Updating my previous post, I can now say that I have finished reading Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy a couple of weeks ago. I hadn’t intended to plough through it so quickly, but it was just that enjoyable.
One thing I noticed is that from time to time, Davies has a touch of that donnish love of wordplay and anagram. For example, in the third book in the trilogy, World of Wonders, Magnus Eisengrim, the narrator for most of the book, tells the following anecdote about his dining experience on the Canadian Pacific Railway while touring with a theatrical troupe:
“There were bottled sauces too. Commercial stuff I learned to hate because at every meal that dreary utility actor Jim Hailey asked for Garton’s; then he would wave it about saying, ‘Anybody want any of the Handkerchief?’ because, as he laboriously pointed out, if you spelled Garton’s backward it came out Snotrag; poor Hailey was that depressing creature, a man of one joke.”
In the second book in the trilogy, The Manticore, the narrator, David Staunton, describes how, upon his wealthy father’s death, his stepmother Denyse intended to commission a statue of him, as well as a biography:
“What she wanted now was a monument for my father, and she had decided that a large piece of sculpture by Henry Moore would be just the thing. Not to be given to the Art Gallery or the City, of course. To be put up in the cemetery. I hope that gives you the measure of Denyse. No sense of congruity; no sense of humour; no modesty. Just ostentation and gall working under the governance of a fashionable, belligerent, unappeasable ambition.
“Her second great plan was for a monument of another kind; she announced with satisfaction that my father’s biography was to be written by Dunstan Ramsay. She had wanted Eric Roop to do it — Roop was one of her proteges and as a poet he was comparable to her dentist friend as a sculptor — but Roop had promised himself a fallow year if he could get a grant to see him through it. I knew this already, because Roop’s fallow years were as familiar to Castor as Pharaoh’s seven lean kine, and his demand that we stake him to another had been circulated to the Board, and I had seen it.”
“Castor” here is not the character of mythology, but rather the name of the charitable foundation set up by his father. It seems that Eric Roop the poet is one of those starving artist types who is allergic to hard work and has made a habit of resorting to the Castor well for grants to support his accustomed standard of leisure.
Here is what makes this example worthy of a Notes & Queries post: knowing about Davies’ love of anagrams, I can’t help but wonder whether he was playing with us here, and that the poet’s name ought really to be “Crie Poor”.