Quote of the Day (Margaret Atwood, on ‘The Collective Memory’)

“The collective memory is notoriously faulty, and much of the past sinks into the ocean of time to be drowned forever; but once in a while the waters part, allowing us to glimpse a flash of hidden treasure, if only for a moment.” —Canadian novelist, poet and essayist Margaret Atwood, The Testaments: The Sequel to The Handmaid's Tale (2019)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Leonard Cohen, on the Soul and Longing)

“I’ve heard the soul unfolds
In the chambers of its longing
And the bitter liquor sweetens
In the hammered cup
But all the Ladders
Of the Night have fallen
Only darkness now
To lift the Longing up.” —Canadian poet-singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen (1934-2016), “Born in Chains,” in The Flame: Poems Notebooks Lyrics Drawings (2018)

Quote of the Day (Robertson Davies, on Life and Experience)

“Man moves from confident inexperience through the bitterness of experience, toward the rueful wisdom of self-knowledge.”—Canadian man of letters Robertson Davies (1913-1995), A Mixture of Frailties, Volume 3 of “The Salterton Trilogy” (1958

Quote of the Day (Margaret Atwood, on Hope as ‘Part of the Human Tool Kit’)

“Hope is part of the human tool kit. We need it to go on in the face of negative odds. I’m probably an inherently hopeful person. If I weren't, why would I write? Think how much hope is involved! You hope your book will be good. You hope you will finish it. You hope it will be published. You hope the perfect reader will come across it, and find all the breadcrumbs you've dropped in the forest, and also find some meaning or delight in them. That's a lot of hope.” —Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood, “Margaret Atwood on the Wages of Whining” (part of the “Sane Advice for Crazy Times” article cluster), Esquire, October 2018

Quote of the Day (Leonard Cohen, on His Desired Audience)

“I want an audience of inner-directed adolescents, lovers in all degrees of anguish, disappointed Platonists, pornography-peepers, hair-handed monks and Popists, French-Canadian intellectuals, unpublished writers, curious musicians etc., all that holy following of my Art.”—Canadian poet and singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen (1934-2016), to his publisher in 1960, quoted in Ira Nadel, Various Positions: A Life of Leonard Cohen (2007)

Quote of the Day (Robertson Davies, on Re-Reading Great Literature at Different Ages)

"Nobody ever reads the same book twice. People are expected to read [Vanity Fair] during their university years. But you are mistaken if you think you read [William Makepeace] Thackeray's book then; you read a lesser book of your own. It should be read again when you are thirty-six, which is the age of Thackeray when he wrote it. It should be read for the third time when you are fifty-six, sixty-six, seventy-six, in order to see how Thackeray’s irony stands up to your own experience of life. Perhaps you will not read every page in these later years, but you really should take another look at a great book, in order to find out how great it is, or how great it has remained, to you.” —Canadian man of letters Robertson Davies (1913-1995), The Merry Heart: Reflections on Reading, Writing, and the World of Books (1995)

Robertson Davies died 25 years ago yesterday in Orangeville, in the Canadian province of Ontario. I have identified him as a “man of letters” because, during his prolific career, there were few forms of writing in which he did not succeed—journalism, essays, poems, plays, ghost stories, and novels.

Davies’ considerable success in Canada has not extended south of the border, a popularity deficit that might have been overcome had he received the Nobel Prize in Literature he was widely rumored to be in the running for late in life. The Nobel committee could have done worse (and often has) in extending this honor to him.

I first became exposed to him the old-fashioned way: through a former co-worker and fellow book-lover who pressed on me her copy of Fifth Business, part of Davies’ “Deptford Trilogy” revolving around his fascination with magic. 

I became further interested in him when I was lucky enough to hear him speak at Fairleigh Dickinson University (near where I live in Bergen County, NJ), on his promotional tour for The Cunning Man, his last novel. 

His white beard may have predisposed the unknowing to expect a jovial Santa Claus until his still-resonant deep voice and wry wit testified to his early training as an actor. Within a year of his deathat that point, he was surely far more frail than in his prime, but he still knew how to command an audience’s attention.

But my fascination solidified when I saw a 2001 adaptation of Davies’ Tempest-Tost, at Canada’s famous Stratford Festival (an institution he had played a major role in establishing 50 years before, and in which he retained a lively interest until his death). I went on to read the novel itself, as well as its follow-up volumes in his “Salterton Trilogy,” which has, with a great deal of truth, been regarded as a Canadian answer to Anthony Trollope’s “Barchester Chronicles.”

There is much more that can be written about Davies and his career, and in the next year I hope to pursue at least some of those aspects. But today’s quote reminds me of maybe the best way to get an idea of his gifts: through his essays.

When he wasn’t writing, Davies served as professor of English at Massey College and a master of the college until his retirement in 1981. 

But I suspect that he was an old-fashioned professor—scornful of academic jargon and fads, intent on communicating basic truths to listeners—because his essays on literature and the stage convey a vast amount of his erudition without deadening readers’ thrill in discovering and working out the meanings of great books for themselves.

(For a solid, no-nonsense summary of Davies’ career—the kind that he himself might have appreciated—I suggest you read this post by Andrea Koczela on the blog “Books Tell You Why.”)

Quote of the Day (Alice Munro, on the Constant Changes During Childhood)

“Every year, when you're a child, you become a different person. Generally it's in the fall, when you reenter school, take your place in a higher grade, leave behind the muddle and lethargy of the summer vacation. That's when you register the change most sharply. Afterwards you are not sure of the month or year but the changes go on, just the same. For a long while the past drops away from you easily and it would seem automatically, properly. Its scenes don't vanish so much as become irrelevant. And then there's a switchback, what's been all over and done with sprouting up fresh, wanting attention, even wanting you to do something about it, though it's plain there is not on this earth a thing to be done.”—Canadian Nobel Literature laureate Alice Munro, “Child's Play,” in Too Much Happiness: Stories (2009)

Quote of the Day (Robertson Davies, on the Human ‘Wish to be Told a Story’)

“The simplest function of the novel is the tale, but only someone who has never tried it thinks that the discovery and relation of a tale is simple work. The wish to be told a story never dies in the human heart, and great storytellers enjoy a long life that more subtle writers sometimes envy.”—Canadian man of letters Robertson Davies (1913-1995), “Reading,” from The Merry Heart: Reflections on Reading, Writing, and the World of Books (1997)

Quote of the Day (Marjorie Pickthall, on the ‘Marching Men’ of WWI)

“With souls unpurged and steadfast breath

They supped the sacrament of death.

And for each one, far off, apart,

Seven swords have rent a woman’s heart.”—Canadian poet Marjorie Pickthall (1883-1922), “Marching Men,” from The Wood Carver's Wife (1922)

Remember those lines this Memorial Day, and beyond—along with this one, from Herman Wouk’s novel War and Remembrance: “Either war is finished, or we are.”

(The image accompanying this post shows a grim, agonized Kirk Douglas, knowing his men face certain death, in Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory. That 1957 film showed, in less poetic terms than Ms. Pickthall’s verses, the immense, lacerating sacrifice of soldiers in WWI—indeed, implicitly, of all wars.)

Quote of the Day (Robertson Davies, on How to ‘Train Yourself to Read Plays’)

“You can train yourself to read plays so that they will give you keen enjoyment. The directions are few. First, you must give the play a fair chance; it is not a novel, and it should not be read in scraps; try to complete it in an evening. Second, always read it in a theatrical frame-work; it was written for the stage, and you must, to the best of your ability, visualize it as a stage production. This takes some doing, for you may not have a strong theatrical imagination. When a play is well performed in the theater a crowd of experts have all worked to give you pleasure; you will not at first trial provide in your mind a director, a designer, and a cast of talented actors. Do not be disappointed if your early attempts seem a little heavy. If you persist, the art will come, in a sufficient measure, for it is a law of the imagination that the more you want, the more it will provide. Persist, and the reading of plays can become a splendid private indulgence.”—Canadian man of letters Robertson Davies (1913-1995), “Making the Best of Second Best,” in A Voice From the Attic: Essays on the Art of Reading (1960)

Quote of the Day (Robertson Davies, on The Theater, ‘Ever-Renewing, Like Spring’)

“The Theatre is a wonderful creature, ever-renewing, like Spring. Sometimes people—usually Broadway people, who do not know her as well as they imagine they do, refer to her as The Old Lady, but she is not old. Of course she makes such johnny-come-latelies as the lyric, the novel and the philosophical essay seem like babies, because she is as old as Prophecy and the Epic, with which she has a strong kinship. But that is not to be old; that is merely to be greater and wiser. She is wonderfully wise and generous, and large-minded enough to be proud of her bastards, the film and television, even though they are still somewhat embarrassing in their attempts to find their feet.”—Canadian man of letters (including plays) and former actor Robertson Davies (1913-1995), letter to Herbert Whittaker, May 7, 1984, in For Your Eye Alone: The Letters of Robertson Davies, edited by Judith Skelton Grant (1999)

Not a bad thought to keep in mind for those who watch the Tony Awards on June 9...

Quote of the Day (Margaret Atwood, on the Survival of the Book)

“Every prediction—radio would kill books, it didn’t; television would kill movies, it didn’t; e-reading will kill books, it hasn’t—these predictions have all been wrong. You’re never going to kill storytelling, because it’s built into the human plan. We come with it.”—Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood quoted in Lily Rothman, “Margaret Atwood on Serial Fiction and the Future of the Book,” Time, Oct. 8, 2012