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Trivias Humorous - Robertson Davies

“The love of truth lies at the root of much humor.”  Robertson Davies
 

Much has been written about Davies, one of Canada’s most celebrated writers, and much about his live and work is easily accessible on the Internet. 
Some links to fairly comprehensive bio info are provided at the bottom. But first here are few tidbits.
 
·         Davies was born in 1913 in Thamesville in Southwestern Ontario, the home of the Bull Dog Steel Wool Company and near the site of the War of 1812 Battle of the Thames that saw the death of Shawnee Leader Tecumseh.


·         His real first name was William: William Robertson Davies.   He had two older brothers: Fred, the eldest, and Arthur.


·         His father Rupert Davies, an immigrant from Wales, became an influential and important newspaper owner, businessman, and eventually a member of the Canadian Senate.

 
·         The newspaper business brought the Davies family to Renfrew in the Ottawa Valley when Robertson was a boy.  He did not like the place, later calling it one of “spiritual deprivation.”

 
·         Fred ended his formal education at Renfrew collegiate; Arthur went on to study art at Northern Vocational School in Toronto; Robertson attended Upper Canada College, Queen’s University, and eventually Oxford University.

 
·         Davies attended Balliol College at Oxford.  He may be a distinguished graduate of the college but far from the most noteworthy.  Its graduates include three British Prime Ministers, and many other figures from politics and the arts, including philosopher Adam Smith. 

 
·         An actor in England when he was a young man, Davies, although he moved on to other things, retained his passion for the theatre all of his life, writing plays, several with commercial success, until he experienced the pain of high profile failure in New York with his 1960 production of Love and Libel .   
 
·         Davies was, in fact, immensely interested in the history of the theatre, which he called “one of my great hobbies.” He started the Dominion Drama Festival and was one of the first people to serve on the Board of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival.

·         His greatest novel writing successes took the form of a trilogy of trilogies: the Cornish Trilogy which revolves around the life and the aftermath of the death of an odd art collector named Francis Cornish; the Salterton Trilogy which included the Leacock Medal winning Leaven of Malice; and the Deptford Trilogy which featured the writer’s best-known work the Fifth Business.
 
·         The Fifth Business is in the form of a long letter written by a college headmaster upon his retirement.   
 
·         In 1947, Davies fell ill, was diagnosed with Hodgkins disease, a type of cancer, was treated, and recovered.  He may have been misdiagnosed.

·         Davies was the Editor of the Peterborough Examiner newspaper at the time that he wrote Leaven of Malice.   During those days, the Examiner featured regular editorials by a grumpy writer named Samuel Marchbanks, who was later revealed to be a pseudonym for Davies.

·         Leaven of Malice features a newspaper editor pestered by a would-be freelance writer who ends up being the hapless scoundrel of the story.  During this period, Fred Davies had pestered his younger brother the Editor for freelance work including funding for a trip to Nassau in the Bahamas where Fred died in a car accident just months before Leaven of Malice was published.

 
·         Reviews of Leaven of Malice were very positive for the most part with some notable exceptions usually from the hands of Canadian critics including Davies’ friend and newspaperman Arnold Edinborough.  Any negative criticism of Leaven of Malice today normally takes the form of comparison with Davies’ better known and presumed superior works.

·         Davies was among the most celebrated and successful authors in Canadian literature, but even his publisher (Penguin) did not always identify him as a writer, regularly listing his professions as actor, publisher, and professor.

·         When Davies died in 1995, the CBC broadcasted his funeral live.

Sources
Robertson Davies: A Portrait in Mosaic, Val Ross, M&S, 2008
Athabasca University - Canadian Writers - Robertson Davies

Leaven of Wicked Wit

Robertson Davies and I have a lot in common.  We both spent many years in the Peterborough and Kawartha Lakes region of Central Ontario.  We both grew wiry, unreasonable beards.   He was an erudite, imaginative writer skilled in many genres.  I know how to type.
He wrote Leaven of Malice.  I read it.
Strange that despite these myriad connections, I still struggle to describe my affection for Davies and his writing.   It may be that I need to spend a few years acting in the English theatre, attending Oxford, and working as a literary critic to fully comprehend and elucidate Davies.  His narratives and descriptions which always amaze, as well as amuse, me, draw on all those experiences.  I have scrutinized his life and remain an admirer, but I have a hard time pulling the fibres together to explain exactly why.
 It may have been his urbane manner.  I am not exactly sure what urbane means, but it strikes me as a word that was invented to describe writers and wicked wits like Robertson Davies.  He had a style, a level of culture, and a sophistication that remains uncommon in our rustic little corner of the northern Earth, and it might be one of those things best savoured without the disruption of dissection and over analysis.
I manage to avoid worrying too much in reading most of his books, and the 1955 Leacock Medal winning Leaven of Malice (published in 1954) can be enjoyed without trying to explain why. 
Yet I must admit to recognizing one specific reason why I particularly liked this book.  It is the association with Peterborough and the profession of journalism.
Davies was, according to his publisher and other authorities, really thinking about Kingston, Ontario, when he painted the picture of the town of Salterton in this and its trilogical companion books (the earlier Tempest-Tost (1951) and finally A Mixture of Frailties (1958)).   But he was living and working as the editor of the Peterborough Examiner at the time he wrote the second book, and this information is the mental touchstone I reference when reading this, the ninth recipient of the Leacock Medal for Humour.

As well as reflecting the Davies style, the Leaven of Malice is indeed a humorous story: one instigated by a practical joke, a false engagement announcement placed in the local paper, The Salterton Evening Bellman.  The announcement, which opens the book and launches the drama, begins by stating that “Professor and Mrs. Walter Vambrace are pleased to announce the engagement of their daughter, Pearl Veronica, to Solomon Bridgetower, Esq.”   The Vambrace and Bridgetower families were not on friendly terms and thus the joke, the embarrassment, and the quest to find the false-announcement culprit.
The Vambrace-Bridgetower feud was a mannerly version of the Hatfields and McCoys having its roots in a career-defining slight from the local university.  This set the stage for a satirical account of academic ambition.  Add in the affairs of the local Anglican congregation, the airs of an aging journalist, and the general busy-bodiness of a small town and you have the ingredients for a sophisticated spoof and the kind of humour that likely elevated the stature of the Leacock Medal through its association.
Character depictions are among this great writer’s strengths, and there is quite a cast.  In addition to Solly Bridgewater, his mother, the Vambraces, their lawyer Matthew Snelgrove, and the Dean of the Cathedral, the book includes a number of truly odd characters like the shoddy Bevill Higgin and charming Humprhey Cobbler. 
I particularly liked the meticulous portrayal of Snelgrove who was described as not only a lawyer in reality but also a lawyer in a score of “stagey mannerisms” ... “ a lawyer who joined the tips of his fingers while listening to a client; a lawyer who closed his eyes and smacked his lips disconcertingly while others talked; a lawyer who tugged and polished his long nose with a very large handkerchief; a lawyer who coughed dryly before speaking; a lawyer who used his eyeglasses not so much as aids to vision as for peeping over, snatching from the nose, rubbing on the lapel, and wagging in his listener’s face.”
Instead of a distraction or delay, the repetition and specifics all seem like a logical path leading to Snelgrove’s interest in pushing for a legal assault on The Bellman and its “negligent” editor, Gloster Ridley.
While one could get lost in the forest of personalities and intrigue, it is pretty clear that Ridley is the protagonistic focal point of the story, and it is easy to believe that Davies was drawing his hero from his own experiences behind the editor’s desk at the Examiner even if the imaginary Salterton was echoing Kingston and not Peterborough.  
The book opens and closes around Ridley. It begins with his typical day and his anticipation of an honorary degree as reward for his role in forming the journalism program at the local university.
It is mildly uplifting from the perspective of any fragile connection to Davies that his reworked self, Ridley, decides at the end of the book, after witnessing the parade of pretension and pomposity induced by the Leaven of Malice, that he does not want the honorary degree or validation from the community behind it after all.
I like to think that it suggests that Davies might have been just as happy to be away from such a place and harboured, as I have been told, at least a few positive thoughts for  the non-Salterton Peterborough and his time in the Editor’s job in that place on the fringe of our Kawarthas.

OPL Blog - Humour Writing TIps

Ottawa Public Library Blog Bits 

1) The Rule of Threes 

Triads - sets of three -feature in lots of writing as a way of emphasizing a point.  To create a humorous effect in this format, a writer can say (1) something expected, (2) something expected, and (2) then something unexpected.  The technique is a function of the incongruity quality of humour and operates by hitting the reader with a twist. Two items provide just enough repetition to establish a pattern without boring the audience or reader. The third provides the surprise. For a master work in this technique read books by former CBC personality Arthur Black, three of them won the Leacock Medal: Black in the Saddle (1997), Black Tie and Tales (2000), and Pitch Black(2006).
   

2) Metaphors and Similes  

Well-crafted similes will immediately strike you as apt and reveal a truth, and yet they’re unexpected, musical, and literate.  In the 1973 Leacock Medal book The Outside Chance of Maximillian Glick master storyteller Morley Torgov invokes such imagery to describe young Max’s home town dominated by a steel mill: it “sprawled like a gathering of dragons, belching smoke and fire” and Max’s growing interest in the opposite sex: “on-again-off-again manhood . . . constantly trailed Max like an uninvited pet, usually a few paces behind, sometimes drawing alongside, sometimes even a pace or two ahead.”  It’s not easy.  A metaphor that is merely unusual can take too much work to understand or too much humour-crushing explanation.  Again, try to study the masters like Torgov

3) Big Incongruity
If you want to underpin a whole story or presentation with a humorous feel, you might consider framing it with a pervasive incongruity. The second book win the Leacock Medal Sarah Binks (1948 –author Paul Hiebert) presents the modest life story of an early 20th century poetess along with samples of her bad poetry.  It is funny because it is cloaked in an over-the-top effusive literary biography that seems absurd at every turn.  The narrator describes Sarah’s major award, the Wheat Pool Medal which recognizes increased production, as among “the highest awards . . . ever . . . bestowed upon one of Saskatchewan’s Daughters” and the “highest award in the bestowal of Saskatchewan people.”  A comparable approach to a speech presentation might be to do it in costume or with a funny backdrop throughout.

4) Good intentions go wrong

Canadian humour seems to have a soft spot for well-intentioned hosers.  It becomes funny when we recognize how it can all go wrong.   In his 1969 Leacock Medal book You’re Only as Old as You Act, New Brunswick journalist Stuart Trueman tells the story of his friend Roly who has his head turned one Christmas by exposure to four speeches on keeping up “the goodwill of Yuletide . . . all the year.” When Roly decides to leave his Christmas tree and decorations up, neighbours brand him a tightwad “trying to make one tree last two Christmases.” His persistent goodwill wishing causes friends to assume he has something to sell and then “the rumour flew around that Roly was going into politics !!!  and shouldn’t be trusted.”

5) Comparisons in a Series

While many speeches and writings follow a logical cause-and-effect story format, some information requires the presentation of a series of facts or policy elements.   This can be done in a humorous way by comparing each element to how it might be perceived from another perspective like that of a client, a taxpayer, or a competitor.  The 1965 Leacock Medal Book by Globe and Mail columnist George Bain (Nursery Rhymes to be read aloud by Young Parents of Old Children) appears at first like a children’s book with colourful illustrations and verse laid out in the abecedarium (A is for ape, B is for beaver) style for kids on every other page.  The book as a whole becomes funny because each of these pages sits opposite one of prose, biological information, and facts that are meant to be cheat sheets for parents who have to deal with the awkward questions that the pages for kids will induce.

6) Physical Descriptions

Try to describe the physical or technical features of a policy, a project or friend in a way that comments on the essential character you want to mock or emphasize.  In Donald Jack’s third Leacock Medal winner, Me Bandy You Cissie, the hero describes his first meeting with his girlfriend’s father by inventorying the great man’s features: “At the top end of a pair of heavy, sloping shoulders stood a boulder of a head, on which a thrusting face had been carved . . . with its expanse of pallid brow below a mat of uncombed graying hair, its domineering nose and wide, stubborn mouth … (his eyes) …were positively alarming . . . when they were fixed on you, you could actually feel your own personality draining away into your sweaty socks.”

7) Unrelated Story

If you are struggling to find something funny in the writing project before you, stand back and think of a totally unrelated story that has made you laugh in the past; it can be a joke or a personal experience. Then think of the fundamental human concerns that made it funny and see if there is a way to tie it into some aspect of the underlying interests at play in the subject of your current writing.  John Levesque, author of the 1993 Leacock Medal winner Waiting for Aquarius, often began his columns with reminiscences drawn from his childhood and teen years.  In reporting on changing demographics, he led with the story of a six-year-old friend who had to keep a back-pocket list to remember the names of his sixteen siblings; he explored office politics by recalling a grade school exchange of Valentines; and he tied Descartes to his dog, physics to sentient trees, diapers to inventions.

8) Dramatize the Ordinary

Another way to use incongruity to present seemingly dull information is to dramatize the seriousness in a satirical or ironic way.  The celebrated Vancouver humorist and multiple Leacock Medalist Eric Nicol applied this approach to great effect in his book, Girdle Me a Globe, which reports on a year-long, round-the-world honeymoon trip.  He complains a lot, details the aggravation of packing clothes, and fusses over dinner jackets and satin pants. Nicol describes foreign laundries in epic terms, shudders over the ordeal of standing on marble floors, and talks of the multi-gauge Australian railway with terror - all to mock travel writers who dramatize their adventures for personal puffery and to, at the same time,  make readers recognize the common features of life everywhere.

9) Ridicule the fearsome

It is cathartic to mock the things that scare us individually or as communities and organizations.  By making it sound silly, it minimizes it and makes it seem manageable.  In W.O. Mitchell’s Jake and the Kid, the hired man Jake and other yarn-spinners all say they have “the deepest snow, the worst dust storms, the biggest hailstones . . . Rust and dust and hail and sawfly and cutworm and drought.”  Their tall tales are explained by a character who says “These men lie about the things that hurt them most . . . If a man can laugh at them he’s won half the battle . . . When he exaggerates things he isn’t lying really; it’s a defense . . . He can either do that or squeal.”


10) Make fun of yourself

Unless overdone or insincere, self-deprecating humour is usually a pretty safe and effective fall back in any setting and any form of writing.  Again, it always helps to stand back and look at yourself and your work from a different perspective.  In his book, Mice in the Beer (1963 Leacock Medal winner) the author Norman Ward, a political scientist and academic, explains to a passing workman that musing over an academic article with eyes closed while sitting under a tree is considered work for a university professor.  “When I write articles, my wife calls it loafing,” says the man, who then tries to make amends saying “For a fellow who never does anything but read books . . . you seem to know a lot.”


From: 

What’s So Funny ?
Lessons from Canada’s Leacock Medal
for Humour Writing

Dick Bourgeois-Doyle
General Store Publishing House, 2015


Tips for adding Humour to Your Writing

Ottawa Public Library Blog Bits 

The Rule of Threes 

Triads - sets of three -feature in lots of writing as a way of emphasizing a point.  To create a humorous effect in this format, a writer can say (1) something expected, (2) something expected, and (2) then something unexpected.  The technique is a function of the incongruity quality of humour and operates by hitting the reader with a twist. Two items provide just enough repetition to establish a pattern without boring the audience or reader. The third provides the surprise. For a master work in this technique read books by former CBC personality Arthur Black, three of them won the Leacock Medal: Black in the Saddle (1997), Black Tie and Tales (2000), and Pitch Black(2006).
   

Metaphors and Similes  

Well-crafted similes will immediately strike you as apt and reveal a truth, and yet they’re unexpected, musical, and literate.  In the 1973 Leacock Medal book The Outside Chance of Maximillian Glick master storyteller Morley Torgov invokes such imagery to describe young Max’s home town dominated by a steel mill: it “sprawled like a gathering of dragons, belching smoke and fire” and Max’s growing interest in the opposite sex: “on-again-off-again manhood . . . constantly trailed Max like an uninvited pet, usually a few paces behind, sometimes drawing alongside, sometimes even a pace or two ahead.”  It’s not easy.  A metaphor that is merely unusual can take too much work to understand or too much humour-crushing explanation.  Again, try to study the masters like Torgov. 


Big Incongruity
If you want to underpin a whole story or presentation with a humorous feel, you might consider framing it with a pervasive incongruity. The second book win the Leacock Medal Sarah Binks (1948 –author Paul Hiebert) presents the modest life story of an early 20th century poetess along with samples of her bad poetry.  It is funny because it is cloaked in an over-the-top effusive literary biography that seems absurd at every turn.  The narrator describes Sarah’s major award, the Wheat Pool Medal which recognizes increased production, as among “the highest awards . . . ever . . . bestowed upon one of Saskatchewan’s Daughters” and the “highest award in the bestowal of Saskatchewan people.”  A comparable approach to a speech presentation might be to do it in costume or with a funny backdrop throughout.

Good intentions go wrong

Canadian humour seems to have a soft spot for well-intentioned hosers.  It becomes funny when we recognize how it can all go wrong.   In his 1969 Leacock Medal book You’re Only as Old as You Act, New Brunswick journalist Stuart Trueman tells the story of his friend Roly who has his head turned one Christmas by exposure to four speeches on keeping up “the goodwill of Yuletide . . . all the year.” When Roly decides to leave his Christmas tree and decorations up, neighbours brand him a tightwad “trying to make one tree last two Christmases.” His persistent goodwill wishing causes friends to assume he has something to sell and then “the rumour flew around that Roly was going into politics !!!  and shouldn’t be trusted.”

Comparisons in a Series

While many speeches and writings follow a logical cause-and-effect story format, some information requires the presentation of a series of facts or policy elements.   This can be done in a humorous way by comparing each element to how it might be perceived from another perspective like that of a client, a taxpayer, or a competitor.  The 1965 Leacock Medal Book by Globe and Mail columnist George Bain (Nursery Rhymes to be read aloud by Young Parents of Old Children) appears at first like a children’s book with colourful illustrations and verse laid out in the abecedarium (A is for ape, B is for beaver) style for kids on every other page.  The book as a whole becomes funny because each of these pages sits opposite one of prose, biological information, and facts that are meant to be cheat sheets for parents who have to deal with the awkward questions that the pages for kids will induce.


Physical Descriptions

Try to describe the physical or technical features of a policy, a project or friend in a way that comments on the essential character you want to mock or emphasize.  In Donald Jack’s third Leacock Medal winner, Me Bandy You Cissie, the hero describes his first meeting with his girlfriend’s father by inventorying the great man’s features: “At the top end of a pair of heavy, sloping shoulders stood a boulder of a head, on which a thrusting face had been carved . . . with its expanse of pallid brow below a mat of uncombed graying hair, its domineering nose and wide, stubborn mouth … (his eyes) …were positively alarming . . . when they were fixed on you, you could actually feel your own personality draining away into your sweaty socks.”

Unrelated Story

If you are struggling to find something funny in the writing project before you, stand back and think of a totally unrelated story that has made you laugh in the past; it can be a joke or a personal experience. Then think of the fundamental human concerns that made it funny and see if there is a way to tie it into some aspect of the underlying interests at play in the subject of your current writing.  John Levesque, author of the 1993 Leacock Medal winner Waiting for Aquarius, often began his columns with reminiscences drawn from his childhood and teen years.  In reporting on changing demographics, he led with the story of a six-year-old friend who had to keep a back-pocket list to remember the names of his sixteen siblings; he explored office politics by recalling a grade school exchange of Valentines; and he tied Descartes to his dog, physics to sentient trees, diapers to inventions.

Dramatize the Ordinary

Another way to use incongruity to present seemingly dull information is to dramatize the seriousness in a satirical or ironic way.  The celebrated Vancouver humorist and multiple Leacock Medalist Eric Nicol applied this approach to great effect in his book, Girdle Me a Globe, which reports on a year-long, round-the-world honeymoon trip.  He complains a lot, details the aggravation of packing clothes, and fusses over dinner jackets and satin pants. Nicol describes foreign laundries in epic terms, shudders over the ordeal of standing on marble floors, and talks of the multi-gauge Australian railway with terror - all to mock travel writers who dramatize their adventures for personal puffery and to, at the same time,  make readers recognize the common features of life everywhere.


Ridicule the fearsome

It is cathartic to mock the things that scare us individually or as communities and organizations.  By making it sound silly, it minimizes it and makes it seem manageable.  In W.O. Mitchell’s Jake and the Kid, the hired man Jake and other yarn-spinners all say they have “the deepest snow, the worst dust storms, the biggest hailstones . . . Rust and dust and hail and sawfly and cutworm and drought.”  Their tall tales are explained by a character who says “These men lie about the things that hurt them most . . . If a man can laugh at them he’s won half the battle . . . When he exaggerates things he isn’t lying really; it’s a defense . . . He can either do that or squeal.”


Make fun of yourself


Unless overdone or insincere, self-deprecating humour is usually a pretty safe and effective fall back in any setting and any form of writing.  Again, it always helps to stand back and look at yourself and your work from a different perspective.  In his book, Mice in the Beer (1963 Leacock Medal winner) the author Norman Ward, a political scientist and academic, explains to a passing workman that musing over an academic article with eyes closed while sitting under a tree is considered work for a university professor.  “When I write articles, my wife calls it loafing,” says the man, who then tries to make amends saying “For a fellow who never does anything but read books . . . you seem to know a lot.”


From: 

What’s So Funny ?
Lessons from Canada’s Leacock Medal
for Humour Writing

Dick Bourgeois-Doyle

General Store Publishing House, 2015