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For Your Eye Alone

To Horace Davenport

Massey College
University of Toronto
[ after November 18, 1984 ]

Dear Horace:

Many thanks for your letter and the photographs. Do you, as I do, look with astonishment at every picture of yourself? I don't feel like I look at all like what I obviously look like.. Yes, I meant the copy of the Gillman for you, and I am glad you liked it. And I am interested in your speculation about how many of my hearers took "Death, thou shalt die," as you say 90% of them must have been atheists. I knew that, and did it on purpose, because I like to jolt atheists, a group of marked instability.

In my experience, which includes some very good scientists, atheists are people who have rejected the Faith They Learned at Mother's Knee, and have never considered that such a faith was the intellectual equivalent of The Three Bears. They never think that religion might be a poetic approach to some important questions, and that of all poetry, only about a third is good poetry. They have believed that salvation is free - which would make it the only thing in a complex world which is not achieved by a serious struggle - and they have very sensibly rejected such an idea as nonsense. Christianity is very much to blame for this; the notion that salvation is free and may be attained by the idlest, the dullest, the stupidest is understandably very popular with persons who may be so described. Christianity was very hard toward the Gnostics, who suggested that maybe salvation called for some intelligence and the rigorous exercise thereof. And the idea of the Pale Galilean - the Sanctified Wimp - has appealed to the inadequate everywhere. Whatever Christ may have been in historic reality - and I suspect that he was the lucky one of a score of wandering prophets teaching a roughly similar faith - he cannot have been an ineffective boob. Christ as a poetic ideal, as a paradigm of the fully-realized soul, is quite another matter and hasn't much to do with the carpenter's son. Persuasion, for its splendid ritual and its music which, as Aldous Huxley said, grace what one really believes with style. But what I really believe is the work of another kind of idiot. But perhaps now and then I may make them wonder if they really do know all the answers.So I quote Donne to them, hoping that for an instant the chilly laboratory walls of their minds may be darkened by a fine seventeenth century shadow.

Regards

Rob

[ end of letter one, starting letter two ]

To THE NEW YORKER

Massey College
University of Toronto
December 15, 1992

Dear Sirs:

Will you please stop sending me cute notes asking why I have not renewed my subscription. I did indeed renew it in October, for two years so will you now stop wasting time and postage on this matter.

For several months past you have been sending me three copies of every issue. Although I am happy to re-direct two of them to Old Folks' Homes and asylums for circulation managers who have lost their minds, I assure you I really only need one copy. It will save you money if you will look into this matter.

Yours sincerely,

Robertson Davies

I've always been a fan of Robertson Davies, so when I read about For Your Eye Alone in the Times book section I knew I'd want to read it. And I'm so glad I did. This book is funny, thought provoking, and interesting. It makes you see how versatile Davies's interests were. As these letters weren't written for the public eye, they're politically incorrect in many cases, which makes them even more delicious to read.