[In the following essay, which was based on an interview with Davies, Farnsworth presents the novelist's views on Canadian culture and politics.]

When American invaders crossed the Niagara frontier during the War of 1812, they came upon the family farm of one of the forebears of the author Robertson Davies and were astonished to find angry youths shooting at them from the farmhouse windows.

"They thought we'd be delighted to lay down the hateful British yoke, but they didn't think they were bringing another kind of yoke with them," said the man some consider to be Canada's greatest living writer.

Four of his ancestors fell in that engagement, the Battle of Stoney Creek, and he is proud that it helped to turn the tide against the invaders.

That Canadians are distinct from Americans is a subtheme of his novels, the most famous of which are the Deptford trilogy, Fifth Business, The Manticore and World of Wonders. In the 11th and latest novel, The Cunning Man, the aging hero—not unlike his 81-year-old creator—rues the withering of Canada's British connection and the growth of the American connection "under the caress of the iron hand and buckskin glove."

Greg Gatenby, the literary scholar who directs the Harborfront International Reading Series in Toronto, said that "in anyone's delineation of the pantheon of Canadian writers, Davies holds a place close to Zeus."

With his magnificent snowy beard, great white mane and protuberant brow, Mr. Davies has a magisterial look as well. As he talked about his views of Canadian nationality on a recent day, wisps of sunlight filtered into his second-floor office above the red-brick quadrangle at Massey College, the University of Toronto's graduate college, where he is the founding master.

Mr. Davies, who was born in Ontario, said the biggest difference between Canada and the United States is in their underlying myths. "The myth of America is a very powerful one and one that we in Canada look toward with envy," he said. "You have your heroes. You have your great men of the past, you have your myth of tradition, of the conquering of the west, and the pioneer life and the gold rush life and all that sort of thing, which is enormously romantic, and nations feed on the romantic tradition." "We don't go for heroes," he said. "As soon as a man begins to achieve some sort of high stature, we want to cut him down and get rid of him, embarrass him."

He also sees Canada as "very much a northern country—much more like Scandinavia or Russia than the United States." Moreover, he went on, "Canada is a socialist monarchy. You hate monarchies and socialism—and we're both."

Mr. Davies is just as eager to see Canada hold together as he is to avoid an American yoke.

"The present hullabaloo about Quebec is precisely that," he said. "It will not die down, but it will not come to anything."

He contends that economic considerations will keep Quebec in the fold. "What happens to the thousands of French Canadian civil servants who are no longer on the public payroll?" he said. "They're suddenly going to be without a job, and certainly the new Quebec wouldn't be able to provide them with comparable income. And what would Quebec do with its share of the national debt? They wouldn't want to shoulder it."

He also expects pressure from the United States. "I don't imagine for one instant that the United States wants a balkanized Canada to the north," he said. The United States says officially that it supports a strong and united Canada.

Quebec separatism is Canada's civil war, Mr. Davies said, but unlike the American Civil War, he predicted, it will not become violent. "Our civil war is a psychological one," he said. "It's a tough kind of war to fight because it's very wearing. There is never any letup. There is never any cease-fire. There is never any stopping to celebrate Christmas."

His comments about French Canadians underscore the observation of Richard C. Davis, professor of Canadian literature at the University of Calgary, that Mr. Davies "comes from a traditional male, English-Canadian base."

The French are "always complaining." Mr. Davies contended. "They have never got over the defeat on the Plains of Abraham," the battle in 1759 that established British rule in Canada.

"They're terribly unrealistic about this sort of thing, but they are also very shrewd and very practical," he said. "They know the dollar better than they know their mothers, and if they think that is threatened by leaving the dominion, they will stay."

Mr. Davies's reflections on politics come from a certain academic distance.

His cozy office is dominated by a large writing desk, book-cases and portraits of Shakespeare, Rabelais, Robert Burton—whose Anatomy of Melancholy provides inspiration for the latest novel—and John Cowper Powys, the 19th-century novelist whom Mr. Davies called "a great, great, undervalued man."

With the help of a secretary, he handles correspondence in the office and researches current projects. For example, he is now working on an article for the Dictionary of National Biography on a 19th-century English actor, Henry Irving. But his main creative work is done on his 150-acre estate in the hills of Caledon East, about an hour from downtown Toronto, where he lives with his wife, Brenda.

He taught literature at the university for 21 years and still confers with students, including many, he volunteers, who ask whether getting a job on a newspaper would harm their writing style.

A former editor of The Peterborough Examiner, as well as an actor and playwright, he tells them that journalism "teaches you to write more concisely and to get busy and write when you must, instead of just sitting around waiting for the inspiration, which isn't going to come."

And if students are making noise below, he has no qualms about opening his window, looking down sternly, beard flowing, and thundering, "God is watching!"