The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Robertson Davies · a novel in six parts · Macmillan of Canada and the Viking Press, 1970 · scored on Davies’s English, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Novel of a life as confessional memoir; comedy of manners, war novel, hagiography and novel of the marvellous in one narration
Mythos
The fool-saint, holy and mad at once; the changeling who becomes the magician; the shadow who acts where the narrator withholds; the daimon who teaches; the stone as the act that returns
Phase
From a snowball thrown in Deptford in 1908 to a death in Toronto harbour sixty years later, told in retrospect on the narrator’s retirement
Presentation
Fiction; six parts, narrated in the first person as a letter from Dunstan Ramsay, a retired schoolmaster, to the Headmaster of Colborne College, written in answer to a farewell tribute that patronised him
Register
From the urbane, ironic and learned voice of the schoolmaster and the comedy of village manners to the night at Passchendaele, the counsel of a Jesuit and the oracle of a magician’s show
Scale
One man’s sixty years, a village, and the three lives it sends out into the world
Governing Proposition
In a village in Ontario in 1908 a boy ducks a snowball thrown by his friend; the stone inside it strikes the Baptist minister’s pregnant wife, her son is born early and she loses her reason, and the boy who ducked carries the guilt for sixty years, keeps the stone, and comes to believe the woman a saint. He tells it all, on his retirement, in a letter to his headmaster. The wager of the novel is that a life can be ordered for sixty years around one act and the role it assigns, that a rational, Protestant culture with no room for the marvellous drives it into madness, sainthood and the magic show without abolishing it, and that the man every story takes for a minor part may be the one on whom its end depends.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“My lifelong involvement with Mrs. Dempster” is how the book begins, and the involvement begins with a snowball. In Deptford, a village in Ontario, in 1908, Percy Boyd Staunton, called Boy, throws a snowball at Dunstan Ramsay, and there is a stone inside it. Dunstan ducks. The snowball strikes Mary Dempster, the pregnant wife of the Baptist minister. Her son Paul is born early, and she loses her reason. One snowball, one stone, one early birth, one lost mind: every later life in the book comes out of that moment.
The man who tells it is Dunstan himself, sixty years on. He has retired as a schoolmaster at Colborne College, a farewell tribute has patronised him, and the whole book is the letter he writes to the Headmaster in answer. It is a claim by the minor character to his own story: the man everyone took for a supporting part writes the play from his side of it. The voice is lucid, ironic, learned and dry, and its reticence is the measure of what it has kept down for sixty years.
The act is divided between two boys from the first page. One throws and the other ducks, and it is the one who ducked who carries the guilt. Dunstan keeps the stone. Boy goes on into the world and becomes the man of the world, the one who acts where Dunstan withholds, so that the two lives run side by side for sixty years like a man and his shadow. An object holds them together: the stone stays with Dunstan through every part of his life, and in the last pages it comes back to Boy.
Movement II
Deptford has no place for what has happened to Mary Dempster. She is found in the gravel pit with a tramp, to whom she has given herself, and her answer to her husband has a terrible simplicity. The village calls it disgrace. It is drawn exactly, its Baptists and Presbyterians, its decencies and its cruelty: a rational and Protestant place that punishes her for a charity it cannot understand, and has no room for anything it cannot explain.
Dunstan comes to believe that she is a saint, and the book gives him three miracles. His brother Willie returns from death. The tramp from the gravel pit turns from his life to a life of service. The third will come in the war. Each is the kind of thing the village has no word for, so that what Deptford calls madness and what Dunstan calls sainthood are the same facts seen from two sides.
The book will not decide between them. Mary Dempster is holy and mad at once, a saint or a damaged woman whom a guilty boy needed to sanctify, and the novel keeps both open to its end. Her son Paul, born early from the blow, grows up in the Dempster household and escapes it: as a boy he runs away with a carnival, and the book lets him go out of sight, as if the marvellous had left the village with him.
Movement III
Dunstan goes to the war. At Passchendaele, wounded, at night, he sees by the light of a flare a statue of the Virgin in a ruined church, and the face on the statue is Mary Dempster’s. It is the third miracle, and the summit of the book. Afterwards he loses a leg.
The scene stands in a book whose usual register is not elevated. The schoolmaster’s urbane, ironic voice keeps most of his life at the level of comedy of manners and learned anecdote, and the heights rise out of it like islands. The voice does not change for the trench. It moves from the comedy of the village to the night of the flare without a seam, and its plainness is what lets the vision hold.
After the war the two lives part and run on. Dunstan becomes a schoolmaster and a writer on saints, and keeps the stone on his desk. Boy becomes a rich man in the sugar business, with political ambitions, and the book follows his rise at length. What Dunstan saw at Passchendaele has no place in either career, and he keeps it alive in the one place left for it, his learning about saints.
Movement IV
Dunstan’s learning takes him abroad, to Europe and to Mexico, and into the company of the Bollandists, the Jesuit scholars of the lives of the saints. One of them, Padre Blazon, becomes his counsellor, and tells him to forgive himself for being human. The lore of saints is given at length, and it is the schoolmaster’s own lore: the digressions are the man.
Abroad he meets Paul again. The boy who ran away with the carnival has become the magician Magnus Eisengrim, and with his company is Liesl, who becomes Dunstan’s teacher. The meeting is one of the coincidences on which the plot depends, for the people of Deptford keep finding one another across continents. But the changeling has become what the village could least have imagined, a master of illusion, and the marvellous that left Deptford with him has come back as a show.
Liesl tells Dunstan what he is. The title names the role: a part that is not the lead, essential to the end and unacknowledged, and it is the part Dunstan has played in every life he has touched. The book’s wisdom arrives as counsel, from Blazon and from Liesl, and the pattern behind it is visible; but the people who speak it stay particular, and the role, once named, is still to be played.
Movement V
Boy Staunton is found dead in his car in Toronto harbour, and the stone is in his mouth. The object that was hidden in a snowball in 1908 and kept on a schoolmaster’s desk has come back to the man who threw it. Who put it there, and whether Boy took his own life, the book does not say.
The last scene belongs to the magician. In Eisengrim’s show the Brazen Head, an oracle, names those who killed Boy Staunton, and the fifth of them is the “keeper of the stone”. Dunstan collapses. The scene is staged for awe and nearly reaches it, and it enacts the title: the minor part, unacknowledged for sixty years, is named in public as essential to the end.
The letter ends where the role is played out. What the narrator himself owes is left open, and so is the question with which the book began, whether the woman struck by the stone was a saint. The novel is complete in itself. Davies went on to retell its events from other sides in The Manticore and World of Wonders, but the first book’s own ending is a stone, a head that speaks, and the man who ducked, named at last.
Act III · The Twelve
The test is subtractive, and the spine is required. Its first act is the book’s best-made piece: one snowball, one stone, one early birth, one lost mind, and from them every later life. The three miracles are the structure of the narrator’s faith and must stand; the war must stand, since the third miracle happens there; Liesl and the last scene must stand, since the role the title names is given and then enacted. What the test finds is the licence of the memoir. The letter form permits digression, and Davies uses it: the lore of saints and the Bollandists given at length, the travels in Europe and Mexico, the urbane asides on Canadian manners, Boy Staunton’s rise in the sugar business told past its work. These are pleasant, and in part they characterise, since the digressing schoolmaster is the man the letter means to show; but perhaps a sixth of the book is permitted rather than compelled.
Score: 7.4 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and much of it holds. A life can be organised for sixty years around a single act of guilt and the role it assigns. A rational, Protestant culture that has no place for the marvellous does not abolish it but drives it underground, into madness, sainthood and the magic show. And every life is a drama in which others play the parts, some of them essential and unacknowledged. The village that punishes Mary Dempster for her charity to a tramp is exactly drawn. Held well below the bar on two charges. Much of the finding is spoken rather than shown: a Jesuit tells Dunstan to forgive himself for being human, Liesl tells him what he is, and the novel’s wisdom arrives as counsel. And the Jungian frame supplies a meaning in advance, so that the book confirms a scheme more than it uncovers a condition.
Score: 7.7 / 10
The book reaches height in a handful of places, and they are real. The night at Passchendaele, when the wounded Dunstan sees by the light of a flare the face of Mary Dempster on a statue of the Virgin in a ruined church, is its summit and among the strongest scenes in Canadian fiction. Mary Dempster found with the tramp in the gravel pit, and her answer to her husband, has a terrible simplicity. Willie’s return from death, and the boy Paul’s escape with the carnival, carry wonder. The last scene, the Brazen Head’s oracle and Dunstan’s collapse, is staged for awe and nearly reaches it. What holds the axis among the lowest of the twelve is frequency and register: the narrator’s urbane, ironic voice keeps most of the book at the level of comedy of manners and learned anecdote, and the heights are islands in it.
Score: 7.2 / 10
Myth built, and built into the plot rather than laid on it. The stone in the snowball is a load-bearing object across sixty years, kept on Dunstan’s desk and returned to Boy’s mouth in death. Mary Dempster is the fool-saint, holy and mad at once, and the book will not decide which. Paul is the changeling who becomes the magician; Boy is Dunstan’s shadow, the man of the world who acts where Dunstan withholds; Liesl is the daimon who teaches. The title names the archetypal role the narrator plays in every life he touches, and the end enacts it: the Brazen Head names those who killed Boy Staunton, and the fifth is the “keeper of the stone”. The people stay particular while they bear the patterns. The axis stops below the bar because the myth is explained as it is built: Blazon and Liesl gloss it, and the Jungian scheme behind it is visible, so that the pattern arrives already interpreted.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The inheritance is the English novel of memoir and confession, the first-person lives of Dickens, the comic novel of manners Davies had written in his Salterton books, and the Canadian realist novel of the small town. In 1970 the form was conservative: a well-made retrospective narrative, told in order, in a decade in which the novel in English was being broken open. The turn is in what Davies brought into that form and that country: sainthood, miracle, magic and the Jungian unconscious, admitted as real into the most rationalist of Canadian settings, and a narrator who claims the minor part as the essential one. Within Canadian fiction that was a real departure from the documentary realism that had dominated it. The stake was bounded: Davies was a known journalist, playwright and comic novelist, and the book wagered his reputation on a graver register in a proven form.
Score: 7.2 / 10
The form carries knowledge. The letter to the Headmaster, written by a retired schoolmaster patronised in a farewell tribute, makes the whole book a claim by the minor character to his own story, and the form is the argument of the title: the man everyone took for a supporting part writes the play from his side of it. The retrospective voice, ironic and exact, is the man’s character, and his reticence is the measure of what he has repressed. The six parts follow the stages of a life and of a faith. Held below the top because much of the content could be told in another form with less loss than the highest marks require: the letter frame is set up in the opening pages and then largely forgotten until the end, and for long stretches the book is a conventional memoir novel.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Evidence over fifty-six years, real and largely Canadian. The book has been read as a Jungian allegory, as a novel of the Canadian Protestant conscience, as a study of guilt and its displacement, and as the first panel of a trilogy that reinterprets it twice: The Manticore and World of Wonders retell the same events from the sides of Boy’s son and of Paul, which is evidence that the material keeps yielding. Within the single novel the open questions are real: whether Mary Dempster is a saint or a damaged woman whom a guilty boy needed to sanctify; who put the stone in Boy’s mouth, and whether he took his own life; what the narrator himself owes. Held here because the book’s explanatory voice, the glosses of Blazon and Liesl and the Jungian frame, closes some of the questions it raises, and its re-examination has run more through the trilogy than through the novel.
Score: 7.5 / 10
The field is fiction in English of the 1970s, with its Canadian part within it. The intrinsic force is real and bounded: the book showed that the Canadian novel could carry the marvellous, the religious and the mythic without abandoning its realist ground, and it gave Canadian fiction an urbane, learned and international voice. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the width of the field: the reach is real in one national literature and slight in the wider one, and the turns of the decade in the novel in English were made elsewhere. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within Canada it became one of the defining novels of its literature, read in schools and universities for decades, and it established Davies internationally as a novelist; beyond Canada it was widely read but did not redirect what came after.
Score: 7.1 / 10
Survival is demonstrated over fifty-six years. The text survives whole, as published, and has been in print throughout, singly and in the trilogy, in Canada, Britain and the United States, and in translation. Presence is continuous and wide in Canada, where it has been taught for decades, and steady elsewhere among readers of literary fiction. That presence is not contested, but it is concentrated in one national literature and narrower beyond it than that of the most widely read English-language novels of its decade, and the concentration holds the axis below the usual figure for its span. Its surface is not fixed to its moment: the book is a period novel by design, set from 1908 to 1968, and has not dated as its own era passed. Decades demonstrate less than centuries.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Judged on Davies’s English, with no translation between. The command is of a voice: lucid, ironic, learned and dry, sustained across sixty years of a life without slackening, and able to move from comedy of manners to the night at Passchendaele without a seam. The narrative is built with a dramatist’s care: the stone is planted in the first pages and paid in the last, and the three miracles are spaced to carry the book. The set pieces are well made: the snowball, the gravel pit, the carnival, the magician’s last show. Three charges hold it below the top: the talk, in which characters deliver essays to Dunstan, Liesl and Blazon above all; the coincidences the plot depends on, Dunstan meeting Paul and Liesl abroad among them; and the women other than Mary Dempster, Leola above all, drawn thinly and through the narrator’s condescension.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the Baptist parsonage in Deptford in 1908, and the magician’s show in Toronto sixty years later with its Brazen Head; or the trench at Passchendaele and the library of the Bollandists. One law governs them: the marvellous is real, in the mind and in the world, and the act a person refuses to own returns to claim him. The parsonage produces the magician; the war produces the saint’s third miracle; the stone travels from the snowball to the corpse. The range is wide, from village comedy to war, theology and stage magic, and it is held. Charged: the law is enforced in part by coincidence, the plot’s machinery bringing the people of Deptford together across continents more often than the book’s world otherwise allows, so that the hand of the arranger shows.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Many orders, joined through one life. Consciousness, in the narrator’s guilt and its displacement. The family, in Dunstan’s hard mother and the Dempster household. The village and its morality. Religion in three forms, Baptist, Presbyterian and Catholic, with the hagiographer’s learning. War, at Passchendaele. Money and power, in Boy’s sugar fortune and his political ambition. Education, in Colborne College. The theatre and the carnival, as the world of illusion. Sexuality, in the gravel pit, in Leola and in Liesl. Canadian history from 1908 to 1968, as the ground. They are integrated, not listed: each is a stage on which the stone does its work. Held in the middle sevens because every order passes through one narrator’s reticent and ironic vantage, labour and class are drawn from above, and history is a ground rather than an agent.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.6, then The Archetypal Deep at 8.0 and The Made at 7.9. A text that survives whole and has been read continuously for fifty-six years, its period surface undated; a myth built into the plot, the stone carried from the snowball to the dead man’s mouth and the fool-saint left undecided between holiness and madness; and a voice, lucid, ironic and learned, sustained across sixty years of a life, with the stone planted in the first pages and paid in the last.
Limiting Dimension
Pressure on Tradition at 7.1: a real force within Canadian fiction, which it showed could carry the marvellous on realist ground, and slight reach in the wider field of fiction in English, whose turns in that decade were made elsewhere. Next above it, The Sublime and The Swerve at 7.2: heights that are real but few, islands in an urbane comedy of manners, and a turn in content made inside a proven, conservative form on a bounded stake; then The Inevitable at 7.4, a spine required from the snowball to the last scene, with perhaps a sixth of the book permitted by the licence of the memoir rather than compelled.
The Necessity Cap is unmet: The Inevitable at 7.4 falls a tenth short of the threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Made at 7.9, The Inner Law at 7.8, The Living Form at 7.7, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on four axes: The Imperishable at 8.6 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.0, The Unconcealment at 7.7, The Swerve at 7.2 and Pressure on Tradition at 7.1 each fall short of it. The Universal Minimum is unmet at Pressure on Tradition, 7.1, The Sublime, 7.2, The Swerve, 7.2, and The Inevitable, 7.4, all below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.6. Two of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 7.6, in the band of Tier III, short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Robertson Davies’s Fifth Business, published in 1970 by Macmillan of Canada, Toronto, and the Viking Press, New York: the first novel of what became the Deptford Trilogy, followed by The Manticore (1972) and World of Wonders (1975). It is scored as the single novel of 1970, in six parts, written as a letter from Dunstan Ramsay to the Headmaster of Colborne College; the two later books are cited as evidence of the material’s yield and are neither credited nor charged to it. The book is in copyright and no text of it was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on Davies’s English, with no translation between. Events are paraphrased, and English is quoted only where its words are certain: the opening words and the Brazen Head’s name for the fifth of Boy Staunton’s killers. Facts that could not be verified, among them the page and word counts, the titles of the six parts, the epigraph and its source, the hour and day of the snowball, and the names of minor characters, are not given. Citations are by episode.