Remembering a Magus

Biography, that earliest form of story-telling, is a complicated art that has undergone several permutations of late. The arc of a life provides a narrative thread at its simplest: a birth, a life and a death that allow the author to praise or damn his subject and throw some light upon the age. A lot of the time, the venture is detailed and hagiographical, as James Boswell’s Life of Johnson was, or historical and instructional, as was Plutarch’s exemplary Parallel Lives. A couple of decades ago, biography went through a phase of being monstrously and exhaustively fat as was, most famously, Michael Holroyd’s monumental four-volume study of George Bernard Shaw. In retrospect, that work appears to have been a pinnacle of the literary form, the scale of which is not likely to be revisited. Now, as suits the age, the trend is for short, quickly digested biographies that make their single point hurriedly—as the Penguin Lives and now the company’s Canadian series do. We are in the age of Plutarch revisited, although without his artful pithiness and acuity.

Another way in which biography has come to reflect the Zeitgeist shows in the doubts we now carry about the very possibility of an authentic, truthful account of a life. The late 20th and now 21st-century democratization of the means of storytelling—a phenomenon that started with radio, well before the flourishing of Facebook, internet blogs and the like—has made autobiographers of anyone who knows how to use a password, and has institutionalized a proliferation of points of view with the effect that the distinction between fiction and the possibility of “objective” biography has been blurred completely.

In the wake of this phenomenon, what some biographers have done is suppress the self and take their cue from oral documentarians such as the late Studs Terkel, in the United States, and Tony Parker, in Britain. Both were present in their work, but marvellously self-effacing. The prominence their methodology conceded to other people’s testimony (when in fact other people are equally capable of telling lies and Terkel and Parker were arranging the stories, after all) imbued their oral histories with the ring of truth; their testimony becomes a document because it can be traced to a source and attributed—consolation of a kind. At the BBC, where I made radio programs for many years, there was for a long time an ideological insistence on the distinction between the “facts” of “documentaries” and the interpretation of them in “features.” In the latter, the presenter was given free rein and able to arrange and even exploit others’ statements to support whatever was the guiding idea of the program. It was understood to be derived from the truth but not strictly documentary. In the former, more orthodox category, all statements had to be attributable and the writer of the program was prohibited from hazarding opinion and played a secondary role to the material.

Robertson Davies: A Portrait in Mosaic, by Val Ross—the much-loved Globe and Mail arts correspondent who died, unfairly young, of brain cancer in February 2008 (her own quite beautiful, inspiring and touching life worthy of its own recounting) is a biography of the oral sort, witnesses’ testimony collected and arranged very much like a radio documentary. Ross, who finished her acknowledgements in the week before dying, collected the remembrances of dozens of contributors—family, friends, colleagues and others such as the family’s sometime groundskeeper and the owner of the London bookstore where Davies was a regular. Her sturdy edifice of other people’s views is buttressed by statements of late players plucked from archives and newspapers, as well as a good portion of Davies’s own letters and brief interstitial sentences that explain who the speakers are and link moments in the book’s linear chronological progression.

There is mechanical finesse in the book’s construction but the effect can be untoward as there are no surprises here. When one speaker names a person or a house or remembers a moment the reader has not yet encountered, it is no mystery what will come next. This will do for many, as the book is thorough and well researched, but the reader’s experience is generally unexciting. The residual feeling after reading A Portrait in Mosaic is one of asking Why Robertson Davies? and, more so, Why now? Davies’s life has been, in Canadian terms, quite abundantly documented already. A couple of biographies have been written, including Judith Skelton Grant’s substantial Robertson Davies: Man of Myth, and Davies’s letters and even bons mots have been published too. Davies’s father, brother and his wife all published memoirs themselves, and the author’s own journalism, criticism and plays as well as the novels—his enduring works—amount to a corpus so copious that the breadth of it is actually one of its more remarkable aspects. Davies, who died in 1995, aged 82, was producing literature into his ninth decade, and he wrote one of his best novels, the Booker-short-listed What’s Bred in the Bone, when he was 72.

Ross dips into the archive, Davies’s and the surrounding memoirs and letters, but it is as if the completion of the structure, rather than any particular feature that might draw us to it, became the overarching task. This is a pity. The actual events of writers’ lives, even those of long-lasting ones, are rarely all that interesting—and those of Davies’s life, no matter the sartorial airs, the interest in Jung and magic (and biography) were no exception. New information about a life can provide an answer to the questions of why Davies and why now, but there is really not much of it here. A new point of view would have achieved as much, but having chosen the oral testimonial form, Ross left herself no room for it. So what has resulted is a good book but not an enthralling one, its shortcomings almost entirely attributable to the kind of biography that Val Ross decided on. Put bluntly, the material needs more opinion—more correlation with the work, more adjudication and inquiry. Her Mosaic should have been a feature and not a documentary. There should have been more Val.

Certainly, there are occasions when the deferential nature of oral biography is warranted: for example, when insufficient time has elapsed since the death of the author for reasonable expectations of dispassionate analysis. But there has been plenty of time for a proper assessment —even reassessment—of Davies’s contribution to Canada’s literary panoply since Grant’s biography, his death and the slew of anthologies of the author’s material afterward. The voices of people not previously heard are mostly not those on which Ross’s Mosaic depends, and she is let down by the generally reserved, Presbyterian bunch she does include—how rare is the telling anecdote! John Fraser, who presently occupies the position of master of Massey College at the University of Toronto—Davies was the first—tells a few, and Robert Fulford is typically incisive. (This period of the country’s literary maturation—the 1960s and ’70s—has always been the one in which he is most at ease.) But far too many of the stories are flatly related, affirming testimonials such as might be heard in a court’s recollection of events, rather than the aperçus on which lively storytelling relies. There are nuggets, of course. Eluned MacMillan, mother of the historian Margaret (the family was friends with the Davies through their mutual connection to the Masseys), provides one when she recalls that

And Margaret Atwood, astute as usual, remembers a meeting at Massey with Davies in the 1970s when

There is the beginning, here, of a book. Davies was fond of costume—wearing a cape, brandishing a cane, the beard Atwood saw through—having imported much of the church basement theatre he favoured into the strictures of his own life. It had been a habit since he was a schoolboy in Renfrew, Ontario. It was his way of holding onto the values as well as the vestments of the old country and keeping at bay the ordinariness of the communities in which he worked, such as Peterborough and Kingston, or even the recalcitrance of the academic community at the University of Toronto. But Davies betrays himself as a Canadian like any other when, early on, he writes H.L. Mencken beseechingly, in the hope of procuring work and a way out of the dull condition of Peterborough—where, in 1946, Davies was editing the newspaper his father, Rupert, had bought and was writing his Samuel Marchbanks columns. After Mencken mailed the Peterborough Examiner inquiring about Canadian usage, Davies took the chance fortune had offered him and, in his reply, wrote

Mencken did not answer. By the 1980s, when Davies and Brenda had purchased a time-share in a flat in Chelsea, the illustrious, prolific and finally internationally successful literary son of a Welshman (Rupert, who had returned home) had learned that being Canadian—and subsequently ignored—was his lot, if only by virtue of the snobbery of the English society in which he evidently aspired to participate. Davies, in the sartorial excesses and the atavistic customs, in his hearkening after a class order and even his interest in pantomime-like theatre (rather than the kitchen sink variety that had revolutionized the English stage, but to which he could not relate), was pronouncing himself of another world than the one he found himself in. He was, in effect, a liar—at least to the degree that most great novelists are. And where his fabrication and the fondness for the arcane had the most impact, where this tendency actually mattered, was not in any dandyish construction of himself either at Upper Canada College or at Oxford (having trouble passing in both places), as an “actor for a time”—and not a very good playwright for all that time before he realized novels were what he should be writing—or even on the quasi-stage of Massey. But it mattered in the firebrand language that he used and his masterful magicians’ plots. Davies was, from the very beginning of his artistic career, concerned with artifice as well as the great and often very amusing discrepancies between lives as they are lived and as they are ultimately recorded. Hence, the plots of his two best novels—What’s Bred in the Bone, conceived while Judith Skelton Grant was doing her own biographical researches, and his first success (what is today called the “breakout” book), Fifth Business: ideas about biography enter each.

And, too, it was probably inevitable that when Grant (who is given curious prominence in this book, as if she had not already written enough) published her biography of Davies, the author would take issue, referring to her as Boswellina—amusing, I suppose, but also immodest, her subject imagining himself as a latter day Johnson (the Samuel in Marchbanks). This is far from the only instance of Davies’s inclination to puffery and it made at least this reader uncomfortable when, somewhat gullibly, Ross participates in it—Davies, in 1982, was said to be in the running for a Nobel Prize for literature, the sort of tendentious rumour that is typically spread by the person leading the campaign for nomination for the prize (in this case, Anthony Burgess). It may have been so, but the choice would have been preposterous and what is more telling is that Davies actually believed the story and became involved, to his emotional detriment, in its unlikely possibility. Davies, who toward the end of his life toured in Sweden, would have liked nothing more than to have been acknowledged by other than Canadians as great.

Later, Davies came round to Grant’s biography, mostly because other people liked it. He was, after all, a vain and pretentious man much concerned with wearing the properties and the accreditation for deserving them—and in this contradiction lies most of the interest in a writer’s otherwise boring life. Out of such vanity, such frippery and airs, great literature can arise, although it requires a more probing and adventurous exercise of biography than this to strike the bull’s-eye of a truly penetrating and memorable understanding—rather than mere record—of a life. Davies himself complained of Grant’s biography that the book “has lots of research and that’s what a biography is all about. But the book is not about ME.” Had Ross elected to write a conventional biography and not collate an oral one, then she would have been obliged to explain him more, rather than be satisfied—and overly busied—by the portrait a mosaic can provide out of such carefully arranged parts. We would have had more of the gifted reporter that so many miss, and there would have been more purpose and enjoyment in this book.