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— he read everything. I was still at Exeter — this was about 10 years before my fellow Americans would “discover” Robertson Davies upon the publication of
Fifth Business
— when George Bennett urged me to read
Leaven of Malice
and
A Mixture of Frailties. (Tempest-Tost
, the first novel of
The Salterton Trilogy
, I wouldn’t read until much later.) And, not surprisingly, it was reading Robertson Davies that led me to Trollope. (With all there was to read of Trollope, this doubtless caused further injury to my schoolwork.) It has been said many times that Robertson Davies is Canada’s Trollope, but I think he is also Canada’s Dickens.
    Twenty years later, Professor Davies reviewed
The Hotel New Hampshire
(1981) for
The Washington Post.
It was such a likable and mischievous review — and by then I’d read everything of his — that I eventually journeyed to Toronto for the sole purpose of having lunch with him. I’d broken a big toe (wrestling), and the toe was so swollen that none of my shoes would fit. My son Colin already had bigger feet than mine (by the time he was 16); yet it was only a pair of Colin’s
wrestling shoes
that permitted me to walk without hobbling. It was either wear the wrestling shoes or meet Robertson Davies in my bare feet.
    Professor Davies took me to the York Club in Toronto for a rather formal lunch; he was exceedingly polite and kind to me, but when his glance fell upon the wrestling shoes, his glance was stern. Now my wife, Janet, is his literary agent. Janet and I live part time in Toronto, where we dine frequently with Rob and Brenda Davies. Footwear is never a topic of conversation between us, yet I don’t doubt that Professor Davies’s memory of our first meeting remains somewhat critical.
    When Janet and I were married in Toronto, my two sons from my first marriage, Colin and Brendan, were my best men, and Robertson Davies read from the Bible. Rob brought his own Bible to the wedding service, not trusting the Bishop Strachan Chapel to have the correct translation. (Professor Davies is a great defender of the King James Version in these treacherous modern times.)
    Colin and Brendan had not met Rob before the wedding, and Brendan — he was 17 at the time — didn’t see Professor Davies, in his magnificent white beard, approach the pulpit. Brendan looked up and, suddenly, there was this big man with a big beard and a bigger voice. Colin, who was 22 at the time, told me that Brendan looked as if he’d seen a ghost. But Brendan, who was not overly familiar with churches of any kind, had had a different thought. Brendan was quite certain that Professor Davies was God.
    In addition to providing me with my first opportunity to read Robertson Davies — at a time when I was about the age Brendan was at my second wedding— George Bennett encouraged me to go beyond my initial experience with Faulkner. I don’t remember
which
Faulkner novel I was introduced to (in an Exeter English class), but I struggled with it; I was either too young or my dyslexia rebelled at the length of those sentences, or both. I would never love Faulkner, or Joyce, but I grew to like them. And it was George who talked me through my earliest difficulties with Hawthorne and Hardy, too; I would grow to love Hardy, and Hawthorne — more than Melville — remains my favorite American writer. (I was never a Hemingway or Fitzgerald fan, and Vonnegut and Heller mean much more to me than Twain.)
    It was also George Bennett who forewarned me that in all probability I would be “cursed to read like a writer,” by which he meant that I would suffer from inexplicably strong and inexpressibly personal opinions; I think George really meant that I was doomed, like most of the writers I know, to have indefensible taste, but George was too generous to tell me that.
    I can’t read Proust, or Henry James; reading Conrad almost kills me.
The