(Photo: Robertson Davies with Almuth Lutkenhaus-Lackey -- photo: Doug Boult. The sculpture is now in the National Library of Canada.)
I recently joined a book club and participated in my first meeting on Saturday. The book discussed was Fifth Business, the first of the Deptford Trilogy by Robertson Davies.
Let me say that I wasn't overjoyed at the choice. I had read this iconic bit of CanLit waaaaaay back in highschool and hated it. Simply hated it. The only recollection I had of the story was that someone threw a snowball at someone and of the emotional bleakness that filled me as I read it.
My opinion changed very quickly this time round.
Robertson Davies is brilliant.
"My lifelong involvement with Mrs Dempster began at 5:58 o'clock p.m. on 27 December 1908, at which time I was ten years and seven months old."
With those words, Davies' prologue sweeps us into a life lived with the guilt of the outcome of the aforementioned thrown snowball, into smalltown mores, and into the very heart of British Canada. The story begins as Dunstan Ramsay pens his memoir -- an examination and defence of his life written to his Headmaster -- following a silly article published in the College Chronicle upon his retirement from a life spent teaching at a private boy's school.
"... It is not merely its illiteracy of tone that disgusts me (though I think the quarterly publication of a famous Canadian school ought to do better), but its presentation to the public of a portrait of myself as a typical old schoolmaster dodering into retirement with tears in his eyes and a drop hanging from his nose."
The umbrage he takes that there is no mention of his Victoria Cross, his ten books, or his ongoing contributions to Analecta Bollandiana -- the later remarkable in that Ramsay is the only Protestant contributor to a reknown Jesuit publication -- flows from the page.
So, why did I hate this so much in my youth? It's the Fifth Business element. What is Fifth Business exactly? Here's how it is explained in the book by Liesl, a monsterously ugly, yet beguiling woman.
"Who are you? Where do you fit into poetry and myth? Do you know who I think you are, Ramsay? I think you are Fifth Business.
"You don't know what that is? Well, in opera in a permanent company of the kind we keep up in Europe you must have a prima donna -- always a soprano, always the heroine, often a fool; and a tenor who always plays the lover to her; and then you must have a contralto, who is a rival to the soprano, or a sorceress or something; and a basso, who is the villain or the rival or whatever threatens the tenor.
"So far, so good. But you cannot make a plot work without another man, and he is usually a baritone, and he is called in the profession Fifth Business, because he is the odd man out, the person who has no opposite of the other sex. And you must have Fifth Business because he is the one who knows the secret of the hero's birth, or comes to the assistance of the heroine when she thinks all is lost, or keeps the hermitess in her cell, or may even be the cause of somebody's death if that is part of the plot. The prima donna and the tenor, the contralto and the basso, get all the best music and do all the spectacular things, but you cannot manage the plot without Fifth Business! It is not spectacular, but it is a good line of work, I can tell you, and those who play it sometimes have a career that outlasts the golden voices. Are you Fifth Business? You had better find out."
Now that I have infringed on copywrite law, let me say that it is this emotional distance from ones own life that fills me with despair. What a dreadful way to live. And, how very, very British. It is that element deep in the Canadian psyche that in many ways defines us.
I can't wait to tackle the remaining books, The Manticore and World of Wonders. Davies writes in a way that is at once simple and literary.
Can anyone recall if Davies coined the term "Fifth Business?"
Colleen
