Robertson Davies; Celebrated Canadian Novelist, Scholar

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.

Turner reported from Toronto and Gross from Los Angeles.