[The] experience of reading One Half of Roberston Davies was enlightening—I was forced to realize how close, how astonishingly close, colossal vanity is to pristine innocence. (p. 24)

Of these 22 pieces perhaps five are worth preserving; the others, particularly a "satirical" poem on Hair, not to mention a coy, cute animal story written for children but included here because "several people" assured Davies it was really for adults, might have been tossed away without regret. The collection improves as it progresses, though this may be a consequence of Davies's choice of subject matter (Freud, Jung, Trollope, melodrama, ghost stories, Proust, etc.) rather than the actual quality of his writing…. On Dickens he writes knowledgeably, if without any particular genius; on Jung he is disappointingly simplistic, and makes statements I would challenge—"For Jung," Davies says, "God was a fact for which evidence existed in the mind of man." And is it true that "Jungians assert the existence of God"? The Jungian position as I understand it is that a God-experience of some kind is possible psychologically. But as an empiricist Jung would hardly make the claim that God exists apart from the human psyche.

The collection ends with four conversational lectures on the problems of evil in literature, and one of those essays most Canadian writers have felt compelled to write in recent years, "The Canada of Myth and Reality." In this essay Davies repeats what many have said—that Canada … is apt to feel self-righteous as a consequence of virtual powerlessness, and to blame the United States for its own problems. I am not altogether convinced, however, that Davies knows, or really cares, where Canada is, or who comprises its population. In his speeches he is careful never to mention the name of any distinguished Canadian contemporary of his, out of indifference—or simply ignorance—or perhaps envy. He speaks as if "the writer" must show Canada to Canadians—as if no writers have yet done so? He will speak learnedly of the supernatural in literature, and confine himself to English writers, ignoring Canadian writers—like Howard O'Hagan, for instance, whose Tay John alone is worth the windy rhetorical conventions of all of Davies's books. (pp. 24-5)

It is grossly misleading to bill Davies as Canada's "leading man of letters," and he should certainly not be taken, by non-Canadians, as a "great" Canadian writer. He is, depending upon your taste, a genial storytelling moralizing conservative; or a pompous but charming Tory; or a narrow, exasperating reactionary; or a curmudgeon of the old school whose spite, anger, and vanity have been successfully—or nearly so—hidden behind a persona of bemused old-fashioned courtliness. I read him as possibly the very last image in Canada's collective dream of an older English tradition: a Floating Head whose allegiance is with the Queen (that is, the one who died in 1901), a symbol of all that younger Canadian writers and artists have been struggling to accommodate, or repudiate, or transcend, or forget. (p. 25)