A Celtic Temperament

See my full review at The Emerald City Book Review. Here's the latest posthumous publication from one of my all time favorite novelists and essayists, the Canadian literary magus Robertson Davies. Davies was a voluminous diarist who kept multiple journals of his private and working life, and to publish them all would be a massive task (an online version is in the works). In this volume the editors have selected and interleaved about half of his output for the years 1959 to 1963. This was an important period of his life that included both a major failure — his play “Love and Libel” flopped in New York — and a significant new step — his appointment as Master of the new Massey College of the University of Toronto, and his involvement in its founding and construction. As opposed to the retrospective view of a memoirist or autobiographer, the diarist doesn't know what is coming next in his story, and this gives it an immediacy that is very engaging. Though I was personally more interested in the theater portions of the diary than in the details of college funding and furnishing, I still read it from cover to cover with great appreciation for this glimpse into the life of one of the most intellectually stimulating writers I know.