The Lyre of Orpheus

A man's life of any worth is a continual allegory -- and very few eyes can see the Mystery of his life -- a lie like the scriptures, figurative.  

                                                                                                            -- John Keats

As the third book in Robertson Davies' The Cornish Trilogy, The Lyre of Orpheus does a good job of wrapping up the whole narrative, but it's probably the only volume in the trilogy that would be a disappointing read on its own: without the in-depth introduction to the academic characters from The Rebel Angels and the full biography of Francis Cornish in What's Bred In the Bone, a reader might think that this book is just about completing and mounting a lost opera, without realising how it ties everything up. (And I mention this because I've heard many people say that these three books can be read in any order -- since they don't have the linear storyline of a The Lord of the Rings -- but why not read them in the order written?)

The Cornish Foundation -- chaired by Arthur Cornish and rounded out by his wife, Maria, and the familiar cast of professors -- is looking for a large, ambitious project to fund and decides on endowing a PhD candidate: the rude and dirty, but absolutely brilliant, Hulda Schnakenburg, who intends to finish an opera by E. T. A. Hoffman (an actual composer and author of Tales of Hoffman) in order to earn her Doctorate of Music. The source material "Schnak" has found is thin at best and there is much interesting information revealed about how an opera is scored, the libretto written, the production cast and directed and mounted. The opera itself is Arthur of Britain, or The Magnanimous Cuckold, and as the love triangle between King Arthur, Guinevere, and Lancelot is fleshed out for the stage, it also plays out in real life.

In a secondary storyline, Simon Darcourt is still working on his biography of Francis Cornish, and when he happens upon Cornish's triptych, The Marriage at Cana, his subject's life and work finally come into focus. Recognizing the painting as a representation of Cornish's personal mythology, Darcourt then explores what his own myth might be (that of The Fool from the Tarot) and helps others to see how their own lives are simply the playing out of their own mythologies. This is the key to the whole trilogy, and as Davies says in this interview:

I write novels that I hope will be interesting just as stories, but they also have implications and byways which I think would interest people who have more information. That may conceivably lead them to form conclusions about the persistence of myth in what we are pleased to call real life. I get awfully tired of people who talk about real life as though it had no relation to the life of the imagination and the life of legends and myth. They would do better to look again, though the trouble is they don't know enough in order to know where to look.

As in the previous two books, there is a shift in focus (and an opportunity to make third party assessments) with, in this case, intermittent scenes featuring Hoffman watching the progress of his opera from limbo. Trapped for hundreds of years because of his unfinished work, I couldn't help but be put in mind of Robertson Davies himself, who left his own final trilogy unresolved. As for myself, I identified with this statement of Arthur's:

Increasingly, I'm glad I never went to (university). As a reader I've just rambled at large on Parnassus, chewing the grass wherever it seemed rich.

I wouldn't say I'm glad to have not finished university, but the paths my reading has led me down has brought me that much closer to discovering what my own personal mythology might be. If I were grading this book on its own, it might only merit three stars (because I can't truly say I loved it), but for the way it completes the trilogy, I'm bumping it up to four.

This is the final book for the Lit Course, and for the way that they tie into the discussions we've been having there, here's two more relevant quotes. The first is from that interview linked above:

I've often observed how very difficult it is to give anything to the public. It's certainly very difficult to give things to a university. I had experience of that when the Massey Foundation gave Massey College to the University of Toronto. The university almost had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, to accept a handsome gift. There are always conditions imposed, and they give the impression of some hidden motive. People are extremely suspicious of generosity. It's not a very pretty characteristic of humanity, but there it is.

And another from The Lyre of Orpheus:

Madame Laoutaro and Yerko were not crooks in the ordinary way; it was simply that they had no moral sense at all in such matters. Gypsies through and through, aristocrats of that enduring and despised people, they thought that taking every possible advantage of the gadjo world was the normal course of life. The gadje wanted to hunt and crush their people; very well, let the gadje find out who was cleverest.

*****

Edit added after the class talked about this book:

For the final class, I would have expected more of a tying-in of all five books we read, but mostly, we just talked about The Lyre of Orpheus. I wonder if the Prof was just responding to the interests of the class and ultimately decided to keep away from the political at this point, but for a course called "The Perils of Patronage", I certainly never learned what those perils were.

Once again, the two class members that I feared would be the most annoying (the poet and the ponytail) didn't show up, and the discussion was monopolised by one senior woman (who at least had some interesting ideas about literature), and the Gypsy (who, while being very opinionated about literature, seems to be coloured by a real dislike for Robertson Davies).

The Gypsy started by saying that she didn't like this book -- that it didn't make sense to her that characters would behave the way they did (and especially that Arthur would consent to being a magnanimous cuckold). Others agreed with her, and the old lady said, "It makes sense for King Arthur to forgive Guinevere because Merlin was in the shadows making it all happen. But we're supposed to believe it would happen in real life?" The Prof asked if anyone saw it differently, and for only the second time, I spoke up. "Well," says I, "I think this book was about finding your personal myth and then living it out. Simon was The Fool and Arthur was the cuckold. It was in the cards, bred in the bone, there was no escaping it -- he didn't need Merlin in the shadows because it was going to happen anyway." Without actually agreeing with me, the Prof went on about fate and predestination and pointed out that Arthur was the third generation of magnanimous cuckolds in his family and that that must surely mean something.

The Gypsy stuck to her dislike of the book, saying that the problem really was that the characters were flat and two-dimensional; that considering the quality of the first two books in the trilogy, Davies really lost it here -- like he wanted to write about an opera and didn't care about anything else that was happening in the book. More people agreed with her. The Prof then said, "Keep in mind that Davies, while getting old at the time, still wrote two more books after this one. He was in complete control of his writing and you better believe that anything he put on the page was exactly what he wanted there. There's a literary device known as 'roughing the reader' where an author makes the narrative feel a little off, and when that happens, we as readers should slow down and try to figure out what the author is trying to tell us to pay attention to. In this case, if the characters feel two-dimensional, that's because they're archetypes. If you ever read an epic -- like The Odyssey, or Gilgamesh, or even Mort D'Arthur -- you would find that the characters are two-dimensional because they aren't what's important; they're only there to frame the action, which is the point."

And as she always does when the Prof tries to point out her errors, the Gypsy said, "Yes, I see, but what I really didn't like was..." (and I think this time she went on about how the book didn't tie everything up or she was waiting for a surprise or why was Little Charlie brought back for just one scene...all of these complaints were brought up eventually). But what really bothered me was when the Prof did try to tie the biography that Simon was writing in this book to the biography we read of Davies (and how impossible it is for anyone to discover all of the facts of someone else's life -- how we don't even always know all the facts of our own lives as Francis discovered in What's Bred In the Bone) and the Gypsy made another personal attack on Davies: "What I think is sad," said she, "is that other than the literature, what legacy has Robertson Davies left behind? He had three daughters and you never hear anything from them. I think that means they couldn't have been very close to him and so what, other than the books, did Davies ever accomplish? It's like his genius died with him."

I don't even know what that was supposed to mean. I don't ever hear about Margaret Laurence's or John Steinbeck's families, and if the messed up Hemingways are supposed to be  the correct model for leaving a "legacy", who would want that?

As I said before, a course like this (essentially a book club led by an English Professor) is only as interesting as the people who contribute to the discussion, and as interesting as the books were, I would have to think hard about joining again (and this Prof might be available to lead another course next Spring).

Perhaps I really am only suited to a solitary rambling on Parnassus, chewing on the grass wherever it seems rich. 


All Five Titles:

Robertson Davies : A Portrait in Mosaic

None is Too Many

The Rebel Angels

What's Bred in the Bone

The Lyre of Orpheus