Davis, Richard Clarke

• David, Richard C.

Richard Clarke Davis was born on August 7, 1946, in Lincoln, Nebraska. He attended Purdue and Indiana universities, graduating with a B.A. Honours with Distinction in English from Indiana University in 1968. His Selective Service deferment expiring upon graduation, Davis chose to immigrate to Canada, rather than serve the U.S. military in Vietnam. After seven years working from coast to coast in his newly-adopted country, he experienced a life-altering automobile accident that prompted him to apply to the University of New Brunswick. Under the leadership of Desmond Pacey, UNB’s Department of English at the time was highly influential in shaping a critical appraisal of Canada’s writing, and Davis was accepted into the PhD programme in 1975 to study Canadian Literature.

Davis’s literary training at Indiana University had made him aware of the importance of captivity narratives, travel accounts, and exploration writing in shaping the American fiction and verse that followed. For example, the journals of Lewis and Clark were celebrated as a rich pathway to understanding the American literature that flowered later. Yet in Canada, Northrop Frye dismissed the writing of explorers as being totally “innocent of literary ambition.” Rather than seeking out the unknown frontier, a character attributed to American writing, Canadian writers were said to recoil from the uncivilized wilderness, to construct garrisons protecting cultured society from the foreign and wild unknown geography surrounding it. To Davis’s thinking, these antithetical conceptualizations of the two national literatures developed from the different points at which a “literary” history was thought to begin. Frye’s notions — and other such prevailing cultural icons as Margaret Atwood’s “survival” — were based on early colonial works of poetry and fiction, whereas America’s literary roots were not found in Britain so much as in the written discourse of travellers, traders, and settlers in America. As a way of coming to grips with these very different cultural assessments, Davis began testing the notions of a “garrison mentality” and “survival” against the writing of explorers and travellers in British North America.

An immediate problem he encountered was access to documents, since literary minds in Canada had largely dismissed and, hence, ignored such writing. Much of the work included in this collection arises from Davis’s effort to make previously unpublished explorer and traveller manuscripts accessible for future scholarship.

Davis edited the holograph (hand-written) daily journals that John Franklin kept in the Canadian Arctic between 1819 and 1827. This accounting of experience could then be compared to the published narratives Franklin constructed after the close of his two land expeditions, and through this comparison, the many rhetorical and literary manipulations inherent in Franklin’s writing rise clearly to the surface. Two volumes of Franklin’s journals and correspondence were published by The Champlain Society.

Davis executed a similar editorial project for The Hakluyt Society, transcribing Capt. Charles Sturt’s nineteenth-century journals documenting his exploration of central Australia. As with the Franklin project, Davis’s emphasis was always on the variant written accountings, not on the historical event that the documents recorded. Having returned to Adelaide at the close of the expedition, Sturt worked closely with his daily journals to render a public accounting of his undertaking. Readers largely accepted this published document as a reliable accounting of events, recorded as they unfolded — a reading Sturt encouraged through his choice of structures. But the vastly different rhetorical position from which they were constructed made them a substantively different text from the true journals upon which they were based. For both Franklin and Sturt, the promise of financial success through narratives by heroic exploration was but one of many “literary ambitions” evident in their writings.

In his PhD dissertation (1979), Davis had written about R. M. Patterson’s The Dangerous River, a book Patterson had written about his adventures on the Nahanni River decades previously. Many years later, the daily journals that Patterson kept in the 1920s surfaced and became accessible to the public. Those journals made the highly constructed nature of Patterson’s The Dangerous River immediately obvious. This led to yet another editorial project, published by The University of Alberta Press.

Davis read dozens of papers and published many articles arising from the many variations between the different rhetorical positions from which these written accounts were created. He brought the fictional aspects of non-fiction, as well as the historical and autobiographical aspects of fiction, to all his teaching. He also taught numerous graduate seminars related to scholarly editing. He was the recipient of three SSHRCC grants, as well as many fellowships and awards that enabled him to carry out his research into exploration and travel writing.