Review: The Papers of Samuel Marchbanks

The Papers of Samuel Marchbanks by Robertson Davies
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Gosh, I really had to push myself through this book. I don’t recall the last time I was so sorely tempted to just not finish a book. Perhaps someone recalling or interested in Canadian life from 1930 to 1960 would appreciate this imagined diary and collected papers. (I also thought it work of nonfiction when I first picked it up.) Maybe what Marchbanks needs is a skilled editor. I think a succinct abridgement of the 539 pages (!) could have left me thinking of Davies as the Mark Twain of Canada. For, it was the hilarious highpoints that kept me reading. Such as,

“Pedalezza is a variant, deriving something from frottage, that other delight of the refined sensualist, but managed with the feet.”…
“… I slipped off the elegant evening pump from my right or left foot—on a great night, I employed both—and stretching my silk-socked extremity beneath the table I would gently squeeze the thigh, or the sensitive area just above the knee, of a lady sitting on the other side of the table. This requires a prehensile quality of foot, which can be developed by picking up oranges from the floor for half an hour every day. The lady thus squeezed might squeak a little, but more often she blushed prettily and sometimes—if I were not quick—I would find that my foot was being given an answering squeeze. As a usual thing she showed a new warmth toward one or the other of her dinner partners, which pleasantly surprised him and gave me exquisite delight. I felt that I was playing the role of Fate in lives that needed a touch of fateful unpredictability.”
“And that was pedalezza?”
“It was. I wish I might say that it still is, but you will have observed that I walk with a slight limp. A lady whose virtue I had underestimated stabbed me in the foot with a silver fork. It was all I could do not to scream with pain, but the laws of pedalezza are rigorous, and I forbore.”
“But—allow me to ask—what was there in it for you, Sam?”
“I do not follow you”
“This pedalezza—the ladies never knew it was you?”
“But of course not! That was its ultimate refinement. Exquisite enjoyment wholly divorced from any personal involvement. What can Sex offer more?”

There is more proactive and even edgy material than I expected from something of this vintage.

OF WORDS AND THEIR EFFECTS •
I WENT TO the movies last night and saw, among other things, a film about soil erosion called The Rape of the Earth. The word “rape” was so irresistibly humorous to two girls and their escorts in my neighbourhood that I thought they would burst; their sniggers were like the squirtings of a hose when it is first turned on. Some people are affected by some words as slot machines are affected by coins; feed in your word, and the result is invariable. Feed “Communist” into an old gent with a quarter of a million dollars, and out comes a huffy lecture; feed “Booze” into a prohibitionist, and out will come highly imaginative statistics about accidents and insanity; feed “Rape” into girls and boys and you get this bromo-seltzer fizzing.

Some of the racy innuendo is maybe now closer to the truth. It’s not hard to imagine a female navel with a halo of tattooed Song of Songs quotations.

… it is that comparatively undistinguished portion of the female anatomy comprising the lower ribs and the diaphragm which is now the focus of holy horror. If women showed their navels with texts from the Song of Solomon tattooed around them, I might see some sense in all this fuss, but they don’t, and I don’t.

Many of Marchbanks’ criticisms of his modern times could be made today, like this one that I read of Helen Hayes making:

This was in the days when actors thought it part of their job to be audible and comprehensible. Many modern mummers, working on the principle that much conversation is inaudible, have altered stage speech to a point where only some of a play is heard, and varying amounts of the remainder are overheard.

Also, there are witty cynicisms I wish I thought of:

• OF COMPLACENCE •
OF LATE PEOPLE have been picking on me because I am what they call “complacent.” By this they mean that I refuse to share their hysterical fears about another war, about Russia, about the atom, about the commercialization of Sunday, about divorce, about juvenile delinquency and whatnot. Because I do not leap about and flap my arms and throw up all my meals when these things are mentioned, they assume that I am at ease in Zion. As a matter of fact I have my own well-defined field of worry, which I exploit to the full. But it seems to me that a little complacency would do nobody any harm at present and I am thinking of incorporating complacency into the platform of the Marchbanks Humanist Party—a retrograde movement of which I am leader and sole support. “Tired of Clamour? Try Torpor!” How’s that for a campaign cry?

And this, which reminds me of a conversation with my brother a month ago:

• OF IMPUDENT TRACTS •
AN ENVELOPE full of tracts came for me in the mail this morning. Tracts always ask foolish questions. “Are you on the way to Heaven?” said one of these. “Are you prepared to meet God?” said another. “Are you prepared for Eternity?” asked a third. “Are you going to a Christless grave?” enquired the last of the bunch. Really, I do not know the answers to these questions, and I doubt the ability of whoever writes the shaky English grammar of these tracts to answer them for me. I am not even prepared to meet Professor Einstein or Bertrand Russell; why should I vain-gloriously assume that God would find me interesting? And I really cannot claim to be prepared for Eternity when I have so many doubts about today. I wish that whatever God-intoxicated pinhead directs these inquiries to me would cease and desist. In the struggle of the Alone toward the Alone, I do not like to be jostled.

And a final memorable one that makes me think Marchbanks would have been bemused by Facebook:

• FRANKNESS DEPLORED •
THERE ARE TOO MANY people in the world who think that frankness is an excuse for anything; so long as a man is frank and sincere, say they, he may talk as he likes. They also cling to the stupid and mistaken notion that people like and admire frankness and respond well to it. For instance, I was standing on a street-corner today, when a man in a windbreaker approached me and said: “Lookit, I’m goin’ to give you no bull; I wanta get a coupla beers; will you gimme the money?” I looked deep into his eyes, and in low, thrilling voice I said “No.” … Now if he had given me some bull—some richly ornamented tale of poverty, of undeserved ill-fortune, of being robbed while on some errand of mercy—anything in fact which would have revealed a spark of imagination in him, I would have given him a small sum, knowing full well that it would be spent on beer. But to ask me, flatly and baldly, for money to buy beer—! Is that the way to appeal to a Welshman, a lover of the spoken word and the gem-encrusted lie? No, no. Let such ruffians beg beer-money from those who admire frankness. Anybody who wants a quarter from me must first produce a quarter’s worth of fascinating bull.

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