Chapter Eight

    "No Iliad ever began with the birth of Achilles."

    This is a bit of iambic pentameter I came up with one morning a few years ago when I was trying to write a long poem about the spiritual life. Homer's classic, as its readers know, gets off to a quick start, with two grown men in a battle over a young woman, in the midst of the siege of Troy. A battle within a war, like a play within a play, and even at this point we have had nine years of encamped Greeks and embattled Trojans with as yet no decisive conflicts. Inasmuch as the spiritual life is often likened to combat, especially with the forces of evil within oneself, anecdotes of war, real or fictional, have a certain relevant intensity.
    So, before we get too far along in this ramble, which has the fact dealt somewhat with my childhood, although not with actual birth, we must deal with some warfare, some gunshots, some wounds. and in fact the slow dying to the world, the flesh, and the devil without which the spirit cannot truly be set free.
    But what is the spirit? Even those who believe God gave them a soul and a mind, not just a sensual body filled with contradicting and unreliable emotions, so often seem unable to get beyond the few basic mental skills sufficient to stumble through the minimal obligations to family, workplace, school, and perhaps religion. Given the power and depth of life in a fully developed spirit, the limited existence in no small tragedy. Yet who can escape it without the grace of God, and who will go to the ultimate depths and heights of his or her soul without very special graces from God? And not only grace but the most definite participation in glory? And all of these lovely favours presume, of course, victory over grave sin. And then victory over lesser sins, and even imperfections and faults that interfere with advanced graces and the presence of glory. The growth pf the spiritual life is methodical, like every other undertaking of any consequence, and in our later years, with sufficient time on our hands and water enough flowed under our personal bridges, we delight in reminiscing and piecing together the chapter and verse, the times and places and person of these moments of instruction. This is not to say that the moments themselves were all pleasant. In order for the spiritual life to progress as it should, so much of the time spent is extremely unpleasant, in the way that mankind ordinarily measure pleasure. The spiritual life is indeed a rigorous affair, full of internal obedience as well as external, and therefore more demanding than even the military - which I was for years, on a casual basis, happily part of - and yet it also knows the most horrendous moments of battle agony. Many times over, the fully matured and experienced contemplative knows that death - would be much preferable to the spiritual trials in which it suddenly finds itself.
    The absolute sureness of this realization, for all that I had been given an habitual experience of the contemplative life, never fell upon me until I was twenty-one, and was, in reflection, a kind of graduation present or even the bestowing of a Divine equivalent of the bachelor of arts degree. After all, a large proportion of the students who had entered university with me were receiving their diplomas. so why, in a sense, not I?
    The place of this anointing was my beloved Sechelt Inlet, at Porpoise Bay, a sparse collection of homes scattered along the shore of the south end of that long, narrow, generally uninhabited Pacific fiord with a mouth so small that only sixty percent of the normal tide fluctuation is allowed to pass through it. By the summer of 1945 my mother's mother, remarried to a just-retired old gentleman of innumerable sea-going and outdoor adventures, was having a house built at Porpoise Bay - a small part of it by my ten-year-old-self - and she and Grandpa Alex were to live there for the next twenty years and some. I was awe struck by my new grandfather - the old one had died long before I came along - and fell in love with the Inlet as well. I had always loved the wild reaches of Nature, but never had any of them feel I could call my own. Now, through my Nana, I had a beachhead on my very own Eden, to which I regularly made my pilgrimages, and five years later, when my father and uncle bought adjoining houses three miles up the inlet coast, I had an even stronger grip on the meditative use of holidays and the sens of feeling doubly privileged.
    By the spring of 1957, I'd known the inlet and its profound silence for a dozen years. I'd fished regularly, hunted a little, but mostly I had simply loved being there. For those who have learned how to be still and look about them, who lack false ambitions and a guilty conscience both, the quiet, the solitude, of Nature is an overwhelming and most companionable presence, especially in a region blanketed by the very real faith of someone close to you. It was my Nana who had taught me my childhood prayers and it was my Nana who had been the occasion of my secure and comfortable access to the wilderness and its lonely reach of water.
    And as well as these key decisions regarding real estate and religion, it was also my Sechelt grandparents who subscribed to the Saturday Evening Post, the weekly magazine founded by Benjamin Franklin and in my youthful days, before television swept away most of the magazine storytellers, North America's favourite source of short stories and serials. My parents did not subscribe, but the Post, so often with its cover adorned with a Norman Rockwell illustration, was the journal no doctor or dentist's office could be without and I no doubt read it as well in homes where I visited or babysat. But in the months prior to the discovery I made in my grandparents' house I must have slipped up on my reading, because when I arrived at the inlet late in a certain summer - I think it was 1950 - I dipped into their great stack of Post issues and came upon a serial I had not been aware it had carried.
    The story was Perilous Passage, by Canadian author Arthur Mayse. I was swept into it instantly, landing by chance in an early episode, and after locating the first installment in the pile kept in Grandfather Alex' workshop at the back of the little house, I found to my great joy and relief that my Nana had preserved every relevant issue. The entire tale was there: I could relax and read it at my leisure.
    As far as I can remember, Perilous Passage was only the fourth novel I had ever read that was set in a landscape I could call my own, and the first of these was not of much use to a boy. It was located in my native province, and I suppose that may have been of some influence on my young mind that did not yet know it belonged to a writer, but I did not like it much and that may have suggested to me that people could not write well about British Columbia. That first book was written for adults, and ended unhappily.
    My next discover of a local author was Roderick Haig-Brown, with his two excellent books about a young lad's adventures along the east coast of Vancouver Island, first with a trap line, then with a salmon troller. Therein not only did I find my own territory very well written about, but I was also in no small way consoled over the uprooting from Nature that had come upon me when I was going on twelve and was hauled away from eighteen months in a coastal island paradise. It was probably best that this rupture occurred, for no paradise is complete without the prayers and education that come with a monastery, and my island had possessed no monks: I was to make great use of the opportunities the city could provide; yet I missed the island and was much pleased to have it restored by Saltwater Summer and Starbuck Valley Winter. Sometimes a good book can put us into a place, or back into a place, more suitably than can the place itself. A healthy mind makes more journeys than a body ever could hope to, and often better, and for all that I probably needed the city, and made good use of it, I also absolutely required regular journeys to the country, journeys real or imaginary yet always open to the spiritual law by which, where one considers the intellectual quality of the company, the imaginary journeys may be more real according to the actual relation to what Being truly is.
    Roderick Haig-Brown was awfully good company for a boy, especially a boy already well versed in the young reader's classics that have descended from Homer's detailed love for life on land or sea. Starbuck Valley Winter - it came first - was simply another of these, with the pleasant surprise of it being my own turf that acted as the setting. I had indeed read a few stories set in Canada - Glengarry School Days being one of the most notable, discovered when I was already familiar with the Ontario landscape - but in a country as big as this one, your own province merits its own treatment, and each generation of its writers need some rooting in those who went before.
    In a new province, in a settlement and colonization too young to have its own indigenous cultural history, those first writers will have had to be born somewhere else and have brought their culture with them. Haig-Brown had been born in England, and brought over many of the best things British, yet he became thoroughly at home in the Canadian West, making ti completely and comfortably his own back yard, therefore helping myself and any other apprentices to the work of words to truly make British Columbia our own back yard. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and the eye, really the understanding and appreciation, must be trained, and trained again. Following young Don Morgan about was no bad training programme, and part of my being able to accept and be at peace with my return to the city, the settling in to urban ways.
    Initially, except for losing a new friend who had just come to my school on the island because his had closed, I did not mind leaving Lasqueti. My mother was already in town with my youngest brother and my father, of necessity, was winding down his logging operation. All my aunts and uncles and one set of grandparents lived in Vancouver or Burnaby. The urban area was full of libraries, athletic facilities, scout troops, cadet corps, movie theatres, and the high schools and the university a lad born to use his brains had to leave the coastal corners to go to anyway. It also contained the employment opportunities that would eventually be just right for my father, and a newly begun inexpensive veterans' rental housing development that would be just right for our family needs and economics. For the second half of grade seven and then for all of grade eight I landed myself two very fine male teachers - excellent role models for the trade I would one day take up - to my own astonishment and my luck continued on into high school. It seems pretty clear that I was meant to come back to the city of my birth. In fact anyone not so fond of the wilderness as myself might have thought that the year-and-a-half on the island was simply a necessary interlude, some time my family had to spend before work and accommodation came available for returned veterans.
    The city also possessed something else I had been able to avoid in good conscience on my little island: church and Sunday school, and therefore the opportunity to wrestle with the angels over the question of some sort of regularized allegiance with church buildings. congregations, Sunday school teachers and ministers before the Lasqueti interlude and then for eighteen months only the daily Bible readings in school had been there to remind me that Nature and books were not quite everything my spirit required. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that these things had continued to be the means through which I was pursued by a light that I took for granted, by which I was given a nourishment in grace that I did not truly comprehend. But with parents who had left religion behind as they entered their adult and family lives, my conscious and articulate relationship with anything formal. and external. when it came to my Creator and Redeemer, was bound to be spasmodic, relying on the good will of relatives, good luck in schools - two months in a denominational college in Belleville, Ontario, for example - and whatever inner promptings and other special moments God might bestow upon me. Not the least of favours too, would be friends and associates, with their particular, better organized, relationships with specific religions.
    I am not by any means suggesting that there was no religion on Lasqueti Island. On the contrary, as I have always recalled very clearly and with much affection the spirit what was quite common to the island generally and exercised some definite benefits in my direction. The first house of influence had a mother who was Catholic by birth, the second was Jehovah Witness to a moderate degree, and in the third the mother came from a devout Mormon upbringing. But on an island barely twelve miles long and boasting no more than a hundred-and-fifty souls. there were no churches and no services of regular obligation. One could be both a Christian and a free spirit without a sense of guilt or estrangement that can come in the presence of specific buildings, specific congregations, and resident pastors. I had lived for the time in a kind of child's paradise, where there were all sorts of benefits but not so many obligations. And yet, because I was a child, not yet an adolescent, and because I was actually not all that many years away - a mere decade - from becoming a Roman Catholic and finding myself a theologian as well as a novelist, in so many ways, I think, the Holy Spirit made it to no small degree a Catholic paradise, if only because I had so much love for the Nature He had created and then renewed, and on the island so much time to exercise that affection and regard.
    And regard nature I most certainly did, continuously absorbing her unspoiled beauty and variety from the moment I awoke until the time I fell to sleep. Except for the hours I was in school. or at my chores at home, there was little else to be preoccupied with. I read habitually, of course, but even there in my reading the wild outdoors, with a farm or a ranch as home base was pretty much my favourite reading. We had battery radio on Lasqueti, and I listened fairly widely to any serials we could get, but I recall that the most important stories were those set in the Old West - again the outdoors - The Lone Ranger and The Cisco Kid. Being a story-teller in the making naturally I enjoyed any well-told tale, so I was also aware of Superman, The Green Hornet, and so forth, but I was basically convinced that the country mouse had the better side of life.
    I think that one of the reasons for this poet's preference was my instinct for mystery. The city was full of information, very necessary and useful information, but the fields and the woods, the coastlines and the mountain ridges, streams and pools and lakes: all these were an endless source of wonder and mystery. And this fascination over bottomless personality of nature was a very general passion. I had none of the ear-marks of the young botanist, geologist, forester, butterfly or birds' egg collector. From time to time I managed even to feel inadequate because of the lack of a special interest. I simply found the entirety of it all a satisfying companion, a necessary companion, and endless friend. Had I known anyone with the talent to teach me, I might have become a fairly competent landscape painter, but even this is only supposition; I might equally as well have realized that the particular concentration required of an artist injected far too much material interruption into the generally metaphysical tone of my happy brooding. And even a trained and accomplished painter is wary of asking his best friends to pose, for he knows it can be difficult to get into a painting all the right qualities of those he knows and loves the best.
    And the face of the created earth I certainly loved, and most of the time it seemed to be smiling fondly back at me. Fondly, and always full of mystery.
    If I seem to be insisting, in the early part of this recollective argument, that the towns and cities held no beauty, no mysteries for me whatsoever, let me say that such is not my intention, because in fact one of my earliest memories of being sublimely wounded by the glory of nature took place not in the forest or the middle of some vast and lonely meadow, but right in the front garden of a small nursery, close by the house and office building, just off a busy main thoroughfare. Nor did the inside of houses and other buildings lack many wonderful and arresting moments, especially where books or religion were natural elements, and gardens - I have just spent some time looking over mine, which lies south of the house, gleaming most provocatively in the November sunshine - November is the month of the dead - gardens could be inebriating too, especially when they were huge and full of everything from chickens to strawberries, corn and apple trees, like my paternal grandparents' garden. And later, perhaps even before I left childhood and entered the labyrinthine passages of adolescence, God exerted His rights over His own creation and began to teach me that not only is beauty in the eye of the beholder, but that from time to time the eye of the beholder is, divinely, radically, and not a little unpleasantly, interfered with. This happened even on my beloved Lasqueti Island, before I'd been there half-a-year. In these circumstances, even Nature loses all her charm, ceases to be a friend and ally, is for emotional and educational purposes nonexistent until God choses to restore the normal - or better than normal - relationship.
    This is nothing to complain about. If the created is so wonderful, then the Creator must be even more so, and the wisdom we are inspired to acquire by natural observation and experience must be rather less than the wisdom that comes to us through supernatural interference. And this supernatural seizing and purging of the faculties, one way or another even educates and stimulates our capacity for using and enjoying creation and the natural experience of it. Mountain climbing is a noble and exhilarating sport, stimulating to the mind as well as the body, but these passive steps by which we are enabled to ascend the inner mountain also present great challenges, with an even more lasting result.
    As God is everywhere, obviously this kind of experience can take place in a city as well as the heart of a lonely forest, and thus the opportunity for mystery is available to other than the country mouse. Moreover, as people. absolutely speaking, are greater sources of mystery than even the most awesome feature of non-rational creation, a truly civilized city is an immense source of the most wonderful, the most endless, occasions of mystery. It is for this reason that Saint Augustine employs his immortal image and title of The City of God, because we need this virtual infinity of human spirits, before our eyes in one way or another, as the proper material of the meditations that will one day take us to Heaven. In the afterlife we will have all the benefits of the solitude and quiet of the wilderness, of the lonely inlet or the desert island, yet we will have no shortage of company. If we need the outback to give us the space for looking into our souls, we need the roaring city to remind us of the inevitable quantity of our eternal brothers and sisters.
    Augustine's City, as its students know, is a town within a town, a numbering of the saved, and constantly rubbing elbows - in this earthly life - with those of an opposing spirit, even within the external signs of fellow membership in the Faith, every man jack of these will have to acquire that solitary wisdom of the wilderness before he enters the heavenly city. That is the great paradox of the spiritual life: the soul must learn to be totally alone with God, utterly detached from all created things, in order to learn how to be totally united in the spirit with those souls who have also learned to be completely alone with the Infinite and completely detached from anything created. Nor is this detachment applicable only to the material and the visible, as certain amateurs of the spiritual life like to pretend; to be truly effective it must also embrace the devotional life, the soul's own specific ideas, even genuinely spiritual events that have taken place at the very centre of the soul itself. This is a rule of thumb that beginners, by definition, find difficult to accept, but it is the law of the life of the spirit and completely unbreakable. No advancement in possible without adhering to it: God will toss the defaulting practitioner - no matter how highly placed in the spiritual or canonical journey - right off the path, sometimes without ceremony and quite brutal in His exposure of the soul to its spiritual acquaintances and even, on occasion, to wide open public scrutiny. The standards of the spiritual life, the integrity of the rules of perfection, are to be respected, for it is they, and they alone, through which is fulfilled God's desire that men and women be totally fulfilled in His image and likeness. No amount of masses and communions, no legions of good works, no quantities of devotions, as excellent and useful toward salvation as these may be, can do the work of the spiritual life. and this is a "work to rule" situation if ever there was one. And one works with a ruler, that is, a spiritual director. whose first obligations - after holiness and learning - are to exact obedience and to instill fear of the Lord.
    Do I seem to have strayed from my topic, my youthful anecdotes? No, because without having followed the rules of the spiritual life, most rigourously, and with frequent recourse to interpretation by, and deference to, another, I would not have been able to interpret these stories accurately, and in their right context. In fact I might not have been able even to recall them, or at least not all of them. And what writer wants to tell an incomplete story? No author can function without the Muse - study Homer, at the very beginning of the Iliad - and the Muse will co-operate only to the extent that the author lives up to his own standards as he has been granted the grace to acquire them.
    And, most certainly, the Muse requires deference to the principle of spiritual direction, even in its most obscure and tentative beginnings. That is part of the great paradox of the language of the spiritual life. More romantic images than the two great Canticles. the first of Solomon, the second of John of the Cross, cannot be found. Yet neither is there a stricter atmosphere of discipline than in both of those works, albeit spelled out more specifically, and at a completely exhausting length, in the Carmelite's masterpiece. The soul, the spirit, is called to love at the most profound level both God and man, yet to love with only the most refined, disciplined, purged of loves, a true charity, which sees all objects of affection as either Divine in themselves, or as a simply lent effects of the Divinity.

Chapter Nine

 
    Somewhat to my surprise, my upstairs typewriter - the one with the view - has been very quiet for a number of weeks. It is now almost the end of January - to be precise the 26th - and in two months I have managed only three or so pages up here. Whenever the Muse allows me to write steadily, I think of at least two pages as a normal day's work. Sometimes I have had to settle for half-a-page, as late in 1986 when I was moved to decide that I was due to put "finis" to the first volumes of Contemplatives; and then at other times, as in the summer months of 1987, when I was getting up to twenty pages on my highest day, and for an average day ten to fourteen, I have been able to produce in great quantity - indeed, unable not to do otherwise - but ordinarily I am content with a daily quota of half-a-thousand words; and so, I think, are many writers who take their craft seriously. The slower pace is pretty much preferred by authors who hope to leave something lasting. He who rushes to appear in print will rush to be forgotten, probably more quickly than he might have expected. The images and ideas of the mind can be voluminous, the stirrings of the heart and the feelings profound and numerous, and these can make for prodigious quantities of words, yet there might be such a loss of balance as to make the whole thing of a most ephemeral interest. Volume is usually necessary for a beginner, and even for the most proficient who relies on external draughting, for there must inevitably be a terrifying amount of words to throw away, but the finished result, if anything, will err on the side of economy.
    But this preferable measure should, ordinarily, occur within the working day, and no doubt as well the proper working week, where the prudent thinker in production mode still inclines to the wisdom of a day or two off every working five or so. Writing is a satisfying business in itself, but good writing, fully truthful stuff that is going to stick around for awhile, is often exhausting labour, and the writer needs his holidays, regularily small, yet occasionally large.
    Yet I was not really looking for any rests longer than a weekend, certainly not a couple of months, so from more than one past experience of Divinely created shutdowns, I knew I was waiting for something, either a research note - occasionally these take quite a while to come upon - or a major public event significant to what the Muse had in mind for me, eventually, to consider paying attention to. As it has turned out, there have been two events during the occasion of this delay - one of them seemingly connected with a question of research - and those two public events have occurred pretty well simultaneously. John Paul II has just concluded a visit to Fidel Castro's Cuba, and the President of the United States, Bill Clinton, is being made to face into the question of alleged sex scandals. Praying for leaders, of state as well as church, is a duty for the faithful, it goes almost without saying, but praying for those in the posts of decision and example is a full-time job for a contemplative, especially for a contemplative in the seventh mansiion.
    In fact it seems that the older I get, the less I write and the more I pray. As our professions shape us, of course the writer is always chattering away internally, for habits are habits, and that inward activity is satisfying, stabilizing, in itself. Yet this is still only the writer thinking, and valuable and necessary as thinking may be, it is not the same challenge and proof of ability as getting the words down on the page; the best words, in the best order. Nor, for the writer, is it quite enough of the work he has to do in order to employ the talents given him and thus save his soul.
    Yet, in 1987, as I was storming along at my most productive rate, the Holy Spirit did remind me, via a series of locutions, that praying remained my first duty, and that writing was to be considered number three. (Spiritual direction was two.)  Then a couple of years after the book was done, He furthered his sense of my priorities by a most - to me - mysterious intimation: I was, at least from time to time, to regard myself as "never having written a novel at all". I still do not clearly understand all the reasons this was said to me. Ongoing lessons in detachment are never unwelcome to the prudent, but I suspect a reason more precisely practical, and having to do with other assignments, especially the assignment of praying for a bankrupt hierarchy; national conferences have in so many cases become the biggest enemies of Christ since - to my cultural background - the Anglican revolt of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries.
    In every country, including my own, there are some bishops and archbishops who do not go along with the whining of modern psychologisms, nor the strange ambitions of nationalists of this or that stripe; these are men who believe fully in the ancient, wise, and unchangeable essentials of Catholic Christianity, who can discern the perils of surrendering to whims, whether from so-called leaders and learned advisers, or from the rank and file. This distinction is valid, as the two do not always go mad in the same way, In our times, while the "professionals" babble on and on in "inclusive" language, the general run of parishioners wonder what all the fuss is about. A recent poll conducted in the American Church has proved this overwhelmingly, yet the addled Mandarins fail to make suitable adjustments. Likewise, the average worshiper of my experience is embarrassed by the habit of standing during the changing of the bread and the wine into the Body and Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ, yet, like true sheep, they follow the herd, Rather comfortingly, I must say, one of the few genuinely devout priests of whose acquaintance I can boast in the modern Church said to me a few years ago: "Those who know they are sinners will kneel at the time of consecration; those who do not know they are sinners will stand."
    Yet - it must be asked - how can the laity recognize themselves as sinners when their professional leaders seem so generally incapable of such beginnings of wisdom? Just recently, in a brief conversation with a bishop, I used the phrase mortal sin. Had I slapped him, he would not have reacted with more vehemence and outright denial of the point I was trying to make.
    Moreover, even more recently I hear of a parish pastor being not a little off-hand in his advice to a young couple, for some time already living together, who are finally taking marriage instruction.
    And what of the young oaf, also in a collar, who a few years ago removed from a cathedral bulletin board an article, from L'Osservatore Romano, warning against inclusive language? He was already acquiring notice from parishioners as a preacher who went on twice as long as need be, so much so that eventually his bishop had to send him for what is euphemistically called a "year's study".
    With shepherds like these, the flock, to be destroyed, has no need of wolves. Only the mercy of God, His love for His Church, and the raising up through special infusions of grace in exceptional souls can counter these kinds of folly, can at least hold their influence on the faithful at bay, can eventually overcome them. And while certain souls among the laity, with a strong and genuine faith, may be able to set a minor example, may remain a truly graceful element within the body of the Church Militant, the vanquishing of all these harmful practises is possible only to the clergy: the bishops and priests, not excluding, of course, the vigilance and legislative authority, through canon law, of the Bishop of Rome.
    History tells us there was a time when Kings could deal with stupidity and sin among bishops and clergy, and not just for the ordinary criminal offenses, but it is unlikely that we shall ever see again the likes of Stephen of Hungary, or Henry of Bavaria - although recently I seem to have seen a line-up of medieval kings who wished they had been more like these men - and so we have to wait upon those whose task it normally is.
    This is not to say that the laity cannot have a strong spiritual effect on priests and bishops, and even cardinals and popes. Despite the clamours and follies of the world, and the worldly factions of the Church - and these are more manifold than Heaven has ever wished to see these days - constant prayer and example, in the souls of the genuinely virtuous, remain the Holy Spirit's weapons of choice, and such armament is readily available to the laity as well at to clergy and religious. In these times, however, it needs to be said that only those who firmly understand the Church's ancient and unchangeable teachings on real and wholesome chastity are truly virtuous, and thus capable of influencing the hierarchy for good. It is the spirit and example of those who have compromised on questions of purity and chastity that have brought the Church to its present sad condition in so very many areas of the world. Such a huge preponderance of souls, one way or another, are in the same predicament as Saint Augustine before he gave into the voice of Christ. They live in the flesh, for all that they might think of themselves as respectable - or even devout - and withing their minds they wander in a labyrinth of unanchored concepts and endless rationalization.

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    As with all of this book so far, the pages of this chapter have taken their time, once again waiting on events. Providence insists on having, for the time being, the lion's share in my processes of inspiration and permission to carry on with the text. Providence, of course, always knows what lies ahead, while we mortals must wait patiently on her signs. And the sign, once more, as with Gone With The Wind, is American. Two mornings ago, May 5, my agents mailed a letter of inquiry to one of the best known and respected - deservedly - of American Catholic theologians, Jesuit Father Avery Dulles.
    The idea of contacting Father Dulles was not new. Well over a decade ago, at a point by which Rome, through novel chapters and my letters to the Holy Father had heard much of our fictional bishop, the Most Reverend Meinred Schwartz, Ordinary of the fictional diocese of Sterling, Father Avery had come out swinging so hard against the bishops of his own nation that one could easily think that the mighty Babe Ruth had returned to the Bronx. (In that New York borough stands Yankee Stadium as well as Dulles' Fordham University.) And a certain novelist and his advisers could easily think that the learned Jesuit had been advised about Schwartz and was kindly tipping off episcopal palaces throughout his native land.
    Father Dulles was saying that throughout the United States, where could be found a bishop with a genuine understanding of liturgy, theology, or spiritual direction? Our spirits leapt, mightily, and we even wondered if we might be hearing from him in the not too distant future. There were matters we cared about intensely and prayed over constantly, and the fictional Meinred Schwartz had been summoned to a most intense case of spiritual direction even before he arrived in his new diocese! By grace as well as nature we have been optimists about eventually finding a home for the novel, in a publisher, and like-minded souls with learning and an influential circle are automatically a possible doorway.
    Yet at the time we were much of a mind to believe that only the Vatican had the spiritual intelligence to oversee such a project. Either on my own, or after 1982, with my agents, a fair assortment of publishing interests had been approached without success, as I had known that I would have to start testing the waters long before the boat was built and ready for sailing. Canadian, British American, Irish; old friends. total strangers; French, Italian, Pakistani, Spanish by proxy; academic, commercial, small and hardly known in the publishing world or as huge and profiled as could be imagined; publishing houses which dealt with fiction, or publishing houses specifically theological; radio, film, and television interests, magazines, daily newspapers; priests, bishops, cardinals, religious, even the Pope; actors, directors, producers, editors, and of course, fellow writers: all of these functioning as alternatives whenever it seemed that we would not be able to think of Rome as a publisher, or simply seemed to be following an alternative inspiration.
    Genuine mysticism, of course, especially at the fully mature levels, is a rare thing, and the average literary man, artist, or critic is not really prepared to deal with it, nor is the average theologian or philosopher, no matter how experienced, learned, or published himself. Nor could I feel ignored as a writer generally, and go off in a fit of sulking. My lesser excursions with the Muse had received a very fair degree of attention, on a least one occasion, more than my agents were comfortable with. Some poetry, a play adaptation, a few songs, one of which was the theme for a radio drama broadcast on the national network. Moreover, this piece of composition, more than any other lyric I had written, was the one which prompted me to be in wondering about the day when I turned to creating an opera.

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    And yesterday, as Providence and the Muse would have it, my beloved, who originally sang The Bluebell for the radio broadcast, performed the song at the annual gathering of an informal association of museum and gallery personnel. This year's meeting was held in Riondel, the little town beside the Bluebell mine, on the east shore of Kootenay Lake and the lyrics were rendered, a capella, after a tour of the mine area. I was not present, following the usual habits of a hermit, but my wife had to admit that there was not a dry eye in the house. Furthermore, she did not mention the Margaret Mitchell project, for fear that if the audience knew I was considering an opera they would insist on a local concept.
    And I must admit that twenty-five years ago I was quite willing to try an opera on the Bluebell theme - it was, after all, a tragedy, a murder provoked by greed, claim-jumping, and frustration. Interestingly enough, one of the protagonists, the convicted murderer was an American. My neighbours, for better or worse, seem always to be a part of my inspirations.
    For many reasons, this is only natural. On my father's side, my ancestors were American, until after the Revolution, when a Charles MacCarthy Lamb emigrated from Pennsylvania to Upper Canada. Nearly a century later the family tree returned to the States, with a young offspring in Montana, marrying a Maggie Cavanaugh in Great Falls in 1889. I think I have mentioned this earlier, in connection with Gone With The Wind and its attendant discoveries, but it comes around again as something to think about in connection with Father Dulles and my one trip to New York City, naturally a Mecca or Jerusalem or Rome for any young soul who finds himself with the vocation of a writer.
    But in my case, there was also a supernatural element, because it was while I was in New York that I had a rather profound religious experience, fundamentally the third experience of the weeks following my last day in classrooms ordinarily dedicated to the study of the liberal arts.

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.

                                *          *         *          *           *

    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.

                                    *         *            *            *         *

    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.

Chapter 11

    Since my last chapter, the fall term has well begun, and I have had a kind note from Father Dulles, thanking me for informing him about the use I hope to make of his metaphysics text. In fact the text is already in full employ, and within a week, the class has doubled, from one to two students. My first pupil is in grade ten, the second in grade eight. With the second one joining us, as a result of her mother's growing discontent with the literature programme offered by the provincial department of education, I was reminded keenly of my first and last full metaphysics class, of some thirty students, grade eight thirteen-year-olds, back in the late winter and early spring of 1964, in the Catholic school in Terrace, B.C., in the diocese of Prince George. Teaching later in Nelson, where the school stopped at grade seven, I had taught philosophy not actually as a separate subject, but only as an adjunct to grammar. The extra element added to the normal list of subjects here was in fact the theology of Catholic meditation. This was the result of a different kind of inspiration, and let to startingly more significant results, although the effects of the Terrace experiment were in themselves remarkable and were to send me to the Kootenays with an insight and determination to look for even greater results in the souls of the young.
    Indeed, God was no liar, and I found the results, and I would be the most ungrateful man who ever put words to paper if I did not acknowledge that the Church that I came to was, increasingly, step by step, year by year and decade by decade, exposed as a nightmare, and I cannot fulfill my obligations to the grace and will of God without some reference to this disturbing fact. Nor, indeed, is the nightmare done with. For a few years, before he was promoted to archbishop, we had a fairly decent bishop, a man and priest with some sensibility to Rome, and a modicum of respect for the norms of the Faith. But on either side of his reign, our chief shepherds have been far too busy fulfilling Saint Augustine's prophetic warnings - found yearly in the September breviary - against leaders who have no mind for the true wisdom of Christ and the genuine care of their flocks. As a fictionalist, I could happily ignore their follies, and invent a good bishop of my own, with the help of the writings of the saints and examples from other dioceses, but as an autobiographer - a vocation laid upon me by the Lord about the same time as I began the first draught of my first novel - I have to deal with the sad truth. Literature, as we call it, is one thing, with its own Muse, and its own light; history is another thing. To have the whole truth, men must read both. We have in our lives that which was glorious, that which could have been glorious, that which was horrific. Christ had both a John and a Judas, a Peter and a Pilate. In the diocese of Nelson I have found the best of souls - and therefore much bettered my own spirit - and some of the worst. From the time I have been able to create something of what I think is, by the grace of God, as exalting a fiction as can be come upon; from the second I have notes that must, for the record, be included in a grimmer chronicling. The evil that I have encountered could also be used in fiction of course, one way or another, but the Muse has not been content with this employment only, and has always urged me to make mental notes as well for a strict history.
    Does it signify anything that I have now changed writing rooms? The long warm summer is over - today is the feast of the Guardian Angels - and a damp, cool, weather system has moved in for at least a few days, although the Kootenays inevitably knows a lovely Indian summer. I no longer gaze at the arm of the lake and the town below, but the eastern half of our back yard. I see the roof of the kitchen, some lawn, two venerable deciduous trees, a lilac and a cherry, and the concrete wall of the garden shed, affectionately know to as as "the bunker". The yard has such a slope up to the lane that these walls used to double as the foundation of a garage floor. Years ago I took out that structure - the side walls of the garage had previously collapsed - and also an adjoining trailer pad, and reclaimed the ground for a garden. Vegetables were the result for almost two decades, but now the earth has been reassigned again and herbs rule the day. Beautiful things, herbs, and there seems to be a growing culture of people returning them to their rightful place in medicine.
    Ah. There is indeed a significance to this new view. In my fourth year of enrolling in university, in my second year of law school, I quickly unrolled and embarked upon my own study programme, leaving legal questions entirely for the social sciences, initially, searching for the causes of mental health, in society as well as individuals. I was living in a fraternity house, although not as a member, and the view from my desk in this old building was also from the second floor, as here, and of a garden, although on the west side of the house, rough and not much attended, but still a garden, a patch of green: some lawn and a few shrubs. I was most content: I had the green of Nature without, the vernal, poetic, spiritual spring of new, good, self-chosen somewhat classical texts within. That autumn, of 1956, is a long time ago now, but the circumstances of this room bring it back infallibly. Memory, if we look after her, refreshed herself again and again from analogous occasions, especially for those possessing, whether they are terminologically conscious of it or not, the metaphysical turn of mind.
 
                              *           *              *             *            *

    My initial movement into this room was modest. I brought only my typewriter and the simplest of tables that has stood upon, over the summer, on the glassed-in porch. I had in fact wondered about leaving my dart board on the porch, perhaps finding some other useful occupation that would fill in the moments when I wait for the correcting fluid to dry on top of my typing mistakes. But I found that there were no substitutes for the little exercise of darts - they seem also to have a quite profound effect on writer's grist and contemplative recollection - and so in intervals of whiteout, or when I was waiting for a thought to clear, I reassembled my dart course right in this room. A search for a suitable piece of plywood to protect the back of the door from my wandering aim, the application of a few screws, and the poor man's archery yard is back in business.
    I've yet to rise to the little pointed rascals today, however, as the correcting fluid moments are taken over for the time being by a further use of the little white-covered brush. On Saturday, while the two ladies of the house worked mightily among rooms, closets, clothes, books, paintings, and other objects, I strove with equal concentration at the piano keyboard, looking for, and finding, some solid methods for fingering studies. It was a very long time ago that I stopped trying to use the Frederick Harris Brown Scale Book for myself or students, but only on Saturday did I take my bottle of whiteout to the fingering numbers for the treble scale, in similar motion, for the key of C major. The time for printing out my own scales, exercises, and studies had not yet arrived, but I think it is appropriate now, with my various guinea pigs, to attempt some employment of the printed scales currently available. I must admit to enjoying using the correction fluid: my history with the Brown Scale Book has been more frustration and confusing than otherwise, and I suspect there are many keyboard enthusiasts who share at least some of my discontent. By now, thanks to the typing slips, I have made alteration up to the scale of B major.
    When I take up the minors, if I do, I shall have even more work to do, for this publication, somewhat endorsed, it seems, by the Toronto Conservatory, doesn't seem to think that the natural minor scale is a useful study. Thus exits folk music, not a few hymns, and the more arithmetically sound introduction which is always essential to the peace of mind, self-possession, and autonomy of genuine beginners. I should add, to be fair and accurate, that other fingerings, particularly of the triads, solid and broken, are not at fault, and are indeed, the proof of the pudding that does not seem so well recepied on the other side.
    But now I am back to darts, in the failing moments, and having a devil of a time with double thirteen. This state of affairs has been with me since Friday night - it is now Monday afternoon, late, not too long before dinner and my usual writing time, and perhaps it is symbolic of the length of time I've put in with more important frustrations or obligations laid on by the Christian need to practise patience.
    I was mentioning the process of initiation into the horrors of the Nelson diocese, over thirty years ago. in part because of the timing of a recent gathering. It was forty years ago, at the same time as I was concentrating on the studies and prayers that would bring me into the Catholic Church, that Wilfrid Emmett Doyle, then an official in the archdiocese of Edmonton, Alberta, was made bishop of this diocese in the Kootenays, in the south-east corner of British Columbia. Doyle was made a bishop - by Pius XII, his last - while I was finally into the spiritual life by the gift of the flight of the spirit, with special notes from the Blessed Virgin Mary. Doyle had not spiritual life whatsoever, as I was six years later to so painfully find out, while I had more of it than any man would dare ask for, even though I was neither priest nor religious, and I would continue to have even more blessings dumped upon me, in spite of, or perhaps because of, the horrific conditions I was advised to endure while remaining in Nelson. The poor man did, however, have a kind of public life, and canonical responsibilities, and these were recently "celebrated" in a mass and banquet organized by the present bishop of Nelson, also from Albert, and in his own way similarly foolish, on the occasion of Doyle's fortieth anniversary of consecration.
    I think it fair to say that the only true honours that could be given out associated with Bishop Doyle's tenure were to good souls who chose to endure him, and went on serving the whole truth of Christ's Church as best they could within his canonical domain. The present bishop, had he any discernment, would have know this, and left well enough alone. But he has odd concepts of community, truth, and faith, and fancies himself as a leader of missions and retreats. The first and probably last time I was moved to engage him in a conversation he recoiled, as if slapped violently, at my use of the term mortal sin. When clergy, especially episcopal clergy, are not comfortable with this phrase, and do not use it warningly in their sermons, can there be any other reason other than they are in it?
    None of our community, of course, had anything to do with this hypocritical celebration, but as always, as we began noticing many years ago, whenever the parish or the diocese threw some questionably oriented clambake with which we could not honestly have anything to do, the Holy Spirit infallibly bestowed some real, special, concomitant grace upon ourselves. Thus it was no mere coincidence that a long week after the Doyle affair two of the foremost angels in my flock, the dear souls of genuine spiritual perfection, should be spending an entire day to establish this most comfortable and comforting room on my behalf. Poor Emmett has had his banquet, but now he is gone back to Edmonton, to where he was banished in 1990 by his successor, the fourth bishop of Nelson, Peter Mallon, and I remain, still secure in the place of my purgation, as Saint John of the Cross calls it, to whence I was called from the time Emmett was ordained. Mallon had been advised, by the most stable priest in the diocese, once a missionary in Africa, and a Dutchman, that he, Mallon, would not be the real bishop as long as Doyle was allowed to function here in any capacity.
    Poor Emmett? Perhaps Evil Emmett would be a more accurate title, but he is an old man now, and the last time I saw him a dark little gnome in a corner of a gathering of parishes come together for the sacrament of confirmation, the present bishop having brought him back to help with reducing the number of such get togethers. One of my little students was receiving the sacrament; to her horror she got Doyle rather than the present bishop, but the Holy Spirit came with His infallible light and protected her from the darkness of a pervert and protector of perverts. Such is the way of God's power in His Church, that through the sacraments the faithful are strengthened and nourished in spite of the weakness and even total sinfulness of the ministers of those sacraments.
    Nonetheless, one can still wonder at the wisdom of the committee that nominates candidates from among the nation's clergy. If Doyle was the best man for the job in 1958 the country's priests must have been, at that time, a sorry lot. Or is the committee stocked with perverts? Here and there, serious allegations against our seminaries have been made, and of late all the young priests I have come across would profit from a regular series of floggings or the spiritual equivalent. Knowledge of the classics of the spiritual life is non-existent, and mortal sin, as I have mentioned, is no longer mentioned, and I pity the imbecile who thinks these are exaggerations.
    There are, of course, some good priests, and even a few genuinely pious and learned bishops, and I think not only in my fiction. God and his power are realities, and the world and the Church cannot be left entirely without some of the real thing. But the folly is too abundant to be ignored, and nowhere can it be worse than in my own country.
    Yet, at the moment, any solution seems to be in the hands of others. The Vatican exists for the sake of discipline, for correction and purification. The layman, especially the contemplative layman, can do little more than stick to the helm of his version of Noah's ark. And this room seems so much like just that sort of sanctuary. Good memories, good books, the chance and the fortune and the grace to ruminate over both, spiced and salted and illuminated by the events of the day and the opportunity to teach the innocent and the spiritual what more could a man ask? Let the dead give false comfort to the dead. Those who know the peace, joy, and light and strength, of a true cell, a true monastery, a true spiritual community, will ultimately see their concerns addressed, no matter how dark, cold, and full of lies some of their attendant circumstances seem to be.
    By the way, I did get that double thirteen, as I was pondering my thoughts on priests who refuse to mention mortal sin. And thirteen years ago. this morning, brought up some interesting points in my journal, having to do with Jesuits and bullies, among other things.

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.

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.