For Your Eye Alone

by Robertson Davies

A collection of letters by one of the nation's greatest writers and poets includes Davies's correspondence with John Gielgud, Margaret Atwood, and Salvador Dali, among many others. 10,000 first printing.

Genres: Nonfiction, Literature, Biography

416 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

William Robertson Davies, CC, FRSC, FRSL (died in Orangeville, Ontario) was a Canadian novelist, playwright, critic, journalist, and professor. He was one of Canada's best-known and most popular authors, and one of its most distinguished "men of letters", a term Davies is sometimes said to have detested. Davies was the founding Master of Massey College, a graduate college at the University of Toronto.

Novels:

The Salterton Trilogy
• Tempest-tost (1951)
• Leaven of Malice (1954)
• A Mixture of Frailties (1958)
The Deptford Trilogy
• Fifth Business (1970)
• The Manticore (1972)
• World of Wonders (1975)
The Cornish Trilogy
• The Rebel Angels (1981)
• What's Bred in the Bone (1985)
• The Lyre of Orpheus (1988)
The Toronto Trilogy (Davies' final, incomplete, trilogy)
• Murther and Walking Spirits (1991)
• The Cunning Man (1994)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robertso...

Reviews

[Marian Deegan · Rating 5 out of 5]

When a friend told me about the HandsOnTwinCities Expo held at Mall of America, I volunteered to help. Encouraging Minnesotans to contemplate civic responsibility sounded like positive gesture in support of the community that was shortly to become my own. It just goes to show you: a tiny good deed can repay the doer a hundredfold in the most unexpected ways. Me? I met Mark Heimenz and Jacquie Hee during that Expo, and both have become dearly treasured friends.

And then, my volunteer duties completed, I wandered into a MOA bookstore and discovered Robertson Davies’ collection of previously unpublished personal correspondence on a clearance table.

Davies is in my Top Ten list of favorite authors, and I’d read everything he’s written. Multiple times. Personal correspondence by so fabulous an author must be equally delicious to read, yes? Yes, and yes, and yes; I can tell you for certain. If Mosby’s work opens doors to richer possibilities in living, Davies’ correspondence is an inspiration to anyone who believes that notes between loved ones and friends and mere acquaintances, and sometimes even strangers, can matter. This collection is tender and sardonic and wise and laugh-out-loud hilarious in turn. It is the How To Say It manual of a luminous soul, and one of those volumes I will have always with me.

So thanks, HandsOnTwinCities. Your commitment to community brought fine friends and fabulous words my way in 2006. In fact, I think I’ll open my Davies and write down my appreciation for your eye alone.

[C.A. Simonsen · Rating 4 out of 5]

People used to write letters to other people on paper. Then they'd fold the letters into envelopes and address the envelopes. Then mail them. At a post office. And wait weeks for a reply.

I know. Insanity.

For Your Eye Alone is not a James Bond script. It is a collection of correspondences the great Robertson Davies sent to various persons throughout his life. A much more interesting read than I'd expected.

Even a brief missive from Davies became something witty and amusing. He was a true lover of language - a wise wordsmith. If the man were alive today and jotted down a grocery list on a sticky note, it would turn out to be poetry.

"Your letter was balm." "one of those barnacle-scraping experiences." "My writing chases too many rabbits." "She would grind my bones to make her bread." And on and on.

The most interesting bits of the collection, for me, pertained to Davies's relationships with other giants of literature. I didn't realize he'd had a brief spat Joyce Carol Oates (or, rather, that she'd had a beef with him). I hadn't known that Davies thought very little of the writing of John Irving. Or that he was intimidated by his biographer, Judith Skelton Grant.

Davies was extremely encouraging to lesser writers. He was clearly proud of his children. He was a proponent of libraries giving authors recompense. His knowledge of theatre history was astonishing. For Your Eye Alone is a great bedside book to pick up and read five or ten pages at a time. Highly recommended to readers of Canadian literature.

[Corey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Davies is a charming companion and these letters sparkle with wit and sophisticated opinion.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

To repeat, Robertson Davies is as delightful as a letter writer as he is as a novelist or essayist. Here's a sampling from the letters:

"...I would be doubtful if a home for elderly writers would be a good idea. Writers are an extremely contentious group and old age does not make them any more peaceful. I think that they are better spread around among the rest of the population." Robertson Davies, 10/11/88

When I was a boy I knew a professor who never travelled without packing first of all his bulky Liddell and Scott (just in case he wished to verify something while away from home)... Robertson Davies, 11/10/88. [Liddell and Scott=Ancient Greek Dictionary]

"One of the disadvantages of growing old is that critics are determined that one must be running downhill. It may be so, but there is much to be observed from the bottom of the hill." Robertson Davies 6/21/89

[Tia Gonzales · Rating 4 out of 5]

a Canadian great...Robertson Davies...if you love his novels you will enjoy a look at his personal conversation/correspondence

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of those books that stands in for a long conversation with an intelligent, affable and utterly charming companion. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it with my morning coffee over the course of several mornings. (Of course, it helps that Robertson Davies is officially My Literary God. I would read his grocery lists, if they were available.)

[Kathryn Buchanan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I quite enjoyed it, though I found I had to limit my reading to about 3 letters a day. Robertson Davies' sense of humour and wit certainly comes through!

[Yvonne Aburrow]

Most of these letters show a kind and generous person who writes to friends in a heartfelt manner about their bereavements and other life events. They also show the literary genius of the man, and his wit, which one might call Rabelaisian.

Much as I love Robertson Davies and consider him to have been a very great writer, some of his opinions (specifically on male homosexuality and the casual use of racial slurs) were rebarbative. He also seems to have got the Wrong End of The Stick about Indigenous people in many ways, though he made good use of the Ojibwe lore of the Shaking Tent in his novel, “The Cunning Man” (perhaps he had read Edith Fowkes’ book “Folklore of Canada”).

Nonetheless I thoroughly enjoyed reading his letters and in many cases they give extra insight into his books and his personal philosophy, which was generally of a liberal variety. He was also highly intelligent.

[Michael Joosten · Rating 4 out of 5]

I share relatively few of Robertson Davies's opinions, belong to a generation and an ethnic background that has known a markedly different Canadian history, and cannot claim to be particularly well-read in his works, for all that I have enjoyed them since I was first introduced, years ago, by an introductory English professor.

And yet, I find him fascinating, not as something or someone different from me, but as a version of me that I would love to be: erudite, steeped in the arts, connected to those who are part of the literary and dramatic worlds. This book awakens my never too-dormant love of the epistolary craft and the concomitant regret that the Internet has vitiated its exercise.

[Carolina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Letters. I especially liked the incidental stuff about works in progress. It's interesting to get the author's process-angle on it when you're already familiar with the finished work.

[Erik · Rating 3 out of 5]

To be clear, I consider Robertson Davies to be one of my favorite authors. He writing is insightful, economical, and worth spending time with. Two of his novels - Fifth Business and What's Bred in the Bone - are two of my favorite books of all time.

This book, a collection of his personal letters to colleagues and critics from the 1960s-1980s -- the height of his fame and prominence -- is simply tough to read. Not because of his writing, which is amazing even in letter-form, but because of his personality which emerges in these letters. He is cranky. High maintenance. Hard to please. Critical. I suppose this is what made him such a great novelist and scholar, and I am thankful for that, though I am not sure I would want to find myself in his company.

[Jack Coleman · Rating 5 out of 5]

The selected letters of Robertson Davies.A must read for Davies readers.
I didn't like everything Davies said and his grousing about Libraries is just miserly but I cherish this
man for his tenacity to say it his way;distictively Canadian.
Library book sale