Although he taught literature at Toronto's Trinity College for 21 years, Davies entered university as a non-degree student because he could not pass a mathematics exam.
Writer, journalist and professor, William Robertson Davies is well known as both an essayist and novelist. He taught literature at the University of Toronto’s Trinity College for 21 years and in 1963 he became the first master of Massey College, the University of Toronto’s new graduate college.
Born in Thamesville, Ontario on August 28, 1913, Davies entered Queen’s University, in Kingston, Ontario as a non-degree student because he could not pass the mathematics exam required to gain university admission. He studied at Upper Canada College from 1926 to 1932 moved on to Queens until 1935 and finally received a Bachelor of Literature in 1938 from Balliol College, at Oxford University in England.
After graduating from Oxford, Davies played some minor roles with the Old Vic Repertory Company in London. In 1940 he returned to Canada with his new wife, to a new job as literary editor of Saturday Night, Canada’s leading journal of opinion at the time. Two years later he took over as editor of the Peterborough Examiner, one of the newspapers owned by his father, Senator William Rupert Davies. Davies remained the paper’s editor from 1940 through 1955, after which he became the publisher until 1965.
Under the pseudonym Samuel Marchbanks, Davies wrote a column for the Examiner and later collected these works in three books: The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks, published in 1947, The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks published in 1949 and Samuel Marchbank’s Almanack published in 1967.
In 1960 Davies joined Trinity College and he became master of Massey College in 1963.
Aside from writing and teaching Davies also founded the Dominion Drama Festival and played an important role during the 1950s, in the making of the Stratford Festival, serving on the Board of Governors. Davies wrote plays himself; in fact his one act play Eros at Breakfast won the 1948 Dominion Drama Festival Award for the best Canadian play. However Davies earned his greatest praise from his novels.
His first three novels later became known as the Salterton Trilogy. The second of these novels, Leaven of Malice, published in 1954, won the Stephen Leacock Medal for humour.
Davies second great trilogy, The Deptford Trilogy, drew on Jungian psychology. The series began in 1970 with the popular novel Fifth Business, continued in 1972 with The Manticore, which won the Governor General’s Award for fiction and ended in 1975 with World of Wonders.
As his academic career was ending Davies wrote two novels, The Rebel Angels in 1981 and What’s Bred in the Bone in 1985, which poked fun at academic life. He continued to write well into retirement, The Lyre of Orpheus appeared in 1988, Murther and Walking Spirits in 1991 and The Cunning Man in 1994. Finally, The Merry Heart, a collection of speeches, reminiscences, parodies, book reviews and essays was published after his death on December 2, 1995.
His many honors include, a Companion of the Order of Canada, an Honorary Fellowship of Balliol and honorary degrees from Oxford, Trinity College, Dublin and the University of Wales as well as twenty-three other Canadian and American universities.
Sources
Athabasca University, 2007, Robertson Davies, Centre for Language and Literature
Cameron, Elspeth, 2007, Davies, Robertson William, The Canadian Encyclopedia
Penguin Group (USA), 2007, Reading Guides, Fifth Business
