“‘I have always said the theatre was a coarse art,’ said Hollier, with tipsy dignity.
‘That is why it is a live art,’ said the Doctor. ‘That is why it has vitality.'”

—Robertson Davies, The Lyre of Orpheus

John Banville appeared as himself and as “Benjamin Black” in Seattle on March 22 to promote his new book, Christine Falls. The novel primarily follows Quirke Griffin, a Dublin haunted, naturally enough, by the woman he loved but who chose his brother over him, and secondarily follows a blue collar Boston drunk Catholic (enough modifiers there?) named Andy Stafford. Quirke dominates the novel, which is fortunate because Banville writes melancholy Irish intellectual much better than angry American loser.

Then again, Banville is a character-driven author, and Quirke carries the novel more than Stafford or the murder mystery. I paraphrased Robertson Davies, who in an interview, paraphrased Edmund Wilson saying that he didn’t care who killed who but why, in a question to Banville, and he essentially agreed with the sentiment and compared bad murder mysteries to crossword puzzles. He also told me Wilson said it first, a fact I hadn’t realized since I’d just finished Conversations with Robertson Davies. This explains why some of the characters’ motives are implausible at best, and several comments don’t pass the sniff test, like one villain who passes a usual bromide for excusing villainy: “‘I’ve done some wicked things in my time’—a chuckle, another rattle—’even made people take falls, but I’ve done a lot of good, as well.'”

Mystery is much more mysterious than the explanation, or at least Banville said so, and that may help explain the let down of the resolution of Christine Falls. Expect a different understanding of it eventually, because Banville said he has at least one more Benjamin Black novel in him, and its ending will make one have to reevaluate Christine Falls. An astute questioner asked if Banville routinely gave away the end of his unpublished books, and he laughed with the audience and said that we’ll forget his comment before then. Maybe that would have been true in the days before people like me posted about readings on the Internet.

In spite of minor problems, Banville did a fair job of making me care more about Quirke than about how the woman he nominally investigates died. As often happens in mysteries—or at least as I understand them—the real journey is into the heart and life of the hero, not about the victim, much as so many people grieving over a loved one’s illness wonder more about how it will affect their own lives than out of true empathy. If that happens, I see the genre novel as equally powerful to the literary novel even if Banville apparently does not.

The audience didn’t seem much interested in discussing Christine Falls, which I found overwritten in the Banville style, but it is also elegantly ornate in way that called attention to itself without being ostentatious as The Sea was. Banville’s naming scheme commanded much more attention. Some name questions were more worthy than others, like the one eliciting the the origin of his non de plume. In some earlier books, a character named Benjamin White appeared, although relatively few know of him because Banville says those books are mostly forgotten (and he doesn’t seem upset or unhappy). As “White” indicates, the character was more of the good guy, but Benjamin Black—well, he’s got a bit more of a sense of mischief. The relationship between White and Black might be somewhat like the relationship between Banville and Black, though Banville didn’t explicitly say so.

The sense of mischief might have come out when Banville showed a curious disrespect to, or at least distance from, the noir genre, calling Christine Falls “playing at fiction.” But he also said he created a new identity to show that Christine Falls isn’t a joke or literary lark. The difference between writing literary and genre fiction comes from what Banville sees as being a craftsman, while draftsmanship is only part of a literary novel. I don’t see the difference, at least in the end product, in a fine literary or fine genre novel, and his comments smack of the unfortunate distaste for the popular. The drawing of literary lines also came up in his distinction between novels that describe “life as actually lived” and noir novels, though I think this view ignores the power of the the latter as a kind of metaphor. No one has seen Middle Earth, but I feel like I’ve already walked there, and to say that it isn’t life is to ignore the fictional dream that sustains readers.

Still, that lead led to some comments about eternal question of the relationship of the novel to real life, as when he said novelists are “complete frauds,” with a wink and that “we make it all up.” Then he gets a bit more serious and says that the great thing about fiction is that it is all made up, but that it seems more real than the life we’re living. That sounds very much like someone else I’ve been reading (see the third paragraph), and it’s a sentiment I can agree with, especially when he says that some characters in books seem more real than some people he’s met.

Characters in “The Dead” qualify, and I wanted to ask Banville about the many connections to Joyce’s “The Dead,” since Christine Falls fairly drips with allusion to it. From the stymied male characters to the pervasive sense of failure mingled with the scent of eternity to the repeated use of the two words “the dead,” which, used by an author no doubt steeped in the lore of Joyce—Banville referenced him once in his talk—you cannot get away from the story echoing through Christine Falls. The time expired before I could ask, so I went away with the question remaining.

A few other random points are worth noting, though they don’t really fit in a coherent essay. Banville also said that fiction when he started publishing wasn’t “sexy,” especially in the 1970’s, but that since things have improved. Wait, what? Fiction has somehow become sexy? If so, that’s certainly news to me.One more random Banville fact: he loves the art of painting. That explains why so many of his metaphors involve pictures of some kind, like this one: “The scene within had the unreally dramatic composition of a painting, a genre scene of a deathbed with attendant mourners.” There are enough deaths in the novel that this won’t give away a plot point.

If you want to read more see L.A. reading highlights from The Elegant Variation. Another interview appears in The Guardian.

“When I went into a movie house to see something made by one of these great men, I felt that the half-darkness, the tunnel-like auditorium, spoke of that world of phantasmagoria and dream grotto of which I was aware as a part of my own life, which I could touch only in dreams or waking reverie. But film could open the door to it, for me; film therefore had a place in my life that I had never tried to define, for fear that too much definition might injure the fabric of the dreams.”

—Robertson Davies, Murther and Walking Spirits.

Substitute “novels” for “film” and you would lose nothing, and the movie house in this passage also functions as an excellent metaphor for writing, with the feeling of being aware of part of life that can only be touched in dreams of waking reverie of creation.

“One reason we have professional novelists is that tales told by amateurs are frequently pointless, dull and inconclusive.”

—A.O. Scott in his review of Ten Days in the Hills. The link goes to the New York Times’ walled garden, so in two weeks you probably won’t be able to read it, but you don’t need to—he thinks little of Smiley’s new novel because he says its characters exhibit the traits of amateurs’ stories. Regardless of the merits of the novel, I do like Scott’s succinct and accurate defense of the novelist’s craft.

I’ve continued moving through the Davies oeuvre and even into an authorized biography called Robertson Davies: Man of Myth by Judith Skelton-Grant. It doesn’t appear to be available in paperback in the U.S., and I retrieved it from the stacks of the Seattle Central Library, which are too new to be properly dusty yet. The biography probably hadn’t been moved since it was first placed, and it will probably be years before someone moves it again.

Grant’s biography shares the strengths and weaknesses of most literary biographies in that the writer of the biography is not as captivating and imaginative as the work of the subject even as she helps illuminate the subject’s works. Admirable parts of Man of Myth are written in the plain style employed by Davies in fiction but put to nonfiction uses here. The biography started slowly due chiefly to Davies’ parents lack of color or interest except as they related to him and fueled the family drama in his novels. Their stories are only remarkable in that they somehow produced Robertson. Once he appears seriously on the scene the biography starts to canter at stories about his school days and run when discussing his novels.

Davies’ life provided important fuel and theme: “When suffering boredom from [Upper Canada College], Davies had thought desperately: ‘there’s got to be something better than this.’ He’d wished that reality were sharper, brighter, more intense emotionally, more splendid… at bottom he was sure that he was missing something; life must be more vivid than it seemed.” Many of us feel this way at times, I suppose, and I’m certainly one of them, but I also often think it when reading biographies—if only they could be brighter and more vivid. The biography isn’t as splendid or as emotionally deep as Davies’ novels, which he sees as describing his own spiritual and intellectual development better than a biography of the events of his life ever could. To Grant’s credit she makes the biography a study in the development of both, but even so it can only supplement the novels in a mean way and captures only a small part of the man.

Grant says: “Facts—even his own facts—do not come alive for him until they are transformed by imagination. Striking the balance, establishing a distanced context, checking for accuracy—such exercises hold little appeal to him.” In this paragraph Grant suggests that novels are Davies’ form of autobiography, and that one can track the most important part of his growth—his imagination—through reading them, rather than through the dry facts of his life. Davies’ does not rank among the debacherous and fascinating, as artists sometimes (but do not always) do.

As for Davies’ literal life, something better did come along in the form of fiction, but it only came along through work. The need to work at something as a way of creating identity and exploring the self is a constant theme in Davies’ novels and an implicit theme in Man of Myth. Sections of it also offer insight on Davies and his creative process in a way far deeper than the innumerable people inquiring about where authors “get” ideas, as though they can be picked up at the grocery store with milk and vegetables on the way home from work. Davies talks about the transformation process and the way unleavened fact holds little appeal to him. Yet the process itself I do not describe here, and Davies does not or cannot fully describe because there is a mythological element to it. Unlike, say, building a house, the process of a novel cannot be fully described, and so any reader looking for such a thing will be disappointed, just as those questioners at author events are.

I find writing about Davies difficult because his novels feel like they resist literary inquiry, which seems so banal and pale next to the stories. This may be in part by design; Davies was an academic at Massey college for many years, and “he raised a few hackles in advocating that people should read less, that they should read feelingly rather than critically, and that they should read only what they like.” In other words, he was an academic for a time but also a rogue or outsider, and wrote, whether consciously or not, in a style that makes him unpalatable to contemporary literary criticism. Maybe this is part of the reason he is not better known in the United States, where I have never heard of him in classes or elsewhere. He also links himself to the past in a way likely to make modern academics uncomfortable:

“Painting, fiction, and faking,” a lecture given in 1984, describes how Davies believes the modern artist has a problem because the artists “have lost access to an important resource… the shared myth and religion whose wisdom has captured imaginations and commanded belief across the western world from the time of the ancient Greeks until the present century. The stories of the classical and Judaeo-Christian heritage gave earlier artists a vocabulary that their viewers understood, in which they could frame their most profound insights. Lacking this shared language, modern artists paint the things that arise from their unconscious in a multitude of private forms. In such circumstances it is easy for an artists to fake inspiration, while the viewers, confronted with this multiplicity of new symbols and forms, are faced with extraordinary challenge.”

The process is explicit in The Lyre of Orpheus and What’s Bred in the Bone, two books in which artists make what seems new old, in a manner of copying that is not stealing but rather working within a style of old masters. They are clearly explanations of Davies’ own methods, and his work is no doubt rich in commentary about itself that I was unaware of prior to reading Man of Myth. For that reason the biography is worthwhile, even if parts of it lag and Davies’ novels are of more interest in learning about his life and art than what he did outside of writing.

Calvin Trillin discussed his new book About Alice on January 31, although the book is almost identical to a magazine article published in The New Yorker last March. I read both and didn’t immediately detect any of the differences in the book. It is probably the most moving piece of short nonfiction I’ve read, and dealt honestly and cleanly with a subject that could easily have descended in sentimentality, and would have in lesser hands but never did in his. The large crowd came because of that, and when I say large I mean it: I arrived just before Trillin started speaking and had to wedge myself between some bookcases toward the back of the reading area at the University Book Store.

Instead of jumping right into About Alice, Trillin first read some other pieces where she played a starring role; before he discussed Alice as she passed he discussed Alice as she lived, but the questions focused on his new book. I started. In About Alice, Trillin says that he met Alice when she was engaged—well, apparently just a few weeks from being married—so I asked if he’d still knew the guy or if he knew whether the guy’s reaction to About Alice. His answer—all one word of it—made the crowd crack up: “No.” But the crowd was already in a good mood, and I wonder how many standup comedians have so appreciative a group.

Some of their goodwill must have come from the way Trillin mixed genuine feeling with humor, since the latter is so often bound up with cynicism or cruel irony. Hearing something different is startling, and from About Alice and other books one can hear and feel how Trillin feels about Alice. I could even hear it in his discussion, and this is a greater accomplishment than it seems because Trillin talks almost in a monotone and relies primarily on words for his delivery.

A few people asked questions that seemed like they were out of advice columns lite; one woman asked about whether Trillin found closure and the like, as though his writing is just a version of therapy, while another asked how Trillin “transubstantiates” everyday experience into writing. In other words, he was asking how to be funny. Trillin was patient with them, as I guess authors have to be, though he did seem to poke a little bit and gently at some questions—after all, he makes humor out of life. It was very much worth hearing him—even if it meant being stuck between bookcases.