Chapter Ten

    Before we get to the weighty subject of spiritual experiences, however, I must report the new home for this typewriter, the machine that has the pages of my autobiography wrapped around its rubber roller. Is there an interesting symbol right here? A couple of years ago, studying the pamphlet accompanying a computer course on typing, I read a most interesting account of the history of the typewriter. It pointed out, it taught me something I had never known, even though I had been at work for over forty years on the result of Nineteenth Century technology, that the rubber roller that makes the typewriter such an obviously efficient device, was years, even decades, in the process of being realized. Prior to the roller, various inventors and designers were busy having the keys come thumping down on a piece of paper laid out on a flat surface. Truly, someone did make good at reinventing the wheel.
    The new home for this typewriter is also an old home. In the summer of 1986, after some barbarous rumbles at my Beloved's suggestion, I moved a different typewriter into a tiny cubicle - six feet by eight - on the porch on the west side of the house, and spent a useful June to August or so methodically puttering at the novel and firing off fairly regular epistles to Rome. In those months, as I recall, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was as likely a target as the Pope.
    The little office is now gone. A wall was removed, a seven foot window was placed over a screened opening, an assortment of chairs, tea-chest coffee tables, books, maps, prints, posters, exercise machines and a filing cabinet was moved in, and now I have, as far as I'm concerned, as fine a studio as any writer ever laid claim to. I should add that my dart board also was installed, rising from the basement. The Little Woman talks of the space becoming employable all year round, in the cold Kootenay winter as well as the warm Kootenay summer.
    An attractive idea. Years ago, a previous owner had her aged father living with the family. The porch, an L-shaped institution bordering the north and west sides of the house - with the longest reach on the west - was glassed in, with wonderfully big panes, so the old gentleman could spend as much time as he wanted in solitude, gazing down on the waters of the West Arm of the Kootenay River and as much town as he could see between the arms of the Norway maples. I never met this meditative old gentleman, but I know his daughter well because I taught the old fellow's grandson. The daughter, incidentally, has read Gone With the Wind, and reacted quite wonderfully when I told her I had begun work on an opera.
    And the thought of opera brings us back to New York, does it not? Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence - a book which has nothing whatsoever to do with the longest word in the title - opens most engagingly with a description of a scene in the old New York opera house, and reminds us that New York is as synonymous with opera as it is with the Statue of Liberty.

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    Well, how long has it been since I typed the last? The Muse appears to be making a deliberate point of requiring this chapter to wait on current events, a sort of symbolic index of how most of this book, so far, has gone as well, and He's had me shut down for weeks. All three books currently taking their turns have had no turns at all. Every writer has his dry times, just like Mother Nature, but a writer, having an intellect, always asks why, especially when the dry weeks begin to become dry months.
    Again, New York has been a factor. I cannot be surprised for a number of reasons, not the least of which was the Lord declaring to me, about the time the literary shutdown was beginning, that I was to put my meditative and intercessory mind on New York "for a year".
    Opera, the Statue of Liberty, and publishing. Since I began writing about two of the most inspiring authors of my youth, Roderick Haig Brown and Arthur Mayse, I have discovered that they both had the same New York publisher, William Morrow. I'd know about Morrow since I read Haig Brown's daughter's book about her parents, but I had not remembered - if in fact I ever noted - that they were also the people, along with Curtis, of the Saturday Evening Post, who brought out Mayse's Perilous Passage. Did Mayse, who knew Haig Brown, have the same Seattle agent as the latter, or did he make his own contacts with New York when he was fiction editor, in Toronto, of Maclean's Magazine? Perhaps I'll find out one of these days from Susan Mayse, the daughter and author in her own right, with whom I've already had an exchange of letters.
    Susan thanked me for agreeing with her that Perilous Passage is her father's best book, but she could not help me with my search for my own copy, in fact not even for one I could borrow, just to get the names right! Her own copy, she said, was in Norwegian.
    Enter the Internet, wherein our own municipal library came on line just as I was about to begin my search for Avery Dulles' books. Success with him, as I have mentioned - and now his excellent 1955 introduction to metaphysics is on its way here from a used book dealer - and again success with Mayse. The Vancouver Public Library had all his books, including the one I had been trying to run down for twenty years! (I had tried the Open Shelf provincial lending system in the late 'Seventies, when I'd committed to my novel draughts that Michael Thurman had made a film version.) I was incredibly delighted, at a depth not entirely disconnected from the centre of my spiritual life, and filled out the form for borrowers with a hand that wrote with an uncanny mixture of relief and anxiety.
    The anxiety was not unfounded. I had actually requested two books from my teenage years, the other being Stephen W. Meader's Red Horse Hill, and the latter came within the week, but Perilous Passage, said Vancouver, was not for loan. It was held as a reference work.
    Thump. Even as I had filled out the request form, I had wondered if everything seemed too good to be true. Regularly, a nagging voice has tried to tell me that a romantic adventure serialized in and old "slick" magazine could only be a sentimental distraction for a mature theologian, especially a theologian whose everyday concern was the dark night of the soul and the spiritual marriage of the mystics.
    I was disappointed, but not undaunted. And the spirit of determination seemed to continue to come from the same deepest wells of concern. To the local staff I insisted that I needed the book - for one thing, I had already begun to discuss it with the Archbishop of San Francisco, a man about to revive the diocesan newspaper, perhaps therefore a prospective publisher - could the Vancouver library photocopy the book for me? Or set up a line of communication so I could ask all sorts of questions? The fact that the book could not come by mail was only disappointing in part: the Vancouver library obviously valued it if it was being held as a reference and successors were justified! Perilous Passage, in the opinion of the professionals, did run a little deeper than your average serial in a shiny paper magazine.
    Not a little of my extreme delight in locating the mere presence of this voice from the past had rubbed off on the staff, but they stayed professionally calm, insisted that I not rush into unnecessary expense or effort, and further stressed that they were sure they could find the book elsewhere in the country, and , furthermore, available.
    They were right. A few weeks later, another phone call. Perilous Passage had arrived, all the way from Lakehead University, in Thunder Bay, Ontario. Coincidentally, this was the institution whereat my second daughter had taken her librarian's certificate. I was mightily delighted, had plenty of words with which to express my happiness with the library system that had worked, and yet my joy also went much further than words could express. The moment was indeed sublime: I was reliving the excitement of my adolescent discovery - it is always good to be returned to the days of our youth - and this was confirmed and augmented by the satisfactions that come with watching Providence work the signs of wisdom and reflection through one's older years. Moreover, where God has spoken once, He will speak again. From all the spirit that had surrounded and fuelled the undertaking of finding the book again, there had to be to this adventure than a single exercise in recollection. The Muse was up to something. There was a pattern taking shape, and having Perilous Passage in my hands again would provide not a few clues to making that pattern out.

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    Finally, today, my own copy. The two or three readings of the days since the book arrived have not filled the Muse's requirement's, that's for sure. The schedule of symbols in Mayse's crisp little work - 247 smallish pages - must have even more significance than I had hoped for, and if I ever had any doubts that it would be an excellent study piece for my literature students they have been swept away, and I am more than intrigued by trying to visualize the scenes through film-makers eyes of my fictional Michael Thurman. This too is more than a mere cinematic exercise for the sake of fiction.
    At my wife's museum, there is a photocopy machine. Previously it has served for copies of my first novel, either for chapters sent to the Vatican or for copies used as scripts for our two-voice recording. But now it has served for the 125 sheets that it took to provide the community with its very own copy of this long-last friend. Within a fortnight at least one teenager will be using this copy in an experimental course in English literature, and I have it as a very fundamental and prime source for recollective browsing.
    Interesting, how a book - or any other art object, of course - can be as strikingly informative as a human being, or a stunning adventure, when it comes to arriving at a clear grasp of the full significance of some past experience, especially in the often shrouded events of our youth. As I was walking home from the library with Perilous Passage I had a flash of understanding as clear as daylight: one of my earliest assaults on the work ethic had been so right!
    In the late spring of 1949, freed up from my winter job of baby-sitting my younger brothers and cooking supper while my mother held down a job at a Woolworth's store, I had donned my best clothes, shined my shoes, and applied at the old Beatty Street offices of the Vancouver Sun for a job as a newspaper delivery boy. I heard nothing out of that building for many weeks and then one day in early August the manager of the sub shack dropped by to tell me I had a job, if I wanted it. He seemed like a nice lad, therefore comforting to ponder as a prospective boss, and he further seemed genuinely disappointed when I said that I could not accept right away as I had planned a trip to my Nana and Grandpop's place at the food of Sechelt Inlet. My determination to have my inlet holiday meant at least a two-week delay in filling the post, and of course the sub-manager had to put a new boy in place as soon as possible. I was genuinely regretful, not only from losing the job, and the money that would have gone with it, but also because he was an older lad who seemed to like me for myself.
    My father was even upset that I had turned down the opportunity and I can't say that I blamed him. Although the family finances of the moment had improved enough that my mother no longer had to work so that we could have some basic furniture, they were still lean. And I had already had a wonderful holiday, paid for from the slim family budget, of ten glorious days at the Salvation Army camp on the west shore of Howe Sound, at Hopkins Landing. How well I remember my parent's exchanged looks of concern - over the squeaky finances, of course - when I raised the subject of camp at the supper table, following the announcement at a scout meeting. Ten dollars for ten days, including the Union Steamships fare from Vancouver to Hopkins, was the tariff. It sounds like so little now, but in 1949 it was almost a day's wages out of my father's winter salary as a depot master for the B.C. Electric. He was marking time, waiting for a job in personnel, simply happy, like so many veterans, to have a job and a roof over the head of his family. One of the biggest perks from my mother's quitting work was that I was able to join the school softball team, playing third base. There was no money for a proper glove, and I used an old left-hander's glove - the wrong side for me - that had been my Dad;s in his younger days when he played for a sawmill team. But that was before the War, perhaps before I was born.
    Was it the first time I stood up to my Father, on behalf of my own instincts? Thirteen is an adventurous age. Certainly I was not business oriented, as he was inclined to be, and in my own mind I wondered if I were being a bit of a snot, and revenging myself for the previous summer before, when I had, unquestionably, been a genuine little wretch over my mother and my two younger brothers going off to the inlet for a holiday while I had to stay home with my Dad. It was not a little complicated and yet, as I could not escape, there seemed to be a purpose in my intransigence. I had to make this journey, this pilgrimage, to my Nana's place.
    The first impressions of children are enormously important. They can never be exaggerated, never underrated. Our Lord Jesus Christ and his Church are most emphatic on this subject, and to disagree, one must indeed have a profound hatred of life. We were all children once, and "unless we become as children" again we shall never enter the kingdom of heaven. Grim words, in their connotations of absolute severity, and yet, if we turn them over in the slow, gentle, marination of genuine reflection, we come to ground zero with the wisdom of what has been said. Children are by no means completely, irretrievably, innocent. Their virtues have not been tested, their perhaps virtually infinite reception of individual gifts from the Holy Spirit have not been honoured by a proportional return. And yet the initial thrust and first fire is there. God cannot betray his own priorities and standards, and all youthful souls, as I remember, are flooded with grace whether they like it or not. Sooner or later, as the day of judgement approaches, they have no choice, short of hell, in acknowledging the instances of such favours. But these stern words are for the wavering, the ungrateful, the unrecollected. Those who have been given the grace for tracing their spiritual lineage - always more important than their natural ancestry - are only too happy to give the credit where it is really due. How could their thinking otherwise give them spiritual maturity?
    I had first gone to Porpoise Bay, at the lower, southern, end of Sechelt Inlet in August of 1945, when the collected family wisdom decreed that number one grandson should spend the summer on the Coast. The first half of the trip saw me in Burnaby, at the Central Park house where my father had grown up. and then my Nana came by and took me up to Sechelt and the beach property whereon my new grandfather was building her a cosy little cottage. Later I will list the details of yet another province in far flung empire of my childhood garden of Eden; for now, suffice to say that I loved my weeks there from start to finish - I even helped my new grandfather with some of the nailing - and had been eagerly awaiting a return. But the year-and-a-half on Lasqueti had intervened and the only family or any other jaunt to my mother's mother's new home had come in the summer of 1948, when my Mom and my two younger brothers had gone for a couple of weeks, without me! I'd been scheduled to stay behind, with my Dad.
    One could probably write a full novella, at least, about the riot of indignation, self-pity, outrage, sense of injustice, blah blah, and etcetera,. that flowed through my youthful veins and brains at the announcement of this arrangement, and I can vividly remember the mood of hoping and praying, right down to the moment of the other trio getting on the Union Steamship sailing for all those lovely little ports on the Sunshine Coast, including Sechelt, that there would be a change of heart and I would be told I could come aboard too. But, no dice, and I spent two weeks in the city, fishing and biking and roaming about with my buddies in the day, eating supper and chewing the fat with my Dad in the evening. In the golden tranquillity of old age, I perceive that my parents had decided that father and oldest son needed some time together, as it was the beginning of the vacation, and I had just spent the previous six months living with my Aunt Beulah, my father's sister, because our present living accommodations were so small. (In a tiny apartment in my mother's brother's basement.) I had got to go to a better school, thanks to my aunt, and come to the family on weekends, but not I was hone for the summer, and , as I said, spending quality time with my Dad. I have to admit that the pain of not getting back to Sechelt did ease, and I had the further satisfaction of hearing, on Mom and siblings' return, that the youngest brother had worked a certain amount of havoc on Grandpop's tools.
    And now, somehow, in the summer of 1949, there was nothing to stop me from making my return to Sechelt, my boyish pilgrimage to Paradise. For all that I was eager - with the aforementioned qualifications - to land a job as a paper boy, I did have some income. I had an allowance, possibly still money left from my salary as cook and babysitter during the winter months of my Mom's working, and more than likely money from babysitting at the next door neighbours'. They were a very nice family, and with a two-storey house they had a den on the main floor with an entire wall of books. My little income paid for my trip to and fro the grandparents' place, and not on the Union Steamship boat, but this time on a rebuilt navy corvette. Standing on the stern, you were closer to the green and white churn of the wake. It was a most satisfying journey, both ways, paid for out of my own independent pocket, and in the middle of it, first in my grandparents' living room, where I fell into the middle of the Post serial, and then in my grandfather's workshop and wood-room out back, where I found every one of the other episodes, emerged the raging, fiery, ultra-west-coast-marine beauty of Arthur Mayse's romantic adventure. My instincts for a solo journey, a pilgrimage, to my grandparents' had proved to be right, and not only right, but right beyond my deepest expectations.