Robertson Davies has lauded Stephen Leacock as a significant influence. However, Davies also represents Leacock after all as a failure. Davies's dark view of Leacock's fiction may be Davies's own skewed perspective, quite unrelated to what Leacock actually wrote. For Davies's fiction has some telling ambivalences about it -- it is difficult to know whether his Deptford is his own small town Ontario, or merely that of his character, Dunstan Ramsay's.
