The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks

by Robertson Davies

  • OF EQUINE NONCHALANCE •

  I WATCHED A MAN giving his trotting-horse a workout this afternoon. It was a noble animal with a great deal of what appeared to be adhesive tape on its legs, and when it moved it had the high-stepping, galvanized action of an usher at a society wedding. I was particularly entranced by the way it rolled its eyes. It has been my observation that the spirit of a man or an animal may be judged from this characteristic alone; a wildly rolling eye is invariably the accompaniment of a proud and daring spirit. Most of us, of course, have eyes like green grapes which have been partly squashed, floating in pools of mutton gravy, and we are incapable of moving them to right or left.… When the horse trotted its trainer allowed one of his feet to dangle nonchalantly from the side of the sulky; somehow this mannerism seemed to embody the whole devil-may-care attitude of the trotting fraternity. I watched until I was chilled, and then trotted home, trying to roll my eyes.

  • OF UNCONTROLLED DESIRE •

  THE ONWARD MARCH of statistical research sometimes provokes me to incredulous protest. For instance, I see in the paper today a statement attributed to a “hair stylist” (which is what hairdressers now call themselves) that “Upswept hair-dos reduce woman’s sex appeal 60 per cent.” How does he know? Frankly, I think that he is wrong. Indeed, I once knew a fellow who found upswept hair-dos so provocative that he used to roam about at parties, nibbling the napes of the necks of any women whose hair was so arranged. It was the little curly wisps at the bottom of the hair-do, he explained, which drove him to this: they reminded him of hearts of celery. Sometimes the women were flattered; sometimes they screamed; sometimes their escorts offered to punch him on the nose. I gave up his acquaintance, considering his conduct embarrassingly eccentric, yet I suppose he did no more than yield to an impulse which afflicts all men at some time or other, but which they shove down into the reeking cesspit of the Unconscious.

  • SOCIAL EMBARRASSMENT •

  FOR MANY YEARS I have used a cigarette holder to keep the smoke out of my eyes as I work. Last week I bought a new one, for which I have already conceived a hearty dislike. I have a supply of little bombs, filled with crystals which look like chips from a moth-ball factory, and I am expected to put a little bomb in the gizzard of the holder every now and then, and to remove it when it becomes discoloured and obviously drenched with poisons, tars and harsh irritants. But I find that two cigarettes are quite enough to turn one of these pretty, white little bombs into a stinking obscenity, and if I carry the holder, containing one of them, in my waistcoat pocket people whisper behind their hands and leave cakes of brick-coloured soap about the place in an obvious manner, wounding my self-esteem and causing me to lose face. I cannot possibly afford to change the little bombs every time I smoke a cigarette, nor do I want to become an object of loathing. And, being of a frugal disposition, I do not want to throw my new holder into the garbage, or give it to a tramp. Other people do not get into these embarrassing difficulties. Why am I thus cursed?

  • OF CHUNNERING AND NATTERING •

  YES, AS YOU SAY, madam, it keeps cold. I wonder how the legend ever grew that the Canadian climate was a fine and bracing one. Winter braced me slightly, but Spring has unbraced me completely.… I have passed much time today chunnering with various friends about the weather. I discern that you do not keep abreast of the latest developments in the English tongue. Permit me to provide the following definition: “Chunner: verb: To engage in desultory conversation, much of which may be repetitious and meaningless; phatic communion.” Chunnering about the weather is a recognized way of killing time. Chunnering, by the way, is a distinctively male pastime. Women do the same thing, but when they do it the proper word is “nattering.” I have known whole evenings to be passed in chunnering and nattering. I suggest that you now natter to the gentleman on your left, and I shall chunner to the lady on my right.

  • OF HIS LEWD TONGUE •

  I WAS TOLD TODAY by a friend that some of my more respectable acquaintances are deeply offended by the frequent references to privies and allied subjects which crop up in my conversation. There is an explanation for my grossness, madam, which I shall impart to you: when but an infant I was kidnapped by pirates and for the first twenty-one years of my life I shared their criminal pursuit, albeit unwillingly. During this time the vilest and most degraded circumstances of life—rapine, barratry, drunkenness, privies and cannibalism—were all that I knew; no childish innocence relieved the blackness of my character and no good woman’s tears wore a channel through which delicacy of feeling might have penetrated my flinty bosom. But upon my twenty-first birthday I made my escape, and sought shelter in the hut of a snowy-haired old journalist who treated me with the first kindness that I had ever known, and instructed me in the rudiments of his lowly but necessary trade. In the employment of a journalist I have remained ever since, eking out a meagre but honest living and trying to forget those early horrors. But now and then, when swept along on the high tide of prose, some telltale evidence of my pirate days creeps into what I am saying, and the hateful word “privy” bursts upon the air. Now that you know my dreadful secret, can you find it in your heart to censure me?

  • OF HIS REMOTE BENEVOLENCE •

  MONTHS AGO I wrote to a class of school children in the U.S.A. on a subject in which they, and I, were interested. Today I received thirty-seven letters in return. One boy tells me that his appreciation of my letter is “greatly high”; another tells me that he was “greatly joyed” to hear from me, and wishes that we could meet because “to have a friend and not to see him is very uneasy”; a little girl ends her letter charmingly thus: “There are many other things I would like to say, but you know how it is in School”; my favourite, however, is the little girl who says: “I have often pictured a writer with a serious mind and a boredom for children.” Several of them asked me for photographs of myself, which I shall not send, for fear of destroying the notion they have of me as a benevolent old gentleman who has no boredom for children.… The success of this venture leads me to wonder whether I do not get on better with children by letter than face to face? In a letter I am able to express all the easy-going affability which I feel when I am alone in a room by myself; I find it hard to do this when I am in a room with thirty-seven children. Perhaps I shall go down in history as a Great Lover of Children By Correspondence.

  • OF MONEY IN GALLSTONES •

  I CHATTED WITH that man on our hostess’ right before dinner, and he tells me that the Chinese value gallstones highly for their supposed medicinal properties, and that they will pay as high as $60 a pound for gallstones in good condition. The sale of extirpated gallstones should certainly be taken into consideration whenever it is necessary to finance the building of a new hospital.

  • OF ANTISEPSIS •

  IT WAS HOT LAST NIGHT, and as I brewed myself a refreshing pot of tea, I reflected that without tea and alcohol the human race would probably have perished of its own filthiness centuries ago. Our modern supplies of clean drinking water are a thing of the last sixty or seventy years; before that time water was so unspeakably polluted that nobody in his right senses drank the stuff, and used it for washing only with the greatest caution. The nations of the East preserved themselves by drinking beverages in which antiseptic herbs had been boiled; the nations of the West drank enough alcohol in one form or another to keep themselves reasonably pure, if a little pixillated. Even today alcohol is the great sterilizer, and water is used only if it has been boiled. I pondered on mankind’s debt to booze for a while, and then pensively added a noggin of rum to my tea, just to make sure that I came to no harm.

  • THE MIGHTY MINDS OF PHOTOGRAPHERS •

  I ATTENDED A lecture on photography this afternoon and was bemused by the complexity of it. It seems to resemble astrology closely, and also the mysterious tables by which the date of Easter is determined. If you want to take a picture of the baby, or your aunt gardening, and if your camera is anything more complicated than a pinho
le affair which you have made yourself, you must base your calculations on the Golden Number, the Julian year, sidereal time, the helix of the parallax, and whether or not the Virgin has entered the house of Ram. It brought back the sensations which overcame me years ago when I tried to read Chaucer’s treatise on the use of the astrolabe. It gave me a new reverence for photographers, and convinced me forever that they are mightier fellows than mere painters. A painter, like Rubens or Velasquez, is just a chap with a knack; a photographer is a blood brother to the Astronomer Royal.

  • OF PROGRESSIVE COMMENDATION •

  I WAS READING Dorothy Dix this afternoon; she says that it is permissible for a young man to tell a girl he knows fairly well that she has pretty ankles; from this I assume that the better he knows her the higher he may praise her.

  • OF PAPER HANGING •

  I UNDERTOOK a long-deferred job of paper-hanging this afternoon; there is a knack to this work which I have not fully mastered. It looks simple enough; the paperhanger slops a lot of paste on a length of paper, throws it carelessly at the wall, gives it some swipes with a brush, and after a few repetitions of this child’s play, the room is done. Unfortunately I was working on a ceiling, and no sooner had I fastened a bit of paper at one end than the other end descended with slow grace, like a ballet dancer, and stuck to my head. What I needed was a ladder on wheels, and somebody to push me rapidly back and forth, as I stroked the paper. Lacking this convenience, I got into some postures which reminded me of the famous statue of Laocoon struggling with the serpents. When the job was done, it lacked that rather characterless professional smoothness; at night the wrinkles catch the light in a manner which will undoubtedly soon be all the rage with professional decorators. “Marchbanks Log Cabin Style,” it will be known as.

  • DESIRING THIS MAN’S ART AND THAT MAN’S SCOPE •

  I WENT TO THE country with some children to get pussy-willows the other day. They asked me how the pussy-willows became woolly? I did not know, but made up some quaint lies which pleased them. Psychologists frown on such conduct, I know, but I can’t help it. Sometimes, however, I wish that my only ability did not lie in the direction of concocting untruths of one sort and another. I wish that I were a great wood-carver, or a wonderfully minute jeweller, or a bookbinder—somebody who can make something satisfying with his hands. In an earlier age I suppose I would have been a professional story-teller, sitting in the market place, spinning yams and asking for alms—rightly despised by all the craftsmen who had tangible wares to sell.… But one must not quarrel with one’s fate, and as it has pleased Providence to make me a sort of accredited prevaricator I must be content.

  • OF DISCONTENT WITH ONE’S APPEARANCE •

  WHY IS IT that people never like pictures of themselves? Earlier today I had a chance to observe a large group who were looking at a number of pictures in which they appeared in various guises, and while they agreed that admirable likenesses of everyone else had been caught they were deeply dismayed by their own faces and forms. Do we all cherish an ideal likeness of ourselves in our bosoms? Do we, when we peep into the mirror, refuse to see the wrinkled necks, the ant-eater noses, the cauliflower ears, the wens and bubukles which are indubitably our own? Or is it that we are all so discontented that we cannot bear the hideous forms with which nature, unwise eating and tight boots have endowed us? Or are we distressed that such horrible scarecrows should house such elegant souls as we know ours to be? I cannot answer these questions. I only know that I have never seen anyone look at a picture of himself with unalloyed pleasure.… No, madam, I did not mean anything personal by my remarks about wrinkled necks.… Oh, very well! If the cap fits, wear it.

  • HE ENLARGES THE SCOPE OF MUSIC •

  I INVENTED A new musical instrument today, by one of those happy accidents so often recorded in the lives of great men. I sat down to play my piano, which gave out a loud, wiry whine whenever I touched B natural in the middle octave. Raised the lid and investigated and found that some careless child had left a glass alley on the strings. In fishing the alley out I dropped it on the strings again, and it produced a succession of delicate, tinkling arpeggii, very pleasing to the ear. I repeated this a few times, and then got some more alleys and tried chucking them into the piano in handfuls; this was wonderful. Then I played a little piece on the keyboard, and threw alleys into the works at a musically appropriate moment. Superb! I shall patent this device of mine and market it as “Marchbanks’ Fairy Harp.” The soap operas will all snatch at it, I expect, and the electric organ will fall into disfavour.

  • OF FEIGNED INDUSTRY •

  I SPENT A BUSY DAY today, but got little done. This is because I am at last becoming perfect in the art of seeming busy, even when very little is going on in my head or under my hands. This is an art which every man learns, if he does not intend to work himself to death. By shifting papers about my desk, writing my initials on things, talking to my colleagues about things which they already know, fumbling in books of reference, making notes about things which are already decided, and staring out of the window while tapping my teeth with a pencil, I can successfully counterfeit a man doing a heavy day’s work. Nobody who watched me would ever be able to guess what I was doing, and the secret of this is that I am not doing anything, or creating anything, and my brain is having a nice rest. I am, in short, an executive.

  • HYMEN HASTE! THY TORCH PREPARE •

  I PASSED A CAR which had a crude sign on the back reading “Just Married and Away to the West to Build a Nest.” The car was going east. I gaped at the occupants, a young couple who looked very serious, not to say worried. But as it can never be said that Marchbanks failed to encourage the noble institution of marriage, I waved at them, and shook hands with myself like a Chinaman or a boxing champion, and leered and wagged my head in what I believed to be a benevolent manner. They caught sight of me, and their jaws dropped, and they hastily looked away. It is very difficult to be a ray of sunshine in this self-conscious world.

  • OF HIS BITE •

  MY DENTIST told me last week that modern man eats too much soft food, which weakens his bite and loosens his teeth. But this afternoon I bit my tongue with such vigour that I nearly bit it off. I do not understand how anyone could possibly have a stronger or more destructive bite than I have. Probably I am the only writer and critic in Canada of whom it can truthfully be said that his bite is worse than his bark.

  • OF RATIONALIZING ANGER •

  THE LADY ON my right passed the afternoon at the hairdresser’s. Such women are full of information, for they read old copies of digests and news magazines under the drier. She told me that a psychologist says that it is wrong to repress anger, as anger creates adrenalin and if this nasty stuff is not used up it poisons its owner, giving him indigestion, communism, rabies or ulcers. Anger, this fellow says, should be rationalized by violent physical action. It seems to me that the trouble with this idea is that the kind of violent physical action which follows anger is awfully hard to explain. If a man disagrees with me, and I become angry and pop him on the button and then say, “Nothing personal, you understand; I’m just rationalizing my anger and working off my excess adrenalin,” he will probably secrete a lot of adrenalin himself and pop me back again. Then I shall fill up with adrenalin for a second time, and be compelled to re-pop him, and when the cops arrive it will look just like a low brawl, and not like a high-class adrenalin-rationalizing party. I wish psychologists wouldn’t fill women up with such stuff; I am slopping over with adrenalin all the time and it doesn’t seem to hurt me—very much.

  • OF UNIVERSAL DEMOCRACY •

  I WENT FOR A WALK this afternoon and pondered about democracy. Good as it is, no one can pretend that we have carried it out to its logical conclusion. The equality of man and man is now pretty well established, but what is being done to spread democracy among animals? Is the junk-wagon horse treated as the equal of the race-horse? Does the thoroughbred Boxer receive the same treatment as the mongrel?
There is not even equality of opportunity within such fairly homogeneous groups as dogs and horses, much less among all beasts. Is a duck ever given a chance to run in the Grand National? And yet who is to say that a duck, given the proper education, and the right food and housing, might not some day win that famous race? And this question of equality among animals brings up the greater question: what is Man that he should consider himself the Lord of Creation? Will we not realize that all life is sacred and all animals—man included—equals (or “on all fours” if you prefer the expression)? There will be no real equality until our Parliament is filled with fowls, rodents, and horned cattle, as well as men. Then we will have earned the right to talk about Democracy.

  • OF PROFESSIONALISM IN GRAMMAR •