Robertson Davies: Man of Myth

Pauline Carey is the author of Magic and What’s in a Name?

Robertson Davies had many other lives before he became famous as a
novelist. His first love was the theatre, and it was as a playwright
that he suffered perhaps his worst failures and deepest hurt. He was
also a journalist, and the founding master of Massey College in Toronto;
he held the latter post for 20 years.

These separate careers usually overlapped, as the author makes clear in
this exhaustive work. Her study of this exuberant life took more than 10
years, and the result is a book crammed with information, photographs,
an excellent index, and 78 pages of notes. Influences on Davies’s work
are carefully explored, from his powerful parents and his childhood
hunger for Victor Hugo, magic, and the theatre, to his mature delight in
esoteric information of all sorts and his very adult passion for Carl
Jung. The plot of each novel is also meticulously explained, and the
author is tenacious in ferreting out real-life sources for Davies’s
characters, ignoring his response to a query, in which he wrote in
italics “My books are works of imagination.”

In recent years, works of biography have become very large and very
long. This latest example will prove a splendid reference book for
future students of the work of Robertson Davies, but as for the man,
there are questions left. To her credit, the author includes Davies’s
view on this matter when she tells us, “As far as he is concerned, the
ideal biography ... is possible only in fiction.”