New Men and Old Masters

By Paul Gray

Fictional biography has one clear advantage over the real thing. Facts that are inaccessible to scholarship may simply be invented. On the other hand, a story of a made-up person can hardly rely on the fame or noteworthiness of its subject to attract and hold readers. So the writer who takes up this curious, hybrid genre assumes a mixed blessing: the freedom to fabricate reality in service of a goal that many may find inconsequential because it is not true. In his eleventh novel, Canadian Author Robertson Davies tackles precisely this problem and turns it into a triumph. What's Bred in the Bone not only shows how biography could be written, if mortals possessed supernatural wisdom. It also offers a hero portrayed so vividly that the real world seems at fault for never having produced him in the flesh.

The tale begins with an impasse. The man who is trying to write the life of the late Francis Chegwidden Cornish, a distinguished art collector and connoisseur, finds himself stymied. It is bad enough that he has turned up hints of fakery in Cornish's long and otherwise exemplary career. These suspicions, if proved and published, will offend the immensely rich and powerful Cornish family and sully the reputation of the Cornish Trust, one of Canada's most respectable financial institutions. Worse, the aspiring biographer must admit that he cannot determine the influences that molded his man. Research has led only to the impenetrable mystery suggested by the old English proverb: "What's bred in the bone will not out of the flesh." The scholar despairs: "What's bred in the bone! Oh, what was bred in the bone?"

The inquirer will never know, but Davies' readers are luckier. Two unearthly spirits appear bearing privileged information. One is the Lesser Zadkiel, an assistant to the Recording Angel; the other is a daimon called Maimas, who steered Francis Cornish through his existence. Maimas insists that he was nothing so wimpish as a guardian angel, a role he describes as "detestable theological fraud." He did not shelter his charge from evil but hounded him mercilessly: "My job was to make something of Francis with the materials I had at hand."

Francis' history thus unfolds from the leisurely perspective of eternity, with frequent interruptions from the two immortals guiding the tour. Given this long view, episodes tend to cluster into something resembling a preordained pattern. Born in a backwater village in eastern Canada, Francis had his maternal grandfather to thank for his lifelong freedom from money worries. He owes his mixed Protestant and Roman Catholic training to the strictures of his British father, whose family has been Church of England "since Reformation times," and the meddling of an aunt who gives him holy pictures and sees that a priest baptizes him during a siege of whooping cough.

By the time he goes to Oxford, in the early 1930s, to polish off his Canadian education, Francis has been honed into a practical, tightfisted young man who is also a thoroughgoing romantic about art. He meets Tancred Saraceni, the world's foremost restorer of old masterpieces, and confesses a secret desire to become a painter himself. The trouble is, Francis adds, he does not find the methods of any contemporary artists compatible. Saraceni replies: "Don't try to fake the modern manner if it isn't right for you. Find your legend. Find your personal myth."

Francis' quest plunges him into some dark, Jungian archetypes of Western civilization. It also entangles him in matters more mundane but equally diverting: some questionable brushwork, under Saraceni's tutelage, intended to bamboozle nationalistic collectors in the Third Reich; postwar work for British intelligence, during which Francis sees his old indiscretions coming home to roost. As the hero fumbles for a vocabulary that will lend coherence to his experiences, Davies pulls out nearly every trick in the old books. There is a monster in the attic of Francis' childhood home. Natural and putative fathers are seldom one and the same. Magic intervenes, and so do outlandish coincidences. But the Lesser Zadkiel issues a scornful judgment on the way mortals customarily regard such phenomena: "Coincidence is what they call pattern in which they cannot discern something they are prepared to accept as meaning."

What's Bred in the Bone stands stubbornly in the way of a number of trendy currents. It suggests, in an era of rampant individuality, that all people are but tiny figures in a carpet of immense scope and intricacy. It celebrates religious yearnings at a time when faith appears, if at all, as superstition. It argues that the old should not be replaced by the new unless the switch enhances the health of minds and souls. Best of all, this novel nourishes the brain while it beguiles the senses. Even those who dislike its message must keep it in mind while they scramble for a rebuttal. --By Paul Gray

"People are hungry for marvels," says Robertson Davies. "And the world is full of them. People don't see them even though they are right under their noses." Those who catch sight of the author himself can hardly fail to pay attention. His sturdy frame and flowing white beard have sent observers scrambling for analogies. He looks like an Old Testament prophet. No, he is a dead ringer for Shakespeare's Prospero. How about a slightly satanic Santa?

In fact, Davies has played a number of roles on his way to becoming the acknowledged dean of Canadian literature. As a boy growing up in rural Ontario, he began contributing stories to the two newspapers his father owned. Later he fell in love with acting and became good enough at it to join England's Old Vic Company, along with promising newcomers like Alec Guinness. Back in Canada in 1940, Davies became the editor of the Peterborough, Ont., Examiner and eventually its publisher as well. In 1961 he was appointed master of Massey College at the University of Toronto. Through it all, he wrote during his spare time, first plays and then the series of witty, bizarre novels (including Fifth Business, The Manticore and World of Wonders) that slowly won him an international reputation.

Recognition at home was slower in coming. "We Canadians," Davies told TIME Ottawa Bureau Chief Peter Stoler, "are not enthusiasts about our own people." That is no longer true, at least in his case. What's Bred in the Bone has garnered raves from Canadian reviewers. Which seems fitting, since this novel, like most of his other fiction, draws heavily on the author's experiences in his native land. Elements of Francis Cornish's troubled youth come straight from Davies' memories: "As a child, I was beaten up by Catholic kids every day after school. As a newspaperman in that area, I knew families that had idiot children hidden away in attics or barns. It sounds grotesque. But it is the way things were."

Since his retirement from academic duties in 1981, the author and Brenda, his wife of 46 years, have been spending less time at their modern apartment in Toronto and more at their house on 150 acres of land near Lake Ontario. This haven does more than satisfy an author's need for peace and quiet. A vast inland sea once covered the property, and Davies can refresh his conviction that the world is full of surprises every time he finds a fossil in his garden.

Two of the couple's three grown daughters have taken up careers based on the works of Carl Jung, one as a practicing therapist and the other as a scholar and teacher of psychology. "I'm not a born-again Jungian," says Davies of the analyst whose influence is discernible throughout his fiction. "But I find that Jung provides rich feeding for a novelist, with his layers and depth of meaning." Davies' increased leisure has given him more time to read and reread his favorites: Trollope, Dickens, Balzac and Stendhal. "If you pay attention to great literature," he says, "you don't have to have a psychiatrist."

He continues to write, spending up to six hours a day on a novel that will tie up some strings left dangling in his earlier books. He has no inclination to rest on the laurels that have increasingly come his way. "I'm 72," he says, "and I don't like to think that my powers are waning."