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Robertson Davies

When Robertson Davies became Master of Massey College in the early 1960s, he was asked to find a suitable quotation to adorn the new institution's dining hall; the quotation that he chose serves as a foundation to understanding his life and works, as well as encapsulating what he hoped to achieve at the college:

Happiness is impossible, and even inconceivable, to a mind without scope, and without pause, a mind driven by craving, pleasure or fear. To be happy, you must be reasonable, or you must be tamed. You must have taken the measure of your powers, tasted the fruits of your passion, and learned your place in the world and what things in it can really serve you. To be happy you must be wise. (Santayana)
Another building, the chapel, was considered by Davies to embody the search for self-knowledge, a quest that he asserted always ran parallel to the quest for the divine.

William Robertson Davies was born in 1913 in a small village in southwestern Ontario, Canada, called Thamesville, which would eventually be transmuted into the root scene of his most well known and acclaimed novel, Fifth Business. He spent six years there, during which time important influences and ideas shaped his conscious and unconscious life, remaining with him until his death. The important, ineluctable and ambiguous relationships that exist within a family were first impressed on him at that time, relationships that not only comprised the present familial unit, but reached far back (and, by extension, forward) to the family's spreading histories. His parents' ancestors, from Scots, Welsh and Canadian pioneer stock, were living presences that colored the daily life and development of the Davies household, that would eventually find their way as dominant players into Davies's late novel, Murther and Walking Spirits.

Davies observed that stories were a key to understanding not only his family but himself. In his family, story-telling was a venerable, persistently practiced tradition, its oral nuances carefully honed. His father Rupert's family stories, his ghost stories, and his stories steeped in myth, formed and underlined Davies's propensity for sound and rhythm, and perhaps his great, life-long love of the theater itself. In fact, he regularly told himself stories in bed until he began to write in earnest when he was 18: the only rule was that these stories were something "that could happen." As a correlative to this oral tradition, Davies's parents emphasized the art of conversation, focusing not only on the content, but on the proper use of grammar, syntax, tone and the astute use of the only correct word. Rupert's work supported this: as the owner and editor of the local newspaper, the Herald; he was an active participant in village life, and spoke often to his family about the things he had heard and seen. His meticulous observations and information were passed on to his son, Robertson, who later would make use of these descriptions, details and insights to turn his sometimes outlandish fictional settings into credible arenas of action. Besides the vagaries of his family life, often marked by dissension and acrid exchanges between his parents, three of Florence's and Rupert's shared abiding interests were transmitted to and became life-long passions of Davies: the theater, music, and the primacy and love of knowledge.

When he was six, the family moved to Renfrew, where Rupert bought and assumed the editorship of another paper, the Renfrew Mercury. This city, reeking of what Davies has called "bleak, malignant ignorance," would be darkly incarnated in another Davies novel, What's Bred in the Bone. The family lived there for six years, unable to form significant attachments or breach the closed nature of the community. On the other side, however, several epiphanic experiences marked Davies's Renfrew years. One was a Chautauqua tent production of Verdi's opera Rigoletto: although he had been falling more and more under the spell of the transformative magic of the theater, it was this production that led him to apprehend the teaming life under the veil of everyday reality, a life to which he wanted access. For Davies the theater was always to embody the element of illusion in life, as well as serving as the jumping-off point for his belief in the crucial importance of the arts in the shaping of personal and national identity. These intuitions, which would later blossom into Jungian-based beliefs in the collective unconscious, the role of artistic creation, and the importance of the invisible world, were buttressed by a vision he had also during his Renfrew years, which he would be able to identify later as the Unus Mundus, the wholeness of the world.

In 1925, Rupert bought another newspaper (that would later become the amalgamated Kingston Whig-Standard), and moved the family to Kingston, the university town that is home to Queen's University. It would be a much more gracious and hospitable city than Renfrew ever was to the family. Davies's play Fortune, My Foe, and the novels comprising the Salterton trilogy, rely substantially on Kingston as the inspiration for many of their settings and characters. Davies started attending Upper Canada College (1928-31), where he began writing seriously. At the College, he was seen by the other students as a brilliant but eccentric student, a poseur adorned with dramatic costumes and adroitly witty, and a truly fine writer, editor and actor as well. It was during his time there that theater assumed a prime importance in his life: he enjoyed successes as Malvolio in Twelfth Night, as well as in roles in Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, and from these successes began to envision an acting career in England. He also started a theater diary that he would continue in varying forms throughout his life, as well as a very substantial book collection that now holds many rare and out-of-print plays.

Davies left for England and Oxford University in 1935. The university afforded a highly congenial atmosphere that nourished his love of theater, literature and life, and allowed him to fully play out the various youthful personae that he embodied. He was a frequent theater goer, and joined OUDS, the Oxford University Dramatic Society. That society collaborated with professionals from London, thereby creating a network that would be invaluable in later years for theater students. Davies worked there as a stage manager, writer and actor, and again played the part of Malvolio, this time with a brilliance that earned him favorable recognition from many including his professional London colleagues.

Shortly after his graduation with a degree in literature, Davies was contacted by Sir Tyrone Guthrie of London's Old Vic, who had met him through his connection with OUDS. Guthrie offered him a one-year contract at the Old Vic in the capacity of actor, researcher, writer and teacher; a second contract followed the year after, this time with the additional opportunity of learning how to direct. At the Old Vic, Davies's ambition to become an actor modulated into a desire to become a playwright. It was also at the Old Vic that he met the Australian, Brenda Newbold, Guthrie's assistant stage manager, who had dreams of founding a theater in her country. The two found they had much in common, including, critically enough, a similar attitude to marriage, and in February 1940 they wed. One month later, they sailed for Canada, casualties of a war that had shut down London theater. Their former dreams--he to become an actor or playwright in London, she to found a theater in Australia--were relinquished.

From this time forward, Davies pursued various, always overlapping professions in Canada: editor, journalist, playwright, professor, director, novelist, among others. He began a long-standing daily routine that consisted of three work periods a day, with the evening reserved for his own writing. In 1940 he inaugurated the satiric Samuel Marchbanks column for his father's paper, the Peterborough Examiner, a column that would continue until 1953, and which would later be collected in several volumes: The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks (1947), The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks (1949), and Marchbanks' Almanack (1967). He became the literary editor of Saturday Night as well, Canada's leading weekly opinion journal, for which he also occasionally wrote theater and music reviews.

During the decade of the 40s, Davies worked in the theater as well as journalism. He had taken over the editorship of the Examiner in 1942. He wrote, acted in, and directed a substantial number of plays, many of which won prestigious contests and were produced throughout Canada. He and Brenda were involved extensively with the local community theater, and both of them taught theater classes at the YMCA. Indeed, by 1950, Davies was a major force in regional and national Canadian theater through his diverse talents, winning awards for direction and having seen several of his plays published, many of which dealt with the theme of Canadian identity (Overlaid; Eros at Breakfast; Fortune, My Foe). In 1950 the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences, commonly known as the Massey Commission, asked him to write a report on the state of theater in Canada. His report enumerated numerous shortcomings that would need to be overcome before Canada could begin to enjoy the quality of theater available in England. Davies addressed many of these problems in his plays, as well as in his later novels: the unfamiliarity of Canadians with theater classics; the lack of knowledge among teachers and critics; few professional theaters and lack of work for professionals during the winter months. This devotion to the theater and diagnosis of its shortcomings in Canada largely occupied Davies throughout that decade and the next, and honed his interest in and perspicacity toward the much larger problem that concerned him most of his life: the development and coming-to-maturity of Canadians and the Canadian nation.

Throughout the 50s he continued his work in the theater, and was a persuasive force in the establishment of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, on whose Board of Governors he sat from 1953 to 1971. As he knew the theater from both the business and the aesthetic angles, he was an excellent bridge between the Board and the artistic director. The festival hired Davies's former boss and friend, Sir Tyrone Guthrie, as its director, and they collaborated on several books that commemorated its first years: Renown at Stratford, 1953; Twice Have the Trumpets Sounded, 1954; and, with Tanya Moiseiwitsch and Boyd Neel, Thrice the Brinded Cat Had Mew'd, 1955. By the late 1940s, Davies was tiring of the difficulties and political machinations bound up in working in the Canadian theater, most particularly as a playwright, and was seriously thinking of turning to novels instead; this conviction grew throughout the 1950s and when the theater version of his novel, Leaven of Malice (called Love and Libel), flopped opposite Camelot on Broadway in 1960, he definitively took leave of his profession as playwright.

During this time, Davies began to keep notebooks for ideas as well as works in progress. It was his view that ideas grew and took shape until they demanded to be written, a belief that would mesh perfectly with the Jungian notions he was to embrace in the 50s. Since his time at Oxford, he had known that the writer's art would partake of the mystical, that it would be a "distillation and alchemy" of the unconscious. As he began to approach middle age, he found that his interest in Freud was dwindling, to be replaced by a firm conviction of the veracity of Jungian psychology, a psychology that he found less reductive and better suited to maturity. As well, Jungian inclusion of the invisible world as a real phenomenon corroborated the reality of visitations and visions that he had experienced when young. And like Jung he believed that one's best creative work wass an offering to God. Two of the works he wrote during these decades revealed a strong Jungian cast, most specifically the 1958 play written for the Crest Theater, General Confessions (published in 1972 but never produced), and the last of the Salterton trilogy, A Mixture of Frailties (1958).

In 1961 Davies was approached by Vincent Massey, whom he had known since his time at Upper Canada College, both through Rupert and through Massey's sons, who were his classmates. The Massey Foundation, having elected to found the first male residential graduate school in Canada with an endowment, now wanted Davies to become Master of the College, with a complementary appointment as full professor of English. Davies initiated several traditions that would continue throughout his tenure there (he resigned in 1981) such as High Table Dinners, where college fellows and outside guests would meet for stimulating conversation as well as the popular Christmas Gaudy, at which he would tell an original ghost story. These stories were later collected as High Spirits (1982). Davies was present during the initial stages of planning (Massey did not open until 1963), and was a guiding spirit in matters pertaining to the college's architecture; logos and symbolic images, including quotations and crests; its structural organization; apportioning of office space and the other myriad things that are entailed in such an enterprise. He made many important appointments of senior fellows, including those of the Canadian Northrop Frye, one of the most renowned literary critics of this century, and John Polanyi, a Nobel prize winner in chemistry. Good relations with faculty, staff and outside associates characterized the major part of his tenure there, although there were one or two troublesome episodes with faculty, and a fairly contentious period with feminists, who targeted the predominantly all-male status of the college and did not take kindly to Davies's well-broadcast belief that men and women were essentially different. He believed that men were ruled by Logos, inclining them toward logic, rationality and individualism, and women by Eros, inclining them toward instinct, emotion and communication. Because of this, he felt that their ways of learning and their abilities were different, and that they should thus be educated separately. Nonetheless, it appears that female students did not feel that he was unfair to them, and in 1974 women were admitted to Massey College.

While he was Master of Massey College, Davies wrote the novels that were to gain him international acclaim. He was coming more and more under the influence of Jungian psychology, most specifically its ideas relating to religion and creation, and he started again to pay close attention to his dreams and visions. Davies interpreted one important dream to mean that he was evolving on the path toward integration (individuation) by embracing and rendering harmless the shadow parts of himself. This dovetailed with Jung's thoughts on God, also sometimes called life or self, not as perfection as manifest in traditional orthodoxy, but as wholeness, the very embracing of opposites. Indeed, Fifth Business (1970), The Manticore (1972) and World of Wonders (1975), chart the quests of three connected protagonists for individuation in these Jungian terms. As with all of Davies's novels, an artist figure is central, if not key, as the conduit through which the personal and collective unconscious speaks and makes the wonders of the world accessible to others. Fifth Business in particular has been read as an analogy of the Canadian struggle for national identity and self-recognition. Reception of it at first was cool, until it gained recognition in the United States and other countries; it is now commonly viewed as a masterpiece and by many as the greatest of his novels. University life strongly influenced Davies and he decided to write a novel in which it would function as setting and theme. He viewed it as one of the great institutions of Western civilization, proceeding in a direct path from the middle ages and preserving in large part an atmosphere steeped in alchemy, mystery, and the rarefied pursuit of knowledge. This first university novel, The Rebel Angels (1981), was published in his last year as Master of Massey, although his connection with Massey continued long after, and the other two novels of The Cornish trilogy, What's Bred in the Bone and The Lyre of Orpheus in 1985 and 1988 respectively. As with the previous trilogy, issues fundamental to Davies such as individuation, myth, knowledge, the collective unconscious and artistic creation were of supreme importance, but were amplified and treated from very different perspectives than in the Deptford works.

Very soon after publishing The Lyre of Orpheus, Davies decided to approach a subject that had been with him since his youth. Starting with his parents' families, he envisioned a book that would take as its subject the ways in which someone became a Canadian and what, indeed, it meant to be a Canadian. From the time of his theater troubles, he had felt that Canadians were indifferent or even hostile towards the arts, which pained him as he believed that it was only through its culture that a country could achieve greatness. These concerns, grafted to his broad meditations on good and evil, as well as life and death, life after death, and the meaning and imperatives of heritage, informed Murther and Walking Spirits (1991). The next and final novel was published in 1994. Called The Cunning Man, it once again took up the idea of Jungian wholeness, this time incarnate in the figure of an unorthodox physician who achieves success at cross purposes with traditional institutions and curative praxis. As in all of Davies's novels, other themes that had apparently been with him since his youth surfaced again, revealing a man in constant grips with permanent life-revealing matters.

In 1986, Davies was short listed for two of the most prestigious literary prizes in the world. The first was for the Nobel Prize for Literature, bestowed instead on Wole Soyinka (he was also on the short list in 1992), and the second was the Booker, which was given to Kingsley Amis. Although disappointed, Davies felt after his losses that he could return to a life with a more healthy and balanced perspective. This life after retirement from Massey was filled with activities that he had always loved: traveling, working in education, avidly attending the theater and opera, listening to music, seeing art, and, of course, writing. He was a recipient of numerous high honors, of which several were especially gratifying: the Oxford degrees; the Companion of the Order of Canada; the honorary membership in the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (the first Canadian so honored); investiture as an honorary fellow of Balliol College; and degrees of D. Litt. from Trinity and Dublin Universities. From the early 1970s as well, filmmakers had been taking options on his novels, though to date, no film has been made. Fifth Business, however, has been dramatized on television, and World of Wonders was produced at the Stratford Festival. Davies died unexpectedly in December of 1995 from a heart attack. The last year of his life had been devoted to writing an opera, penning tributes to several friends, and planning a book about old age. The Merry Heart, a selection of his writings from 1980-1995, was published in 1996. His widow and daughter published Happy Alchemy, a book containing his writings on the theater, in 1997, and in 1999 the Toronto Opera Company launched his opera, The Golden Asse to near-universal acclaim. In the fall of 1999, his biographer, Judith Skelton Grant, published a selection of his letters entitled For Your Eyes Alone: Robertson Davies’ Letters 1976-1995.

The above profile and the bibliography of works by Robertson Davies was prepared by Lynne Diamond-Nigh. Interested in writing a profile of your favourite Canadian author? Visit our contribution page for details.

• A selected bibliography of works by Robertson Davies

Books by Robertson Davies available from Northwest Passages

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