What's Bred in the Bone by Robertson Davies

So you stood by him to the end, brother, said the Lesser Zadkiel.

--The end is not yet. Though he sometimes defied me, I obey my orders still, said the Daimon Maimas.

--Your orders were to make him a great, or at least a remarkable man?

--Yes, and posthumously he will be seen as both great and remarkable. Oh, he was a great man, my Francis. He didn't die stupid.

--You had your work cut out for you.

--It is always so. People are such muddlers and meddlers. Father Devlin and Aunt Mary-Ben with their drippings of holy water, and their single-barrelled compassion. Victoria Cameron with her terrible stoicism masked as religion. the Doctor with his shallow science. All ignorant people determined that their notions were absolutes.

--Yet I suppose you would say they were bred in the bone.

--They! How can you talk so, brother? Of course, we know it was all metaphor, you and I. Indeed, we are metaphors ourselves. But the metaphors that shaped the life of Francis Cornish were Saturn, the resolute, and Mercury, the maker, the humorist, the trickster. It was my task to see that these, the Great Ones, were bred in the bone, and came out in the flesh. And my task is not yet finished.

What's Bred in the Bone is the second in Robertson Davies' "Cornish Trilogy," coming after The Rebel Angels, which deals with the aftermath of the death of Francis Cornish, a wealthy patron of the arts, and his estate. Rebel Angels always seemed a bit funny, the way it establishes a central character who never appears; What's Bred in the Bone is the novel that fills in Cornish's life: how he went from an upper-crust but provincial childhood in the small Ontario town of Blairlogie to become a world-renowned art expert, as well as--something no one in The Rebel Angels seems to know--a British spy.

Young Francis is a tormented child: tormented by the moralistic pictures that dominate his childhood bedroom, tormented by his peers, who see him as weak and strange (and what's worse, rich), tormented by the surprising revelation that his older brother, a mentally disabled boy also named Francis, has been kept secreted away in the attic for many years, while a nearby grave lets the world believe that he's dead. Francis learns to draw from a book, and his early talent is given room to practice when he's allowed to accompany the local mortician and sketch the bodies. After an Oxford education and a disastrous marriage to a reckless but sexy cousin (!), Francis becomes the assistant to Tancred Saraceni, a world-famous art restorer who recruits Francis into a scheme to fake old German paintings so they might be traded to the Nazis for legitimate world treasures. Saraceni's education is technical--and in true Davies style, the art of a restorer and forger is intimately and convincingly detailed--but also spiritual, and as a final project for his master, Francis produces an original painting in the style of the German masters that is so convincing it becomes the talk of the art world. Funnily, it's this painting that destroys Francis' ambition to be a painter: to paint in this style, the only style he really can, would be to out himself as the forger.

As the title suggests, the big theme of What's Bred in the Bone is how one becomes the person they are meant to be. Davies intersperses scenes from Francis' life with a conversation between his guardian angel and the animating "daimon" who guided Francis' development. The daimon explains to the angel how the qualities that already existed in Francis had to be brought out by the external influences in his life: his luckless brother, the kindly mortician, the wily forger. Like Dunstan Ramsay of The Fifth Business, who makes a cameo appearance here, Francis must be content with being something other than great, or great in a way that is different than how he conceives it. Francis can never be a painter, never an old master, but in his capacities as a forger, a restorer, a critic, a benefactor, he can become something else. If that something else is not quite what one dreams of, still it is something the world needs, and which represents the fulfillment of his capabilities. (Of course, self-actualization takes a lot of money, something that Davies never seems to want to interrogate that closely.)

What stands out to me, though, is the way that Francis is presented as something of an old soul: he might have been one of those German masters, if he had been born in the right time and place. Nearly all of Davies' protagonists are anachronisms, people who live by moral and aesthetic codes that have been sent to the rubbish bin by modern life. Davies has this kind of quality, too, I think, but his models aren't really Renaissance painters, or even the pre-Raphaelites that Francis loves, or even the medieval thinkers that preoccupy Dunstan Ramsay. Instead, they strike me as callbacks to a kind of early 20th century Oxford don: fussy, cloistered, small-c conservative. Like Francis, Davies is an old soul working in a modern medium, searching for greatness in a genre that no longer allows for it.