The Salterton Trilogy

The first batch of novels by Robertson Davies makes use of his interest in theatre, journalism, and opera. They are united by setting (the fictional Ontario city of Salterton and seat of Waverly University), and by their exposure of people whose lives have been emasculated by a lack of feeling and culture.

Tempest-Tost 1951

An amateur outdoor production of The Tempest results in comedy due to an inept, egotistical, and misguided cast and crew.

Ferdinand and the assistant director (Solly Bridgetower) get into a fist-fight over Ariel, and the makeup artist (Puss Pottinger) is so old she needs a magnifying glass to apply her greasepaint. Caliban is a practical joker who crashes a rehearsal on horseback with unfortunate consequences. On opening night a seedy musical trio shows up just before the play begins: "Can we just have a little run over the play before we start? You tell me where you want the music to come in, and we’ll fit it in somehow." Prospero (Professor Vambrace) defies the director by eating grapes while reciting his lines, Juno gets sloshed, and Gonzalo tries to hang himself.

One of the central characters is a schoolteacher named Hector Mackilwraith, aka Old Binomial, who hands out negative marks to students who had "fallen into mathematical sin." Though outwardly successful, he has not been able to escape a chilly upbringing. Aged forty and living at the YMCA, he suspects something is missing in his life.

His opposite number is a raffish musician named Humphrey Cobbler, one of the few characters who, along with Solly, Solly's mother, Puss Pottinger, and Professor Vambrace's daughter Pearl, appear in all three books. Cobbler's appearance "was of the sort which causes housewives to lock up their spoons and their daughters." Yet he was "so alive, and so apparently happy, that the air for two or three feet around him seemed charged with his delight in life."

The funniest of the three novels, Temptest-Tost had me laughing throughout.

Leaven of Malice 1954

A notice in the Salterton Bellman announces the engagement of Solly and Pearl, but the announcement is a hoax and reopens an old feud between the two families.

Professor Vambrace takes particular offense. In Tempest-Tost he was portrayed as little more than a pompous boob. Now he is revealed as a domestic tyrant, "immoderate in self-esteem," who terrorizes his wife and daughter. He perceives the hoax as a blow aimed at him, and launches a libel suit against the newspaper.

Likewise Solly’s mother, who in the first book was merely a tiresome hypochondriac, is now revealed as a person for whom "pouring salt into wounds was a specialty…and the older the wound was, the better she liked it."

Caught in the middle is Gloster Ridley, the newspaper’s editor, and through whom we learn some of the tribulations of running a small-market newspaper. Due to a slip-up in record-keeping, the identity of the person posting the false announcement is unknown. Until it is discovered the issue cannot be resolved. Ironically Solly and Pearl are the least concerned and quite willing to let the whole thing drop.

Two of the best scenes in the book involve Professor Vambrace: first when he engages Ridley in a superb verbal duel, and later when he vanquishes a young half-baked psychologist who tries to foist an Oedipus complex on him.

Leaven of Malice won the Leacock Medal in 1955, but its humour is darker than in Tempest-Tost, many of its characters being malicious rather than merely foolish.

A Mixture of Frailties 1958

This book is markedly different from the other two, for while not lacking in wit, it is not a comedic novel. It has a larger cast of characters, deals with weightier situations, and more closely resembles the rich and complex novels that are to follow. Though it begins and ends in Salterton, most of it takes place outside of Canada.

Mrs. Bridgetower has just passed away, and because she resented the marriage of Solly and Pearl (now called by her middle name, Veronica), the old cow left a vengeful will. Though she had over a million in investments, the only cash she leaves her son is $100. Everything else goes into a trust to support a worthy young artist unless Solly and Veronica produce a son. Mrs. Bridgetower's friend, Puss Pottinger, who in the first book was hapless and in the second a busy-body, is now revealed as mean-spirited.

The recipient of the trust is a talented singer named Monica Gall, who is employed at the Salterton Glue Works. She goes to England where her musical development is overseen by Sir Benedict Domdaniel. Finding her suffering from "cultural malnutrition," he sends her to a vocal coach named Murtagh Molloy, who undertakes her "vocal and spiritual unbuttoning." She meets a gifted Welsh composer and "Satanic genius," Giles Revelstoke, who seduces her and treats her shabbily. She attains success when she sings in an opera written by Revelstoke, but before the novel ends she has to make several difficult decisions, one of which involves a body.

A Mixture of Frailties contains a number of things that Davies explored more fully in his later novels. For example, spirits make a brief appearance at the end of this book; in What's Bred in the Bone, they play a larger role. Davies's interest in Wales is pursued to a greater degree in Murther & Walking Spirits, as is his interest in opera in The Lyre of Orpheus.

Interestingly enough, the opera that Revelstoke writes is based on The Golden Ass. Davies himself wrote the libretto for a similar opera, which was performed after his death.

The Cunning Man

"Should I have taken the false teeth?"

A great opening line delivered by the narrator, Jonathan Hullah, a physician who grows up in Sioux Lookout where two medical practitioners are presented as possible models. One is a shamanistic healer, the other a second-rate doctor who is also the town's bootlegger.

Hullah goes away to a boarding school where he makes two close friends, Charles Iredale and Brocky Gilmartin, whose lives continue to intertwine with his own throughout adulthood. Iredale becomes an Anglican priest, Gilmartin a respected prof of English literature, and Hullah a doctor who employs unorthodox methods of diagnosis. Their professions provide the three principal motifs in the book, and give Davies a broad canvas on which to display his erudition. There is a boggling number of literary references, as well as forays into theatre, opera, painting, and church music.

But the great thing about Davies is the way he mixes his erudition with comedy, often of the ribald variety. Here is Hullah examining one of his patients:

...not that he demanded to peep up her chimney, or anythng like that...but he stared at her until she said she blushed from head to toe. Then he poked at her with an enquiring finger simply everywhere! He grabbed her tum until she thought he was trying to dislodge something inside, but it appears it was just an unusually prolonged and searching examination of the spleen. He made her turn over and did the same sort of investigation of her back, including a prolonged parting of the buttocks while he seemed to be staring at her exit – about which she seems to be extremely secretive. He did a lot about feet. Then – and this is what really shook her -- he began to sniff at her, very close up, and he sniffed her from head to foot, very slowly and even quite a lot of sniffing in that area which Miss Fothergill described as You Know Where...

But he's not merely a "twat-sniffer." He believes the health of the body is inextricably bound up with the health of the spirit, and combines modern medical techniques with enemas and poetry-reading. He refers to himself as a Paracelsian physician, melding humanism with medicine. He is the modern version of a village wise man who can also mend bones – a "Cunning Man."

The novel proceeds with a combination of satisfying plot twists, outrageous incidents, and lots of playful but wide-ranging dialogue fueled by good wine and fine scotch. There is a murder, a couple of miracles, a bad breath contest, and a scene during the war when a bomb explodes while Hullah is taking a bath, leaving him trapped in the tub for four days.

In the penultimate chapter Davies introduces a brave new character who takes over some of the narrative duties. She writes numerous letters in an amusing "schoolgirl-slangy vein," letters which later come into Hullah's possession. When he incorporates them into his Case Book and comments on them, the result is an interesting narrative crossfire.

In the final section Hullah reaches retirement age and devotes himself to working on a revolutionary approach to literature. He is going to re-evaluate the the characters of great works from a medical point of view. Was Shakespeare constipated? What about Mr. Pickwick's prostate? The Anatomy of Fiction will be the title, in homage to Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, from which is taken The Cunning Man's epigraph.

Some Great Lines

A brief sampling of the many delightful turns of phrase:

She blabs to conquer. a trumpeting of flatus a hymen like parchment a melting young beauty English beef-witted folly some dark cupboard in my mind the portcullis of respectability the small change of her conversation The church is an anvil that has worn out many hammers.

Names

The book has an astonishing number of characters. Many of them are minor, some appearing only once, but Davies names them all, a formidable task in itself. He always comes up with some great ones.

Dr. Ogg
Elsie Smoke
Hugh McWearie
Emily Raven-Hart
Edwin Allchin
Richard Craigie
Father Ninian Hobbes
Father Tommy Whimble
Pansy Freake Todhunter (aka Chips)
Hercules McNabb and his wife Dorsy
Lieutenant Dorrington
Prudence Vizard
Joe Sliter

An Unfinished Trilogy

One of the sweetest aspects of Davies's work is the way the books in his trilogies complement each other. The Gilmartin family tree was exhaustively explored in the preceding book, Murther & Walking Spirits, and while not necessary to understand The Cunning Man, it so enriches it that I've revised somewhat my earlier opinion of that book.

The ending in particular harkens back to Murther in a couple of respects – Esme wondering whether Gil's ghost might be hanging around, and a misdirected telephone inquiry about a movie. Those who have read Murther will immediately understand their significance.

And not only do the books in the trilogies overlap, but the trilogies themselves occasionally do. For example, Dunstan Ramsay has a brief walk-on as a history teacher at Colbourne, the boarding school attended by Hullah and his friends. And Brocky ends up a prof at Waverley University in Salterton, the setting for Davies’s first trilogy.

Unfortunately The Cunning Man is Davies’s last novel. He had begun preliminary work on another, mostly likely the concluding volume in what has been termed the Toronto series, when he died. While it's useless to speculate on what the contents of that book may have been, it's also fun. The main question is who would have been the lead character. Perhaps Nuala Conor, Brocky's wife and Hullah's lover.

Since Murther and Cunning Man both open with a death, it's not unreasonable to suppose the final volume would have done so as well. Perhaps it would have been that of Darcy Dwyer, who died of stab wounds in Gilbraltar.

There is a character in Murther known as the Sniffer. In Cunning Man, Hullah is also a sniffer, using his nose as a diagnostic tool. Would there have been another sniffer in the third book?

The Gilmartins

Since several of Brocky's relatives pop up in Cunning Man, I made an abbreviated family tree to refresh my memory. All except for Ollwen appear in Murther. The names in bold are those who appear in this book.

The Female Line (5 generations)

Anna Vermeulen + Major Gage
--Elizabeth Gage + Justus Vanderlip
----Nelson Vanderlip
------Cynthia Vanderlip + Dan Boutelle
------Virginia Vanderlip + William McOmish
--------Caroline, Minerva & Malvina McOmish

The Old World Gilmartins (5 generations)

Thomas G.
--Wesley G. (adopted)
----Samuel G.
------Polly G. + John Jethro Jenkins
------Walter G. + Janet Jenkins
--------Elaine, Maude, Lancelot, Rhodri G.

The New World Gilmartins

Rhodri G. + Malvina McOmish
--Brochwel "Brocky" G. + Nuala Conor
----Conor "Gil" G. + Esme Barron
-----Ollwen G.

Murther & Walking Spirits

Connor Gilmartin is killed by his wife's lover in the opening sentence, but it is not his own life that flashes before his eyes. Instead he sees the lives of his forebears -- the Welsh Gilmartins and the Vermeulen-Gages, Loyalists of Dutch stock who fled New York during the Revolution.

These two families experience lots of ups and downs, illustrating a saying in the book attributed to Heraclitus -- "anything, if pursued beyond a reasonable point, turns into its opposite." During the course of the story more than one rags-to-riches-to-rags story is told, in terms of wealth, religion, and love.

As usual, the prose of Davies is a pleasure to read, polished but not flashy, filled with great lines and imaginative diction, and managing somehow to be both earthy and erudite. A few favourite quotes:

a killing moustache orray-eyed drunkards the winey air of Canada the gumbo of their emotions the lion-like face of Gladstone an ill-used toy of circumstances she dashed off arpeggios like confetti donkey liver fricassee, and orange Jell-O to top it off the spirit of a very rich fruitcake, made habitable clothes that looked as if they had been made not by tailors but by upholsterers who had heard tell of the human figure but had never seen one What is a pistol to a bear?

The novel is populated by a huge cast of characters, many of them minor yet wonderfully named: Hugh McWearie, Tabitha Drinker, Liz Duckett, Elsie Hare, Guinevere Gwilt, Reverend Cattermole, Louida Beemer, Forty-Pie Doane, and Bug Devereux ("so called because, when he was seventeen, his face welled hugely and at last burst, and a great black bug crawled out of it, spread its wings, and flew away").

Yet despite the fine writing, the book doesn't quite reach the level set by the Cornish trilogy. It gets off to an excellent start, but begins to wallow a bit midway through. Part of the problem may be a lack of overall cohesiveness. The narrator, Connor Gilmartin, is present throughout but remains a minor character, his role mainly that of an observer. In the end he achieves self-knowledge, but it seems a rather thin discovery.

And while there are deft touches of humour throughout the book, there is no memorable comic scene or character. Of the latter, two of the most interesting are Thomas Gilmartin and William McOmish, but they occupy the stage for too short a time.

The Gilmartins

Thomas Gilmartin is a Welsh weaver-preacher who adopts a pot-boy named Gwylim Griffiths and renames him Wesley Gilmartin. Wesley has two sons, Samuel and Thomas.

Thomas finds work as a servant, while Samuel becomes a tailor and his children include Walter and Polly. Polly marries the untrustworthy John Jethro Jenkins, and they move to Canada.

Walter marries Jenkins's sister Janet, and they have several children, including Rhodri. Their family too relocates to Canada.

The Gages

After her husband is killed, Anna Vermeulen Gage and her children flee overland to Canada. Her daughter Elizabeth marries Justin Vanderlip. Cynthia and Virginia are their grandchildren. Cynthia is lame and mean-spirited; she marries Dan Boutell, who eventually skips out on her. The frigid Virginia marries a master builder named William McOmish, who goes broke building a church. Their children include Malvina and Minerva.

The Two Lines Merge

Rhodri Gilmartin marries Malvina, who in lying about her age causes a rift between them. She is firmly rooted in Canada, while his dreams lie in Wales, where he eventually buys and furnishes Belem Manor. Their son Brochwel (Brocky) Gilmartin is the father of the dead narrator, Connor Gilmartin.

Not a word is said about the narrator's mother, Nuala Connor. Her story is most likely taken up in the next book (The Cunning Man) of this unfinished trilogy.

The Lyre of Orpheus

This is the concluding novel in the Cornish trilogy.

Leapfrogging the middle book are several characters from The Rebel Angels, the most important being Simon Darcourt, and Arthur and Maria Cornish.  The latter bankroll an unfinished opera by E.T.A. Hoffmann -- Arthur of Britain, or the Magnanimous Cuckold -- and soon find the Arthurian legend reflected in their own lives.

Darcourt is the narrative glue that unites two plot lines. He writes the opera's libretto, and solves certain mysteries surrounding Francis Cornish (Arthur's uncle and the central figure in the middle book, What's Bred in the Bone).

A pair of characters new to the trilogy are doctoral student Hulda Schnakenburg, who is completing the music, and the composer-in-residence, Gunilla Dahl-Soot. Once their work is done and Darcourt's libretto completed, the opera company is assembled and preparations made for opening night.

Throughout it all Davies' comic touch is as sure as ever, especially in portraying the foibles and peccadilloes of actors, students, and professors. However, the portrayal of Arthurian archetypes is not entirely convincing, and the book gets a bit windy in spots, though Davies' prose is never less than urbane, his erudition never forced or heavy-handed.

With no engaging villain (as with Parlabane in Angels), Dahl-Soot is a welcome eccentric, as are Maria's mother (she gives another Tarot reading) and uncle Yerko (he puts together a claque for opening night). There is an especially fine scene involving drunken academics, but the real treat of the novel is the exhilarating account of opening night.

Names

One of the things I admire about Davies is his wonderful use of names. In Lyre he has to populate an entire opera company, a formidable task in itself. Some favourites:

Ogden Whistlecraft - poet
Mervyn Gwilt - lawyer
Dulcy Ringgold - costume designer
Gwen Larking - stage manager
Nutcombe Puckler - "Sir Dagonet"
Clara Intrepidi - "Morgan Le Fay"
Oliver Twentyman - "Merlin"
Ulick Carman - herald
Eden Wigglesworth - attendant
Dicky Plaunt - head carpenter
Otto Klafsky - concert-master
Claude Applegarth - New York critic

A minor character named Wally Crottel makes a brief appearance. His name harkens back to a monologue on excrement in Angels -- "the crotels of a hare." As the name suggests, he's a bit of a shit.

Quotes

"Lies keep the teeth white."

"You don't smell bad, for a man."

"A horse is always a sure card in an opera."

"...we shall add a little salt to the dreary porridge of our lives."

"That's what I like about you Canadians," said the doctor; "you are so ready to admit fault."

"Is there something ambiguous about Knockers?" said Hollier. "I'm sorry. I'm not very well up on the latest indecencies."

NY Times review

The Rebel Angels

What a shitty book!

Professor Ozias Froats examines human excrement by the bucketful.

Clement Hollier is interested in Medieval Filth Therapy.

Maria Theotoky's mother uses horse dung to refurbish old violins.

John Parlabane bequeaths his arsehole to the university.

Urquhart MacVarish likes having ribbon shoved up his bum.

And here are a few pungent thoughts from the Reverend Simon Darcourt, after visiting Ozy's lab:

I walked on toward Ploughwright, thinking about faeces. What a lot we had found out about the prehistoric past from the study of fossilized dung of long-vanished animals. A miraculous thing, really; a recovery of the past from what was carelessly rejected. And in the Middle Ages, how concerned people who lived close to the world of nature were with faeces of animals. And what a variety of names they had for them: the Crotels of a Hare, the Friants of a Boar, the Spraints of an Otter, the Werderobe of a Badger, the Waggying of a Fox, the Fumets of a Deer. Surely there might be some words for the material so near to the heart of Ozy Froats better than shit? What about the Problems of a President, the Backward Passes of a Footballer, the Deferrals of a Dean, the Odd Volumes of a Librarian, the Footnotes of a Ph.D., the Low Grades of a Freshman, the Anxieties of an Untenured Professer?

But The Rebel Angels is not just a satire of university life, it is also a morality play. The title refers to angels tossed out of heaven, not all of them "sore-headed egotists like Lucifer. Instead they gave mankind another push up the ladder, they came to earth and taught tongues, and healing and laws and hygiene..."

The profs at the College of St. John and the Holy Ghost are rebel angels, flawed but well-intentioned. They are also medievalists, either by training (Hollier, Darcourt, McVarish, Parlabane and Maria) or in spirit (Froats). Maria's mother is a gypsy who's practically living in the Middle Ages; she gives tarot readings and knows how to cast a curse and prepare a love philtre.

Parlabane is the villain of the piece, "as slippery-tongued, as entertaining, and sometimes as frightening as the Devil himself." He is also one of Davies's most engaging creations.

The urbane prose is a pleasure to read, and the humour has a superb Rabelaisian flavour.

"Roberta, have I ever shown you my penis-bone?" Professor Burns, a zoologist, did not turn a hair. "Have you truly got one? I know they used to be common, but it's ages since I saw one." Urky detached an object with a gold handle from his watch-chain and handed it to her. "Eighteenth century; very fine." "Oh, what a beauty. Look, Professor Lamotte, it's the penis-bone of a raccoon; very popular as toothpicks in an earlier day. And tailors used them for ripping out basting. Very nice, Urky. But I'll bet you haven't got a kangaroo-scrotum tobacco pouch; my brother sent me one from Australia." Professor Lamotte regarded the penis-bone with distaste. "Don't you find it disagreeable?" he said. "I don't pick my teeth with it," said Urky, "I just show it to ladies on social occasions." "You astonish me," said Lamotte.

The Rebel Angels is the first book in the Cornish Trilogy. The second is What's Bred in the Bone, the third The Lyre of Oprheus.

What's Bred in the Bone

I first read Roberston Davies when I was a summer student working at a camp. In the evening we returned to our quarters and ate slabs of meat blackened in a cast-iron pan. Afterwards, while the rest played crib, I crawled into bed and read Fifth Business. The elegant prose warmed me as much as the food and the heat from an oil-burning space heater.

The narrator of Fifth Business, Dunstan Ramsay, makes a brief appearance in What's Bred in the Bone, a novel that was shortlisted for the Booker in 1986. It recounts the life of Francis Cornish, the much ignored son of a wealthy family. He spends his early life in rural Ontario, is educated at Oxford, becomes an artist, works for MI5 during and after WW2, and ends his years as a rich but odorous miser in Canada.

The title comes from an old proverb: “What’s bred in the bone will not out of the flesh.” For Francis, what’s bred in the bone is his upbringing in a loveless and hypocritical environment. His mother is presented at the court of Edward VII on her “coming-out,” after which she celebrates by having sex with a stranger. When her pregnancy is discovered, her father arranges a speedy marriage with a monocled major of “unimpeachable family descent.” The major agrees to the marriage after presenting an invoice for his services. The child, when born, is found to be mentally deficient -- the result of several comic attempts at inducing a miscarriage. The boy is kept locked in an upper room, cared for by a servant, until he dies.

Thus, the household that Francis grows up in is financially rich, yet morally impoverished, and gradually his own life takes on a similar aspect. His own marriage, for example, is a distorted reflection of his parents’. He is duped into the union by Ismay, his cousin, when she becomes pregnant. Only after they are married does she reveal the child is not his. Meanwhile, her family milks him for as much money as they can get, until Ismay “scarpers” off to Spain to be with the child’s father. Francis assumes financial responsibility for the child but nothing more.

Next, Francis’s lifelong dream to be an artist takes a wrong turn when he agrees to apprentice under Tancred Saraceni, whose métier is “improving” old paintings. One of Francis's duties involves exposing a fake work of art being promoted by a competitor – a fraud exposing a fraud – after which the competitor takes his own life.

The crowning irony of his life is the death of a dear friend, Aylwin Ross, who is director of the National Gallery in Ottawa. Ross asks for money to buy a painting for the museum, a purchase that would also save his career. Francis refuses because the painting that Ross wishes to buy is a fake, painted by himself. Ross, whom Francis loves platonically, commits suicide.

What’s Bred in the Bone is an old-fashioned morality tale, gracefully told, full of wit and humour. Davies is never heavy-handed with his characters. They are deftly portrayed, and for all of their flaws, are generally likeable, or at least understandable. The prose is smooth and erudite. Discussions of art, religion and astrology are incorporated seamlessly, along with quotes from Browning and Ben Jonson, which form a kind of gloss on the story. There are many splendid lines.

She was worse than a blabber; she was a hinter. The British have some odd talents, and writing obituaries is one of them. If the testicles needed some stern talking-to from time to time, even more so did the penis. The pianist had been the great Teresa Carreno, a famous matador of the instrument, imprisoned forever on a perforated roll of paper. His breath suggested that he was dying from within, and had completed about two-thirds of the job. Few of these horses were of the noble breed with arching neck and flashing eye; most were miserable screws, rackers, the broken-winded, the spavined, often far gone with the botts, or with nostrils dribbling from the glanders.

The Author

Roberston Davies was one of those protean figures who seemed larger than life. He looked like a character in one of his novels. He acted at the Old Vic, and helped launch the Stratford Festival in Canada. He was a newpaper editor and publisher, then taught literature at the U of T, where he was Master of Massey College. He wrote plays, and humorous essays under the pseudonym Samuel Marchbanks, and a stack of fine novels.

The Salterton Trilogy
Tempest-Tost
Leaven of Malice
A Mixture of Frailties

The Deptford Trilogy
Fifth Business
The Manticore
World of Wonders

The Cornish Trilogy
The Rebel Angels
What's Bred in the Bone
The Lyre of Orpheus

The Toronto Trilogy (unfinished)
Murther & Walking Spirits
The Cunning Man

When Davies died in 1995, John Irving wrote a piece in Maclean’s that began by calling him the greatest comic novelist since Dickens.