Chapter 12

    It is now some six weeks since this room gained a new practitioner, and some quite nice things have been accomplished within it. Two chapters of fiction in two different books, and some letters, a pair to the Vatican and a third of some length to a professor of English and philosophy at an American college, a woman, who has written - for me at least - a very useful study of Margaret Mitchell and John Marsh, her husband, and as the new book points out so thoroughly, her editor to a degree never quite so thoroughly documented before. As with myself, Marianne Walker never read Gone With The Wind until well on in her professional career and at that she only took it up at first - after being asked to give a talk on the book - because she learned that John Marsh came from Kentucky, the state which was now her home. From the youngest and last surviving of John's siblings she had access to a box of letters no one outside the family had ever seen, and the rest is the history of the solving of a mystery. Her book was published in 1993, some two years before I took up Margaret Mitchell's novel for my own final reading, and yet in the circumstances of all this there is that kind of coincidence dear to the heart of those who pretty much leave the active life for the contemplative. Mrs. Walker's year of adventurous discovery was 1985, the year in which, because of my mother-on-laws death, I fell into reading, finally, Tolstoi's War and Peace, by all critical parameters the inspirational book of choice for Gone With The Wind.
    There has also occurred some good and useful reading in this room. A novelist always reads, and as I tap along I recall reading Evelyn Waugh's Ninety Two Days as a companion piece and inspiration to the last many chapters of my first book, but that was dungeon reading, the researches of the basement study which, although not inconsiderable, as a man must carry his essential cell within, was not quite the same as the constant opportunity to browse the shelves in this room, all one hundred and sixty four feet of them. I do use other libraries, as my references to the Open Shelf and the Internet have explained, and I use them most gratefully, but at the same time I have to confess to the indescribable value of the hundreds of books in this study, and I think I am still getting used to the leisure of browsing they not only provide, but even insist upon.
    In fact, as I started up my trio of letters, I heard the Muse say quite clearly that in this room I could virtually make no mistakes. This is a very nice sort of assurance when one is about to rebuke a Pope, especially a naturally formidable Pope, and yet it only seemed proportionate to the quality of the texts in the room, and the genius of their chief gatherer and librarian, my wife. Nor is it the only room of books, although it has the most books, for virtually every room in our house has shelves of books, and the bathroom always carries at least one significant volume for recollective browsing. At the moment, Archbishop Alban Goodier's Life of Christ. Not quite John of the Cross, but a reputable work nonetheless, and full of wonderful memories in my reading. The resurrected Christ on the beach, Jesus and Magdelene, Jesus and the Pharisees; incidents all told with enormous insight. The living room has many books - theology, literature, texts on herbs and natural healing; the housekeeper's room is full of books on all these subjects; the kitchen has all manner of cookbooks, the dining room is full of music, and the master bedroom contains shelves of theology and shelves of those altogether magical masterpieces, the classics of juvenile fiction. Juveniles they may be called, but pity the adult who never takes they up again, at least from time to time. "Unless you become as a child . . ." seems to me to be a pretty serious admonition.
    But I forget something on my list of the accomplishments of this lovely room. Sunday a week ago, quite unable to do otherwise, I rattled off forty lines of poetry. "And then there were so many, many books" Five lovely feet of poetry; iambic pentameter, the stuff of English rhythmic thinking made great and unforgettable by William Shakespeare, and ever after, I suppose, the challenge and standard of those who would essay to write poetry in a form both narrative and dramatic. It all came together most swishingly, hopefully a final form, a final beginning on something I have been on and off with for many years. On behalf of my Beloved I had written a lyric or two, especially in the Genesis of our affections, but the big poem had to be a sleeper, not totally unrelated to the travails of Milton in his speculations in and around Paradise Lost, and the day of its manifestation could only be akin to several other dates of no mean significance. And so it landed, on one November 8, in this room. November is late in the fall, early in the winter; it was probably in November that I was swept one Saturday morning into the womb of the Virgin, reborn as it were in an ecstasy, taken into the flight of the spirit, as Saint John of the Cross calls it, while I was actually meditating on the person of my wife-to-be. That was exactly forty years ago, 1958. Pius XII, that magnificent man, was dying. John XXIII had yet to be elected, but since the summer I had been praying, and "offering up" as I had learned from Catholic pamphlets, my trials for the change of the Mass from the Latin to the vernacular. In my very few months of exposure to the Catholic Mass, that mightiest of liturgies, I had come to realize that it was, simply. the most useful operation I had ever seen, I was furious at every agency I could think of that seemed to have screened this - now- incontrovertible fact from my young sensibilities, and as someone destined, I had every confidence, to soon pen the Great Canadian Novel, I wanted any of my passages referring to the Mass to be in English!
    To many, this will sound awfully brash, but that was exactly how I thought in those early days with the Church and sometimes, moreover, I wondered if it were simply not part of the deal that the Lord had made with me as I agreed to take on - or, more honestly, give in to my need for - the Faith.
    And then, in January of 1959, it was announced that Angelo Roncalli, one of the ultimate father figures of all time, had summoned the Church to the Second Vatican Council, and the revamping of the liturgy was on its way. God's refusal to allow my high school mind to excel in Latin finally had a redeeming meaning for me. (I had not yet heard of Jean Vianney's difficulties with the language a hundred years earlier.) English would triumph where, by the end of Shakespeare's life, England had become the mortal enemy.
    And speaking of the Bard, and his cementing of iambic pentameter on our cultural sensibilities, I should mention one other accomplishment worked in recent days my Muse of this room. I just might have begun the final version of the long narrative poem I began work on at this time of the year, the month of the dead, in 1972. Our house had become, irretrievably, a genuine domestic monastery. Marianne had moved in; all other boarders had left; I had given up trying to find a publisher for the fourth draught of The Cruise of the Ballerina; there was an awful lot of conversation and activity - and spiritual passivity - that had to do with prayer and progress into the Seventh Mansion; I did keep puttering at prose, as the family connected with the young hero of the yacht novel continued to grow, but I was most emphatically inspired to start up a poem that would also serve some biographical purpose, and I had an awfully good time doing it. And why not? I was focusing, from the starting gun, on one of the greatest souls of our time, my own wife, and trying to set down what she had meant to my adult existence, albeit with the hours of inexperienced youth, yet within the context of friends, a university campus, and the burgeoning cultural life of a rising city.
    I went on for some dozen of lines, which have since been buries in my files, and then I stopped that first version. From time to time since, I have taken it up again, the longest outburst occurring  back in 1992, after I had reconnected with a childhood friend who was the integral element, after God Himself, in my first experience of the dark night, but I suspect that the unique matching of universal with particular, that is always the struggle for the artist, has only come to fruition in this room.
    I think that my wife has had a certain degree of conviction that something like this would be the case. She has not been especially aware of the poem, particularly as I've been without a creative thought for it for several months - there was one glimmer of a line in September - but she has been very much aware that it was time to move me out of the usual quarters, mostly for the past dozen years the basement, but if not there, then a corner in a room much in demand for other functions, and only partially mine.
    Yet this biography was begun - after the pen sketching aboard my living room corner throne - in this room, on this typewriter. But there was a table of many purposes, not this desk, and the room was subject to a variety of uses. It was not the thinker's sanctuary, the poet's lair, and I did not feel, as now, so habitually the lurking omnipresence of the shelves of my scribbling peers. A very fine room, yes, and I was content with how it was used, but it was plainly not then a room for poetry, and now it might be just the room. Certainly the poetry came along Sunday morning a week ago, some forty interesting lines of it, roaring up out of that chaos and sense of expanding futility that lets a writer know he must quickly get to work on something, and please God, what is it? And I found myself phrasing its speech in the direction of my Beloved. (This was a device that had worked very well for the last thirty years of journals.) I just happened to be sitting in the one chair of the room that is not my desk chair, and suddenly whatever book I was reading was not enough to keep me occupied. I found the long black notebook with the previous hopeful scrawls and was swiftly at it, and was not released from the tender claws of the great bird of the sky until I'd sketched, as I say, forty lines. For me, that's a lot of poetry at one sitting.
    It seemed to be the seal of something, and at the age of sixty-two, one is allowed to hope that the various somethings that come along have a certain final perfection to them. I've known the Muse for a long time, even in bits and pieces before the autumn of 1953, when I began the first draught of the yacht novel and ran into the writer's light and spirit and remarkably new - and eternal - sense of self-worth, but much of the time He's been a Muse of sketches and practise runs, pretty much the same fellow that spirits actors through the working days prior to public performance, or sparks up students in their first approaches to a musical instrument. It's the same Muse, the same source of inspiration without which - of Whom - there would be neither beginning nor middle of any genuinely artistic process, but His role at the end, the final stages is somewhat different. In the beginning, mistakes were not only as permissible as they were predictable, they were probably even necessary.
    This has something to do with the good old Aristotelian maxim about the whole being the sum of the parts. A beginning student, a beginning artist, is probably quite good with a part or two. Beginning little pianists, unless their abilities are interfered with by a faulty programme of studies, are usually good with rhythm. After all, they have been walking for five years or so, and at the same age, running for at least three. The beginning novelist in myself, having been able to articulate nimbly for at least a dozen years - my father and my uncles were sure I'd make a great lawyer - had no trouble whatsoever thinking of dialogue. It seemed to come as easily as talking, so much so that my internal sections of the Puritan and working class ethic made me wonder if indeed writing was actually honest labour! I was having such a good time, and never had I felt more proud of myself.
    The euphoria was balanced, of course, by the difficulty of good descriptive passages, whether of character, scene setting, or action; and even more humbling was the confrontation with my own dearth of language when it came to providing a philosophical or moral observation. A few months earlier, as I pondered my future after high school, and actually did come to a number of useful realizations - by the help of the Holy Spirit I hardly had a name for - I also made the eternally regrettable mistake of deciding that I was natively smarter than Aristotle, and while I would borrow some of his terms, I wouldn't actually get down to the honest labour of reading him, at least not for some time. An utterly moronic decision, of course, but nicely punished by Providence as soon as I tried to set mind and fingers to the keys of a typewriter aimed at producing a novel I had hopes of any moderately intelligent person wanting to read.
    Neither should I try to claim that the dialogue was good dialogue. (I have just been reading, by way of contrast, the opening chapters of Robertson Davies' Mixture of Frailties.) But it was dialogue that poured out of me, for better or for worse, and the vehemence of the operation, and the light of the Muse that came with it, told me that I was a writer in such a way that no one left to the history of the universe could argue me out of my basic confidence. And it is dialogue that makes the characters of a novel. just as much, although over a more leisurely context, as it makes the characters of a play. As the Lord said, a man is known by what comes out of him. And a psychotherapist would say that a man comes to know himself by what he comes to utter, finally, under the circumstances most favourable to him. My dear old back bedroom; an ancient but working typewriter on a desk; a door I could close against the world and the rest of the house; my confidence that I had my first year university courses under control, (insofar as I had any interest in mastering them), and my lively and educational participation in the campus journal, (three editions a week meant a lot of participation); and even a tiny bit of boredom - or was that a lot of boredom? - with the idea of spending all this time and money at a university and not using some of it to get cracking on a novel, got me rolling.
    And in the rolling, I realized another dimension of myself. In fact a most fundamental dimension: now I knew why I existed, why God had made me. I had understood this to no small degree eighteen months earlier, when the Muse came crashing through my puzzled reading of Hemingway and left me stretched out as near like a corpse as I had yet to be - with one exception, years earlier, back on Lasueti Island - but now, in the steady rain of a Vancouver autumn, on a Sunday afternoon when I had not, as usual, darkened the doors of a place of worship, the Muse was honouring His bets.
    I've no doubt covered this scene before, but, like the circumstances of natural birth, high school graduation, falling in love, a first job, and so forth, its key elements require - as well as they bear - analysis again and again. At any point where they have a status of wayside markers in the spiritual journey they are, where sacraments also exist, as significant as the sacraments themselves, for no sacrament ever created salvation or perfection without a disposition, without acts of will that rose to the opportunities to do good and avoid temptation. In a soul geared from infancy for the spiritual life these events are intensely lightsome, so much so that the soul cries out that it has done nothing for itself, as all has been accomplished by the manifest Light of the omnipotent God!
    Well, I wasn't omnipotent, but the onslaught of dialogue, mediocre though it might have seemed from the imagination of an all-but-eighteen-year-old, made me feel enormously powerful. The writer had been conceived, months earlier; now he was born. And I knew it. There was no shaking my confidence. The Muse was with me, and my life from henceforth would centre around keeping that companionship, simply because I could not recall any other experience that had made me feel better about myself.
    Forty-five years later, in another back bedroom that is no longer a bedroom - except when guests need a place to sleep - those two pages of poetry, which I probably should not call mediocre or apprentice-like, also made me feel very good about myself. And perhaps even better about the room. Is it possible to fall in love with a room? Perhaps not, speaking strictly. But certainly one can love the spirit of a room, especially the spirit of this room. The Holy Ghost is making a profound point, probably several profound points. Possibly I should break off now and go work on a different book so I leave myself plenty of time to think over all those points.
    But one last item. Yesterday I gave, for the first time to an adult, a lesson in my latest discoveries in keyboard pedagogy. He was the perfect student, catching on quickly. His wife runs a small Montessori pre-school and he has been an accomplished swimming instructor, a sometime philosophy student, and an amateur blues guitarist. We had a great time together, and he learned, irretrievably I think, that music, as Aristotle said so long ago, is a branch of mathematics.