Oh, Canada. In the past two months, our northern neighbor has managed to keep Quebec and lose Robertson Davies -- a dismal season indeed.
The loss feels doubly keen, for at age 82 the grand old man of Canadian letters was still eminently productive. His most recent novel, The Cunning Man, came out last spring, and his biography, Robertson Davies: Man of Myth, by Judith Skelton Grant, was released in America by Viking just a week before his death.
Although Davies had long cultivated an imposing, even antique, physical presence -- really, that beard! -- his manner was more that of a jesting grandfather. The Economist, in its obituary, ran a formal photograph of him sticking out his tongue. In his novels and essays, Davies could tilt quickly from crusty scholar to libertine rascal -- as in his Deptford trilogy, set chiefly in mid-20th-century Canada and Switzerland, which is packed with loving descriptions of forgotten medieval saints and also bubbles with marital infidelity, bisexual seduction, and the darker sorts of buggery. (I didn't learn the word "catamite" from reading Davies, but his account of a traveling carnival in the third Deptford novel, World of Wonders, gave me the chance to use it in polite company.)
A latecomer to fiction, Davies had fallen in love first with the theater. He tried his hand as stage manager and actor and was a prolific (if not terribly successful) playwright. He earned his keep in the '40s and '50s as a journalist, serving as editor and publisher of the family-owned Peterborough Examiner. When he settled into academe in 1960, his field was the unfashionable one of 19th-century English melodrama, and his enthusiasm for the gaudy, lowbrow tradition of the popular theater infects his novels deliciously.
Although the erudition on display in even his lighter works makes it easy to think of Robertson Davies as a rather donnish novelist, or a peculiarly imaginative professor, the academy was a curious choice for him. His passion for cultural excavation was unrestrained by the curatorial, analytical bent of modern scholarship. The past was very much alive in his work (he loved ghost stories and authored a collection, 1982's High Spirits), and he had an abiding contempt for blind faith in empiricism. The "rationalist rickets" was his cutesy label for the great malaise of modern times, whose symptom is the inclination to dissect, pin down, explain -- and in so doing, to set limits on what's allowed as truth.
His antidote was to write novels suffused with something awfully close to magic. In the Deptford trilogy, written in the '70s, and the Cornish trilogy, written in the '80s, the books' rangy plots unfold almost like fables, one thing leading to an inevitable next, until you realize partway through that the whole forms a vast braid of marvelous intricacy, and that a world has been created much more tightly determined than the one we believe we inhabit. A thrown stone precipitates a birth at the beginning of Fifth Business (1970) and a death at the end; the tale of Arthur, Lancelot, and Guinevere not only is the plot of the opera produced in The Lyre of Orpheus (1988) but is also reflected in the lives of both its producer and the man whose estate funds the project.
Contrived? Perhaps. Good art, in the Davies schema, is always a kind of artifice but never a pure confection. The secret that he found in old melodrama -- and in the work of Carl Jung -- is that art begins in the warm (and often smelly) earth of a culture's myths, and that even the most fantastic fables can ensnare us if their roots lie sufficiently deep in the collective unconscious.
Indeed, you wonder after reading a Davies novel: yes, isn't life more fraught and resonant than we give it credit for? Davies dedicated himself to maintaining the density of the weave: his novels tend to draw from his own background (childhood in a small Canadian town; exposure to England, or Oxford; dollops of theater and journalism and academe). Even his alter ego, the crotchety feuilletonist Samuel Marchbanks, had a name plucked off the Davies family tree: "Samuel" from a great-grandfather; "Marchbanks" the maiden name of a great-grandmother.
It's not hard to see the man's great white beard and four-button jackets as tokens of a mind not a little at odds with the 20th century. But what troubled Robertson Davies about the time in which he found himself wasn't modern manners, or the sexual revolution. It was the inclination of 20th Century Man to think himself a thing apart, a creature unprecedented in enlightenment and untethered to the past. His novels work in tireless opposition to that error, knitting together this century and the last, high art and low art, religion and folkways with the certainty of a moralist and the wisdom of a graybeard.
