This Rough Magic
BELL, PEARL K.
Writers & Writing THIS ROUGH MAGIC By PEARL K. BELL THE critic Northrop Frye, whose intellectual influence by now extends far beyond Canada's borders, has shrewdly explained the chronic sense...
...From its banal title to its glibly assertive conclusion, this book lacks the fine original lustre of mettlesome urbanity and witty invention that distinguished its predecessors...
...How did the pathetic little Paul Dempster transform himself into the most celebrated magician of all time...
...Writers & Writing THIS ROUGH MAGIC By PEARL K. BELL THE critic Northrop Frye, whose intellectual influence by now extends far beyond Canada's borders, has shrewdly explained the chronic sense of being second-rate that afflicts his country's writers...
...To him, Canadians are "the world's elected squares.' Robertson Davies, who grew up in small-town Calvinist Ontario, has over the years sniped relentlessly at his country's insular resignation and mediocrity: "We are shallow, distrustful of ourselves and forever following after American or English gods.' A character in his novel, The Manticore, complains that Canada has been emasculated by "a want of daring and great dimension, a second-handedness in cultural matters, a frowsy old-woman quality...
...Inexplicably enchanting to men, Liesl intoxicates Ramsey, though he believes she is a crafty disguise of the Devil, who "knows corners of us all of which Christ himself is ignorant...
...His virtuoso attack against the cobwebs of submissive timidity draws upon theology and mysticism, psychoanalysis and myth, and the less cerebral delights of sex and mischief...
...Richler's The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and St...
...Dempster, pregnant wife of the Baptist minister, brought her son Paul into the world much too soon, and drove her mad...
...A similar awakening is experienced by a different route in the second volume, The Manticore...
...Illusion, he recognizes, is the atavistic force that binds history to popular mythology...
...For Ramsey, hagiography attests the incontrovertible truth that faith is a psychological reality which, when denied or cynically belittled, "invaded and raised bloody hell with things seen...
...The novel consists almost entirely of David's analytic conversations with his beguiling lady doctor, and in less expert hands might have been as tiresome as the unsolicited account of a neighbor's dreams...
...Neither is he reluctant to spell out a moral lesson about the ethical consequences of human behavior...
...He has none of the saintly innocence and compassion of the demented mother he had abandoned at the age of 10...
...Yet if he is too smart to overlook the tangled ambiguities in the motives of men, he still brings a fierce conscience to his judgment of their deeds...
...During his egotistic confession, we learn that he was in fact abducted by a scrofulous magician in a traveling carnival, who for ten hellish years kept the boy as his catamite slave and the hidden accomplice of his mind-reading act...
...In the trilogy just completed with World of Wonders (Viking, 358 pp., $8.95), Davies audaciously leaps free of Canada's cultural provinciality...
...Educated at Oxford and currently Master of Massey College at the University of Toronto, he has been an actor, a successful playwright, a gadfly newspaper editor needling his faint-hearted countrymen, and, more recently, a triumphant novelist...
...It hit young Mrs...
...In Richler, though, the familiar cockiness of the outsider is combined with a peculiarly indigenous contempt for the national character...
...In desperation David flies to Zurich to begin the painful pilgrimage of Jungian analysis...
...For some 50 years Ramsey, a cranky bachelor schoolteacher, has kept the stone, hairshirt emblem of life's fatality and the capricious nature of guilt and obligation...
...Unfortunately, World of Wonders is a feeble fiction, totally devoid of the intoxicating wizardry and momentum of the earlier books...
...Davies winds up the melodramatic saga with a reprise of his favorite and by now familiar apercus about good and evil, God and the Devil, myth and history, justice and expiation...
...He conjures up the imperfectly secular trinity of Liesl, Ramsey and Eisengrim halfway through the book, with yet another outrageous coincidence, to playfully accentuate his serious ideas about Jungian psychotherapy...
...And in much the way we are happily confounded by the prestidigitation of a Magnus Eisengrim, we readily acquiesce to the spell of Davies' manipulative cunning...
...In the trilogy, begun in 1970, Davies explores the hidden mythical face of contemporary life and dogma, which prizes "reality" over illusion and dangerously underestimates the human hunger for marvel, by dramatizing his undoctrinaire synthesis of Christian and Jungian thought...
...Then he went on to Switzerland, where his genius began to flower with the nourishment of Liesl's fortune and craftiness...
...We expect no less than an extravagant finale of spectacular hocus-pocus in a groundswell of Jungian revelation...
...Because the novelist's trickery and deception are in the service of his fertile intelligence, The Manticore is far more than an idle game...
...Urbain's Horseman are interesting, however, not for what is uniquely Canadian about his brilliant comic imagination, but rather for what is characteristically and recurrently Jewish...
...In the '30s, Paul fled this grimy life for Europe and drifted to London, where he joined a mildewed theatre company trapped in the obsolete tradition of Sir Henry Irving...
...Only the dusty props are left on an empty stage...
...His mentor and manager is the enigmatic Liesl Naegel, a wealthy, uncannily intuitive Swiss and the ugliest woman in the world...
...Who put a pink stone in Boy Staunton's mouth before he died...
...Under the spell of Liesl's provocative intelligence and Eisengrim's pyrotechnical feats of deception, the austere Canadian schoolmaster is forced to concede the emotional poverty of his "unlived life...
...Like Davies, the narrator of the first and most fully realized volume, Fifth Business, is the son of a newspaper editor in a strait-laced Ontario hamlet...
...To demonstrate the obstinate endurance of the marvelous, Davies engineers a flagrant coincidence in Mexico after World War II: Ramsey discovers Mrs...
...One evening early in the century when Dunstan Ramsey was a boy he ducked to avoid a snowball, wrapped around a pink rock hurled by the rich and handsome bully Boy Staunton...
...Davies himself has done his energetic best to refute these charges...
...When a magician makes the fatal mistake of showing his hand, the spell is broken...
...As Boy Staunton rose to enormous wealth and power in Canadian industry, his friend Ramsey became the world's most learned Protestant authority on saints...
...He is an insufferable, heartless peacock, and his bloated ego demands sycophantic obeisance from friends and audience alike...
...Davies, a richly informed connoisseur of theatre and magic, seems less concerned with the grand moral design of the trilogy than with using up a large legacy of technical stuff that is irrelevant, diffuse and boring...
...But Davies' sorcery effortlessly endows David Staunton's strenuous journey of self-discovery with a razzle-dazzle of excitement, wisdom and charm...
...Raised in a Montreal immigrant community closely resembling New York's Lower East Side, Richler shares the astringent irony of Bellow and Fuchs toward a native culture from which they find themselves, as not-quite-native Jews, estranged...
...With the aid of his new friends, Ramsey learns to acknowledge that magic in many forms, including those of his beloved saints, satisfies a universal longing for the romance of miracle...
...Long associated with the Jungian Analytical Psychology Society of Ontario, he transforms its concerns into theatrical fiction...
...N Now in the final volume, World of Wonders, Davies sets out to clear up the unfinished business of his imaginative world...
...This tells the story of Boy Staunton's son David, a successful lawyer and grimly controlled alcoholic, whose sanity begins to crumble after his father's mysterious death...
...Canada, he has observed, developed "with the bewilderment of a neglected child preoccupied with trying to define its own identity, alternately bumptious and diffident about its own achievements.' If Canadian literature??in English, not in French??has lately ceased to be a stale American joke, much of the credit must go to a pair of very dissimilar novelists, Mordecai Richler and Robertson Davies...
...As the sophisticated preacher, his eloquence and nimble erudition rescue him in the nick of time from the sanctimonious infallibility of the righteous...
...Most powerfully of all, Davies is a mesmerizing storyteller, unmoved by any modernist disdain for such old-fashioned devices as coincidence, stagey mystification or cliffhanging suspense...
...This is the story of Magnus Eisengrim, always the least winning of Davies' characters...
...Dempster's son, not heard from since he ran away with a traveling circus at the age of 10, in the person of the brilliant magician Magnus Eisengrim...
Vol. 59 • March 1976 • No. 7
