Lynne Diamond-Nigh
Robertson Davies: Life, Work, and Criticism
Toronto: York Press, 1997. Pp. 59. $9.95
Reviewed by Camille R. La Bossière

This most recent addition to the “Authoritative Studies in World Literature” from York Press delivers what that series promises, to provide with each study a genuinely useful yet “inexpensive research tool” specially designed to assist “young scholars in their investigations.” Lynne-Diamond Nigh’s Robertson Davies does good pedagogical service in providing a tour d’horizon of a richly complicated writer’s achievement as journalist, man of the theater, essayist, businessman, moralist, university educator, and novelist. Generalist readers and newcoming researchers of the Davies oeuvre are equally well served by the synopsis this book makes available. Emphasis on the overlapping, interactive features of shamanstvo, metafiction/fabulation, and Jungian psychology often remarked by seasoned interpreters of his achievement lend the succinct volume a nicely interpretive coherence.

This is not to suggest that Lynne Diamond-Nigh’s survey represents a too-closing, too-authoritative reading. For all its surface, pedagogical clarity, Robertson Davies: Life, Work, and Criticism seems no less well designed to induce a sense of mystery, if not mystification, to draw attention to substantial contradictions in the Davies enterprise as raconteur/illusionist/educator/sage. Diamond-Nigh opens her study by connecting Davies, founding Master of Massey College, with the high intellectualism of “elitist” Santayana, who argues for the need to be “reasonable” in human life: “To be happy you must be wise” (5). And yet, as she has occasion to remark in her “Summary” of the works, Davies in his “university” novels (The Rebel Angels, in particular) indicates clearly enough “his valorization of instinct over intellect” (33). Nor does her account of Davies’s apparent aversion to “skepticism, the refusal to believe seriously in anything that is characteristic of late twentieth-century intellectual life” readily reconcile with the positive connection she draws, for example, between What’s Bred in the Bone and André Gide’s The Counterfeiters, which latter text quietly pays tribute to the skeptical, anything-but-serious Montaigne (34-35). “Moderation,” a key word in Anglican-convert Davies’s moral lexicon (e.g., 3, 45), additionally serves to suggest his affinity with a (post-)Augustan high culture founded on doubt’s playful artfulness. As Diamond-Nigh’s study tacitly invites the recognition, the skeptical logic of balance-and-mean basic to the writings of Burton, Halifax, Dryden, Johnson, and Aldous Huxley, for instance, finds renewed, Canadian expression in the fugue-like counterpointing of Robertson Davies. Robertson Davies: Life, Work, and Criticism, in other words, provides something worthwhile for seasoned as well as newcoming scholars of an eminent Canadian’s oeuvre to chew on. The current absence of any comprehensive, substantially critical reading of the whole of his literary production lends added value to this survey.