More than a decade after his death, the faucet of fantasy, outrageousness, wisdom and invention that was Robertson Davies continues to drip for us, though the posthumous trickle is down to an intermittent plunk in the bucket that once brimmed over with masterpieces such as the Deptford Trilogy, fortunately still in print and fascinating readers at an impossibly far remove from Davies’ lost world of pre-World War I rural Ontario and the received truths and life-sustaining lies that scar the destinies of all those who escape from it, the author and his characters included.

This year brings a collection of blurb-length reminiscences by various people who knew, loved, despised or had dealings with Davies in his successive careers as newspaper editor, man of the theatre, academic panjandrum and Canada’s Grand Old Man of Letters; I, for one, am very glad to have it. Though it was probably not the intention of editor-compiler Val Ross, Roberston Davies, A Portrait in Mosaic should be read as a compendium of must-have marginalia on Robertson Davies: Man of Myth the 785-page biography by Judith Skelton Grant that was researched with her subject’s grudging cooperation and published before his death in 1995. A good many cats that it would have been impolitic to let out of the bag then, now yowl for our attention.

To that extent, the Ross book can be considered a variant of the ‘dark side’ biography, deeply as I loathe that mendacious genre. I was willing enough to go along with Donald Spoto in his exploration of Alfred Hitchcock: The Dark Side of Genius—definitely there was enough kinkiness to justify the conceit. But then came Walt Disney: Hollywood’s Dark Prince by Marc Eliot, not just a hatchet job, but random butchery by someone too lazy to hijack the truth and too incompetent to distort it, choosing instead to bury it under a profusion of pernicious poppycock. Somewhere between those extremes, David Michaelis’ recent book on Charles Schulz of Peanuts fame comes packed with inaccuracies refuted by family members and unsourced inventories of Schulz’s thought processes, emotional states, true intentions and unconfessed desires.

But in the case of Robertson Davies, the fabrication of a personality was entirely his own doing. The theatricality began at boarding school in Canada, and got even more intense and mannered at Oxford, where he perfected his early persona of 19th-century dandy complete with Chestertonian ensemble of walking stick, slouch hat and cape. Sowing consternation among the scolds and gossips of fusty Peterborough, where he edited the newspaper his father owned, Davies cultivated early avatars of the beard that would eventual assume Pentateuchal proportions and whiteness (one small boy thought God was coming to get him).

He was a ‘character’ by conviction, at first styled in the fashion of his earliest creation, the harrumphing Samuel Marchbanks, echt outsider and purveyor of hilarious home truths to complacent Canadians. But the verdict at Val Ross’s round-table inquest into the real Roberston Davies relates this to the fact that this late-life child of a ‘difficult’ mother in a loveless marriage had a thin skin and boundless need for assurance and approval, which, just as with the rest of his species, was not always forthcoming.

Their remarks leave little doubt as to how deeply Davies was wounded by his failure to make a go of it in the theatre. Especially interesting (because biographer Grant had to tread on eggshells when approaching the subject) is testimony as to how deeply he felt betrayed by his mentor and ‘father in art’, Tyrone Guthrie, who mucked up Davies’ Big Chance on Broadway by burying the play he wrote under an incoherent blather of avant-garde staging conceits. ‘If you’ve been repeatedly told that your work stinks, you stop doing it.’ says director and friend Martin Hunter. That final failure left him forever afterwards stranded on the wrong side of the orchestra pit, to pursue his passion as spectator and critic.

As a parent, too, Davis was wonderful fun, but never easygoing or indulgent. ‘I was afraid of him as a child, afraid to make him angry. He was very explosive and unpredictable, You never knew what would upset or irritate him,’ recalls one of his three daughters. Of course,  he took it badly when another came home to announce an untimely pregnancy. For the world’s premier authority on nineteenth-century melodrama, it must have required an effort to gulp back the words ‘darken my doorstep,’ but he did react with a snarled, ‘You’re not the first little Welsh girl to whom this has happened’.

The worst side of Robertson Davies clearly emerged during his two-decade tenure as master of Massey College in Toronto, which put him in the thick of administrative turf wars, power grabs, backstabbing rivalries, confrontations with sixties’ students and other varieties of unpleasantness that find their most vicious expression within the groves of academe. Even victory brought out a vindictiveness that he nursed until his enemies were dead and could be safely libelled, as he did with the most appalling and hilarious brio in the Cornish Trilogy.

Participants disagree on where the lines are drawn between anecdotal immortality and urban legend. The latter is the surely the case with the student who rode around on a bicycle while whistling up the Air on the G-String, giving Davies the excuse for commenting that ‘His Bach is worse than his bike’. But it’s absolutely true he refused to allow washers and dryers in the student residence hall on the grounds that ‘a gentleman doesn’t wash his socks’.
Snobbery, did you say?  His children were not allowed to play with the cook’s children, though he would rage if any guest in his home were inconsiderate to one of the household staff. Intolerable as that may seem today, that sort of thing was a conventional attitude of Canada’s anglophile elite into which Davies father, a self-made millionaire and senator by appointment,  managed to insert himself.
And despite the praise showered upon him with the 1970 publication of Fifth Business, he loved a literary dust-up and did not shy from Corleone-class vendettas. ‘He would get 25 wonderful reviews and never forget a bad one,’ says his wife, Brenda. ‘He would wish terrible things on those who gave him bad reviews because of what he called “a vengeful streak in my nature”.’ At the same time, however, he tried to encourage young authors and was forthright enough to retract overhasty dismissals of other people’s talents, as in the case of John Irving.

From Samuel Johnson, Davies borrowed the term ‘Black Dog’ to refer in his journals to recurrent episodes of depression and paralysing lethargy that recurred throughout his life. It also emerges that in the 1930s, he underwent Freudian psychoanalysis, which may not have done much for his inner life, but did his future readers a tremendous service by driving him (intellectually) into the arms of Jung, thus making for one of the most fruitful cases of a writer not just incorporating ideas into his novels for the sake of adding to the intellectual furniture, but playing on them like some enormous Baroque pipe organ to achieve swelling novelistic effects.

Thanks are due to the friends, family members and others mustered by Val Ross for their tesseratic contributions to a darker picture of Davies and his daemons than we are used to seeing, but also one full of fascinating incongruities not unlike the ones he delighted in deciphering in the Mannerist paintings he so much admired.