Chapter Five

    For better or for worse, our lives revolve around our mental images as much or more than they turn around anything. We live with things-become-symbols or we don't live at all. Some of these are universal - and hopefully objective, although this is not always so - like the Cross, the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the Virgin Mary and the specific signs of the Roman Papacy; and other images are personal, specific to ourselves alone, although they recur to our thinking, in darkness or in the light, again and again. These have to do with persons, places, and things, and both life and art often give even new significance. God would give me an image of looking down on the sea not only by way of praying for a wonderful cast and crew with a noble and genuinely passionate objective, but as a sign of remembering my own youthful follies and the woman - my wife-to-be-who helped me out of them. We had our first fight, you see, as we stood on a somewhat grassy promontory, the outermost headland of the university endowment lands, in Canada's most Pacific province, gazing down on the sea, that is, the inland sea, of the Strait of Georgia and the entrance to English Bay, the first body of water to the port of Vancouver.
    What were we arguing about? Not sex, not money, not even - yet - religion. (She was Catholic, I was an odd sort of Protestant.) We were arguing about symbols, and whether or not they had any place in literature, or, more specifically, in my writing, whether I wanted it to be literature or not. I was, at that point, against symbols, at least as a subject of serious discussion among those who wrote, or studied writing. I was barely twenty-two, half-way through a "novel" of my own manufacture -although it had only just begun perking, after months of silence - and I was for the moment firm in the belief that preoccupation with symbols in literature interfered with all that was "natural", and therefore to me, then, with all that was most necessary not only to literature but to life.
    I cannot remember any of our exact words, even though I have always clearly recalled the critics and scholars we were discussing, but I have never forgotten how angry I suddenly grew, nor the strength of will with which I was rebutted. I was used to my own temper, but that it should emerge on such short notice, in such an idyllic setting, and upon such a subject was in itself - discerning scholars please chuckle loudly - as complex and indicative a symbol as the arts of man could ever hope to fashion. Unravelling my explosion and all that had provoked it - and all that would correct it - was to become a very long story in its own right, not always free from a certain atmosphere of judicious penance, especially around my wife, habitually now, as then, such an amazing spirit of learning and intuition. Just three days ago, for example, she picked up from the book shelves in the local recycling depot a little gem first published five years before I was born. Wigfall Green's The Inns of Court and Early English Drama. I had actually spotted the book first, as a matter of fact, yet my mind was still so full of the just seen Twelfth Night that I could not think of also dealing, in the same mood, with something that promised - I thought - some academic justification of what must surely be amateurish? Again, and after William Shakespeare, the Inns and their young manhood provided much of the best of English drama. So this book is also a symbol, bringing together, within its own mere two hundred pages so much of the thinking that roiled through my mind in my own university, law school, and  - introduction-to-theatre years. Nor, to those who understand the writing process, should it be difficult to signify - without a lot of explanation - that the timing of such a happy discovery is also of major significance.
    Wisdom is indeed a reason for acknowledging that we must, like the earth around the sun, let our destinies unfold in circular fashion.
    In the year before my wife-to-be and I actually encountered each other in any useful dialogue I was both co-operating and fighting with this need to deal with the wheel of fortune. On the one hand, due to much of my reading and some of my writing, I was starting to take a sound professional look at my childhood and student life - not only as a writer but as a teacher-to-be - and on the other cuff often determinedly making notes about going to Toronto to work as a journalist, thus avoiding, as it turned out, the need to return for fifth year to my own campus and all the written and human encounters it still held in store for me.
    Also, as soon as I got back to the university to begin year five, my Heavenly Father was going to sharply upgrade and intensify the spiritual and supernatural encounters that had been a more or less regular part of my existence for some years, in spite of my utter lack of scholarship in the language of such experiences, and hindsight makes it very plain indeed that UBC and the Lower Mainland was to be the setting for this adventure, not only for a fifth year, but also a sixth. The Lord wanted me to make the best of the old home town and my alma mater before he took me away, it seems, forever. Or was it to be for only as long as it would take to help turn my wife's old home into an internationally known arts centre? (This sentence perhaps inspired and clarified through a conversation this morning with yet another pair of grips at the hotel coffee counter. And both of the mornings when I have been moved to go in, I have previously been awfully shy of inspiration.)
    My beloved had grown up in the heart of the Kootenays, in the cathedral town of Nelson, and though she had profited much from the degree of culture already present, and its earliest days as a mining centre, we were both to see the need of a larger and more professional concentration in the arts of all kinds. For various reasons, the arts and crafts grew, and by 1984, twenty years after we arrived, the town had lost its Catholic university; - actually public since 1973 - its sawmill and plywood plant; and the CPR diesel refit shop and telecommunications center were about to disappear, while the marshalling years dropped to a fraction of its own-time business. For the first half of the 'Eighties the town reeled from one blow after another, economically speaking. The first sign of hope arrived in 1986, when Columbia Pictures shot two full-scale movies, Roxanne and Housekeeping, in Nelson and area. Other enterprises followed.
    None of these things were to be the most important part of our lives here, but they and related undertakings grew out of skills and interests I was still acquiring in my extended university years, the time I did not give over to Toronto, and they most certainly grew out of all that was signified by the night I had my second encounter with this immensely rich - and growing richer - symbol that is Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. (How useful it is to have lost that first battle!) My first meeting was in the usual place for students in those days, in the 'Fifties, long before you could take a video for almost everything off of a shelf in a store just around the corner - in Nelson, at any rate - that is, in the classroom. In the eleventh grade we read, in parts, three of the Bard's comedies. The other two I recall only mistily, but Twelfth Night sticks out most vividly because I as selected by my teacher to render the part of Malvolio. At sixteen I knew nothing of any of the rudiments of acting, nor did my teacher seem to have any ability or interest in helping us along that rather technical path, and such an unpleasant old goat as the steward to the Countess Olivia is not the most attractive character for a young male ego.
    Nonetheless, I never forgot the humiliation of yellow stockings and cross-garters, and five years later, on a night when the wet Vancouver winter was changing into the wet Vancouver spring, my recollections, and my since acquired ability to laugh at myself in them, did me good with the members of a very successful UBC Player's Club production of precisely my best remembered Shakespearean comedy. So busy was I with other things, mostly off-campus, and anyway still not so sure that live theatre, especially university live theatre, was a necessary element to civilization, I had not even seen the play, but somehow my roommates had organized a party which turned out to be at least half-staffed by the Twelfth Night cast. Thanks to my old English teacher's casting of the play of my first theatre experience, I had something to talk about and the party went swimmingly. A lot of excellent food - the affair was pot luck - and a liberal wine supply also contributed. I might even have bought wine myself for the occasion, knowing it was to be a theatre party. My usual choice was utterly young Canadian at that time, beer or rye whiskey, yet somewhere during the wonderfully educational months previous I had begun appreciating the vintning abilities of the Eschnauer people, and a theatre party would have been just the atmosphere for trying yet another style.
    It was a fine, friendly, chatty, gathering - and there was even a Twelfth Night predicament in that one poor young lady present took a shine to me which I could not in my heart reflect back upon her - but my stil-to-be-discovered intended was not there, because, for reasons she cannot remember, she had not been in the play, although she was a fiercely committed member of the Player's Club and a green room habitue. Moreover, she was on the best of terms with a small circle, my newest friends in matters literary, who were in part also much involved with the campus players, and even that connection had not brought her to the gathering.
    Yet, like Cesario to Olivia, the gathering proxied well on her behalf, for the lively and learned spirit of the group spoke well to me of so many of the things she held, and had held so long, so close to her heart, and therefore of things I would need to study much further than I had so far. Furthermore, the timing was excellent. The party was on a Friday evening, and if it was  not precisely my last day at my office job of the moment, it was close to it; I was about to take up the first period of my young life in which I would discover what it is like to give the first hours of the day to original writing, and all the rest of my waking hours to whatever study, recreation, and dialogue would make that writing work out best. All that freedom and opportunity is a heady prospect for a young fellow, and though I certainly had my doubts and fears, I was fundamentally as buoyant as a cork in a mill race, and moving just as quickly. In fact, too quickly. My last blocks before our basement apartment, on my way home from my last or close-to-last day at the office involved a sharp right-hand turn on the road just below the old Fourth Avenue diversion, near Jericho Beach. The road was slick from the rain, and my little Vauxhall slewed for a bit before I got it back on track. I was in no danger of leaving the road, but it was one of those times when a driver is very grateful for the absence of oncoming traffic. The dangers of driving too fast in unsafe conditions aside, the incident in the rain was a sign, always keenly remembered, of how much I was looking forward to the party and even what I knew then of its significance to my new life as a full-time artist. And full-time student again, inasmuch as I did not have to read or work at anything that was not connected with my writing directly and by my immediate choice.
    Furthermore, any time it rains, in the later afternoon, especially at that time of year . . . .
    Intellect, memory, and will: the three immaterial, post-birth eternal, faculties of the human soul utilized by the rational psychology of Saints Augustine and John of the Cross, and likewise also by Thomas Aquinas except in the practise by which he reduces the memory to the intellect, quite logically, but at no discredit to his fellow geniuses; and what a thing it is for a man to be able to know all his memories in the glow of God's preservation and illumination of them, not only in the next life, but in this one as well. Such are the perks of the veteran, fully matured, spiritual life; such God is able to work in spite of the sin and ignorance in an individual soul.
    I should make a distinction: Thomas calls the memory the passive intellect, the storehouse for that which has already been understood - or at least apprehended - as contrary to the active intellect, that which does the work of abstracting from present essences and recollected essences and then reasoning out the understanding that will then retire into the passive intellect, or intellectual memory until that which has become understood will be needed again. All three saints are agreed on how the soul operates, but they use a different nomenclature.
    And I should also distinguish further over my own recollections. I was not to merely write and study, but also to have myself free to be a full-time contemplative, that is, someone whose best energies, so far as could be understood at the time, went to thinking one's way toward the whole truth, and acting on its promptings. While the other two categories were useful and necessary, this third was the most useful and necessary of all, and within it, for many months to come, would happen all that was most significant. Almost everything I chose to write, as a rule with deliberation, was a profound distance from what I actually thought about, and regularly felt; most of what I read, although I read much better than I wrote, was also considerably less than I thought, because I consciously stayed away from reading - generally speaking, with occasional exceptions - literature that was specifically theological, or, as I would then have called it, religious.
    But the exception proves much, and was also a profoundly relevant sign of all that was happening to me during those interesting times. On a winter trip to Seattle I had bought a new book then being much talked about, The Outsider, by the English writer, Colin Wilson. This was actually the first book I had ever read which dealt deliberately and at any length with the question of mysticism - chiefly in George Fox, the founder of the Quakers - and it had read awfully interestingly to me. There was a certain sharpness, and personal relevance that had been missing, as a rule, in my literature and history classes, and also in my social science reading of recent months, as interesting, as illuminating, as liberating as that might have been. Nor did it hurt Mr. Wilson's cause with me that he was writing about very definite characters - T.E. Lawrence, Nijinsky, Fox, and so on - and his reader, in myself. was a storyteller's apprentice. For the last months my master had pretty much been Ernest Hemingway, and I was about to be introduced - very gratefully - to F.Scott Fitzgerald, but neither of them dealt with intellectual experiences and comprehensions beyond the poetic, generically speaking, although I  periodically wonder if Hemingway, had he become a better student of philosophy, might have been one of the great metaphysicians of the century. He certainly had taught me the virtually infinite value of any thing in itself; it is more than a coincidence that much of his writing was set in France and Europe of Henri Bergson and Jacques Maritain; it was in large part Hemingway's exercise of the metaphysician's first principle of identity that was at the bottom of my argument with the brilliant nineteen-year old who was to become my wife shortly after she turned twenty-one. Well, that is, the argument over symbols. We were to have other arguments, quite separate from metaphysics or the use of symbols in literature, but we would agree on the merits of Hemingway and Fitzgerald.
    The mention of those authors, of course, raises questions as to the indirect participation of theology in the short stories and novels of theirs I had been reading, or was to read, because both men were Catholic, Fitzgerald, by being born Irish-American, and Hemingway by conversion through marriage. I had read of priests in Hemingway's short stories, and then of his relatively prayerful visit to a Spanish church in The Sun Also Rises. Well, it was Jake Barnes visiting the church, but I could not but think that it was Hemingway discussing his own prayer-life to some degree. I had taken up this novel just before Christmas, and although I found it sparse from time to time, I felt very good about myself because I was reading it, and very good afterward, in no small measure, actually, a fairly respectable repeat of the same experience Saint Ignatius of Loyola had from his first studies - as opposed to the knightly romances of his day - of the Lives of the Saints. This is not to compare Hemingway's characters themselves with the saints Ignatius was reading about - that, of course, would be silly - but to suggest a measure of the disciplining effect of his style upon myself. And it must be remembered, an author with real poetic sensibilities will often render a most effective picture of creation and the inexorable hand of Providence while at the same time not necessarily serving up fictional characters filled with virtue, heroic or ordinary. I always had been "wounded by nature", as John of the Cross speaks of in the early chapters of the Spiritual Canticle, and would continue to be even more so affected, and Hemingway was no small channel for God's grace in this regard.
    Some readers might be surprised that I give him so much credit - although there are others probably who think he deserves more - and they are of course entitled to their view, but it must be remembered that not only did the Muse tell me I was a novelist through the writings of Hemingway - and this is an inescapable fact - but so did the patron saints of philosophy use him to give me my first lessons in metaphysics, to any extent that they can be provided through a novelist. If my first tutorials in logic came in law school - I have always felt this to be one of law school's providential purposes - then certainly my first studies of pure metaphysics came in not a few passages hammered out by the being-penetrating mind of Papa Ernest. He was, of course, not totally self-taught. No one is. The student is the agent of his own learning, but he does have teachers, and Hemingway had Gertude Stein. "A rose is a rose is a rose." Or, as the scholastics say, a thing is what it is. The first principle of identity, and the battle cry of all those who love the truth, and have come to realize how easily men fall away from it. There is a time to avoid the elaborate conceit; a time, even, to drop the barest of analogies, to neglect, moreover, adjectives and adverbs; an occasion to let the thing, like a good piece of music, or a picture of substance, speak for itself.
    Like most artists, Hemingway could not always make his system work perfectly for him. But when it did work, it worked very well indeed, and, as I said, it taught me some basic metaphysics and a much improved respect, in many areas, for thought processes I had either taken for granted or not yet learned how to articulate. And, to my young manhood, his writing indicated fields and rivers, forests and towns, pits and ladders I still had to encounter and negotiate. To this day, I'm sure, I could never start writing a novel without having a good browse in a least two of Hemingway's novels, The Sun Also Rises, and For Whom the Bell Tolls. I may in fact find that I have to do precisely this bit of research for clarity and inspiration before I begin the third book of my current project, the sequel to Contemplatives.
    Did I discuss Hemingway the night I partied with the cast of Twelfth Night? In those days I kept no journal - I would have considered such an act too self-conscious, too artificial - so I cannot say for sure. Possibly none of them were interested in Hemingway: after all, he wrote, the scholars say, no plays of consequence; and Shakespeare is already a lot to take on intelligently. But the young lady who was not at the party turned out to be rather fond of much of his work, and all things have their time and place.