Robertson Davies: Man of Myth

By Judith Skelton Grant and Judith Ann Skelton Grant

Book Overview

Drawing on interviews with the Canadian novelist himself and an unprecedented access to his notebooks and family papers, a detailed biography traces the evolution of Davies's work and the relationship... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0670825573
• ISBN13: 9780670825578
• Release Date: December 1995
• Publisher: Viking Adult
• Length: 816 Pages
• Weight: 3.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 20.0" x 20.0" x 20.0"

Customer Reviews

Canada's greatest Jungian

The biographer's reverence for her subject is restrained but evident. If there was a dark side to this great old man of Canadian letters, hardly a shadow of it is to be found here. The figure who emerges from this book is a small-town boy -almost a backwoods boy - whose imagination flourished in the unbearable stuffiness of early twentieth-century Ontario. Davies' greatest private enthusiasm seemed to be his repeated trips to the U.K. He did a less-than-outstanding Oxford BA, and fell in love with the place, there meeting an Australian who became his wife. Fans of Davies' eleven novels will find ample links between the life and the works; they will also learn much about his unremitting early attempts to become known as a playwright, a genre in which he made less much of a mark than with his novels and his journalism (the latter effort highlighted by his 1950s and 60s stint as editor of The Peterborough Examiner).Davies' role in the early 1950s startup of the Stratford Festival is an accomplishment not to be overlooked; for that alone, he would merit top ranking in the annals of Canadian Shakespeariana. If the Bard was Davies' first intellectual love, Carl Jung would likely be the second. My favourite passage in the 700-plus pages of this splendid biography is on 461-62, where Davies is quoted at some length on how Jung viewed the "second half" of life - the 40-plus years - as the truly magic time of existence. A second memorable passage comes at pages 484-85, where the author (for once, with immodesty, but here deserved), reveals how she asked Davies to see his preparatory notes for THE CORNISH TRILOGY. Davies politely refused the request in a letter which might be seen as his essential statement on the art of fiction. Here is its key sentence: "The imagination is a cauldron, not a filing cabinet." We should all paste these words on the top edge of our computer monitors.

Outstanding biography of a Canadian "icon"

Judith Skelton Grant has done an absolutely outstanding job of giving us everything we wanted to know about Robertson Davies: his background and roots in small town Ontario, his three careers (acting, journalism, academia), critiques and illuminating discussions of his plays, novels, and occasional writings, his beliefs and philosophies, and so on. I could not put this book down; read the first 500 pages in two sittings and finished it on the third. Let's hope that she brings out an updated version to take the story up to Davies' death; as it is, there is no discussion here of his fine last novel, The Cunning Man. END