Reading Group Guide
INTRODUCTION
One
of the joys of Robertson Davies' fiction is its easy
commerce with the full sweep of western culture from the
ancient Greeks to the present. Another is its vigorous,
talky characters, whose challenges, exhilarations,
defeats, and ultimate destination are bodied forth in
telling details. And a third is an old-fashioned,
attention-grabbing theatricality. The Cunning Man is
as broadly learned as its predecessors, as replete with
vividly realized characters, and as dramatic in its
presentation.
The declared subject of the novel (which shares
several major figures and events with its immediate
predecessor, Murther & Walking Spirits) is
the cultural life of the city of Toronto in the years
before and after World War II - or rather, that of the
small area around St. Aidan's Church. Here "The
Ladies" - the minor artist Miss Pansy Freake
Todhunter and her friend the sculptor Emily Hart-Raven -
resided and entertained the artistic community at their
"Sundays." We learn about what happened through
Miss Todhunter's letters to the sculptor Barbara Hepworth
back in England, and through Dr. Jonathan Hullah, who is
stirred to record his reminiscences by a young
journalist, Esme Barron, who is herself bent on writing a
series of articles about The Toronto That Used To Be.
Miss Todhunter is especially good at conveying the
peculiar mixture of accomplishment and parochialism that
characterized the cultural life of the period.
ABOUT THE
TITLE
Dr. Hullah, the story's chief narrator, takes the view
that to understand a city's cultural past it is necessary
to understand the people who created it. And so he tells
the life stories of a number of the key figures, and
provides capsule histories for many others. The life he
explores most richly is his own. His account makes it
entirely plausible that he should introduce many of the
novel's learned references. He is comfortable with the
thinking of Paracelsus, Thomas Browne, Robert Burton, and
Sir William Osler, and refers easily to a wide range of
novels and poetry. Without saying so directly, he makes
it obvious that he himself has been a major contributor
to The Toronto That Used To Be. So too was his old
schoolfriend, Charlie Iredale, priest of St. Aidan's,
passionate high Anglican and lover of its ritual and fine
music. But Iredale's life had gone off the rails, and he
was exiled to a minor parish, slid into alcoholism, and,
after a brief period of reprieve, into death.
The Cunning Man is Davies' eleventh novel. In
it he has drawn once again on his seemingly inexhaustible
hoard of intuition, formidable memory, and astonishing
erudition to produce a truly entertaining story.
ABOUT THE
AUTHOR
Robertson Davies (1913-1995) was born in the
village of Thamesville, Ontario (the Deptford of three of
his novels), where he lived for five years. His parents
were remarkably like those of Brochwel Gilmartin in The
Cunning Man - great readers, talkers, and singers,
but unhappy in their marriage and eager to win his
allegiance.
His father's newspaper interests took the family to
the town of Renfrew (the Blairlogie of What's Bred in
the Bone), and then to Kingston (the Salterton of
his first trilogy and of his most recent two novels). He
attended Upper Canada College in Toronto (the original of
Colborne College), Queen's University in Kingston, and
Balliol College, Oxford, where he took his B. Litt. in
1938. He then joined the Old Vic Company for two seasons,
acting bit parts, teaching theatre history in its school,
and doing literary work for the director. In 1940 he
married Brenda Mathews, who had been a stage manager with
the Old Vic, and returned to Canada.
He was literary editor of Saturday Night magazine
in Toronto until 1942, then editor of the Peterborough
Examiner. Until the mid-fifties he threw his
considerable "leisure" energies into theatre,
writing and directing plays for the Little Theatre and
for several professional companies. In 1963 he left the Examiner
and became Master of Massey College in the University of
Toronto (the original of Ploughwright College in The
Rebel Angels). At the university he taught in the
English department and the Drama Centre until he retired
in 1981.
Reading the works of Jung in the fifties and sixties
changed Davies' outlook and had a strong impact on his
writing. Where earlier he had turned away from the images
and ideas that rose unbidden in his dreams and visions,
he now opened himself up to them. And he came to accept
and value his intuitions. He came to see the novelist and
playwright as givers of shape to the archetypal material
rising from the unconscious. As a result he ceased to
write novels that were essentially comedies of manners
with distanced, cool, analytic omniscient narrators.
Starting with Fifth Business, he began to write
fictional autobiographies or confessions in which the
underlying presence of the archetypes is palpable.
His many works include not only plays and the novels
that won him international renown, but criticism, belles
lettres, stories, and speeches. He was awarded the
Governor General's Award (for The Manticore),
the National Arts Club (New York) Medal of honour for
literature (1987), and was made Fellow of the Royal
Society of Canada (1967), a Companion of the Order of
Canada (1972), an honorary member of the American Academy
and Institute of Arts and Letters - the first Canadian to
be so honored - (1980), and in 1986 Honorary Fellow of
Balliol. The honorary degrees he particularly treasured
are those from Trinity College, Dublin (1990) and from
Oxford (1991).
AUTHOR
INTERVIEW
This conversation took place shortly before Mr.
Davies' untimely death on December 2, 1995.
Q: You have talked about the way your
novels Fifth Business and The Manticore began
to take shape with the appearance in your imagination of
a vivid image. How did The Cunning Man get its
start?
A: Well, it didn't get a start in
quite such a determined way as that, but it was an idea
which had been in my mind for many years, which was the
transformation of the city of Toronto from being quite
literally a colonial capital to being a metropolitan city
- and the changes that had taken place, particularly in
the world of art, and what had been gained and also a few
things that had been lost in the process.
Q: Were The Ladies - your lesbian
artists - based on Frances Loring and Florence Wyle as
the Globe and Mail's critic claimed?
A: No, they had their origin in two
artists I knew in England who were people of a type which
has always interested me. They had a lot of talent but
not quite enough to make the grade in a strong way. I've
seen people like that here in Canada, and I thought that
in their complaints about the country and their feeling
about it could be reflected a lot of the change that was
taking place which I wished to describe, and which
evinced itself among other places in the city churches.
They changed from really rather devout nonconformist
churches and ritualistic Anglo-Catholic churches to
churches now where - well, my daughter Rosamond is
conducting some seminars in one United Church and a woman
said to her quite seriously, "You know it's very
interesting to have somebody come here and talk about
God. We never talk about God in church." To an
extraordinary extent Christianity has become a kind of
social work, and the mystical and contemplative side of
it has been rather swept under the carpet for literally
hundreds of thousands and probably millions of people.
Q: When did you actually encounter
the Toronto of the thirties and forties and fifties that
your journalist Esme Barron writes about and your central
character Dr. Hullah recalls? You've lived here only
since 1963.
A: I was a schoolboy in Toronto [from
1928 to 1932]. I was very much aware of what was going on
in the artistic world then because a lot of the masters
at Upper Canada, particularly the music masters, were
deeply involved in it. So we heard a lot about it and, in
a very modest way, participated in it, because we were
let go to rehearsals of the Toronto Symphony and saw the
development of theatre at Hart House, and it caught my
imagination.
Q: Were you drawn to high Anglicanism
at the time?
A: Yes, I was, because I was very
interested in the music. You see one of the people we
looked up to enormously was Healey Willan. He made St.
Mary Magdalene a church that was famous far beyond the
bounds of Toronto and of Canada as a great place for
Gregorian chant and early English service music, some of
it sung in Latin. The ritual that went with it was
fascinating to someone of my theatrical leaning because
it was a show, but it was a show in order to evoke a
sense of worship and of otherness and of a mystical
approach to religion. You certainly didn't get that in
Calvin Presbyterian, the church which I went to under the
direction of my school, a very good church, excellent
preacher, good services, but dry as a biscuit. St. Mary
Magdalene was a plum pudding of a church.
Q: Are you doing anything connected
with music at the moment?
A: I have written the libretto for an
opera which is being composed for the Canadian Opera
Company by Randolph Peters, a western Canadian. He's a
very cultivated, able chap. I've heard some of the music
that he's writing and it's witty and charming. The theme
of the libretto is The Golden Ass. It is about a man's
transformation from a self-delighted fool through the
humiliation of being enclosed in the form of an ass into
a more realized and intelligent and bigger person.
Q: You refer to Robert Burton's Anatomy
of Melancholy again and again in The Cunning Man.
Why does it appeal to you?
A: Sir William Osler, a great
humanist as well as a terrific doctor, said that it was
the greatest book of psychiatry that had ever been
written by a layman, unbeatable for depth of interest and
just sheer wondrous curiosity about mankind. And that's
true. I was fascinated with it from my schooldays and
have taken pleasure in it all my life. Old Burton's idea
was one which he doesn't directly attribute to
Paracelsus, but it was Paracelsus's idea, that it's no
use talking about the liver and the lungs and so forth,
they are your liver and my liver, and your lungs and my
lungs, and they are never exactly the same in any two
people, and that you've got to find out your person and
find out his feelings and his spirit and, Paracelsus
would have said, his soul, if you're going to be able to
do him any good. Apparently Paracelsus was a very
remarkable healer but he was, like Osler, a charismatic
healer.
Q: Murders and suicides happen
frequently in your stories. Murther and Walking
Spirits began with a murder and so does The
Cunning Man. What draws you to write about the
deliberate ending of a life?
A: Well, you see, for twenty years I
was a journalist. I became aware that there was an awful
lot of suicide that was never identified as such because
it was thought to be disgraceful. And it occurred to me
that probably more deaths were murder than was commonly
admitted. And that some of the murders were prolonged and
dreadful in a marriage. People talk about being nagged to
death and I think some people are. And it is a two-way
thing. Men can make their wives feel so unworthy and so
wretched that the poor creatures just more or less
shrivel up. I think that this is murder, too, of a very
vicious kind. And I'm always extremely suspicious of
hunting accidents, like the one in The Cunning Man where
the man who had been used to guns all his life suddenly
shot himself while he was cleaning a gun. He needed to do
that.
Q: Characters in The Cunning Man refer
to the soul, to saints, to the various kinds of prayer,
and you yourself are a religious man. Have your beliefs
changed as you have grown older?
A: Yes, they have. I was fed, at an
early age, the so-called Shorter Catechism of the
Presbyterian church, which is full of admirably phrased
and succinct answers to some very, very difficult
religious questions. As I have grown older I have
expanded that kind of answer and I now feel a sort of
recognition of the whole of life as involved and
intermingled, not simply "wonderful wonderful"
humanity running the whole show and forgetting about the
extraordinary worlds of insects and animals and the life
of trees, in which I have become intensely interested,
and that of plants. I literally never meet anybody who
ever talks about God as something other than a kind of
big man. I think God is a wondrous spirit, infinite,
eternal, and unchangeable, but only interested in men as
part of a giant creation which is pulsing with life.
People say, when a relative dies: "Oh, how could
God have taken her away so young and with so much before
her?" God doesn't give a bugger about how young she
is. He probably isn't noticing particularly. That's just
the way a lot of things happen. A lot gets spilled, you
know, in nature. When you look at what's going on out
there now, those trees are dropping seeds by literally
the hundreds of thousands and millions, and one or two of
them may take on. I think that that is the way that God
functions. He doesn't care nearly as much about
individuals and individual fates as we would like to
suppose. But by trying to ally ourselves with the
totality of things, we may get into tao as they say in
the East and be part of it, really take part in it, and
not just regard ourselves as a kind of miraculous
creation and the rest just sort of stage scenery against
which we perform.
Q: What about Evil?
A: Well, you see, Evil, if you look
at long stretches of history, you are astonished at how
often extraordinarily evil things have outcomes which
cannot be regarded as Evil. They are part of evolution.
They are part of the destruction and, in human terms,
despair and wretchedness, which seem to be necessary in
getting on with the greater job of keeping the universe
going. Of course, I do believe that there is a power of
Evil and a reality of Evil and that you just have to do
your uttermost not to get caught up in it and abandon
yourself to it, which people sometimes do. It's hard for
me to believe that that fellow Bernardo, for instance,
had not, in medieval terms, sold his soul to the Devil.
Q: You have said that none of your
trilogies were planned to be such at the beginning. Have
you ever speculated about why your novels have always
eventually emerged in groups of three?
A: Well, I don't honestly know. It is
just that I become very much interested in a group of
characters and in an atmosphere which I wish to pursue
and explore further. That is what I am doing at the
moment with the third volume to follow The Cunning
Man. It is going to be a rather muddled trilogy if
people want to consider it a trilogy because, quite
frankly, I think that Murther and Walking Spirits isn't
a very successful book. I tried to do more than I could
manage in it. But some of the things that are in it I've
tried to work out in The Cunning Man and I'll
try to work out in the third novel.
Q: It's interesting to know what a
writer chooses to read. What book has especially caught
your attention in the last year or so?
A: Oh. It's never one book. It's many
books. But a book I am re-examining because it lays a lot
of the foundation of the novel that I am going to write
is Spengler's Decline of the West. And I am
reading also Toynbee's History, not the ten
volumes, but the compressed job. And that's a very
interesting thing to do because both of those great men
with their extraordinary knowledge of history and their
brilliantly understanding minds end up fretting and
fussing and stewing themselves about Russia and neither
of them foresaw the breakup of Communism. It is a
fascinating and truly Shakespearean warning - that the
very wisest don't see at all. Time and chance happen to
everybody and they happen to them because it's left their
books slightly, not foolish, but wrong, at the end.
- Judith Skelton Grant
PRAISE
"This is a wise, humane and consistently
entertaining novel. Robertson Davies's skill and
curiosity are as agile as ever, and his store of
incidental knowledge is a constant pleasure. Long may he
continue to divert us." - The New York Times
Book Review
"One of his most entertaining and satisfying
books. . . . Davies composes a kind of fictionalized
grand opera, replete with emblematic characters,
archetypal plotting, soulful arias and much sparkling
repartee." - The Washington Post Book World
"The Cunning Man is a delight, a novel
that travels 70 years of history on its own swift feet, a
book of love and wisdom, loss and irony." - The
Boston Sunday Globe
"Urbanity, wit, and high seriousness, mixed by a
master chef." - The Cleveland Plain Dealer
"Wonderfully funny, poignant and never less than
totally engrossing. . . . Davies' clear-sighted humanism,
irony and grasp of character are on vivid display."
- Publishers Weekly
"Davies' embracing energy and his eye for the
telling detail drive this . . . crafty, wayward and
engrossing tale." - San Francisco Chronicle
"**** - One comes to the end of The Cunning
Man reflecting on the sheer pleasure of reading a
novel by a writer who has lived a full life . . . and one
who has read and thought about everything from Jung and
male bonding to medicine and art. What delight to be
again in the hands of a master storyteller." - Detroit
Free Press
"Davies deftly combines metaphysics, magic, and
modern medicine to tell a contemporary story with ancient
roots . . . a splendid intellectual romp as well as an
absorbingly literate novel. Davies at his best." - Kirkus
Reviews
DISCUSSION
QUESTIONS
- The story of Dr. Hullah's life and times emerges
in reaction to a series of interviews with the
young journalist Esme Barron. What does she add
to the story? What happens to shift Hullah from
his initial mistrust of her to "love?"
- The Cunning Man turns on Father Ninian
Hobbes' death. The event is recounted at length
three times, at the beginning by Dr. Hullah, in
III:18 in a letter by Miss Todhunter, and in
IV:21 by Charlie Iredale, and it is referred to
more briefly again and again. Why is the old
priest's death given such prominence?
- Interspersed through the third section of the
novel are letters written by Miss Pansy Freake
Todhunter ("Chips") to the English
sculptor Barbara Hepworth. Chips and her
companion, Emily Raven-Hart, observe The Toronto
That Used to Be using the standards they had
absorbed in Britain. Consider what the letters
add to the story.
- Contrast Davies' view of Toronto's cultural life
in the thirties, forties, and fifties with the
cultural life of a mid-sized U.S. city during
that period.
- Dr. Hullah has Emily Hart-Raven sculpt a
four-foot tall version of the caduceus, the
symbol of medicine, for the wall at the entrance
to his clinic. This, we are told, is
"Hermes' walking-stick with two snakes
curling around it." Why does Hullah specify
a pair of Massassauga rattlers? Why does Davies
link this Greek mythic symbol to Canadian Indian
lore?
- The first section of the novel describes a
discussion at the Curfew Club at Colborne
College, where the supporters of religion
(Dunstan Ramsay and Charlie Iredale) confront the
advocates of science (Evans). Why does Davies
include this scene? Where do you think Hullah
stands?
- At the end of this scene Dunstan Ramsay argues
that "The truly historical view was not a
tale of man's progress from barbarism or
superstition to modern enlightenment, but a
recognition that enlightenment had shown itself
in the long story of man in a variety of guises,
and that barbarism and superstition were undying
elements in the human story." How is this
observation evinced by the novel?
- As readers of Murther & Walking Spirits know,
that novel begins with the murder of Esme
Barron's husband, Connor Gilmartin. There, the
man who killed Gilmartin eventually confesses to
Hugh McWearie, just as, in The Cunning Man,
Charlie Iredale eventually confesses to Jonathan
Hullah. In a scene near the end of The
Cunning Man McWearie and Hullah exchange
secrets, each confirming what the other
suspected. What makes us accept their insights?
Why is this scene so satisfying?
- In the last section of The Cunning Man,
Dr. Hullah, now sixty-five, decides to give his
life fresh interest by engaging in a new form of
literary criticism. He will "apply modern
medical theory to the notable characters of
literature" and call the resulting book The
Anatomy of Fiction. This project produces a
series of "Notes for ANAT." each one a
literary excursion inspired by something in the
main story. What effect do these literary asides
have on you as the reader? Do they distract you
from the main story? Are they in some sense part
of the story? Does Davies want a slower pace and
if he does, why? and does he carry you with him?