There are few things more pleasant or more absorbing to read than a work by someone of enormous erudition, perception, and taste where they just let loose and talk about the subjects most near and dear to their heart for as long as they want to. I've always thought that Davies' prose style - learned, opinionated, funny, curious sarcastic, but above all reader-friendly - would work at least as well spoken as it does on the page, and boy does it ever here. This is a collection of mostly speeches that he gave throughout the later part of his career, mixed with a few short stories, plus a few odds and ends. The primary highlight for me was the four long lectures in Part Five where he talks about the Problem of Evil in literature, drawing heavily on the Jungian philosophy that underlies the Deptford trilogy, but this is a phenomenal companion to his novels and essential for any Davies fan. I came away thinking that the title was even more cleverly chosen than he intended, since it means that it contains only just a part of him, and you end it wanting much more.

One of Davies' greatest strengths is that he writes and speaks from the point of view of a fan of literature. I do think it's possible to be a great writer without making your readers actually love your writing; for example, James Joyce doesn't have much sympathy for his readers. He writes from the point of view of someone who wants to be admired rather than loved, even if people have found a way to make some of his work lovable. But Davies always writes with an attitude of enthusiastic adventure, like he's on a really interesting expedition through life and he wants you to come along with him to see what he's seen. Another part of his appeal to me is that he has strong opinions without being curmudgeonly, rarely putting down something without suggesting a better alternative or discussing how it could have achieved its goals more successfully. Failing either of those, he's funny about his dislikes, such as his poem "Lines Written in Dejection" where he criticizes the weaknesses of 60s hippie events like the play "Hair". He also has that rare analytical ability of a Jorge Luis Borges or H.L. Mencken, where he doesn't just explore the virtues of one thing at length, but also does the opposite and draws fascinating connections between different things using aspects you never noticed. Literature evaluation is inherently comparative, and Davies is a master at using many specific examples to support a broad theme while also delving deep into the most interesting aspects of a chosen few.

An example is the essay "The Funny Professor" on novelist Stephen Leacock, who I'd never heard of before but Davies does a great job promoting. Davies praises his skills as a humorist (he seems to have been a sort of Canadian Mark Twain or Will Rodgers), but he uses this occasion to also talk about professor jokes as a distinct joke category, the difficulty of explaining humor without also being humorous, the effects of comedic form on jokes, why you should judge a man by his best works rather than the inevitable lesser works, the difference between the public and private lives of artists, the difficulty of comparing comedy to tragedy in terms of artistic worth (this is also an obsession of my own, but he uses Eugene O'Neill, Cervantes, Dostoevsky, and Dickens as his examples, who I probably wouldn't have thought of), how a grounding in Greek and Latin improves your prose style, the similarities and differences in how men and women benefit from education, the Victorian idea of the role of education in spiritual growth, how universities cope with generational change, and how authors come in and out of fashion. All in 13 typewritten pages, with barely a wasted paragraph. One great part relates to the famous show vs tell dichotomy:

"Leacock was a specialist in humour. He not only knew how to make jokes himself: he knew how other people made them. Like all specialists, he sometimes went too far, and one of the few really melancholy passages in his writing is in the book called How to Write, where he explains how anybody in print can be funny if they will just follow his directions. This always seems to me to be like Jupiter writing a book to demonstrate that anybody can turn himself into a swan and be a great success with the ladies. If it lay in anybody's power to be as funny as Leacock, we wouldn't need Leacock - and we do, yes, indeed we do."

That special conundrum of being asked to explain "how do you do it?" comes up often in his speeches. It's only natural that people would keep asking a great writer what their secret is; it's also only natural that the standard response would be a mixture of bafflement and bemusement. But since Davies is such a pleasant fellow, he doesn't just throw up his hands at essentially unanswerable questions like that, he actually revels in them. To continue his mythology metaphor, often fans of an author (and I include myself among the guilty) treat a novel as a sort of literary Minerva, somehow sprung forth fully formed from our hero's head, rather than as the product of a lot of hard work. In essays like "The Conscience of a Writer", Davies talks about the actual method of being a writer, which for him consists of a solid routine of simply sitting down and trying to capture life as best he sees it, balanced out by living a life with as much ordinary commonplace joy as possible.

He comes at that from a different angle in "The Deadliest of Sins", a speech he gave to Queen's University, which was the inspiration for Waverly University in the Salterton trilogy and where, as it happens, my grandmother attended just a few years before his brief attempted matriculation. His subject is sloth. Thomas Pynchon once wrote a more comic essay about sloth titled "Nearer, My Couch, to Thee", seeing sloth as simple laziness. In Davies' hands though, sloth is a deeper failure to love life with an active passion, which involves putting work into cultivating the good things in your life:

"You must look clearly at the things which make your life happy and give yourself up to a grateful contemplation of them. Never take such things for granted. I have seen many a promising marriage shrivel and dry up because one or both of the parties to it assumed that happiness was something that came to them by right, and could never be diminished. Consciously summing up, and consciously enjoying, the good things life brings us is a way of preserving them. It is not in their nature to last forever; they will change, and if you cherish them gratefully, the change is much more likely to be a change for the better than if you accept them as gifts which a grateful providence has showered upon you as a recognition of your magnanimity in condescending to inhabit the earth.

"I have never been able to make up my mind which it is that people fear to feel most - pain or joy. Life will bring you both. You will not be able to escape the pain completely, though Acedia will dull it a little. But unfortunately it lies in your power to reject the joy utterly. Because we are afraid that great exultation may betray us in some actions, some words, which may make us look a little foolish to people who are not sharing our experience, we very often stifle our moments of joy, thinking we shall give them their outlet later. But alas, after a few years of that kind of thing, joy ceases to visit us."

I paused after reading those paragraphs - it reminded me of the Kafka quote about suffering that David Simon chose as the epigraph for his phenomenal work The Corner: "You can hold back from the suffering of the world, you have free permission to do so, and it is in accordance with your nature. But perhaps the holding back is the one suffering you could have avoided." Life can include a lot of good things and bad things. My takeaway from those two quotes by very different authors is difficult to articulate, but I've found that embracing life in that manner seems to be a lot more difficult for me than it seems to be for other people. Is reading literature where characters experience the same difficulties helpful to me, are self-help books the only way, is life just trial (apologies to Kafka) and error? What's the best balance of Thought and Action? Heavy questions for a book review, yet it's just another example of how skillful he is at making the reader think.

On a lighter note, even when he's being deep he's able to be funny, and when he's being funny he's able to be deep. In "Ham and Tongue" he discusses his own pet linguistic peeve about people using 'prestigious' as a synonym for 'distinguished': "To me 'prestigious' means, and will always mean, juggling tricks, because it derives from praestigiae, and when it is used in the modern way I feel as though a rusty sword has been thrust into my - well, not perhaps into my heart, but into some sensitive part of my body. But I do not want to parade as a conservator of endangered species in the world of words. Let the unlettered yahoos ravish the language; what do I care? But I refuse to join in the gang-bang." And in "How to Design a Haunted House", a fantastic relation of the relationship of architecture to plot (I would love to see oubliettes, boudoirs, and Secret Passages make a comeback in today's McMansions), he beautifully articulated some of my own feelings on the popularity of modern colorless, sterile interior design:

"In those old theaters there is ornament everywhere. In the meanest of them there is a frieze, or perhaps a statuary group, of the Nine Muses, and Apollo is usually somewhere to be found. There is nothing puts the audience in the right mood for a trivial farce about adultery so quickly as a good preliminary stare at the Nine Muses.... Everywhere you saw combinations of richness and elegance of which the secret seems to be lost, for of late years there has been a widespread notion that the secret of elegance is austerity. Austerity is what happens when people dare not trust their taste."

The lectures on the Problem of Evil in literature near the end were the real treat for me, and anyone whose favorite trilogy was Deptford will especially enjoy it because he talks about a lot of the psychological theory, in particular Jungian psychology, that's in those books. Some people find that kind of thing boring, and would rather just experience it via his novels, but I personally love reading literature theory. It's divided into 4 lectures, given over successive nights:
- "The Devil's Burning Throne". Taking its title from a Shakespeare line, it's about why melodrama was given such a high status in the 19th century. Davies connects the often wildly over-emotional characters, rhetoric, and situations popular then to the uncomfortable and emotionally starved lives that rapid industrialization brought to theatergoers in cities, describes the lively atmosphere of theatergoing, and discusses why Jungian dream theory helps explain the stock characters and struggles of melodrama: the Hero, Heroine, Faithful Friends, and the Villain.
- "Phantasmagoria and Dream Grotto". A Thomas Carlyle phrase, he discusses 19th century novels, primarily but not exclusively Dickens. Davies introduces the Prophecy, the Epic, and the Drama as a way to discuss how the Novel, if successful, draws on a kind of deep sentimentality that's most commonly associated with spiritual feelings about Good and Evil, and more specifically investigates how people navigate the everyday manifestations of the Seven Deadly Sins.
- "Gleams and Glooms". From a Henry James quote, an investigation into ghost stories. Davies offers his own theories on why ghost stories are still popular in a rationalist world that's discovered psychology and other sciences, and in addition to discussing the proto-horror movies of his era like Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist, he covers the great novelists of the uncanny like Poe and Peake, and ponders why people retain a fondness for mystery and the supernatural in the modern era.
- "Thunder Without Rain". Via its T.S. Eliot epitaph (which "signifies threat from the heavens, without any blessing to soften its severity"), why 20th novels are less cheerful and optimistic than they should be. Davies dismisses Existentialism as a gloomy, unsatisfying metaphysics along the way to investigate what best-sellers say about how we experience unhappiness in modern life, from adventure stories like Tarzan, novels like A Glastonbury Romance or Remembrance of Things Past, the works of Evelyn Waugh and Thomas Mann, through to authors with religious concerns like Graham Greene and G.B. Shaw, with an emphasis on great literature as "the chronicle from the battlefield" between Good and Evil.

His speeches on Canadian identity were also interesting, as I'm American but my father is Canadian (more specifically Anglo-Quebecker). In general national identity questions remind me of tedious debates on "what makes a true Austinite" from my hometown: is it meaningful to say that there's a coherent identity for a Canadian author when both their closest companion and their most distant rival could be from the same country? However, in "What May Canada Expect of Her Writers?" he uses Alexander Solzhenitsyn's award of the Literature Nobel as an example of a specifically Russian writer who's able to transcend his native country by appealing to universal interest. He uses Solzhenitsyn as an example of a "saint", which might be a bit much, but it's undeniable that a writer in the Soviet Union faces greater dangers than in peaceable Canada, and that that affects what each might write. And in the closing speech "The Canada of Myth and Reality", he talks about what makes Canada distinct, without descending into the negative anti-US/UK nationalism that passes as positive identity (for Austin, insert "California"). He takes Canada's relatively brief history and low population as an advantage, summoning up a truly thoughtful metaphor from Douglas LePan's poem "Coureurs de Bois" that the Canadian at heart is "wild Hamlet with the features of Horatio".

Aside from two speeches that didn't quite hit the mark ("What Every Girl Should Know", "Sir Ernest MacMillan"), every other entry in here was fantastic. I wish he had discussed his own work more, since when he does it's very insightful (though I believe his later collection The Merry Heart, which I haven't yet read, does this somewhat more). However, if it prompts people to go out and read his novels on their own so much the better. There is no better way to end than how he began:

"'The tongue is one half of a man: but the other half is the heart.' I have always liked that proverb, because it does honour to the faculty of speech, and it is speech as much as anything that divides man from the lesser creation. Without it, we should have no abstract thought, probably little memory, and therefore nothing much in the way of foresight. Speech can be developed into a form of art, and thus puts some artistry within the grasp of every man. And, as the proverb makes clear, speech is a means of revealing what is in the heart. In offering this book to the public as one half of myself, I certainly mean to imply that the other half, of necessity, goes with it."

Like I said, even with that, you still want more. ( )

Read several of these speeches etc. because the author is a Big Name in some circles and I wasn't drawn to his fiction. I didn't identify so much with the short samples, either. Btw, when I develop better Librarian skills, I need to fix the cover and page number. My copy, which I will bookcross and share, is almost 300, and has an artsy cartoony drawing on the cover.

A Canadian novelist, playwright, critic, journalist, and professor. He was one of Canada's best-known and most popular authors, and one of its most distinguished "men of letters", a term Davies is variously said to have gladly accepted for himself and to have detested. Davies was the founding Master of Massey College, a graduate residential college associated with the University of Toronto. This is a collection of after-dinner speeches, commencement-day speeches, some humor, and a few lectures by the Canadian novelist-playwright-scholar. "When you read this book, will you please try to hear it," pleads Davies. A rambling and chatty affair, the book contains warnings against sloth, a gentle attack on modern architecture ("how many modern houses have a study?"), fables about academia, musings on Canadian identity. Davies is exceedingly erudite but in an old-fashioned manner, and his satires on the Age of Aquarius ("originated in the mind of a very young person who had been partaking unwisely of a feast of whipped cream complicated by several sharp snorts of cocaine") did not match my own memory (of mainly observing rather than obsessing). I enjoyed the selections when he was discussing literature, and his four straightforward lectures on evil--in melodramas, ghost stories, and novels. He offered intriguing praise for some "minor" writers, as well as familiar but neatly-phrased Dickensiana (Thackeray "handles Evil with tongs. Dickens didn't: he lived it"). In spite of his reliance on platitudes I enjoyed this collection. Perhaps there was a bit too much jargoned Jungian predilection ("Jung and the Theatre" is the nadir) for my taste, but this is a good book for the bedside shelf. ( )

One half is more than enough. Davies fund of knowlege,esoteric/exoteric is deeper than a well, broader than a barn, it always serves. One half of Robertson Davies is more satisfying than the whole of some few others. Section 5 is must reading. He concludes the essay THE MASKS OF SATAN with a quote from the AUTOBIOGRAPHY of John Cowper Powys:

'It comes to pass, even while we are still in life, that when our soul loses itself in the long continuity of kindred lives, it does not lose itself in any power less gentle, less magical, less universal than itself, or less the enemy of cruelty; for what it finds is what it brings, and what it sees is what it is; and though the First Cause may be both good and evil, a power has risen out of it against which all the evil in it and all the unthinkable atrocities it brings to pass are fighting a losing battle.' ( )