Meet the authors: Robertson Davies, Allan Gurganus & Leonora Carrington
I’ve always wanted to write a book column. Not about new books coming out but about older books and writers, that people might never had heard of before.
I’m not sure this one column will be the start of such a series but it will give a few quotes from some books I love – and love to reread.
If anyone who reads this will go on reading these or other books by the authors I mention I will be very pleased indeed.
The first writer I’ll quote is Robertson Davies. Davies is no longer as widely read as he deserves to be but if you want very clean and effective writing, dry wit and intelligent stories, he’s your man. He is still at the top of the field when it comes to creating and effectively depicting characters. He has been compared endlessly with Charles Dickens. There is some merit in that: both writers are great at creating characters, but whereas Dickens leans to the sentimental, Davies does not. He has a clearer eye and is, in my mind, the better writer.
You can find more information about Robertson Davies on this Penguin website.
The quote is from ‘Tempest-tost‘, the first book in his Salterton Trilogy:
“The reverend John Mackilwraith was a failure. The reason for his insufficiency, if it could be discovered now, probably lay in his health. He never seemed to feel as well as other men, but as he had never known good health he had no standard of comparison, and he accepted his lot, almost without complaint. That is to say, he never complained of feeling unwell, and he rarely complained in an open manner about anything else, but his whole way of life was a complaint and a reproach to those who came into contact with him. He was unsatisfactory to his congregation, because when they complained to him of misfortunes they were uncomfortably conscious that he had misfortunes of greater extent and longer duration. At funerals his mien of settled woe somehow robbed the chief mourners of their proper eminence. At weddings his appearance was likely to turn the nervous tears of a bride into a waterspout of genuine apprehension. [...]
The reverend John was no doubt to be pitied, but pity is an emotion which cannot be carried on for years. He was a gloomy and depressing parson.”
The second writer I’ll quote is Allan Gurganus. This from the A.G site:
[His] novels, stories and essays stand as a singularly unified and living body of work. Known for their dark humor, erotic candor and folkloric sweep, his tales are now widely available in English and translation. Paris’s La Monde called him “a Mark Twain for our age, hilariously clear-eyed, blessed with perfect pitch.”
This is from his wonderful novel: “Oldest living Confederate widow tells all“:
“My aunts - like lots of folks who live together from birth till old age - had divided up who to be. They were each good at different-type emotions - they respected one another’s territory. You couldn’t quite think of them as separate, more like three plants sprung from one pot - root-bound, leaf-entwined hybrid ivies maybe.
The three girls had loved one boy. He’d gone off to college up North, he’d come back sick, he’d published one poem in The Atlantic Monthly while away studying at Cambridge. The poem, my mother said, was about spring - how everything looked bleak and bare till your buds came and your birds got back from Florida - not all that original.
The poet signed his name with his middle name only, Randall. He had ghost-colored skin, he drooped across furniture, looking boneless. The sisters played piano for him constantly [...]
[...] Randall - when finally pressed about which adoring sister he would marry - got tactful: his color improved and then, roses in his cheeks, the poor boy died of consumption at age twenty-three. Randall had no aptitude for marriage.”
The third author I’ll quote is Leonora Carrington. This from a L.C. website:
Author of, among other things, two plays, The Flannel Night-Shirt and Penelope, as well as of an account of her experiences during a period of separation from the artist Max Ernst when she was pronounced incurably insane, Leonora Carrington entered the surrealist movement in 1937. An artist whose painting recurrently evokes magic encounters, she brings to the practice of storytelling a sense of occasion that endows her tales with quite a special atmosphere. Her stories are not characterized by a mood of wonder of excitements. Rather, these celebrations of the marvelous are marked by a singular matter of factness; as they are, also, by an element so mysterious to the French, that in defeat, they refer to it helplessly as l’humour anglais.
The feeling communicated in the stories Ms. Carrington tells owes much to her distinctive point of view. This is not at all the viewpoint of militant feminism. It is, however, so characteristically that of a woman as to make Leonora Carrington’s tales noteworthy examples of how narrative may be approached and handled under surrealist influence. In the most positive, creative, and revealing sense, her imagination is feminine. It enriches her stories with numerous details that contribute to undermining the barrier separating normality from the universe where her characters are in their natural element.
Two quotes from her novel “The hearing trumpet”:
“At times I had thoughts of writing poetry myself but getting words to rhyme with each other is difficult, like trying to drive a herd of turkeys and kangaroos down a crowded thoroughfare and keep them neatly together without looking in shop windows.”
“The fact that I have no teeth and never could wear dentures does not in any way discomfort me. I don’t have to bite anybody and there are all sorts of soft edible foods easy to procure and digestible to the stomach. Mashed vegetables, chocolate and bread dipped in warm water make the base of my simple diet. I never eat meat as I think it is wrong to deprive animals of their life when they are so difficult to chew anyway.”
There’s an excerpt from “The hearing trumpet” here.
And just for the Hell of it, I’ll leave you with yet another Robertson Davies quote, this one from his book ‘What’s bred in the bone.’
“It was in a garden that Francis Cornish first became truly aware of himself as a creature observing a world apart from himself. He was almost three years old, and he was looking deep into a splendid red peony. He was greatly alive to himself (though he had not yet learned to think of himself as Francis) and the peony, in its fashion, was also greatly alive to itself, and the two looked at each other from their very different egotisms with solemn self-confidence. The little boy nodded at the peony and the peony seemed to nod back. The little boy was neat, clean and pretty. The peony was unchaste, dishevelled as peonies must be, and at the height of its beauty. It was a significant moment, for it was Francis’s first conscious encounter with beauty - beauty that was to be the delight, the torment, and the bitterness of his life - but except for Francis himself, and perhaps the peony, nobody knew of it, or would have heeded if they had known. Every hour is filled with such moments, big with significance for someone.”
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