Robertson Davies: The Tory mode

Robertson Davies: the Tory mode ROBERT CLUETT The use of style as an expression or negation of political, cultural, and religious values is not a new thing. The most durable example in the Modern Era is probably that of the English Puritans of the seventeenth century, though the history of the phenomenon during the Christian era goes back far beyond them. Instances more familiar to contemporary readers would include the long hair and then-outlandish dress of the Woodstock Nation, the ostentatious asceticism (Puritan echo?) of the life-style of Ralph Nader, and the radical chic chronicled a few years ago by Tom Wolfe. 1 We are all aware of the phenomenon, but the instances .that come most readily to mind are those of people and groups that are self~styled spokesmen for the future. Less common and less appealing to our progress-biased sensibilities - are styles that by their properties make some affirmation of the values of the past. Such a style is that of Robertson Davies. It is one thing to say this on hunch, prejudice , and biographical information; it is rather another to discover and specify the particular habits and other recursive elements in Davies' style than can be seen to assert certain values. Our technique of discovery in this case is that of the York Computer Inventory of Prose Style, a bank of 300 samples, 3,500 words each, from 185 writers since 1560. The samples are encoded into a 95-slot syntactic code and are then processed in several ways by the York University computer. Comparison of computer results from a number of samples reveals several of the distinctive formal features of each sample as well as distinctive formal features of their authors' styles.2 Davies' career since the latter 1920's would seem to have been cut from the centre of the tweed of the Upper Canadian WASP Journal of Canadian Studies Establishment: he was educated at Upper Canada College and at Queen's, he holds a degree from Oxford, and since 1963 has presided as Master of Massey College at the University of Toronto. Despite his avowed lack of United Empire Loyalist blood, there is possibly no person in North America better qualified by training, experience, and temperament to be a spokesman for the values of our English heritage in education and culture. And Davies has not in this regard buried his talents: he once defended WASP values on television; he is clearly identified with the cause of slow change (if any) in education; and in the book of particular interest to this article - A Voice from the Attic - he issued a "call to the clerisy to wake up and assert itself." 3 Davies defines the clerisy ("The word is little known because what it describes has disappeared") as "those. . . who read for pleasure and with some pretension to taste" (7). And his call "is a call, not a roar" (7). Though ostensibly a literate ramble through the pleasures of reading, the book asserts and reasserts with persistent yet temperate firmness the notion that "we are all beads on a string - separate yet part of a unity" ( 114). The past, as Davies says, "is only partly irrecoverable" ( 114). In consonance with his Tory message Davies has fashioned a muted, Anglo-Tory style that acts at several levels as an expression of the conservatism of its author. Examples of that style are very easy to find at the lexical level. C/erisy itself is outdated in both fact and word, and not many of our contemporaries are likely to use a vocabulary that includes a high density of items like emulation, adjure, hortatory, base passions, good taste, decent, and be/dam. Such tokens from our linguistic past are mixed into a lexical assortment that habitually includes heavy components of both social rank and religion (grandee, noble, position, high priest and the like), to which are added sprinklings of Anglicisms (boss, where most of us would say employer, did not play games, instead of our customary terms for 41 a t h I et i c participation). The Anglicisms, though small in number, make a heavy impression because they are unusual in our own literary...