Unhallowed eve

Robertson Davies

Leaven of Malice
by Robertson Davies,
in the Salterton Trilogy.
Penguin Books 2011 (1954).

Thirty days hath September,
April, June, and November…

Salterton, Ontario, 31st October 1949. An apparently innocuous announcement of an engagement appears in the Salterton paper The Bellman, but it will function like yeast in dough: once the fermentation process starts the components cannot be separated out. It turns out that ferment indeed is the purpose of the notice, the leaven that instigates the action, but whose is the malice that lies behind it, what is their motivation, and do they truly know how far the mixture will rise?

The second of Robertson Davies’s instalments in his Salterton Trilogy brings in some of the characters from the first, but it works equally well in isolation. We are given a picture of the bourgeoisie of a fictional provincial Canadian Town, one blessed with university, cathedral and an independent press, with most of the cast of characters acquainted with each other by name or in person. In such a seething cauldron the chances of submerged rivalries and hurt egos bubbling to the surface are infinite, and so it proves.

Despite the character list approaching (as I estimate) fifty individuals the main actors in Leaven of Malice are easy to distinguish, and what soon emerges as a comedy of manners manages also to be crime fiction without a murder, a courtroom drama without a court, a romance where dislike doesn’t run smooth, and a Halloween tale where some ghosts are eventually laid to rest.

On the 31st October the Dean of Salterton’s Cathedral is apprised of Halloween shenanigans in the church, instigated by one of the cathedral’s musicians. Gloster Ridley, editor of The Bellman, discovers on the first day of November that the engagement announced in the previous evening’s edition, between Pearl Veronica Vambrace and Solly Bridgetower, not only had the marriage taking place on the impossible date of 31st November but that it was a malicious hoax perpetrated by an unknown individual.

Together these incidents rouse the ire of a number of Salterton’s self-appointed custodians of the city’s morals: the busybody Miss Pottinger, Matthew Snelgrove the cathedral’s chancellor and an established lawyer, and Professor Vambrace, the very aggrieved father of the alleged bride-to-be. Snelgrove and Vambrace aim to take the Bellman to court for libel, and Miss Pottinger has convinced herself of the identity of the guilty party who maliciously placed the advertisement; meanwhile the editor’s attempts to discover who the perpetrator was meet with a blank wall.

As November draws on matters start to get impossibly complicated, drawing in incidental actors from the university, the cathedral, the newspaper, the legal profession and wider social circles in Salterton. Amongst the action two strands constantly hove in and out of view: where does the malice truly reside, in those responsible for the false announcement, or those who pursue personal vendettas while claiming the moral high ground? And the two supposed innocents caught up in the case, why do so few people consider whether they have been libelled, and why? Until the true perpetrator is found the caucus race continues apace.

Apart from a complex but satisfying plot much of the joy comes in the merciless, almost forensic, depiction of character, a dissection almost approaching parodic proportions of small-town personal politics. For example, Matthew Snelgrove

presented, in himself, one of those interesting and not infrequent cases in which Nature imitates Art. In the nineteenth century it appears that many lawyers were dry and fusty men, of formal manner and formal dress, who carried much of the deportment of the courtroom into private life. And Matthew Snelgrove […] seized upon this lawyer-like shell eagerly, and made it his own. Through the years he perfected his impersonation until […] he was not only a lawyer in reality, but also a lawyer in a score of stagey mannerisms…

Chapter Two

Pearl Vambrace, one of the injured party, is having a disagreeable discussion with Solly Bridgetower, the other injured party to whom she has been forcibly but wrongly linked; Solly says to her,

“Didn’t it occur to you that I might want to contradict that notice?”
“Surely I am the one that’s been dragged into this mess.”
“Why you more than me?”
“Because—” Pearl was about to say “because I’m a girl,” but she felt that such a reason would not do for the twentieth century.

Chapter Three

While Pearl develops self-awareness for herself others, such as her pompous and precipitate professor father, may have to have self-awareness forced upon them as the comedy plays itself out.

What particularly helps to make this novel so delicious is the knowledge that the author was fully aware of all the situational comedy he described: with experience of the theatre, of academic life, of newspapers, of literature, and being an enthusiastic student of human nature, he ensured that the ins and outs of his set pieces allow us to suspend any disbelief that so much folly could abound within such frail creatures. Typical of his many jokes is the name of the paper: The Bellman takes its title from the late medieval figure of the town-crier, but it is also a synonym for a gossip. And of course a large proportion of the novel’s machinations can be attributed to the influence of the town’s gossips. Additionally, we are introduced to a certain Bevill Higgin, an English elocution teacher, who though insisting there is no ‘s’ in his surname inevitably brings to mind a certain professor of phonetics in Shaw’s Pygmalion; there, however, the resemblances end.

Preceding this novel is Tempest-Tost in which several of the dramatis personae here are involved in a stormy amateur production of a Shakespeare comedy. While there are no staged theatrics this time Davies has a gentle side-swipes at Victorian poet Charles Heavysege, a Canadian immigrant from Huddersfield on whose work Solly Bridgetower has been considering basing his academic reputation. Though Solly is impressed by Heavysege’s doggerel (such as the example that follows) I can’t help but imagine the author enjoying describing an academic desperately staking his reputation on a writer of turgid poesy.

“Man is a pipe that life doth smoke
As saunters it the earth about;
And when ’tis wearied of the joke,
Death comes and knocks the ashes out.”

Charles Heavysege

Davies followed up this instalment with A Mixture of Frailties, part of which is set in North Wales where, as with Leaven of Malice, he brought personal experience to bear: he came from Welsh stock himself. I shall of course be expecting more wit and insights into the human condition in my reading of this final volume.

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Lory at Entering the Enchanted Castle inaugurated the Reading Robertson Davies week a couple or so years back, to coincide with the anniversary of his birth. Robertson Davies, 28th August 1913 — 2nd December 1995