Robertson Davies

William Robertson Davies (28 August 1913 – 2 December 1995) was a Canadian novelist, playwright, literary critic, journalist, and academic who was the dominant figure in Canadian letters for the last quarter of the twentieth century and whose novels — learned, theatrical, psychologically dense, and blackly comic — have no real equivalent in English-language fiction. His masterpiece, the Deptford Trilogy, is one of the great achievements of postwar literature, and its opening gambit — a snowball with a stone inside it, thrown by a boy, hitting the wrong person and setting three lives on their extraordinary courses — is one of the most celebrated beginnings in modern fiction.

Early Life and Career

Davies was born in Thamesville, Ontario, the son of a Welsh-born newspaper publisher. He was educated at Upper Canada College, Queen’s University, and Balliol College, Oxford, where he studied literature and acted with the Old Vic Theatre Company under Tyrone Guthrie. He returned to Canada in 1940 and worked as a journalist, literary editor, and publisher at the Peterborough Examiner, a newspaper owned by his family.

He was also a playwright and theatre critic — his involvement with the Stratford Festival in its early years was significant — and he published three early novels, the “Salterton Trilogy” (Tempest-Tost, 1951; Leaven of Malice, 1954; A Mixture of Frailties, 1958), witty comedies of manners set in a fictional Ontario university town. These novels established Davies’s voice — erudite, satirical, suspicious of Canadian philistinism — but they remained minor works, Canadian in subject and limited in ambition.

The Deptford Trilogy (1970–1975)

Everything changed with Fifth Business (1970). The novel, narrated by Dunstan Ramsay, a retired schoolteacher, begins with the snowball incident in the fictional Ontario village of Deptford in 1908 and expands into a narrative spanning decades and continents, encompassing hagiography, magic, war, guilt, Jungian archetypes, and the nature of myth.

Ramsay’s obsessions — the saints, particularly the unofficial saints and holy fools of Christian tradition; the connection between magic and religion; the concept of “Fifth Business” (the character in opera who is neither hero nor villain but without whom the plot cannot proceed) — give the novel its unique intellectual texture. The snowball victim, Mary Dempster, becomes a figure of ambiguous sanctity. The snowball thrower, Boy Staunton, becomes a captain of Canadian industry. Ramsay becomes the secret chronicler of both their lives.

The Manticore (1972) continues the story through the Jungian analysis of Boy Staunton’s son David, who is struggling to understand his father’s death. World of Wonders (1975) tells the life story of the magician Magnus Eisengrim — born Paul Dempster, son of Mary — from his abduction by a traveling carnival through his rise to become the world’s greatest stage illusionist.

The trilogy’s power lies in its combination of intellectual density and narrative propulsion. Davies is simultaneously a storyteller and a philosopher of the unconscious; his novels argue that myth, magic, and the irrational are not primitive relics but essential dimensions of human experience that modern rationalism ignores at its peril.

The Cornish Trilogy (1981–1988)

Davies’s second major trilogy is set at a fictional Canadian university and explores the interplay of art, scholarship, and human appetite. The Rebel Angels (1981) is a campus novel involving the estate of a dead art collector, a lecherous professor, Rabelais, and Gypsy music. What’s Bred in the Bone (1985) tells the life story of Francis Cornish, a Canadian art collector who was secretly a master forger. The Lyre of Orpheus (1988) concerns the completion of an unfinished opera by E. T. A. Hoffmann.

The Cornish Trilogy is lighter than the Deptford, more openly comic, and more discursive. It is also more explicitly concerned with Canadian cultural identity — the question of whether Canada can produce genuine art or is doomed to provincial imitation.

Later Novels and Other Work

Murther & Walking Spirits (1991) and The Cunning Man (1994) form the beginning of a planned third trilogy that Davies did not live to complete. Both are characteristically learned and eccentric.

Davies was also a prolific essayist, lecturer, and public intellectual. His journalism, collected in volumes like The Enthusiasms of Robertson Davies (1990), is witty and opinionated. His Massey Lectures, delivered at the University of Toronto, are among the best examples of that distinguished Canadian lecture series.

Critical Standing

Davies was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in Literature and was widely regarded as Canada’s greatest novelist. His work has sometimes been criticised for its elitism, its Eurocentrism, and its preference for Jungian mysticism over social realism. Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro are more fashionable today, and Davies’s particular blend of erudition, theatricality, and moral conservatism can seem unfashionable in an era that values minimalism and identity politics.

But the Deptford Trilogy is a genuine masterpiece — a work of extraordinary intellectual ambition and narrative skill that creates its own literary world, populated by characters of genuine complexity and animated by ideas that are genuinely interesting.

Collecting Davies

Canadian first editions — particularly Fifth Business (1970, Macmillan of Canada) — are the most desirable, bringing $200–$500 in dust jacket. American editions (Viking) are more common. The Salterton Trilogy first editions are scarce. Signed copies exist, as Davies was active on the lecture circuit and a generous signer. UK editions (Penguin, later) are affordable.