Back to the Classics #16

I read this book for the reading challenge Back to the Classics 2022.

Wild Card Classic: At a used book sale I found this novel, first published in 1972. The back cover blurb said it is the second volume of The Deptford Trilogy. It assured me that I didn’t have to read the first, Fifth Business, to appreciate The Manticore as a stand-alone novel. I like to live dangerously so I thought I’d go for it. Unpredictable, unforeseeable, like a wild card should be. And costing only 50 cents, an attraction in our inflation-ridden days.

The Manticore – Robertson Davies

Attorney David Staunton has made a name for himself in late Sixties Toronto. Like Perry Mason, he dazzles courtroom spectators with cunning cross-examinations and flashy flimflam. Like Sydney Carton, he puts away a fifth of whiskey a day. His breakdown upon the sudden mysterious death of his father makes David realize he is facing the choice “Get help, or go mad.” Because he has never met a person cured by never-ending Freudian therapy, David ends up in Zürich with a Jungian therapist.

Davies has three purposes in this novel: to teach, to preach and to entertain. Obviously a hardcore reader and seeker, Davies presents an overview of Jungian psychology. For example, Jungian archetypes are images and symbols that derive from our collective unconscious, the mental predispositions we all share as part of our human nature. David and his therapist discuss events and themes in his life in order to examine his problems in terms of archetypes such the The Friend, The Anima, and The Shadow. This, on The Persona.

We all create an outward self with which to face the world, and some people come to believe that is what they truly are. So they people the world with doctors who are nothing outside of the consulting-room, and judges who are nothing when they are not in court, and business men who wither with boredom when they have to retire from business, and teachers who are forever teaching. That is why they are such poor specimens when they are caught without their masks on. They have lived chiefly through the Persona.

This instructional material was curious and interesting to me, a seeker who’s for anything that gets me to examine my unexamined life, from reading novels to wandering in green spaces. Note to self: Jungian psychology, like Taoism, has too many concepts to be parsimonious enough to study for a simpleton impatient and awkward with highly abstract ideas.

As to preaching, the novel was written in the “God is Dead” era of the late Sixties and early Seventies when lots of people were groping for answers to their social, psychological and spiritual issues. I think a lot of seekers then and now would agree with a character in this novel who says, “Be sure you choose what you believe and know why you believe it, because if you don't choose your beliefs, you may be certain that some belief, and probably not a very credible one, will choose you.”

Yessir, a clear set of values will help resiliency, not to mention fighting illusion and facing reality. And keeping in the mind the attitude of despair has been a mere fashion at times in history, Davies has a priest say,

Now I want you to remember something because I don't think we shall meet again very soon. It is this; however fashionable despair about the world and about people may be at present, and however powerful despair may become in the future, not everybody, or even most people, think and live fashionably; virtue and honour will not be banished from the world, however many popular moralists and panicky journalists say so. Sacrifice will not cease to be because psychiatrists have popularized the idea that there is often some concealed, self-serving element in it; theologians always knew that. Nor do I think love as a high condition of honour will be lost; it is a pattern in the spirit, and people long to make the pattern a reality in their own lives, whatever means they take to do so. In short, Davey, God is not dead. And I can assure you God is not mocked.

From the entertainment angle, Davies calls to mind Wilkie Collins, a writer who keeps things lively with various narrative devices. Davies uses journaling, play-like dialogues, straight narrative, and time jumps back and forth to relate David’s retrospection. And similarly to Charles Dickens, Davies uses a variety of Forsterian flat characters for comic and tragic purposes. I thought David remembering his mother Leola Cruikshank Staunton through a child’s eyes was especially persuasive; the terrible Christmas and other kid memories when he treated people badly were persuasive. 

Davies’ prose reads smoothly, mixing in the occasional funny name like Leola Cruikshank or strange old word like "absolonism" and "merry-begot." Thankfully, Davies does not shy away from what his bourgeois readers would call shocking either. He can do both shockingly distasteful and shockingly funny.

I enjoyed this clever novel, with its odd characters, its survey of a mystical thought, and its moralistic view. Davies seems forbearing with foibles, vices, and abuses but tough-minded about reaping what we sow. Readers that should steer clear are those who don’t like a male author to be too big a fool about women or don’t like educated characters sounding too much the same because they talk too cleverly. Other readers may dislike an author to be too satirically opinionated, learning too proudly displayed, tone too high-minded, or incidents too theatrical.