The two voices of A Mixture of Frailties

The two voices of A Mixture of Frailties CLARA THOMAS 'The muhd's everything. Get it and you'll get the rest. If you don't get it, all the fiorituri and exercises in agility and legato in the world'll be powerless to make a good singer of you. The muhd's at the root of all. And that's what I teach my beginners, and my advanced puplis, and some who've gone out into the world and made big names, but who come back now and again for a brush-up with special problems. And mostly it all boils down to the muhd" (p.113). Goaded, cajoled and driven by Murtagh Molloy, Monica Gall learned to "breathe the muhd" and sing. So did her creator, Robertson Davies - for the difference in quality between A Mixture of Frailties (1958) and Fifth Business ( 1970) is precisely a matter of the mood and its sustaining. From its first words to its last, the voice of Dunstan Ramsay in Fifth Business is as unremittingly on target as the trajectory of the fated snowball that begins his story. In contrast, the third person narrative voice of A Mixture of Frailties moves between two keys which at times clash in discord. The frame-story of Salterton and the Bridgetower Trust is narrated by Davies' early and familiar voice, that of a social-satirist, detached, funny and sharp, but sometimes also gross and crude. The voice which narrates the story of Monica Gall is much closer to its subject, still sharp with wit, but always warm with understanding and sympathy. Nevertheless, there are many reasons for looking again at A Mixture of Frailties, reasons that range from its own autonomy as a highly readable novel, to its heightened present interest as a forerunner and, in some senses, a foreshadower of the Deptford trilogy, Fifth Business, The Manticore and 82 World of Wonders. The novel's deepest themes are moral. They are the same concerns about problems of evil, guilt and responsibility that permeate the RamsayStaunton -Dempster trilogy. Again, like each one of the latter, the major plot-line concerns the individual's growth to maturity, selfrecognition and self-acceptance - in this case the growth as artist and woman of Monica Gall. Furthermore the portrayal of Monica Gall stands alone in all of Davies' works. She is drawn in depth and with an entirely believable complexity of temperament and motivation so that beside her any of the rest of his women characters, even Liesl VitzlipOtzli, seems a cardboard-flat figure from a morality play. The strange alchemy of successful fiction transports Monica from the pages to live in the mind and imagination as surely as do Willa Cather's Thea Kronberg and Margaret Laurence's Morag Gunn, her fellow-fictional developing artists. The story of Monica Gall is both framed and propelled into action by the terms of the Bridgetower Trust and the dilemma of Solly Bridgetower and his wife, Veronica. Thus, at its beginning A Mixture of Frailties is linked with its predecessor Leaven of Malice, the story of the miserable, malicious, false engagement announcement - and the true and finally successful romance - of Solly and Veronica (Pearl) Vambrace. The book starts in the same vein of sardonic humour that permeated its predecessor: "She had planned her funeral, as she had planned all her social duties and observances, with care.... Not two hours after her physician had pronounced her dead, her lawyer, Mr. Matthew Snelgrove , had put a fat letter in the hands of her son Solomon, on the envelope of which was written in her firm, large hand, Directions for my Funeral'' ( p. 1). The humour speedily becomes black and bitter. Mrs. Bridgetower's entire estate is to be devoted to the training and education of "some young woman resident in this city of Salterton, who is desirous of following a career in the arts.... She is to be maintained Revue d'etudes canadiennes abroad in order, as your mother says, that she may bring back to Canada some of the tangible treasures of European tradition" ( p. 16). The trust, which involves the income from over a million dollars, will only terminate if and...