What's Bred in the Bone/Fifth Business/The Manticore/World of Wonders
Jones, Robert
Books: A COMPANY OF DAMONS THERE are any number of bad books by writers I admire on my shelves. Think of recent misses or near misses like Norman Mailer's Ancient Evenings, Gore Vidal's...
...Unless each character is identified after each statement, it becomes difficult to determine who is speaking...
...The structure of his novels has become increasingly creaky and full of gimmicks as he repeats the same ideas over and over within an identical framework...
...The master is the one who learns to manipulate them and dazzle the observer with his sleight of hand...
...The unnerving message underlying the real, if precious, charm of The Deptford Trilogy, and which is increasingly manifested in his most recent novels, is that the fundamentalist view is essentially correct...
...And he wanted it so badly...
...He has taken as his theme the idea of the supernatural, usually represented through the figure of the magician, and the tricks and turns of perception which reveal a world beyond that of appearances...
...Saraceni and Francis indulge their love of conversation with much bombast about the modern world versus the past, the role of art in society, and the misuses of tyranny and power...
...Davies is the perfect example of what we have come to know as the "middlebrow" writer...
...And they each include the birth of a hideous, misshapen child who haunts the action of the novel and who, perhaps unwittingly, betrays much about the mind of Robertson Davies...
...We also know when it does not...
...WORLD OF WONDERS Robertson Davies Penguin, $4.95, 295 pp...
...In the hierarchy of domination, celestial bodies reign over the earth, the strongest men rule the weaker, and of course, even the feeblest wimp is the sine qua non master of women...
...But to see art as a partner to crime is to give up entirely on whatever we might imagine as the possibility of truth...
...But the conservatism of writers like Waugh and Eliot evolved as a response to their particular experiences of the bleakness of modern life...
...Commonweal: 708...
...The sight of the two women with legs and arms intertwined is enough to undermine Ramsay's entire quest for truth...
...The evolution of life is a ceaseless process of outwitting the opponent and struggling for position...
...Canadian novelist Robertson Davies has written more than twenty-four books...
...It is from Julian's ability to manipulate and conquer that we see the horror of a mechanistic universe, not from any chatter about the fate that determines our lives...
...His new novel, What's Bred in the Bone, is a peculiar rehash of everything he has done previously, but it is a caricature of his other books, like a hammy performance by a fading actor reduced to repeating his glory in small towns and sideshows...
...The life of Francis Cornish as portrayed in What's Bred in the Bone culminates in a castle owned by Saraceni, a shady Teutonic art collector...
...To read several of Davies's novels in succession is to suspect that he is no match for his intentions...
...Occasionally, of course, a writer defies this protracted evolution and becomes possessed by one overriding idea or event that bursts forth in a single, enduring novel...
...In Fifth Business a pregnant woman is hit by a snowball as she walks with her husband and immediately gives birth to a premature, deformed child...
...His "Deptford Trilogy," consisting of Fifth Business, The Manticore, and World of Wonders, is his most widely known work in the United States, but it is Fifth Business alone by which he stakes any claim to respectability...
...If one tolerates Franny and Zooey, it is only because of the residual goodwill generated by The Catcher in the Rye...
...Since Davies sees people as cardboard cutouts pulled along by cosmic strings, his characters cannot be anything but flat, ventriloquist dummies...
...It is like sitting in a theater and seeing the props and settings and realizing after several hours that there will be no play...
...It is possible that the entire myth of his reclusiveness has been built around his knowledge that he has nothing more to say...
...His work gives no indication of the natural or instinctual play by which an author's voice speaks through the form...
...Both even share the device of a newspaper article in the opening scenes which is meant to demonstrate that the facts known about the character illuminate little about him...
...He goes out onto the street to find a prostitute he can pay to beat up...
...The foundation of Davies's work has been the desire to lead his readers into this world of wonders, but he never penetrates beyond its surface...
...Such writers spend the rest of their careers either in silence or in fitful attempts to reclaim whatever mysterious forces produced their first success...
...It is impossible to understand much about the creation of art, or to determine how or why that odd confluence between writer and audience happens, but we know when it does...
...His characters speak volumes (literally) about art, religion, and the meaning of life, but even in Fifth Business, he 20 December 1985: 705 fails to follow the primary lesson of all fiction workshops: don't tell me, show inc...
...History has taught us much about the truth of this dynamism, but seldom has the matter-of-fact benefit of slavishness to authority been embraced with such apparent reasonableness...
...It is natural that any writer who is compelled to experiment and change course will come up with a clunker in the process of development...
...For all of his novels portray the figure of the crumbling, desperate man...
...It is an odd trust that is built up between these kinds of writers and their readers...
...Davis clearly thinks he is making a coy joke by abbreviating the husband's name, Amasa Dempster, so that it sounds like a slave addressing a master Commonweal: 706 when spoken...
...The birth of the tiny monster unhinges this woman completely...
...The invisible universe is populated by angels and devils at battle for human souls...
...These spirits are intended to represent opposing 20 December 1985: 707 voices of reason in Francis's life and, by extension, the world itself...
...But it is all a fantasy...
...Suddenly all the references to harlots and virgins, to private parts and masturbation, become evident not as aspects of a vision, but as part of a private pathology...
...We are left with a curiously despairing idea of experience, but one that includes neither tragedy nor even pathos...
...He has clearly been struck by the presence of angels and demons, but he has never gone beyond the original perception...
...Be it the sorcerer's apprentice, the magician's apprentice, or the Nazi's apprentice, Davies is fascinated by servitude and the violence of the oppressor towards the oppressed...
...In Davies's work, and especially in What's Bred in the Bone, these spirits have personality...
...Its source is not hopelessness, but the rage of the insignificant man who has peeked into the void and glimpsed his essential powerlessness...
...embracing...
...If his narratives seem structurally flimsy and pallid intellectually, and if his mechanistic view of the cosmos irritates rather than disturbs, it is because he has accepted as his vision the most retrograde view of human existence possible...
...Ideology ruins aspects of each of their work, but when they break through and render their vision meaningful, it is always in those moments when private opinion finds itself translated into something larger than the self and its tedious autobiography...
...Writers like Robertson Davies are concerned with pretentions to greatness and the compulsion to be Significant, not with art itself...
...All the talk of Freud and Jung and the unconscious is a smokescreen for a determinist view that should be the delight of creationists the world over...
...This is not to suggest that literature is the property of liberals...
...Doris Lessing's interplanetary explorations are to me unreadable, but there is no doubt that these strange novels are part of a total project...
...And so it is with our most difficult and prolific writers...
...She disappears from her sick bed, only to be found copulating with a tramp in the woods...
...What could be a more telling episode of this figure than Francis's reaction to his abandonment by his wife...
...WHAT is Robertson Davies trying to tell us...
...In the circus, maybe...
...Or that they represent a terrifying capacity to compromise with evil as we see in a book like Thomas Mann's Dr...
...They exist as mouths who lip-synch the author's views...
...He has prevailed because in the context of most glib, popular fiction, the issues he raises appear to be substantial...
...This fragile control is proclaimed as the natural order of things because only such an extreme response to nothingness returns the world to a necessary, if illusory, harmony...
...But this idea of women as mindless dolts eager to succumb to any bum with a zipper never leaves us and clouds Dunstan Ramsay's quest for the great magician, Magnus Eisengrim...
...But it is quickly replaced by the exhaustion of having spent too long among clever distortions, and one rushes to escape to the world of truer size...
...Especially with our most idiosyncratic writers, like Mailer or Oates or Vidal, one has almost come to expect that every other book will be dangerously flawed because these public failures are the necessary exercises by which they lay the groundwork for the next, more assured work...
...The critical leeway or suspension of final judgment given writers like Lessing has something to do with trust in their integrity and the belief that they may ultimately bring us to that shock of recognition that emerges when someone else's vision becomes our own...
...Francis, like Dunstan Ramsay in Fifth Business, has become an apprentice, but this time our hero yearns to discover everything there is to know about art...
...The devil is a woman...
...Think of recent misses or near misses like Norman Mailer's Ancient Evenings, Gore Vidal's Duluth, or Joyce Carol Oates's Mysteries of Wintherthurn...
...And it is to see the artist as that cliche of the explorer who flicks his lighter just before he is to be eaten by cannibals and finds himself hailed as a god...
...This is why Davies is fascinated by magic...
...Enough scoundrels, prostitutes, Nazis, and plot contrivances abound to rival the convolutions of a grand opera (Goering even buys the fake triptych Francis paints in the style of the Old Masters), but as always with Davies, the real story comes down to the talk...
...Davies's concept of apprenticeship is the act of initiation into this world of artifice and duplicity through which one learns the tricks of domination that others misbelieve as power...
...Even when they leave us bewildered or impatient, there is often an implicit understanding that they know where they are going even when we miss the point...
...His grandiloquent, quasinineteenth-century prose is an artificial attempt to find a style to match his moralizing about a past he fails to grasp historically, yet wields as an image by which he damns the present...
...The apprentice looks to the master to glean the tricks of appearances by which he gives the illusion of strength...
...FIFTH BUSINESS Robertson Davies Penguin, $4.95, 266 pp...
...Davies's problem begins with his very understanding of art...
...Except for a few short stories, everything that followed Salinger's debut has been part of a slow freeze...
...There is nothing to suggest that these spirits are meant as metaphors of benevolence or malevolence unloosed by human power and desire...
...Robert Jones few times in which all the undefinable elements come together and in one or two startling books, a world emerges from their sight...
...As Francis Cornish engages in a bit of summing up at the end of his life, he reflects upon his painting and decides that, "the division between art and deviousness and — yes, it had to be admitted — crime, was sometimes as thin as a cigarette paper...
...So he dreams of greatness as a way back and worships those he believes have conquered the emptiness he has felt at the core of life...
...He pastes spirits onto the scenery and by that act attempts to persuade the reader that they exist...
...He cannot create motivation in his characters or sustain dramatic tension because his understanding of the universe is antithetical to human .action and responsibility...
...And this is the source of Davies's misogyny...
...To enter Davies's universe is like walking into a fun house and losing one's way among the mirrors...
...Whenever the reader is treated to a lengthy conversation about God or the supernatural, he or she becomes lost in the voices...
...And while there is no suggestion that Davies admires the teachings of the German Reich, there is a confusion and ambiguity in Cornish's conversations with Saraceni that remain unsettling...
...As he says, "I have never known such a collapse of spirit even in the worst of war...
...In Fifth Business, the narrator says of his childhood, "But what I knew then was that nobody — not even my mother — was to be trusted in a strange world that showed very little of itself on the surface...
...We don't feel the threat of Julian in A Fairly Honorable Defeat because Murdoch tells us he is evil, but by the way he so cheerfully and successfully victimizes each character...
...But in allegedly "serious" fiction, it is virtually a unique occurrence to find a writer who was born to write one novel and yet who continues to produce at an astonishing rate...
...Master and slave, oppressor and victim: these are the categories by which Robertson Davies imagines the world...
...BOTH Fifth Business and What's Bred in the Bone begin with a mystery about a central character and both seek to reveal their secrets by the retelling of that character's life...
...If his work has never evolved from the one book by which he is best known, it is because of his basic misperception of ideology as in any way credible as a vision...
...As a writer, Davies may be the victim of his own conservatism...
...Eliade says in his journals that he has never been able to write the one book that spoke to his intentions, that one must read his entire oeuvre to understand what he meant...
...To refer to oneself as "damned,", as Dunstan Ramsay does in Fifth Business, is a different matter entirely fronrgiving any indication through characterization or action of the state of damnation...
...The writer Davies would most like to imitate is Iris Murdoch, but he lacks the sophistication of her best novels or the ease by which philosophical ideas become the backdrop to her characters' motivations...
...And once Ramsay finds himself under the spell of the magician and is finally able to seek answers to his questions about the supernatural, he experiences a crisis of belief...
...One begins to suspect that all the talk of damnation, of the mysteries of the universe, and the journey of the soul have nothing to do with theology or the life of the spirit, but with a dread of sexuality and an alarmist view of women as the "other...
...And this time there was no Little Madonna to offer me courage or ease me into oblivion...
...When her bewildered husband asks the reasons for her betrayal, she replies, "He was very civil, 'Masa...
...One feels the initial exhilaration of what might be a new way of seeing...
...One woman is the same as another...
...In case the reader fails to grasp Davies's point, he states it explicitly in a later conversation between Ramsay and Eisengrim...
...All the references to Faust and damnation, to God and the afterlife, never amount to anything but glitter...
...He believes in pitchfork-carrying devils and in angels who tell jokes...
...Because of respect for the worth of the long view, one accepts the fits and starts, the interruptions and the doubling back, for the WHArS BRED IN THE BONE Robertson Davies Viking, $17.95, 426 pp...
...Faustus...
...Francis's spiritual guides, a recording angel and a daimon, frequently interject interpretations of events as they occur in the novel...
...His view amounts to a kind of reactionary Darwinism with religion thrown in for good measure...
...For him there is no netherworld to encounter, but only masks of deception, one giving way to another...
...Not because he has glimpsed anything revelatory about another world, but because he stumbles upon Eisengrim's two women, Liesl and Faustina (get it...
...But they have no substance and become little more than another disappearing act in his bag of tricks...
...Each possesses a lethal magic to beguile away his power and unnerve the ground beneath him by restoring him to doubt...
...Or this is how life should be in Davies's zen heaven...
...THE MANTICORE Robertson Davies Penguin, $4.95, 310 pp...
...To Kill a Mockingbird is probably the most notable example from the recent past of the "one book" phenomenon, but Salinger also falls into this category...
...What, then, are we to make of the daimon's comment following one of Francis's and Saraceni's dialogues about art, "Those who find a master should yield to the master until they've outgrown him...
Vol. 112 • December 1985 • No. 22
