Jane Gross and Craig Turner (obituary date 4 December 1995)

SOURCE: An obituary in Los Angeles Times, December 4, 1995, p. A16.

[In the following obituary, Gross and Turner provide an overview of Davies's life and career.]

Robertson Davies, one of Canada's most celebrated novelists and the master of multiple, eclectic careers in theater, journalism and academia, has died.

Davies died Saturday night of a stroke at the age of 82. He had been hospitalized with pneumonia.

Davies' breakthrough as a novelist came with the 1970 publication of Fifth Business, the first work in the renowned Deptford Trilogy, which traced the interconnected lives of three men in the fictional town of Deptford, Ontario, the province where the author was born, spent most of his life and died this weekend.

In the 1970s and again in the 1980s, he produced two more well received trilogies. His last work of fiction, The Cunning Man, was published in 1994.

Explaining how so many of his novels came to be trilogies, Davies said, "I found almost as soon as I had finished that it wasn't all I wanted to say."

Although he wrote plays, criticism and essays, his reputation rests on dense novels full of mysticism, absurdity and Canadiana.

He has been praised as a gifted storyteller who favored complex plots and shifting points of view, a man of strong moral sense, a repository of obscure facts and esoteric vocabulary and a writer who could move easily from bawdy humor to lofty abstraction. His wide-ranging interests included Jungian psychology, medicine, religion and crime, and his command of these subjects course through the novels.

Davies was among the first Canadian novelists to gain an international reputation and he used his stature to promote Canadian culture and defend Canadian nationalism.

His books were translated into 17 languages, and he was mentioned as a possible winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in literature.

Responding last year to complaints about Canada's reputation for being boring, he noted trenchantly, "There's worse things than being dull. There's being crazy and we're not that."

"He thought life was fascinating," Davies' widow, Brenda, told the Canadian Press Assn. on Sunday. "Nowadays, not enough people think life is fascinating. They think it's dreadful. He was very keen that they should take a look at it as magical, fascinating and extraordinary."

Toronto critic Robert Fulford called Davies' death "like the abrupt disappearance of a mountain range from the Canadian landscape" in an appreciation he wrote for publication in today's Toronto Globe and Mail. In an interview, Fulford noted the "theatrical quality" Davies brought to his writing and to his life.

Long before Davies gained acclaim for his fiction, first in the United States and later in his homeland, he had made a mark on the stage in London; then as a columnist, editor and publisher of a small Canadian newspaper; and again as a professor and founding master of Massey College at the University of Toronto.

He was born in 1913 in Thamesville, Ontario. His father was a Welsh immigrant who worked his way up from printer's apprentice to one of the country's leading newspaper publishers, political activists and philanthropists.

Like the sons of many prominent Canadian families of the day, Davies traveled to England for his university degree, graduating from Oxford in 1938. He then moved to London, where he played small parts and wrote plays for the Old Vic Repertory Company. At that theater, he met Brenda Mathews, an Australian stage manager, and they were married in 1940.

Returning to Canada after the outbreak of World War II, he was excluded from military service by his poor eyesight. He gained attention as columnist, editor and eventually publisher of the Peterborough Examiner, one of his father's newspapers.

Newspaper work turned him into an easy, prolific writer; his curmudgeonly columns, written under the pen name of Samuel Marchbanks, were eventually compiled for his first three books.

From there, Davies turned his kaleidoscopic intellect to teaching, specializing in English drama from 1660 to 1914. He began as a visiting professor at the University of Toronto and then, for nearly two decades until he retired in 1981, as head of Massey College, a graduate school of the university, where he kept an office and continued to advise students until his death.

With a flowing snow-white beard, a protuberant brow and an actorly demeanor, Davies made an unforgettable impression. His prose was equally arresting.

"He had no imitators and he imitated no one," said Douglas Fetherling, a Toronto critic and essayist who has written a book on the Davies family.

He published the first of his 11 novels, Tempest-Tost, in 1951. That and Leaven of Malice and A Mixture of Frailties comprise the first of his three trilogies.

The second, the Deptford Trilogy, written in the 1970s, includes The Manticore and World of Wonders as well as Fifth Business In the 1980s came the Cornish Trilogy: The Rebel Angels, What's Bred in the Bone and The Lyre of Orpheus.

He was planning to write another book after Christmas dealing with his old age, his wife said. He is survived by his wife and three daughters.

Peter B. Flint (obituary date 4 December 1995)

SOURCE: An obituary in The New York Times, December 4, 1995, p. B10.

[In the following obituary, Flint focuses on Davies's works, noting his concern with themes of morality, evil, myth, love, and death.]

Robertson Davies, the novelist, journalist and educator who became one of the first Canadian literary figures to gain an international following, died on Saturday at a hospital in Orangeville, Ontario, 50 miles northwest of Toronto. He was 82.

The cause was a stroke, his secretary, Moira Whalon, told The Associated Press. Mr. Davies, who lived in Toronto but had a home in Caledon East, near Orangeville, had entered the hospital last Tuesday, said a supervisor at the hospital where he died, the Dufferin-Caledon Health Care Corporation.

Mr. Davies published more than 30 volumes of fiction, including three trilogies, as well as plays, essays and criticism. He was once mentioned as a potential recipient of the 1993 Nobel Prize in literature, which went instead to the American novelist Toni Morrison.

Though he retired as an educator more than a decade ago, he had continued to write in recent years, and his last novel, The Cunning Man (Viking, 1995), made the bestseller lists this year. It is a chronicle of personal and social change in Toronto as reflected in the life of a doctor whose brilliant diagnostic skills rest on shamanism and Platonism as well as scientific medicine.

Mr. Davies was primarily a storyteller concerned with moral conflicts. Beneath its imaginative, enigmatic themes, his work, which was translated into 17 languages, was informed by the philosophy of Carl Jung, with its emphasis on self-knowledge, creative maturity and wisdom.

Describing his admiration for the Swiss psychiatrist, Mr. Davies said in 1985: "Jung's thought is very expansive, a sort of opening out of life, whereas so much psychoanalytical thinking is reductive: getting you back to the womb and a lot of trouble."

Mr. Davies once said the theme at the core of his work was "the isolation of the human spirit" and mankind's growth "from innocence to experience." Characters' actions are carried out "on their own volition and usually contrary to what is expected of them," he remarked. "The characters try to escape from early influences and find their own place in the world but are reluctant to do so in a way that will bring pain and disappointment to others."

Other concerns in Mr. Davies's work were evil as an expression of suppressed fears and wishes, the irreversible consequences of actions, and myth, sainthood, ambition, love, vengeance and death. With disarming ease, he could fuse a comedy of manners with Gothic melodrama, blend realism with illusions, and juxtapose low humor and lofty abstractions. Satirizing bourgeois Canadian provincialism was one of his favorite sports.

Critics, mostly realists, assailed his mystical style as schematic and accused him of overstressing and overanalyzing the cerebral at the expense of emotions. He was also at times accused of being pedantic, repetitious, vague and antifeminist.

The tall, flamboyant, bearded Mr. Davies was also the editor and publisher of The Peterborough Examiner in Ontario from 1942 to 1962; a professor of English at Massey College, a prestigious postgraduate unit of the University of Toronto, from 1960 to 1981, and master of the college from 1962 to 1981, when he retired.

He completed three trilogies of novels, set in fictional Ontario villages, that have been reprinted by Penguin paperbacks. The first, called the Salterton Trilogy and written in the 1950's, included Tempest-Tost, about a bungled amateur staging of Shakespeare's late romance; Leaven of Malice, arising from a bogus engagement notice involving two warring families, and A Mixture of Frailties, focusing on a factory girl transformed into an opera star.

The Deptford Trilogy, written in the 1970's, included Fifth Business, The Manticore and World of Wonders. All three followed the course of lives that were partly defined by a childhood prank in which a boy threw a snowball containing a rock at a classmate but hit a pregnant woman instead. These three novels were considered by some critics and readers to be Mr. Davies's best works.

The third set of novels, the Cornish Trilogy, was written in the 1980's and includes The Rebel Angels, What's Bred in the Bone and The Lyre of Orpheus. The novels center on a painter and art forger who was also a spy. The books satirize gift-giving, foundations and grand opera.

In 1985, Michiko Kakutani wrote in The New York Times that Mr. Davies "has created a rich oeuvre of densely plotted, highly symbolic novels that not only function as superbly funny entertainments but also give the reader, in his character's words, a deeper kind of pleasure—delight, awe, religious intimations, a fine sense of the past, and of the boundless depth and variety of life."

Mr. Davies's other books included A Voice From the Attic, the attic being Canada (1960), One Half of Robertson Davies (1978), The Enthusiasms of Robertson Davies (1979) and The Papers of Samuel Marchbanks (1985). Mr. Davies often revived the character of Marchbanks, an irascible old bachelor who issued blistering opinions about people, particularly Canadians, from his isolated home in Skunk's Misery, Ontario. Mr. Davies created the character in his columns in The Peterborough Examiner.

In a 1991 novel, Murther and Walking Spirits, Mr. Davies's narrator is murdered in the first line, and his spirit thereafter moves about, learning of his ancestral Holland, Wales and North America, watching scenes from the dead's point of view and slowly gaining revenge.

A frequent composer of epigrams in his work, Mr. Davies once wrote about marriage: "People marry most happily with their own kind. The trouble lies in the fact that people usually marry at an age where they do not really know what their own kind is." Of the future, he wrote: "The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to an idealized past."

The writer, whose full name was William Robertson Davies, was born on Aug. 28, 1913, in the southern Ontario town of Thamesville. His parents were William Rupert Davies, a Welshman who became a publisher and Liberal senator, and the former Florence McKay, whose British loyalist family had fled to Canada from New York at the time of the American Revolution. Mr. Davies attended Upper Canada College and Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, and he earned a bachelor of letters degree at Balliol College, Oxford.

He spent two years with the Old Vic theater in London, directing, acting and teaching, before returning in 1940 to Ontario, where he spent two more years as the literary editor of Saturday Night, a Toronto magazine. He then began editing The Peterborough Examiner, an evening daily owned by his family, and wrote a column. He also wrote several plays, with little success, and was an active sponsor of the Shakespeare Festival at Stratford, Ontario. He received many awards and honorary degrees and was the first Canadian to be named a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

In discussing his careers in journalism and education, Mr. Davies was candid. Of newspapers, he once wrote that they "like to represent themselves as wonderfully romantic and hitched into world events," but "they are really an entertainment and manufacturing business. The news is what you can squeeze in before you have to go to press; it's not what's happening in the world."

As an educator, he said: "I'm a great believer in encouragement. A great number of young people who are very brilliant come from very humble families, and they have to fight family criticism."

Mr. Davies lived in the Toronto area for most of his life with his wife, the former Brenda Mathews, an Australian whom he married in London in 1940. In addition to his wife, he is survived by three daughters, Miranda, who lives in England; Jennifer Surridge of Mississauga, Ontario, and Rosamound Cunnington of Oakville, Ontario, and four grandchildren.