Oral biographies are a comparatively recent genre. The first one I recall that reached an exalted level of excellence was Edie: An American Biography by Jean Stein and George Plimpton. The first Canadian one to have a large commercial and critical impact, I believe, was 2004’s The Last Honest Man, Mordecai Richler by Michael Posner. Now comes Robertson Davies: A Portrait in Mosaic by Val Ross, who fought off cancer just long enough to complete the manuscript. This was her first book outside of the YA market. While she didn’t call it an oral biography, that’s mostly what it is, though it juxtaposes interview highlights from Davies’ family members, colleagues, students, friends, rivals, and antagonists with material drawn from many obscure printed or archival sources. It does so in a way that lets the narrative proceed chronologically and thematically at the same time: a neat trick by a highly skilled editor and journalist.
    Davies, who was born in 1913 and died in 1995, was the son of a Welsh-born printer who published two small-town Ontario weeklies and eventually became a Senator. To help the Liberal Party, his father bought Kingston’s two dailies and combined them as the Whig-Standard. Later he acquired the Peterborough Examiner as well and installed Robertson as its editor. Robertson, who had studied at Oxford and acted at the Old Vic, was not only a prematurely geezerly man of letters in the Edwardian tradition, but a true and tireless champion of Canadian theatre as well. For him, nearly two decades of living in Peterborough, Ontario, was something like forced confinement. 
    He was paroled to help found Massey College at the University of Toronto. But even there, what many considered his affectations of manner, speech, and appearance – to say nothing of his family’s wealth (his father was also an early business partner of the first Lord Thomson) – provoked jealousy and disdain. “I was the kind of girl,” Alice Munro recounts, “who would have come to do his mother’s ironing.” For her part, June Callwood calls him an “old rascal.” Even Ramsay Derry, who edited Fifth Business – the novel that Davies couldn’t bring himself to write until his father had died; the one that earned him great respect throughout the English-speaking world and beyond – admits that he had until then considered Davies “a grand magnificent has-been.” Margaret Atwood, Robert Fulford, and Robertson’s nephew Michael Davies, the philanthropist and former newspaper proprietor, are among the contributors with the sharpest perceptions.
    Ross’s book dutifully examines a distressing and puzzling strain in Davies’s makeup: the negative comments he sometimes made about women (who were not permitted to live at Massey), Jews, native peoples, blacks, and so on. Many believe this was merely part of the stage role of “Robertson Davies, quaint old curmudgeon,” in which he had cast himself. His U of T colleague John Polanyi, the Nobel laureate, once the recipient of an anti-Semitic remark from Davies, takes the charitable view that Davies was simply pretending to defend “a vanishing age.” Ross herself, whose instincts were the absolute opposite of those attributed to Davies, seems here to concur. Some people feel certain that the bigotry was genuine. Still others hold that Davies was being deliberately shocking to obscure his offstage shyness. As his widow remarks, “He was shy … though a great man for covering it up.”
    A tiny handful of errors in Ross’s
narrative links (some minor confusions of chronology and some mistaken job titles) no doubt result from the tragic circumstances under which she completed this very fine work, a healthy corrective to the long, monotonous, and rigidly traditional 1994 biography by Judith Skelton Grant.