Robertson Davies: A Portrait in Mosaic.

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

Robertson Davies was, above all, a writer; books constituted a major part in his life. Judith Skelton Grant recognized this in her exhaustively researched, scholarly, well-balanced Robertson Davies: Man of Myth (1994), published the year before Davies’s death. The present book, linking up extracts from numerous memoirs of all sorts of people who encountered him, could have provided an ideal counterpart by offering a multifaceted, rather than traditional, single portrait. Unfortunately, it is badly flawed.

Sad to say, Val Ross died of cancer just as this book was completed. Still, the truth has to be told: she was a journalist—and it shows. So, of course, was the early Davies, but Ross’s journalism is closer to People magazine than to the high quality of the Peterborough Examiner in Davies’s early years. Ross, to be frank, is primarily interested in gossip; her idea of balance is to follow every positive assessment of Davies with a negative equivalent. The praise comes across as grudging. One receives virtually no information about his books. Far more space is devoted to his failures as a dramatist and such minor matters as the collapse of attempts to film his novels.

Moreover, the book is based on the pseudo-democratic assumption that one person’s opinion is as valid as any other. Not so. Davies was a satirist, exposing stuffiness, phoniness, superficial smartness, political correctness, etc. Seasoned readers of Davies will recognize in many of these memoirs precisely the qualities he so properly attacked. A recurring response may be summed up in Alice Munro’s book title: “Who do you think you are?” One detects an urge to cut him down to size.

Of course, Davies had his faults. Geniuses can be difficult at close quarters, and the awkward truths they reveal are frequently unwelcome. But he was a deeply serious artist, whose view of life is expressed through often deflating comedy. Fortunately, his wit, wisdom, and intelligence triumph over all attempts to belittle him here. By the end of the book I found myself recalling Shelley’s assessment of Coleridge: “A hooded eagle among blinking owls.”