A Celtic Temperament: Robertson Davies as Diarist Read online

  At dinner Betty and Peter wrangled about royalty, she for and he against. In the evening Tony read his last chapter aloud, then we had theatre gossip till 12:30, and chattered about MacLeish’s J.B.

  TUESDAY, JULY 14, LETTER TO BRENDA

  Dearest Pink and Girls:

  We are now nine in number: Tony and Judy, the Reas, Zeisler, Joe Hone, myself, and two old ladies, Miss Bunty Worby and Miss Meg Davis, who arrived on Monday. Miss Worby was Tony’s mother’s companion for many years and is now too old to be shifted. The nasty little dog, Scamp (who bit me in the leg yesterday), is hers, called “my wee man” rather unpleasantly. They are indefatigable pickers of the raspberries which Judy sells. Poor Mrs. Rea is a slave. “I think I’ll go into Newbliss this morning,” says she. “Oh, be a dear and pick five pounds of berries and leave them with Old Becky,” says Judy. Five pounds is a lot of berries. But Judy is avid of gold. I don’t think the petty sums thus realized mean much to her, but she is like a child playing shop, and presses everybody into service. It is rather amusing that the five men cluster around the sink and do the breakfast dishes, while the four women put on macs and rubber boots and rush out in the rain for 9 pennyworth of greenish raspberries.

  On the Leaven of Malice play I am working virtually alone, because Tony will not settle down to it. He has finished his own book (and I have read all the proofs) and he cannot get at anything else. He talks about writing a “manifesto” for Rea and Zeisler, and has no stomach for the niggling work on Leaven of Malice. So I must do it and really I don’t much mind, for it is his ideas rather than his actual writing which is valuable. So far the ideas have tended to be of the “That won’t do: see if you can think of anything else” kind. But there are many worse things than that.

  Yesterday we went in to Monaghan, a bleak ugly town with its share of madmen and dirt. The Reas are very good sports and do not shrink from the dirt, but their glances are eloquent. Here at Annagh-ma-Kerrig, of course, the towels and napkins are not changed, and the strain of nine people and the maids on the one gasping o’erparted w.c. is intense. I have been brought to using the chummy, and emptying it out of the window into the garden. In so damp a climate, it makes small difference.

  Love to you all, from the bogs.

  Rob

  WEDNESDAY, JULY 15: At supper Tony and Judy were at their old tricks. Tony says, “Nobody who is anybody eats a peach with its skin on.” Cries Old Meg, “Trash: nobody who is anybody cares if anybody thinks they’re anybody or not!” She can daunt Tony. So can I. I Come the Scholarly and it quells them both; but I don’t like doing it for it leads to pedantry, but it can be done. To my room at 10 to write to Brenda.

  WEDNESDAY, JULY 15, LETTER TO BRENDA

  Dearest Pink:

  It is 10 o’clock and I have come upstairs because I wanted electric light: in the drawing-room (which boasts one globe) they have not yet put it on, and though I can neither read nor write, Tony and Meg Davis are playing patience. Meg is about seventy-five and an old friend from Belfast, and she and Tony bully one another unmercifully: she “knew the garden” in Tony’s mother’s time, and insists it has gone to ruin, and goads Tony to great feats of weeding and transplanting. I was sucked in after tea for some heavy weeding: they have the scutch-grass very badly. It is locally called “twitch” and is in the box-hedges, so when Meg says to Judy, “Ye’ve terrible twitch in your box,” I know that no indecency is meant.

  The Reas and Peter Zeisler left this morning. They were very nice and bid us look them up in New York. Tony and I did some good work on the play this morning. It is beginning to take shape: he wants more short scenes. Also the plan of production begins to emerge—many small trucks with wee bits of setting on them. This means a good deal of patching and tinkering, not as much work as I was prepared for but tinkering takes time. Fortunately I have a nice room to work in, and Tony’s beast of a typewriter. So most of the day I peg away, and turn up for meals. Last night he read us all the last chapter of his book, which is very good. Then we talked about J.B.

  Tony is a strange one. After the weeding yesterday I wanted a bath, to avoid stiffness. “Hurry up,” he cried, “and I’ll get into your water, so we won’t run down the tank.” And he did, and pushed in while I was having my bath and nakedly o’erhung me while I was in the tub. Then hopped in and swilled around in my suds, with a right good will.

  My letters to you seem to be a long whimper about the dirtiness of the Guthries, which I do not mean, but it is worrisome. The dishwashing! But Old Meg will have none of it. “Put that back, Tony, it’s DORTY!” she screams. I warm to her, I must say, and she to me, I think, for she offers me toffees from her personal store. Well, I am achieving what I came for, because the play goes ahead, and Tony’s ideas are, on the whole, good. I remember Hugh MacCraig’s advice, and handle him with kid gloves. But he intends to do it all right, and is truly interested in the collaboration. He has bushels of ideas, and thank Heaven he leaves it to me to carry them out.

  Eleven o’clock now and quite dark outside. Goodnight, dearest Brenda: I miss you very much, and wish you were here to halve the discomfort and double the fun. Because there is a lot of fun, but the kind that would be twice as delightful if you were here to share it. It was very stupid of me to come away without a picture of you.

  Much love to the girls and unreckoned heaps of it to you—Rob

  THURSDAY, JULY 16: Worked with Tony this morning and then went on to try the suggestions he made. In the afternoon to Monaghan for his arthritis injection; Tony and Judy in front and Old Meg, Joe, and me in the back of the baby Morris—very squeezed. Then to Lady Rossmore’s to a fête for the British Legion—a kind of raspberry social. Torrential rain, so it had to be indoors. Gave 10 shillings. Tony judged the hats, made by the ladies of bits of newspaper and paper ribbon. A dull affair. Returning, Tony sat in the back and I in the front as Old Meg insisted that I was bigger than he, but when she got him in beside her she found differently. In the evening Tony and I read aloud from A Mixture of Frailties, which reads very well, and brought many laughs, even from Miss Worby, who has read it twice. Then Tony and Joe and I sat up till 1, talking about J.B. Priestley,30 and the miseries which can come from early success. The dirt here worries me: towels, napkins, all that sort of thing, never changed. Yet constant bathing. Strange.

  FRIDAY, JULY 17: A wretched day when nothing seems to go right. Work all morning with a headache: work in the afternoon and Tony comes in, hears what I have done, and does not think any of it will do! He sees the play as a romantic comedy, I as fantastic farce. Walk to the post in pouring rain, with headache (sinus) and despair. The trouble is, Tony condemns what he has half heard and cannot have fully comprehended. But I must heed him, or he will want to write himself, and he can’t. Hugh MacCraig warned me to handle him with kid gloves, and I do, though longing to give him the rough side of my tongue. Tonight read more Mixture of Frailties; how it improves read aloud and how an audience multiplies its effect.

  FRIDAY, JULY 17, LETTER TO BRENDA

  Dearest Pink:

  I am now working very hard, and get quite tired. Judy says I don’t get out enough in the fresh air, which is nonsense, because the air in my bedroom is just as cold and wet as the air out-of-doors. The discomfort is of a special quality: the all-embracing damp cold is a big part of it; so is the oniony, very greasy food; so is the dirt—never a clean towel, and my napkin stinks and is grey. Judy grabs any fat off my plate that I don’t eat and consumes it with relish. Their miserliness takes extreme forms: this morning Tony found that the proofs of his book had gone astray, but he wouldn’t call the post office in Dublin, because the call might be a long one and could cost him £1! Yet in other ways they are so generous! It is just a thing about money. She makes £10 on the garden in a year but slaves £300 to get it.

  So my days pass in work and lively evenings of talk and Irish whisky. Tony and I are reading A Mixture of Frailties aloud to the party and you’d be amazed how well it reads!

&nbs
p; I miss you almost to bursting.

  Much love to you and les girls

  Rob

  SATURDAY, JULY 18: Toil away all day to write the new opening for the play on the lines Tony wants. I am sure it rained five times today, and in between there would be perhaps half an hour of sunshine; in some of these intervals I took a few pictures. Tonight continued the reading of Mixture of Frailties, which gives pleasure and which Tony reads very well. Wonderful moonlight on the lake and garden: done on a stage it would be monstrously sentimental, but Nature has none of these foolish qualms.

  SUNDAY, JULY 19: In the morning Tony, Meg, and Joe to church and I talk with Bunty, who tells me Tony was very much his mother’s son, and had a distant but not quarrelsome relationship with his father. When Tony returns I am conscripted to pull groundsel among the strawberries. After dinner Tony and I work all afternoon on the play: he likes my new opening, and we work on physical details of settings, and their management, and on this he is remarkable. Then we plan a new final scene and some contrapuntal passages. Very interesting and helpful and sets out my work for the week to come.

  At dinner Tony asked those who had not read A Mixture of Frailties to guess what would happen: Old Meg predicted darkly that Monica would “come to no good and have to go home.” Tonight we came to the scene where Monica loses her maidenhead in the bathroom at Neuadd Goch, and later asks Revelstoke to be her lover: Old Meg received it very sourly. As Joe says, to hear an author read such things from his own book seems to her an affront. Joe is in misery: an Irish film company has asked him to do a scenario from a book about a hideous dwarf in Galicia; he can make nothing of it, and we tease him with suggestions. Tony is particularly fecund of wheezes for giving the dwarf quality: he suggests a child of four on whom a huge head has been fixed. It continues to be chilly; they call it summer, but it is more like a bad November.

  MONDAY, JULY 20: In the night I woke roaring because I dreamed Joe’s dwarf was strangling me. Somehow I have taken a chill and feel miserable: sharp stabbings inside and a general weakness like ’flu. Keep to my room most of the day and sleep a lot: do not mention to the others that I am unwell, for fear of well-meant remedies. Of course no work possible. Old Meg goes back to Belfast. She would not say goodbye to me: offended by my “dirty” book! To bed and have a poor night, with pain and sleeplessness. This is no house in which to be seedy: the general strenuosity, the greasy food, and the dirt are all against it. The methods of washing-up appall me: cigarette stubs and butter in the water, and the only dishes that are scraped are those the dog is given to lick. There is a bucket for the hens under the sink and so far as I can discern, the hens live on coffee-grounds, tea leaves, and empty cigarette boxes. I suppose I am ridiculous and faddy, but such things destroy my appetite. The bathroom hangs full of Isabella-coloured ladies’ lingerie.

  Tony has been going through a lot of family possessions, and his curious cast of mind is never better exemplified than with these. He has a fine enamel snuffbox given to Tyrone Power, for which a dealer has offered him £600 but he won’t sell that; instead wants to sell a Victorian Power seal, a piece of trash worth perhaps 15 shillings. “Some American would buy it; they don’t know anything.” He wants money but wants it for trash, from Americans: he seems to have no sense that this is cheating.

  I am aware that this diary seems very critical of the Guthries, whose guest I am: perhaps I should say that their conversation is plentifully packed with criticism of me, and I am astonished to be called “worldly,” by which they mean ambitious and climbing. They are charmers, but loonies.

  TUESDAY, JULY 21: Continue to be unwell: a restless and miserable night. Miss Worby takes me in hand and doses me with weak bicarbonate of soda solution every four hours, with good effect. Tony and Joe go to Dublin and it is quiet here all day, so I do a little work, read Little Dorrit, and doze in an armchair in my room, rather invalidish. Tony rouses me from a nap when he returns with his lifelong friend Christopher Scaife31 and Marc Blitzstein.32 Both very charming. Later arrive Hubert and Peggy Butler and Peter Smithwick: Hubert is a landowner, Peggy is Tony’s sister and rather like him, and young Smithwick is a son of the well-known brewers. So we are ten in number. After dinner we go for a walk and Blitzstein impresses me by the ease and charm of his address. I walk with Scaife and Smithwick: the former a genial and learned man, the latter a very polite, intelligent fellow of, I should have said, twenty but I believe he is twenty-three. Must get to work; my megrim has cost me two days.

  WEDNESDAY, JULY 22: Feel better; the Butlers, Scaife, and Smithwick off on an antiquarian jaunt organized by the Georgian Society to Castle Coole and Florence Court. Work in the morning but not well. Tony comes in to say Marc has been playing Juno to him and he does not like it: shallow and mock-Irish. At lunch Marc talks about Schönberg, with whom he studied. He talks all the time, and well. In the afternoon he and I are set to picking raspberries by Judy. He said, “Will I cut my hands? They’re my living.” Tony said, “Rubbish.” At dinner Tony was on one of his flights about the villainy of accents other than his own—Australian, Canadian, American. He is dogmatic in a schoolboy fashion. This evening he and Scaife sang: Scaife has great tenderness and musicianship and has had a sweet, charming voice. But Tony—boy again—wants everything very fast and ranting. It is sad to watch Judy when Tony is singing—she loves him so that she weeps unashamedly, but will not close her eyes for fear of losing sight of his face. I think this embarrasses him, for he will not heed her when she calls for her favourites. But Scaife is very sweet to her and sings to her. He sang Wood’s “Ethiopia Saluting the Colours” with fine feeling and Marc played it well. Then I was asked to read the Yarrows’ party from Leaven of Malice, which I did, with good effect. A good evening, marred only when Bunty Worby’s dog, Scamp, had too much music and had noisy hysterics.

  WEDNESDAY, JULY 22, LETTER TO BRENDA

  Dearest Pinkie:

  I mention, just in passing, that it is beginning to arouse comment here how seldom I get letters from home. Actually I think it is their wretched postal system. But anyhow, stir up those lazy girls and save me from shame. I seem to have been away an age, though it is only two weeks today, and I miss you all—but you especially. The woe of parted lovers—wet dreams, which are no substitute, I can tell you, as well as being an infernal nuisance in a house as ill-plumbed and over-inhabited as this.

  Tony and Blitzstein are banging the piano and rowing downstairs. Judy picking fruit like a demon. Me upstairs trying to rewrite the last scene and Tony bustling me. He doesn’t seem to realize how long writing can take and wants everything in a hurry. So this must be brief—but I paused in work to write to you just to say that I love you to pieces.

  Will let you know when I am going to London and my hotel, as soon as I know myself. It hangs on how long they stay here, as Tony wants me to leave with him—probably the 30th or 31st.

  Much love to all, and especially to you, my dearest dear

  Rob

  THURSDAY, JULY 23: Hard work this morning and write a new finale to the play. In the afternoon the Butlers and Smithwick go and Blitzstein goes with them. After dinner Christopher Scaife read us some of his poems, which I liked, then Joe read us some of his movie treatment of his dwarf theme; Tony is a tireless interrupter, but to good purpose. We talked about the dwarf till 1.

  FRIDAY, JULY 24: Wretched sinus headache. Read my new stuff to Tony, who likes it and suggests some details of good change. We begin to approach a workable script. At 7 to Camlagh to dine with Lady Rossmore. A very good meal but she fidgets like any Peterborough hostess. Rather sad. Lovely old crested silver but coffee cups the cheapest quality. (At Camlagh the men’s washroom is hung with eighteenth-century French erotic engravings, to Tony’s puritanical disgust, but I thought them charming, as did Scaife.)

  SATURDAY, JULY 25: The wonderful warm, bright weather continues. I work all morning on the play. After lunch a fascinating discussion about Hamlet, then to work again. But it is uphill work for it is
so warm that it is a call to pleasure and I wish consumedly that Brenda were here. Go to the post, for the walk, and the others go across the lake and take their tea. I have tea with Bunty, who tells me Tony’s father died of lung cancer. Work again, and my total day’s writing is satisfactory. Play the piano for Tony to sing some Irish songs. After dinner he reads his libretto for a Nativity opera, which John Gardner has set. Good, but gloomy and hopeless in the last few pages. We then fall to a discussion of the nature of Christ, and am interested to discover how much Tony’s ideas chime with mine, though he thinks Christ was a proletarian, I, an aristocrat. While here have read Chayefsky’s The Dybbuk from Woodhaven, which Tony will direct in New York this autumn: a good play but leans very heavily on Jewish ritual and also on Ansky’s Jewish classic, The Dybbuk, in my opinion, though Tony says not. Exciting, rich mixture.

  SATURDAY, JULY 25, LETTER TO BRENDA

  Dearest Pink:

  Now: I go to London next Friday, July 31, as that is when Tony goes to Edinburgh. He wants me to fly with him. We leave here at 6 a.m., motor to Belfast, and fly at 8:30. I shall be glad to get to London, because it will be a rest. I really work very hard here, and Tony, who does not know how long writing takes, hounds me. But I hope that before I leave I shall have a script of which he approves. It is maddening to read to him—continual interruptions, often about things which come in the next three words. But I find he often comes back to my notions, the next day. He is in no sense a private person: he can live and work in hubbub, and doesn’t know why I can’t. He wants to help me by reading my script to me as I type it on his horrid, bucking wee portable: such help would drive me out of my mind. But the collaboration is working well and I think the final script will be a great improvement on what you have seen. Of course Tony knows how he can make it work on the stage, which is a huge advantage.