Chapter 13

    Although it was through Hemingway's Farewell to Arms that I realized I was to be a novelist, I did not actually study his style and his characters until I was twenty, and attending my first - and only - creative writing class, in summer school while I was working the late afternoon shift as a reporter for the Vancouver Sun. My first model among authors was Somerset Maugham, and I'm sure that I chose him, among other reasons, because I found him easier to understand that I found, at that point, Hemingway.
    Maugham seemed very sophisticated, well-read, and much travelled. I was a college freshman, and although I read all the time, I knew there were thousands of books I'd not even heard of, let alone studied, and my travelling had so far been restricted entirely to Canada. Opposites, they say, sometimes attract. But there were familiarities that made him accessible. His culture was British, which was pretty much the flavour of my education so far, and he further drew me along in the comfort of my formation by seeming to reflect an attitude reminiscent of my favourite English teacher. Also, he seemed unabashedly modern, and I was definitely bent on holding back the classics as long as I could.
    But I think the single most important reason - and I knew it at the time - was that he was represented in my first and second year English courses in a rather minor way, so that I did not really have to account for my thoughts on him to my professors. Maugham was mine, and mine alone, and I took great satisfaction, in fact a kind of sanctuary, in this independent position. I enjoyed Dickens' Great Expectations, I quite loved Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan, and , under pressure, dutifully wrote the requisite essays - with no distinction whatsoever - and met all exam requirements, as always throughout my previous school years, but Maugham I could treasure in the secret recesses of my bosom, where the established arbiters of learning would have no access until the day when the successful author would cough up his mentors and his opinions on them. I don't think I felt particularly rebellious, or that courses should be changed - though I was no fan at all of John Millington Synge - I was simply very happy with my own private island of exploration.
    Nor did I try to write like Maugham. For one thing, our childhoods - going by Of Human Bondage - were poles apart, and for another, I was always much affected by my native landscape, which he had not touched upon at all. Moreover, while Maugham might not be as classic as Shakespeare or Jane Austen, he was definitely more literary and less of a formula writer than I initially intended myself to be. That I would one day write seriously, in fact very seriously indeed, I never doubted, but first, I was convinced, I had to succeed as someone who could whip off a mainstream romantic adventure. Half-a-dozen short stories and serial or two in the Saturday Evening Post: that was my goal for my first two years, and I could see nothing wrong with it. (By the middle 'Fifties, moreover, I don't think my favourite magazine was publishing Maugham anymore, if in fact the Post had done so in earlier days.)
    I also hoped to make some money out of my attempts at commercial writing, but I was not really willing to put into that goal the effort that it actually took. Somehow, I managed to acquire just enough inspiration for a bit of a plot, and a character or two, but never enough for the real labour of crafting even a formula tale. Occasionally I was made aware, by trying a few times over, just how difficult it could be to get a genuinely solid first sentence. Sometimes I was bemused by this fact of the trade, at other times I think I knew the day would eventually come when I really would know how to do it. And I'm also pretty sure that no matter how self-satisfied and grateful for the identity my clattering keys made me feel, I knew that I would have had to live and read a great deal more in order to have the words roll off as adroit and significant as I hoped they would eventually be.
    So, as I say, the long shelf I would have to read along the lines of my own choosing started with Maugham. But even that is a more or less in the realm of self-recollection, qualified, now that I think of it, by recalling that I took up a volume of de Maupassant's short fiction not long after the realization, at sixteen, that I was to be a novelist - Time for some serious reading, I told myself, with my new knowledge warm in my breast - and also fell quite in love with John Buchan, some of whose books stood on the shelves of my high school library. Now de Maupassant, not being a penner of very happy tales, I put away. My brief encounter gave me a certain air, for sixteen, of sophistication, but I think that even at that youthful age I had more faith than he, poor lad, had ever come across by the time he wrote what I had read. Buchan, on the other hand, while he did not like Arthur Mayse and Zane Grey write about my favourite and very own landscapes, nonetheless got out of his own woods and fells and shorelines certain of the most delightful elements that I had known in mine. And Buchan, the son of a minister, had faith.
    I also tried James Joyce, as I may have mentioned, reading all of Portrait of an Artist, and he too I put away as someone who, leaving the faith of his childhood, was not to be trusted. And, without being judgmental, I simply did not like the episode with the prostitute. Compared to the sparkle of the chastity - and the drama of the treat to chastity - between the romantic principals of Perilous Passage. Stephen Daedelus' commercial affair was the ultimate in drab. I don't think I was influenced, either, by the concurrent reading of John Ciardi's translation of Dante's Purgatorio. I think, at that point, I realized that I preferred my epics in prose rather than poetry, and in terms of rolling around in another man's agonies in order to learn the wages of grave sin I had already been through Zane Grey's study of the guilt of Stephen Latch in The Lost Wagon Train, at age ten or so.
    But I got an immense pleasure out of buying these books, one misty autumn morning, in the old campus bookstore, along with two or three others, the titles of which I do not recall. Perhaps the short stories of Maugham were in the group, perhaps a copy of Huxley's Brave New World which I did not read until the following summer when I was in army camp. The actual titles and authors probably do not matter too much; the point is, I was investing money in a sample of the writers that a student writer had to take on to some degree, and I was enormously excited to be starting my own library.
    One title that I'm quite sure I did not purchase that adventurous morning was Maugham's Razor's Edge, because it was not until my second summer at the Picton, Ontariok anti-aircraft base that I was reading that book. Moreover, I should probably add a word of doubt as to my own memory specifics: it could be that the big buy-up came later than October, not as I was starting up my novel, but after I had somewhat exhausted my own store of ideas. A fog sweeping over the Point Grey campus has been known to occur at any time during the fall and winter months.
    Did I, indeed, actually buy The Razor's Edge? One of the things God had intimated to me in the mentally eventful months before I actually found myself at university was that the friends I would meet over the years there - and indeed elsewhere and forever - would recommend and lend books to me. In my high school days such was not the case; my omnivorous and constant appetite fed on the shelves of the school and public libraries, and also from the old favourites in the home stock.
    I that first year of college, I pretty well filled up on twentieth-century authors. Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984 both went down in the first summer at gunnery school. A friend there, I suspect, for one of my barrack-mates, the son of a Liberal M.P., bound for a legal career so he said then, was as regular a reader as myself and I know I borrowed freely from his trunk. He returned for a second year - not everyone did - and it is not impossible The Razor's Edge came from him. Given the effect it was to have on me, it was one of the most important of the titles-to-be-borrowed God might have had in mind.
    Good old second-year English, at least in those years at UBC, but probably still in most institutions, was, of course, that mighty trundle through the classics of the language, starting with something like The Sea King's Burial and carrying on through that other Geoffrey - Chaucer - and Shakespeare, right unto the very formidable feminine intellect of Jane Austen. When you think about it, you wonder how you got through it all and still had time to breathe, let alone eat, drink, converse with your friends and yet still have time for an original creative thought. There is an enormous amount of thought in all that writing, and underneath it, an even more enormous amount of history. For the true scholar, of course, a veritable swampful of material for research and consideration, and for the purposes of clearly digesting a particle or two, the essay form was quite in order. To a degree, the sheer volume is a kind of comfort: there is too much to be mastered in a short few years; English literature will be there for the rest of your life, especially when in your heart of hearts you do feel the call to become, eventually, a thoroughly serious author, the sort of thinking and writing man who will deal with all the big questions, and therefore you have every right, as someone trying to learn the business of creation, as distinct from simply learning, to avoid taking the actual prescribed work load too seriously.
    And yet, as I think I have already said, I had some very fine mental experiences when, for exam purposes, I was trying  to grasp Wordsworth's Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, and, after reading H.G.Wells Tono Bungay on the insistence of - and loan from - my best friend of that year - also a considerable mentor - I was surprisingly delighted with the aforementioned Pride and Prejudice. And I should probably also confess, if I have not done so already, that in my studying for the Christmas exams I had really swatted up the plot in Hamlet, scene by scene, with a great sheaf of notes and thus, for me did rather well, pulling off a bare first class. To a degree, I enjoyed the process, proving to myself, I suppose, that I could be a genuine academic if I wanted to, but at the same time I sensed the atmosphere of the work ethic, the pursuit of marks for marks' sake, and I could not believe that these were the best reasons for my being at the university.
    I really don't know why I expected that Jane Austen's prose should be boring, or difficult, or irrelevant to modern sensibilities. Was it because I'd spent the year either writing for the Ubyssey sports page or, for the most part, struggling with what I thought of as standards for slick fiction? My reading was almost invariably more thoughtful than my writing, and could it be said that Austen was any less interesting than Maugham or Dickens or Nicholas Montserrat? I'd always love a good romance, moreover, and I'd thoroughly enjoyed the Greer Garson/Laurence Olivier movie version that the Varsity film club brought in every year. (Much better entertainment, I thought, took, than Olivier's Freudian Hamlet.)
    Perhaps - in fact, probably - the initial distaste for Pride and Prejudice was a little bit of the devil of contradiction that was to regularly begin to dog my journey toward a genuinely adult appreciation of culture and learning. I was simply faced with the temptation, which comes to every free intellect sooner or later, to avoid the very sublimity that is the most good for me. There is a possibility of a nobler cause, although I will not insist on it functioning as absolutely at that point in my life as it was to do later: I might have been, somewhat, carrying the problems of other students, especially those not confident in the knowledge that they were bound to the intellectual life or the craft of writing.
    And then there is one other possible significance: never again was I to be examined on a novel listed withing a university course as a university student. My days of an ordinary relationship with the liberal arts were over, even if I was as ignorant as I was as to what form of study lay ahead of me.
    When I realized what a delightful book had actually been assigned by the English department, I was sorry that I had left the study of it to a time so close to exams. I had to read in a hurry, at a forced pace, and could not give Pride and Prejudice the leisure it deserved, nor the leisure I, as a storyteller myself, needed to apply to the study of Miss Austen's genius.But I did realize that I could find a great pleasure in such a classic, such an old book, and if so there, then likewise elsewhere. Education had succeeded.
    On the other hand, I was grateful that I was long schooled in the habit of reading quickly. The more plots we have known in general, the greater mastery - for exam purposes - we can have over one plot in particular. Simply from an appetite for a good yarn I was eminently capable of digesting at the gallop, and part of me was quite content to do just the same as always with the inhabitants of Meryton and its assorted handsome domiciles, but another part of me saw, I think, instant reason for being utterly free from the shackles of reporting my thoughts on Elizabeth and Darcy to a mere academic or her lackey of a graduate student marker. Jane Austen was worthy of a fellow author's attention in the greatest possible arena of the reading public; and one of these fine days, so help me, she would get just that!
    It was interesting, I have realized on further reflection, that I should have felt that I had met my match in a woman. Had I felt superior to Maugham? He did trod a little in the gutter, and I had already had conversations with the Heavens that he, for all his stunning ability with words, never seemed to equal, at least not in anything I had read so far. (Yet I must insist forever on the great comfort it gave me to take him for my first conscious example.) For all her complacency in the lesser galaxy of Anglicanism - perhaps weakened from its original strength by Eighteenth Century rationalism - Miss Austen was a noble thinker, and I firmly suspect to me a harbinger of my later intimations of the unquestionable presence in my life of the Blessed Virgin Mary. And even if that is a concept difficult to grasp in the hearts of those poor souls who have yet to know the friendship of the Mother of God, then at least - what a poor phrase - she was a precursor of that incredibly bookwise young lady that Divine Providence, at the moment unknown to me, had picked out as my future spouse.
    And yet, as I hazard a quick glance at the text, in order to be accurate over those initial golden moments - chapter nine - I remember the mighty elevation of the mind, the threat to my ambitions for commercial fiction, my journalistic environment - the climate of the Ubyssey was not always according to the standards of the poet's Muse, with its ambitions toward downtown journalism - and my fear that I might have a very long row to hoe before I could sit down with Jane Austen and thrash the living tar out of ninety-nine percent of our fellow novelists. My heaven, but she was magnificent, and, although not with my wife-to-be, I was already, to a degree, falling in love.