Robertson Davies and the Cornish Trilogy

Revietvs Robertson Davies and the Cornish Trilogy THE LYRE OF ORPHEUS. Robertson Davies. Toronto: Macmillan, 1988. WHAT'S BRED JN THE BONE. Robertson Davies. Toronto: Macmillan, 1985. THE REBEL ANGELS. Robertson Davies. Toronto: Macmillan, 1982. With the recent publication of The Lyre ofOrpheus, Robertson Davies presumably completes his third trilogy of fiction (or fourth , if you count the Marchbanks books). This latest novel is an impressive achievement in the expected Davies vein - witty, inventive, compulsively readable, and devastatingly critical of certain modern attitudes but , like the third book in the previous trilogies, it needs to be read not only on its own terms but in the light of (and as a complement to) its predecessors. Ifwe attempt this, we shall find that the Comish trilogy (as I suppose it will come to be called) operates on rather different principles from those earlier fictional sequences centred upon either Salterton or Deptford. Perhaps the first features of The Lyre ofOrpheus that we notice are the curious echoes that it sets up with many of its predecessors. At first, if my own initial reading was at all typical, these seemed disturbing. Can it be, I found myself thinking, that Davies is losing steam and merely repeating old effects? If, for example , one opens the dust-jacket to read the introductory summary, one finds this: "There is an important decision to be made. The Comish Foundation ... must decide upon what worthy undertaking to next dispense a portion of its considerable funds." Seasoned Davies readers will immediately think of the Bridgetower Trust in A Mixture ofFrailties, and its sending of Monica Gall to England to study music. This recollection is 140 strengthened when we read on and discover that the Comish Foundation decides to give its support to Hulda Schnakenburg (Schnak), "a grumpy, grimy, and thoroughly unpleasant young genius ofa music student." Monica was anything but grumpy and grimy, but it is difficult to escape the suspicion that the new plot is unfolding along disconcertingly familiar lines. At this point, however, a change is evident - one that merely takes our recollections back to an even earlier book. Schnak's task is to restore and complete an unfinished opera by E.T.A. Hoffmann that will be performed , with backing from the Comish Foundation, at the Stratford Festival. As we are plunged into situations where the lives of those connected with the opera are found to parallel certain events in the opera itself, The Lyre ofOrpheus begins to take on the appearance of a workedover (or, if one is unkind, warmed-up) version of Tempest-Tosi. It would not be difficult to compile a long list of similar echoes. The following instances make no claims to completeness . Early in the novel, Mamusia consults a Tarot-pack as in The Rebel Angels; an amusing scene between Simon Darcourt and Gunilla Dahl-Soot in a restaurant recalls similar sequences involving Ramsay and Padre Blazon in Fifth Business and Maria and Parlabane in The Rebel Angels; like Ramsay in Fifth Business, Darcourt finds himself in "a real adventure" after establishing an "eminently respectable life" (300-01); Dahl-Soot, the grotesque but talented musician, shares a number ofcharacteristics with Liesl Naegeli, while the cliche-ridden Cranes inevitably recall Norm and Dutchy in Leaven ofMalice; Schnak's attempted suicide during a full rehearsal of the opera repeats Hector Mackilwraith's action on the first night in Tempest-Tost; the imagery of wax and stamp here performs a similar function to that of root and crown in The Rebel Angels; the leitmotif of lesbianism here balances the equivalent leitmotif of homosexuality in the same novel. I have Revue detudes canadiennes Vol. 24, No. I {Prinremps 1989 Spring) assembled these connections, however, not to build a case against Davies but, rather, to defuse any such attempt. Davies is too self-conscious and skilled an artist to have repeated himself by accident . These repetitions - "variations on a theme" might be a more appropriate designation - are clearly deliberate; indeed , I suggest that further consideration of them may well lead us to a better understanding of Davies's purpose in his recent fiction. Some of these echoes may alert us to the possibility that Repetition is...