Chapter 15

    Truth, goodness, beauty, and love; when they come with any degree of proximity toward a genuine norm they come as a surprise. That is, they come this way some of the time. We do have a certain proportion of control over their presence in our lives, or otherwise study, prayer, and right action in their pursuit would be valueless, and yet we also realize that too much calculated effort can take us away from the real thing. My discovery that I was, for a time, lovable by a young woman, was anything but a result of a deliberate search for such an experience.
    Well, there had been a certain element of deliberation. Sometime into the new year of 1955, after a lot of thinking, I had asked to a Ubyssey party a girl who had shown up in the north basement of the Brock earlier in the academic year. I had decided that it was time to date, and the girl was attractive and intelligent. (She was later to work in international advertising and was also for a time the road companion of the well-known black female singing and acting artist Diana Ross.) The girl said yes, she would go with me to the party. However, to cut to the chase and preserve all and sundry from unnecessary speculation, I will next say that half-way through the party I realized, with absolutely no chagrin on my part, that her real interest was not in me, but in my best friend, also a member of the university paper, like her, philosophically a socialist, and the young man I had been meditatively prepared to take on as a friend even before I got to the campus. My chum looked a little apprehensive of my opinion half-way through the triumvirate conversation we got into midway through the evening - the girl politely went home with me - but I found myself quite delighted by the turn of events - good grist for a story, it struck me - and an excellent opportunity for practising detachment. What the heck? The pair of them seemed very happy, and I had made the little bridge to their Paradise. Who could ask for a finer honour, at nineteen?
    But not too many weeks after this small exercise in self-denial, on a find sunny Friday morning, when for reasons I can't remember I was in possession of my father's car, making me a free agent of my own transportation schedule, my boy-friend invited me to a small gathering at his house, already to some degree my home-away-from-home in the university district, no small favour to someone who lived ten miles away in the East End of Vancouver. For some reason I was not, in the morning, keen to go. Having the car, perhaps, was a symbol of an opportunity to find a grander adventure, or perhaps the wonderfully clear skies of that early spring inspired me to think I was supposed to spend a Friday night conquering some segment of the universe. There might also have been an interesting movie at the Varsity that I'd had my eye on. At any rate, I was fairly sure that I was not joining the party.
    Nor did I change my mind throughout the sunny day. I went to a class or two, or perhaps did not go, and did a bit of studying or reading. Friday being that lovely day when no real work went on around the newspaper offices, and then I must have gone for supper either to the campus cafeteria or Dean's Cafe, as it was in those years across the street from where the Ubyssey was printed and I spent so many evenings as a proof-reader and headline author. Then, as I pondered the movie, I was struck with a thundering wave of loneliness, rarely a sentiment of someone like myself, so passionate and satisfied a general reader, and realized that I was predestined - there is no other word for it - to go to the party. To open any other door was to stare into a black and bottomless pit.
    Although it was still early in the evening, the little gathering was well underway when I arrived, and came upon my first surprise of the evening, a very pleasant drink made with something I'd never heard of, grenadine. There seemed to be an ample supply, and I happily settled into it. Having left my decision to come until so late, I'd not laid in any contributions of my own and I was grateful for my friend's largess. Probably his new girlfriend, my one shot at a date that year so far, had contributed. It was the spring of the year, or close to it, a low time in students' funds.
    I'm not sure if I'd been much of a visitor to that very hospitable home in my first campus year. I must have been a few times, because the second son of the house and I had become friends quite quickly. He it was who offered me a beer at my first newspaper party, a quite unforgettable evening at the old Kerrisdale lawn bowling clubhouse, wherein I had been transfixed by the impromptu performance of a live trio: piano, trumpet, and stand-up bass. The rapture was perhaps not solely from the music alone: the trumpet player came from the interior town where my wife-to-be was raised, and they had performed together in the high school orchestra, she as a singer. But I knew none of that then. I had no idea what to say to anyone so talented, and my new friend, as he was becoming, who had brought the case of beer we was so generously sharing, was like myself born to habitually talk of literature, and it would have been around that time that I would begin my first attempt at a novel.
    But certainly in my second year, and then on into the third, the strange and mysterious one full year of law school, I was a most regular visitor, first because the son of the house, then because of a family friend from the days when they had lived in Victoria - the head of the house was an engineer on the CPR steamships - a lad come across the Gulf to attend the university and board with the family. He would act as a broker of sorts in my short-lived romance, and that indicates that he also had become one of the reasons I was there so often to chat, watch television, and late in the evening dine on the sandwiches provided by the lady of the house. In my first university year there was not quite so much of this, because I was still spending quite a lot of my free evenings with my old chums from high school and my neighbourhood.
    I don't mean to give the impression that I was a freeloader when it came to booze at parties. The two incidents I have mentioned were exceptions. After that first handout, I acquired the none too difficult skill of asking an upperclassmen to pick up a mickey of rye or a quantity of beer for me, and then at some point learned to brazen out my under twenty-one status at a liquor store or hotel off-sales. The second level probably came after my first year at summer camp in the officers' training programme. Being legal in an army mess goes a long way towards mitigating the fears of an arbitrary decision as to age at which a man can be allowed to buy his own alcohol. The officers' mess in Picton, Ontario also gave more than courage. There I was also given the nightly company of young French-Canadians, and the taste for an occasional Scotch whiskey.
    But back to romance, as some might call it. From the perspective of the subsequent years, I think of the adventure more as a lesson in friendship, in the realities of marriage as opposed to the fantasies, and perhaps most significant of all, a further and rather large step toward my growing apprehensions of the spiritual life. (I cannot say "comprehensions" because of course I knew hardly one word of the vocabulary particular to that science, let alone had studies the smallest and most amateur manual relevant to it. Nor does it quality that I was familiar with certain scriptural texts that applied to ethical action. I simply had no idea that prayer and meditation as a way of life were exactly that, a way of life, although I was in reality being introduced to such an ordinary fact, by experience.)
    The evening had worn on in complete and leisurely affability. Discussions here, discussions there, and it was quite likely that night that the son of the house had handed me an H.G.Wells novel, Tono Bungay. One of the bits of advice about campus life that God had pumped into me had been to let my student friends advise me on books worth reading, and at that point I had not actually cracked Pride and Prejudice, and perhaps the only satisfying part of my entire exposure to second-year English at that point had been some concentrated study, for the sake of the Christmas exam, on Hamlet. I'd found myself enjoying taking the trouble to memorize the action of every scene, chapter and verse, possibly just to prove to myself that I could master a subject if I really wanted to. The effort was rewarded. As I remember, it earned me my only first class in university English. I don't think I was ever stimulated to such a methodical analysis again, until I'd discovered scholastic theology and the history of the Church, the combination of which genuinely wonderful intellectual tools finally gave me the real machinery for taking the literature of Britain apart piece by not always entirely satisfactory piece.
    I suspect that it was that evening also that I brought out my ukulele and my modest collection of simple folk and then popular songs. I would have put the uke in the car on an instinct that something social would turn up. But this certainly would have been one of my first public performances, and I had probably decided that it would be a good idea to find out just how well I was progressing as an entertainer. I could hardly think of myself as the pick of the litter. My inspiration to learn the ukulele had come from a lad who, in partnership with another student, wrote magnificently funny, perceptive - and occasionally somatic - satires. Then, this other student acquired a five-string banjo, which, although reduced previously to a mere four strings, still made an irresistible sound. And, finally, to put me in my humble place, through my student mentor's socialist connections I was able to attend a local socialist's party, in respectable Point Grey, at which the star performer was a Vancouver boy, not a UBC student, who not only sang creditably, but who could play melody on a five-string banjo. I have always remembered that I felt as if I were hearing and seeing a young Pete Seeger, and as a beginning musician, I was not a little stunned. Two-and-a-half years later he has started up the publishing of a folk-song magazine, in Vancouver, and I had the happy satisfaction of spending a Sunday afternoon with him, spelling out the words, chords, and melody of a song I had written during my great job in the wilderness south and west of Tatlayoko Lake.
    So, as I said, I had good reasons to feel humble, to feel grateful for an audience that would listen to me, or, better, join in, and I think that night was successful, from the musical point of view, and therefore boosting to the ego and the confidence.
    If my memories are correct, our young lady, she whose person and spirit was to land on me with such unforgettable effect, came home somewhere toward the close of my musical hour in the sun. I think she caught the last two or three songs of my engagement and I was by then altogether warmed up and cooking, with all due respect to the limitations of the ukulele.
    Them came my hour as a raconteur. As befits a novelist, especially a novelist with a gift for dialogue, words have almost come easily, often too easily, for me, and that night by that time, I was as fluent as I could possibly be. That I remember distinctly. What I was talking about, what sagas or anecdotes I was summoning out of my young past, I have no idea whatsoever. But I seemed to be entertaining, everyone at the small gathering was listening, perhaps all else were much more aware that I was that the daughter of the house had just dropped one boy friend and might be interested in a replacement.
    She was certainly a pretty lass, and as she was by nature much more quiet than myself, there was most certainly the potential of opposites attracting. I had not thought too much about the fact that she was breaking up with the other fellow - someone in the house had told me this at some point - but the more she seemed to be paying attention to my story-telling, the more I became aware of her.
   And then something happened that I had never seen before.
    As the Lord said, the eyes are the window of the soul. Yet, although I'd had a few specifically spiritual experiences, I had no special habit of studying such windows, and certainly my final courses in such matters came two decades after the night I am describing now, when I was instructed again and again in the difference between eyes that were windows on a soul in heaven, as it were, and eyes on a soul in hell, strictly in accordance with the dispositions of the seventh mansion. But on this evening back in the 'Fifties, suddenly the lovely young woman was more than ordinarily attractive, and I saw in a sudden heightening of her colouring and an expansion of her eyes something I much later learned was called the dilation of the soul. There is a God, He is the manager of our destinies, and we do have guardian angels who can effect such changes upon us.
    I think this happened for a quite simple reason: she had realized, perhaps, that she needed a boyfriend, eventually a husband, who followed a profession of the mind, of the intellect. So she had made a choice, for her own self-preservation, and had been quite quickly rewarded, or confirmed, in the new direction.
    By the tender age of nineteen, I had, of course, been fond of a number of girls, and known some who had been fond of me, in a few cases quite substantially, sometimes expressed, sometimes not. But not since I was ten years old had I known a regular female companion, of my own age, except in the ordinary social context of school and youth organizations like scouts and army cadets. I had rarely even thought of dating, as for one reason, it cost money I didn't want to spend in such a way, and I'd had nothing whatsoever to do with high school dances. I did not even attend my graduation banquet and dance, for that particular Saturday in June had been booked for a yacht cruise, a cadet outing on the vessel owned by the honorary colonel of the reserve regiment to which our co-ed corps was attached. I was by that time regimental sergeant-major, and felt it my duty to attend that function. And I also should add that I could not think of myself as missing much: the only girl who had really bent me out of shape in my final year in high school was quite happily going with someone else. It did not seem fair to take one girl to an affair at which I would too likely have had my mind on another. And I should further admit that one of the girls in the cadet corps and myself were involved in some casual circling around each other, although as subsequent history was to prove, she was between bouts with an older, working, young man. My history as a stand-in had begun.
    So, while my heart had been severally stabbed - and keep in mind that mine was the heart of a poet - I had a limited record of the toil and trouble of romance, in the French sense that also means a novel, or plotted story, full of dialogue and outbursts of all the varieties of emotion. For almost a decade, all my closest friends had been boys, and, furthermore, I had no sisters, although all my women relatives had showered nothing but affection and good will on the first born of the third generation. I'd had an entirely satisfactory circle of male companions my own age: sufficiently athletic, responsible in their schoolwork, good-humoured, kindly in their relationships with each other, and undissipated. Some of them were also committed Christians, and this did me no harm. Twice, in fact, I was drawn in to a certain degree of participation with the organizations my friends belonged to.
    Yet those influences, I had some sense of right away, were to a degree, in my opinion, automatically somewhat right wind. (Or was it that the fathers of both influential lads followed the accounting profession?) I knew I needed to study the left-handed point of view, and this is was that had led me to my current predicament of the heart.