Reconsidering Robertson Davies

His love of drama and his curiosity about its history were virtually inexhaustible.

– Judith Skelton Grant, Robertson Davies: Man of Myth

Eight papers in this special issue of the University of Toronto Quarterly had their origin in a symposium called ‘Reconsiderations of Robertson Davies,’ which took place at Massey College, the graduate college at the University of Toronto. Davies helped found Massey and he served, from 1963 to 1981, as its first master. Prior to his role as master, Davies had (after an abortive career as an actor) been known to the Canadian public as a journalist, a witty and satiric columnist, and a newspaper publisher; a successful playwright; and an internationally acclaimed novelist. To those roles, he added librettist and author of ghost stories. Our aim in this issue is to reconsider this substantial legacy from the perspective of the nearly fifteen years that have passed since Davies died. The first decades following a writer’s death are a good time to ask if his work will last – and conferences and special issues offer opportunities to reassess a writer’s reputation and to gain new perspectives on his work.

I

A popular columnist and dramatist, Davies will be most remembered as a novelist, even though, as Brian Johnson reminds us, his fiction seemed backward-looking to some. Citing Joyce Carol Oates’s dismissal of the novels as belonging to ‘an older English tradition,’ Johnson suggests that similar objections are still felt among scholars: ‘[T]o study Davies is to risk appearing reactionary, or at least quaint.’¹ Despite such objections, Davies’ fiction was generally celebrated during his lifetime. And his work was, though Davies made no secret of his discomfort with academic criticism, the subject of scholarly commentary and the occasion for pedagogy.

Davies may have been ambivalent about being discussed by academics, but he never saw himself as writing for the masses. By reviving and redefining the word clerisy in A Voice from the Attic (1960), he identified his desired readers. Where the historic meaning of clerisy was ‘a body of learned individuals,’ and later an equivalent for the literati, Davies modified it to describe his ideal audience: ‘those who read for pleasure, but not for idleness; who read for pastime, but not to kill time; who love books, but do not live by books,’ characterized by ‘[c]uriosity, the free mind, belief in good taste’ (‘The Shame of Brains’), along with ‘informed, rational, and intellectually adventurous individuality’ (‘Epilogue’).

Because such a group might seem more difficult to imagine in our time than in Davies’, perhaps scholarly and academic interest will help preserve his reputation. One crude measure of that interest is the number of entries on a writer in the MLA bibliography: the 79 entries to date show the academic community treating Davies’ work as important – though this number is well behind the most attended-to Canadian authors (Michael Ondaatje has 199 entries; Alice Munro, 240; Margaret Laurence, 250; and Margaret Atwood, 643). But we should not see Davies as appealing only to professional readers: a Google search, which can be used as a measurement of broader popularity, returns 200,000 hits for Davies (rounded to the nearest thousand), as compared to Laurence’s 108,000, Ondaatje’s 324,000, Munro’s 645,000, and Atwood’s 1,170,000. These numbers suggest substantial contemporary readership; in comparison with prominent American authors, for example, they put him ahead of Thomas Pynchon and only a bit behind John Steinbeck.

II

In the past, critics have often focused on Davies as a satirist and portraitist – locating his work in the context of that Canadian tradition of writers who capture the problems of claustrophobic community (as in the satiric humour of Thomas Chandler Haliburton, Stephen Leacock, Sara Jeannette Duncan, and W.O. Mitchell, as well as in the realist depictions of small towns in writers such as Sinclair Ross and Alice Munro). Other critics have noted Davies’ use of archetype and myth, seeing his fiction (beginning with the Deptford Trilogy) as an expression of the Frye-influenced interest in universal heroes and archetypal patterns that emerged...