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Robertson Davies

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William Robertson Davies Template:Post-nominals (28 August 1913 – 2 December 1995) was a Canadian novelist, playwright, critic, journalist, and professor. He was one of Canada's best known and most popular authors and one of its most distinguished "men of letters", a term Davies gladly accepted for himself.<ref>Responding to Peter Gzowski's query as to whether he accepted the label, Davies said, "I would be delighted to accept it. In fact, I think it's an entirely honourable and desirable title, but you know people are beginning to despise it." Davis, J. Madison (ed.) (1989). Conversations with Robertson Davies. Mississippi University Press. p. 99.</ref> Davies was the founding Master of Massey College, a graduate residential college associated with the University of Toronto.

BiographyEdit

Early lifeEdit

Davies was born in Thamesville, Ontario, the third son of William Rupert Davies and Florence Sheppard McKay.<ref name="RD">Template:Cite encyclopedia</ref> Growing up, Davies was surrounded by books and lively language. His father, a member of the Canadian Senate from 1942 to his death in 1967, was a newspaperman from Welshpool, Wales, and both parents were voracious readers. He followed in their footsteps and read everything he could. He also participated in theatrical productions as a child, where he developed a lifelong interest in drama.

He spent his formative years in Renfrew, Ontario (and renamed it as "Blairlogie", in his novel What's Bred in the Bone); many of the novel's characters are named after families he knew there. He attended Upper Canada College in Toronto from 1926 to 1932 and while there attended services at the Church of St. Mary Magdalene.<ref>Penguin USA: Book Club Reading Guides: The Cunning Man Template:Webarchive</ref> He would later leave the Presbyterian Church and join Anglicanism over objections to Calvinist theology. Davies later used his experience of the ceremonial of High Mass at St. Mary Magdalene's in his novel The Cunning Man.

After Upper Canada College, he studied at Queen's University at Kingston, Ontario, from 1932 until 1935. According to the Queen's University Journal Davies enrolled as a special student not working towards a degree, because he was unable to pass the mathematics component of Queen's entrance exam.<ref name=queensjournal2010-06-29/> At Queen's he wrote for the student paper, The Queen's Journal, where he wrote a literary column. He left Canada to study at Balliol College, Oxford, where he received a BLitt degree in 1938. The next year he published his thesis, Shakespeare's Boy Actors, and embarked on an acting career outside London. In 1940, he played small roles and did literary work for the director at the Old Vic Repertory Company in London. Also that year, Davies married Australian Brenda Mathews, whom he had met at Oxford, and who was then working as stage manager for the theatre.<ref name="RD"/> They spent their honeymoon in the Welsh countryside at Fronfraith Hall, Abermule, Montgomery, the family house owned by Rupert Davies.<ref>Template:Cite book Section 6, pt. 1.</ref>

Davies's early life provided him with themes and material to which he would often return in his later work, including the theme of Canadians returning to England to finish their education, and the theatre.

Middle yearsEdit

Davies and his new bride returned to Canada in 1940, where he took the position of literary editor at Saturday Night magazine. Two years later, he became editor of the Peterborough Examiner in the small city of Peterborough, Ontario, northeast of Toronto. Again he was able to mine his experiences here for many of the characters and situations which later appeared in his plays and novels.<ref name="RD"/>

Davies, along with family members William Rupert Davies and Arthur Davies, purchased several media outlets. Along with the Examiner newspaper, they owned the Kingston Whig-Standard newspaper, CHEX-AM, CKWS-AM, CHEX-TV, and CKWS-TV.

During his tenure as editor of the Examiner, which lasted from 1942 to 1955 (he subsequently served as publisher from 1955 to 1965), Davies published a total of 18 books, produced several of his own plays, and wrote articles for various journals.<ref name="RD"/> Davies set out his theory of acting in his Shakespeare for Young Players (1947), and then put theory into practice when he wrote Eros at Breakfast, a one-act play which was named best Canadian play of the year by the 1948 Dominion Drama Festival.<ref name="RDPlay">Template:Cite book</ref>

Eros at Breakfast was followed by Fortune, My Foe in 1949 and At My Heart's Core, a three-act play, in 1950. Meanwhile, Davies was writing humorous essays in the Examiner under the pseudonym Samuel Marchbanks. Some of these were collected and published in The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks (1947), The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks (1949), and later in Samuel Marchbanks' Almanack (1967). An omnibus edition of the three Marchbanks books, with new notes by the author, was published under the title The Papers of Samuel Marchbanks in 1985.<ref name="RDCB&A">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

During the 1950s, Davies played a major role in launching the Stratford Shakespearean Festival of Canada. He served on the Festival's board of governors, and collaborated with the Festival's director, Sir Tyrone Guthrie, in publishing three books about the Festival's early years.<ref name="RD"/><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Although his first love was drama and he had achieved some success with his occasional humorous essays, Davies found his greatest success in fiction. His first three novels, which later became known as The Salterton Trilogy, were Tempest-Tost (1951, originally conceived as a play), Leaven of Malice (1954, also the basis of the unsuccessful play Love and Libel) which won the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour, and A Mixture of Frailties (1958).<ref name="RDCB&A"/> These novels explored the difficulty of sustaining a cultural life in Canada, and life on a small-town newspaper, subjects of which Davies had first-hand knowledge. In a 1959 essay on Nabokov's Lolita, he wrote that she was a corrupt child taking advantage of a weak adult.

1960sEdit

File:Massey college.jpg
Exterior of the college from the southeast on Hoskin Avenue, showing residence of the master

In 1960, Davies joined Trinity College at the University of Toronto, where he would teach literature until 1981. The following year he published a collection of essays on literature, A Voice From the Attic, and was awarded the Lorne Pierce Medal for his literary achievements.<ref name="RD"/>

File:Robertson Davies in 1961.jpg
Davies in 1961

In 1963, he became the Master of Massey College, the University of Toronto's new graduate college.<ref name="RD"/> During his stint as Master, he initiated a tradition of writing and telling ghost stories at the yearly Christmas celebrations.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> These stories were later collected in the book High Spirits (1982).<ref name="RDCB&A"/>

1970sEdit

Davies drew on his interest in Jungian psychology to create Fifth Business (1970), a novel that relies heavily on Davies's own experiences, his love of myth and magic, and his knowledge of small-town mores. The narrator, like Davies, is of immigrant Canadian background, with a father who runs the town paper. The book's characters act in roles that roughly correspond to Jungian archetypes according to Davies's belief in the predominance of spirit over the things of the world.<ref name="RD"/>

Davies built on the success of Fifth Business with two more novels: The Manticore (1972), a novel cast largely in the form of a Jungian analysis (for which he received that year's Governor General's Literary Award),<ref name="NPRD">Template:Cite news</ref> and World of Wonders (1975). Together these three books came to be known as The Deptford Trilogy.

1980s and 1990sEdit

When Davies retired from his position at the university, his seventh novel, a satire of academic life, The Rebel Angels (1981), was published, followed by What's Bred in the Bone (1985) which was short-listed for the Booker Prize for fiction in 1986.<ref name="NPRD"/> The Lyre of Orpheus (1988) follows these two books in what became known as The Cornish Trilogy.<ref name="RDCB&A"/>

During his retirement from academe he continued to write novels which further established him as a major figure in the literary world: Murther and Walking Spirits (1991) and The Cunning Man (1994).<ref name="RDCB&A"/> A third novel in what would have been a further trilogy – the Toronto Trilogy – was in progress at the time of Davies's death.<ref name="RD"/> He also realized a long-held dream when he penned the libretto to Randolph Peters' opera: The Golden Ass, based on The Metamorphoses of Lucius Apuleius, just like that written by one of the characters in Davies's 1958 A Mixture of Frailties. The opera was performed by the Canadian Opera Company at the Hummingbird Centre in Toronto, in April 1999, several years after Davies's death.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

In its obituary, The Times wrote: "Davies encompassed all the great elements of life ... His novels combined deep seriousness and psychological inquiry with fantasy and exuberant mirth."<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> He remained close friends with John Kenneth Galbraith, attending Galbraith's eighty-fifth birthday party in Boston in 1993,<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> and became so close a friend and colleague of the American novelist John Irving that Irving gave one of the scripture readings at Davies's funeral in the chapel of Trinity College, Toronto. He also wrote in support of Salman Rushdie when the latter was threatened by a fatwā from Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran in reaction to supposed anti-Islam expression in his novel The Satanic Verses.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

Personal lifeEdit

Davies was married to Brenda Ethel Davies (1917–2013) in 1940 and survived by four grandchildren and three great-grandchildren from his three daughters Miranda Davies, Rosamond Bailey and author Jennifer Surridge.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref><ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

Davies never learned to drive.<ref name=TheWhig2015-11-25/> His wife Brenda routinely drove him to events and other excursions.

Awards and recognitionEdit

WorksEdit

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NovelsEdit

EssaysEdit

Fictional essays

edited by the author into:

Criticism

PlaysEdit

Short story collectionEdit

LibrettiEdit

Letters and diariesEdit

CollectionsEdit

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ReferencesEdit

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Further readingEdit

External linksEdit

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