Robertson Davies: A Mingling of Contrarieties

Introduction: Davies Tristram-gistus

Introduction: Davies Tristram-gistus CAMILLE R. LA BOSSIERE TheANTITHESIS, or SEESAW,wherebyContraries andOppositions are balanced in such a way, as to cause the reader to remain suspended between them, to his exceeding delight and recreation. - Alexander Pope,PeriBathous, or the Art of Sinking in Poetry Themiddle ofthe dayis like the middle ofthe night. Life seems suspended when it is most intense.. . . -Amiel's Journal, translated byMrs. HumphreyWard Themeridian demonwasuponhim; hewaspossessed bythat... post-prandialmelancholy which the coenobites of old knew and feared.. . . - Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow [A] qualified Yes, conditioned by a prudential No ... a fine credulity about everything, kept in check by a lively scepticism.... It [is a cast of thought] that keeps you constantly alert to every possibility. It is a little understood aspect of the Golden Mean. - Robertson Davies, Murther and Walking Spirits nce upon a time, in 1949, Robertson Davies revisited the time of his youth to recall of his first reading inAldous Huxley that O 2 it lifted him into "the sunshine world of high comedy" and cast over his life "a summerglory...which noconceivable winter could dispel"(Enthusiasms 230). The book was Antic Hay (1923), taken up at the suggestion of a lad of his own age who aspired to priesthood in the Church of England. "Enthralled" by the "wonderfully amusingpeople,""easy scholarship," and"wittypedantry" hemet with inthatnovel,theteenaged Davies immediately "knew that this man Huxley stood in a very special relation" to him (229). Sometwenty years later, in "The Conscience of the Writer" (1968), Davies extended his account of that very special relation, from his "surprise"atthe appearance of Eyeless in Gaza(1936) tohisconsideredunderstanding ofHuxley'smid-lifechange from neo-Augustan satirist toreligious mystic: "But whatwas significant aboutEyeless in Gazawas that it was written when Huxley was forty-two, andripe for change. If there had been no change, we should soon have tired of the old Huxley wearing the young Huxley's intellectual clothes" (OneHalf127). TheDavies of "The Conscience of the Writer"continues to prize the youngHuxley's workfor "the brilliance of itswit," its "strongsatirical edge,"and"stringentcharm" (126),even ashe more or less explicitly acknowledges the persistence of Huxley, "one of the most farranging , capacious and powerful intellects of our time" (Enthusiasms 141), as eminencegrise inthe continuing progress ofhis own"spiritual" life: "And from that time [of Eyeless in Gaza] to the end of his life ... [Huxley's] exploration ofmystical religion andhis discussionsofmorality were atthe root ofeverything he wrote" (One Half 127). But signs of disenchantment,not longin comingafter "The Conscience of the Writer," seem clear enough in the record of Davies' subsequent commentaryonHuxley's intellectualclothes,whethernew-Restorationly flashy or latter-day-monastic in cut.Certainly, boththeyoungHuxley andthe oldcome in for a somewhat circumspect ruffling in World of Wonders (1975), where an intermittent discussion of "intellectual fopperies" touches on unworldly "nonattachment " asmuchas on"the Ironic Spirit" oftheearly 1930s (175,204).And when the theme of Huxley's shift in garb is revisited in a Davies lecture of November 1976, it isby a critic apparentlymuch altered inhis view since 1968: though Huxley "became fascinated with those things which he had formerly derided," according to Davies in"Thunder withoutRain," hecontinuedto suffer from "his earlier defect-he thoughttoo much andfelt too little" (OneHalf 253, 254). Like the "heartless[ly]" wittyproceeding ofCrome Yellow (1922), Antic Hay, and Point Counter Point (1928), the mystical Huxley's enterprise, as Davies now sees it, was impelledby a"negative andlife-diminishing"spirit: his 3 quest for "Absolutes" effectively occludedthe "infinitely complex mingling of contrarieties" essential for the generating of "a new and stronger spirit in man" (253,258,263).Now altogether privileged over Huxley are Powys,Mann, and, of course, Jung, agents for a "Mystical Marriage of Opposites" that results not in a static, deadening "perfection," but in an inspiriting, dynamic "wholeness" (263,268). The Davies of "Thunder without Rain" leaves little doubt as to the traditional theological importofhis critique:Huxleyyoung and old suffered from the cardinal viceofthe modernage, "Wanhope"or"Accidie,"the"very old sin" attributed in the Middle Ages to "monotony of life" (248, 258). For all its surface transparency, though, the seasoned Davies' pronouncement of his break with Huxley on the grounds of persistent unfeeling or acedia remains substantially curious, perhaps even mystifying. And the curiosity is this: that Davies, in effect, takes a pagefrom Huxley even as he turns from him. Readers familiar with Huxley's "Accidie" (in his first volume of essays, On theMargin, publishedin...