The Cunning Man

by Robertson Davies

  “Sorry. I don’t have much to say. In the last few minutes I have lost the great love of my life, and also my only likelihood of a son. It takes a bit of getting used to.”

  “Now, now, let’s have no cheap melodrama,” said Brocky. “You haven’t lost the great love of your life. She’s still right where she has been for years—in your memory. And as for losing a son, you’d have been a rotten father, but you made a splendid weekend uncle, a Saturday-on-the-town uncle, and you had some of the best of Gil, and missed the adolescent revolt and other conventional nuisances I had to cope with. You don’t suppose this Club of yours could come up with some really good rum, do you?”

  “I’m certain it could. That’s the kind of place it is. I am sure I could get a bottle. Then we might adjourn to my quarters.”

  That is what we did, and made a merry evening of it, in which our newly found situation was carefully considered, and approved, and old ties were tightened.

  The odd thing was that we spoke so little of Gil. But in a very real sense, this was Gil’s wake.

  (5)

  Artistically, everything was wrong with the resolution of my affair with Nuala. It had been passionate love in the beginning, and those student days, and the afternoons in the Ford Hotel, were as glorious to me as anything in literature or art. The continuance of our love for several years after her marriage had for me as powerful a savour as the deception of King Arthur by his dearest friend, Lancelot of the Lake—the subjection of loyalty to passion. But the conclusion! Suspicion, and instead of a manly confrontation, resort to a private detective; a muted row in the dining-room of the York Club; a merry drunken threesome in my study, with everybody kissing everybody else and an acceptance of what, by all the rules of art, should have been utterly unacceptable. The stealing hand of old age spreading its pall over the romance of youth, so that I saw, unwillingly, my darling Nuala as a wiry gynaecologist, with a few threads of grey in her Irish black hair. I saw Brocky, with all his finely woven mantle of learning, as also a husband who had settled the hash of his wife’s lover by the most conventional means, and had shown no anger. Because Nuala had said so, and Brocky had agreed as if she were saying an incontrovertible truth, I had to accept the idea that a woman could, in complete sincerity, love two men at the same time. Worst of all I saw myself not as Lancelot of the Lake, the self-hating adulterer, and decidedly not as the figure in the centre ring of the circus, but as a side-show in the lives of the two people I loved best.

  Artistically I suppose I should have shot myself, leaving a message saying, “I forgive you all.” But I really had no appetite for suicide and I came at last to a recognition of myself as, in part, a Tom Sawyer who wanted everything done according to the rules of romantic fiction, and complicated simple situations with his absurd adolescent, book-born nonsense.

  In part; it is important to stress that qualification. The romantic lunatic and the shallow-witted adolescent were not the whole of Dr. Hullah who was so successful at unravelling and reweaving the fabric of other people’s lives. How often is this so, I wonder? Turn the Wizard toward the light, and you see that he is also the Fool. The lives of the great philosophers, so far as we know them, afford ample supporting evidence.

  (6)

  Note for ANAT.: To what extent does our whole concept of the mixture of sexual attraction, elfin glamour, simple lust, and loneliness which we call love, need revision as we grow older? For there is no use pretending that love does not change with the years, in the cases when it survives the years. Fiction and poetry have little to say about this.

  I have no young patients. The ills I can treat are those of middle and old age. The young have other needs. But I hear a good deal about the young, and read what they write about themselves. For them love—and I don’t think they have entirely abandoned the old word—has lost virtually all of its glamour because sexual union is comparatively easy. (Though not perhaps so easy as the popular writers would suggest.) As every child knows, waiting for Christmas Dinner, hovering around the table, sniffing the wondrous scents from the kitchen and working up an appetite is immensely better than the actual consumption of the meal. Only when they have achieved some experience as gourmets does the true satisfaction of appetite arrive, and gourmets do not stuff themselves at every opportunity. So—in our time love has lost some—not all—of its glamour because it has been too much simplified. But of course lust and loneliness still play their accustomed roles. And sexual attraction, though it has found some new robes (or brought old robes out of the closet), is as potent as ever.

  It was not always so.

  Until quite recently the concluding experience of most popular fiction took place at the altar. With our great-grandfathers it very rarely reached the marriage bed. But oh—what we would not give to know what really happened when Mr. Rochester, in his fine linen ruffled nightshirt, lifted the cotton nightie of Mrs. R. the Second (née Jane Eyre) and set about an act which unquestionably was, for her, something new and strange.

  Strange in deed. Probably not wholly strange in imagination or in daily observation. Jane cannot have lived the life she lived and remained entirely green about sex, nor could Charlotte Brontë, who was her only begetter. Charlotte and Jane both lived in the country, and in the age of horses, and horses are not modest creatures. The dissolute Branwell Brontë must surely have dropped a few hints about his own life in the hearing of his sisters. Brothers are no friends to innocence. One of those sisters, the heroic Emily, must certainly have known how many beans made five, and what it was that—in part at least—bound Heathcliff to his youthful love Cathy; adolescent sex cannot have been unknown to a daughter of the Reverend Patrick Brontë, whose parish must have presented examples enough.

  One cannot doubt that Jane Eyre went to her marriage bed a virgin, but not a fool.

  What of the heroines of Jane Austen? So witty a girl as Elizabeth Bennet must have picked up a few things before her marriage to Darcy. She had the true Shakespearean heroine’s combination of modesty and merry intelligence, and modesty is by no means incompatible with knowing how the world wags. Jane Austen’s girls knew to a hair’s breadth the fine line between merriment and simple smut.

  A purity that is ignorance, when the age of childish innocence has passed, is mere stupidity, and nobody ever thought Jane valued stupidity. But later in the nineteenth century this came to pass, for there is no nonsense so gross that society will not, at some time, make a doctrine of it and defend it with every weapon of communal stupidity.

  It was a convention of ordinary fiction until fairly recently that a really nice girl is not merely innocent—which is one thing—but a simpleton—which is something quite different. Amelia Sedley may have been a fool, but Becky Sharp assuredly was not. What ignorance can Becky have possessed, raised as she was? Thackeray did not write ordinary fiction.

  Nor can the children in these great books have been as numbly ignorant of sex as would appear from a hurried reading. Henry James’s very intelligent little Maisie knew a great deal that her biographer tells us, and undoubtedly a great many things about the sexual life of her elders which her author knew she knew, but was forbidden by convention from telling us.

  Of course I, the well-read Dr. Hullah, know these things, but it is only now that my experience strikes home, and I understand that the love in literature and the love in life are one, and that the intelligent reader must bring his own experience to supplement the experience of the novel he holds in his hand. Romance, a true devotion, and simple bodily lust are all part of the same plum pudding, and there is so much more to the pudding than the delicious savour that arises from it. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and it is only when we have eaten several mouthfuls that we begin to understand. If a book cannot stand up to this test, how good is it?

  (7)

  It was not Gil’s death, but the aftermath in which I had to reassess my affair with Nuala and see that the Irish enchantress of the past and the middle-aged (to be gallant, for she was
not more than three or four years younger than I) and wiry gynaecological specialist of the present were two different creatures and that I was well into what the popular journals call “the youth of old age.” Nor could I expect the world to sympathize with me if the world should ever hear of my trouble. The world, as represented by those who give advice on such matters in the press, would doubtless have advised me to seek a new partner, probably in the columns of those papers where “Peppy lady, 45 years young, seeks real man, fond of opera, candle-lit dinners, walks in the woods, baseball, and fly-fishing, for lasting comradeship and who knows what?” The world had, without my being strongly aware of it, changed its attitude toward sex dramatically, though not, I think, deeply. Homosexuality had become, not the love which dares not speak its name, but the love that never knows when to shut up. Words that as a boy I had seen scrawled in chalk on barns were now commonplaces in the daily press, and probably that is a move away from a narrow puritanism, and a foolish affectation of delicacy in reportage, where there can be no delicacy and little decency. Nevertheless, I can never see the word “fuck” in print, or hear it on the lips of women old and young, without a start, which I have learned to conceal, because to me it speaks only of physical sex as it applies to a rape or commercial unions with bored hirelings. There is no other word except chilly medical circumlocutions, but to me “fuck” will always lack the elfin glamour without which the interplay of the sexes is simply hot flesh and cold potatoes—a poor meal.

  Nevertheless I was kept from sinking into ancientry by my patients. Many of them belonged to the group McWearie called Hullah’s Aporetics, which was his grand word for people ingenious in producing doubts and objections to virtually everything that might be expected to help them. If I prescribed a medicine they were sure to find that it was too strong, or not strong enough, or seemed to provoke new and troublesome symptoms. If I suggested that some reading, or concert-going, or hi-fi listening, or the new marvel which can bring a movie right onto your TV screen might give them a lift, they found reading “tried their eyes,” or they were not “up to” getting to a concert hall, or home listening “disturbed” the rest of the household. As for the notion that films at home might raise their spirits they were more than usually ingenious in their objections. The sight of films made when they were young, or younger, were too painful because of the sense of the past they evoked; since the Holocaust all that sort of thing seemed unbearably shallow. Or else they were ridiculous because the fashions were so stupid that nobody could ever have worn them; or there was too much drinking, or cigarette-smoking, or indifference to the mounting threat of Russia, or some other thing that made the film unendurable; and of course the Marx Brothers weren’t funny any more and my aporetic couldn’t raise a laugh to save her life.

  Did this mean that I stopped my suggestions or that they did no good? Not a bit of it. “How lucky you are, Doctor, to have such a zest for life. A poor creature like me simply has to envy you. No, the films didn’t help and I’ve returned the machine to the shop—but I must say that what does me good is a talk with you, Doctor. You have what I heard one person call infectious mental health, and that’s a great gift.”

  Gift! To these wretches I was a marvel of well-being. It wasincon-ceivable to them that I might have any cares, disappointments, aches or pains, for these things were their exclusive property. My appearance of well-being was a professional manner.

  Not all my patients were in this group, thank God, or I might have gone mad. But the majority were the people with infectious mental ill-health and they spread their misery to pitiable husbands, wives, unmarried daughters, and dependants and connections who could not, or would not, flee from them. I am sure I did them some good, and in doing so I earned my fee, for they were depleting company and if I had not maintained a firm professional attitude I would have laughed at them, or cursed them, for they were cumberers of the earth—poor souls.

  Now and then I had a novelty, like the very pretty case of Farmer’s Lung I diagnosed in a chartered accountant, whose devotion to his city garden had brought it on. It was a clear extrinsic allergic alveolitis but I thought myself rather clever to have traced it to its cause, and when he followed my advice and gave up so much intense composting, he quickly came round, and hailed me as a wonder-worker.

  But there were hours when I longed for a more interesting group of patients. I had read and reread Axel Munthe’s Story of San Michele, and I wished that I too were called upon to treat crowned heads, and society beauties, and fascinating artists. True, I had a few millionaires, but they were not the interesting kind—not great pirates and rascals of finance, but just toilsome lawyers and manufacturers, every one armed with a dismal tale of how he had raised himself from humble beginnings to—it seemed to me—an intellectually and spiritually humble present. I wished for a larger life. I knew that I was just as good a physician as Munthe, looked at medicine in the same humanist light, but the interesting patients did not come my way. I was doomed to lend an ear to what Wordsworth called—

  The still, sad music of humanity

  which all too often degenerated into a whine. I was rich, for I had made my substantial inheritance grow by sound investment, and I had acquired a good deal by—it must be said—soaking my patients heavily for my services. The health system at that time permitted what was called “extra billing” which allowed a doctor to charge his patients something above the fee recognized by the government. I was a remorseless extra-biller, and it seemed to me that the more exacting I was, the more eager my aporetics and dismal sufferers were to reward me for my attentions.

  Cynical. Inexcusable. Professionally reprehensible. My parents would not have approved. The Anglo-Catholicism which I had adopted (with substantial reservation) would not have approved. But did I not deliver the goods? Did I not disperse my infectious mental health to those who were so eager for it? Was I not, in the term now popular, “charismatic”? As for my extra-billing, had not Sigmund Freud counselled against treatment that was too cheap, on the grounds that what came cheaply was cheaply esteemed?

  But oh, I longed for a crowned head or an ailing beauty!

  (8)

  “Miss Todhunter has asked for an appointment.”

  “Extraordinary. That’s never happened before.”

  “I know. They see Dr. Dumoulin when they see anybody.”

  “Any idea what it’s about?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’d better get it straight from her. I’ve given her five o’clock. Last of the day.”

  When Chips arrived in my consulting-room she was uneasy, and that was in itself strange. I let her go on about the weather—such a splendid autumn—for a while until she was ready to unbutton.

  “It’s not about myself I’ve come. It’s about Emily. I wish you’d have a look at her, Doctor.”

  “What is this ‘Doctor’ business, Chips? We’re old friends.”

  “I know, but this is a professional visit, and we’ve never consulted you professionally. You’re too expensive for us poor artists.”

  “I believe you are patients of Dr. Dumoulin. If you mean to go on with him, I must be reserved. No poaching. Old professional principle. But of course if you want a second opinion—”

  “That’s precisely what I do want. And I’ve come to you because you’re the Cunning Man. I don’t think she’s getting the right sort of treatment at all.”

  “What is her treatment now?”

  “Dumoulin keeps saying it’s depression. She’s become awfully hard to live with. I mean, not just the usual temperament one is used to in artists like Em. She snaps my head off about the least thing and she mopes a lot.”

  “I don’t suppose that was what she went to Dumoulin about?”

  “No. Fatigue. No chug. Run down.”

  “I see. Appetite?”

  “Tricky. Things she used to love she won’t touch. That’s not like her, you know, Jon. Not a bit. It used to be that if she didn’t feel like eating I could coax her,
and she’d eat to please me. Now if I coax she gets very shirty and tells me not to boss her. She’s losing weight, I know.”

  “Sleep?”

  “Poorly. Reads a lot in the night.”

  “You share a bed?”

  “Always have. So I know. And it isn’t just reading. She weeps. And if I try to show any comfort she gets hysterical and tells me not to watch her all the time.”

  “Do you notice anything else—any unusual smells, for instance?”

  “Yes. Breaks wind a lot. But stealthily. What the Québécois call le pet jésuite. No noise, but of course you know. She’s very ashamed of it, but can’t control it.”

  “This is a bit personal, but what about libido?”

  “Meaning—?”

  “Any interest in sex?”

  “Oh, that’s all over. Menopause dished it. Perhaps it shouldn’t have, but it did.—You are a nosy old thing.”

  “Professionally so. What does Dumoulin suggest?”

  “Oh, he gives her some charcoal pills for the farts. What he really recommends is a trip of some sort. Thinks a sea voyage would help. But you know what that means nowadays—one of those bloody tours with retired simpletons. I suppose one could go on a freighter. They take passengers and I hear the Dutch ones are very good. But its no use, anyhow. She won’t hear of it. Says she must stay with her work.”

  “How’s the work going?”

  “Hardly at all. She’s still messing with that banker’s head she began three months ago. She puts funny faces on the clay model and then bursts into tears. Rum, Jon. What do you make of it?”

  “What can I make of it when I can’t see the patient? Won’t Emily come and see me?”

  “Not a chance. I suggested it and she blew up and said she’d be damned first. This is one of the rum things; she takes against people so unreasonably. Once she called you the Cunning Man, but now she’s taken against you. You used to be on pretty good terms.”