The Enthusiasms of Robertson Davies - Hardcover

Robertson Davies was born and raised in Ontario and was educated at a variety of schools, Upper Canada College, Queen’s University, and Balliol College, Oxford. He had three successive careers: first as an actor with the Old Vic Company in England; then as publisher of the Peterborough Examiner; and most recently as a university professor and first Master of Massey College at the University of Toronto, from which he retired in 1981.

He was without doubt one of Canada’s most distinguished men of letters, with over thirty books to his credit, among them several volumes of plays, as well as collections of essays, speeches, and belles lettres. As a novelist he gained fame far beyond Canada’s borders, especially for his Deptford trilogy, Fifth Business, The Manticore, and World of Wonders, and for his last five novels, The Rebel Angels, What’s Bred in the Bone, The Lyre of Orpheus, Murther & Walking Spirit, and The Cunning Man.

His career was marked by many honours: he was, for example, the first Canadian to become an honorary Member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He was a Companion of the Order of Canada, and Honorary Fellow of Balliol, and received an honorary D.Litt. from Oxford.

Robertson Davies passed away in 1995.

From the early 1940s on, Canada's greatest living novelist wrote weekly newspaper and magazine articles and book reviews. Of the 93 reprinted here, 33 are about "characters," 34 about books and 26 about himself--his interests (Shakespeare), pleasures (book collecting and scrapbook keeping) and public image ("an exacerbated curmudgeon"). Each piece is entertaining and enlightening. Regardless of the subject matter--ranging from the novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett, Joyce Cary and John Cowper Powys to appreciations of Casanova, Chaucer, Freud, Jung, O'Casey, Whitman and Wodehouse, Nellie Melba, Mme. Pompadour and Lolita --Davies has something amusing and original to say. What he states about A Book of Characters by Daniel George applies equally to this one: "It does not lend itself to gobbling, greedy reading, but it is a wonderful bedside book . . . not a mere compilation; it is in the variety of people included, and the way in which their oddities are played off against one another, that the author shows his quality."
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