The Cunning Man

by Robertson Davies

  “All this is well recorded. What do you intend to do with it?”

  “Nothing. I’m taking an entirely different tack. You won’t sympathize with it immediately, because you don’t read much but Spengler, who doesn’t really grab the average reader. No, I’m going to apply modern medical theory to the notable characters of literature. Why did Micawber lose his hair? Want of keratin? What were his nails like? What did Jane Eyre, as a governess in a gentleman’s house, get to eat? None of the imported pineapples and grapes; I’m convinced; it was stodge, stodge, stodge for Jane every day of her life, and what had that to do with the solid little creature she became? We know that Jane Austen was fond of port; does it show up in any of her heroines? Think of the refusal to cope with normal sexuality in nineteenth-century literature.—What was the truth behind the marriage of Dorothea Brooke and Mr. Casaubon? They must have shared a bed; it was the iron custom of the time. What happened? Did anything happen? What conclusions can we draw about the menstrual cycle of Emma Bovary? How did Nana avoid having babies? Was it the old vinegar tampon, or what? What was the dental condition of the crew of the Pequod? I intend to go into as much of this subject as I can manage, and it will take me many happy, inquisitive years, equating literature with what we know about the medical practice that was contemporaneous with it. And—this is what I want to impress on you, Chris—the day will come when no writer will dare to offer a novel or a play to the public until he has investigated the medical history of all his characters. Very likely the great writers of the future will all be doctors. Do you follow me?”

  “I think I understand you, which is not quite the same thing.”

  “Do you still think I’m mad?”

  “Not yet.”

  (2)

  I was quite serious in what I proposed, but in describing it to Christofferson I inevitably pitched the note somewhat too high. Her temperament demanded it. There was that about Inge Christofferson, so admirable in every way, that simply called for the farcical approach; one wanted to make her turn pale, or squawk with dismay or amazement, or even—but this was asking for the unattainable—to laugh. She had her own dry wintry jokes, but was unaffected by the jokes of others. She was a Spenglerian to the backbone. It was his great theory of cyclic progression that had prompted her birthday talk with me. I had, she reasoned, passed the ages of Growth and Maturity and was now passing—with my government’s sour sanction—into Decline, Blüte, Reife, and Verfall; it was as plain as that. In her view I had reached the Age of Regret, and spots of food on the lapels. That anything in my temperament might change Decline into Enlightenment, and thus inevitably into a somewhat mirthful approach to whatever of life still remained to me, would have been wholly inconceivable to Chris. She had a Teutonic acceptance of authority, and Spengler was her authority.

  But not mine. Admirable fellow as Spengler was (foreseeing the disastrous consequences of National Socialism in Germany, and standing up bravely for the Jews) I could not tag along after his Prussian insistence on austerity. As it appeared to me, a practising physician, life would provide all the discomfort anybody needed, without making a principle of it. I would, so far as possible, enjoy old age.

  My great book I had decided to call The Anatomy of Fiction, taking as my model Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, and as his had been declared the greatest work on medicine written by a layman, I hoped that mine might be the greatest book of literary criticism written by a physician. It would, of course, be a work of extrapolation, working from the known, as given by the author about an imaginary (but not therefore unreal) character, to well-researched and intelligently guessed-at elements which the author was probably aware of but which the conventions of his time did not permit him to describe. As a doctor, I could not conceive that he might have chosen to omit such details from reasons of literary choice; surely the health, physical state, and living conditions of his characters would be of absorbing interest to him? As they were to me.

  But in the course of a life still much occupied with my medical practice even though I was trying to diminish it, and deflect potential patients to other doctors, I had not the time for the absorbing research my book would demand. So I determined to make a note whenever an idea occurred to me, and to do so in this Case Book, even though the occasional intrusive NOTE for ANAT. would interrupt the flow of what was developing into a substantial narrative.

  (3)

  Other intrusions into my Case Book and Catch-All I could not by any stretch have foreseen. Such a one was the murder of my godson Conor Gilmartin.

  It was Christofferson who first informed me of it. That woman seems to have assumed the character of Lachesis, the measurer of the web of life. One morning she came into my office before my first patient arrived, and laid the morning paper on my desk.

  “Bad news,” she said, and left.

  Bad news indeed. It appeared that the night before, Gil, as we always called him, had entered his apartment, gone to his wife’s bedroom where he expected to find her at work, as she usually was at that time, and was met at the door by an intruder who struck him with a heavy weapon, apparently some sort of metal cosh, and killed him instantly.

  Now here I must be frank, although it may seem that my frankness does me little credit. At the moment I read the news a patient was ushered into my room by Penley—Chris would not have done it, but presumably she was not at her desk—and I gave myself, for the next fifty minutes, wholly to the concerns of that patient. By all fictional convention I should have refused to talk to old Mr. Ellworthy about his arthritis, and have rushed to the Gilmartin apartment in order to do what I could for Esme. But I didn’t. I was as cool as a cucumber, and Mr. Ellworthy left much refreshed.

  The shock came later. After I had telephoned, and said several things which I knew to be of no help whatever, I went to the apartment, where Esme was being “taken care of” by a distracted young woman colleague who was more bother than she was worth. Esme did not need medical attention; her own doctor had been to see her and had given her something to steady her nerves, which seemed to me to be in very good order, all things considered. I called the police and talked to the surgeon on the job, who was an old friend of mine, and was told all the medical details, which were not very revealing. I assured Esme of any help I could give, said a few bracing words to the foolish helper, and went back to my clinic. I had a full day’s appointments before me, and it was not until evening and after my usual dinner at my club that I had a chance to think about Gil.

  This was the man who might very well be my son, but although I was regretful and somewhat stunned I cannot pretend that I felt any disabling grief, and I was ashamed of myself for not feeling more than I did.

  Had I no decent grief in me? Or is grief something that popular opinion apportions to particular misfortunes and which may not present itself to order and in the right form? Frankness compels me to say that although I felt a certain solemnity and decent regret, I felt nothing approaching true grief and pain of bereavement until I attended Gil’s funeral.

  That was when I saw Nuala, and of course Brocky with her. To my eye she looked beautiful in her desolation and Brocky looked, to my dismay, quite old—older surely than I looked myself! I greeted them, but did not sit with them; that might have seemed to be claiming some equality in bereavement.

  The Advocate had provided Gil with a funeral in high style. Esme, to my dismay, put on rather a show, going to the coffin and touching it with reverence as the priest spoke the last few words of the service. A histrionic and, of course, an un-Christian action, but not therefore insincere and I did not allow myself to judge her. Canadians, on the whole a grim-faced lot, do not show much grief in public, but that is not to say that those who do so are not giving form to true feeling.

  No, the champion in grief was a man I did not know who was sitting among Gill’s colleagues, and whose noisy weeping was an embarrassment. Rather a dandy he was, for as he left the chapel, leaning on the arms of two women colleagues, somebody
picked up and handed him a handsome walking-stick which I assumed was his. He accepted it with a look that seemed utterly inappropriate to what was happening—a look almost as if he expected to be struck with the stick, instead of grasping it by its decorative knob.

  “You’ll have dinner with me tonight?” I contrived to whisper to Brocky when the funeral was over.

  (4)

  Thus it was that we three got together at my club, the York Club, a famous refuge of the beleaguered well-to-do, and dined in the handsome dark chamber where a few others were eating and engaging in muted conversations. I had feared that talk might be difficult, but it flowed freely. Talk of the funeral, and some astonishment at the number of people present and the warmth of feeling they showed. Talk, inevitably, of the music, to which Brocky gave reserved approval. Talk of Esme’s somewhat overstated performance as the widow, and it was here that I understood that Nuala and Brocky had never really liked Esme but had done their best to accept her as a daughter-in-law; it was a matter for comment that, although she had kissed them both, not warmly but with proper funeral chill, there had been no suggestion that they should meet her at any future time. They wondered what her financial situation was. (I was able to set their minds at rest; Gil had taken my advice about investment and Esme would be all right.) They did not complain, but it was clear that they felt that they might have been consulted about the funeral service, which the Advocate had taken unto itself and which I knew that McWearie had arranged. But at last this preliminary discussion was exhausted and we came to more important matters.

  “Of course this leaves us with a problem,” said Brocky. “As you can guess, my father left quite a bundle. It has been growing because we live simply, and now we have no heir. What do we do?”

  “You’ll want to do something about Esme, I suppose,” said I.

  “Don’t say we want to. Say rather that we shall,” said Nuala.

  “But she won’t be the heir in the sense that Gil was,” said Brocky; “wouldn’t do at all. I haven’t thought much about it, but at the moment I rather favour a large bequest to Waverley.”

  “But earmarked, probably for the Library,” said Nuala. “Don’t put it into general funds or Principal’s Discretionary Fund, or those greedy scientists will blow it all on expensive toys.”

  “You surprise me,” I said. “I thought you would favour directing the money to medical research. You—a doctor? You astonish me, Nuala.”

  “I know our investigative brethren just as well as you do, Jon. One of the giant industries—Cancer, or, Alzheimer’s, or AIDS—could gobble up everything we have and not even bother to lick its lips. And what would come of it? Damn little, so far as anyone could see. But a Library—well, a Library goes on as far as thought can reach. Who are you, to talk piously about medical research? You’ve done some pretty good work simply using your head.”

  “Ah, but I don’t decry research. Some fine things are done.”

  “Not nearly enough for the amount of money spent. Too much machinery, too much administration, and not enough brains and intuition. Research harbours a lot of second- and third-rate people.”

  “Aren’t you being extreme?”

  “Yes, and high time more people were. Those huge labs are what the monasteries were before Henry VIII took the axe to them. More humanism and less science—that’s what medicine needs. But humanism is hard work and a lot of science is just Tinkertoy.”

  “The people at other tables are beginning to glance this way,” said Brocky. “Pipe down, Nuala, this isn’t your Club and you may get Jon a bad name here. Rowdy guests. But Jon, of course any ideas you have or think up during the next few weeks would be very welcome. We think of you as having a very special association with Gil.”

  I pricked up my ears. Was this an invitation to raise the subject that had been so much in my mind ever since the murder? “Very special—I agree. How special, would you say?”

  “You were awfully good to him during his school-days. Formed his enthusiasm for the theatre and for literature. He spoke of you with real affection. You were very much an uncle to him.”

  “An uncle?”

  “Don’t you like the word?”

  Here goes! “Brocky, I’ve never raised this point, but have you and Nuala never considered that I might have been Gil’s father?”

  Brocky stopped eating crème brûlée and looked me in the eye. There was a perceptible change in the atmosphere, and Nuala was part of it, though she did not move a muscle.

  “Of course I know that you and Nuala were in love before you joined the Army. I suppose if things had been different, you might have married. But the gods disposed otherwise. I came back from abroad much earlier than you did; Nuala and I were both working at Waverley and were inevitably thrown together; we fell very deeply in love and married. Gil was one of the evidences of that love, if I may talk sentimentally for a moment. So I think it unlikely that you could have been Gil’s father. But—that’s a silly thing to say; we academics are always qualifying and diminishing things; you simply couldn’t have been.”

  “I suppose this is the time to get it all out, literally on the table. You’ll have a cognac with your coffee?”

  “Oh—should I?”

  “I think you should. Speaking as a physician. You didn’t know that for years after your marriage Nuala and I met very often?”

  “I know her work took her often to Toronto. You mean of course that you were carrying on an affair?”

  “That’s one of the damnedest, silliest ways of describing what we were doing that I know.”

  “Just at the moment I can’t think of a fancy new expression for what I mean. But listen to me; if you thought I didn’t know, you underestimate me grossly. In fact, Nuala told me all about it, when things came to a head.”

  “You had already suspected it?”

  “He knew it for a certainty,” said Nuala. “He put a snoop on us.”

  “What!”

  “A private dick named—what was that horrid little creature’s name, darling?”

  “The best of the lot was a worm called Joe Sliter.”

  “My God! Brocky—you put a tail on your own wife and your best friend? How could you do such a thing?”

  “Well, when it comes to that, how could you do what you were doing? Making a cuckold of a man you think of as your best friend?”

  “But—hiring a snoop!”

  “What else is there to do? I don’t say I’m proud of it, but you know very well we all do a lot of things we’re not proud of, when it seems necessary.”

  “But it shows such hateful mistrust.”

  “Which, as is so often the case, proved to be perfectly justified.”

  “You’re both being silly,” said Nuala, “and people are beginning to stare. I suppose any evidence of life in here comes as a happy change. Now listen, Jon, and I’ll tell you how it was. Brocky had been getting his reports from the worm, and one night he faced me with the facts.”

  “And raged and screamed and carried on, I suppose,” said I, because now I was thoroughly angry. “Did he beat you? Slug you one? It’s not unknown, you know. That’s the sort of situation that brings out the caveman in professors of Eng. Lit.—usually quite a small caveman, but rough.”

  “Of course he didn’t beat me. If he’d tried, I would have given him as good as he got. I’m wiry, Jon, as you have good cause to know. We had a very sensible discussion.”

  “Sensible!”

  “Now who’s being a caveman?”

  “You know nothing about marriage, Jon,” said Brocky. “People like ourselves don’t go on like that. Have I worked in the world of literature for so many years, not to understand that a woman may very truly love more than one man at a time? Not the same. Not probably in equal shares, if love can be quantified. But Nuala loved you, and was sorry for you—”

  “Pitied me, in fact!”

  “We’re all pitiable, one way or another. You must submit to being pitied, just like everybody el
se.”

  “So what came of this ultra-modern married exchange of confidences, after you had thumbed through Joe Sliter’s grubby, illiterate reports?”

  “Cool down. Joe wrote very plainly and suitably. No gloating. No pitying the cuckold. Just facts and times. We got out a bottle of rum and had a long, very loving talk.”

  “Ending up where?”

  It was Nuala’s turn. “Ending up with me admitting that I had been just the teeniest scrap devious, and Brocky admitting that it wasn’t very nice—”

  “Though wholly justified,” Brocky put in.

  “To put a snoop on us, and get the goods in quite that way. It was a simple case of middle-class adultery begetting middle-class retribution, and very sensible as so much middle-class behaviour is. But then we got down to facts. I told Brocky I still loved you quite a bit, though I thought I was really still in love with the idealistic, amusing young man you had been, rather than the very successful, ironic middle-aged man you had become, and was truly in love with the wonderful Brocky with whom I had lived in such happy intimacy. Admitting, of course, that some of the dew had dried on my own personality and that being a gynaecologist does somewhat change one’s attitude toward sex.”

  “And had being a clear-eyed gynaecologist made you certain that Gil was not my son?”

  “Yes, it did,”

  “I never saw you taking any precautions.”

  “I wasn’t as obvious about it as you were, when you remembered, which wasn’t always rolling on your condom with satisfaction at filling it so well, you vain ass.”

  A silence followed, and at last Nuala said:

  “Don’t take it so hard, Jon. We’ve none of us been especially noble. Just human. But I don’t think we’ve anything much to reproach ourselves with.”