Robertson Davies: The Well-Tempered Critic

After having first received by mistake (the vendor's mistake, not mine) the similarly titled "The Well-Tempered Critic" by Canadian critic Northrop Frye (published in 1963, and thus my exact contemporary), today I finally got "The Well-Tempered Critic: One Man's View of Theatre and Letters in Canada", written by Robertson Davies (or Robertson Gravies, as my nephew hilariously refers to him) and edited by Judith Skelton Grant, who later went on to write his monumental biography. How's that a sentence for you?

This book came out in 1981 (and so the year I first heard about Davies, although I paid little attention to his work until years later); this is it's 40th anniversary. It is an ex-library book from California. It's also the last Davies' book I'm likely to buy unless another volume of his diaries comes out. There are more obscure, specialist books of his, but they are rare and priced out of my range. Even the 1964 reprint of his first book, "Shakespeare's Boy Actors" (1st edition 1939) is going for $1331.30.

I am only a few pages into it and I have already found this, from a 1949 entry of Davies writing in his persona of the crusty curmudgeon, Samuel Marchbanks:

"Saw The Glass Menagerie this evening, very well acted, but it did not move me to tears or laughter because, I think, I am temperamentally unsympathetic to such pieces. The plot was about a group of people who were in terrible fixes of one sort or another, with no hope of getting themselves straightened out. Now when I encounter such situations in real life my instinct is to run, for I know that if I remain among such people I shall not be able to help them, and they will only succeed in involving me in their troubles, and dragging me down to their own hopeless level. One of the bitterest realizations which life offers us is the knowledge that there are some people who are doomed, either through ill luck or their own unsatifactory character, to be always in trouble; it is necessary to be kind to such people, of course, but it is dangerous to try to straighten them out, for their genius for misfortune is far greater than my genius for assistance. When I see them on the stage I do not have to take a humane attitude towards them, and I reflect that it would have been far better if they had all committed suicide before the curtain went up."