relations are normal. It’s a good thing Dad never paid to have me schooled like you, not if it means I have to admire freaks like Havelock Ellis.”
“Fred has a point, Bobbie. Why are you wasting your time reading such filth? I’m surprised the university would allow its students to handle such material.”
“I’m a student of the human condition. If I want to understand my fellow citizen, then I have to observe him in all his manifestations. And far from being censured, Dr. Ellis should be commended for his honesty and scholarship.”
“Now I know why Queen’s won’t grant you a degree when you leave,” his brother said with a spiteful laugh. “Even if you speak like an English ponce.”
While Davies contributed sporadically to the Queen’s University journal, The Bookshelf, he was (as always) active on the theatrical front. Whether it was as producer, director, set designer, or actor (or a combination of all four) he involved himself in productions of Alice in Wonderland, The Importance of Being Earnest, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Oedipus, King of Thebes. In the case of Sophocles’ tragedy, which was not known to general audiences at the time, Davies decided on a lavishly visual spectacle.
“The thing about Greek tragedy, Bob, is that it is always muted and never shocks the audience,” Wilhelmina Gordon, a professor of English, advised him. “All violence is suggested and remains offstage.”
“That might have worked in ancient Greece, but I have different ideas.”
“I hesitate to ask. Like what?”
“In the last episode, when Oedipus appears before the citizens of Thebes, he’s blinded himself.”
“That’s right.”
“Well, I want him to be dripping with blood. And I want the women on stage....”
“The ones you’ve dressed up in those scanty costumes?”
“Yes. I want some of them to scream as soon as he walks on. That should get a rise from people.”
“That’s not true to the spirit of Greek drama.”
“My purpose is to dazzle, and you can never go wrong with sex and violence.”
It was through his theatrical pursuits, Alice in Wonderland in particular, that Davies got his first taste of the Sweezey family in late 1933. Mrs. Harriet Sweezey, the daughter of a Queen’s philosophy professor, was in a rocky marriage with Robert Sweezey, a brilliant survey engineer. Impressed with Davies’s production of Alice, she invited him to Pine Ledge, the family’s lavish country house, for a week-long New Year’s party to produce The Importance of Being Earnest. On meeting her youngest daughter, eighteen-year-old Eleanor, Davies was bowled over.
“I’d be careful around Eleanor, if I were you,” Mrs. Sweezey advised him.
“Why’s that?”
“She’s capable of cruelty. If she senses she has you wrapped around her finger, she won’t treat you well.”
“She seems very decent to me.”
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
If anything, Mrs. Sweezey’s words spurred Davies on. Through the course of the spring of 1934, he and Eleanor spent lots of time together. Davies was a regular guest at Pine Ledge, and the pair often went on drives, attended plays and concerts, or sat in on Sunday evening services — not to listen to the sermon, but to enjoy each other’s company. Over the next year both participated in Queen’s productions of the fifteenth-century morality play Everyman and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (staged on Rupert’s magnificent lawns). When Davies joined his father in Wales that summer, he wrote regularly (and affectionately) to Eleanor back home.
She was not the first of Davies’s girlfriends. Not long before his introduction to Eleanor, Davies had been infatuated with Elizabeth Stewart, whom he had practically overwhelmed with his conversation and interests — only to lose her to a Royal Military College cadet. Because he had grown up in a household without women (besides his mother) and had spent a large part of his adolescence in an all-boys school, Davies was possibly a bit “pushy” with the women who attracted him. Despite their glorious times together — Davies was always amusing and full of boundless energy — Eleanor was impatient with Davies’s endless attentions and would occasionally keep him waiting or fail to show up for a date.
“I don’t mean to say I told you so,” Harriet Sweezey observed one night when Davies appeared to take Eleanor to a dance, only to discover she had gone with someone else, “but I told you so. Eleanor can be cruel.”
“She’ll come around eventually.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure of that.”
In the spring of 1935, Davies’s tenure at Queen’s University reached an end. Despite the courses he had taken and his formal attainment of a B.A., he could not receive a degree because of his special-student status. Just as he was trying to puzzle out his next career step, he received heartening news. Some months earlier, at the suggestion of one of his professors, he had sent in an application to Balliol College in Oxford, England. Because he had not received any response, he assumed Oxford had rejected him. In the late summer, however, his father cabled him from England to announce that he had in fact been admitted into the B.A. program. Davies started packing for this adventure overseas, but first he was determined to seal his relationship with Eleanor.
“I’ll be gone two years. But when I return with a degree in hand, I’ll be able to work as a drama professor.”
“That’s so exciting, Bob. Congratulations.”
“The thing is, I don’t want to lose you in the shuffle. That’s why, after intense deliberation, I ... well ... that is ... Look — will you marry me when I get back?”
“Oh Bob. I don’t know. I’m not so sure that’s a good idea.”
“Why not? You know me well by now ...”
“To begin with, there’s madness in my family. Look at my uncle — do you remember how he attacked you once? And there are certain other relatives as well.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Every family has its genetic quirks. My side suffers from asthma, frazzled nerves, and Welsh garrulity ...”
“And I don’t love you.”
“Oh. That’s more serious. But ... is there someone else you love?”
“No, not at present.”
“Well, why don’t we leave matters as follows: I’ll go abroad, I’ll write regularly, I’ll visit in the summers and ... maybe you can wait for me.”
“Yes, that sounds like a workable arrangement.”
“Good. And take my word for it: everything will work out well.”
But even as he kissed his “sweetheart” goodbye and prepared for his long, transatlantic journey, Davies experienced a pang of doubt.
Davies, at the age of twenty-two, acting as stage manager of a production of Richard III. Oxford, February, 1936.