A Celtic Temperament: Robertson
Davies as Diarist by
Robertson Davies, Jennifer Surridge
Versatile and prolific, Robertson Davies was an actor,
journalist and newspaper publisher, playwright, essayist, founding master of
Massey College at the University of Toronto, and one of Canada’s greatest
novelists. He was also an obsessive, complex, and self-revealing diarist. His
diaries, which he began as a teenager, grew to over 3 million words and are an
astonishing literary legacy. This first published selection of his diaries
spans 1959 to 1963, years in which Davies, in mid-life, experienced both
daunting failure and unexpected success.
Born in Thamesville, Ontario, in 1913, he was educated at local schools, then
Upper Canada College, Queen’s University and Oxford University. He worked in
England at the famous Old Vic theatre as an actor and literary advisor before
returning to Canada where he became the editor and publisher of the Peterborough
Examiner, established himself as a prominent Canadian playwright, and
published his first three novels now known as the Salterton Trilogy.
By 1959, at the age of forty-five, Robertson Davies was already one of Canada’s
leading literary figures. Even so the diaries show that he was frustrated by
the limitations of his literary success, often exasperated with the
distractions of his daily life and buffeted by his mental and emotional state.
They also show that he enjoyed life, was deeply interested in the society he
lived in, and in the people he encountered. More often than not he found comedy
in the world around him and delighted in recording it. He kept not only a daily
journal, but also more focused diaries such as his accounts of the Toronto and
New York production of his play Love and Libel, when he worked
closely with the great British director Tyrone Guthrie, and of the founding of
Massey College, the brainchild of Vincent Massey. The descriptions of backstage
and academic politics are invariably entertaining, but in his diaries Davies
also reveals himself as intensely self-critical, frequently insecure, and with
a highly changeable nature that he described as his “celtic temperament.” We
also see him as a partner in an intensely happy and creative marriage, and as a
man with an astonishing capacity for hard work. By the end of 1963 his life had
taken a new direction. As master of Massey College, he finds himself a
public figure, but he is increasingly preoccupied with a new novel he wants to
write which he is calling Fifth Business.
The publication of A Celtic Temperament establishes Robertson
Davies as one of the great diarists. In their range, variety, intimacy, and honesty
his diaries present an extraordinarily rich portrait of the man and his times. –
Amazon.
The Well-Tempered Critic: One Man's View of Theatre and Letters in Canada by Robertson Davies, Judith Skelton Grant
Feast of Stephen by Stephen Leacock, Robertson Davies
“Do you know the characteristic wine of Madeira?…I do not
know whether Leacock ever drank Madeira himself – he was very much a
Scotch-whisky man – but I enjoy Madeira greatly, and I never drink it without
thinking of Leacock, who was sometimes dry, sometimes sweet, but who always
leaves upon the tongue a hint of brimstone…”
In his witty and illuminating introduction, which takes up the first third of
the book, Robertson Davies invites us to join him in a Feast of
Stephen. Davies’ selection of fifteen pieces from Leacock’s less
familiar works presents the humorist as a true, broad, and sympathetic
interpreter of Canadian life, as a man who may have lacked self-knowledge and
sensitive insight into the feelings of others, but “whose best work was the
outpouring of genius.” All shades of Leacock’s writing are represented here,
from the “brilliant nonsense which made some critics liken him to Lewis
Carroll,” to his occasional attacks of “aggressive Lowbrowism.” Together in all
their diversity, Davies’ selections pay tribute to the gifts of exuberance,
originality, and slightly malicious truth with which Leacock so entertainingly
extends our vision. - Amazon.
Shakespeare's Boy Actors by Robertson Davies
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