Book Review: What's Bred in the Bone

Book Review: What’s Bred in the Bone

Author: Robertson Davies

Date: 1985

Publisher: Macmillan / Penguin

ISBN: 0-14-00-97112

Length: 436 pages

Quote: “If one member of the Cornish family is shown to be a crook, the financial world will be sure that the whole Cornish family is shady.”

They are. What else is new? But if you’re a person who enjoys long novels full of picturesque details and complex relationships, you may get some pleasure from finding out how, when, and why they’re shady.

For one thing, they’re the sort of people for whom the term “cousin” does not automatically exclude the thought “bedmate.” I understand that in England, where part of What’s Bred in the Bone takes place and where some of my better documented ancestors lived, many people feel this way. I had more Irish than English ancestors, myself, and the cousin-lust motif grosses me out. And I don’t think Davies minded grossing readers out; holding my nose and reading on, I come to scenes that could hardly be meant to serve any other purpose for any reader.

One of the questions the novel promises to answer is whether Frank Cornish was homosexual, or, if not, what was his sexual aberration. I don’t want to spoil the plot for anyone who wants to know that sort of thing, but I will warn readers that a formative influence on Frank was discovering his secret, shameful, shut-in half brother. The half brother is abnormal because their mother tried so hard to abort him, but Frank’s elders blame his abnormality on the fact that he was conceived outside of marriage. Unable to do much else, the half brother fiddles with himself a lot.

We’re supposed to share the adult Frank’s shame and horror at the harm done by Victorian efforts to deny sexuality. I find myself pondering the shifting fashions in moral conventions, and wondering which of our society’s taboos will seem most outrageous to our grandchildren, like Victorian denial or the early twentieth century’s ideas of eugenics. Will it be the 1960s view that the worst sexual sin was to withhold erotic pleasure from another person, thereby causing frustration, which might cause hostility, which might cause nuclear war? Will it be the current effort to claim that homosexuality is “gay” and is “just as good,” at least for humans, rather than being the symptom of overcrowding and harbinger of disaster that it is for other animals?

Well...Cleveland Amory, a fine writer and a great American, maintained that women can’t be curmudgeons. Out of respect for his views on this subject, as a quintessential curmudgeon, I will not claim that novels like What’s Bred in the Bone are helping me develop toward being a curmudgeon. I will say that, along with my inner children and inner sages and all the other trendy denizens of my psyche, I have an inner curmudgeon. Sometimes he is loud.

Robertson Davies had an inner curmudgeon too. Possibly that’s why I’ve enjoyed his short nonfiction so much. Definitely it’s at least partly a defect in me that I didn’t enjoy What’s Bred in the Bone, the first and last Davies novel I’ve read. Davies’ inner curmudgeon had no objection to Peeping Tommery. Mine has. And unfortunately this novel is mostly about people’s dirty little secrets.

When it’s not, What’s Bred in the Bone does contain the kind of felicities to which Davies rose in his short essays. Fun facts float out like bread on the waters: “The name of the Recording Angel was Raduriel...the Angel of Biography, and his name was the Lesser Zadkiel.” Clever phrases bubble up: “lettuce-juice words like ‘extra-terrestrial,’” “a drunken detrimental called Old Billy,” “a man who knew his place, but also knew his worth.” We can hear the Liszt rhapsody performed at “pell-mell speed,” see the schoolboys drawing and shellacking silly faces on their raincoats, feel Frank’s admiration for a cousin who “was a Terror, even among the Chegwidden lunatics.” For sheer word-smithcraft, I agree, Davies deserved the fame he enjoyed. I merely prefer his craft dedicated to fun facts, literary criticism, and parodies rather than continually twitching shower curtains and giggling at the back views of people.

If you don’t agree, you may have remembered by now that Davies was Canada’s best known writer during the years before Atwood and Gibson teamed up. No doubt at least we can agree that, some of the time, he deserved his reputation. If you like wit and literacy mixed with smut, this book is for you.