A Celtic Temperament: Robertson Davies as Diarist

by Robertson Davies

  During this year Davies kept his personal, Massey, and theatre diaries and made entries in his “big diary.”

  MONDAY, JANUARY 1: To the Mathewses’ bouillon party as usual, but this time with all of us as a family. In the afternoon walk with Brenda in the raw cold. Miranda went to a friend’s wedding so our New Year’s dinner was without her. I hate to see the family holiday come to an end.

  TUESDAY, JANUARY 2: Had my familiar bad dream of teaching ignorantly and inadequately. A busy day at the Examiner. Discuss salaries with Wilson Craw and increase some. In the evening read Angus Wilson’s Old Men at the Zoo, which I like: literate, if raw-nerved and thin.

  FRIDAY, JANUARY 5: Busy day at the Examiner, and talk with Bill Garner about business affairs. Write a Star column. In the evening made notes on George Meredith to assist Miranda with an essay, and read for my lectures and for pleasure. This ease and command of work is delightful but can it last? If only I could be on top of my job all the time!

  SUNDAY, JANUARY 7: Severe storm and rain, lie late. In the afternoon go through papers, make notes, timetables, and fuss, then a walk in the storm with Brenda. In the evening hear our new records of Weber’s Der Freischütz and am very pleased with its romantic scene in Wolf Gulch, or whatever it is called. The dismal part of winter comes early this year and already I feel depleted and gloomy—but this will not—must not—last. This year is the worst, because of the quantity and variety of undergraduate teaching.

  WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 10, TORONTO: A busy day and lectures go well. The fact that I have no B.A. comes up, as I knew it would.1 Vincent Massey is steamed up about College furnishings. In the evening Miranda dines with us and we go to Hart House Theatre to see the Victoria College Drama Society do Cymbeline. It was appalling, unimaginative and vulgar.

  FRIDAY, JANUARY 12: Busy on College matters. Call Vincent Massey and also Ron Thom about changes in plans and decoration. Write a Star column on John Cowper Powys. In the evening hear a recording of Macbeth in preparation for my Stratford season lecture and am greatly stirred by it.

  SUNDAY, JANUARY 14: Brenda says I am greatly changed and will write in a new way. I think the change is owing to the Alexander Technique to a great degree. Certainly I am not so subject to nervous exhaustion and am able to do university and College work without becoming emotionally involved in a destructive way.

  WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 17, TORONTO: Brenda is forty-five. I have a slight hangover. Give good lectures, then I am joined by Brenda and we order her some letter paper. To the flat and h.t.d. Dinner at the Lord Simcoe and to the Royal Alex to see Gratien Gélinas and La Comédie-Canadienne in his play Bousille et les Justes. Old-fashioned in form: all the characters are second-rate except honest, lovable little Bousille; all the actors shout and overdo except the star, who murmurs and plays very modestly. The crude appeal to sentimentalism reminded me of plays I used to see as a boy. This was worse in the light of Gélinas’s lecture at the university yesterday in which he went on about the need for real Canadian plays that truly reflect the Canadian people. Does he mean this—several nasty hypocrites harrying one half-witted saint?

  FRIDAY, JANUARY 19: Pack after lunch and away at 4:45 to Toronto alone. Dine at the Club and then to the flat to read, dye my beard, bathe, and try to rest for what will be a long day tomorrow: how I dislike all this jaunting!

  SATURDAY, JANUARY 20, TORONTO: Heavy snow but drive to Stratford with John Lockwood2 and George Harris. A good board meeting. Michael Langham explains the new stage.3 I talk with Lionel Massey at lunch about the College. Drive back to Toronto by 5:30 to catch the 6:30 train with Jenny, Sara Waddell, and Miranda to Peterborough.

  SUNDAY, JANUARY 21: In the evening Brenda tells Miranda about her family and childhood and shows her photographs. I think much of the importance of keeping a family record and urge this upon Brenda and have got her a book for the purpose.4

  TUESDAY, JANUARY 23, TORONTO: I begin to lose my voice. Do a lot of College business, then to the ROM at 3:15 and talk with Dr. Vic Mean of Mineralogy till 5.

  Dinner at the flat and then to the Crest Theatre to see Caesar and Cleopatra very well done. Mavor Moore as Caesar and Toby Robins as Cleopatra, both good, though Moore somewhat lacks greatness—but he makes excellent sense. Direction by Leon Major skilled and subdued to the play. All of Act 3 cut and not much missed: result, we were out at 11 instead of emerging beaten at 11:40. I last saw this play in 1951 when Laurence Olivier did it with Antony and Cleopatra. Toby Robins was better than Vivien Leigh. (I should like to see her in my Casanova play with Major directing.)

  WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 24, TORONTO: Voice gone but enough to give two lectures. To a Hart House “Library Night” with Ron Thom to discuss Massey College with any interested undergraduates. The audience, counting the warden of Hart House, Joe McCulley, and his assistant, numbers thirteen—so much for “interest”; but these affairs are futile anyhow. What really interests me is the notion Joe McCulley seems to have that Hart House and Massey College are twin institutions. And the curiosity of undergraduates as to what sort of “student government” we shall have! Some questions sharp and a few impudent, but nothing really difficult. Hart and Geoffrey Massey drop in afterward and Thom and I go to the Park Plaza with them for drinks. All Ron says makes the building sound exciting and beautiful.

  THURSDAY, JANUARY 25, TORONTO: My voice worse so cancel my lecture but go to Lionel Massey’s house to meet Vincent Massey, Hart, Lionel, and Ron Thom to discuss furnishings. My suggestion that Eaton’s be our buying agent and advisor has been approved. They want to get a typographer on the job to design our stationery, lettering, and, immediately, the cornerstone, which HRH Prince Philip will lay on May 25th. VM wants more Senior Fellows as soon as possible; I would prefer not to have them till we have something for them to do. But it is exciting that we are now going ahead full steam. The governor general has written the Queen about the “augmentation” and I hope she will move quickly, as we need that coat of arms. I must see Claude Bissell and talk to him about the academic work of the College and especially my own, as I am determined this must always be the foundation of all we do.

  Brenda very kindly drives up; we lunch at the Club and drive home in splendid sunshine. It is my old trouble—exhaustion. To bed with remedies.

  SATURDAY, JANUARY 27: In bed till noon; Jenny to Toronto at 1. Write two Star columns, both good, and hear recordings of The Winter’s Tale. My nose purging and cough going full blast—the full hell of a bad cold. Brenda and Jenny return at 8:15. I am restless and want something special to read and can’t find it.

  SUNDAY, JANUARY 28: Rose at noon: eyes swollen, nose runs like a faucet. Am I mad to think of work—university work—next week? Read William Gaunt’s Aesthetic Adventure and E.H. Shepard’s two books.5 What about my cold? It is the rise and fall that surprises; periods of improvement followed by abysmal slumps, pain, and depression.

  MONDAY, JANUARY 29: Really ill: Dr. Dobson comes and prescribes. I abandon all thought of work this week. Read The Rack by A.E. Ellis—a novel about TB. Very ill-chosen. Take a sedative and antihistamine.

  TUESDAY, JANUARY 30: Deaf, tasteless, and sans scent. Finish The Rack and begin Angela Thirkell’s The Headmistress but can’t bear its ill-organized waffle. I have a libidinous fantasy, as usual with a cold—why?

  WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 31: Brenda to Toronto. I spend all day in bed. Read A Victorian Poacher and some of Dr. Harding’s Jungian exposition. Brenda returns at 8:30.

  THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 1: H.t.d. on waking, a great renewal of humanity. Feel better but cold is still heavy. Read Relief of Lucknow and began Waugh’s Unconditional Surrender. We discuss Brenda’s visit to Australia in April.

  FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 2: Our twenty-second wedding anniversary. I give Brenda spring flowers; she gives me whisky. I am up in the afternoon and dictate many letters to Miss Whalon. We have an excellent dinner—steak, soufflé, and champagne—and read and hear music. Splendid h.t.d.

  TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 6: To Toronto by train. Teaching
goes well. Gordon Roper says the new dean of the Graduate School is one Ernest Sirluck,6 who is dubious about Massey College. I must work on this. To the ROM at 3:30 and a boring talk with Heinrich.7 With Brenda to El Cid, very good melodrama and refreshing.

  WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 7, TORONTO: Saw Claude Bissell at 3:15 and discussed College affairs. I asked him directly if he wanted Eric Phillips as a Senior Fellow. He said he had not thought of it. Vincent Massey says Bissell has hinted about this to him, but VM is very prone to see hints and portents. Claude Bissell said Frank Stone is Eric Phillips’s bulldog: if finances are difficult in the early years, do we want the man who owns the bulldog as part of the College?

  To the Crest Theatre and see an Australian play, The Shifting Heart by Richard Beynon. Argument: an Italian family (Bianchi) have been eight years in a Melbourne suburb and are not “accepted”; the son, Gino, resentful of this, makes a scene at a dance hall where he is refused entry, and is killed; his sister, Maria, married to an Australian, bears a son and he is named Gino; thus “acceptance” is attained. Good theme and dramatically worked out, but I am offended by the mindlessness of everyone; two minutes’ quiet reflection on anyone’s part would have saved all the fuss. But so many of these proletarian tragedies (and noble ones, too) are rooted in a passionate stupidity.

  TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 13, TORONTO: To Eaton’s at 3:30 and met A. Russell of the Contracts Department, who took me to R. Howard, who is to do the College work—a wee Scot, professionally dubious but knows his job, I judge. We agree that some parts of the College have a 1910 Frank Lloyd Wright air, which can probably be mitigated by the furnishings. Encouraged by their competence and plain good sense.

  FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 16: Busy day: Miss Whalon has cracked three ribs. Write Star column on The Seven Deadly Sins and read books for the University of Toronto Quarterly review.8 In the evening help Miranda with notes on Sheridan. At bedtime attempt h.t.d.: no go; back too painful; all the humiliations and pain of February.

  SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 18: Lie late; Jenny went to Toronto with friends last night and was not in till 2:45. In the afternoon the whole family walk at the zoo and in Lakefield. Miranda returns to university on the 7:45 train. Read Kenneth Tynan and chat with Brenda, who also has a form of ’flu. February is always a brutal month: Brenda says my depression and desire to give up the Star column is due to this. She is upheld by thoughts of going to Australia, another journey in search of herself, we both feel.

  WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 21, TORONTO: To the O’Keefe to see The Unsinkable Molly Brown by Meredith Willson, which seemed to promise well in the first half but went to pieces in the second. As always in that vast warehouse, everybody screamed, and any nuance the thing might have had was lost. Tammy Grimes has an urchin charm but the rest of the cast was as obvious as cornflakes. Theme: a determined mountain girl gets rich, gets position, is loved for her naïveté, and at last returns to her first love. American twaddle. The music is unmemorable.

  FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 23: Lionel Massey calls to say that the Queen has approved the augmentation for Vincent Massey “in principle” but its precise nature has now to be worked out and this will take time—as what does not, in the world of heraldry? Today also I received an acknowledgement of my letter of December 28 to the governor general from his secretary, Esmond Butler, who writes an oddly illiterate hand for a man in his place; fifty-seven days to answer a letter!

  SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 24: Heavy snowfall. Walk to the office with snow almost to my knees. Mark some twenty student essays. In the afternoon shovel a lot of snow and enjoy the unwonted exercise. In the evening read Kenneth Tynan on the theatre. Brenda has ’flu and its characteristic waves of exhaustion.

  SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 25: Bouts of sinus, headache, nausea, and cold sweats have left me unwell for the day. Brenda and I lay on sofas and read. Went for short walk. What a hateful winter! Every winter has its low point and I hope this is it: is it age or bodily rot that brings this appalling tedium vitae?

  MONDAY, FEBRUARY 26: Vincent Massey calls—he thinks trumpets would be nice for May 25 so I pursue trumpets. An awful day: feel ill and do a good deal of work. In the evening labour with Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller, which baffles me. Excellent h.t.d.

  In the night I dream of the Miraculous Child,9 very fine (he smelled of apple blossom).

  MONDAY, MARCH 5: A great to-do about Mrs. Pedak, who has been growing more removed, unheeding, and miserly with the food for some months. Brenda was angry with her on Saturday—no, Friday—an almost unheard-of thing. Brenda says, “She is having a great affair with herself.” This morning this proved literally to be true. Mrs. Pedak confides that she discusses everything with her “love”—a Russian soldier she loved before her marriage—and writes poems to him, and lives with him in imagination. She did this all through her marriage, it appears. Brenda has persuaded her to have some talks with Dr. Currier, as this is rather too much. Mrs. Pedak has no friends, no interests, and is growing away from the world—with her “love.” An extraordinary woman, very strong in her egotism and a kind of early nineteenth-century romanticism that one would have sworn was dead.

  WEDNESDAY, MARCH 7, TORONTO: To the refurbished Central Library Theatre10 to see the Red Barn company do N.F. Simpson’s One Way Pendulum. Well directed and acted and the second act theatrically effective, but the Theatre of the Absurd is too remorselessly absurd. Non sequitur, to be telling, must emerge from a rich setting of sequitur. This play is Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear pushed too far. Perhaps one must be very English to respond fully: to me all the jokes are variations of one joke and the whimsicality grows wearisome. Anarchic humour? No, for the self-conscious disorder all too quickly becomes tyrannous, and as there can be no real characters we are bored with it.

  THURSDAY, MARCH 8, TORONTO: Meditation in Trinity College chapel. I would like to continue this during Lent. I give a good lecture and then to a meeting of the Massey Foundation at the office in the Shell Building at 2:30. Vincent Massey, Lionel, Hart, Ron Thom, Bill Broughall, and Russell and Howard (from Eaton’s) there and look at silver and china and discuss furniture, narrowing the field of choice. VM favours what is traditional; Hart, a little cantankerously, wants what is contemporary. I dare say something workable will emerge, with a few errors here and there. At 4 p.m. the typographer, A.R. Fleming,11 arrives and we discuss the cornerstone. Thom wanted it on the ground: I pointed out the impropriety of placing it where dogs could pee on it. We progress. The cement footings begin to take shape. Those at the southwest corner must be complete before the frost goes, or there is a danger that the St. Thomas Aquinas Chapel may subside into our excavation! Persuaded VM against putting a Hammond organ in the chapel, which looks as if it might be charming. All of this encourages me and I am confirmed in my faith that the College will really be built. My doubt is irrational, and springs from my own impatience and the slowness with which all goes forward. My present fear is that the College will emerge as a Tom Thumb’s castle, the foundations look so small: Howard assures me that it will continue to look smaller and smaller until the walls are plastered, whereupon everything will appear in its proper, appropriate size.

  WEDNESDAY, MARCH 14, TORONTO: At 10 a.m. meet Ron Thom at the Park Plaza and discuss a few College details. Allan Fleming joins us and shows us the lettering he means to use on the cornerstone. The letters are from Trajan’s Column, but as shown in rubbings from the column itself, and not from the British Museum casts—much freer, and the serifs very decorative. I suggest we use upper- and lower-case letters of this sort for all the signs in the College, which will be many. The rediscoverer of this Roman form is one Edward M. Catich.12 The university’s carilloneur has written me about the foundation stone laying: he won’t simply play some agreeable changes, but wants to do a “program” containing all the carillon clichés—sea-songs, patriotic airs, and whatnot. The army are being sticky about letting us have trumpeters.

  To the Central Library Theatre to see Jean Genet’s The Balcony. Idea good, but worked out in pseudo-p
hilosophical style, not aided by the translation or the mispronunciations of the actors, e.g. no-MEN-clature, repeated several times. How short-winded these fellows are! Have been teaching Ibsen’s The Wild Duck this week: it makes this look like a pretentious sketch. But then, revolution is never strong on organization. Toni Weinberg good as the Madam. Tiff Findley13 castrated himself in a way that suggests either a very odd physique, or stylization gone mad.

  TUESDAY, MARCH 20, TORONTO: To the Royal Alex to Little Mary Sunshine by Rick Besoyan, a spoof of musical comedy as it was in my very early youth. Well done and a relief after the avant-garde theatre-going of the past few weeks. Pat Galloway surprised us by being able to sing quite well and was funny with the kind of control and real wit Tammy Grimes lacks. Dominique Michel the best soubrette I have seen in years: she comes from La Comédie-Canadienne. The whole production from Montreal, and is dying on its feet, Ernest Rawley, the Royal Alex manager, says. A pity; it deserves better. But two women next to me were taking it perfectly straight! How extraordinarily variable the sophistication of Toronto audiences is.

  WEDNESDAY, MARCH 21, TORONTO: To the Crest to the opening of Roar like a Dove by Lesley Storm, a vapid comedy but I laughed a good deal, and Herbert Whittaker was tart with me about it in the interval.14 He grows dreadfully pompous and self-honouring, but writes no better; grammar rickety and vocabulary all reach-me-downs. Charmion King was too vehement as Lady Dungavel, but Drew Thompson has become a good character man. There was a party after at a hotel on University Avenue—one of those affairs where you buy tickets for drinks. I think it was designed to make the opening seem modish, but who was impressed?