Robertson Davies: An Appreciation

David Little is a graduate English student at the University of Toronto.

Most of the offerings in this collection have been printed elsewhere.
However, for those of us who do not own back issues of sundry newspapers
and scholarly journals, it is now possible to add to our bookshelves
important articles about Davies’s work—like, for instance, a version
of Gordon Roper’s groundbreaking paper on Jungian elements in Fifth
Business. In fact, this volume begins most appropriately with a reprint
of an interview with Davies, in which he is engaged in a lively
discussion about many of the diverse topics that form the central focus
of other essays in this book.

Subsequently, Herbert Whittaker provides a series of reminiscences
about Davies’s travails in the nascent Canadian theatre of the postwar
years, and Martin Hunter relates his own anecdotes explaining how the
author’s carefully cultivated personas manifest themselves in his art.
Balancing these are equally cogent but less personal commentaries about
Davies’s work. Richard Plant explores the consequences for his drama
of the sort of struggle outlined by Whittaker. Stephen Bonnycastle
censures the elitist ethos prevalent in the Deptford trilogy. In turn,
Bonnycastle’s position is addressed by two further articles: Barbara
Godard counters it, whereas Linda Lamont-Stewart extends it to the
Cornish novels, condemning Davies’s “reactionary political views.”

I do have two concerns about this book. The pair of excellent articles
about A Mixture of Frailties—one by Clara Thomas, and the other by
W.J. Keith (original to this volume)—might more appropriately have
been placed before rather than after those essays focusing on the
subsequent Deptford trilogy, particularly since both Keith and Thomas
assert that this earlier novel is transitional. Also, the conclusion of
James Neufeld’s argument regarding Davies as egoist is marred by a
careless omission. He offers a crucial passage from World of Wonders
that distinguishes between “egotist” and “egoist”;
unfortunately, since in this collection the essential “t” is missing
from the former term, this putative contrast collapses and we are left
more confused than convinced.

Notwithstanding these problems, Robertson Davies: An Appreciation is a
valuable book—varied yet coherent, generally accessible to both the
academic and the lay reader—and I am pleased to have it for my
library.