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 (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 (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 (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 (Robertson Davies, on Obeying the Heart)

“A man must be obedient to the promptings of his innermost heart.” —Canadian man of letters Robertson Davies, quoted in Herbert Mitgang, “Robertson Davies, a Novelist of the North,” The New York Times, December 29, 1988

Quote of the Day (Robertson Davies, on Academic ‘Symbol Simons’)

“I wonder what your professor means when she speaks of ‘symbolic references’ contained in the names of characters in Fifth Business. When a writer chooses the names for a character in a book he is anxious to get them into the same key—to use a musical expression…The names in Fifth Business, which are given to the Canadian characters, and particularly to those in the village of Deptford, are all quite familiar in Canadian ears and there are lots of Papples and Hornicks to be found in any large Canadian telephone directory. It is a wise rule never to assume the existence of a symbol where a meaning is apparent without it. People who disregard this rule are sometimes called ‘Symbol Simons.’”—Canadian man of letters Robertson Davies (1913-1995), expressing annoyance in a letter to Canadian undergraduate Theresa Riordan, December 6, 1978, regarding the first novel in his "Deptford Trilogy," in For Your Eye Alone: The Letters of Robertson Davies, edited by Judith Shelton Grant (1999)

Quote of the Day (Robertson Davies, on Money and Happiness)

“Money, it is often said, does not bring happiness; it must be added, however, that it makes it possible to support unhappiness with exemplary fortitude.” ― Robertson Davies, Tempest-Tost (1951)

This past week marked the centennial of the birth of Canadian man of letters Robertson Davies. The drollery in the above quote was a characteristic trait of his more than 30 books, including numerous novels, plays, newspaper columns, longer essays, ghost stories, diaries and letters written before his death in 1995. 

In a way, Davies is responsible for the birth of this blog. As I mentioned six years ago in my inaugural post, I read about his theater diary and wondered if I could keep a similar record of the plays (not to mention films and books) that had gained my attention—except that this record would be shared with the blogosphere. 

Faithful Reader, you can readily see how this blog has evolved over time, in ways good and bad, from that original conception. But, from first to last, it has reflected what obsesses me, just as Davies’ work, no matter what the genre, did—in his case, magic and the occult, academe, journalism, gypsies, Indians, music (especially opera) and theater.

Theater: that was his first love, as well as, in both literal and metaphorical senses, how I first encountered him. A friend had given me Fifth Business, the first installment of his Deptford Trilogy, so I had a bit of an idea of his ironic narrative voice and phantasmagorical plots. But then I saw him at Fairleigh Dickinson University on a tour to promote what turned out to be his last novel, The Cunning Man.

Davies himself turned out to be a theatrical presence, with a stocky frame and a full white beard that recalled more than a little of Santa Claus, if Santa might be said to be less a jolly fellow than a mocking contrarian, well past the age when he needed to care what the young might think. Certainly appearing well along in years, he was also the type of person who could have looked that way for a long time and, given his mental vigor, might have gone on looking the same way for a fair number of years more. It was with some surprise, then, that I read of his death not long after. 

Davies left his imprint on the audience, as well as on my autographed copy of The Cunning Man. On the title page, he had drawn a single line through one of those pedestrian italic typefaces that make up in clarity what they lack in personality. His signature, in contrast, occupied virtually the same amount of space, but in a more fluid, albeit firmly controlled, calligraphic-like manner, with the initial “R” appearing more like a “17” and with first and last name intertwined. “No author had a more attractive signature,” noted a Michael Dirda essay on handwriting for The American Scholar.

Six years later, the Stratford Festival in Canada, a project that Davies was associated with in the early 1950s under Tyrone Guthrie, staged an adaptation of Tempest-Tost. The latter, which marked Davies’ transition from playwriting to fiction, took advantage of his recent involvement with a “Little Theater” group to send up these well-meaning amateur productions.  (Evidently, he figured that it was unlikely that any theater group would mount a play that satirized the acting profession. How wrong he was!)