DATE: Sunday, August 17, 1997               TAG: 9708131175

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J2   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BY JEFFREY H. RICHARDS 

                                            LENGTH:   84 lines

FRESH UNDERSTANDING FOR AN OLD FRIEND

THE MERRY HEART

Reflections on Reading, Writing and the World of Books

ROBERTSON DAVIES

Viking. 385 pp. $27.95.

At the time of his death in 1995, Robertson Davies was considered a major figure in Canadian letters. His 12 novels, including Fifth Business, What's Bred in the Bone, Murther and Walking Spirits and his last, The Cunning Man, constitute an impressive body of work, output enough to satisfy many a writer. In this volume, the first of two such, his widow, Brenda Davies, and an editor, Douglas Gibson, have assembled lectures and other occasional pieces, most of them heretofore unpublished. Here, Davies gives rein to his ideas on literature, authorship and the postmodern world against which his sensibility grated most fervently.

Davies was a throwback to another era - the 19th century, to be precise. His novels involve the same kind of social description, sense of authorship and artistic perception as that of British fiction writers more than a century ago. In these essays (24 in all), Davies more frequently drops the name of Charles Dickens than any other. He has the Victorian's aversion to sexual explicitness, though he is less of a tease than the mainstream novelists of that time were. Culturally, he is an Anglophile, though he crows proudly about being Canadian. Davies has little time and much scorn for the new, for word processors, for America and all it stands for (in his eyes), for political correctness. Indeed, none of the attitudes encountered in The Merry Heart should surprise his readers.

Davies has sometimes been called a moralist, a word he brings up several times in the speeches and lectures reprinted here. He is careful to distinguish that term from moralizer, which he most certainly is not. But as a moralist, Davies felt that the struggles, the ambiguities, the puzzles that ordinary people encounter should be the novelist's chief province. Life is a series of moral conundrums, often without tidy solutions, but it is the life, not the moral, that first engages the writer.

As he remarks in ``Literature and Moral Purpose'': ``(L)iterature may indeed have a moral purpose when the moral judgment rises naturally from the work of art and is answered by a strong inner conviction in the reader.'' No tacked-on morals, says Davies: The best writers naturally encounter moral themes in their choice of subjects.

In several of these essays, I detect some of the same sententiousness - for instance, there are authors, the few; then scribblers, the many - that I have objected to in my reviews of his novels. But in reading these essays, I have also learned a few things.

One claim that struck me as right was that creativity is not linked to intelligence. It is a mistake, Davies says, to think of authors as having logical, coherent philosophical positions at the base; rather, it is more useful to imagine them as people with keen instincts and abilities to observe and concoct. An author - in the sense that only a small number can claim to be such - then is simply more creative and more consistent than other writers, not brighter. This jibes well with author interviews many of us have read in which the writer of the book you love cannot say a single coherent thing about it - though that is not Davies' problem.

Another thing that struck me in a new way was Davies' love of 19th century theater. His interest in the stage is apparent to anyone reading his novels, but the depth of his understanding comes out more in these essays.

I am also one of those rare birds who find that particular theater compelling - the old formula-driven melodramas and special-effects thrillers of yesteryear that hardly anyone reads or sees on stage anymore. Davies' expressed love for what was in its time skillfully done and vastly more popular than any play has now allowed me to think in fresh ways about his work. For Davies, the writer is a conjurer, the creator of a universe that, while grounded in reality, is not to be taken as ``real life.'' The illusions, the tricks of stage that one might have seen in any playhouse in Britain or North America 150 years ago serve him as ways of seeing the artist and his endeavor.

So rest in peace, you humorist, moralist, loyalist, elitist author you. Despite all your best efforts to annoy readers of my kidney, you have succeeded in these essays in getting me to see, if not entirely agree with, your view of the literary world. It is a time-honored view, full of reference to myth and the beauty of language. One could do worse than curl up with this book - and a cup of tea - and listen to the actor, the admitted ham in Robertson Davies, expound on ``reading, writing and the world of books.'' MEMO: Jeffrey H. Richards is chair of the English department at Old

Dominion University. His most recent book is an edited anthology,

``Early American Drama'' (Viking Penguin).

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