The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks

by Robertson Davies

  • OF THE BOOK OF BOOKS •

  I RECIEVED A COPY of The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks this morning. It looks very nice, though the price is too high, owing to the heavy costs of production, particularly binding, these days. Nevertheless, I suppose people will insist upon buying it, thronging to the bookshops with their money clutched tightly in their little hot hands. Poor souls! How much better off they would be if they would concentrate upon that Book of Books, in which wisdom, beauty, and ineffable solace are to be found—I refer, of course, to the book which I published in 1939, and which nobody bought. It appeared between the Anschluss and the outbreak of war and these trivial distractions ruined it.

  • OF A CRUEL DECEPTION •

  I VISITED THE DENTIST again today. When he had finished his work he disappeared into a little back room and I heard the sound of something gurgling from a bottle; this is a noise which always cheers me. Soon he returned with a small glass of pink liquid which he handed to me. “Try that,” he said in a conspiratorial voice. I was touched by this kindness, and I winked at him, said “Chin-chin,” and drank it at a gulp. It was mouthwash, without even an alcohol base.… I consider that the dentist abused my confidence, and I think it was a dirty trick to play on a man whose nerves were still shaky. If that dentist ever visits me in my office, I shall treat him to a glass of whisky-coloured ink.

  • A TREND? •

  I AM DEEPLY interested in a news dispatch from South Africa which tells of twin girls who suddenly became boys. I want to know more about this. Was the change the result of deep emotion generated by the Royal visit? What are the feelings of the girls with whom, until now, they mixed on terms of girlish intimacy? Is there any sign of a trend toward this sort of thing in the Sister Dominion? Have bearded Boer farmers begun to look speculatively at their reflections in the glass, wondering how they would look in one of those saucy Voortrekker bonnets? Canada is outclassed now. All we can show is a set of Quintuplets when our King visits us, but in South Africa they are ambisextrous.

  Personally I like being a man, and I can face with stoicism the possibility of becoming a woman, but I dread the intermediate period, during which I should be an It, tossed hither and thither on the turbulent seas of irreconcilable ambitions.

  • PITFALLS OF CLEANLINESS •

  I TALKED TO a man this morning who is financially interested in Ontario wines. I asked him why they were no better than they are, and he replied by telling me of the extreme care and cleanliness shown in manufacturing them. “But that’s just the trouble,” I said: “you make wine as though it were a disinfectant. In the wineries of France they concentrate on flavour, and not on cleanliness, and as a result they produce great wines; wine must be made by vintners, not by analytical chemists. Wine and cheese are two things which cannot be made under laboratory conditions if they are to be good. It is better for the connoisseur not to poke his nose into the cheese factory or the winery. Cleanliness is the bugbear of this continent, and too much is sacrificed to it.” He goggled a bit, and then said that he didn’t know anything about it; he was a rye drinker himself. Oh, for a glass of real wine from grapes pressed by the feet of joyous, pleasure-loving Ontario farmers.

  • OF LEGERDEMAIN •

  MY BROTHER Fairchild has been having rather a difficult time with magic. Hoping to ingratiate himself with his children, he bought them some magic tricks, with which he thought that they might mystify their little friends. Having made this false step, he was soon involved in the appalling task of teaching the children to perform the tricks. Teaching a child to do even the simplest sleight-of-hand is like teaching a hippopotamus to embroider pillow-slips. The result of the whole mad scheme was tears, bad temper, and frustration for Fairchild.… I sympathize with him. Once, in the bleak past, I cherished a desire to be a magician; I would have been quite content if I could have achieved the modest skill of say, Dante or Blackstone. I laboured before a mirror with coins, cards, eggs, handkerchiefs and billiard balls for weeks, my arms aching until one bitter day when I came to my senses and admitted that nothing short of psycho-analysis and blood transfusions could make a conjurer of me. For the same reasons that I cannot carpenter shelves, fix leaky taps, or tend a furnace, I was unable to pluck fifty quarters out of the air, or pull a rabbit out of a hat.

  • OF ILLOGICAL PERSONS •

  I ARGUED TODAY with the most illogical opponent I have met in a long time. For my part, I can argue quite logically when it suits me, having been trained to it at my school, where there were a number of clever young English masters who supervised our boyish wrangles. “That’s an argumentum ad hominem, Marchbanks,” they would cry, when I was buttering up my opponent before giving him a verbal K.O. Or they would shriek, “Tu quoque!” when I sought to unnerve my rival by shouting “The same to you, with knobs on!” at him, hoping to make him lose his temper. They were also very critical of something called “an undistributed middle” which I apparently made use of when I was being particularly foxy. Under their tutelage I learned the useful art of logic, which permits me to hold my opponent very closely to the rules, while pulling a dialectical fast one on him whenever I can. But when I argue with someone who scorns logic, and even reason, I have to depend on my talent for abuse if I hope to win.

  • SIN, GLUTTONY AND SLOTH •

  AT CHRISTMAS someone gave me some Russian cigarettes, wrapped in black paper and with elegant gold tips. From time to time I smoke one, enjoying a deep sense of sin as I do so. Thus it is to have been brought up in a household of Continuing Presbyterians; when others wallow happily in the fleshpots I gather up the skirts of my immortal soul and dabble my feet timidly over the brink.…I shovelled a lot of heavy snow this afternoon, which caused a great lethargy to come upon me. But I revived myself with a glass of sherry, which made me so hungry that I ate a huge tea, after which I could do nothing but loll by the fire and yawn until it was time to come here. Physical activity of any kind is my downfall; in order to keep my brain working and my productiveness at its height, I should be carried everywhere in a chair, like a Chinese mandarin.

  • OF CALLIGRAPHY AND TURPITUDE •

  THERE WAS A time when I took a modest pride in my handwriting; of late years it has degenerated into a scrawl. This probably means that my moral stature is increasing, for I have observed that beautiful writers are usually uncommonly wicked men. One of the most exquisite writers who ever lived was Casanova, and everybody knows that he was a fellow you wouldn’t trust even with your old Aunt Bessie; another impeccable master of the cursive hand was Poggio, who used it chiefly to write down dirty stories about the clergy. Of late years I have grown so moral that I am becoming dull company for myself, and it is my invariable habit to remove my hat to all wearers of back-to-front collars. Result: I can hardly read my own notes. Canadians on the whole must be remorselessly moral fellows, for they are shocking scrawlers.

  • MARCHBANKS NO COMMITTEEMAN •

  I ATTENDED A committee meeting this afternoon to decide certain matters bearing upon the public weal, and tried to look serious for three hours and a half. As I am incapable of concentrating on any single theme for more than an hour at a time, this was a strain on my histrionic powers. My imagination wandered; I thought about what I would do if I had a lot of money, what I would do if I were wrecked on a desert island with Joan Fontaine, and what I would do if I were a wood-carver of the genius of Grinling Gibbons. I drew funny faces on the paper which had been given to me for the purpose of making serious notes. I wondered what would happen if an evil fairy were to sneak into the room through the keyhole and strike us all stark naked. I wondered if I would be able to eat a woolly old Life Saver which I found in my pocket with my car keys, without being rebuked by the Chair. It is useless to put me on committees: I have an incorrigibly frivolous and vacillating mind.

  • JONSON’S MESSAGE FOR OTTAWA •

  I WENT TO SEE Donald Wolfit in Ben Jonson’s Volpone last evening, and liked it much better than I liked Lear last week; the compan
y seemed more suited to the satirical work. This play is all about avarice, and was a delightful change from most modern plays which are all about love. But avarice, as a vice, seems to have gone out of fashion. Nobody is miserly in the grand manner nowadays. Of course, following the trend of the times, the State has taken over avarice, and for genuine grasping, grinding, scrunching, scraping meanness and extortion it surpasses immeasurably all miserliness based on individual whim. In fact, I think it would pay the Income Tax Payers’ Association to engage Mr. Wolfit and his company to stage a special performance of Volpone and give free seats to the Government, the deputy ministers, and the heads of all bureaux and boards at Ottawa as a lesson in avarice punished.… The genius of Jonson never fails to astonish and refresh me. What a torrent of golden words! And what a magnificent detestation of cant and folly.

  • OF AN IMPERFECT WIG •

  WHILE ON THE train today I sat near a man who was wearing a particularly fine example of a $5 wig. Like many other things, the excellence of wigs increases directly with their cost, and $5 procures the absolute minimum of deception and aesthetic satisfaction. This fellow had bought a somewhat larger wig than he really needed, perhaps in the hope that his head would grow, and in consequence it shifted a little every time the train lurched. Sometimes it dropped down over his eyes, and I was treated to the spectacle of a growing gap between art and nature at the back: at other times the thing jerked backward, giving him a high forehead, like pictures of Shakespeare; when it tilted over one eye he had quite a rakish appearance. His hair alone entitled him to challenge Lon Chaney’s right to the name of “The Man With A Thousand Faces.” I should judge that he had owned this wig for many years, for it had grown a trifle mangy, and he had tried to rejuvenate it by smearing it with brilliantine. The result was rather as though he had decorated his pate with a piece of cotton waste which someone had used for cleaning an engine.

  • CANADIANS AT the PLAYHOUSE •

  I WENT TO SEE John Gielgud’s production of The Importance of Being Earnest. I have never understood why some people call this an “artificial comedy”; true, it does not sprawl, and it wastes no words in foolishly reproducing the emptiness of everyday speech, but it is no more “artificial” than the music of Mozart is “artificial”… . It has been a long time since Canada saw comedy acting as perfect as this.… It is a wonderful thing to watch the audience at a performance of this quality; every time they laugh they seem to roll forward a little in their seats, and the cumulative effect of this movement is as though the whole theatre had given a tiny hop toward the stage. And what a wonderful thing it is to see an Ontario audience laugh! Those stony, disapproving, thin-lipped faces, eloquent of our bitter winters, our bitter politics, and our bitter religion, melt into unaccustomed merriment, and a sense of relief is felt all through the theatre, as though the straps and laces of a tight corset had been momentarily loosened.

  • OF BEING POORLY •

  I ATTENDED A meeting of a Strength Through Joy committee of which I am a member this afternoon, and we talked about the encouragement of hobbies. There was no mention, however, of Ill Health, which is the hobby of a lot of people I know, and a very satisfactory hobby, too. You can pursue it anywhere, with simple materials which are to be found in every home, such as a bed, a rug, an easy-chair, or even a box of bicarbonate of soda. If you want to go in for it in a big way it is well to spend a dollar on a clinical thermometer, which you can carry in your pocket, and a watch, so that you can take your own pulse. The object of a hobby is to broaden your outlook and develop your personality, and mild invalidism will do both. Once you establish the fact that you are Poorly, you will be able to impose on your friends in a variety of delightful ways, and as a means of dominating your married partner, and subduing your children, it has no equal. It is a mistake to omit Ill Health from any list of hobbies, for it has its devotees in every class; I think it would be a good scheme to get all the Ill Health hobbyists together, and let them be Poorly at one another, and select a Champion. And instead of an annual Festival they could hold a Depresstival.

  • OF A FAVOURITE SWEETMEAT •

  I BOUGHT MYSELF a small bag of dragées yesterday; life has been using me rather shabbily, and I thought I deserved a little treat. They are delicious sweetmeats, my favourites. The modern dragée is an almond coated with hard sugar, delicately flavoured with (I suspect) talcum powder; eating one always reminds me of my childhood when I was occasionally commanded to kiss ladies who tasted just like that; old ladies tasted like mauve dragées and young ladies tasted like the delicious pink and white dragées; I always gave them a little unobtrusive lick as I kissed, to test their flavour. Modern face powder affords no such delights.… The dragée has not always been an innocent indulgence. A century ago physicians concealed their most detestable purges in those sugar shells, and poisoners have also made use of them.… Dragées are the sugar-plums about which one reads in old children’s books, and they are still more wholesome than chocolates. I sat before my fire sucking, champing and wallowing in the nostalgia which the sweets evoked.

  • OF LAGLES •

  WHILE DRIVING this morning near a lake I saw a large group of seagulls swooping and wheeling over its surface. Among the most graceful of birds, they have the ugliest faces; in the countenance of a seagull we observe all the bitter hatred and malignance which we usually associate with the faces of money-lenders or book censors. To my mind the inland seagull is misnamed; it ought to be called a lake gull, and as seagull is commonly pronounced seagle, I suggest that lake gulls be known as lagles. I have several ornithologist friends to whom I shall mention this, but I do not expect that they will pay any atention. Ornithologists like to give birds a Latin name, with a Latin version of their own names stuck on the end. But it is rude, untutored nature-lovers like myself who give birds their common, deeply poetic names, like the Marsh Grommet, the Wheat Teazle, and the Double-breasted Ninnyhammer, or Extra-Marital Lark.

  • OF ROMANTIC POVERTY •

  A CHILD WHO IS interested in music was telling me about her favourite composers today; according to her they were all desperately poor, and never had a square meal. “Where did you pick up that notion?” I enquired; “you are wasting your pity on Chopin, who was really very well off; Beethoven had a pretty bank book, Haydn was well-heeled, Mendelssohn was born in the lap of luxury, and made a small fortune on his own account, Handel made and lost a couple of fortunes, and even Bach was in easy circumstances, according to the standards of his day. The only poor composer of the first rank that I can think of was Schubert. Dry your tears, my poppet.” But she did not want to be comforted and was annoyed by my array of facts. Why people like to think of composers as poor I cannot say, but they do. My observation has been that most musicians were as sharp as a tack in their attitude toward money, long before the days of Petrillo.

  • OF HIS CHOICE OF BOOKS •

  THE WEEK-END approaches, and I want to collapse with a book during the whole of it, seeking surcease from the cares of the world. But what book? Ah, there is the question! For when I am in this spiritually depleted condition I lack the strength to tackle a book with any substance to it, but I am too cranky to endure a foolish book. Today in a bookshop I picked up a new novel and, as is my custom, looked for a picture of the author on the back of the jacket. I judge most books by the pictures of the author. If he looks a congenial fellow, I read his book; if not, not. This accounts for the fact that I read few books by women; authoresses are, in the main, an unappetizing crew. Upon the back of this book was a picture of a fellow with large intense eyes and his hair combed forward in a fringe. Obviously, I thought, this fellow has a grievance of some sort, and his novel will fall into the great category of Gripe Novels. So I looked at some others, but found none with pictures of authors who pleased me. They all looked like Gripers, or people with a Social Conscience, or Oh-God-The-Pain-Of-It writers. I like authors to look sassy and bright, like Evelyn Waugh.

  • OF FREEDOM IN TEACHING •<
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  I WATCHED A CHILD attracting a bit of steel with a magnet this afternoon, and realized with a sudden shock that the bit of steel was a five-cent piece; I can remember when those coins were made of silver, and were much in vogue for Sunday School collection. As a child I was a regular Sabbath Day scholar, graduating from the Infant school to the Intermediate, but never rising to the Bible Class, which was taught by a lawyer whose scriptural teaching was inextricably mingled with his deeper knowledge of baseball; sometimes he would devote most of a lesson which was supposed to be about the Prodigal Son to an analysis of the Babe’s batting form. This led to a widespread belief in his class that the Prodigal passed his years of riotous living as a professional ballplayer. Sunday School teaching is one field into which the modern pedagogical approach has never penetrated. And I still think that children learn more about life and conduct when an interesting man is given the run of his tongue, and is not chained to a syllabus which dictates everything, including the opening and closing of the classroom windows.