I chose this biography to accompany the literature of Robertson Davies, who was chosen as one of our Writers in Residence for the second quarter of 2022 at the (Mostly) Dead Writers Society. In all honesty, he was my choice, having encountered his work in 1979 as part of a first year English course at university. I remember being jazzed after reading Fifth Business and getting my mom to read it too. She was a writer, with a number of published short stories, and we shared a love of good literature. We both looked forward to each new Davies novel.
RD would definitely agreed with Shakespeare that all the world's a stage. He treated his life like a theatrical production and greatly enjoyed both being on stage and being a playwright. He belongs to a time period in Canada when we were desperately trying to create our own identity, free from our Mother Britain. RD studied in Oxford and had intellectual aspirations, which were dashed when his father summoned him back to Canada to take up the family business, newspaper publishing in Southern Ontario. Journalism honed his craft, teaching him to write clearly and to a schedule.
Returning from Oxford and London, RD found Ontario very colloquial and boring. Although he was an actor, he couldn't seem to conceal his condescending attitude towards his neighbours and they noticed. RD was also remarkably thin skinned when it came to criticism of his own work. He seems to have expected to be the smartest guy in the room and was offended when his superiority was challenged. Plus he desperately wanted Canada to be more cosmopolitan and much more sophisticated, but it seemed to him that Canadians resisted him at every turn.
Reading about his upbringing in rural Ontario, I realized how much he mined his own experiences for the details of life in the Deptford trilogy. Like all writers, he gussied up these details, exaggerating or rearranging as needed to accomplish his purpose. His time as Master of Massey College is thoroughly reflected in The Rebel Angels and, interestingly, I feel that the marriage of Maria Theotoky and Arthur Cornish in that book had some aspects of RD's relationship with his wife, Brenda.
It is the role of a writer to feel like an outsider—we all feel that way at least some of the time, making outsider status a regular theme of literature and film. RD felt this status particularly keenly, being Master of Massey without having finished his own degree. He was a shy and sensitive man with a mercurial temperament, being aggressive to defend himself when he felt misunderstood. Nevertheless, he managed to produce powerful novels that depict characters who feel real and whose concerns I understand. His best work was produced after the deaths of both of his parents, which seems to have set him free of their judgment. It's a great shame that he felt so constrained. Wouldn't it be wonderful to have more of his magical writing to enjoy?
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