Remembering Marchbanks

A long time ago, in a backwater town in the far north, there lived a genuine literary talent, toiling in obscurity for the local newspaper.  No, not me - I said genuine literary talent.  I refer to Robertson Davies, who from 1942 to 1962 was the editor (and eventually the publisher) of the Examiner newspaper of Peterborough, Ontario.  Peterborough is, as every Canadian schoolchild knows, "the gateway to the Kawarthas"

Like many men of letters before him, the isolation of the small town may have driven Davies slightly mad, or perhaps nurtured a previously undiscovered inner unhingedness.  He began to write a Saturday column - almost always 200 words or less - in a format that could today be seen as a kind of proto-blog, or, as they used to say the old days, a "diary".  It is not, however, the diary of Robertson Davies, but of an alter ego named Samuel Marchbanks, who strongly resembles Davies, and lives in the same town, but lacks his civility and restraint.  The results are quite wonderful:

OF MEAT BALLS 

I had meat balls for lunch today.  This is a delicacy of which I am very fond.  But I insist upon the True Meat Ball - prepared in an open pan and tasting of meat - rather than the False Meat Ball - prepared in a pressure cooker and loathsomely studded with raisins.  The pressure cooker is all very well in its way, but there are some dishes with which it cannot cope, and the meat ball is one of them. A meat ball made in a pressure cooker has a mild, acquiescent taste - the sort of taste which I imagine that a particularly forgiving Anglican missionary would have in the mouth of a cannibal.  Your True Meat Ball is made of sterner stuff, and if he tastes of missionary at all he tastes like some stern Jesuit, who died dogmatizing.

John Kenneth Galbraith's (?) positive review of the omnibus Papers of Samuel Marchbanks is here.  The book itself - all 540 pages of it - can be had on Amazon today for $0.79 (paper binding) - here.

Davies published material of this era written under his own byline as The Enthusiasms of Robertson Davies (here), which is also great.