April 15, 2022
In the previous newsletter, I quoted the great fantasist Ursula Le Guin’s disparaging remarks about what is commonly called formula fiction or category fiction, adding that I did not necessarily share her negative judgment. By category fiction, publishers and bookstores mean exactly that: when you walk into a bookstore, the books are organized by categories. “Fiction” means literary fiction: all the rest are category fiction, including thrillers, romances, erotica, horror novels, paranormal romances, and, yes, science fiction and fantasy. To which we may add categories that are either extinct or nearly extinct, like the Western, or represent sub-categories, such as the traditional mystery story, the hard-boiled detective story, and so on. A few books in a few of the categories are “literary” enough that they might be noticed in the New York Times or the New York Review of Books, though often in a collective review of several such books, reviewed by a specialist reviewer. But books selling by the millions or, in a few cases, tens of millions, are never even mentioned in the journals of high culture, or in literary histories. I have been reading science fiction and fantasy all my life and try to keep up with the important names and titles. And yet my students time and again sing the praises of some author or series that I have never even heard of, let alone read. If we weren’t so used to it, it would strike us as a strange situation.
There is a social issue here, about elitism: although this kind of snobbery is perhaps disappearing, it used to be a point of honor that of course you would never have anything to do with that kind of stuff. The rationale given was always high-minded: we must preserve the purity of art and cast out those who prostitute themselves pleasing the crowd in the marketplace. Some thirty years ago, I was at a conference in which an older-generation academic went on a rant about the decline of standards evident in the fact that you could actually study film in his university. Any kind of film—not Attack of the Flesh-Eating Space Bimbos but Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola. Film, period. The man was so out of date and out of touch that we were all a bit shocked. It is a measure of progress, of a sort, that the scope of the ranting has been narrowed: now we listen to Scorsese and Coppola ranting about superhero movies as not being really film at all, the way some people used to say a century ago that people with names like Scorsese and Coppola were not real Americans at all. The sexist and xenophobic analogies here are not intended to be mean-spirited, but they are intended to point to a kind of ideological blind spot, whose dead giveaway is a certain kind of touchiness: Jonathan Franzen will be damned if he’s going to consort with the kind of people who belong to Oprah’s book club. The touchiness is always rationalized as a defense of the integrity of art, of “high standards.” But in the end the high standards are social, not artistic. When Northrop Frye said in Anatomy of Criticism (1957) that it was not the function of criticism to make value judgments, he caused a furor. But he is quite right: high standards are an index of the history of taste, and, far from being eternal, are usually out of date within a generation or two, certainly within a century or two.
Are we “reduced” to relativism, then? Is there no canon? Are there no criteria of greatness? My impulse is to respond as Christ did to Satan in Milton’s dramatization of the Temptation in Paradise Regained. When Satan urges Christ to have a care for his kingdom, Jesus answers, “Why art thou / Solicitous? What moves thy inquisition?” (3.199-200). To me, canonicity in culture is what orthodoxy is in religion: an excuse to start persecuting heretics. “Inquisition” is exactly the right word for it. Frye did not speak of a canon, but of an order of words, to which all texts belong. Do I see no difference between Hamlet and some Hollywood blockbuster ultra-violent revenge movie? The point is not to keep them socially distanced in order to avoid contamination but to compare their differences—and their similarities. And while we’re at it, we may bring Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare’s first tragedy, into the comparison. Chances are it will out-Herod Herod and score a higher gross-out quotient than the blockbuster. In short, I advocate the method of this newsletter, which shows the interconnections and yet the differences of all sorts of works, and also show the interconnections of those works with the form of human life as we live it, both domestically and politically.
But beneath the social conflict is a deeper one, an authentically artistic issue. The formulas of category fiction are commercialized, updated versions of the age-old patterns evident in the first forms of storytelling, myth and folktale. The imagination in its pure form is formula and category—or, if you prefer a term with more scientific pretentions, structure. The formulas of the imagination recreate life in terms of human desire and fear, wish and nightmare, and are thus polarized into the opposites clearly on view in formula fiction: the hero and villain, the light and the dark. The hero’s quest is to renew the world, rekindle the light, by opposing and defeating the powers of darkness. Much useless effort has been expended complaining that such a pattern is simplistic and reduces all stories to one big monomythic cliché. This confuses what is done with the pattern in certain stories, which can certainly be reductive enough, and the pattern itself. It is like complaining that the DNA molecule is a reductive cliché: four chemicals that just keep getting rearranged, how boring and limited.
Myths and folktales are studied in terms of their recombinant patterns. We may learn something about the enduring yet metamorphic nature of those patterns by studying the work of Vladimir Propp and Seth Thompson on folktale motifs or Claude Lévi-Strauss on myth, even if we do not necessarily accept their theories about why these particular patterns reappear. Fantasy is the storytelling mode that in our time keeps closest to storytelling’s origins in myth and folktale. We see this in the most eminent modern fantasist, J.R.R. Tolkien, who as a medievalist had a scholar’s grounding in myth and folktale. His famous essay “On Fairy-Stories,” closely related to The Hobbit, lays out the common plot pattern of a descent into troubles, conflicts, and danger, with a sudden reversal into what he calls the eucatastrophe, or good catastrophe. “Catastrophe” literally means down-turning, but the “eu-“ prefix means “good,” so this is a good reversal that would really be an upward turning towards a happy or desirable ending. Thematically, Tolkien says, this narrative reversal is the vehicle of a vision of Escape, Consolation, and Recovery. By Recovery, he means a clarification, coming to see reality as it really is instead of in the narrow version of it in which we are trapped by habit and social conditioning—in other words, the function of fairy tales, of fantasy, is consonant with my touchstone “expanding eyes.” It is this cleansing of the doors of perception, in Blake’s phrase, that keeps the Escape and Consolation from being mere wish-fulfilment. And it is this recreation of perception that gives the fairy tale (or folk tale—for our purposes, the terms are interchangeable) its mood of “wonder.”
However, “serious,” meaning critically accepted, literature in our time is dominated by the opposite of wonder: by realism and irony, which show people in the grip of larger, dehumanizing forces that they have no power to resist. The closest thing to a eucatastrophe in modern literary fiction is some small victory that enables the sympathetic characters to survive, to gain insight, to cope with the conditions in which they are trapped, conditions that are supposed to be inevitable because they are not humanly created but part of the fabric of both external reality and internal human nature. We are caught in the “human condition,” and no heroic stance is possible, only a good sense of balance and a wise endurance. There is no moral order in the universe, no providential power working to ensure that, however long it takes, some eucatastrophe will result in the triumph of the good and the defeat of evil. Most novels do not argue such a perspective philosophically: it is simply built into the presuppositions that control the story’s realistic or ironic texture. The degree of the irony may vary. At its most intense, it is summed up by the famous statement, the very opposite of eucatastophe, in George Orwell’s 1984: “Imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever.”
But it is at this point that the split has developed between high and low culture, between the literature (and film) of realism and irony and a popular literature in which the old patterns survive, although in modified form. Due to the decline of institutionalized religion and the aristocracy, and the rise of the middle class, the 18th century saw a shift in literary genres. The older forms of epic and dramatic tragedy died out and were replaced by two new types of prose narrative, the realistic novel and the romance. The novel became the principal vehicle for “serious” literature dominated by the reality principle. Romance was popular escapism, allegedly enjoyed by frivolous or neurotic people. Jane Austen’s first (although posthumously published) novel, Northanger Abbey, concerns a woman addicted to Gothic romances who cannot tell the difference between fantasy and reality and tries to live life as if it were a Gothic romance. It does not go well, as they say these days. There is a eucatastrophe or happy ending, but it consists in the triumph of realistic common sense over the unbridled imagination.
Not every romance writer was writing escapist literature for neurotic middle-class women. Hawthorne and Poe in America and various German Romantics such as E.T.A. Hoffman made the romance into serious literature in two ways: by infusing it with a strong component of ironic darkness and tragedy, and by use of the traditional archetypal symbolism of romance with a new inward and psychological reference. In the process they invented, among other things, the “literary fairy tale,” a self-conscious and sophisticated recreation of a traditional oral form. Sir Walter Scott combined the romance form with historical content formerly the subject matter of epic, and by doing so invented the historical novel, which is more accurately the historical romance. But in the course of the 19th century, literary romance was not able to hold its own in the competition with realism and gradually became sequestered in the area of children’s literature. Some Victorian writers, like George MacDonald, the mentor of C.S. Lewis, wrote both adult and children’s literary romances or fantasies, as did Lewis himself, and as Ursula Le Guin would do in a subsequent generation.
The audience for literary romance was relatively educated and elite. The explosive spread of literacy from the late 18th through the early 20th centuries created an audience hungry for stories but not of the kind characterized by Matthew Arnold’s “high seriousness” and “criticism of life.” If we want to know what Arnold meant by those terms, we can look at his most famous poem, “Dover Beach,” a somberly eloquent expression of the meaninglessness of modern life now that the tide of traditional values has ebbed. In such a world—which is our world—all we can do is “be true to one another.” This is the poem, incidentally, that Montag, the protagonist of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, forces the middle-class housewife of his future dystopia to listen to instead of watching the mindless escapism on her wall-sized TV. Traumatized and outraged, the woman sobs that only a sick person would write something like that. Although a fantasist and science fiction writer, Bradbury here aligns himself with the high culture values of realism and irony, and it is no accident that his novel was filmed by Francois Truffaut, one of the generation of auteur film directors intent on elevating film from popular entertainment to serious art. But the popular audience of the 19th century was not up for either literary romance or sophisticated irony, and a whole new type of storytelling came into being to satisfy it—not primarily in prose fiction but in the more collective public form of the popular theatre, the ancestor of early film and television.
At this point in tracing the history of popular storytelling we are in the position of the hero of romance who can only complete his quest by plunging into a vast, unknown forest. Nineteenth-century theatre is simply not a part of literary history told from a high-culture point of view. You may have a doctorate in English literature, perhaps even with a specialization in the 19th century, without knowing a single thing about it. Although educated people went to the theatre as a guilty pleasure, the 19th-century stage was entirely devoted to popular art aimed at the lower middle and working classes. Scarcely a single “serious” work of art emerged from it to enter the literary canon, and even when Shakespeare was staged, it was a radically popularized Shakespeare that would not, to put it mildly, be approved by modern standards.
By lucky accident in graduate school I acquired a knowledgeable guide to this uncharted forest, the novelist Robertson Davies, whom I think of as the other great Canadian novelist of the generation of Margaret Atwood, although he will never be as popular because he is not a realist. I was already a fan of Davies’ novels when I began graduate studies at the University of Toronto, but I did not sign up initially for his course because it was a theatre-history course. I registered instead for a course on the English Romantics—which I quickly, however, dropped after the hopelessly dry and incompetent professor spent two hours literally lecturing in a monotone out the window, a window that was at right angles to the class, basically delivering a soliloquy on critical theory to invisible beings dwelling in a higher dimension than I inhabited. Knowing I would not survive an entire course of this, I fled to Davies’ class, where I think I was the only non-theatre person in the room. That included the professor, for Davies had an eminent theatrical background as an associate of Tyrone Guthrie, the director instrumental in founding the Stratford, Ontario Shakespeare Festival.
I could not have had a better guide, especially because Davies approached the plays in part through the depth psychology of C.G. Jung, which also explicitly informs his novels, which could be described as comic-satiric novels of ideas. This makes him a kind of latter-day George Bernard Shaw, right down to the huge, white Shavian beard that Davies sported in his later years, although he was free of the streak of rationalism that inhibited Shaw’s basically Romantic vision. I sat at the seminar table in the library of Massey College at the University of Toronto (fictionalized as the setting for Davies’ wonderful novel The Rebel Angels, which he must have been working on while teaching our course, as it was published the following year, 1981) with the Collected Works of C. G. Jung symbolically right behind my back. The year after that, 1982, Davies delivered the Alexander Lectures, published in 1983 as The Mirror of Nature, and the subject he chose was the predominant theatrical genre of the 19th-century theatre, melodrama.
The subject of melodrama brings us back immediately to the issue of literary value judgments, for in our time melodrama has almost ceased to be a literary term and become a value judgment: to say a novel or a film is “melodramatic” is to say that it is sensationalistic, emotionally overblown, naïve, and corny. The remembered images of actual melodrama are not from 19th-century theatre but from the artform that subsumed theatrical melodrama and gave it a whole new life: the silent film. It is from the early films of D.W. Griffith and others that we derive the stock images of melodrama: the moustache-twirling villain tying the heroine to the railroad tracks and all that. The breakthrough film showing the possibilities of this new medium, Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915) is pure melodrama, now chiefly remembered for its hideous racism idealizing the Ku Klux Klan. George Bernard Shaw’s early play The Devil’s Disciple (1897) is, oddly enough, a melodrama also about the birth of the American nation, but from the left rather than the right, a delightful romp that satirizes the conventions even as it shamelessly exploits them. Earlier, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe had used the techniques of melodrama as weapons, opening shots in the war for what we might call the rebirth of a nation. The book was enormously influential not despite but because of its melodramatic style, which means that literary critics have never known quite what to do with it.
What was melodrama to its original audience in the Victorian theatre? As Davies makes clear in his first lecture in The Mirror of Nature, it was an adaptation of the age-old form of romance to the emotional needs of a new, lower-class audience:
It meant a world in which the spectator—poor workingman and his female counterpart, or bourgeois citizen toiling to keep his place in a hurrying world—could equate himself with the Hero, the Heroine, or the Villain in a world of Myth, a world in which these archetypal figures worked out their destiny in an atmosphere where Poetic Justice, however tardy, would manifest itself after many trials and vicissitudes. It was a world of romance. (22)
And that world of romance is an escape. as he says, from reality, “from the purely external world of job, of domesticity, and the pressing needs of the everyday…where justice might be seen at work in a society so often unjust” (22). It offers what the early Gothic melodrama The Castle Spectre calls “Oblivion’s balm,” the title of Davies’ first lecture. That is the first problem, from a high-culture perspective, with melodrama and with most forms of popular art. The first objection is moral rather than aesthetic: these are the opiate of the masses. Marx’s famous phrase referred to religion, but the Poetic Justice Davies refers to indicates the presence of a providential moral order whether or not the melodrama explicitly attributes such justice to God and religion, although indeed it often does. The popular art of both the 19th century and our own time is guilty of peddling opioids, for exactly the reason that the drug companies have peddled them here in Ohio: this is capitalism making a profit by selling a means to numb the pain caused by the social effects of capitalism.
The objection is not without force, but I am reluctant to buy into it without serious qualification because I think that, like most activist ideological criticism, it oversimplifies a complex situation. For one thing, it risks underestimating its audience: complaining of stereotypes, it tends to stereotype popular audiences as at best gullible, at worst morally lax, falling short of the austerely stoic high-mindedness necessary to stare without flinching at the hard truth of life. In The Productions of Time, I made a case for romance and satire as being potentially in the yin-yang form of Blakean Contraries. Amazingly, Victorian theatre audiences managed this balance of idealistic yearning and humorous detachment without the benefit of literary theory. Naïve? “Not a bit of it,” Davies says. “In the slang of their own time, they knew perfectly well what o’clock it was, and that romance, though sweet on the palate, was not all there was to life” (23). As proof, he offers the Epilogue to the very Castle Spectre that had in its opening promised oblivion’s balm. The heroine Angela comes on stage and addresses the audience, summing up what it has just seen. The villain Osmond, she says,
well deserved his fate, He heeded not papa’s pathetic pleading; He stabbed mamma—which was extreme ill-breeding…. To save my honour, and protect my sire, I drew my knife, and in his bosom stuckit He fell, you clapped, and then he kicked the bucket. (24)
One of the places melodrama has survived is in those often-disapproved-of superhero comics and movies. It was part of the brilliance of Stan Lee in the early 1960’s to counterpoint melodrama’s tendency to humorless solemnity with wiseacre comic dialogue. In Fantastic Four Annual #3, the wedding of Susan Storm and Reed Richards in 1963, there is a general melee in which the Hulk goes up against Captain America, who has minimal super powers. But when the Hulk is unable to land a punch, he grumbles, “How do you move so fast?” and Cap immediately shoots back, "Clean livin’ does it, sonny.” No one had heard anything like this before, and it quickly became part of Marvel house style. I have the original art for a page of The Defenders in which Dr. Strange is so deeply in a meditative trance that he is almost hit by a baseball flying out of bounds from a kids’ game. He levitates to safety at the last minute, prompting the boy chasing the ball to ask, “How’d you do that?” The doctor replies, “Magic.” The boy says, “Aw, c’mon—there’s no such thing! You’re pulling my leg!” Dr. Strange quips, “From ‘way over here? Well, then, it must be magic.” But to himself he ruefully concludes, “On need only ponder the undignified aspect of a Sorcerer Supreme with a broken nose to grasp the urgency of my search into self.”
The general plot of a typical melodrama reproduces the archetypal formulas of romance: good versus evil, the hero versus the villain, the happily-ever-after ending including the hero getting the girl. Jung serves Davies well by providing psychologically-rooted archetypal character types: the Villain is the Jungian shadow, the love interest is the Jungian anima, the Wise Old Man is the Self, and so on. Davies lays this out more fully in an essay titled “Jung and the Theatre.” Another contemporary survival, or rebirth, of melodrama in popular culture is the original Star Wars trilogy. In conceiving it, George Lucas was influenced by Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, but there is a strong Jungian element in Campbell (who edited The Portable Jung). I might add that the charm of that original trilogy lay in the counterpointing of suspenseful plot with the kind of light-hearted mood and bantering dialogue about which we have been speaking. We note that an identifying trait of villains, from Darth Vader to Thanos to Voldemort, is a self-absorbed, brooding humorlessness, often accompanied by a wardrobe preference for black. Batman’s darkness of both mood and color scheme mark him as a hero-villain. In Tolkien, the half-comic mood of The Hobbit gave way to the dark solemnity of Lord of the Rings, whose eucatastrophe has the accent on the catastrophe. As his essay on fairy tales is a critical companion to The Hobbit, the critical companion of Lord of the Rings is Tolkien’s celebrated essay on Beowulf, so that the influence of fairy tale romance gives way to the influence of tragic epic. A similar darkening takes place over the course of the Harry Potter books. Behind all these writers stands Dickens, who achieved his early success by adopting the formulas of melodrama to the novel, and whose mood also darkened in his later career. The tear-jerker pathos of the death of Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop and the cliffhanger suspense that caused women to faint in Dickens’ live readings (facilitated by corsets that kept them from breathing adequately when excited) are right out of the melodramatic tradition—and thus disqualified Dickens in the mainstream critical view from being a serious novelist. When F.R. Leavis omitted Dickens from his canon-making work of critical value judgment The Great Tradition (1948), he was expressing a majority view, just a little more forthrightly than usual.
The word “melodrama” means musical drama and originated in the fact that stage melodramas had a more or less continuous musical accompaniment. This gives them a kinship with opera and musical theatre, which are frequently melodrama completely subsumed into music. Some forms of melodrama are called “opera” to signal the kinship even though they do not depend on music: soap opera, and the type of science fiction adventure story called “space opera” of which Star Wars is a nostalgic half-recreation, half-parody. Early silent film melodramas often featured live musical accompaniment, with an organist or orchestra in the pit, and modern film often divides between the popular and the elite according to the presence or absence of a soundtrack. Stage dramas, and art films like those of Ingmar Bergman (who began and ended his career as a theatre director) do not have a soundtrack because life doesn’t have a soundtrack. What does the musical accompaniment do? It intensifies the mood, whatever the mood happens to be at the moment. It heightens it, and makes the action seem larger than life.
Aside from music proper, melodrama is characterized by a verbal music: the characters tend to speak, especially in moments of emotion or crisis, in a grandiloquent rhetoric, no doubt derived from the verse drama of Shakespeare’s age but displaced downward on the social class ladder—a technique that had its dangers. It was one thing for Shakespeare’s well-born characters to speak in thunderous volleys of iambic pentameter, another thing to have characters from common life attempting the same thing, as Shakespeare shows when the “rude mechanicals” attempt to put on the tragic Pyramis and Thisbe play in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. With their bombastic, ludicrously overblown speeches, the actors murder the English language long before they put an end to themselves. Hamlet’s famous phrase about holding the mirror up to nature has as its context his advice to the players warning them not to overact in such a melodramatic fashion. Mind you, Hamlet is not a totally reliable critic: he praises the First Player’s tearful recitation of an archaic and corny translation of the death of Priam in Virgil’s Aeneid. In Kenneth Branagh’s film of Hamlet, Charlton Heston delivered that recitation exactly as the 19th century would have loved it, hamming it up shamelessly and having a great time of it. For the 19th-century audience wanted a heightened speech rendering a heightened reality. As Davies puts it, “The humble nineteenth-century playgoer went to the theatre to hear people like himself talking not as he talked but rather as he would talk if it lay within his power” (14).
Hence, when the sailor in the nautical melodrama Black Eyed Susan sets foot on shore to find his love, he shouts, “My noble fellows, my heart jumps like a dolphin—my head turns round like a capstern; I feel as if I were driving before the gale of pleasure for the haven of joy” (13). In this as in other things Dickens follows melodramatic conventions. As Davies goes on to say, “Dickens can make a humble clerk like Dick Swiveller say, ‘Fan the sinking flame of hilarity with the wing of friendship; and pass the rosy wine.’ Where did Dick learn to talk like that? In the theatre, probably” (14). Gilbert and Sullivan parody the excesses of this rhetoric in another nautical melodrama, H.M.S. Pinafore, when a common seaman says,
I am poor in the essence of happiness, lady—rich only in never-ending unrest. In me there meet a combination of antithetical elements which are at eternal war with one another. Driven hither by objective influences—thither by subjective emotions—wafted one moment into blazing day, by mocking hope—plunged the next into the Cimmerian darkness of tangible despair, I am but a living ganglion of irreconcilable antagonisms. I hope I make myself clear, lady?
To which his true love responds, “His simple eloquence goes to my heart!” (52). The funniest thing about that speech is that it is an exaggeration—but not by much. This “simple eloquence” is a tendency carried on in the superhero tradition, in which it is especially the villains that speechify: “Puny mortal! How dare you oppose the cosmic, world-rending power of Galactus, eater of universes?” Or some such. They all do it, and we take it for granted, understanding on some deep level that the story is reaching for archetypal rather than realistic status.
What is the appeal—to some of us, anyway—of such popular art? Davies, faced with the question, rises to his own kind of rhetorical eloquence:
For years I have been telling my students that the theatre is a coarse art. By that I mean that it is coarse as music is coarse; it appeals immediately to primary, not secondary elements in human nature, and if drama and music cannot grab you with a fine strong effect, all the elaboration of intellectual art will go for nothing. Drama and music must appeal to people who are not learned in critical theory as well as to the highly informed; the primary assault must be upon the senses, not upon the intellect. Once the emotional pressure has been achieved, refinements of all kinds, and of the uttermost tenuity, are possible, but they are not in themselves capable of creating and sustaining great art. (46-47)
Because I come from a modern version of the same social class at which melodrama was directed, I am rooted in that coarseness of the senses and emotions. If it were not too coarse a way to put it, some people would say that popular art is shit. But shit is fertilizer, a metaphor that plays a key role in Davies’ novel The Rebel Angels. I think of the countless comic books I grew up on, the science fiction and fantasy, the naïve and sometimes goofy movies and TV shows, and do not regret the time I “wasted” on them.
Nor are we done with melodrama as a culture, despite the outcry against the Hollywood Academy’s proposal of a Best Popular Film category, which I for one am sorry they drew back from. Out of the 2022 Best Picture Oscar nominees, West Side Story adapts Shakespearean tragedy in the best melodramatic fashion by replacing the high-born characters with those of humbler origin. Dune is “space opera,” Nightmare Alley a Gothic melodrama by way of film noir, and The Power of the Dog a deconstruction of the melodramatic form of the Western, of which more next time. Belfast is realistic and autobiographical, but it is careful to show how, surrounded in 1969 by the troubles in Ireland, the young boy who will grow up to be Kenneth Branagh lives in his imagination, which is dominated by Thor comic books and Star Trek. I have run out of time to arrive where we are headed, which is a discussion of the survival of romance, especially in the popularized form we call melodrama, in modern “category fiction,” so I will have to postpone that discussion until the next newsletter, ending for now, appropriately, in the tradition of the cliffhanger. I hope the suspense will be almost, but not quite, unbearable.
References
Davies, Robertson. The Mirror of Nature. The Alexander Lectures, 1982. University of Toronto Press, 1983.
Davies, Robertson. “Jung and the Theatre.” In One Half of Robertson Davies, Penguin 1977. 143-60.