Robertson Davies (also known as Samuel Marchbanks and William Robertson Davies) is admired for writing novels that skillfully combine accessibility and literary merit with an intriguing dash of the obscure, including such subjects as alchemy, saints’ legends, Gypsy wisdom, tarot cards, shamanistic rituals, Anglo-Catholicism, and Jungian psychology. Most of his work explored the dangers of personal and cultural repression, and his sprawling, intellectually rich novels also exhibit a developing interest in Canadian identity. Davies was a writer of grand ideas and fertile imagination who excelled in a variety of literary disciplines. As a journalist, his humorous observations about life amused newspaper readers over two decades. His comic plays addressed the plight of the Canadian artist to great effect. With his bushy white beard and flowing mane of hair, Davies looked the part of a grizzled, ancient storyteller—which to his millions of devoted readers is exactly what he was.
Works in Biographical and Historical Context
Early Career in Drama Davies developed an interest in drama early in life. At the age of three, he made his stage debut in the opera Queen Esther. He maintained a diary throughout his school years in which he preserved his reactions to the stage performances he saw. Davies completed his higher education in 1938 at Balliol College, Oxford, where he earned a literature degree. His thesis, entitled Shakespeare’s Boy Actors, attracted the attention of Sir Tyrone Guthrie, a legendary drama teacher, and Guthrie hired Davies to work with him at London’s famous Old Vic theater.
Davies spent a year there working at a variety of jobs, from bit player to stage manager. He gained valuable stage experience in productions of Shakespeare, working alongside world-renowned actors including Ralph Richardson and Vivien Leigh. He also fell in love with the Old Vic’s stage manager, Australian-born Brenda Mathews, whom he married on February 2, 1940. The couple moved to Canada, where Davies took a job as literary editor of the Toronto magazine Saturday Night.
Davies, the Columnist After two years with Saturday Night, Davies took a position with the Peterborough Examiner. He remained with that paper for the next twenty years. In the early days there, he wrote a whimsical column under the pseudonym ‘‘Samuel Marchbanks.’’ These witty observations were later collected into the books The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks, The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks, and Marchbanks’ Almanack. Another of his regular columns, ‘‘A Writer’s Diary,’’ which consisted of observations about the literary scene, helped establish Davies as a major new voice in criticism. The 1940s were a fertile period for Davies. Besides his weekly columns, he was also writing and directing plays at the Peterborough Little Theatre. In 1946, his one-act comedy Overlaid was awarded a prize by the Ottawa Drama League. The fantasy Eros at Breakfast won the Gratien Gelinas Prize for best Canadian play at the Dominion Drama Festival. The year 1948 saw the production of Davies’s first full-length play. Fortune, My Foe deals with the plight of the Canadian artist and was awarded the Gratien Gelinas Prize at the 1949 Dominion Drama Festival. Another three-act play, At My Heart’s Core, deals with similar themes. Set in provincial Canada in 1837, this work shows Davies’s growing mastery of historical material.
Davies Turns to Novels Frustrated by his inability to get his plays produced outside of Canada, Davies turned to novel writing in the 1950s. His first novel, Tempest-Tost, was published in 1951. Set in the small Canadian town of Salterton, the book details the reactions of townsfolk to a troupe of Shakespearean actors in their midst. Leaven of Malice is set in the same locale and revolves around the confusion that ensues when an erroneous engagement announcement is printed in a local newspaper. The final book in the Salterton trilogy, A Mixture of Frailties, concerns a young girl who returns to the town after a sojourn studying music in Europe.
Davies followed Fifth Business with another Deptford novel, The Manticore. Again set among the Canadian upper classes, the book follows David Staunton, an alcoholic attorney, on a spiritual odyssey of self-discovery. Another highbrow hit with readers, The Manticore received the Canadian Governor General’s Award for excellence.
Rounding out The Deptford Trilogy was World of Wonders. Telling the story of Paul Dempster, a character who appears in the previous two novels, the book was judged ‘‘a novel of stunning verbal energy and intelligence’’ by Michael Mewshaw of the New York Times Book Review. Readers and reviewers alike generally found it a satisfying conclusion to the trilogy, only one of the many works that have led critics in both his homeland and abroad to describe Davies as a national treasure, securing his place in the Canadian literary canon.
Works in Literary Context
Many of Davies’s novels are marked by the psychological transformations of the main characters. As such, his novels may be considered reminiscent of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, in which the protagonist transforms into a giant cockroach, illustrating his growing awareness of how unhappy he is with his life. The specific nature of Davies’s approach to his characters, however, is highly influenced by Jungian psychology.
Jungian Psychology The recurring theme of self-discovery in Davies’s work follows the pattern established by psychologist Carl Jung, although Davies does not adhere strictly to Jungian psychology. While Roger Sale suggested in the New York Review of Books that, in common with the Jungian belief in archetypal influence on the human mind, Davies’s fictional characters ‘‘discover the meaning of their lives, by discovering the ways those lives conform to ancient patterns,’’ Davies explores a number of models for complete human identity. Patricia Monk claimed in her The Smaller Infinity: The Jungian Self in the Novels of Robertson Davies that though he had a ‘‘deep and long-lasting affinity with Jung... Davies eventually moves beyond his affinity... to a more impartial assessment of Jungianism as simply one way of looking at the universe, one myth among a number of others.’’ Peter Baltensperger, writing in Canadian Literature, saw ‘‘the conquest of one’s Self in the inner struggle and the knowledge of oneself as fully human’’ as a consistent theme throughout Davies’s fiction.
Novel Melodrama Because he wrote a number of plays, had been a teacher and actor with the Old Vic Company, and had served on the board of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival for many years, it is no surprise to find that Davies employed many theatrical elements in his novels. Theatricality is one technique Davies uses to move his story along at a quicker pace. About World of Wonders, a Time magazine critic stated that the characters ‘‘are brilliant talkers, but when they natter on too long, the highly theatrical author causes a grotesque face to appear at a window, drops someone through a trap door or stages a preposterous recognition scene.’’ These melodramatic touches come naturally to Davies who, L. J. Davis remarked, ‘‘is a player in love with the play, and the kind of play he loves is melodrama.’’ In his collection of lectures, The Mirror of Nature, Davies makes his case on behalf of melodrama and attempts, as Alberto Manguel wrote in the Toronto Globe & Mail, ‘‘to save melodrama’s lost honor.’’ Davies’s lectures argue that ‘‘theatre is a coarse art... . It appeals immediately to primary, not secondary elements in human nature.’’ Melodrama’s emphasis on creating an emotional response in its audience, Davies contends, is true to theater’s fundamental purpose.
Davies’s Legacy Many critics have labeled Davies a traditionalist who was a bit old-fashioned in his approach to writing. I. M. Owen of Saturday Night, for example, placed Davies ‘‘curiously apart from the mainstream of contemporary fiction.’’ A critic for the Washington Post Book World characterized Davies as ‘‘a true novelist writing imagined stories, wonderful stories full of magic and incandescence, thought and literary art,’’ something the critic did not find in other contemporary fiction. With such conflicting opinions, it is difficult to determine Davi-es’s long-term impact on literature.
Works in Critical Context
Pages: 1 2
Robertson Davies
Home
Download
