A Celtic Temperament: Robertson Davies as Diarist Read online

  THURSDAY, AUGUST 6, LONDON: One of the oddities of the London streets is the beatniks—dirty boys in jeans, with Elvis hair arrangements, accompanied by girls with long unbound hair, loose bags, and bare feet, which they defiantly plant in the dog-dung, puke, effluent from the fish-shop, or whatever. They strive for Bohemianism but look simple and their mouths tend to hang open.

  To a matinée, as I thought it would be nice to sit down: Roots by Arnold Wesker with Joan Plowright as star. Good play well acted; good theme, and three or four good parts. Glad I went. Then to Clunes’s and saw and bought a rarity—a run of fourteen consecutive Edmund Kean playbills, of the performances preceding his visit to America in 1820: all his famous roles—Richard III, Shylock, Othello—and some rarities—Jaffeir from Venice Preserv’d and Richard II. Very pleased to get them and as I took all, Hart gave me 10% off, making it £23 for the lot. Have now some very nice Kean things.

  To The Complaisant Lover by Graham Greene, which is the mighty thing talked of in theatre circles. Good, but weak conclusion. Sir Ralph Richardson is a bag of tricks but in this as in Flowering Cherry he managed two or three fine moments: wept so that tears fell diamond-like to the floorcloth. But a gloomy piece: love cannot last, marriage must be dull, men are fools and women sneaks. Wonder how it will go in the U.S., for the most-used joke is the English snob one that there is something inescapably common and funny about being a dentist. Americans do not feel this: the dream of every third Jew is to get out of old iron and into old ivory.

  FRIDAY, AUGUST 7, LONDON: The great news is that the Queen is pregnant, thus explaining her fatigue in Canada—that, and the continued meetings with John Diefenbaker. This leads to strange messages on the paper stands: “The Queen: A Baby Official” is the one I liked best.

  A hot night and the Criterion, where I went to see A Taste of Honey, was stuffy and the audience sweaty. The play was formless and had nothing much to say except perhaps that frowsy living and frowsy thinking sometimes gets you into messes, and that it is better to be loved than not. But it had dramatic impact, began in high gear and kept it up until, suddenly and arbitrarily, it ended on a note of false pathos.

  Over too early to go to bed, so I walked down Regent Street and Cumberland Steps, thence to Trafalgar Square and admired the dramatic lighting of Nelson. But if I had my way I would light Charles I, certainly one of the finest statues in London. Thence back to that ill-run, understaffed dump, the Norfolk, and after fifteen minutes’ diplomatic negotiation for a lager got a lukewarm Double Diamond, English beer at its most insipid. Shall be glad to be quit of the Norfolk.

  SATURDAY, AUGUST 8, LONDON: Wake very early, which has been my plague all through this trip, and in due time get away from the Norfolk with a light heart. To the terminus in Buckingham Palace Road: a long wait; then a ’bus ride to the London airport; another long wait, for the caterer had not arrived to provision the ’plane. At 1 p.m. away by jet; from then for nine and a half hours it was whizz, fizz, and rumble, with a procession of people plying me with sweets, Madeira and biscuits, gin and tonic, champagne, tea, coffee, and anything else that could be forced down the human gullet. A brief stop at Gander. Then to New York, where the car compass in my briefcase set off an electric eye, and alarmed Customs. Lurked in the chapel till flight time (for the quiet), then to Toronto.

  SUNDAY, AUGUST 9: Unpack. H.t.d. in p.m. Immense satisfaction to be home again.

  MONDAY, AUGUST 10: Return to office and find plenty of work. Am tired and cannot do anything on play. Sleep after lunch and dinner. Evening to Escapade by Roger MacDougall, badly done by the Peterborough Summer Theatre company—a strange contrast to last week’s play-going in London. Peterborough the same old dump, but weather and countryside lovely.

  FRIDAY, AUGUST 14: Much better: I sleep well and am regaining my energy. Work all afternoon on the play to good purpose and have one or two good notions. In the evening slept again, read Peter De Vries, and talked to Brenda about Dr. Harding, whom she reads with mounting delight. Admirable h.t.d. in the window seat.

  THURSDAY, AUGUST 27: To Toronto on 7 a.m. train: very hot and crowded. Stratford planning committee meeting in Maclean-Hunter board room at 12, mercifully air-conditioned. It goes on till 4, then to University Club and meet Miranda. On the train home she tells of her splendid summer at music camp. Glad to get home and take off clothes.

  FRIDAY, AUGUST 28: My birthday. I am forty-six: Miranda gives me a record of Australian songs, Jenny a jar of honey, Rosamond a knee-robe, and Brenda a very handsome set of evening studs. Work hard and am troubled by sinus and nausea. Even wondered about polio, which rather darkened my day.

  WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 2: In the evening I had an anguished call from Don Herbert in New York: Tony Guthrie’s agent has withdrawn him from the play and the Guild won’t have my play without him.44 I’m sure this is just agent’s power politics but worrisome and the part of this thing I really hate, and of course I shall get no sense out of Tony if it were to cost him a cable.

  THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 3: Low and despairing all day: I have no energy and my hopes seem to be crumbling beneath me; nevertheless work, work, work, the joyless industry of the damned: write Star column about Irving Layton. In the evening review Edith Sitwell’s Anthology.

  FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 4: In the evening, a special dinner for my birthday. The great news is that Miranda has been accepted for Trinity College at the University of Toronto, so much talk of clothes, of which she has no notion, to Brenda’s despair. Read poetry: much moved by Walter de la Mare.

  THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, STRATFORD: Board meeting 9:30 till 12:30, then to the Country Club for lunch for the governor general, Vincent Massey. We gave him a costume sketch and orb from Richard III. Then to the costume and book exhibition. We dine at the Victorian Inn and then to As You Like It, somewhat disordered since the first performance in June. Afterward to a party given by actors, very jolly: talk to Douglas Rain and Irene Worth. Bed at 3.

  FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, STRATFORD: Unwell at waking: hangover? Only three whiskies last night. Took sinus pill and hot bath and felt very much worse. Don Herbert phones from New York and calls my play “a true high comedy”: very heartening. Dine at the Bells’. We see Othello but it is now much diminished though Rain has improved. This should not happen. Excellent h.t.d.

  SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 12: To Toronto: meet Jenny at the Royal York, where we have a suite, and Rosamond comes in from Peterborough on the Dayliner. To film North by Northwest, Hitchcock thriller, very good. Early to bed at hotel.

  SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, TORONTO: Maygames on waking. Breakfast in our suite, to Rosamond’s great satisfaction. Matins and Eucharist at St. Mary Magdalene, very fine. Then rest and to Hawthorn Gardens for WRD’S eightieth birthday: Percy, Mary, Arthur, Kit,45 and all grandchildren. Welsh boasting, weeping, and singing, and a lot of champagne. Strange to think of WRD as eighty. He is hale and vigorous mentally, though garrulous, but then he always was so. Interesting to observe grandchildren, family resemblances, though all very different and on the whole a good lot.

  MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 14: Bad day at office: men resign, men drunk, Wilson Craw46 sorely tried. Spend much time trying to resolve chaos. Shrimpton going—he finds Peterborough dull! God, and what do I find it after eighteen years? Evening, read and work on Knopfbook. Rosamond has cold and Brenda is unwell. Mrs. Pedak has lumbago.

  SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 27: A week of worry about the final chapter of Knopfbook, which obsesses me. It is as though I had never written a line before. I’m scared to death of it: am I really a writer, or simply an impostor, a hack with a writing neurosis?

  FRIDAY, OCTOBER 2: The continued work on the book is wearing me down and today I got into a rage about the usual street jeers which greet me from the anthropoid youth of this squalid town.

  FRIDAY, OCTOBER 23: Gordon Roper47 called to sound me out about being a guest professor at Trinity next year, to do a course or two and talk to students: should like it immensely and it would get me among new people.

 
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 24: Star column in morning on old music; Star column in the afternoon on witchcraft; Brenda in Cobourg rehearsing.48

  SUNDAY, OCTOBER 25: Lay late. In the afternoon work with Brenda to clean tool-house at the end of the garage thoroughly, a dirty job but satisfactory when done. This has been a refreshing week but has also served to emphasize how weary and empty I am. When all this is done, I must refill my well of inspiration, read and think. Don Herbert’s production of Robert Bolt’s Flowering Cherry seems to have done well in New York.

  MONDAY, OCTOBER 26: No: Flowering Cherry came off Saturday night: how chilling! But I thought it poor in London. I hope failure of Flowering Cherry does not put Herbert in a nervous and carping mood. Brenda in Cobourg for rehearsals and returns tired and pale.

  TUESDAY, OCTOBER 27: Uneasy day: fidgeted and fussed with revisions of Knopfbook but made no progress—wrote a page and tore it up. My bowels are a basket of eels, I cannot hear what people say to me, I eat to quell my mounting dismay and sense of failure, yet beneath all this I am calm and resolute: the work will be done.

  SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 1: Completion of the book leaves me very nervous and disorganized but this will pass. Wish I had it all to rewrite, however. I’m sure I could do it better: it seems formless to me, but not to Brenda.

  TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 3: My disintegration proceeds apace. Wrangle on the phone with a man who says his daughter was nearly raped. Have begun Proust and do not know how far I shall go, but am more engrossed than when I tried in 1938.

  WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 4: Collapse in full tide: muddled through the day and did quite a bit of work. In evening read Proust and tend to find him a brilliant bore: so good, but who gives a damn? Brenda returns from Cobourg shredded by the ineptitude of her cast. These are dull days in our sordid home.

  FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 6: To Toronto and chat with Gordon Roper and Provost Owen of Trinity College. It is now settled that I shall be visiting professor in 1960–61: am well pleased. Lunch at Trinity very bad.

  MONDAY, NOVEMBER 9: Don Herbert phones and weeps about the terms my agent Willis Wing is asking. I sympathized but won’t interfere. He also said Tony Guthrie plans to rehearse the Leaven of Malice play in Stratford next August, which is good news. In the evening to Cobourg with Brenda to her rehearsal of Arms and the Man—a very amateur group with no concentration and she has done well for them, but a silk purse–sow’s ear impasse.

  TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 10: Am beginning to come out of exhaustion: worked on Knopfbook revision; can never master the grammatical nicety of “that” and “which.” H.t.d. in sunroom, best in many months.

  FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 13: Ralph Hancox unwell, so write lead editorial for Saturday paper. Letter from Honderich49 via Willis Wing saying he likes my Star columns. After lunch h.t.d., unforeseen and delightful. See Vincent Massey on TV and he speaks of me!

  SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 14: Lunch with Jenny and her friends: odd girls, boy-crazy and firmly resistant to any sort of education. Revised end of the final chapter. In the evening chatted with Brenda and read. Unforeseen h.t.d. at bedtime.

  SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 15: In the morning read Proust, and Brenda cut my hair. Afternoon to Bryn and was annoyed by boys prowling with a gun: to shoot water birds?

  Release from pressure of book has released my sexual powers from an icy grip: Brenda says it is always so. Called Judy Guthrie in New York on Saturday evening. Of course Tony has forgotten we were to meet in Toronto and is off to San Francisco; he has eye trouble (retina).

  WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 25: Very busy day and Miss Whalon almost completes Knopfbook manuscript. To bed early and just in process of h.t.d. when Judy calls, proposes to change our Toronto appointment with them to Friday: we decide we cannot do so and call her back. After all this business h.t.d. resumed with added gusto and quite wonderful.

  SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 28: To the high school at 6:30 for the drama competition performance of Brenda’s Cobourg theatre group’s Arms and the Man. They win the cup—all delighted: besides directing, Brenda was very good as Catherine. About thirty-five people in after for food and beer. Bed 1:30.

  SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 29: Go over my manuscript: Miss Whalon has made 5 errors in 427 pages! H.t.d. in p.m. Evening to Thompsons’: other guests drank too much, cocktails, champagne, Irish coffee, and beer; long, good talk, bed 1:30.

  Busy week and tiring but our New York holiday approaches. We have both had considerable success of late but bought with hard work, and some sort of break is very desirable.

  WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 2: Fly at 3:20 to New York and at Dorset Hotel by 6; dine at Le Gourmet on 55th, then buy some theatre tickets. Brenda has a cold and is frail but hope holiday will help.

  THURSDAY, DECEMBER 3, NEW YORK: To Lulie Westfeldt at 9:30: we have made progress. Lunch with Willis Wing at Camillo’s, having given him the Knopfbook manuscript. I sign the Theatre Guild contract. We shop for the girls’ Christmas presents, rest, dine, and to Shaw’s Heartbreak House, brilliant but never moving. H.t.d. with delight: both free and off the chain after our autumn’s work.

  FRIDAY, DECEMBER 4, NEW YORK: Lesson at 9:30 with fine result; dine at Luchow’s; to Ingmar Bergman’s film The Magician, finely acted with powerful, Jungian plot: see it through twice and much excited by it. It had what Heartbreak House so notably lacked—poetry.

  SATURDAY, DECEMBER 5, NEW YORK: Excellent lesson. Afternoon h.t.d. most eloquently. To Wild Strawberries, as good as on July 8, and enjoyed it and doubly admired Ingmar Bergman. We shop in the Village for clothes for girls very successfully. In the evening to Lysistrata at the Phoenix, good but rather loud.

  SUNDAY, DECEMBER 6, NEW YORK: Lay late, then by train to White Plains to lunch with Alfred and Blanche50 Knopf. Alfred and Blanche quarrelled sans intermission and it was a heavy and somewhat embarrassing occasion. Back to New York with Blanche in full cry at 4:50 and were quit of her by 6. To Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible, Part 2. Crude but very powerful. A strange and revelatory day. Why revelatory? As showing the hellish home life of a very successful and able man; as showing our own compatibility in contrast; as showing how dark life can be where there is no love. We have seen the movies at their most subtle and also at their most powerful in three days.

  MONDAY, DECEMBER 7, NEW YORK: Good lesson, then shop and buy a purse, $90, and a watch, $140, for Brenda and get things for girls. Evening dinner at Jackie Davie’s: altogether charming.

  TUESDAY, DECEMBER 8, NEW YORK: Remarkable lesson with Lulie Westfeldt, then shop, lunch, and shop again. To La Plume de Ma Tante, very good fun in the French manner, somewhat too much pee-fun and peeping up girls’ skirts but very clever panto. We both feel great changes as result of Alexander Technique and we are both delighted.

  WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 9, NEW YORK: Another good lesson, then to Knopf’s and see Lemay, the publicity man, and Alfred Knopf, who thinks the theatre section of the book is too long but says I am the only man in North America who could have written this book! To matinée of Chayefsky’s Tenth Man, finely acted, and directed by Tony; Chinese dinner and then to At the Drop of a Hat, with Flanders and Swann. Brilliant.

  THURSDAY, DECEMBER 10, NEW YORK: Very fine h.t.d. on waking: the Alexander changes the pattern here, too. Pack and to Lulie Westfeldt for final lesson, then we take her to lunch. Much bustle and frustration to get to air terminal, but a good flight to Toronto, then on home and find the house decorated for Christmas by Rosamond, and much mail.

  WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 16: Again very busy, a horde of details plague me. In the evening address Xmas cards. I dream I am deserting a derelict old taxi-driver for much better one: an old pattern rejected for new?

  THURSDAY, DECEMBER 17: Pressure continues: Brenda to Toronto, returns with Miranda and Jenny, both very lively and both now sing very nicely and we have carols, but Rosamond has a streaming cold.

  FRIDAY, DECEMBER 18: No let-up in work. Finish Christmas cards. Hear that Massey Foundation gives $1,500,000 to found a graduate school at University of Toronto. Would do something like that if rich. Nice letter from A
lfred Knopf.

  SUNDAY, DECEMBER 27: Have enjoyed past week, though humiliated to learn from Knopf’s editor Strauss that I have misused the word “comprise” for forty-six years: just when I begin to think well of myself, some new abyss of ignorance opens at my feet.

  THURSDAY, DECEMBER 31: Worked in the morning, and in the afternoon at Brenda’s insistence went tobogganing in Jackson Park, which was toilsome as the snow heavy. Brenda is unwell with intestinal ’flu and could not go so I was goat.

  H.t.d. 79 times in ’59, being absent one month.

  This has been a year of hard and unremitting work for me, and I enter the New Year depleted and exhausted. The Knopf book, now called A Voice from the Attic, was demanding, though a kind of agonizing pleasure went with it. Alfred likes it. Wrote the dramatization of Leaven of Malice, took it to Ireland, and revised it with Tony. This was pleasant, but not easy. And I wrote fifty-two columns for the Star—“A Writer’s Diary”—which are syndicated and have had favourable reception. A year of slogging hard work. Kind friends assure me that getting a play on in New York will be a desperate experience, but I refuse to be panicked: Tony says we shall resist nonsense together, and I believe him. But this may be a fateful year, with the book and the play. May it be propitious! If I am ever to make a name it must be soon. The Examiner goes well, in spite of staff difficulties, and makes money, so we live comfortably.