Robertson, We Hardly Knew Ye
by Farrell Childe, licensed television critic
Biography has become a craze on American television, so of course the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation had to copy the Americans. The result is Life and Times, a series of biographies of Canadians, which is like A & E's Biography but without the vitality.
There is a startling preponderance of white faces among the subjects of Life and TImes, which highlights once again the inconsistency of the CBC's commitment to multiculturalism. Racial minorities appear on certain types of programs but not on others. The on-air staff of Hockey Night in Canada, for example, could go to a Klan meeting in Alabama without arousing the slightest suspicion. As far as I can make out, the largest group among the handful of non-white subjects of Life and Times consists of aboriginals – I guess they show it on the Northern Service, eh?
To be fair, some of the episodes I have seen have occasionally been informative, and they have occasionally been interesting. Largely, though, they take the familiar Canadian approach of sentimentalizing the lives of their subjects.
As has been mentioned before on this site, the people who control the production of Canadian television also want to control the reaction of the public to it. Your upper middle class types doubt the intellect and fear the emotions of the lower orders, so they do their utmost, through narrative and through other cues, to ensure that the lower orders are never in any doubt about what sloppy but socially approved sentiment they should be indulging in at any moment, or about what appropriate platitudes they should be incorporating into their mental apparatus.
Occasionally, though, these plans go awry. Sometimes the defenders of whitebread Canadian culture just miss the point completely, and then, for a change, we get quality television programming of the high comedy variety as well as an expose of just what Canadian television, and society, is really about.
Which is what I got when I watched a rerun of Life and Times this week. Its subject was Robertson Davies. The particular approach taken was that Robertson Davies was not only a great artist and an influential academic but a fascinating person. He upheld the highest standards while establishing an international literary reputation and running Massey College, but still had time for intense study of the arcane. The idea clearly was for our chests to swell with pride that such a great and fascinating man deigned to be a Canadian.
The only thing frustrating the achievement of that goal was that the film of Mr. Davies demonstrated conclusively that over and above whatever else he may have been, Mr. Davies was a Great Raving Ponce. He grew up in the Ontario towns of Thamesville, Renfrew, and Kingston, where no native speaks with an accent that sounds like a clumsy imitation of British upper class speech, but somehow that is the accent Mr. Davies managed to acquire. He also sported a late Victorian wardrobe, complete with capes, and spouted off with inane upper class opinions like one that no Canadian could win the Nobel prize for literature because it only went to authors from oppressed countries (a category which apparently includes postwar Australia, France, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States, among others).
If the great majority of Canadians met someone like that on the street, they'd conclude he was a buffoon. But then the great majority of Canadians do not produce television for the CBC.
So why did the people who produced this biography not notice any of this? The answer is that the people who produce television for the CBC still have the colonial mentality so useful among the upper classes in a colonial culture. As V. S. Naipaul pointed out in The Middle Passage, a colonial culture assumes that, with the exception of sport, everything good comes from elsewhere. To the television biographers of Robertson Davies, he is a great man because he went to England as a young man and achieved the miraculous feat of coming back as an Englishman. And not just any Englishman, but an upper class one. Mr. Davies transformed himself from a mere colonial into a superior being!
Well, regardless of what you think of it, this transformation would be an interesting topic of study, but the biographers chose not to study it. Or even mention it. The impression was left that Mr. Davies was just so cultured that he naturally started talking like an Englishman and dressing like the stock Englishman in a million theatrical comedies. The possibility that what started out as a foible of youth developed in Mr. Davies' maturity into an astonishingly successful practical joke wasn't even mentioned, and it probably never crossed the producers' minds. They couldn't imagine anyone joking about something as dead serious as being an upper class Brit.
The whole episode was a paean to the Canadian upper classes' idea of culture, which Mr. Davies was taken as personifying. The most horrifying episode of his childhood was his removal from his genteel surroundings in Thamesville and installation in Renfrew, where he was required to go to school with rough lower class children and even to use the same stinking washrooms as they. He was then saved by removal to Kingston, where, the show claimed, gentility and culture reigned, or at least in the parts of town Mr. Davies lived in. The residents of Kingston apparently had enough tone to reserve the stinking washrooms for the poor children.
Mr. Davies' affectation of a comical persona of course says nothing about the quality of his work, either of his novels or of his academic career. However, neither do most of the factors the producers of his episode of Life and Times considered important. Devotion to culture, about which much was heard during the show, quite clearly does not predispose people to become writers. Mr. Davies' solitary childhood was mentioned, but although a solitary childhood is adduced as critical in the development of many writers, little interest was shown in how Mr. Davies' solitary childhood might have contributed to the development of his literary talent.
But then, the point of the exercise was not to explain Robertson Davies, but to romanticize him. A serious biography would have had some serious discussion of his work rather than gushing tributes from publishers' readers about how wonderful they felt when they first read his books. A serious biography would have said something serious about his career at Massey College. A serious biography would have inquired further into his asinine statement about the Nobel Prize. A serious biography would not have been content with his wife's assertion that some people thought he was a snob because he insisted on high standards, and would also have considered the possibility that people thought he was a snob because he looked like a snob, he walked like a snob, and he talked like a snob.
As St. Clair Carr wrote in his recent review of Kingsley Amis's biographies, a serious writer deserves a serious biography. The problem with the treatment Life and Times gave Robertson Davies is that it is the product of a class which does not know what seriousness is.
There are in English Canada two cultures. One is the popular culture which idealizes drinking, gambling, playing hockey, roughing it in the bush, and distrusting British and American influence. The other culture idealizes gentility, cottages in Muskoka, the Anglican church, and the superior civilization of Great Britain. It sends its children to schools where cricket and rugby are played. Needless to say, these schools are expensive ones and the culture is the culture of people who can afford them. It is also the culture from which the producers of Canadian-made television are drawn.
Canadian-made television shows are continually trying to advance Canadian culture, but the culture they try to advance is a culture which most Canadians have no time for. Occasionally Canadian television produces good shows by accident – it puts shows on the air to fill regional quotas or to pretend that it is committed to the young and daring, and occasionally some of them are good. And occasionally a member of the other culture toils for years in obscurity before finally getting a chance to get on a network and then astonishes everyone with the popularity of The Red Green Show.
In general, Canadian television shows are selected by people who haven't a clue. They haven't a clue about the opinions and abilities of most of their fellow Canadians, so they produce television shows which attempt to mould the lower orders into something socially acceptable. They haven't a clue about what entertainment is, so they fill their television schedules with embarrassing, gentrified copies of American shows. They haven't a clue about what literature is, so they produce a biography of a major writer which simply represents him as a poor rich boy who made good.
How in the name of all that's holy can you, when confronted by an apparition like Mr. Davies, not wonder whether he was having us all on? The man did start out as an actor, after all. I think if you'd woken Mr. Davies up suddenly in the middle of the night he would have expressed his surprise in exactly the same accent as another Kingston boy, Don Cherry. I think that his years at Oxford and the Old Vic had shown him that the Canadian upper classes among whom he had grown up were just a bunch of hicks, and that he was either playing to their unsophisticated prejudices or simply having one hell of a time pulling the wool over their eyes while he was putting together his distinguished career. If he was, then he was a far greater man than the Canadian establishment has ever thought he was. My thanks to Life and Times for allowing us to share in the joke.
September 27, 2002
Robertson, We Hardly Knew Ye © Coolth, 2002
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