Brad Spurgeon's Blog

This year I started an occasional series of blog articles in an area on this site called “Brad’s Rejected Writings,” most of which come from my early days of journalism – when I wrote far more rejected stories than published ones.

As I did not go to any open mics last night, I decided to see what else I might have to go up in the rejected stories trove. I found this 1995 “appreciation” of Robertson Davies, the Canadian novelist, that I wrote in December of that year after he died.

My story actually has little to do with Davies, although it clearly shows what it set out to show, what an extraordinary sense of intuition he had. It is mostly about the life of an obscure 19th century novelist named Henry Cockton, about whom Davies was one of the rare established writers of last century to write anything.

The story also contains a letter from Davies to me, which, of course, has never been published before anywhere.