Davies In Detail Canadian Writer’s Life Is Expertly Reviewed By Biographer Who Answers All The Right Questions

“Robertson Davies Man of Myth” By Judith Skelton Grant (Viking, 787 pages, $35)

More than most authors, Robertson Davies earned his readers’ affection. So those who were bereft at his passing last month at age 82 will be glad to learn that Judith Skelton Grant’s “Robertson Davies: Man of Myth” is an affectionate biography. It is also one of the best literary biographies in a long while, a model of sound scholarship and sound judgment.

Grant addresses questions that Davies’ readers would be likely to pose: What sort of man was this writer of three brilliant trilogies? What connection is there between the life he lived and a novel such as “Fifth Business,” which encapsulates Davies’ unhappy days in the small Canadian town where he spent his early years? Davies did not give Grant unlimited access - “certain of Davies’ diaries remained closed to me,” she acknowledges - but he does seem to have provided extensive help, and both he and his wife, Brenda, read “a near-final draft.”

Davies was born on Aug. 28, 1913, in Thamesville, Ontario, the third son of Rupert and Florence Davies. Rupert had come to Canada at age 15 from Wales. By the time William Robertson Davies arrived on the scene, Rupert was owner and editor of the Thamesville Herald and well on his way to success. He would eventually own several newspapers and have interests in radio and TV to boot.

Surprisingly for someone whose works show a familiarity with the lives of saints, techniques of medieval painting, and 19th-century stagecraft, Robertson Davies’ education was rather haphazard.

He attended a first-rate boarding school - Toronto’s Upper Canada College - but failed to meet the entrance requirements for Kingston’s Queens College. Nevertheless, possibly due to his father’s prominence, he was permitted to attend as a special student - he could go to classes, do assignments and take examinations, but would not be granted a degree.

From Queens, however, he gained admission to Oxford, where he received a research degree, after which he went to work for the Old Vic. The theater was where Davies thought his future lay. He had acted in productions at Upper Canada College, acted and directed at Queens, and at Oxford joined the Oxford University Dramatic Society.

But the theater, a capricious mistress, would requite Davies’ devotion with three crucial disappointments, the first at the Old Vic, where he soon realized he didn’t have what it takes to be a first-rate actor, “though if you keep on,” director Tyrone Guthrie assured him, “you might develop quite a nice little career playing grotesques.” Davies became convinced that his calling in the theater was to write for it.

His sojourn at the Old Vic was far from being a total loss, for it was there that he met Brenda Newbold, an Australian who was an assistant to the stage manager. Their marriage was the one unqualified boon he received from his involvement with theater. Grant notes that when he referred to Brenda as his “dear & loving friend” in one of his travel diaries, “he was paying his life’s companion the greatest of compliments.” As one of the characters in Davies’ novel, “The Rebel Angels,” puts it: “Love and sex are very fine but they won’t last. Friendship … is charity and loving-kindness more than it’s sex and it lasts as long as life… . It grows, and sex dwindles… .”

Davies and his bride sailed to Canada in 1940. Chronic respiratory ailments and woeful eyesight rendered Davies unfit for the military, and in 1942 his father named him editor of the Peterborough (Ontario) Examiner. He wrote columns and reviews - 12,000 words a week, in fact - and did all the things executive editors do.

Throughout, Davies remained faithful to the stage, directing and writing plays until, by 1950, he was being routinely referred to as “Canada’s foremost playwright of the day.” That, however, was the problem: His success was confined to Canada. Then, pondering a play about “Shakespeare … performed by amateurs,” he thought to himself: “To hell with it… . I think I’ll try it as a novel.”

The advantage, Grant points out, was that “he would not have to depend on others… . He could direct, set the scene, light the action and costume the cast himself.”

The result was “Tempest-Tost,” the first volume of what would come to be known as the Salterton trilogy, a satire of provincial theatrics both on and off stage.

(Davies had completed three trilogies of novels and had finished two-thirds of a fourth at the time of his death. He said he had never intended the threefold form, but that things just fell out that way.)

Davies’ novels did what his plays had failed to do: gain him international notice. Davies was being compared to the likes of Trollope and Evelyn Waugh. In 1960, Tyrone Guthrie set to work adapting for the stage “Leaven of Malice,” the second novel in the Salterton trilogy, calling it “Love and Libel.” But theatrical success would remain elusive: The play’s Broadway run lasted five performances.

Davies was 47. It would be nine years before he finished another novel. The principal reason for the delay was his appointment as master of Massey College, a graduate college at the University of Toronto newly established by one of Canada’s most prominent families (actor Raymond Massey being its most famous member). Given Davies’ rather skimpy credentials, it is small wonder that some of his academic colleagues proved resentful. Despite that, Davies lasted in the post for 20 years.

In the meantime, he began reading the works of C.G. Jung (the first sign of the good doctor’s influence is in “A Mixture of Frailties,” the last of the Salterton novels).

Grant notes that for Davies “serious writing was thoroughly bound up with his pursuit of selfknowledge.” His study of Jung led him to regard life “as a sort of lonely pilgrimage … in search of God.” As he saw it, “the way the pilgrimage is made is by attempting to acquire self-knowledge.”

Starting in 1958, Davies began having a recurring dream “peopled by two boys, and one was throwing a snowball, and I knew the snowball had a stone concealed in it.”

Out of this grew “Fifth Business,” the first novel in the Deptford trilogy, in which three lives in one small town are unified by the chance toss of a snowball. This was the book that firmly established Davies’ international reputation, which continued to grow steadily (his name was at least twice on the short list for the Nobel Prize).

Grant’s tracing of the connections between the life and the art is deft and skillful throughout. Typical is the way in which she shows how “The Lyre of Orpheus,” which concludes Davies’ Cornish trilogy - a dazzlingly learned effort on art forgery and the dubious politics of foundations and museums - pointedly reprises elements of the Salterton books.

As for what sort of man Davies was, Grant makes it plain that the sense one gets of him while reading his books is pretty much on the money. Davies’ youthful affectations - walking stick, monocle, extravagant neckwear - were no doubt grating to many, but over the years he refined his act, in large part as a result of his writing.

Perhaps his daughter Miranda put it best when she described Davies as “a very mercurial sort of father … who is entertaining and enticing and fascinating and alluring and glamorous and utterly adorable.”

Despite the formidable beard and the formidable formality, he seems to have ended up rather a decent chap - which is what he had come to aim at being. As he wrote to a friend:

“The world is so full of self-seekers … that I am very keen to be a decent man - not a Holy Joe, or a do-gooder, but a man who does not gag every time he looks in a mirror.”