For Your Eyes Alone: Letters 1976–1995 by Robertson Davies (review)

HUMANITIES 503 Rereading Frye is a useful guide to the unpublished works of Northrop Frye, and the contributors' thoughtful essays will set the preliminary terms for the discussion of that material as it becomes available in the University of Toronto edition. Several of the essays also make a persuasive daim for Frye to have a large role in the new critical horizon which will emerge to succeed the cultural and political criticism which has dominated the last decade and a half of literary studies. 0. RUSSELL PERKIN) Robertson Davies. For Your Eyes Alone: Letters 1976- 1995. Selected and edited by Judith Skelton Grant McClelland and Stewart. xiv, 402. $37.50 Canadianauthors are not, in the main, distinguished as letter-writers. Their published letters invariably seem more interesting for the information they reveal than for the stylistiC qualities they embody. Malcolm Lowry, if he counts as Canadian, was probably the main exception - until the publication of this book. Davies is an excellent correspondent. These letters are written in the recognizable Davies style to which we have become accustomed - dear, witty, what David Staunton in TheManticore calls the Plain Style. Yet they encompass a remarkable variety of tone. The range is extraordinary: the combination of shrewdness and wicked humour in warning Jack McClelland of likely reviewer reaction to Marian Engel's Bear; polite but firm letters to inadequately prepared high school students; marvellously sympathetic and wise letters to the ill or the bereaved. They display an exemplary poise. Take, for example, the case of the librarian who wrote to Davies to complain about his use of 'mischievious' in Murther and Walking Spirits. He acknowledges her concern for correct English, then explains that both instances occur in 'the speech of a man who would naturally use that form: goes on to reveal his own linguistic expertise by noting usages acceptable in past ages that are considered solecisms today - and ends by signing himself 'Yours mischieviously'! For Your Eyes Alone, then, is an obviously funny book, but this does not mean that itis in any sense lightweight. All his life Davies was battling with the humourless who thought either that anything funny is merelyfunny and carmot contain wisdom, or that articulate satiric humour is evidence of 'elitist' superiority. Davies' humour was omnipresent - in the wit of a phrase or the tone of an attitude. It is reminiscent of Stephen Leacock (a major inspiration behind Davies' work) but more probing and less prone to exaggerated silliness. It is a humour that bubbles up, bracingly and irrepreSSibly, even in a basically serious letter. This collection, which shows Davies in his last years as Master ofMassey College, in his busy retirement, and in the process of writing his later 504 LETTERS IN CANADA '999 novels from The Rebel Angels onwards, is expertly and unobtrusively edited by Judith Skelton Grant, and it is good to learn that a further volume containing his earlier letters is being prepared for publication in the future. As the author of the excellent biography Robertson Davies, Man ofMyth, that appeared in '994, Grant also appears as a prominent - and sometimes equivocal - presence in the text. Davies was initially suspicious of her intrusion into his life, and writes some hard things about her to others; but he converted the experience into art (in both What's Bred in theBoneand The Lyre ofOrpheus, where the problems of biography are important elements within the plot) and eventually writes her a letter in which he acknowledges 'how gently and conSiderately you treated me' - a characteristically generous gesture. Grant handles this potentially embarrassing material with admirable scholarly honesty. The book is espeCially valuable, I think, for demonstrating the nature of Davies' generally playful but seriously intended and morally committed satire. The letters are full of common-sense attitudes to such inflammatory matters as the intellectual limitations of teachers, the prose of the average literary critic, the greed of academic grant-applicants, current sexual fashion, 'Our [Aboriginal] Heritage: the critical bankruptcy of the Governor-General's awards, and many more. In one letter he writes of Peter Ustinov as 'refreshingly free from political correctness: and the remark applies just as well to himself. Those with a respect for political...