Book Review: Robertson Davies - The Merry Heart

It would be weird to prefer Davies as an essayist or speaker, given his skills as a novelist and love for the form, but I'm nearly there, and I almost can't help it - if you enjoy his humor and insight, it's often "faster" to consume it in the form of his speeches than in his novels, as pleasant as those are, because without those cumbersome accoutrements of plot and characters, you can enjoy his sagacity in concentrated form. Much like in the earlier essay/lecture collection One Half of Robertson Davies, you get a wide-ranging selection of his thoughts, here on the writing process, the power of literature, and, most intriguingly, the author as a moralist. While there are no truly tremendous lectures like the four-part Jung opus in the other collection, and there is one downright awful speech he gave at the very end of his life, for the most part this is just about as pleasurable as you could want, and all the more impressive given that many of these were conceived in the twilight of his career, when he was in his eighties. Davies died before the invention of podcasts; one wonders what he would have made of the form given his techno-skepticism, but many of these speeches come off like lengthy but welcome monologues from a favored guest, wisely given the spotlight and the mic by a thoughtful and indulgent host.

First things first: "Fiction and the Future", the penultimate entry within, is by far the worst thing I've ever read from him, a long tirade against science and modernism he delivered in 1994 that comes off less like his typical good-humored uncle persona and far more like a Fox News Grandpa. Now, normally I'm a connoisseur of cranky reactionary rants; I imagine that one of the chief pleasures of getting old is finally having the power to force everyone to listen to every resentful diatribe I've been saving for my dotage, and so I appreciate heartfelt examples of the form. Complaining is a cherished human pastime for us all, and there's no reason that it can't be as fun to read as it is to do. But while science fiction is just about the last genre I'd ever imagine the firmly classicist Davies to ever express useful opinions on anyway, he goes far beyond the considered apprehension of the possibilities of technology I'd expected and unleashes all kinds of frankly stupid resentments on things like genetic engineering and nanotechnology that are beneath him. 

Now, Davies was born in 1913, and I would no more expect an avowed "technomoron", as he dubs himself later on, to suddenly reveal an Isaac Asimov futurist side than I would my grandmother (who also attended Queen's University just a few years before he did). I mean, there's a whole other essay in here, "Literature and Technology", complaining about all writing technology newer than the typewriter; he just wasn't made for these times. Still, it's unpleasant and unnecessary to read these tirades about political correctness and how modern society is making science into a new religion that could have come from any bargain-bin Wall Street Journal op-ed hack. He does have some decent riffs on the kinds of plots that technology permits a writer (for example, he prefigures the movie Gattaca during his genetics meanderings), but the tone is almost shockingly ill-tempered, and I hope for everyone else's sake that my eventual senescent harangues won't be this bad.

What's especially jarring about "Fiction and the Future" is that "Literature and Technology", which deals with extremely similar concepts from a different angle, was written just 5 years earlier in 1989, and it's great. Instead of asking what technological advancements will do to the contents of novels, it's about how technology relates to the writing process itself. Predictably, Davies justifies his dismissal of newfangled inventions like word processors with the standard old dog/new tricks argument, as well as various clever metaphors about the distinction between quantity and quality. "Mere bulk is not the measure of a literary artist's capability. He does the best he can, and like a cow we judge him by his butterfat content and not by the number of pails he fills." 

Yet, as you would expect for a writer so fascinated throughout his career by the power of the irrational currents sweeping throughout our subconscious minds, his real argument is that technology is fundamentally orthogonal to creativity, and the real questions we should be asking are about where the forces of truly great fiction spring from to begin with, and not how they're translated to the page. Part of it is unaccountable genius, part of it is keen observation, part of it is hard work: "To ask an author who hopes to be a serious writer if his work is autobiographical is like asking a spider where he buys his thread. The spider gets his thread right out of his guts, and that is where the author gets his writing, and in that profound sense everything he writes is autobiographical. He could not write if he had not seen it and felt it deeply." The true effects of technological progress on creativity might forever remain ambiguous; if the internet is any guide, technology enables good writers to get better but also makes bad writers worse. But Davies' final points about the inability of writing aids to duplicate inspiration or style, while perhaps overstated (I've never heard anyone complain that it's too easy to search electronic notes), clearly do have some merit.

"Literature and Moral Purpose", from 1990, is a real treat. One of the reasons Davies loves Dickens so much as a reader is that Dickens was really good at creating memorable characters who experienced morally charged events in a relatable way; as a writer, Davies has the highest respect for his ability to organically communicate inner pathos out to the audience. The real secret to creating such immersive worlds in his view is not so much a good prose style, though that doesn't hurt, as he discusses in more detail in a future speech, but primarily the ability to ask tough questions, and then being willing to follow them wherever they lead. I can't do better than to quote him at length:

For me [a moralist] meant not someone who imposes a moral system upon his art, but someone who sees as much of life as he can, and who draws what conclusions he may. What courses of action lead to what results? Are there absolute standards of good and evil? To what degree is what appears to society rooted in the truth of a particular man or woman? To what degree may the acceptance of a popular or socially approved code of conduct define or perhaps distort a character? Where do the springs of behavior lie; to what degree may they be controlled; how far is a human creature accountable to his group, or his country, or his professed belief (or unbelief) for what he does? How far is it permissible to talk of what a human creature 'makes' of his life, and to what degree does an element of which he may be unaware in himself 'make' his life for him? How far may we accept the dictum that life is a dream, and that we are the creatures in that dream, which is being dreamed of which we have no knowledge? These, it seems to me, are the concerns of the true moralist. He is an observer and a recorder; he may not permit himself to be a judge, except by indirection.

Good questions! That last part is perceptive, and is a great part of what separates great authors from lesser ones. For example, Ayn Rand was a huge fan of Victor Hugo (my copy of Hugo's Ninety-Three has a lengthy introduction by her), and her novels are clearly meant to deal with moral subjects of the kind that Hugo did, in much the same Grand Epic Novel way. But while Hugo tries to draw complete portraits of human beings struggling with weighty choices, connecting even bitterly opposed characters to sentiments and desires common to all humanity, in Rand's hands there is no illusion whatsoever of being in a real world with real people, because she's already got the answers, and the characters are just means to that end. As other perceptive works of literary analysis like René Girard's Deceit, Desire, and the Novel also discuss, the essentially imitative process of our moral struggles means that are no definitive answers to life's moral questions even in theory; to be alive is to question, because if someone had figured out how to live the perfect life in a way that can be duplicated, you'd know it by now. As Davies says, in the meantime all we can do, and all writers can do, is think deeply about deep questions, and faithfully transcribe our partial answers as best we can.

He expands further on the craft of writing in the second of a pair of speeches he also gave in 1990, straightforwardly titled "Reading" and "Writing". "Writing", as expected, is all about what sort of attitude makes a true writer, as opposed to a dilettante. I agree with him that writers are born needing to write in some sense. Even though Davies himself didn't start on his novels until he was 38, he'd been a journalist and playwright before that, and the vast asymmetry of difficulty in literature production versus consumption means that although plenty will try writing, very few will persevere to be writers. I'm always cheered when I read that authors I like didn't start until late; even if it would have been better to start earlier, in order to give the world more of yourself, better late than never, right? But in a way, it might be better for some writers to assemble some stability in life before they attempt their art. The life of an author is famously unglamourous because writing is in a sense using the author to produce itself. Davies makes fun of a magazine targeting credulous aspiring writers who are "unsophisticated enough to believe that writers live marvellous social lives, eat and drink very high on the hog, and have access to unlimited apocalyptic sex." By no means are all writers miserable wretches, but often misery and wretchedness are unavoidable companions. All this, though, is secondary to his discussion of "shamantsvo", a term Vladimir Nabokov plucked from Russian that loosely means "enchanter-quality" (as in "shaman"). This is style, language, skill at communicating to the reader. He doesn't cite the famous quote, which like many others is often arbitrarily attributed to Oscar Wilde, that writing is "spending all morning inserting a comma and spending all afternoon taking it out again", but his discussion of the eldritch art of using the right words to make the right feelings come across in the right way is, as you would expect, full of apt phrases.

"Reading", the other half of that pair, is notable because in comparison to the number of pieces on how to write well, you see far fewer discussions on how to read well. We're all familiar with statistics showing a general decline in number of books read, thanks to TV/the internet/video games/etc, but what would it mean to see a similar decline in comprehension? That's inherently a subjective measure, so Davies appeals to elite understandings of what it means to "read well"; he gives an example of a fellow student from long ago who had done all the required readings for her English degree but remained unedified by it. For Davies, to be "well-read" in the best sense is to cultivate your sympathies and ability to feel. As he's elsewhere alluded, this mental and moral ability is not something that is enhanced by technology (I can only imagine what he'd think of the distracting power of the internet or the smartphone), or anything that reduces our ability to pay the kind of close attention that he associates with a real aesthetic experience. Superficial reading is like listening to a symphony as background music, or treating poetry as abstract word patterns, or experiencing any type of art as something other than the main thing that you are doing. If you are reading, then read! Often real appreciation comes from rereading, which sadly is something I myself have done less of these days. He quotes a now-forgotten author John Middleton Murray: "a truly great novel is a tale to the simple, a parable to the wise, and a direct revelation of reality to a man who has made it part of his being." I've gotten a great deal out of rereading, and much like I've listened to my favorite albums to the point where the notes become my thoughts, perhaps I need to slow down and revisit a few of my favorite novels. Even if you're not out to be a member of the "clerisy", just about everyone could benefit from tips on being a better reader, and who doesn't want to be among "those who read for pleasure, but not for idleness; those who read for pastime but not to kill time; those who love books but who do not live by books"?

Another of the more interesting speeches is 1992's "World of Wonders", which deals with a stage adaptation of his novel of the same name, the final volume in the Deptford trilogy. Davies REALLY dislikes having to explain his novels to people (some variant on "if you want to know what it's about, just read the damn thing" appears in several other speeches), but here, when he talks about what it means as a fellow playwright himself to see someone try to translate his novel to a very different medium, he spends a bit of time of time on the differences between how the two forms attempt to compare the same ideas, and a surprising amount of time on the ideas in the novel itself. A play can dispense with much of a novel's abstraction, and condense many pages of action into just a few scenes, but the tradeoff is that in a play, you can't really just have a character explicate a subtle theme that's taken many chapters to develop with a line of dialogue saying "boy, several people's experiences of the same life event can be very subjective, and small actions can have large and unpredictable effects, and all of us contain unexpected multitudes, and life pitilessly destroys our illusions with extremely painful lessons", without it sounding just as awful as that. He spends some time insisting that his own idiosyncratic experiences with and understanding of religion are at the heart of his work, but I think "You gain the mastery of your art at the cost of your innocence" is an aphorism that stands above whatever your relationship to Jungian psychology is. Either way, it's always a treat to talk about subjects he knows so well.

Some other good essays cover Christmas, a topic near and dear to his heart. 1991's "Christmas Books" discusses how essential it is to really believe in the magic of the holiday to write a good Christmas story. Like in the other speeches where he insists upon the primacy of the non-rational, be it traditional religion or modern psychologies, to him there must be something otherworldly about a Christmas tale in order for it to be effective, or otherwise it's just a story that happens to be set around December 25th. I'm reminded of the perpetual nerd debate over whether Die Hard is "really" a Christmas movie; perhaps he's right, and without some openly supernatural event or happening beyond the mundane, you haven't really captured the spirit of Christmas. As you'd expect, Dickens' A Christmas Carol is exhibit A, as it also is in 1993's "An Unlikely Masterpiece". This one is great for how well he conveys Dicken's abilities as a showman, both as a crafter of spellbinding stories, and as a performer when he would read his own works. When I was at the Dickens Museum in London a few years ago, there were many exhibits that discussed his tours, and Davies really conveys well how brilliantly Dickens bridged the divide between the page and the stage. His love of show, his tugging on heartstrings, his embrace of the supernatural to reveal new truths of the world, his larger than life persona - it's no mystery at all why such an extraordinary work has had such a lasting presence in our literature, and in our drama, and in our repertoire of art that conveys essential truths about the most beloved time of the year.

There's more of his speeches and essays to discuss, but as he might say, why read about them when you could just read them? For the most part, you will find exactly what the title promises: an author somehow still near the top of his game, having a grand old time trying his best, with all of his considerable skill, to get you to have one as well.