He was a genius — that is to say, a man who does superlatively and without obvious effort something that most people cannot do by the uttermost exertion of their abilities.
(Fifth Business)Every man has a devil, and a man of unusual quality ... has an unusual devil. You must get to know your personal devil. You must even get to know his father, the Old Devil.
(Fifth Business)
“Is it my imagination or are you frowning, Zadkiel?” Maimas asked, poking the angel.
“What, with your talk about elitism,” Zadkiel observed, “it has occurred to me that Robertson is removed from the world, and I’m not sure if I respect such withdrawal.”
“I can’t guess what you’re referring to, old boy,” Maimas responded with irritating confidence.
“He has buried himself in a graduate college where he wipes the noses of sheltered types like himself. He pays no attention to the events about him. I mean, he wilfully blinded himself to the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1961 — that staring match between the U.S. and Russia that almost triggered a nuclear war — as well as those developments in Vietnam, the assassination of the U.S. president, and the terrible conflict in the Middle East.”
“Don’t be so cantankerous and stuffy, Zadkiel. Artists are contradictory types. On the one hand, they are full of themselves and blind to the boiling lava about them; yet they manage to set our humanity in relief and capture its meaning with such overarching beauty that who can blame them if they fail to comment on the chaff of our lives?”
“With all due respect, Maimas, Davies’ Salterton Trilogy and dramas are interesting, to be sure, but in my humble opinion they are not in the top tier of artistic endeavour.”
“I quite agree. That why his life’s next chapter is so instrumental.”
It was a blustery day in October 1970. Davies was seated at the desk in his office and was glancing out the window at the Massey College courtyard. A caretaker was removing the goldfish from the pond to store them in a warmer place for the length of the winter. One of the senior fellows, an ancient historian, was going through his regular exercise routine while a short distance off three students were throwing a Frisbee, all of them dressed in shorts and T-shirts despite the hint of frost in the air.
At the same time, a radio was playing somewhere in the background and was tuned to the news. Its lead story was shocking. Members of the terrorist group Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ) had murdered Quebec minister of labour, Pierre Laporte, whom they had kidnapped one week earlier from his home in Montreal. This same group was holding British trade commissioner James Cross hostage in an effort to further their separatist dreams. They would not release him until the police freed their “brothers,” who had been arrested over several months on a number of charges. The death of Pierre Laporte, the broadcast continued, was triggered by Prime Minister Trudeau’s invoking of the War Measures Act the day before — an act that granted the police wide powers of arrest and detainment. And troops would be deployed to various cities in Quebec to guard federal buildings and their employees.
Davies sighed. To distract himself from these chilling events, he gazed at the book that was lying on his desk. It had arrived from the publisher just minutes before, the editor having received it from the printer that same morning. Its cover featured a stylish magician beneath the book’s stark title: Fifth Business. Davies nodded to himself, leaned back in his chair, and reflected on the image that had initially led him to create the novel.
This image or vision dated back to 1958 — just when Jungian psychology had begun to obsess him. It had consisted of a snowy street in Thamesville, Ontario, where he had passed his early childhood. Two boys had been quarrelling. After insulting his pal, one of them had run away, while the offended party had rolled himself a snowball. Catching up with his friend, he had flung the snowball at him and would have hit him, too, had the boy not ducked and allowed the ball to strike a pregnant woman instead. And so a strange chain of events was put into effect.
“Good drama, that,” Davies was thinking to himself.
He was thinking, too, how he’d surprised himself, as well as Brenda when she read his early drafts, when he started writing the story in 1968. The tale was so different from his other writing. Simply put, it was as if he had opened up his head and emptied its contents onto sheets of blank paper. His own story was present, much modified of course, together with his interest in saints, Jungian psychology, his European travels, his belief in coincidence and, most important, his love of magic. He had not been sure he could hold this material together, but like Magnus Eisengrim, his fictional magician, he had carried off this act of ... prestidigitation.
The story is told as a letter, which seventy-year-old Dunstan Ramsay writes to his “boss,” the headmaster of Colborne College, where Ramsay has taught history for forty-five years. In this letter Ramsay wishes to prove that, far from having lived a sequestered life, he has experienced his fair share of adventure and discovery.
Ramsay’s life story starts in the town of Deptford with the snowball episode when he is ten years old. Percy “Boy” Staunton throws a snowball at him, he ducks, and Mary Dempster, who is pregnant, is struck full in the head. The accident leads her to deliver her son prematurely — his name is Paul — and in subsequent years her behaviour is affected. Besides neglecting her household, she wanders Deptford in a state of undress and dispenses charity she can ill afford. More scandalously, she is discovered one night having sex with a hobo in the town’s gravel pit. When asked by her husband why she has behaved so strangely, she answers that the man wanted it so badly and she simply had not the heart to refuse.
Ramsay feels responsible for this chain of events. As the Dempster household steadily worsens, he entertains Paul and introduces him to magic: whereas his own hands are thick and clumsy, Paul proves a natural magician. He also falls in love with Mrs. Dempster and convinces himself she is a modern-day saint, not only because of her charitable disposition, but because (as he sees it) she has been able to restore his dead brother to life.
The First World War erupts and Ramsay joins the army. In one incident he performs heroically but loses a leg, and only survives the ordeal (he believes) because he prays to a statue of the Virgin Mary, whose face is the spitting image of Mary Dempster’s. When the war is over, Ramsay becomes a teacher back in Canada. He resumes his friendship with Percy “Boy” Staunton, loses his childhood sweetheart to him, and watches as his friend becomes a leading Canadian businessman and industrialist. Over the years, Boy’s external success is matched by Ramsay’s internal progress: the latter becomes a renowned expert on saints, to the point that he writes several books on them, even as he discovers in the process truths about himself and the world at large. His introspection and hard-won wisdom eventually clash with Boy’s materialistic outlook:
“Don’t nag me, Dunny,” [Boy] said. “I feel rotten. I’ve done just about everything I’ve ever planned to do, and everybody thinks I’m a success. And of course I have Denyse [his second wife] now to keep me up to the mark, which is lucky — damned lucky, and don’t imagine I don’t feel it. But sometimes I wish I could get into a car and drive away from the whole damned thing.”
“... You’ll have to grow old, Boy; you’ll have to find out what age means, and how to be old. A dear old friend of mine once told me he wanted a God who would teach him how to grow old. I expect he found what he wanted. You must do the same, or be wretched. Whom the gods hate they keep forever young.”
He looked at me almost with hatred. “That’s the most lunatic defeatist nonsense I’ve ever heard in my life,” he said.
It is in his travels that Ramsay meets up with Paul Dempster, on the first occasion when he is part of a travelling show, then later when he has flowered into the world-renowned Magnus Eisengrim. Through Magnus, the aging Ramsay will encounter the magician’s manager, Liesl Vitziputzli, an aristocratic woman of hideous aspect, who hires Ramsay to write a mock biography of Magnus and, after a rough wrestling match, wins Ramsay as her lover. The troupe then travels to Toronto where, in the book’s climactic scene, Ramsay discloses to Boy Staunton and Paul that the snowball from so many years back had hidden at its middle an egg-sized stone, one that he has in his possession still. The next morning Boy Staunton’s car is dragged from Lake Ontario, with his corpse at the wheel, the incriminating stone in his mouth.
As had been the case with his Salterton Trilogy, Davies filled his novel with autobiographical elements. The town of Deptford was based on his hometown Thamesville, to the degree that the layout of each was a perfect match. Ramsay’s attempts to instruct Paul in magic were drawn from Davies’s own experiments as a boy: like Ramsay, Davies possessed a clumsy set of hands. The Madonna that Ramsay spies at the battle of Passchendaele is identical to the statue that Davies purchased on a trip to Austria. And then there is the following passage, which was entirely lifted from Davies’s clashes with his mother:
She pursued me around the kitchen, slashing me with the whip until she broke down and I cried. She cried, too, hysterically, and beat me harder, storming about my impudence, my want of respect for her, of my increasing oddity and intellectual arrogance ... until at last her fury was spent, and she ran upstairs in tears and banged the door of her bedroom....
My father and Willie [Ramsay’s brother] came home, and there was no supper. Naturally he sided with her, and Willie was very officious and knowing about how intolerable I had become of late, and how thrashing was too good for me. Finally it was decided that my mother would come downstairs if I would beg pardon. This I had to do on my knees, repeating a formula improvised by my father, which included a pledge that I would always love my mother, to whom I owed the great gift of life.
The most powerful autobiographical component, however, was Ramsay’s certainty that the realm of mystery, spirit, and awe co-exists with the more ordinary realm of science, law, work, and pragmatism. Just as Davies believed that Jung’s collective unconscious and archetypes explained human initiative and destiny, linking everyday experiences to religion, art, mythology, and literature, so Ramsay discovers that magic and a more mythic and less factual approach to history, together with saints and their inspiring tales of faith and miracles, provide a powerful foundation for human endeavour and identity. Neither man has achieved the same status as Boy Staunton or Rupert Davies, but his internal journey has taught each of them fundamental truths about the human condition, and this knowledge proves more enduring and uplifting than mere wealth and power. In other words, neither villain nor hero in the opera of life, Ramsay, like Davies, is fifth business.
“I like the structure of Fifth Business,” an admirer informed Davies at the launch for his novel. This was on a boat in the Toronto Harbour close to the spot where Boy Staunton had driven his car into the lake. “I like the way you wrote the book as a letter.”
“Thank you. I appreciate your kind remarks.”
“I was just wondering why Dunstan Ramsay addresses himself to his boss, the headmaster of Colborne College —”
“Oh no no no. He does no such thing.”
“Really? Don’t you tell us at the start of your novel that —”
“Yes, I mention his headmaster as the letter’s recipient, but that’s a pure literary dodge.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I see you don’t. The letter’s actual recipient is God himself, my good man.”
The public response to Fifth Business far exceeded Davies’s expectations. In 1970, at the age of fifty-seven, Davies had a reputation within Canada as a man of letters to be sure, and had won some visibility for himself in the United States and England, but he was regarded as a literary talent of the preceding generation — an old-fashioned, middling talent at that. Fifth Business changed everything. Many influential publications in North America were full of praise for his novel: the New Yorker described Fifth Business as “elegant”; the New York Times wrote of it as “a marvellously energetic novel ... driven by inevitable narrative force”; Esquire described it as “as masterfully executed as anything in the history of the novel.” Internationally renowned authors Saul Bellow, John Fowles, and Anthony Burgess praised Fifth Business to the skies, with predictable results. Davies became a celebrity and his novel a bestseller. Having been cloistered in his Massey College office for twelve years, Davies was suddenly deluged with requests to give speeches, readings, and interviews.
“With me this morning is Canada’s own Robertson Davies, author of the best-selling Fifth Business,” a well-known CBC radio host announced shortly after the novel’s publication.
“It’s a pleasure to be here.”
“Now, I realize you’re a busy man and have other interviews to rush off to, so I’ll keep this brief. Fifth Business is doing well?”
“It is faring beyond my wildest expectations.”
“You must be delighted. But tell me, what is it about Fifth Business that has struck such a nerve, more so than any of your previous novels?”
“I write extensively about saints and our religious instincts in Fifth Business; readers seem to like this subject. And then there is the story of the magician Paul Dempster. If you wish to win an audience over, throw in some magic. On a more serious note, however, there is my characters’ preoccupation with death.”
“Death? That surprises me. Our age doesn’t like to talk about such things.”
“Yes, quite right. And that’s precisely why I wished to set it at the heart of my story. There are many deaths in Fifth Business, both literal and figurative. Dunstan Ramsay is obsessed with the subject; he sees it as a cornerstone of human existence, and I think my readers share this point of view.”
“To judge by the sales figure, you must be right.”
“Magic and death: it’s a heady combination.”
Davies’s mind-boggling success led his publisher to ask for a repeat performance, and quickly at that. Still burdened with the task of running Massey College and teaching his literature courses, Davies set to work on another novel, which he had started taking notes for already. Although he was not planning a sequel to Fifth Business, he was intent on reusing some of its main characters, and exploring certain Jungian ideas in greater depth, as well as examining the relationship between a father and his full-grown son. Over time his approach became clear to him; the book found him, as he liked to describe the writing process.
In the last scene of Fifth Business, as Magnus is performing his trick “The Brazen Head of Friar Bacon,” in which audience members ask a “levitated” head of brass any question that comes to mind, someone yells, “Who killed Boy Staunton?” Davies reveals in his second novel that the speaker was David Staunton, Boy Staunton’s forty-year-old son. An accomplished lawyer and alcoholic, David is at odds with himself. Shocked by his father’s death, but at the same crippled by his early upraising — Boy was intent on making a “man” of his son, but one in his own spiritually bankrupt image — David travels to Zurich where, in contrast to his habitual aloofness, he chooses to subject himself to an intense round of Jungian analysis.
His analyst is Dr. Johanna Von Haller. Her procedure is to elicit from him long narratives of his history, then subject these episodes to examination through a Socratic-like technique of question and answer. Resenting the fact he is being treated by a woman, and intensely skeptical of the process itself, David is defensive in his initial sessions. He subjects the doctor’s statements to his own interrogations, as if he were questioning a witness in court, and rejects the conclusion she steers him toward — that his father was a superficial man with no concept or interest in his own inner workings, and by consequence a dreadful parent. Gradually she demonstrates that Boy’s refusal to grant his son an adequate allowance, his countless affairs, his initiation of David into the mysteries of sex through the services of a courtesan, and his insistence that life’s priorities consist of wealth, power, and physical pleasure amounted to intrusions on David’s fragile psyche and explained his alcoholism and instability. As she says of people like David’s father:
We all create an outward self with which to face the world, and some people come to believe that is what they truly are. So they people the world with doctors who are nothing outside the consulting-room, and judges who are nothing when they are not in court, and businessmen who wither with boredom when they have to retire from business, and teachers who are forever teaching. That is why they are such poor specimens when they are caught without their masks on. They have lived chiefly though the Persona. But you are not such a fool, or you would not be here.
And having released him from the need to believe in his father’s greatness, Dr. Haller triggers his awareness of the way certain Jungian archetypes have appeared to him throughout his life — the Magus, the Shadow, the Anima, and others.
And then the story shifts. While touring the Swiss town of St. Gall, David runs into Dunstan Ramsay, who was his father’s friend and his own history teacher at Colborne College. Although David thinks this has happened by chance, Ramsay tells him, “As an historian I don’t believe in coincidence. Only very rigid minds do.... I suppose you had to meet us for some reason. A good one, I hope.” Ramsay is living with Paul Dempster and Liesl Vitziputzli, as the troupe’s residential philosopher, and the trio invites David to stay with them at Liesl’s castle, Sorgenfrei.
In the course of his visit, David learns from Magnus that his father, far from having been killed by the magician, expressed the keen desire to step on his car’s accelerator and abandon his life’s complications. As a favour, Magnus granted him this wish. Ramsay in turn reveals to him that a man can have many fathers, and not merely the biological progenitor. Teachers, mentors, and protectors — all of these can play the role of father. As a way of ending the trauma of Boy Staunton’s death, moreover, Ramsay throws over a mountainside the stone that was planted by Boy in the snowball, and that he has carried with him everywhere these many years. And finally there is Liesl’s influence ...
Davies was planning a big, climactic sense of discovery but, as he sat down to write the scene, its details escaped him.
“Are you just about finished?” Brenda asked him a few days after Christmas 1971.
“It’s that ending. It keeps eluding me.”
“You’ll have to come up with something. Your deadline’s approaching and your publisher is getting antsy. He phoned just an hour ago.”
“I know. I know. But the ending just won’t come.”
He kept grappling with ideas, but none of them fit. Then one night he happened to be reading, even as he nibbled on a bear-shaped cookie from St. Gall (these had been on hand through all of Christmas). The book was one by the mythologist Joseph Campbell, and the chapter Davies was looking over was about a prehistoric bear cult that had been discovered in caves across northern Europe. Davies looked up from his book and glanced down at his cookie. A moment later he was at his desk and typing furiously. He had his climatic ending.
Liesl conducts David to a cave in the Alps, and then down into a remote recess, at great risk to the pair of them. There, she explains, their ancient ancestors once worshipped the bear. When David expresses little interest in her words, she douses the light and forces him to exert himself if he is to escape that mountain cave alive. He barely manages the near-impossible climb and, in his fear, soils himself. The effect of the adventure is cathartic, however:
I was bathed and in bed by five o’clock, dead beat. But so miraculous is the human spirit, I was up and about and able to eat a good dinner and watch a Christmas broadcast from Lausanne with Ramsay and Eisengrim and Liesl, renewed — yes, and it seemed to be reborn, by the terror of the cave and the great promise she had made to me a few hours before.
With the climax in place, and the manuscript submitted, all that remained was the novel’s title.
“I rather like your proposed title, Son and Stranger, but at the same think we can do better than that,” his editor informed him.
“What did you have in mind?” Davies growled, always leery of an editor’s attempts to improve on his efforts.
“I’m not quite sure. Something catchier but at the same time mystical. Maybe a symbol of sorts, something buried in medieval lore, but representative of the complexities of Jungian theory. Do you follow me?”
“No.”
“Here’s an example of what I mean: the manticore.”
“The manticore?”
“It’s a creature of legend, a bit like the sphinx, with the head of a human and a lion’s body —”
“I know what a bloody manticore is!”
“It’s just a suggestion. There’s no sense losing your temper —”
“I like it. It’s perfect. Say goodbye to Son and Stranger and hello to The Manticore.”
Fifth Business was a hard act to follow, but the critical response to The Manticore proved Davies had carried it off. The novel was greeted with a slew of positive reviews. While the Globe and Mail found the book tedious, the Toronto Star, the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, Newsweek, and a large number of other papers extolled the novel. Like Fifth Business, it sold exceptionally well, for a literary work, and earned Davies a Governor General’s Award — long overdue, by some admirers’ estimates. Most important, it encouraged Davies to round his two Deptford novels off with a final sequel.
Even as he set about writing this third book, he was embroiled in a bitter dispute at Massey College. The majority of students refused to accept the fact that the college was a refuge for male academics and voted to allow it to go co-ed. Again and again they tried to force the issue, and Davies, convinced this innovation would be a betrayal of Vincent Massey’s wishes, refused to relent. When students proposed that Massey’s relatives be consulted — Vincent Massey had died in 1967 — again Davies refused to give in.
“You’re bothered by this quarrel, aren’t you?” his daughter Miranda asked him in the course of a phone call.
“Is that why you phoned? You’re lining up for your pound of flesh, along with all the other demolition experts?”
“No. I’m phoning because I’ve finished reading Fifth Business and The Manticore.”
“Oh.”
“And I wanted to tell you, not only that the books transported me, but that you took me by surprise.”
“How so?”
“When I was growing up, you were always telling me to mind my manners, and wear my skirts low and my blouses high.”
“And damned good advice it was.”
“And here you are writing about a woman who has sex with a tramp, and a deformed giant who likes girls, but has a go at Ramsay, and other hilarious and experimental situations. Do you know what you are in your books? You’re a swinger.”
“I don’t know how to answer that.”
“And, incidentally, you’ll lose this battle over the co-ed status of Massey College. But you’ll come to realize your defeat was no big deal.”
Miranda proved prescient. Davies was forced to admit female students into Massey College in 1973 and, once they had settled in, he understood that it was not the end of the world. And when this squabble was over, he had a free hand to focus on his third Deptford novel.
“So what’s it about?” Brenda asked, depositing a cup of tea on his desk.
“I want to bring a variety of ingredients to bear. First, I have unfinished business with Paul and should finally tell the story of his unhappy childhood.”
“Why does his childhood have to be unhappy?”
“Because hardship allows us to see to the heart of certain matters. Besides, he will turn his hard origins to good account.”
“Through magic?”
“Yes.”
“And when’s the story taking place?”
“It starts in our present, but Paul is recounting his early days, near the turn of the century. Such a timeline will allow me to discuss our country’s early, formative years. Because our population has changed over the last two decades, with people arriving from all over the globe, it’s easy for Canadians to forget the English effect on our identity, and in my view that’s a terribly pity.”
“So the book is about a magician’s apprenticeship and the Canada of bygone days?”
“Yes, but there’s more to it than that.”
“Of course there is. You’re Robertson Davies.”
Like its predecessors, the finished narrative was full of twists and turns. The novel opens on a BBC crew that has engaged Paul Dempster to play the role of the nineteenth-century magician Robert Houdin in a film documentary. Between shoots in Switzerland, and later London, Paul/Eisengrim has exchanges with this crew, together with Ramsay, who is on hand to observe the proceedings. In the course of their conversations he reveals the details of his past.
His first step into his life as a performer occurred when he strayed into a circus tent in Deptford, was sexually abused by the magician Willard, then kidnapped by this same man and forced to wander the country as a member of this sideshow. This carnival consisted of the usual fare: a bearded lady, a monkey act, a strong man, a contortionist, and the like. Paul’s own contribution was to sit inside a large mechanical device nicknamed Abdullah and beat the audience at cards. After years of this apprenticeship, he emerged as a master mechanic and a first-rate conjuror.
This circus fell apart over time, and Paul escaped to Europe with Willard (who was an incurable morphine addict) and toured the continent with yet another circus. It was in the course of his travels that he met up with Ramsay. When this venture proved unsustainable, he won a junior position with the London theatre company of Sir John Tresize and his wife Milady (who were based on the real-life actors Sir John Martin-Harvey and Miss N. de Silva). Here Paul received instruction in the techniques of the Victorian stage and participated in a variety of melodramatic productions, accompanying the theatre troupe on a cross-Canada tour, and acquiring a worldly, less antagonistic demeanour.
After Sir John’s death, he found work as an expert clock mechanic, and was subsequently hired by a Swiss aristocrat to repair his collection of rare, mechanical toys — ones that his daughter had broken in a fit of rage. This young woman was Liesl, who suffered from acromegaly and was monstrously tall and had an ape-like facial appearance. While effecting repairs, Paul was attacked by this “creature” but, trained in dirty fighting from his years at the circus, subdued Liesl and befriended her. He also caused her to refine her behaviour and, eventually, the pair created their Soirée des Illusions, an epic show that established Paul’s reputation as the world’s leading magician.
In the book’s last scene, once Paul/Eisengrim’s narrative has ended and the documentary has been completed, Ramsay, Liesl, and Paul lie together in bed and enjoy a final philosophical exchange. Paul is given the last word and he sums his position up as follows:
[Life is] pretty much like a World of Wonders.... Everything has its astonishing, wondrous aspect, if you bring a mind to it that’s really your own — a mind that hasn’t been smeared and blurred with half-understood muck from schools, or the daily papers, or any other ragbag of reach-me-down notions.
World of Wonders appeared in October 1975. Again, the critical response was overwhelmingly positive. Some critics believed that Davies had accomplished the impossible and surpassed the first two volumes of the Deptford Trilogy. He was even referred to not only as the finest living Canadian novelist, but as one of the most accomplished novelists of his generation. Book sales were prodigious, not only in the English-speaking world, but across Europe as a whole, as the trilogy was translated into a variety of languages. Despite the complication of his plots, his puzzling references to an arcane body of knowledge, and his appeal to art and mysticism and disavowal of reason — or perhaps because of these same elements — the demand for his work was insatiable.
“Excuse me. May I please speak to Mr. Robertson Davies?” a stranger asked, calling Davies at his Windhover home.
“This is he. With whom am I speaking?”
“My name is Paula and I’m a Grade Thirteen student from Barrie, Ontario.”
“I’m pleased to meet you, Paula. How can I help you?”
“Well, my English teacher, Mrs. Brighton, finished reading your latest novel World of Wonders two months ago. She liked it so much that she decided to assign it to our class, and tomorrow I have an essay due but I don’t know what to write about it. That’s why I’ve phoned.”
“I see.”
“So can you tell me what your novel is about?”
“I can try, I suppose. The theme of self-discovery is important, of course. But what I really wanted to get at was the transformational quality of art.”
“Mrs. Brighton will like that. It sounds impressive. But what do you mean?”
“Well, think about it. As he passes through all his experiences, Paul comes to understand that, side by side with the world of ordinary, daily events, lurks an invisible reality that is both terrifying and beautiful. Humans can sometimes grasp this reality through religion and worship, but art is an effective avenue as well. More than anyone, in fact, or so Paul concludes, artists like Magnus Eisengrim, through their remarkable skills and acts of deception, lead their audiences to glimpse this invisible world and gape in wonder. And once this invisible world is descried, the viewer’s sense of self becomes infinitely stronger.”
“That’s all?”
“I’m afraid so. It’s not enough?”
“It will only do me for one paragraph, and the essay has to be two pages long.”
It was not only high school students who clamoured to have his novels explained to them. Invitations arrived from a range of institutions for Davies to give readings from his novels or to share his views on an array of topics; indeed, such was the appetite for his various insights that he published a selection of his talks in 1977 in a book entitled One Half of Robertson Davies. While delighted with this response to his efforts, and happy to lap up the attention and critical praise, Davies did not allow these new demands on his time to interfere unduly with his primary work.
His imagination as explosive as ever, he was already at work on a fresh trilogy.