From Musicology to Novel: Reassessing Robertson Davies’s Literary Representation of Peter Warlock

Abstract

. had played for perhaps three minutes, when a voice said very loudly behind her, "Stop that bloody row!" She turned, and standing in the doorway was a man. He was utterly naked. .. patchily hairy. .. He was smiling, which made it all worse. He seemed quite at his ease; it was she. .. she the clothed, she the outraged one, who was overset. (Davies, Salterton, 605-6) That is how the character Giles Revelstoke is first revealed to the reader in Robertson Davies' A Mixture of Frailties (1958), the final novel in his Salterton Trilogy. Writers on Davies have already noted how Revelstoke is a "highly interpretative" portrait of the English composer Peter Warlock (1894-1930) (Grant, 362-3; Elliott, 1034, 1049; Peterman, 107-8), but this article explores in more detail how Davies developed material from Cecil Gray's 1934 study of the composer. Having reviewed Gray's book in the Queen's University Journal in 1935 (Davies, "Peter Warlock"), 1 Davies' novel drew not only upon Warlock's biography, but his work as a composer and critic, his reception, and his family background; the result-a particularly rich literary refiguring of "one of the most remarkable personalities of the postwar period in England" (Davies, "Peter Warlock", 4)-demonstrates Davies's nuanced approach in reflecting the complexities of composers' real personalities, rather than simply using musical characters as demonic or orphic symbols. The idea of representing a real composer in literature is of course not a new one. Nineteenth-century examples include Frédéric Chopin in George Sand's Lucrezia Floriani, Franz Liszt in Daniel Stern's Nélida (both published in 1846), 2 or the moral exemplar of Felix Mendelssohn as the character Seraphael in Elizabeth Shepard's Charles Auchester (1853). However, literary refigurings of British composers from the late nineteenth and early 2 twentieth century are relatively few; they include the titular Auchester (the composer Charles Horsley) and Starwood Burney (William Sterndale Bennett) in Shepard's novel, the character Owen Jack in George Bernard Shaw's Love Among the Artists (1881), who shares a number of traits with the composer Hubert Parry (Weliver, 133-55), portraits of Ethyl Smyth as Edith Staines in E.F. Benson's Dodo novels and as Hilda Tablet (also based on Elisabeth Lutyens) in Henry Reed's radio plays (Fuller, 47-9; Masters, 105-6; Carpenter, 135-9; Savage, 180), William Walton in Lord Berners' Count Omega (and Berners himself in his own works and Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love) (Amory, 200-2, 184-6, 145-8, 212-13), and Edward Elgar in James Hamilton-Paterson's 1989 novel Gerontius (Riley, 190-98). The persistent literary representation of Warlock is therefore something of a special case. As Table 1 shows, Davies was not the only author to use him as the basis of a literary work. Warlock was the subject of what Gray described as a "malignant and scurrilous caricature" as Halliday in Women in Love (Peter Warlock, 220); 3 he was then refigured as Coleman in Aldous Huxley's Antic Hay, where, according to G...