The Lyre of Orpheus

...The criti-cism has come from within and from without...

...The doyen of Canadian authors refuses to succumb to the trite or trendy...

...F or all his barbs, Davies takes a 1 basically humane view of his characters and the world, best ar-ticulated by Simon Darcourt, the be-mused Anglican priest through whose eyes most of the novel's action—and underlying passions—is sensed...

...from teachers, from the taught and from the great and often ignorant world...

...Professor Rose, who apparently believes that the human race redefines itself and grows a new soul every few years, found this a bleak perspective for a novelist because: If circumstances do not affect the soul, if each person lives out a quest to achieve per-sonal integration and only the terms of the quest change, then truly there is nothing new under the sun...

...Thus, his book offers useful information, but unhelpful advice...

...With Davies, the easy read is eschewed for the intelligent read...

...Nor, despite his erudition and academic background, does Davies ever succumb to pedantry, a scholarly affliction which his years as master of Massey College in Toronto have taught him to despise...

...His solutions to the problems of the pres-ent age are radical, even revolutionary, and, because of that, needlessly de-structive...

...Create characters who have no vital connection to their times and they will have no depth...

...Tired Lon-don and trendy New York have been trumped by a white-bearded old eccen-tric in, of all places, Toronto...

...That's why I gave up practical priesthood and became a pro-fessor...

...It has ranged from malicious detraction to the quiet con-sideration of manifest defects which has been the source of all fruitful reform...

...As Davies Aram Bakshian, Jr is a Washingtonbased author and broadcaster...

...The Lyre of Orpheus, as strummed by Davies, evokes myth, magic, music, theatre, ivory-tower oddi-ties, poetry, and generous insights into the Old Adam and his Maker...

...Even an essentially friendly critic, Professor Phyllis Rose, com-plained in the New York Times that Davies's approach is "ahistorical, con-servative" and that, despite "wild in-vention and bizarre plot turns, he does not believe that human nature changes...

...The theme, taken from a real line of Hoffmann's, is that "The Lyre of Orpheus opens the door of the underworld...

...To the extent that psychology has something to tell us, says Davies, the key lies more in Jung than Freud, in seeking to understand the meanings of dream and myth not to explain in-dividual quirks, but to know why human beings have an inbred desire "to believe in certain things...

...An accomplished critic, essayist, and novelist, Davies has also served time as an actor and academician, experiences that enrich most of the pages of his latest novel...

...ProfScam deserves to be read and discussed, but with a sense of caution and a deeper understanding of what academic life has meant and may once again come to mean...

...The Creed was one of the great signposts in the journey of man-kind from a primitive society toward what-ever was to come, and though the signpost might be falling behind in the march of civili-zation, it had marked a great advance from which there could be no permanent retreat...

...In an issue to come, I'll try to take up what is worth conserving in our colleges and univer-sities...

...Without in-tending to be so, it was a system which, once mastered, set the possessor free forever, should that be his wish, from anything a poet, however noble in spirit, might have felt and imparted to the world...

...Professor Rose got it backwards...

...it was an assertion of an attitude toward life that was expressed in the Creed which was a part of the service in a form archaic and compressed but full of no-ble implication...

...The great Freudian revolu-tion diffused old sins...

...Although his complaints are about real problems that threaten the integrity of the American college and university, his proposals are unwise and unsound...

...q THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1989...

...Why do they develop legends that are manifestly untrue but they wish to be true...

...My faith charges me to love my neighbor but I can't and I won't fake it, in the greasy way professional lovers-of-man-kind do—the professionally charitable, the newspaper sob sisters, the politicians...

...Those unfamiliar with the preceding volumes, The Rebel Angels and What's Bred in the Bone (both still in print as paperbacks), will derive maximum enjoyment by reading them in sequence...

...Why do people wish to believe in saints...

...The Lyre of Orpheus explores these questions in a triple-tiered allegory: an early form of the Arthurian legend of chivalry, cuckoldry, and redemption that inspires a present-day attempt to complete an operatic fragment based on the legend by the nineteenth-century German romantic author-composer E.T.A...

...Not that the Victorians didn't know a thing or two about sin, which gives their best work more depth than most contemporary fiction...

...q THE LYRE OF ORPHEUS Robertson Davies/Viking/472 pp...

...I'm not Christ, Arthur, and I can't love like Him, so I settle for courtesy, consideration, decent manners, and whatever I can do for the peo-ple I really do love . . . Perhaps Darcourt's—and Davies'spersonal creed is best summed up in a passage describing the baptism of the baby conceived as a result of Arthur's cuckolding, a product of adultery that reunites an estranged couple with a bond of love: Its solely Christian implications apart . . . [baptism] was the acceptance of a new life into a society that thereby declared that it had a place for new life...

...The priestly role of both author and charac-ter is flawed and limited by human nature, as Darcourt confesses to Arthur Cornish, the millionaire benefactor who, like his namesake of the opera and legend, has tried to create a Camelot and ends up a noble cuckold: I know we are supposed to love mankind in-discriminately, but I don't...

...There is also the occasional graceful swipe at academic bluffers, as when two faculty members, discussing the opera project but totally ignorant of the identity of the nineteenth-cen-tury theatrical hack, James Robertson Planche (who was originally intended as its librettist), engage in a profession-al battle of witlessness: "Neither the dean nor Darcourt knew who Planche was, but they sparred in the accustomed academic manner to find out what the other knew, and worked up a cloud of unknowing which, again in the aca-demic manner, seemed to give them comfort...

...And, ultimately, does a greater truth about man and the universe lie rooted beneath this mythic topsoil...

...19.95 Aram Bakshian, Jr...

...It is not surprising that Davies's dis-dain for learned flummery, and his strong sense of civilized tradition and the darker reaches beneath, should an-noy and perhaps genuinely puzzle some of the more literal-minded literati of today...

...No one be-lieves in spite anymore...

...himself has observed, "Sin is the great unacknowledged element in mod-ern life...

...Davies is a master of plot, character, dialogue, and irony...

...The parents and godparents might think they did not believe that Creed, as they recited it, but it was plain to Darcourt that they were living in a society which had its roots in that Creed...

...And in the course of 472 entertaining pages, it does...

...People call it objectivity and then act mean as hell on very high-minded grounds...

...All this combines to tell a story that, excellent in itself, also neatly concludes the latest Davies trilogy...

...Some of his best needl-ing is reserved for learned philistines such as the lady scholar who had a critical system, unfailing in its power to reduce poetry to technicalities and to slide easily over its content...

...timelessness triumphs over timeliness, and a measure of liter-acy, wit, and mature thought is required of the reader as well as the author...

...T f you are among the growing number of readers who resort to fiction as a mental muscle relaxant, Robertson Davies is not your kind of novelist...

...I f all this _sounds a bit labored, it should not...

...Even at his most fantastic, Robertson Davies clings to this basic truth, recog-nizing along the way that "one of the most difficult tasks for the educated and sophisticated mind is to recognize that some clichés are also important truths," a lesson lost on most of today's novelists, and the reason why they will be forgotten long before this brilliant mixture of Merlin, Falstaff, and moral-ist, Robertson Davies—quite possibly the worthiest novelist writing in the English language today...

...Accordingly, it seems to me that Sykes has too little respect for the en-during values of liberal learning and academic community, which, despite the corruptions of every age, persist and, from time to time, prevail...

...Minor comic figures and comic mo-ments abound, and he has a poetic gift for language...

...By proving that his characters have depths and dimensions that go back far be-yond 1980s North America, Davies gives their feelings and conflicts a larger meaning and recognizes human nature as a spiritual creation of infinite complexity rather than a fickle muta-tion subject to change without notice, rather like each season's hemlines...

...But each stands as a distinctive work, much in the manner of Trollope's ecclesiastical and parliamentary novels, though covering murky areas of the human psyche and behavior which that Victorian worthy may never have dreamt of...

...Tales or') Hoffmann...

...This, in turn, triggers another cycle of idealism, betrayal, and cleansing on the part of the modern roundtable of philanthro-pists, scholars, and artists who work on the opera and its premiere in contem-porary Canada...

...It was a system which, properly applied, could put Homer in his place and turn the Sonnets of Shakespeare into critic-fodder...