There’s never been a writer like Samuel Marchbanks, mainly because there never was a Samuel Marchbanks. The self-proclaimed Philosopher of Skunk’s Misery, head of a one-man splinter party, and mid-century diarist in the Peterborough Examiner was also a pseudonym of Robertson Davies. Not his alter ego — a term that “suggests some dreadful non-cholesterol cooking substance,” Marchbanks insisted — but rather his doppelgänger.
Davies had seen London and New York, and now he had an unobstructed and unrelenting view of Peterborough, just as the Cold War was heating up in places that weren’t rural Ontario. His response — and his first significant literary project — was Marchbanks. “Some important atomic bomb tests were held today,” one early entry reads, “but no consequences were observable in my part of the world.”
The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks and The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks were published in 1947 and 1949. These...
Benjamin Errett wrote Elements of Wit: Mastering the Art of Being Interesting. He also publishes Get Wit Quick, a weekly newsletter.
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