Remember Him Well

Any time I happen to pop by First Things, it seems there's another person that I've not read enough of or, worse yet, not heard of at all. Today was yet another of those days:

Is it just my imagination or has Robertson Davies faded considerably over the past decade? I was sick in bed the middle of last week and, in my convalescence, pulled down a couple of his early novels to read—only to be struck by how rarely one hears his name anymore. Before he died in 1995 at age eighty-two, he was talked up every year for the Nobel Prize, a little implausibly, but still, it’s not every novelist who gets mentioned in pre-announcement gossip. And now it is as though, not having reached the Nobel peak, he is destined to slide back down into the undifferentiated mass of forgotten authors.

That doesn’t seem quite fair. Davies always had character, and as I noted in an article on him at the time of his death, when a man has character, the hardest temptation to resist is the temptation to become a character—and Robertson Davies was never a man to resist the temptation very strenuously. He set out early in life to become a character and to fashion himself into a type of the Edwardian eccentric—complete with broad-brimmed hat, monocle, and walking stick. “Unless someone pretty desperate comes along,” declared a 1937 Oxford student magazine about his time at university in England, “Robertson Davies looks like being the last of the real undergraduate ‘figures.’”

The apparently ailing Joseph Bottum managed to rouse himself from his sickbed and cast yet another fascinating figure into my life, a personage worthy of patronage and a writer to boot. So, the infinite slate of people to read grows longer still. Sigh.

I will say, though, that anyone willing to stump about campus with a monocle, as an undergraduate, who manages to get written up positively in a campus publication certainly deserves attention and praise. So, into Davies I must dive, most likely over Christmas break (at the rate the semester is proceeding, anyway).