Writing Quotes

Robertson Davies: Canadian Man of Letters

"One aspect of Davies's distinctive identity--and a recurring theme in the interviews--is his belief in the importance of mystery. Davies is not a religious person, it seems, in the sense that he adheres to the practices of a particular church, but he is religious in the sense that he has faith that much of what is around us is unseen. He subscribes to the humble view that a person who does not believe in God is putting an inordinately high value upon himself and Davies would never presume to feel he has come to understand what God is. He will not reject the possibility that the Devil operates in the world, and he does not particularly fret that there is no hard evidence for the soul. This is strictly a matter of faith with him, for, after all, the unknowable is that which cannot be known."

--J. Madison Davis, Introduction to Conversations With Robertson Davies.

Robertson Davies On "The Unlived Life"

"Perhaps the concept of the 'unlived life' calls for some expansion. It is not suggested that we should all obey every prompting of our desires, though it is healthy for us to give full attention to those desires which we will not fulfil, but which sometimes arise to plague us. We must be aware of the darker side of our natures. We must know what lurks in the shadows. Goethe said that he never heard of a crime which he could not imagine himself committing, under appropriate circumstances; that is the sort of self-knowledge we should seek. But the 'unlived life' is something different; it is the very often the life that has been put aside in order to serve the demands of a career, or an idea of one's place in the world, or simply--as in the case of the hero of Henry James's story--to serve one's own comfort and egotism. Very often it is love that is sacrificed in this way, but it may also be adventure, or a concern with the arts, or a friendship, or simply a greater freedom of action: these unlived elements revenge themselves , and sometimes they do it with compounded interest.

"We all know the saying that preacher's children are the worst harum-scarums, but do we ever look to see what ghosts of the parsonage they are laying by their rowdy behaviour? The banker's boy who becomes the school thief is bodying forth a repressed part of his father's concern for money. The young people who make a cult of promiscuous sex may be doing what their elders were afraid to do but longed to do. The druggies and the layabouts are living out the unlived life of too scrupulously moral and work-ridden families.

"This does not mean that these disreputable people are in the right, or that their elders are to blame for their bad behaviour. What is demonstrated is simply the principle of enantiodromia, which is the tendency of things to run into their opposites if they are exaggerated. Excessive self-love becomes no love at all; extreme prudence ends up by spoiling the ship for a ha'porth of tar; a rejection of all that is coarsely vital in life brings a shrivelling of sensibilities. As a very eminent psychiatrist once said to me: 'We attract what we fear.' What we fear is the portion of life that remains unlived. Our task, if we seek spiritual wholeness, is to be sure that what has been rejected is not, therefore, forgotten, and its possibility wiped out."

--from "Glooms and Gleams," in One Half Of Robertson Davies.

Aww, Grow Up!: Quotations

"It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird; it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad." --C. S. Lewis.

" 'Well, do you do that consciously?' Daily Alice asked, only partly of Cloud.
'Do what?' Cloud asked. 'Grow up? No. Well. In a sense. You see it's inevitable, or refuse to. You greet it or don't--take it in trade, maybe, for all you're going to lose anyway. Or you can refuse, and have what you've got to lose snatched from you, and never take payment--never see a trade is possible.' " --John Crowley.

"What will make him an old man is a frightened clinging to the values of the first half of his life. We have all seen these juvenile dotards whose boast is that they are just as young as their sons or their grandsons; they do not realize what a pitiful boast that is. They prate about their sympathy with youth, but they mean only the superficialities and ephemera of youth. Many of the sad smashups in marriages that we see among middle-aged people have their origin in this attempt to dodge an inescapable fact. The values that are proper and all-absorbing during the first half of life will not sustain a man during the second half. If he has the courage and wisdom to advance courageously into the new realm of values and emotions he will age physically, of course, but his intellectual and spiritual growth will continue, and will give satisfaction to himself and to all those associated with him. And such courage and wisdom are by no means rare; they may show themselves among many people who have never thought along those lines at all but who have a knack for living life wisely; and they also are to be found among those who regard self-awareness as one of the primary duties of a good life. Paradoxically, such people are on better terms with youth than the shrivelled Peter Pans who dare not be their age." --Robertson Davies.

10 Books A Day: #3

The Deptford Trilogy: Fifth Business, The Manticore, World of Wonders...Robertson Davies...Penguin

The Cornish Trilogy: The Rebel Angels, What's Bred In The Bone, The Lyre Of Orpheus...Robertson Davies...Penguin

High Spirits...Robertson Davies...Penguin

Murther And Walking Spirits...Robertson Davies...Penguin

The Cunning Man...Robertson Davies...Penguin

The Salterton Trilogy: Tempest-Tost, Leaven Of Malice, A Mixture Of Frailties...Robertson Davies...Penguin

Conversations With Robertson Davies...ed. J. Madison Davis...University Press of Mississippi

Happy Alchemy: On The Pleasures Of Music And The Theatre...Robertson Davies, ed. by Jennifer Sturridge and Brenda Davies...Viking

The Merry Heart: Reflections On Reading, Writing, And The World Of Books...Robertson Davies...Viking

For Your Eye Alone: The Letters Of Robertson Davies...Robertson Davies, ed. Judith Skelton Grant...Viking

The Papers Of Samuel Marchbanks...Robertson Davies...Viking

Robertson Davies: Man Of Myth...Judith Skelton Grant...Viking

I first encountered the work of Robertson Davies quite by accident. My mother bought me The Deptford Trilogy on one of her garage sales expeditions; it looked rather fantastic, and was a trilogy, and as far as she knew it could be my cup of tea. On my first glance it seemed far from it: novels set in Canada, in "modern" times, in a realistic milieu. But to humor her I gave it a chance, dipping in, reading here and there, getting interested, then hooked, and eventually eagerly seeking out anything Davies had written. It turned out to be one of the best gifts my mother ever gave me.

Robertson Davies (1908-1995) was born in Canada, son of a senator and newspaperman. Both his parents were avid readers. He got most of his education in Canada and finished up his college in Oxford, where some of the classes he attended were taught by C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien (I have to note that as personally interesting to me; I can't say how significant it was to Davies). He majored in Drama, and throughout his life he acted, wrote and studied theatre. He returned to Canada where he got into the newspaper business with his family, and for years he wrote many books while writing and editing the paper, including essays published in the persona of his alter-ego, Samuel Marchbanks.

In 1961 he became the first Master of Massey College, founded largely by members of the Massey family, of whom perhaps Raymond Massey is the most famous. During his tenure he did his best to supply the New World college with the best of the humane traditions of the Old World colleges. It was through these years he wrote his most famous works, the books of The Deptford Trilogy; also in the spirit of fun he wrote one ghost story each year to be read at the college's Christmas revels, as per the old English tradition; these stories were later published as High Spirits.

Davies at his best is a marvelous mix of qualities: the feeling of wonders behind and alongside the work-a-day world, a generous, tender, and forgiving spirit, not unmixed with wry humor at human follies, the appreciation of a serious and unselfish dedication to a worthy craft. If occasionally he comes up with a howler like saying an orangutan has a tail, we can forgive him with the same generosity and humor he extends to his own characters.

The Magian World View: Quotations

"You have read Spengler? No: it is not so fashionable as it once was. But Spengler talks a great deal about what he calls the Magian World View, which he says we have lost, but which was part of the Weltanschauung--you know, the world outlook--of the Middle Ages. It was a sense of the unfathomable wonder of the invisible world that existed side by side with a hard recognition of the roughness and cruelty and day-to-day demands of the tangible world. It was a readiness to see demons where nowadays we see neuroses, and to see the hand of a guardian angel in what we are apt to shrug off ungratefully as a stroke of luck. It was religion, but religion with a thousand gods, none of them all-powerful and most of them ambiguous in their attitude toward man. It was poetry and wonder which might reveal themselves in the dunghill, and it was an understanding of the dunghill that lurks in poetry and wonder. It was a sense of living in what Spengler called a quivering cave-light which is always in danger of being swallowed up in the surrounding, impenetrable darkness."

--from World of Wonders, by Robertson Davies.