Revaluation a Salute to Robertson Davies

Revaluation a Salute to Robertson Davies George Core Robertson Davies , The Cornish Trilogy. Penguin Books , 1992 . $30 pb. The author may be a genius without illusion, like Shakespeare, or a world-saver, like Tolstoy, or a philosopher and ironist, like Thomas Mann, or an agonist, like Dostoevsky, or an illuminator of [End Page 519] dark corners, like Dickens, but he tells us what he sees the way he sees it; in the infinite variety of things told, or wisdom distilled in poetry, an astonishingly small number of essential truths emerge. —Robertson Davies, “A Try for Greatness” Robertson Davies is described by Penguin Books in these words: he “had three successive careers: first as an actor with the Old Vic Company in England; then as a publisher of the Peterborough, Ontario, Examiner; and later as a university professor and first Master of Massey College at the University of Toronto, from which he retired in 1981. He wrote more than thirty books, including several volumes of plays, as well as collections of essays, speeches, and belles lettres, and eleven novels. It was as a novelist that he gained lasting renown, for his Deptford Trilogy . . . , for the Salterton Trilogy . . . , and for the Cornish Trilogy.” He was, as the Washington Post wrote at the time of his death, “the most distinguished and original writer of his generation.” I would bet he is the best Canadian writer in the nation’s history. He is the only major novelist in English to have written three trilogies. Ford Madox Ford wrote two, as did Joyce Cary and Olivia Manning. Davies’s novels include two more well-regarded books, and, to repeat, he wrote over thirty books. When he died, he was writing his memoirs. In all, the trilogies run to about 3,000 pages. I am choosing the last to focus on because it strikes me as the most ambitious, finished, engaging, and successful—a masterpiece of fictive art. After its publication in 1988, Robertson Davies should have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Over the past two to three decades no one to my knowledge exceeds him, and his only strong rival is Patrick White. Davies was an immensely learned man who put his learning to good use in his fiction without being dogmatic or didactic. He typically creates many characters, flat and round (especially round); he uses complicated and lengthy narrative sequences—plots and subplots—that parallel and reinforce one another. The Cornish Trilogy (The Rebel Angels, What’s Bred in the Bone, and The Lyre of Orpheus) is superficially an account of the life of Francis Cornish and his sprawling family connection, which runs from his monstrous older brother (who dies as a child) to his wealthy and generous grandfather, his parents, and his wretched wife, who is a sexually promiscuous thief and immoralist. He leaves the family money for a foundation, one of whose members, Simon Darcourt, is writing Cornish’s biography, who has been an artist, an art restorer, and an agent for the British secret service. Among other things Davies was a mystery writer who was not only fascinated by painting, drama, magic, and religion, but many other subjects, [End Page 520] especially music. His knowledge of religion ran from Protestantism (especially Methodism and Anglicanism) to Catholicism and Gnosticism—all shades of mythology and magic (black and white). The mysteries that generate the action of the Cornish Trilogy include these questions: Who was the Alchemical Artist who painted a great allegorical picture in the sixteenth-century style of the Old Masters? Who murdered one of the board members in the Cornish Trust? If and how did the wretched and wicked John Parablane kill himself and for what reason? What happened to Parablane’s endless unreadable novel? Did he sire the illegitimate son who is eager to recover the manuscript? How did the wife of Arthur Cornish (who is sterile) become impregnated? And so on . . . . This wife, Maria Magdalena Theotoky, is a Gypsy, as are her parents; and her mother has a leading role in the action. Maria is loved profoundly by virtually all the leading male characters. The Gypsy background provides Davies with the opportunity to elaborate on various Gypsy...

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