A Celtic Temperament: Robertson Davies as Diarist Read online

  Selection and editorial content © 2015 by Pendragon Ink and Ramsay Derry Services Ltd.

  Robertson Davies diaries © Pendragon Ink

  McClelland & Stewart is a division of Random House of Canada Limited, a Penguin Random House Company

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Davies, Robertson, 1913-1995

  [Diaries. Selections]

  A Celtic temperament : Robertson Davies as diarist / edited by Jennifer Surridge and Ramsay Derry.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-0-7710-2764-2 (bound).– ISBN 978-0-7710-2765-9 (html)

  1. Davies, Robertson, 1913-1995 – Diaries. 2. Authors, Canadian (English) – 20th century – Diaries. I. Surridge, Jennifer, editor II. Derry, Ramsay, editor III. Title.

  PS8507.A67Z45 2015 C813’.54 C2015-904373-5

  C2015-904374-3

  All photographs are courtesy of Jennifer Surridge unless otherwise credited.

  The photograph on this page in the second photo insert is courtesy of York University Libraries, Clara Thomas Archives and Special Collections, Toronto Telegram fonds, ASC07267.

  McClelland & Stewart,

  a division of Random House of Canada Limited,

  a Penguin Random House Company

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  v3.1

  For Brenda

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  1959

  1960

  1961

  1962

  1963

  Photo Inserts

  Sources and Acknowledgements

  INTRODUCTION

  —

  ROBERTSON DAVIES WAS AN ASSIDUOUS DIARIST. He began keeping diary notes when he was a teenager and by the time he was eighteen it was an established practice, even though for many years it was sporadic rather than regular. But the total wordage is astonishing: over three million words. He was, from the beginning, skeptical and sometimes contemptuous of himself as a diarist. In 1934, when he was twenty, he wrote:

  I cannot imagine why I keep a Diary. It is, in spite of my best efforts, a thoroughly selective and dishonest document, a novel in which I am always the hero. I suspect that I hope someone will read it some day, and that I always write with an eye to effect. It is, however, a hard habit to break and I regard it rather superstitiously.

  Fortunately he did not break the habit but, on the contrary, elaborated on it. Like many artists, literary and otherwise, he used his diaries as aides-mémoire to store up experiences, emotions, perceptions, and ideas that he could recover at a later time. They were also a means of examining his own life, for he was a man who, throughout his lifetime, strove toward self-understanding and self-knowledge through his study of literature, drama, and art, and his extensive reading of Freud, Jung, and other major psychoanalytical authors. He recorded his states of mind, his dreams, and intimate details of his marriage. The diaries show a man who, despite frequent periods of frustration, illness, and depression, enjoyed life and believed it should be valued and taken seriously. He was deeply interested in the society he lived in and the people he encountered. More often than not, he found comedy in the world around him and delighted in recording it. As he established his reputation as a writer, he recognized that his diaries were part of his literary legacy and assumed that they would have future readers. This did not inhibit him from keeping them as honest and spontaneous responses to the day. They convey the immediacy of the experience, and what he described as his “celtic temperament”—his often mercurial changes of perception and judgment of events and people, and his swift changes of mood from dejection to exhilaration. And, like many great diarists, he recorded the interplay between the momentous and the banal, the descriptions of public activities and events in tight and often incongruous juxtaposition with totally personal experiences and feelings.

  Davies also enjoyed the diary as a literary form. Among his first published successes were the semi-fictional diaries of Samuel Marchbanks, whom he had invented as an alter ego; these had first appeared in his early freelance newspaper columns, later became a regular feature in the Peterborough Examiner, were syndicated to other Canadian papers, and later still were published in book form, in 1947. The title of his weekly column for the Toronto Star was “A Writer’s Diary,” and he sometimes used the diary form for occasional pieces.

  He took his diary-keeping seriously. In addition to his personal daily diary he kept what he called his “big” diary in which he periodically made longer, more considered entries. He kept a separate diary for major trips, and most years he kept a theatre-going diary. He loved all forms of live entertainment including circuses, magicians, and puppet shows, and he also went to the movies a lot, about thirty times a year. He enjoyed them primarily as relaxation and rarely wrote about them critically. His idea of a really wonderful movie experience was a horror double bill, although he usually had to go alone. After seeing one he wrote, “Have always had a taste for such things: they cheer me oddly.” He kept a special diary covering the 1960 production of his play Love and Libel, and he began his separate diary about Massey College early in 1961, soon after he was offered the position of Master. This gradually became his regular diary over the twenty years he was at the College.

  This selection of his diaries, the first to be published, is drawn from the years 1959 to 1963, a particularly busy time in his immensely productive career, a period that included what he considered his greatest failure, but from which he recovered swiftly with Vincent Massey’s unexpected invitation. In 1959 Robertson Davies was forty-five. He was already known by this time as Canada’s leading man of letters, a recognition that had not been his original ambition. Born in 1913, he had grown up in small-town Ontario, attended Upper Canada College in Toronto, Queen’s University in Kingston, and Balliol College, Oxford (although formally graduating only from the last of these). He had hoped for a career in British theatre as an actor, director, and playwright, and in the late 1930s he worked in London in the famous Old Vic company founded by Lilian Baylis. By then the company was led by Tyrone Guthrie, the foremost theatrical director of his generation, who was to become one of Davies’s closest friends. But shortly after war broke out in 1939, the company was forced to close, and Davies, who had recently married Brenda Mathews, an Australian who worked at the Old Vic as a stage manager, was advised to return to Canada. Unfit for military service because of his poor eyesight, he began to establish himself as a literary journalist in Toronto, working for the weekly Saturday Night magazine. Then, in 1942, his father, Senator Rupert Davies, the proprietor of a small but by now very lucrative newspaper empire, pressured Rob, as he was known to his friends, to take over as editor of one of Rupert’s papers, the daily Peterborough Examiner. Rob did not treat the job as a family sinecure but worked hard to make the Examiner the most admired small-city newspaper in the country, and he himself became a highly regarded editorial writer. However, by 1959 his work at the Examiner was mostly routine for him, and he rarely referred to it in much detail in his diaries.

  Meanwhile, he and Brenda had thrown themselves into local amateur theatre, dir
ecting, acting, and, in his case, writing. By the mid-1950s Davies was the foremost Canadian playwright, with a dozen plays both published and frequently performed—although, to his frustration, not outside Canada. He also reviewed books and theatre for the Toronto papers and the national magazines. His first book for a general readership, The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks, and its successor, The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks, were followed by three novels, Tempest-Tost, Leaven of Malice, and A Mixture of Frailties, now known as the Salterton Trilogy. He had a broad interest in promoting Canadian culture, and he had made an influential submission to Vincent Massey’s 1949–51 royal commission on Canadian arts, letters, and sciences. He had been involved in the founding of the Stratford Shakespearean Festival in 1953, was coauthor of books about its first three seasons, and sat on its board of governors. But after nearly twenty years of living in Peterborough, both he and Brenda felt worn down by the obdurate ordinariness that overlay Canadian provincial life. They had a number of good friends in Peterborough, but they wanted to be more at the centre of things. They longed for a change, for something that could take them at least to Toronto. So Rob welcomed the invitation to become a part-time guest lecturer in the English Department of Trinity College in the University of Toronto, starting in September 1960.

  Davies was by now a prominent and easily recognized public figure. Tall, ample, and bearded, with a richly developed theatrical voice and with a wardrobe of grey flannels, unusual tweed jackets, three-piece suits in a slightly Edwardian style, a full-length greatcoat, and a swooping fedora, he had an imposing and distinctive appearance that made him seem older than he was, and that sometimes attracted the derisive attention of boys in the town. His rather magisterial presence hid well the mixture of ambition, anxieties, and insecurities, and often conflicting perceptions and emotions that all bubbled furiously within and that are recorded in the diaries.

  Throughout the diaries, from the time of his marriage, his partnership with Brenda is a consistent theme. A letter Rob wrote to her in 1952, when she was making her first trip back to Australia since she had left at the age of eighteen, conveys something of their relationship.

  So let me say now how happy—deeply happy—I am that you have made this journey, for I feel it will be a turning point in our life together. It will, I hope, hitch you up again to a whole train of thoughts and feelings which our marriage seemed to cut you off from. Coming to live in Canada was a wrench and a nervous adventure, and I never forget or undervalue the great courage and trust in me which you brought to it. But from now on you will have, so to speak, all your luggage with you, and Australia, whatever it may mean to you, will never seem so far way again.

  Brenda was his constant companion, his first reader, critic, and consultant. Widely read, but not “literary” by temperament or education, she brought a direct, personal, and practical response not only to his work but to all the things they saw and did and read together. She was the family manager and also the family driver, for Rob did not drive, and she often drove him to and from his meetings and lectures in Toronto. She drove well and she enjoyed good cars. Brisk and athletic in bearing, stylish in appearance, Brenda spoke with an assurance that hid a shy and sometimes nervous temperament. Like Rob, she had grown up in a comparatively wealthy if idiosyncratic family, and they both assumed a certain level of social status. But together, they saw themselves rather as theatrical troupers, and their relationship is perhaps reflected in that of Sir John Tresize and Milady in Davies’s 1975 novel, World of Wonders, or an earlier fictional couple, the Crummleses, in Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby: they were on their own in life together, they must move on from show to show, they must do the right thing, and they must always be prepared to put on a good face to the world. They were also devoted if demanding parents of three daughters, close in age, Miranda, Jennifer, and Rosamond.

  A family member who appears only occasionally in the diaries but who was a powerful continuing presence for Rob was his father, referred to in the diaries as WRD. Senator W. Rupert Davies was loving and generous and was proud of his son’s accomplishments, but he was also, from Rob’s point of view, overbearing and judgmental, and to a surprising degree intruded into Rob’s imaginative and creative life. Though he had formally retired in 1951, Rupert Davies continued to control the business he had founded, which came to include television stations as well as newspapers. The first two of his three sons were close in age. Fred, the eldest, had not been significantly active in the business, and had died in 1954. Arthur managed the Kingston Whig-Standard, the centrepiece of the family business. Rob was younger than Arthur by ten years. After the death of his first wife, Rupert Davies remarried, and Rob’s stepmother, Margaret, was approximately his own age. Rupert now lived in Toronto in a large house on Hawthorn Gardens and, in the summer, in a larger Gothic revival house, Leighton Hall, in Wales. Rupert had been born in Wales, had immigrated to Canada while a boy, and now enjoyed returning to Wales as a success, holding for a time the honorary title of Lord High Sheriff of Montgomeryshire.

  At the beginning of 1933 Davies acquired a beautiful leather-bound book, about seven by ten inches, for what he called his “big diary,” and he continued to use similar notebooks for many years. He wrote his theatre diaries and travel diaries in various notebooks. For his daily personal diary he originally used a small commercial yearly diary and later small Smythson red leather-bound diaries. Until 1970 all of his diaries, including the Massey College diary, were handwritten in the distinctive italic script that he had taught himself in his twenties. But eventually he found that writer’s cramp was literally cramping his literary style:

  FEBRUARY 16, 1970: Have decided to continue this Diary in typewritten form; my right arm is so stiff at the elbow and my hand in consequence so subject to jerks and unaccountable wriggles, that I cannot write decently.… But apart from the ugliness of my script, I am inhibited from saying what I really want to say because writing soon becomes difficult and painful with the consequence that the Diary becomes increasingly gnomic and confined to the stark narrative of my deeds. Whereas it was always my plan—was it Leland who said this?—“to be somewhat at large, and have orniture.”

  He was a fast two-finger typist from his days as a journalist and editorial writer, and once he began typing his diaries the entries became considerably fuller and have a great deal of “orniture.”

  Mainly for reasons of discretion, Robertson Davies had instructed that his diaries not be published or made available to the public until twenty years after his death, which was in December 1995, and with some minor exceptions this wish has been respected. He had always intended to do something with them himself and at one stage considered using them as the base for some form of autobiography. After her father’s death, Jennifer Surridge, with the permission of Brenda Davies, his literary executor, began to type a literal transcription of nearly all the diaries, a project that took about fifteen years, and she invited Ramsay Derry, who had worked with Davies as an editor and was a long-time family friend, to review the typescripts. As the end of the twenty-year limitation approached, we began to consider possible publishing arrangements. Brenda had read all of the transcripts and took part in these discussions before her death in 2013 at the age of ninety-five.

  The sheer size of the complete diaries, with their overlapping layers, presents a considerable editorial and publishing challenge. The layers are by no means watertight, and entries in one diary may often illuminate or coordinate with an entry in another. Accordingly, for this selection, in order to maintain an easily readable ongoing narrative, we have drawn on all the layers of the diaries and interleaved them without separate identification. Overall, our selection uses about 50 per cent of the original diaries for the years 1959 to 1963.

  Because Davies published frequently in the diary form, we can project the editorial principles he might expect to be used in editing his diaries for publication. The diary style of the writing with incomplete sentences without a first person pronoun subject is
generally maintained. However, in the interests of comfortable reading, we have expanded most of his contractions, frequently replaced the initials of people with their spelled-out names, reduced his use of capitalization, normalized his punctuation and corrected misspellings, and clarified inadvertent ambiguities.

  A page of the 1959 daily personal diary.

  Davies did not want the publication of his diaries to be gratuitously hurtful, and we have avoided a few passages that would intrude unfairly on private individuals, but otherwise the selections are representative of the whole. We have resisted cleaning the diaries up to meet current mores. It often amused Davies to interpret people’s characters and behaviour in terms of their appearance or their backgrounds, whether social, ethnic, religious, or geographic. These perspectives may now sometimes seem offensive. But by the standards of his generation he was not racist or prejudiced, and ultimately he judged people on their merits as he saw them. His snobbery was easily trumped by his appreciation of each person’s genuine worth, talent, or achievement.

  Robertson Davies himself frequently doubted the value or interest of his accumulating diaries, but when he was arranging to donate them to Library and Archives Canada in 1992 he wrote, “Brenda says my diaries are the stuff from which social history is made, and I cannot imagine that Canada has an embarrassment of such material.” They were both right, but the diaries are more than social history, as we hope this introductory selection shows. In their variety, intimacy, and honesty, they present an extraordinarily rich portrait of the man and his times and an entertaining account of a life as it is being lived.

  1959

  —

  AT THE END OF 1958, Robertson Davies was living at 361 Park Street in Peterborough, Ontario, with his wife, Brenda, and his three teenage daughters, Miranda, Jennifer, and Rosamond. Miranda and Jennifer were boarding at Bishop Strachan School in Toronto and Rosamond was at school in Peterborough. In addition to working and writing as publisher and editor of the Peterborough Examiner, a daily newspaper, Davies was just beginning to write a regular weekly literary column for the Toronto Star called “A Writer’s Diary,” and he was still contributing reviews to Saturday Night magazine. His most recent novel, A Mixture of Frailties, had been published in 1958, but his recently completed play about Casanova, called General Confession, had been declined by the Davis family, owners of the Crest Theatre in Toronto, for whom it had been written. He continued to serve on the board of governors of the Stratford Shakespearean Festival, where the artistic director was now Michael Langham. Meanwhile, he was being encouraged by his friend and theatrical mentor Tyrone Guthrie to adapt his novel Leaven of Malice into a play, which Guthrie proposed to direct and which, through Guthrie’s theatrical connections, was to be produced on Broadway.