Contemplatives: the Novel

Chapter 11

2009-10-09T15:03:00.000-07:00

Like the man in the first verse of the first psalm, Michael Thurman was enormously happy, even though the book he had collected in the sports editor's office was not the technical work he had expected to find, but rather a discussion of well-known novels made into film. "Dumb Porter," he muttered, but only because the aborted connection demanded some comment. Inwardly, he was thrilled with his new acquaintance, rapidly, he was convinced, becoming a friend. Few professions in the world offer more opportunity for envy than the writer's, but neither are there many callings which can inspire so deep a basis for friendship. Good writers peel the camouflage from a soul, especially from each others' souls, and where the underlying spirit, laid bare, is that of the honest man - honesty being a kind of beauty in its own right - the bonding is not unlike that which goes on among good souls and the angels. Nor can the recognition of potential be much quicker, where the beholding eyes are clear of fault. Michael was finding his spirit wildly magnified by the significance of Nicholas Taylor. He had certain rational cautions - not the least of which was his practical certainty that Nick was not a Catholic and therefore probably ignorant of the theology of mysticism - but his heart was profoundly drawn to the situation, and his mind was alive with a host of his own memories of encountering the Faith. That he was probably not a Catholic was, for the moment at least, not a major obstacle to anyone himself a convert. And even if he never became one, at least if he had the writer's ability, a certain amount of education. a sense of fair play and a nose for a good story, he could still pull off Jacob's intention. Art was art. Look at actors. Great sinners had played priests. Jewish violinists performed in the "Messiah". Atheistic and Protestant journalists covered Bishop Sheen. Why shouldn't Nick deal with Philippe? If only as a . . . journalist?
Ah, Michael thought. No. Not as a journalist. Jacob would have a fit. Not as a journalist. On questions of religion, journalists were more inclined than not to ride the fence. Neither by experience nor study did they know enough theology to enable them to really get hold of something like Philippe, unless some unusual footwork direct from Heaven kicked them around a bit. Not even the journalists from the Catholic papers always made the grade, as Philippe's history well proved. so many writers, so many professors, so many so-called theologians, including bishops, somehow had been so poorly prepared for running into a real mystic. Their egos, their secret sins, their lack of depth in their studies flared out of control and left them almost hysterical, in some cases, or ineffectively babbling in others. The scribes and the Pharisees had by no means died with the destruction of Jerusalem.
"Journalists have editors," Jacob often said. "And the editors like to tell themselves that no journalist is irreplaceable. If Fred won't play ball, Jim will. Novelists have editors too, but those editors know that a real novelist is not so expendable. You start telling Philippe's story to a journalist and you'll right away see through his eye balls into the back of his brain to find his editor shaking his head. All the editor can think about is his newspaper's reputation and his advertisers. But a novelist, a real novelist, only cares about the story. If it's a good story, he has to tell it. And if it's a true story, the dialogue will carry him through it. Journalism hasn't much room for dialogue. Writers who understand this either stay away from journalism, or leave it, and become playwrights."
"So you find the novelist for Philippe's story and I'll become his playwright. Well, screenwriter. And I won't have been a journalist."
"You know away too much about theatre to become a journalist. I'm not saying that the newspapers and magazines don't need good journalists. If a man has to write, he has to write. But I know that theatre needs you, and not as a critic."
"Thank you. But the big need for a movie about Philippe would be the actor to play him. You can't just fiddle with parts of a wooden crucifix and do a voice-over like they did in the Miracle of Marcelino."
"No, you can't. But maybe that was moving enough, in the ordinary world of grace that movies usually operate in."
"I think finding an actor to play Philippe is harder than finding someone to write about him. My task is more difficult than yours."
"To each his own, although at the moment I will admit you would have the tougher assignment. Words on paper is all about intellectual activity. What goes on in the head. A live actor would bring reality into the picture - pardon the pun - and that would be a different kettle of fish. Probably impossible. But that's only if you actually plan to film the Transformation instead of just mentioning it. Listen. If you've gone that far ahead in your thinking about my project why don't you just write the book first? You're further along in this than I am. I've never really thought about filming it all. I wonder if God has? I suppose one day we'll have to find out, won't we? But not before we find the right writer."
This had been a much earlier conversation. But it came to mind quite clearly as Michael and Nick made their way to the Brock cafeteria. He remembered that Nick had picked up the film book to look at it before he, Michael, had showed up. Was he interested in the business? This was not all that common for this part of the world, even though Vancouver had sent more than one performer to stage, screen, and radio in various national centres. And he obviously wrote. And, as a downtown journalist, he had been paid for writing, which would have given him something of a professional confidence. But of course thousands of people wrote, and had professional confidence, without having any sensibility at all for something as hard to understand as the Transformation. The world is too much with us, late and soon.
He came back to Nick. "When you were writing for the Star, did you do any reviews? Theatre Under the Stars, Totem Theatre, that sort of thing?"
"Good heavens, no. I wouldn't know how to write a review. Not the foggiest idea. For one thing I haven't been that much a play goer." He laughed. "I felt lucky enough to be able to make copy out of the political scene. I mean newspaper copy. Of course what I was really doing in my head was analyzing characters. What makes a man decide to take up politics? To run for office? And you know what I kept thinking? None of the politicians were as interesting men as my teachers. You take your teachers for granted when you're in school, more or less, and then you spend the rest of your life realizing how lucky you were to know them."
Ah, thought Michael. Now there's an opening. "Philippe Gagnon was a teacher."
"Who?"
"Jacob Cameron's grandfather. Dr. Cameron's father-in-law. He eventually became an actor and a writer, but he was first a teacher. The sort of teacher students remember."
They were in the Brock cafeteria now, picking up their coffee and finding a table beside the leaded windows looking out on the gravel of the parking lot.
"How did he get into the conversation?"
"You were talking about teachers and I thought of Jake's Grandpere. He's French Canadian, of course. Lives in Quebec. I've met him. I can tell you he's certainly not the sort of man you'd take for granted. Some people might, of course, because they didn't know any better, couldn't see or hear what he was - and still is - but no one who's ever had the good luck to talk with him for a while."
"The house where I used to baby sit subscribed to the Readers' Digest. They used to have a feature - 'The Most Unforgettable Character I Know' or something like that."
'Right. That may have been where Jake got his idea."
"What idea?"
"Of a book about his grandfather."
"He's writing a book about his grandfather? I've wondered if I would ever write a book about both my grandfathers."
"You're a writer. You might very well do just that. But Jake doesn't see himself as that kind of writer. He's a good man with an essay, and for an academic even entertaining. But he knows too much about good novels to think that he can write one. At least not so far. I mean, you never know. George Eliot wrote everything else until she hit middle age and was then mightily good at the long tale. But Jake is very realistic about himself and convinced he can't do it. He's always been looking for someone. It's a steady thing with him. People who don't know any better might call it an obsession. But I've always believed he was on the right track, except when he thought I was his bird dog. I periodically have to keep telling him that if he's only at home with the essay form, he has to believe that my limit is the drama. I can only think in dialogue."
"That puts you right up there with Shakespeare."
Michael grinned. "Flattery will get you anything you want. And I actually can write iambic pentameter on occasion. But I have my doubts about it working in a modern film, if only because it is difficult to find actors who can make it sound natural. And on the stage it's hard enough to get an audience for plain speech, let alone anything a little more ornate.. It's a different story in Britain, mind you. And New York on occasion. With actors, I mean. The Brits are brought up on the stuff, audience as well as actors, and they are always in danger of feeling un-British if they don't keep it alive. Especially since Henry Irving."
"Who?"
"Great English actor and producer of Shakespeare's place. In the Nineteenth century. Pretty much restored the Bard to Number One, in spite of barely having a voice for it. Now you talk as if you could take over the stage without much trouble."
"That's from the folk-singing. I had to give myself a bit of a course in singing vowels. I suppose it carries over on to the coffee table. But I might be too self-conscious for acting."
"Technique was invented to take self-consciousness away. Technique makes you forget yourself and get on the with speech and its meaning. I heard a bit of that John Henry song, you know. You were very plainly singing about him and his hammer, not about yourself, unless it happens that you like hard work and wanted the world to know it. But that would still be only an after-the-fact. And besides, as far as you knew, there was no one else around to hear you."
Nick grinned. It was interesting to be in the company of someone with all the earmarks of having faith. He was reminded of earlier skirmishes with lads with religious associations, in scouts, cadets, Older Boys Parliament. "My guardian angel always hears me. He's been a pretty good voice coach, actually, from time to time." Actually, Michael somehow made him admit to himself that he knew it was the Holy Ghost that had been his music teacher, but that was a more solemn image, and he did not feel particularly solemn at the moment. Michael's mood - to say nothing of his own - was for the nonce pretty merry. And it was not every day the most perfect of all job opportunities dropped into your lap. Interesting, how that nagging voice in his first weeks of leaving law school kept telling him that he would never find a job again. Using his father's voice. Night after night, as he was trying to get to sleep, otherwise as delighted as a human being could be, from his freedom to study as he wished. Not music, though, very much, but the social sciences.
"Anything to get inspiration," Toby said. "Once you've thrown your hat right out into the ring, left everything to write, it's scary when you go dry."
"Tell me about it. I know. There's more drama behind the writing of the script than there is in the script itself. And for that matter, more drama in getting a play on the boards than there is in the play. I learned that early. Art never quite catches up with life. That's one of the rules. Parnassus is not as tall a mountain as Olympus."
Nick looked blank.
"You would know Olympus," Michael said. "The home of the gods? Parnassus was the home of the poets."
"Ah. Thank you. I'm actually trying to catch up on the liberal education I missed by spending my third year in law school. Have you read Francis Ferguson?"
"Yes, I have. I think Doctor Cameron has everything he's written. You've got to see his library. I mean, I always thought my parents had the best private library in the province until I saw his."
"You must have some parents."
"My mother lives to read. And reads well. My Dad's good too, but of course he has a business to run. But my Mom keeps him informed. She can digest a novel for him better than the good people who copyrighted the name."
"My folks aren't really book readers," Nick said. "They're still shaking their heads over how they got a novelist for a son."
"But you grew up reading."
"Oh yeah. Always a book on the go. I don't know how I could live without reading. I'll never forget 'Pride and Prejudice' for the passage when D'Arcy says he can't imagine a householder without a good library. It suddenly made the book enormously worthwhile. The novelist, you know, is always looking for heroes, and sometimes I think I grew up on a lot of overactive illiterates."
Michael laughed. "Westerns, or detective stories? And of course the movies are basically anti-intellectual. They have to suck up to to the so-called working class mentality in order to pay the bills."
"Westerns. Primarily Zane Grey, who made me very happy when I was young, and then started to need replacing."
"Me too. One thing at a time. He had a lot of good points. An incredible affection for nature, you know. Just as good as Hemingway's. Could have been a great metaphysician - and Hemingway the same - if he'd tucked in under a little philosophy. But that premise that the West is all man while the East is effete is pure garbage. He learned that caper from Henry James, with his wicked Europe always taking advantage of innocent Americans." Michael suddenly found himself staring hard at Nicholas Taylor. Being such a big young man, he had learned the necessity of keeping as gentle a demeanour as he could. But he also understood the need to remind certain citizens of the universe he met here and there that a thing was what it is - the first rule of the metaphysics he had just referred to - and he could be pleasantly blunt when it was bluntness that just might work. "Now listen to me. I write scripts - or try to write scripts - so I know this. If you really want to be a great writer, you have to know some theology. You studied any of that?"
Nick grinned. I stayed at the United Church College for the two years I attended Older Boys' Parliament. Does that qualify?"
"Don't pull my leg."
"And I know that my grandfather kept the Bible by his bed."
"Ah. Now that's reality. My grandfather was an Anglican minister. He had a Bible in his house too. But Jacob Cameron's grandfather is a theologian. Of the most important kind. He's a mystic."
"Now there you've got me."
"A mystic is someone who knows God by science. By experiential knowledge, day after day. Not merely by faith."
"Ah," said Nick.
"What do you mean, 'Ah'?"
"I don't know what I mean by 'Ah', except that what you said seemed to make really good sense. I have a feeling I know what you're talking about. In fact I suspect I've always known what you're talking about except that I've never met anyone who used that word before. At least not in a way that it would mean anything to me. I mean, I don't ordinarily go to church, but I do think about all those things, and I've always known that in the end my writing would simply have to have a lot to do with . . . well, Christianity. After all, Jesus was the greatest of all teachers, and it is better to give than to receive. One image, one principle, by which all of life is made intelligible."
"Holy shit!", Michael said. "Is that what you really believe? What you run your life by, day after day?"
"Yes. I guess I do. But I don't very often run into people I'm moved to spell it out to. Most of the time I'm aware I'm with people who either don't have much faith, or either have a faith that seems more evident on the surface than within. But of course they're alive. They tick. They have something to say. So I enjoy their company. But you're different. I can see that. I can hear it. You're not waiting for something to happen. You know how to make it happen, even if it's only a little thing that needs to be done."
"Like finding my book. Like finding a chain man."
"Exactly."
Michael thought of a story Jacob had told him in their early days, of how in the old Roman times, the days of persecution, Christian suspecting they had just met another Christian would draw the ictus, the outline of a fish, in the sand or the dirt or a piece of writing material. But there was no need to draw anything here. Nick had already been drawn upon. Somebody had been etching in his soul.
"How long have you been out here? How many years?"
"Four," Nick said. "I should be graduating, in a sense. But I'm not. I left arts after second year and went into law school. And then I left that to make an honest student of myself. And now I've discovered philosophy and how to study on my own. I'm a writer. I don't need to graduate. The graduate students study the writers, not the other way around."
Michael nodded. A lot of the time he thought that he had only stayed to graduate because it was a way of keeping company with Jacob and a soul absolutely welded to the Faith, to the theology he, Michael, had to make presentable in the dramatic mediums. And it wasn't just philosophy Nick had discovered. He was too iron-headed. Too rooted in something philosophy had to get its ass into gear to discover. Was he in fact a mystic? Certainly of the unschooled variety, even dumber than Kierkegaard, but legitimate? Now that would be one on the beak for Jacob, who had always assumed for himself a lot of schooling of the prospective candidate for the history of Philippe Gagnon. But of course God was not an idiot. He had a respect for his own designated most onerous responsibilities, and would have probably prepared the ground. Perhaps handsomely.
Oh, God! Michael thought.Of course he would have prepared the ground. Nobody threw seed into a forest, or a plain full of wild grass. The old vegetation was cleared, even burnt off, then the soil plowed, and harrowed, and then came the sower. And just who was the sower, if not himself? Jacob was not in the room. For a staggeringly uncomfortable moment, Michael desperately wished that he was. Jacob could explain Philippe so much better than he could. And the whole idea had been Jacob's inspiration, Jacob's passion. Jacob's cross, given the religious persuasion of the vast majority of the students at UBC. And then he found himself wishing that Doctor Cameron would walk into the room, although the Brock coffee shop was a place he rarely came. Angus would be the perfect connection, of course, putting both theory and experience into perspective, with all the weight of his academic authority . . . .
But academic authority be damned. No, no. If the ground had truly been cleared and laid open to the rain of the grain, there would be something in Nick that was open to the truth. After all, he, Michael, had seen Philippe in his glory, and heard him speak. It was a very brief moment, and it had happened a good while ago, some thousands of miles away, but it had happened, and he could not go back on the fact. It had seen and heard it just as much as Jacob had, so he had all the authority he needed himself for dealing with anyone he thought he should talk to about it.
And then he remembered that not so long ago he and Angus had been talking about the fish sign of the catacombs era, and Angus had said, laughing, that the modern equivalent was simply a word, not a picture. The symbols of Christianity were not obscure anymore, or secret, or in this part of the world - for the moment at least - not actually dangerous. So the trick was not to find out who was a Christian, it was to find out how much people actually knew about religion. In certain situations the word "theology' would help, especially among people who seemed to think they were educated. "Separates the men from the boys," Angus had said. "I've seen an entire Oxford common room simply awash with confusion when that word was uttered by the right man in the right context. It will also take out a good part of any seminary or rectory, in the mouth of any speaker who really knows what he's talking about."
Would he scare Nick off? Michael sipped on his coffee and stared over the cup at his new acquaintance, with the optimism of youth probably new friend, and thought: he doesn't scare easily on matters of the mind. In some way, he really knows what he's doing.
"You gave me to understand you'd done a lot of reading this winter. Did you happen to include any theology on the list?" It came out, as Michael hoped, simply as an inquiry, not as a challenge.
"Actually, to tell you the completely honest truth, not quite. I'm getting there, I think, from what's been going on in my head, but not in any organized, formal fashion. The social sciences and a little philosophy has been the real regime. But I think you'd have to admit that Colin Wilson's "The Outsider" wandered into the theological realm, and sure as hell Nietzsche does, rattling on about religious sentimentality in the Germans. Philosopher my backside. Isn't that theology?"
"Most definitely, although not most profoundly."
"I take it Nietzsche is not your favourite."
"No."
"Who is?"
"Who are. Aristotle and Aquinas."
"To tell the perfectly honest truth, I was just getting things under way to take on Aristotle."
Got that one right, Michael thought. He has been prepared. This news eliminated all manner of unpleasant and time-consuming battlegrounds. "Do you know anything about Aquinas?" A fellow might as well keep going until the gas runs out or the road falls away.
"No," Nick said. "I've heard of him. In high school and then again in my medieval history course. But I've not studied the chap. You have?"
Michael chuckled from his boot heels. "Am I still alive? Oh, sorry. You haven't met Jake Cameron yet. Thanks to him, I'm quite conversant with the man. And very happily, I might say so. But it was part of the price of Jacob's friendship. Not that he insists on all his acquaintances knowing the Summa inside out, by he was particularly rough on me for some reason, especially when he was thinking I should be his Grandpere's biographer. You took medieval history?"
"Oh, yes. The inimitable Dr. Ormsby. A formidable scholar, and a formidable course.
Probably as useful to me as my English classes."
"So you know at least a little about theology, then."
"I know that it exists in the minds of those who occupied centuries of culture."
"Ah, yes. In the mind. I am reminded of Saint Thomas at the very beginning of his arguments, opening the entire ball game by distinguishing between what exists in the mind and what exists in reality." He measured his words, let them fall like an actor closing a play. Ah, Fortinbras observing the passing of Hamlet. Jacob had done that scene as a beginner on the UBC stage. "Does it exist in your mind, or does it exist in reality?"
Nick laughed. "Oh, now you've got me. If you really are conversant with philosophy - genuinely as an academic discipline I mean - then you must have mercy on the man you see before you. To be precise, you have caught me exactly at the point where I honestly, perhaps even humbly, realize I must take on the masters. By which I don't mean Nietzsche or Freud. But this is a new thing. I took psychology in first year. Perhaps to keep peace with my father. He might have flipped his wig if he knew I was studying philosophy. He was a fairly vigorous anti-academic, for an assembly of odd reasons. But all that materialism is a joke, and a contradiction of life as I've actually been granted the ability to see it. So lecture away. I'm interested in alternatives. Alternatives are all I've done since October, when I quit the law school, with its wonderful view, to study on my own."
"And you made good progress with that?"
Nick stared him straight in the face, sipping away at his own coffee. "In the entire history of education, from Sumeria onward, nobody ever had a better time with the books than I have, over the past few months. If your Jacob Cameron can say the same, more power to him. But he'll have to prove it."
Nick was grinning, and Michael realized that he was not in the least being competitive, he simply had been very happy reading serious stuff as he pleased, going from book to book and theme to theme, so happy that he could not imagine anyone being more happy. The truth shall make you free, Michael thought, yet how many students had he known who could honestly say of themselves what Nicholas Taylor had just said? Jacob could, of course, and he, Michael Thurman by following in Jacob`s wake, and of this pleasant situation faith with the practical ability to solve life`s problems as they occurred was the cornerstone. But Nick wasn`t bluffing, wasn`t trotting out some sophomore pretense. How had he come by his security, his independence?
And there was more. "It's interesting that you're thinking about making films. I don't think about that industry very much. It's too far removed from the solitude so necessary to a novelist. But once in a while a film really makes me think, and I can get caught up in a film version of a story as much as I did when I was a kid. But not so long ago I had a very different sort of experience. Not from seeing a movie, but from not seeing a movie for a week or two and then suddenly realizing in my quiet pursuit of my own mind that I had never seen a film with a character in it who was having such a good time with his own head as I was. And I knew that this had happened because I was finally starting to deal properly with philosophy. And it also made me feel that all film makers were liars. Well, maybe not liars, but no where near able to tell the most important truths." Nick grinned again. "How would you make a film about that?"
Michael laughed. "Not how, but where? Not in Hollywood. Well, not until I've been there for a year or two."
Now it was Nick's turn to register a little stunning from his new acquaintance. Michael as well as himself had an inner landscape full of a very easy, comfortable, confident, conviction. "You really mean that, don't you?"
"I have to mean it. Once upon a time I was going to be a painter. I was thoroughly in love with art, and people told me I was good at it. But somehow I became interested in words and music as well, and I realized I had to find a way to put them all together, or I'd feel I was leaving something out. Of myself. From the way you've been talking I'd say you know exactly what I mean."

Chapter Ten: Checking in with the Scholars

2008-12-14T14:02:00.000-08:00

"I saw you out in the garden," Angus said. Yvonne had brought him his coffee, but not to talk. With his first coffee, the cup these days he took in bed, her husband was usually wrapped up in thought, occasionally with something positive, but as a rule at the beginning of the day's work plodding his meditative way through the morning list of abuse sent up from Hell. The positive things, the solutions and inspirations, came after the plodding. So she simply brought him his coffee and went back to the kitchen. Only an idiot would have insisted on patter, or the norms of lesser relationships. Contemplatives woke to the devil, and Angus' brow at this time of day was not something to be trifled with. The alarums of firemen, police, emergency surgeons, or soldiers on guard, had their purpose and their excitement, but for subtlety and depth they were not to be compared to the onslaught of the spiritual underworld, and Angus was predictably not in the mood for irrelevant conversation until he was at least well into spotting the light at the end of the tunnel. And then, of course, with the devil off his back, he was his habitual kibitzing self. As she had learned with her father, one of the infallible signs of the real contemplative, the sun after the rain, was an ability to kibitz like no other profession on earth.
But this morning he was genuinely curious. He must have been awake for some time, then. Moreover, he was reading.
"That's one of Papa's books," she said.
"Yes. That's why I saw you. I had to go down to the study to get it. I wanted my breviary, too, but I must have left that in the car. I didn't go to the garage to get it. I didn't want to disturb you. You seemed quite preoccupied with something. And you were a lovely sight, even from behind. Like a statue in a grotto, somehow. I thought, 'she's up to something, and mustn't be disturbed.' I also thought that if I were a sculptor I'd get me a big chunk of marble and carve out a statue of Mary from the back."
"I'll take that as a compliment. Did you disturb Jacob?"
"I have no idea. I didn't look in on him."
"Good. I think I was up to something about him. There were some angels out there, and they might have been telling me his writer is in the vicinity."
Angus took the cup from her hand. "Really? That's good timing. This is Jacob's last day among the undergraduates. Something better happen soon. Once he gets among the graduate students he'll have to give up on finding anyone creative. Good Lord. Five years. Well, if the job doesn't take a lot of patience, it's no task for a Christian. Or anyone else who has the spiritual life as a priority. Actually, I think I must have had Jake's quest on my mind as well. I wondering this morning how a story teller could get his head around Philippe. A story teller like I would be, I suspect, if I thought I could handle it. It's the old business come round again. Just how in hell do you start off a tale that is essentially about perfection? The modern literary moods are so entirely against such a possibility. All this angst and the soul searching carried on the name of existentialism, which is, of course, merely the absence of common sense as well as faith. The first goal to be accomplished is to stop people from laughing at the whole proposal. It's almost as funny, in a way, as marking student exams, or reading certain critics or so-called Scripture scholars. I'm not about to take up Jacob's cause, of course, but it seemed all right to speculate on the process of beginning. And it's a helpful antidote to a lot of the stuff I run into marking exam papers. I ran into some especially depressing thoughts, as well as especially depressing syntax, yesterday afternoon, so I thought I'd speculate on the antidote. It worked, too. But of course not as well as reading your Pere." He tapped the book, and Yvonne noted the title. "Meditation, Contemplation, and Christian Perfection". Her father's first published book, and, in certain quarters, what a row it had caused, very successfully raising enemies in every quarter of the Faith imperfectly understood, even in high places. Perhaps especially in high places, although, given the identity of the Muses actually underwriting it, not in the Holy See itself, or at least not where it mattered finally. It had helped, probably, that the Vatican had already been through some of the adventures of Padre Pio, and was no doubt grateful that Philippe, for all that the full Transformation in Christ was his habitual, but generally hidden, norm, had not suffered any such publicly visible afflictions like the stigmata, but rather had fulfilled John of the Cross' explanation of intense spiritual contact with the Godhead being contained entirely within the soul. Also, Philippe had been a layman, not a cleric subject to obedience to a bishop or religious superior, and a layman with an enormous quantity - and quality - of friends.
And a few disciples who had been there when the Man emerged. Ah, that was the interesting part for a novelist, was it not? There would be so much to learn, so much to experience, before such a thing could be handled well. It would take such a huge combination of faith, insight, and matter-of-factness.
And why was Jacob so sure it would be a man that took on the job? Surely there were more Austens and Eliots in the wings? And yet, who more qualified than Gisela? And from the experiential point as well, but she had turned Jacob down right at the beginning of his search.
"I can tell stories," she had said. "But not stories as long as a book. Besides, I have met your grandfather. Met him and talked with him. And he with me. He is not an easy subject. You know what Saint Paul said: 'The spiritual man judges all things, yea, even the deep things of God, and he is judged by no man.'" She grinned. "Nor by this woman. But keep going. You'll find him. You've never been one to set out on a wild goose chase, as you Canadians say. God plainly likes to stretch you, but only to make you bigger."
It had been quite something to hear these words in a German accent. Having been raised a Protestant, Angus had heard much of Luther and Melanchthon. Speaking as she did, Gisela struck him as a model of Mary, using that accent on such troublesome heretics at the time of their death. Had she spoken in judgement, or in mercy? It was impossible to think of the Virgin as unkind, unforgiving, but equally as difficult to imagine her unconcerned about the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. By their own words were men judged, and no doubt in their own dialect.
"Have you told Gisela about what you ran into?"
"No. She's not up yet. It's my turn for breakfast. I'm eager, though to know what her soul has encountered since she turned in for the night. I'm sure that if the angels are tipping me off, they won't pass her by. She has the advantage of not being Jacob's mother, she's automatically more detached, although she's always believed in his idea."
"It's difficult not to, when you thing about all that Philippe and Camille have given those of us not raised under the Gagnon roof. And you have to remember that her spiritual life was running into a lot of dryness and discontent before Jacob's inspiration arrived. She got back to normal once he had it up and running, no matter how many blind alleys he charted. And that reminded me, right away, I'm happy to boast on behalf of my own powers of discernment, of what your Papa said to me about Madelaine, how the same thing happened to her - the dryness, I mean, - before he started taking on the hierarchy outside Quebec. You're right about parental attachment, of course. That's why Gisela's view of it all is so valuable. It's simply not an area where she can be accused of being subjective."
Yvonne chuckled. "No, indeed. In fact she was very objective about some of Jacob's candidates. I think she often found his optimism almost ridiculous."
"But so is God's," Angus said, "so it didn't matter. It's been a very good way to expose a few students to at least the possibility of the spiritual life, on a campus where they don't even teach fundamental theology, let alone spiritual theology. This is the pioneering West, remember, the last frontier for men just slightly more intelligent than the buffalo, and proud to be that way. But if your unique and wonderful radar is on target, we might just be coming up to fox level. That would be an improvement."
"You're obviously in a very good mood rather early, as things usually go, but if I don't get out of here and back to the kitchen, there will be no breakfast. I'll send the other seer to you if she shows up. You'll probably be ready for your second cup anyway." She went, as they both heard the denizens of the upper floor beginning to rise, and Angus went back to his morning Muse.
He had ten or fifteen minutes to himself before Gisela came in with the coffee pot, and by that time he had become much withdrawn into the centre of his soul. There were many degrees of the state to which this happened to him - Bernard and Thomas speak of the spiritual ladder with ten steps, Teresa discusses seven mansions - and this was one of the deeper levels, one of those that only his closest contemplative friends were allowed to witness. Gisela had known the signs for more than a decade now - they had in fact been at the core of her own instruction and growth - so she was not surprised when she saw that Angus not only looked immobile, but to the degree that he could move his eyes and the muscles of his face, by nodding in the direction of his cup on the night table, was indicating that he did not have the strength, for the moment, to hold the cup himself.
She poured the coffee. That was the end of it. She set the pot on the floor and sat in the chair beside the bed, smiling at the immense peace radiating from the head on the pillow, waiting quietly until Angus' faculties returned to normal. This was all for her benefit, she assumed, after what Yvonne had said to her as she emerged from her room. She had taken on Jacob's project, in prayer, as much as any of them, and now there seemed to be some news. Besides, she'd had her own dream in the night, and now it might be somewhat clarified.
That was the first thing she had ever learned about Angus Cameron, that he clarified the questions in her head. But not in this house, in this paradise of peace and good order. No, those initial encounters with his insight and understanding had come in the horrors and chaos of the war, with both her parents dead and the country she grew up in as it was turning to madness finally being smashed into submission. It was Angus who had saved her from being raped - albeit by one of his own countrymen in uniform - swiftly, horrifyingly, shedding part of that khaki in a dark alley before Angus' mighty roar blasting out of the night had provoked him to put his pants back in the normal walking position - and then it was Angus who had kept on talking with her, finding out where her heart really lay, discerning what really preoccupied her thoughts, and eventually bringing her to the place where those thoughts could find their own level.
It was a long story, a wonderful story in the annals of the spiritual life, which was the best of lives, but it was long behind them now and not especially relevant to the needs of this particular morning, as far as she could see. It was not her needs that were at stake, it was the intentions of her younger brother, as it were, that provoked her.
"I had a dream," she said. "About Michael and Jacob and a deer. They were hunting, and this great buck showed up. A massive hat rack. Much bigger than anything they've hunted since I've known them. But they couldn't shoot it, somehow, and it ran off into the woods. It was incredibly clear. Vivid. So I thought I should tell you. Can you hear me?"
"Oh, yes. I'm almost normal. Interesting."
"Where were you reading? In Philippe?"
"Where he was talking about something John of the Cross had said. We've talked about it before, especially at essay and exam time. It always comes up."
She smiled. "Paragraph thirty-seven, stanza three, second redaction. Your exit line, as you call it, from the folly of lower intelligence. Am I right?"
"Quite right. But more Philippe's exit line than mine, perhaps. Or his more significantly. I use it to escape from students and lesser faculty, his need had to do often enough with clerics and clerical thinking. And yet, as he insists, from his own thinking processes as well. It's most interesting how he puts it. Quite astounding, actually. But of course the devil is incessant in this life. Never quits, the bastard, with his nagging and trickery. He was actually putting me on the ropes over poor Jake's project, insisting that the lad was simply lazy about getting on with the job himself. Ironic, of course, because the devil certainly doesn't want it done in the first place.
But that's perversity for you."
She quoted, closing her eyes and smiling. "'It is not possible that this loftiest wisdom and language of God, such as is this contemplation, can be received save in a spirit that is silent and detached from sweetness and discursive knowledge.' I know those lines, of course, because you made me contend with them so regularly. And Philippe has the most wonderful discourse on how just that simple phrase, 'the language of God' spoke to him at various times in the course of his contemplations and labours with hell. And he even spoke to me about it when we were still in St. Jean. I can remember thinking how remarkable it would be to know the 'language of God' realizing as he understood it that this was not just the language of humans trying to explain religion. It was more like what Saint Paul spoke of, hearing words that must not be repeated. Or hearing ordinary words, but from a different voice, a voice beyond anything a mere human could utter. I prayed for a spirit that was silent and detached."
"And you got it, didn't you?" His smile was enormously appreciative.
Angus was out from his suspensions now, fully alert. She even braced herself somewhat for the possibility of his being transformed, remembering when she first saw this in Philippe, but there was only a flicker of the eyes of eternity, just a hint, behind the grin, before he became quite ordinary and humanly speculative and said, "Maybe this deer will show up sooner than we think."

Chapter Nine Further Recollections

2008-10-30T16:26:00.000-07:00

When Uncle Edouard was finished his breakfast he did indeed go off, but, as Yvonne checked out by following him out of the kitchen and through the other rooms, it was not to wake Jacob. The cat trundled off upstairs, to see what the younger children were up to. Yvonne came back to the kitchen and started work on the people breakfast. It was her turn this morning; tomorrow would be Gisela's assignment.
More thoughts on Jacob came to give her much to think about while she started up the process of waffles and sausage, and the coffee was nearing the stage where she could have her first cup. Was the angel as much for her sake as his? She was recalling the downright confrontation and conflict of spirits they had experienced in some previous day. Was it as much as a week ago? The spiritual life was like that. It augmented the ordinary arguments between parents and children, especially grown children. There had actually not been that much wrong, on the ordinary face of it, in his temporary determination to cancel the summer in the woods in favour of a summer of paid acting in the city. All his lines of reasoning had been quite reasonable, and had he agreed with the proposal that had been brought to him, all sorts of people would have been happy, and no doubt the ambitions of the theatre world of Vancouver would have been delightfully satisfied, perhaps even to a degree that surprised the city itself.
But she was not Philippe Gagnon's daughter for nothing. Her father, at thirty, had made a mark for himself on the boards, especially in Montreal, with a performance in Cyrano de Bergerac that had taken the city utterly by storm, only to leave that ambitious environment, suddenly feeling itself to be incredibly cosmopolitan because of his performance, and return to a much smaller venue for the sake of that which was even more important than the stage, the dramas of the spiritual life. And so this incident, which she had not thought about for some time, had filled her mind as Jacob, apparently quite disturbed by his recent invitation, had argued on behalf of his sudden plan to remain in town. She had been as immovable as the North Shore mountains, in the moment, and then later much tossed back and forth over her implacability. The event in the garden seemed to assure her that she had been right.
The heart of the matter, of course, was Adrianne. This is where Jacob could not help but be vulnerable to any suggestion that would keep him in the city, by her side, until the autumn wedding. Her family was not entirely happy with her conversion from the ancient Hebrew faith to Catholicism, and was bound to continue offering objections. In a profoundly grace-filled flash of generous understanding Jacob had agreed with Adrianne's father that if she carried on with her studies of the Faith in his absence, that would be a legitimate proof of her convictions, that it had to indicate that she was not simply being swayed by the tug of her heart and the golden-tongued syllogisms of the young man acknowledged even by most of the university's Jewish professors as an aspiring teacher of an intellect the sons of Moses would happily claim as one of their own. But such a conclusion on his part would have to be vulnerable to challenge, to contradictions both obvious and subtle. Indeed, his only real peace of mind came from knowing Adrianne would have constant recourse to this house in his absence, not only to visit her future in-laws, but because it was Angus who would be giving her instruction in the Faith. Jacob had provided most of this, in the ordinary course of the conversations of their courtship, and that circumstance was a novel or two unto itself, but the Church was entitled to insist on a more formal influence, and Angus was the designated catechist. He would have plenty of time, this summer, for a change not teaching, and Adrianne had preferred his tutelage to that of any priest she knew of, because she knew that Angus was even more of a mystic than his son. Jacob had not only insisted that this was so, but Adrianne had already seen certain indications of the older soul for herself.
Nonetheless - and who could blame him? - Jacob had known his faltering moments, and the offer to do Freddie in the upcoming Theatre Under the Stars performance of "My Fair Lady" had set off the latest. Jacob was perhaps a little more athletic of build for the ideal Freddie, but he was unquestionably a remarkable tenor, and would make an awfully good foil for the chap designated to play Higgins. And as Vancouver had yet to create itself a resident opera company, a rattling good tenor might just provoke some appetite for the same. At first blush, even she had felt a lot of attraction for the idea, but, fortunately, she had known about it well ahead of anyone notifying Jacob, and so was able to ride out the surprisingly lively flow of the spirits pro and con that had come in its wake, and in the end decided that not only did it seem right that Jacob should have one more summer on the survey line with Michael, but that if there were to be any real and lasting advance in the higher levels of musical life on city stages, it would be Michael, as a producer and director, who established them. And Michael definitely had no intentions of spending the summer in the city. For him, the Homathko job was to be the best of his youthful career as a surveyor. He certainly loved theatre, but his passions there would have to wait for the fall. And would it not be interesting to see what he created on the boards, too, now that he no longer had to spend time in the classroom?
They would still see him, of course. He was too much a part of the family to forget them now that Jacob was graduating, getting married, and moving into his own place, but it would not be the same.
No. That was stupid. She was being sentimental. Of course it would be the same. Perhaps not in material fact, so many times in the house, but very much in the spirit of things. The young studied, and were regularly in contact with those who taught them their basics: their one, two, threes, and their abc's; but when they branched out, spread themselves on their own wings, and then ran into obstacles, they still had to return to their roots. Not so frequently, but often with a new recognition of what they had been given, in terms of unusual excellence.
And then she had an enormous flash of the spirit again. An image of Michael Thurman bringing her a student. My God. Jacob had been a prodigy, and then his friend Michael, after their summer at the cadet camp in Vernon. Did she need any more exceptional apprentices? She was very happy with her housewives, teaching them to play hymns that created tranquility in their households on Sunday evenings, or lighter music for social occasions. What in heaven's name was this new inspiration? Did it relate to Jacob's story teller? It actually seemed as if it could. Or was it to do with a totally different person? A separate talent? It was always nice, of course, to teach a brilliant student, someone destined for a great contribution to the art. But she never expected genius. She simply enjoyed making people happy either doing something they had not thought they were capable of at all, or simply becoming more competent than they might have hoped they could be. It was the very rare soul who appreciated that a mature understanding of music, instrumental or voice, had so much more to do with thorough technique than talent. As Saint Catherine of Sienna had said, hell was full of the talented, heaven with the industrious, although of course in the case of music, industry was of no more use than talent without proper instruction. She had been so lucky in her father's investigations, and so had her students, not the least of which were Jacob and Michael. And she had also been lucky that they were so docile, so accepting of method.
Of course she had made it very plain to them, each in turn, that as they were both so athletic, so physically strong, they could very easily hurt their throats if they used all their energy without good technique. And then, if they did prove out well, their skill would create problems of another kind, of temptations to fame, or wealth, or females, that would only bring them to ruin in the end, should they surrender.
And yet she was basically confident they would not give over their patrimony, like that poor moron Esau. They both had demonstrated, quite wonderfully, given the average performance of the so-called hope of tomorrow, the youth of the day, a happy addiction to reading the best material available. Around Angus, of course, they had no real status as intellectuals and artists unless they did read well, but up against even a higher standard, the face of God himself, and the divine Mother's distaste for slothful minds, they had manfully plugged away at the mystics and the best of the Marian writers. Jacob especially had a radical bottom line: he who knew not Louis de Montfort and the Carmelites knew bugger all, and Michael was rarely far behind.
Yes, she would miss the regular schedule of their company. Genuinely strong young men were not that easy to come by. Effeminacy, in the Thomistic sense, was more common than the general run of the male sex would like to admit, nor was it helped by the actual illiteracy of so many priests and religious. Well, she would dig in more with the children at home, and write better letters to her oldest in the convent. There too was a great deal of lively company, and a new generation to be formed in the Faith. Margaret had a fiancee, and Paul - these were the oldest that would be left - was a stormy little artist, torn between painting and the Gagnon utterly somatic adhesion to music. This was plenty enough for a mother to think about. And yet . . . .

Chapter Eight A Sharpened Memory

2008-10-23T10:12:00.000-07:00

Yvonne decided not to enter the house through the basement door. There was a chance she might wake Jacob, and although the visionary experience would seem to have been for his sake, she was in no hurry to talk about it with him. Jacob, for all his abilities, quite astounding in a lad in his early twenties, was by no means her spiritual director. Verification and analysis of the recent events were strictly the province of Angus and or Gisela. And given God's ever present affection for symbols and subtlety, coming from himself, and patience, residing in the targets of his special concerns, she had very much to consider that the vision, the apprehension, had no direct bearing whatsoever on Jacob's literary ambitions, but simply referred to the fact that she might be praying for some other exercise in theological precision. The archbishop could be preparing a letter to the diocese, or Pope Pius might be draughting an encyclical or some other directive. The contemplative prayed for these things, near or far, and God had a way of using signs of matters close to the heart to advise that the prayers were useful and even necessary. One took one's hits to the soul, exercised the imagination to a degree, exploring possibilities, but left the sorting out of the results to the angels. Thy will be done, not mine.
She re-entered the house through the back staircase, from the little north-east patio where Jacob had spoken his unidentified words to Garfield, and found to her satisfaction that she was still the only moving member of the household. As it had been given around in the evening that waffles would be the breakfast in the morning, she was half-expecting a kitchen and dining room full of eager youngsters, especially of the male gender. But all was still, all was solitary. There were not even any signs of Gisela having made coffee to have with her morning reading of the breviary. But, Yvonne recalled, the night had run late with the discussions of faith. How convenient, how timely. How courteous of Providence.
As quietly as possible, she began the coffee process. Simply sitting might be nice, but time was moving on, and her thoughts, she had begun to realize, were just a little too lively for completely tranquil meditation. Personally, until corrected, she felt it reasonable to believe that the garden had been all about Jacob's writer and if this were in fact the case, then there was no way the narrative impact of what Jacob was after could be disregarded. Yes, it had all happened three decades ago, and many of the principal actors were even dead, and yet for it all to come boiling to the surface in the hands of an adequate story-teller could not help but stir old skeletons and revive old debates. And the absolute worst of it all, of course, even the thing about which her father himself had the gravest reservations, was that such a chunk of the Church had to be made to look so idiotic, so very, very, negligent, slothful, incredibly envious and malignant. Thus, so sinful, in the very area it was supposed to be the most virtuous.
For what element of the Church could be greater than her capacity for channeling the graces of perfection? Salvation was essential, of course, and the principal reason for the Word of God coming to earth and putting up with so much abuse and contradiction, even unto death, for the sake of giving all men the chance to save their souls, but as charitable on Christ's part as this might be, it was something much less than the opportunity and means by which to become virtually divine, an equal with God Himself, as willed by God Himself. This had been the accomplishment of the union between Christ and her father, this had been the incomparable greatness to be celebrated, and this had been the situation denied by certain of the so-called leadership of the diocese of Saint Jean de la Riviere.
It had been ever thus, of course. A third of the angels had followed the leadership of Satan and denied the authority of God, so why should not a third of the membership of the Church, in any specific location, deny holiness, perfection, the transformation? Still, these were real people, souls and bodies one met on the street, saw and talked with in Church or perhaps even under the roof of one another's houses, so the contradictions were painful, a cause of sorrow and regret. Yet no one could stop a soul from going to hell if that is what it really wanted to do, and made the appropriate choices.
It all made, naturally, for some very interesting legends to anyone who cared about spiritual matters, of which there were many in the extended family circle. Jacob had been a newcomer and unusually literary minded, so the novelty and the depth of the stories had made an enormous, even life-changing, impact on him, and as much as he loved English literature, its generally non-Catholic bias, after Shakespeare, increasingly weighed on him as to a degree shallow in substance, for all the admitted narrative skills and insights into human nature that it did possess. The older he grew through his high school years, the more he wished to see the stories he knew as history immortalized as literature, and as literature he would be able to teach in his professional life. That he had no confidence in his own ability to write it himself, in the manner of Austen or Bronte, Thackeray or Trollope, seemed like a great cross to bear, and at times his only relief was to feel hope in praying for someone who could. Sometimes it had been quite agonizing to watch him feeling the weight of it all, almost annoyed at God for his dilemma, and the only counsel that often could cheer him up was to remind him of his grandfather's own trials, of being a fully mature mystic, John of the Cross' taller, more thespian, brother, in a land ruled by a bishop who rejected his wisdom.
"And even more important, Jacob, is the most critical fact of all, that you somehow seem always to forget, that he or she will probably have to know a very substantial part of the spiritual trials Phillipe went through, in order to be able to do an adequate job of the story. No mere human being, even one as anxious as you for what is undoubtedly a noble cause, can ask those agonies of another human being. Total wisdom comes at a price, and few there are who are willing to pay it.
You yourself have come a long way, you are most satisfactorily advanced along contemplative lines, but you have no idea of the final difficulties or doorways, and perhaps you never will. Only God knows. You have to realize, as your father regularly says, that it is possible that this entire idea is just a little trick of God's to keep you free from some of the nonsense that goes on with so-called scholarship, to keep you disengaged from the perversions in order to walk a higher road simply in literature as it exists. And you have to admit that it has had a very promising result." (This last sentence added to the usual sermon since things had started going well with Adrianne.)
"The whole idea has lifted Adrianne's imagination wonderfully. She began to see you in a different light, she understood by it your basic generosity and selflessness for the sake of others, where no one else could, except dear Michael. Most students talk ideals, but in the end they are as materialistic as anyone else, except that they have more skills for acquiring things, thanks to their education. The idea has done you well, as far as its influence on her is concerned, and thus it is something to be immensely grateful for, just for that. But none of this is meant to discourage you from hoping and looking. I've once in a while wished I were a writer myself, so I could do what you want done. But, I'm cheerfully yoked to what your grandfather taught me about wisdom at the keyboard."
'And bless us all for that," Jacob would reply. This particular exchange happened rarely, when he seemed to be getting at his wit's end. There had been somewhat more frequency of this, with his last school year drawing to an end. Yes, he would be back on the same campus for his master's, but that period loomed as outside the limits of the inspiration.
The house remained quiet, except for the meowing of Uncle Edouard, who wanted his breakfast. The old black cat had been standing on the counter, by the sink, gazing out into the back yard, as she had come in and softly closed the door behind her. She had ignored him at first, lost in the depths of her thoughts, but now as she rummaged in the cupboards for his dry food she asked him if he had seen what had happened in the garden. Cats were only animals, of course, but there were no doubt times when the passing of the angels ruffled or soothed their fur, and at least Edouard had stayed on the kitchen counter rather than go downstairs and wake up Jacob to be let out, as he was sometimes known to do. That activity might have interfered with the solitude she was happy to keep for as long as she could.

Chapter Seven: Writer's Brock, Writer's Bloc, Writer's Banjo

2008-09-28T13:04:00.000-07:00

By ten o'clock, in spite of steady searching in the coffee shop in Brock Hall - the student union building of those days - the enormous stone pile of the university library, the one-story sprawl of the law buildings with their magnificent view of Howe Sound and the surrounding mountains, the hum drum assemblage of the commerce huts, backstage among the little rooms in the auditorium, the restaurant in the auditorium basement, that most competent and, indeed, aggressive of young hunters, Michael Thurman, had found no suitable candidates for the office of chain man. He had stayed away from the engineering building deliberately, because of all the lads he had been thinking of in his original pitch to Dan Carpenter, the students he knew of as yet without summer jobs, none were from the engineering faculty. But either he could not find the students he'd had in mind, or if he did find one, here and there, each had since found work. It was a strange pursuit, yet remindful of some deer hunts he'd taken, when he knew the bush was full of the creatures, yet never a suitable target had showed its shoulder. Ten o'clock was his provisional deadline, as he had some studying to get at: if no prospect showed up, he would hole up in a Brock Hall student office he had access to, hit the books, then see who turned up at lunch time. There would be, of course, an entire shift coming off morning exams at that hour. If he found no one by twelve-thirty, he would then hike over to the engineering building.
This, Michael was deciding on his way back to the Brock from the auditorium. He had entered the campus through Chancellor Boulevard and parked his big old blue Dodge behind the student building. His books were in the car. But he thought he saw a familiar back striding away from him across the library lawn, angling in the direction of the Commerce huts. Michael gave pursuit, and strode himself as far as the north-west corner of the Brock before he realized that his usual eagle eye had been mistaken.
But at that point, slackening off his chase generally as well as in particular, he relaxed enough to become more aware of the moment-by-moment sounds of the campus. Thus he heard suddenly a banjo. Someone was slowly plunking chords in the offices behind the windows, in the basement of the North Brock and at a level with his knees. Somebody's in the Ubyssey offices, Michael thought, and then remembered that a friend who knew his passion for film-making had told him he would leave a relevant book for him on the news desk.
The book might be a distraction from his studies of the hour, but with all that was on his mind, the book might be forgotten in the place for the summer, and that would not be good, neither for him who wanted to read it, nor for its owner. Besides, as Aristotle had pointed out, the musician finds it difficult to resist the sound of music. The hidden troubadour was only slap-chording, but he was in pitch, resonant, and in good rhythm. Moreover, having been rescued himself from the limitations of knowing the instrument only through chords, Michael infallibly took a kindly interest in those who recalled his former ignorance of intelligent musicianship.
So there was nothing for it but to pass through the big glass doors and descend into the offices of the Publications Board. Michael knew his way. That corner of the campus was not his second home, in the way of the Players' Club green room, but he'd had business there on occasion, and knew some of the inhabitants.
The banjo was still plunking as Michael reached the bottom of the stairs and started along the hall to the inner rooms. But now there was also song.
Michael stopped. He knew that voice. He had only heard it once, he thought, but he knew it. He could not remember a name, but neither could he forget a voice. What was the party? Something he and Jacob and Adrianne had happened upon during the winter, and the singer had been familiar because he had not only seen him occasionally among the ten thousand but also because in his occasional trips to this very office he had seen him in and around the premises. The lad had been belting it out at the party and he was belting it out again. Odd, to have this moment, because it reminded him that he had thought of talking to the performer, because he was obviously, at the party, a real folk singer, but Adrianne had needed to be elsewhere and they couldn't stay. Neither he not Jacob had brought any instruments. There had been no advice about a musical evening. Maybe the singer had been a surprise. He had told himself he would probably run into the singer again, but had not.
Well, had not until now, and now he had him all to himself. It wasn't every day you heard that much good, clear, power in a voice. Trained? Maybe, maybe not, but by no means unintelligent, and definitely taking on a song only a strong musical force would really dare sing. "John Henry", the steel driving man. The lad had begun as he had gained the hall, and was continuing.
"He picked up a hammer and a little piece of steel,
Said a hammer be the death of me, Lord Lord,
Hammer be the death of me."
Michael felt like letting the song end, but he also thought of his exams and the need to solve this chain man thing. And there was also the book on filming, so he moved again, entered the main room of the offices and kept on going to the entrance to the office of the editor-in-chief, the final room.
The door was open, and the singer was standing, one foot on the chair, strumming a tenor banjo. A four-string, with a shortish neck compared to Michael's own five-string. He stopped instantly and grinned. "Hello! Caught in the act, wasn't I? Sorry about that, but I was stuck in the middle of the bloody page and thought I would do something to see if I could sake loose the Muse.I don't normally bring the banjo with me, but I picked it up on instinct today, probably thinking that I might run dry." The lad pointed to the typewriter, with the page half-way through the roller, and a full inch of typed pages lying on the desk.
"It didn't sound too bad. In fact I really didn't want to interrupt you, but I'm on a mission and pushed for time, so I rudely butted in. You can go back to it, of course when I take my leave. I have to look around for a book." Now, as he was to insist later, Michael at that moment had no idea of asking the boy if he were interested in a survey job. He seemed very much into his writing as well as his music, the last man on earth to be looking for summer work even if he was of student age. He had seen the fellow before, too, not only at the party, but down in these offices, but he also could not recall a name and he was also pretty sure he had not seen him much around the campus over the year. More likely in the Georgia or some other student-favoured pub. It was more or less over his shoulder, as he was turning to go, that Michael referred to his other search. "By the way, you don't happen to know of someone who needs a summer job with a survey crew, do you? My outfit just lost a guy to wedded bliss and I have until noon to find a student before my boss calls the unemployment office.It's not a job everyone would jump at. We'll be tucked away in complete wilderness for months. No civilized amenities whatsoever. And working seven days a week because there's just not anything else to do." The words came out of his mouth like nothing more than conversation rolled out to fill up space. Utterly undistinguished, utterly unattractive, unless you happened to love the wilderness and the few books and instruments you could take to it. Utterly monastic, and who on this campus he had known for five years had any sense of the monastic, except, of course, good old Jacob?
There was, as posterity was obligated to recognize and reckon with, a very pregnant pause. Something in the lad changed. He was no longer the musician, no longer the frustrated writer. He stared at Michael for a very long moment, and then he grinned again. "Anything wrong with me? I've had six weeks of bashing away at this plot, which has gone well enough, but I'm running out of money and not especially anxious for another summer in Vancouver. I too know some nice young women but not any I'm anxious to march to the altar just yet. And I know the surveying business. I was a chain man in my first summer out of high school. And then again for part of the next summer. A big outfit, too. BC Electric."
"No kidding! Good Lord. You're on! You must have a phone down here, being a newspaper."
The lad came to the doorway and pointed to the news desk. "Right there, and if you're looking for a book on film, that'll be yours. I was looking into it. You don't meet many people in this part of the world that are thinking about making movies."
"No, you don't," Michael said."But you're certain? About the job? You don't have any questions? About being stuck in the wilderness? Pay? Company?"
The lad looked at him. "You look like good company. What's your name?"
"Michael Thurman."
"Ah, yes. I think I sort of knew that. I've been to a couple of the campus plays. Thurman Engineering, right? My boss used to talk about you guys. He always said that if he got tired of BC Electric he'd try to get on with you people. My brain's still a little foggy. Writing can be really hard work. I think that's the main lesson I'm getting out of these couple of months."
"I know," Michael said. "I keep trying to write scripts. And where we're going that will give me something to do in the evening."
"Where are we going?"
"Through the Cariboo, west of Williams Lake, into the mountains on the west side of the Homathko River. It's the drainage basin for the Waddington country."
"Oh my God! The Cariboo? Where's the truck? Phone your boss right now and make sure he hasn't found somebody else! There's a phone on the news desk."
To Michael's surprise, the lad actually looked anxious. He shot out from behind the desk where he had been writing and showed Michael the telephone. He was still grinning, still confident, but still a touch antsy about it. How come the Cariboo was so significant to him? But he went to the phone, got the secretary and told her to tell Carpenter that he'd found a chain man. He could see that the lad could not really relax until then. Interesting. But then he'd never had to worry about a summer job, between officer training school and being the son of the boss. Or was there a reason other than just finances?
"Whew! That's amazing," the lad said. "And yet it's not. You know, I've been so happy and productive since I left the office job in March that I never gave money a thought until this morning. In fact I was going to march over to the student employment office once I'd filled in the gap in my head. I even wondered if I were being stubborn to hold on the the creative determination. So I grabbed the banjo to refresh my mind, and then you showed up. Amazing. Oh. My name's Nick Taylor." They shook hands. Michael noted that Nick's hand was plenty strong enough to swing a surveyor's axe.
"Right. I'd heard your name - although I'd forgotten it - because my friends and I were briefly at a party you were singing at some months ago. I was going to talk to you, but my buddy's girlfriend - fiancee - had to be somewhere else before I got the chance. But I asked your name. You're pretty good, and I hang out with people who are very, very, good, so I know. Why is it amazing that I showed up?"
"Do you read Hemingway?"
"Quite regularly, especially when I'm trying to get a script going."
"I never really dug into him until last summer, although I've known he was there since before I was out of high school. Last summer I was reading all his short stories. He was my choice for a writing course I was taking. I was also working for the Star, but not on Friday nights. So this one Friday night in August I was reading a story about some guys in the woods by the railroad tracks and I had this flash of longing for one more job in the bush before I grew up and did something with my mind. Became a lawyer, or a journalist or something vaguely intellectual. I felt that I'd feel like a terrible failure for the rest of my life if I couldn't do one more stint in the woods. Then I forgot about it and went on living a very good year in the city. Went back to law school, left it rather quickly, and studied on my own, then got an office job, then quit to write, and certainly did write and then as soon as I start thinking about going to work again, you show up and make my vision a reality. Is that not amazing to you?"
If Nicholas Taylor had been anxious for that moment before the phone call to New Westminster, Michael mused, he seemed now like someone who had never had a check in his life. This could not be so in fact, because balanced and healthy people had known plenty of obstacles and simply learned how to overcome or go around them. "Oh, yeah. Well, yes and no. I mean it all depends on how you look at life. Or rather how you live it. I'll grant you that it all seems wonderfully organized and not to be taken for granted, which some people would think of as amazing." He picked up the book on the news desk. "It was amazing, you might say, how this little item came into my mind. I hadn't thought of it for days, what with the pressure of exams and all the talk at home about the summer's work. Yet it was obviously part of a scheduled order. It was meant to come into my mind."
He turned his attention fully on his sudden new acquaintance. "I suspect that you already believe in Providence, but do you know anything about mysticism?" As he stood there, Michael had to admit to himself that of all the prospects Jacob had come across, no one had seemed surrounded with the air of likeliness as this unpremeditated discovery. There was just something about him that seemed to make it possible. The lad only saw the Hemingway incident as something pointing to the job, with the ordinary prospects of a wilderness experience as background material for a story. But it could actually signify much more than this, if one thought about what had happened to him, Michael, earlier in the morning. And Jacob had always believed his writer would come out of his own university.
Now the lad became somewhat guarded, but still smiling. "My English professor in first year mentioned it once. We were studying the metaphysical poets. But it's not a subject I've ever studied. And you're the first student who ever asked me in so many words. Do you know anything about mysticism?"
"To be perfectly honest, yes. I do. I have to. It sounds like you ran into Hemingway when you were in high school, but when I was in high school I ran into a family of mystics. For reasons I've never understood, some of it rubbed off." Michael was aware that this much frankness might end the conversation instantly, and also restart his search for a chain man, but the mood of the moment was for nothing if not blunt, theological, honesty. If young Nicholas Taylor really were Jacob's writer, they might as well understand each other from the beginning. The stakes were too high, the subject too serious for any shilly shallying.
But he was relieved when Nick totally relaxed again. "It doesn't seem to have hurt you in any way. Are we talking Juliana of Norwich and the rest of those medieval English types?"
"Good Lord!. You do know about it."
"No, I don't. I'm a very unstudied liberal Protestant only recently become interested in Aristotle, because I've always believed up to this point that novelists are the best students of human nature and therefore the best philosophers. But I remember hearing about Juliana and some others and thinking that one day I would have to look them up. Probably after I'm published."
"How did you get interested in Aristotle? It's not all that common. Especially in this last outpost of Positivism. Who taught you philosophy?"
"No one. I took psychology in first year. Boresville, but there it was. My father would possibly have kicked me out of the house if I'd taken philosophy." He grinned. "That's probably an exaggeration, but it describes the climate of the Taylor residence. The Old Man reads industrial psychology texts, when he reads, and thinks of himself as beyond philosophy, which he's never studied. So now I've got beyond the Old Man, having finally swung into the social sciences, found them interesting, even exciting, but somehow still lacking, and thus the itch for philosophy, and poets I chose to read rather than relying on a faculty."
"And you romped through all these adventures just in the past year?"
"Yup."
The more I hear, the more I like, Michael thought. We have to keep talking. Bugger the exam. I'm sure to pass, and what would even a hundred percent mean compared with this discovery? But a Protestant? Protestants and mysticism was a rare mix. Even Anglicanism, from which he had come, had little experience of mysticism, for all that sailed fairly close to Catholic ways. But the lad was no flake. His obvious realism, his solidity, was plain. If I hadn't been straight forward, he would have not brought out the references to the English class.
"Did you have Doctor Cameron for English? Angus Cameron?"
"No." Nick named his professors.
"Ah. Well, Doctor Cameron knows about mysticism. A great deal, as a matter of fact. If this university had a real theology department, he'd be the head of it. That is, he could be. But he's very fond of teaching and there are few professors who do the job he does. It was nice to hear that there was someone else around here who knows something about the subject of subjects."
"What's that?"
"Mysticism. The union of the soul with God. It can be a genuine academic discipline. But as a rule you only find it taught in seminaries, and then not always taught as it should be. It's not easy to find genuine mystics with academic qualifications and the academics, even in the Church, don't seem to know what to do with real mystics without qualifications on paper. It's a riddle, like the chicken and the egg."
"But you know about it? And your friends? Are you thinking of teaching it somewhere?"
"Me? Good Lord, no. I'm no kind of expert and anyway I just want to make films, eventually, so I have to do all the stuff that will get me there. But I wouldn't mind making films about a mystic or two. That would be pretty interesting, if I could find the actors to pull it off. That wouldn't be easy. So many actors don't even have a moral life, let alone a spiritual one. My friend Jake Cameron - that's Doctor Cameron's son - he might wind up teaching it somewhere. Rome, Oxford, some place like that."
"Is he a priest?"
"Jacob? No no. That was he and his girlfriend with me the night I heard you sing. Some people used to think he would become a priest, but he never had a vocation." Michael grinned. "Well, maybe he almost did when Adrianne was giving him a rough time. She grew up Jewish, you see, although not in what you could call a thoroughly religious family. She's becoming a Catholic now."
Michael hesitated for a moment before adding the last. He did not want Nick to think he was hinting. God Almighty! What a predicament to find himself in! Never in his wildest speculations had he thought it would be himself that found Jacob's writer. It had been Jacob who searched, Jacob who thought he had found someone, Jacob who had finally decided the candidate was unsuitable. The identity of the lucky - or unlucky fellow - had been none of his business. For one thing, he had no feel for novelists, as far as he knew, only a sense of who would or would not make a good playwright. Novels were such lumbering things, and so probably were those who wrote them. And they were written by and for people who like to hole up in an easy chair, or get themselves propped up against a stack of pillows, and drift off into some other world. That was all right; he'd read a lot of fat books, with a great sense of comfort and excitement. One of them, indeed had given him a sense of a very large chunk of his life's work as a film maker. But a novel was all quiet, all about something going on inside one's head. It was not the roar of a theatre full of people, visibly, audibly, dying with the heroine, or rolling in the aisles with laughter.
But there was no negative reaction from Mr. Taylor. He nodded, and then he said, "People change. I've changed. I never thought so much could happen to a mind in a few months as has happened to mine, just from getting out of law school and reading what I found myself inspired to read. Enormously good fun. Is Adrianne enjoying the change?"
"Very much so. Her parents are another matter, of course."
"My old man was 'another matter', just over my leaving law school. He'd probably flip his wig completely if I decided to become a Catholic. But that's not very likely. I think writers, especially novelists, have an obligation to remain totally objective, so they can be fair to everybody. I actually don't know much about Catholicism, although I've know a few Catholics in the Ubyssey. But I know I have been thinking about religion, church going and all that. It's a good thing for a family, I suspect. My parents don't go to church, but my grandparents on both sides are good Baptists. Are you up for a coffee? I really don't feel in the mood anymore to try to keep going with the typewriter."
"You took the words right out of my mouth. Besides, I want to find out why the Cariboo means so much to you. I've hunted moose up there, and it's a great place of course, in geographical fact and in the history of the province, but I don't know if I've ever had the feel for it you seem to have. Have you been there?"
"No. And that's why I'm so keen to have a crack at it. It's like a Promised Land I've heard about but never had the chance to see. You can fill me in."

Chapter Six The Source of the Summons

2008-08-29T11:22:00.000-07:00

Yvonne moved away from the door to the little room, ready now to go outside. Jacob had not stirred, although there was a sudden cacophony of crow and seagull voices rising from somewhere between their property and the shoreline below. It sounded like at least a dozen birds, in pitched battle. No doubt arguing over a suddenly discovered cache of garbage. Well, someone had to clean up. A little racket was a fair price to exchange for human labour. But the noise had not awakened the lad. He remained asleep, angelic, with not a line on his face suggesting how badly he could rag poor Michael.
And yet, while it was probably not ideal behaviour to thus afflict his friend - as a kind of middle-man for the whole idea Yvonne had never felt that Michael was the right choice for her father's chronicler - there was a kind of justice in it. In the first years of their friendship, Michael had often been anything but casual in his attitude toward Jacob's approach to hunting. Outdoors men, as well as philosophers, could also pick away at someone like maiden aunts.
She loved the garden in the early morning, and as she opened the basement door and stepped out - the sill was only a step above the cement walk - the realization of how lovely their grounds were hit her afresh. She never failed to be appreciative, at any time of the day, but in the light-shifting hours of early morning or the evening, she invariably found that the magic bit more deeply, and there were times when the patterns of light and shade on the grass, or the breeze riffling the leaves of the trees or the water in the gold-fish pond stirred her soul as strongly as some of her favourite texts of scripture or the doctors of the Church. It seemed to be a morning of such interior movements; the light especially had never seemed more lovely.
A freighter, she noticed, was heading out, almost directly below her, riding hull down in the calm morning water with a full cargo. Her life, she thought, was like that ship, full to the top of the hold, and the way to keep it full was to empty herself when the time came, like a hold full of grain, or a deck load of lumber, the other cargo one often saw leaving the port of Vancouver. Only a soul was different than a ship, which always relied on a traffic supervisor to find cargoes and destinations; a soul was surrounded by ports that needed a call. There was a traffic supervisor for that too, but a much more mysterious and unpredictable super than ship captains deferred to.
The thought of Jacob's biographer stayed with her, and this time she thought of him not in terms of his intellectual abilities, but of his moral stature, and she felt a certain weight, in fact not a little oppression. And it seemed real and almost present, as if the chronicler might suddenly appear strolling in the lane below the yard. Usually, when the weight came like that it had seemed only to refer to the world, and its automatic opposition to the spiritual life and any and all writing about it. But of course there was no reason why the writer should not come from the world, already burdened with its follies. Jacob often seemed to assume the task was being prepared for an innocent, like Saint Bernard, or Thomas Aquinas. Perhaps it would be more practical to expect an Augustine, needing another Monica's tears. These were not new thoughts, really, but for some reason they were as fresh, this morning, as the dew on the grass.
She had another thought, too, on the ongoing debate between Jacob and Michael, and this idea was newer than the others in the stark finality with which it struck her understanding. It had occurred to Yvonne before, but much more vaguely, perhaps as little more than a speculation. Now it seemed as conclusive as the signing of a peace treaty.
It was entirely possible, was it not, that Jacob had used Michael as a spiritual cushion because he had never really believed in any of the targets he had fastened upon throughout his search on the campus? It was as if he had needed to present his peers with the opportunity to chose such an assignment without having the conviction that he would really have to turn it over to any of them, like a young man going through the motions of courtship in a given social context, yet always believing that the right girl was somewhere else. Jacob was simple; Jacob was complex. Jacob was being led by the nose by the Holy Spirit and would have to draw his maps after he'd passed through the country he was sent to explore. Nor had it hurt those temporary and supposed candidates to hear about spiritual perfection. Sometimes, listening to Angus, remembering her father in Saint Jean, it seemed that there could be nothing more stupidly wasteful of students' valuable, costly, time, than a secular university.
The crows and the seagulls were still yammering, although not with the vigour of the first call to argument. From the top of the garden Yvonne could see them plainly, wheeling and bitching, now above the beach. Oh, Charlie Garfield, she sighed, and the darkness of the next-door situation smothered her soul for a moment, black and intense in its misery, stealing the reverie with which she had entered upon her lawn and her shrubs and Gisela's herbs and the view of the very mountain where the family annually roamed for the blue huckleberries that grew, on the southern coast, only in the high country. A man was his own worst enemy, but in this case not entirely on his own. Should she have got to know Lorraine Garfield better? Might she have been able to persuade her to keep the child? Or was it that some people were so blind about the most important things in life that they had no other choice but to make things worse before they could get better? Providence was always such a mystery. It was a consoling thing to remember that God's infinity extended to his mercy.
With Jacob they had been lucky. He had generally been able to see the handwriting on the wall, and carried a deep abhorrence of folly. What a lovely professor he would make, and how lucky his students. And his wife and children. Part of the solution rather than part of the problem. She would miss him, of course, nor would they see Michael as often with Jacob gone from the house.
She had tried to get to know Lorraine Garfield, naturally. But there had not really been an ear or an eye for warmth and openness. In some people's faces that was easy to see. She had never been able to know if it was actually hatred for the Faith, or just plain materialistic hardness. It was even possible she was the way she was because she had been a Catholic, left the Faith, and had no intention of talking about it. You never knew until you were told, and even then you had to look behind the words. And some problems, some people, took so long. The house to the east had never held its families long enough since the first gasoline fellow bought it. And of course not even time helped with everyone. She had learned that sadly and well growing up in Saint Jean de la Riviere. Some people there had gone to their graves still declaiming against her father, or had only come to the truth through more dramatic or tragic circumstances than any decent person would have wished upon them. But that was the rule of Saint Paul, was it not? There was no way the unspiritual man - or woman - could judge the spiritual, and so many of those stupid people had assumed they were spiritual. As if they had ever been transformed! Deformed was more like it, from their inexperienced babbling of this or that aspect of theology, while all the while refusing to study the fathers and the doctors of the Church, with whom her Papa had always been on such comfortable terms. What a lot of fools, and yet Philippe was always trying to find reasons to forgive them and save their quite unprintable reputations, labouring manfully against John of the Cross' insistence that one-third of the "holy ones", meaning priests, bishops, and religious, wind up in the infinite pains of hell.
In that sense, the hardness of heart in the house to the east had been useful to her conversations with Jacob over his project, for she had been regularly able to tell him that the incumbent householders were actually no worse than many of the incumbent office holders in La Belle Province, where the real graces of spirituality were concerned. What could be more criminal than to have all the opportunities of the Faith at hand, and yet refuse to use them? And not only refuse to use the opportunities but to pour derision on the name of the man who brought them? Such were certain souls in the diocese of Saint Jean. Sad, but as she had to agree with Jacob, the situation unmistakably did make for a lively story.
If only he could find someone to write it.
In the process of the recollections, she had reached the rosebush, fully leaved now in the northwest corner of the garden. She forgot the problem of the neighbour and remembered that the bush had been planted, coincidentally, in the year Jacob and Michael had become friends, out of an incident when they were both attending the cadet camp in Vernon. Michael had hit a towering fly ball and Jacob, running to catch it, had stepped into a peculiar depression in the ground and twisted his ankle, quite badly. It had been an inter-wing game, so this was the first time they had actually noticed each other amongst the hundreds of boys at the camp, and Michael had come to see Jacob somewhat laid up in his hut for a couple of days, crutch beside his bed. The conversation had turned to music, with Jacob's guitar in plain sight, and Michael, as a somewhat frustrated banjo student, had simply rolled his eyes and leapt for the opportunity to learn Philippe's backwoods counterpoint approach to all questions musical. Jacob, at that point, had actually never held a five-string in his hands, but once it was there, and he asked Michael some relevant questions, the numbers had flown, done their duty, and young Mr. Thurman had been hooked on the road to a higher wisdom than he had ever seen before.
That in itself was a very nice story, and perhaps someone should be found to give it the light of day, but Jacob would not hear of it. Tommy rot. It was Phillipe that had to be chiseled in stone. Anyone with any sense should see that.
Yvonne reached the rose corner. There was indeed a few buds. It had been such a mild April. The wild roses were coming early, she thought, although she had never been the sort of gardener that kept a yearly diary. What she remembered year by year and month by month were people. This rose bush, for example, had been planted the year Jacob and Michael had become friends.
Her body suddenly felt weak and took on a pain that was heavy and somewhat piercing, especially around her heart, and her heart itself felt sick and suffocating. But her thoughts were sharp and clear. She could almost smile, so adroit was the Spirit at separating the faculties one from another. But she didn't smile. She could not smile. Her face, her limbs, although she could still stand upright without difficulty, were quite frozen in place.
The situation lasted a couple of minutes. Her mind seemed capable of thinking only about Jacob's writer, and then how she had learned about such things happening to her father, about how he would have to withdraw from ordinary occupations and go away to lie down, unable to move sometimes for hours, with not only his mind taken over by the Divinity but even his body. She also remembered how certain of the diocesan clergy refused to accept this truth. Sloth? Envy? Or refusing to believe that God would do such a thing in someone who was not a priest or religious?
Then the light became stronger, clearer, more golden, and the oppression lifted. Her heart soared and her head felt clear and filled with hope in all the memories of her growing up. She also thought of when she had received the news that Angus was coming back from England, in the September following the war. VE Day had put an end to the fighting, but not an end to the patching up. Well, Jacob's search had been going on for five years. What would he look like, this writer?
She began to think about breakfast. The gulls and the crows had stopped their racket, too. She looked over her view for a moment, then slowly walked back to the house.

Chapter Five A Summons from the Garden

2008-07-26T12:17:00.000-07:00

That same morning, Yvonne awoke at six. But she did not, as usual, stay in bed until seven or so, reading, thinking, snuggled beside Angus who, as a rule also awoke early to have the first hour of the day in their easily shared, easily individual, solitude. Within a few minutes she had found herself unusually restless, and got up. Angus was still asleep, peaceful, but she was disturbed about something.
She went into the living room, to look down over the back garden, the homes and yards below, to gaze at the quiet blue surface of English Bay and the mountains of the north west shore. She thought perhaps the view might calm whatever it was that had got her out of bed. It was such a big view, much bigger than the prospect from the house where she had grown up in St. Jean de la Riviere, although that view had lain across a valley, with the river through it. But it was not the expanse that spoke to her, it was the climbing rose bush in the lower west corner of the garden. It seemed early for buds, but did she see some? She started out to check, and the motive seemed to work some clarity on her distracted mind.
It was not a regular habit to get up at this time, but if she did have to, the silence of her living room, or the kitchen to herself, was balm enough. But not this morning. This morning there was a definite urge to go outside, not because it was a charming morning, but because there was something out there she had to see. Her route led her through the large house's extensive basement. She went down the stairs, just inside the front door to the right - the front door was actually at the western end of the house - and past Jacob's little room, just capable of holding a bed, a desk, a few books and a small closet, but which had been crammed the night previous with four lads, including Jacob, swatting up for this morning's exam, which would be her son's last before he graduated.
The door was open: by the lingering smell of cigarettes she knew why, and she peeked in. This was another of her habits if she was up early or late and her oldest, adopted, son was asleep. She did the same with all the children of her own womb, but with Jacob - and with Gisela, for that matter - she seemed to do it more deliberately, with their grown faces, because she had never known the mother's joy of gazing on them asleep when they were infants, marveling at the difference between a little angel, slumbering, and the pint-sized hellion battling his or her way through the day's round of learning experiences. Gisela had come to her care at sixteen, at the end of the war, Jacob at twelve, two years later.
The adjunct pair had done well, Gisela continuing the formation given to her in her youth in Germany, before she lost her parents, and Jacob more than recovering from the confused beginning with his natural mother and father. Was that why she was wandering through their comfortable basement at six a.m., so she could render gratitude for the grace of the house that had changed young Jacob's life for the better?
She did not go right into the room, but remained at the door, leaning for a moment against the jam, listening to the robins' songs coming through his open windows, noticing the light of the rising sun on the mountains across the bay. Even in sleep, Jacob's face was open. He lay turned toward her, his head on the outside slope of the pillow, set up as if for a portrait. She could see him plainly without going any further into the room. Such an open face, she thought, hoping it would always stay that way. Even with his eyes closed the qualities of his soul were easy to see: his frankness, simplicity, by the lay of his brow, the easy, restful, line of his mouth. Almost always it was such a kind face, a Gagnon face, as Angus said, thinking of what Jacob had come from.
But why was she down here? To remember Jacob's change for the better, and Angus' change for the better, and therefore to be reminded to pray for the changes in Adrianne, Jacob's fiancee? But Adrianne was doing fine. In fact she was becoming so sure of herself that she no longer hesitated to correct her intended when his categories, like those of all young philosophers - and also not a few old ones - sometimes lay too narrowly. It had become thoroughly delightful to listen to her debating with him, and to see him afterward, alone, sifting through everything she had said. No mother in her right mind wants to see her son marry a yes-woman, and Adrianne Newman was proving to be anything but. Of course at one time she had been completely opposed to Jacob, in so many ways, then she had reversed that attitude and no doubt thought too much of him in his own right, and now she was finding the balance.
She was a small woman, Philippe Gagnon's oldest but also smallest daughter, yet her heart was quite the opposite. She kept on with her interior questioning, although she was beginning to feel more and more the weight of the mystery she was working against.
Am I praying for his exam? But the weight said nothing in reply. How could it? Jacob did not need any of her prayers or anyone else's to get through any examination, let along French. In regards to his studies her only prayer was that he not work at them too hard, in an atmosphere were academic knowledge was all too rarely synonymous with the wisdom of the saints. Sometimes she wondered if Michael Thurman were not better convinced than Jacob that friendship was more important than study.
Jacob and some of his other acquaintances had been enjoying themselves while they studied: cigarette butts - not Jacob's - empty beer bottles, Jacob's guitar lying in its open case, books open or closed lying on desk and chairs and floor as if they had been playing scholastic hop-scotch. Under the dark hair, Yvonne's oval face registered a long, slow, smile. It had been quite the evening: Jacob and his crew giving vent to their youthful energy downstairs, she and Angus in a religious discussion upstairs, although it was Angus who had done most of the talking. The guest was a Catholic who no longer practiced his faith, who did not count her thoughts for much, but tolerated her husband because he was a convert.
Was that why she was standing in the doorway, to remember to be grateful for a son whose faith had become firmly set so young? Who actually enjoyed and loved the liturgies of the Church and the sacraments, and had no interest in avoiding his own personal list of distasteful dogmas? The evening guest seemed to have started his drifting by disagreeing with purgatory and hell. Oddly enough, happily enough, these had never seemed to be a problem with Jacob, as one of the volumes left lying about was a big blue book, part of Jacob's beloved Summa, in the Benziger edition. What Saint Thomas had to say on divine punishment was to the lad much the same as the view from his window, totally familiar and much pondered, a reality he was unlikely to forget or try to wish away. Surely she had not been ushered into the basement to remember that Jacob worked at his faith.
Not that he was perfect, of course. Who could be, going on twenty-three? Certainly he was nicely begun in the contemplative life, with some not insignificant adventures in passive prayer behind him, but the night of the spirit and the upper mansions were really not something he could think about and pare his nails at the same time . . . ah, maybe that was it, the imperfections. And as recently as yesterday, when he'd blown up at the neighbour on the eastern side. Had she been wrong not to correct him? A complicated question, of course, because if anyone deserved a stern rebuke, it was the neighbour. Abortion was wrong, both legally and morally. But it was also a situation that called for compassion, and a critical tone, even if accurate, was rarely helpful, especially after the fact.
She had been on the back porch, tidying up, overhearing the whole incident taking place, between Jacob, studying for his afternoon exam on the patio, and the neighbour leaning over the fence, not yet gone off for work, although it was the middle of the morning. She could have spoken to him easily enough. She had been on the back porch, tidying up, overhearing the whole incident, but for some reason she had kept silent.
The neighbours on that side had been something of a burden over the decade, it was true. Petroleum people, apparently constantly. Buying the house in succession as they came to Vancouver, selling it as they moved on, no doubt promoted. They were all rather breezy, confident in a worldly way, usually in sales. Pleasant enough, of course, and ready conversationalists, else they would not have held the jobs they did. Angus had basically felt sorry for them and tried to open their heads to the necessity of the occasional intellectual pursuit; Yvonne, as the daughter of sometime marriage counselors, had done her best to befriend their wives and add a little depth to whatever faith they had arrived with, as a rule, not much. There were no Cameron household assumptions that all gasoline marketers were like this, nor any resentment at having the business world for neighbours. They were the best of friends with the banker's household to the west, and Angus had said more than once that professors in the commerce or engineering departments had more common sense than some of his faculty, on occasion, but for some reason the current run of the race on the east side had not been much to write home about.
Jacob too would take them on. He liked people anyway, and had the born teacher's instincts for sharing his knowledge as much as he could, given any sign of an opening. But it had not been an easy task, where there did not seem to be any interest in actually opening a book, real or metaphorical. And the young wives seemed just as closed to anything but material concerns, and none of them had been Catholics, who might have sent their children to the parish school. The exchanges remained at a casual level.
The Garfields had been in place only a few months. They were a little older than the usual stream, with three children, and from the beginning Angus had sensed trouble under their roof. It was simply there in the body language, the vocal tones, between wife and husband, parents and the two boys and a baby girl. Neither husband nor wife went to church, nor the children to Sunday school. An enclave, enclosed against the best things in life, and bound to suffer the consequences. Not that church-going solved all problems, of course, but it gave a family a chance, an opportunity to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem, part of the burden of those who knew how and why to pray.
Yvonne had made overtures, of course. In her books, to avoid speaking to a new neighbour as soon as the opportunity arose was seriously sinful, even with the history of the householders on that side. And there were always the children, who had not yet acquired the mind set of the parents, although the oldest boy, at eight, was on his way. But very little beyond civility had come of it, and she also suspected that the Garfields had some bee or another in their bonnets about the Camerons being Catholic, and thus something to be avoided. There was no hurt over this in Yvonne, for she knew very well, had learned very young, that the world was full of hard hearts on which time was not to be wasted when one's talents could be more profitably used elsewhere, but one could still pay attention from a distance, offering a prayer now and again, and always be ready for a change in circumstances. Illness, accidents, death. From time to time they came along and opened a door, if only for a moment, and then a little grace might slip through the cracks.
No door had opened, however, before the abortion. The sad event had come and gone. Nor would the Camerons have known for certain except through the connections Angus had maintained with a few members of his old profession. In a chance discussion with one of them about the underground solution to unwanted pregnancies in general, the coincidence of the neighbour's decision had been mentioned, the informant understanding that the Cameron reaction would be prayerful rather than vindictive. He had occasionally asked for prayers before especially chancy operations. The surgeon was no theologian, was not even a Catholic, but he was scientist enough to know an unusual capacity for prayer when he saw it, and he was somewhat aware of the special nature in that regard of the Cameron household.
None of the younger children had been told, of course, but with Yvonne, Gisela, and Jacob, Angus had shared the news, thus creating a long and thoughtful silence, part of which was caused by the history of Jacob's late mother, who had undergone two abortions, as far as his youthful mind had suspected at the time. For him, to hear of such an incident was to think of her, and later, lean that much more weight into his rosary, to have masses said, and so on. The news from next door had therefore hit him hard, so in that sense an emotional reaction was not surprising. And of course Harry Garfield had deserved a rebuke from some one. God and the Scriptures, to say nothing of the Church, had always been eminently clear on the subject of abortion. But rebuke of an older adult was always tricky, fraternal correction was not only vain but even harmful if it threatened to make the rebuked one worse. A man was rarely moved to change his ways until his own conscience began to nag him. And Jacob had known this. He had not come to them perfect. And those eastern neighbours had successively been such a hard-hearted, brass-headed lot. It was actually quite amazing that Jacob had even seen fit to bother.
But of course the family had always bothered. Had not Gaetan Renard cheerfully, regularly, scolded her own father for his unremitting efforts at trying to spiritualize the oafs Mondonnet, bishop and priest/professor? So much time, with so little achievement, like one of the minor prophets preaching to the Hebrews when they had fallen away. Unremitting effort was the habit for those who understood about hell and purgatory from spiritual experience, and wanted to save those they knew, as much as possible, from acquired experience. There was no question of this not being an exercise in charity, but there was equally no question of it not always being appreciated. The eastern neighbours had been as difficult as the foreign missions, just like the Mondonnets, refusing to listen when to wisdom the truth was as plain as the nose on your face.
Amazing, how a human being, even a supposedly literate human being, could fail to hear a true sound. Free will was such a remarkable option.
But of course there was only one way to actually hear everything that should be heard, and that was to make the choice for perfection. There were no alternatives. A soul had to desire that challenge for himself, chose to follow its path as it presented itself, no matter how provocative the twists and turns in the straight and narrow, and not fall by the wayside when the hills turned up. Such a tiny lot of mankind took such a route. They were the only ones with a hope of living life for all it was worth, of course, but still there were always so few.
And sometimes, she had to think, it seemed that she knew all of them, especially the men. Her father regularly said that the Lord had uttered the principle in all its simplicity: "Be ye perfect, as your Heavenly Father is perfect." And then he would add, "Can't they read?" And her husband had followed the example, with a little help from that shot to the head he had taken on his way to meet his prospective in-laws. And now Jacob, bringing the same happy respect for the supremacy of the interior landscape into his own life and profiting thereby, as was plain to those with the eyes to see it. So many students compromised themselves, and the results did not make good portraits to sit for. Three generations of profound spiritual liveliness. She had been very lucky, as daughter, wife, and mother. Very lucky, and very happy. As Jacob said, she would be hopeless as a heroine for Albert Camus. And Jean Paul Sartre would not believe in her at all. The intellect, the memory, the imagination might hold all the ideas and fancies it was capable of, but only the will could put them into useful operation.
And her will had taken her to the centre of Christ's wisdom. There was no doubt about that, no matter how unworthy she might feel about it. She had stared the Lord in the eye, and accepted His total will. Like her mother, like her husband, and to a certain, although not absolutely perfected degree, her son. How could he be perfect? He was only twenty-three, and unlike Aloysius Gonzaga, not about to die. But he had accepted that perfection was the goal, the norm, as the Church liked to say of the saints, and thus he was removed, protected, shielded from the mud and the dross of the pitiful ambitions of the world, even the world of academia.
This had all come clear, thank heaven, with his inspiration to find a chronicler for her father, the quite incomparable Philippe. Even if it was impossible, it was a blessing, for it had lifted Jacob out of the common run of academic intentions, especially at a secular university. It had preserved him for the search for the will of Christ, for the acute, but also necessary, sensitivity to the insight and the will of the Virgin. Perfection, perfection, perfection: he could never forget it as his ordinary goal, no matter how he might fail to achieve it. His own shots to the head had taken care of that, aside from any deliberate stepping off the track that was always possible this side of the grave.
But he had yet to find that mysterious writer. Five years of inspiration and hope, and no final result. More than once, given Jacob's generous nature, he thought he'd found the intended soul, but not so. The talent never lasted, and the depth was not sufficient. Again and again only Michael Thurman seemed to have the combination of mind and heart and Michael, with all the powers of his heart and mind insisted he was no novelist. When the narrator turned up, no problem: he, Michael, would write transformation scenes until the cows came home, but only if he could rely on a nicely measured set of stories from a properly ordered mind, ordering characters about in the context of a book. And Michael had had to get uncommonly vehement about these distinctions, too, because Jacob now and again got rather pushy.
You couldn't blame him, really. He was probably right. Her father had had, still had, such an enormously vital relationship with the Faith because he had a complete and perfect union with God, which was something that just didn't happen very often. No matter what certain clergy and religious continued to babble, out of ignorance, envy, or sloth, Philippe Gagnon most certainly did sit in a room, from time to time, discoursing with this or that worthy soul, and visibly and audibly become the Master. The contemplative saints, following Jesus insisting that the Christian was to become perfect as his Heavenly Father was perfect, had always known all about this, and the Carmelites in particular had spelled it out so clearly that only a fool would take the trouble to deny it. But of course the world abounded in fools and so, for that matter, did the Church Militant, and it had been Jacob's mission, so it seemed, to find a writer to set the record straight for the public, the man on the street, one might say, if the man on the street could ever pick up a decent book. His grandfather had simply proved out the words of the Son of God, and the story needed to be told.
But, of course, it hadn't been, because no chronicler had turned up. "Bloody Tolstoi," Jacob said more than once. "He was born in the wrong century."
"And the wrong country," Angus would say. "He had such a love for Russia, Jacob. He wouldn't know how to care two roubles for Canada.'
"Yes he would. Canada took in the Doukhobors."
"That was politics, not art. Anyway, Tolstoi wasn't fond enough of Catholicism to be a master of mystical life, no matter how much talent he had. You definitely don't want a Tolstoi. You need a Thomist, an Aristotelean. That's the only way it can be done. And be patient. I really believe you will find your writer. There's a kind of evolution of the national ability at work. Naturally the East gets the first writers because it was settled earlier. But the West will have its turn. Just give it time. God scatters the seed of genius as a culture matures. We got the great Russian novelists as the Russian culture opened to the West. Now there's a thought. How well did Tolstoi know Jane Austen?"
Jacob grinned. "Probably not as well as you do."
"He was a novelist, not a scholar. He only had to know himself."
"Which means you don't think I'll find my writer among the literature students."
'I don't think anything. I only wait on Providence. And so must you. Some intuition will bring you fact to face with the item of your search sooner or later. You have to remember, Jacob, that the task you have in mind is not an easy one. Frankly, I can't think of anything more difficult. If it had been anyone else who had come up with this idea I would have thought he was nuts. I'm not saying that perfection and the mystical life can't or shouldn't be a subject for fiction. On the contrary. It would be much more interesting to lecture on the significance of Philippe Gagnon simply going for a walk, or talking with a shopkeeper, than on Wordsworth or Tennyson in their college days, as entertaining as that is. The lecture room might actually fill up with a little of the light from Heaven and all of us float to the ceiling, but as I must keep saying, the chap - or chapess - you are looking for will him or herself have to take on an awful lot of the spiritual life to give the whole thing any verisimilitude. You get some average scribe trying to put your Grandpere on paper and you will hear Jean-Paul yell all the way from St. Jean. I kid you not. You really are looking for a soul willing to 'strip and enter the lists', to undergo trial by fire. And you might get it, of course. God has obviously hung you out to dry over this project, filling up your brain, and totally frustrating your vision insofar as it lets your eyes light on anyone who can step up to the plate. But you've got got a couple of years left on the old campus. Your M.A. will keep you here. Ah. That gives me a thought. Does Adrianne show any signs of the scribbler? Are you sure your chronicler is not immediately at hand?"
Jacob has smiled ruefully. "I did, indeed, ask her. Not a hope. She's far too awestruck by the novelists she likes. And I have never forgotten what you said to me very quickly after this quest came to mind. You said that the surest sign of the right talent would be the most interesting mixture of appreciation and contempt for every story ever written, outside the Bible and the autobiographies of the saints. You said he would have to laugh at Shakespeare and beg until his heart broke for the simplicity of Teresa of Avila."
"I said that?"
"Of course you did. It is not up to a great teacher to remember what he said. That job is for his students.'
"Good for me. I probably summed it up."
"Yes, you did. Right at the beginning."
It was pleasant, Yvonne thought, to remember those exchanges between her husband and her adopted son. But why had they come up at this moment? What she needed to think about was the row - well, not a row, simply a harsh exchange - between Jacob and the neighbour, because Jacob had been so explosive, and she was, after all, his mother.
Unquestionably, Garfield had been an idiot. Ratting on about dandelions in the lawn to Jacob while he was studying on the little patio below the back porch and off the stairs. But why had Jacob simply not let it pass? Well, the abortion thing. It was hard. Very hard. The lad had a big heart. Adrianne could never stop telling her that, now that she was no longer breaking it. He had loved his first mother, in spite of her faults; oh, Christ, her sins, and he had felt the pain of her abortions. What Garfield would probably never know is that Jacob probably felt like belting him into the middle of next week, but had to let it pass, of course. Two wrongs never made a right, but Jacob, when he cooled down, would recollect that prayer made the difference. And he had cooled down, even looked a bit contrite as he came up the back stairs and into the kitchen. And she had said nothing, simply kept her peace. But should she have said something?
Rebuke was always such a complicated process, and Garfield had indeed sounded ridiculous when he was haranguing Jacob over the uncut lawn and the threat of dandelions infecting his own yard, but Jacob was also supposed to know about turning the other cheek. And he also knew that no rebuke from him could ever speak to Garfield as eventually would his own conscience. The poor man already had so much to live with, and sooner or later he would feel the weight of it, even if he only ever admitted it to himself.
And then she had a further thought, a realization that she might not have heard everything that had passed between the two men. Yes. Gisela had asked her something about the preparations for lunch, had taken her away for a moment from the scene below. And it had been then that Garfield had said something else, something she could not hear distinctly because of trying to answer Gisela's question. It was then, was it not, that Jacob had suddenly stood up from his chair, French text of one sort or another in his hand, and by his sudden movement actually frightened the poor neighbour? And he had said something in return, too, sharp and fierce, but undecipherable because of her attention going elsewhere, and Jacob keeping his voice down. Come to think of it, perhaps Jacob's retort had nothing to do with the abortion. After all, he had just put in five years at a university full of students not especially known for an addiction to chastity, therefore abortion happened from time to time, even amongst students he had known, and he had never been violent about it, just sorry for those involved, as with his own parents.
Could it be that Garfield had seen Gisela through the porch window and said something coarse to Jacob about her? The world was chronically stupid about celibacy, especially around the young and attractive and the house next door had always been as thoroughly worldly as a house could get, and Garfield would have been on edge in the wake of the unhappy event, having difficulty keeping a civil tongue in his head. Would he start a bout of drinking? It was often the logical aftermath of such a soul-crippling act as an abortion. Or would he just get harder-hearted and carry on as if nothing unpleasant had happened, and thus as a neighbour loom as an even darker presence?
That might have been it, something about Gisela. The first neighbour had often gone about with a bit of a leer on him. As a man is, so he judges. And sometimes the women were worse, trapped in their own post-Freudian choices. Especially when the women they were staring at were obviously very happy. "Look at those Christians, how they love one another!" was the old pagan reaction - on occasions lacking the lust for making martyrs - yet the modern pagans seemed not to know how to look for the real cause and the earth was flooded with the spiritually grotesque, leaving the contemplative with the labour of trying to re-instill a bit of life where it was obviously needed.
From time to time Jacob lacked the long-term view on this issue. He had learned quickly, and Michael Thurman had been a pretty easy convert, because he came from an Anglican family - his father's father a minister - that was already solid in its hold on grace. And Michael himself was unusual, because he had a very large imagination for his future as a film maker, an imagination that could not ignore the breadth and depth of ultimate religion as part of his stories, and he had already had a lot of culture pumped into him because of his interests in art and music, for all that he was also the most complete mountain man, for sixteen, that Jacob had ever met. And, as he had learned quickly how to master the five-string banjo, thanks to Philippe's "backwoods counterpoint", so he ingested the catechism.
Naturally enough, following this success, Jacob, when the inspiration about Philippe's chronicler happened along, assumed that such a fish would land just as easily, in spite of Angus' warnings that while any idiot could be converted for the sake of saving his soul, practically no one was genuinely interested in perfection and the spiritual horrors of the dark night. This was too bad, of course, because were the opposite the rule, the earth would be much less afflicted by the horrors of war, and perhaps less subject to accident and disease. If men could only conquer themselves, and accept the purgative help from the Holy Spirit needed in order to do so, they would find little reason to conquer cities. But, in general, they did not do this, thus all the pitting of man against man and the shedding of real blood because of the disinterest in the spiritual variety. Writers honoured this species of suffering because they didn't know how to deal with other kind, and there wasn't that much of it anyway. Good luck, old lad, but never forget that you are asking for at least a small miracle.
And such picking away at poor Michael! Because of his talent for writing dialogue, he was almost persecuted by his best friend! Ah. Was that part of the reason Jacob had blown up at Garfield? Had he been pondering that he was coming to the end of the five years of searching, with no closure, and thus in his own way as much on edge as the neighbour? Imperfections, faults, in a good man had a strange way of being as disturbing as great sins in a bad one. The devil could gain great victories here, far away from any understanding of a world ignorant of the spiritual writers.
Yes, she would probably have to keep probing, probably would have to ask Jacob some searching questions. In some way, at the very least, his quest was a real one, and he had to be kept clear to see him to the correct resolution of it.

Chapter Four Best Laid Plans

2008-07-22T17:38:00.000-07:00

Any gravity in Jean-Paul's request, of course, was addressed to the world at large, not in Yvonne’s direction. He knew very well that she was not about to try to talk her brother into ignoring any inspirations to dig in deeper with his studies of mysticism. The woods were full of historians, but intelligent souls mining the resources of perfection were all too rare. Arid speaking of the woods, which is where this story is supposed to be heading, let us at last turn to Michael, who is leading us there. A book on film-making was not the only thing he was looking for that April morning following the above reported Christmas conversation, because, his boss of the upcoming summer had telephoned to ask him to keep an eye out for a surveyor's chainman.
This had happened while Michael was still in bed, in his basement apartment further up the Point Grey slope from the Cameron house. He had not planned to be lying in at eight-fifteen, with an exam at one o'clock and his usual last-minute cramming programme booked for an early morning start, but that is how it was in spite of his own plans: at a quarter-past-eight he was still horizontal, and not reading in, bed. His great frame - a hand tallerthan Jacob’s - was profoundly still, and had been so since seven, when his roommate's alarm went off. Michael had tried to roll out of his blankets, especially as it was his week for making breakfast, but his heart had been too heavy with inertia. Peter Wasych had to get his own breakfast„ and went off to work downtown thinking that it was a rotten time for poor Michael to get sick, so sick that he was not even interested in having his coffee in bed. Michael loved coffee in bed. He must have a terrible case of the flu. He also seemed to have a species of lockjaw, for he said almost nothing in the half-hour it took Peter to get ready for work.

By quarter-to-eight, when Peter left, Michael knew, though, that it was not the flu which was keeping him in bed. For one thing, his muscles were not sore; nor was his stomach upset, which rarely happened when he got the flu anyway. Basically, Michael felt quite good when he caught the flu, because it gave him a chance to rest and read and indulge himself, but what he had this beautiful April morning did not make him feel good at all, although he also had to suspect that feeling badly about it was the result of the imperfections in his own soul. I say suspect because in the state Michael was in - a middling of the dark night of the senses - one's knowing faculties do not work too well. In fact, in all ways except the will's barely holding on to faith in an. eventual delivery - if anything - the speculative faculties seem to work in reverse, coughing up what might be called anti-knowledge. Michael could not help but think that God was annoyed with him, and became increasingly discouraged trying to figure out why, without having the strength to jump out of bed and do anything that would take him out of his predicament_.
God, of course, was not angry at his ordinarily energetic young Atlas, he merely wanted Michael to stay in his apartment somewhat longer than Michael, five hours before an exam, wanted to stay there. By this I do not mean, incidentally, that Michael Thurman was perfect, at twenty-two, and never the recipient of his Heavenly Father's disapproval, but only that the Lord had no reason to be annoyed with him that particular morning: He just wanted him to stay in bed for a while. So he took away almost all of Michael's energy, mental and physical, for getting up_,and Michael was discerning enough to suspect the real cause of his indisposition, even though it went against every natural intention in his brain and body. That is, he knew that he. might have made it up if he made an enormous, but suicidal, effort of will, yet he could not throw off his blankets by any ordinary strength, of which, of course, he had plenty, when it was time to use it for ordinary purposes.
So, until a quarter-past-eight, he lay quite inert, not even able to enjoy, really, the sunshine that streamed through his bedroom window. An odd situation, he reflected, for a lad once considered good enough to become a professional football player, and who, since he had left athletics, had already acquired a name as an unusually lively stage director.Yet even this kind of resigned recognition came only in fleeting moments of mercy. Most of that time before the phone rang his mind and heart were positively trapped, like a high school quarterback pinned under the defensive line of the Green Bay Packers. All that year, from time to time, Michael had been learning that there are much rougher games than football, when it is the angels that call the plays.
Then at quarter-past-eight, with the ringing of the telephone, all his usual vitality flooded back into his veins. His brain had just barely started to percolate more or less naturally, with his first uncomplicated thought being that it had been at least two or three entire weeks since the great Jake Cameron had raised the question of his grandfather's chronicler. Then the phone rang in the kitchen-sitting room, and Michael Thurman was out of his bed like the speedy receiver of the old days, ball under his arm, streaking for the goal line. That's how it is with genuine mysticism: the Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away.
“Hello. Good morning. Mike Thurman at your service.”
“My God, but you sound cheerful for this hour of a working morning. Especially at exam time." Dan Carpenter, Michael's father's employee and field boss of the upcoming dam survey, was only three years out of engineering school. He still remembered the pressures of exam week. He also knew Michael's love for writing film scripts. "You either aced yesterday's test or you've gotten up early to write a good scene.” Michael’s mind had recovered as quickly as his body. “Not quite an ace, old son. You know me better than that. Acing exams is Jake’s area. But I did all right for me. And I haven’t had a chance to work on a script for days, what with all this damn studying. I can hardly wait for the exams to be over so I can get back to it. What do you need?”
Carpenter’s voice dropped an octave and he chuckled. “A new chainman.” He paused.
“Somebody get hurt, or have you brass hats expanded the team?”
Dan laughed again. “You got it half right. The team’s been expanded, all right, but it wasn’t the boys in the office that did it, nor some whim of your Dad’s. It’s what Ted Kelter did to his girlfriend. Or maybe she to him.”
“Oh, oh.”
“Right. So he needs to stay in town and get married and work close to home. So we need a new chainman and I thought of giving you a chance to land one for us. You were talking the other day about students you knew that still didn’t have a job for the summer. Do you think you can find me somebody?”
Well, so much for the cramming session. “I can give it a try.” I’ve always had connections, Michael thought. Not every student is so lucky. It feels really selfish to lose a chance at a summer job for some needy student just because I hope to get a few extra marks from an hour or two of studying. And maybe he’d find someone right away and not lose much time at all. In any case, where he was hoping to work marks didn’t mean much. He wasn’t going to be an academic like Jacob. “What’s your deadline?”
“Do you think you can have it done by noon? If not, you can call me and I’ll put a message in at the unemployment office. We should have it wrapped up as soon as possible. This is an out-of-town job, remember, a deep-in-the-wilderness classic, and not popular with everyone.”
“I’ll get right on it.”
“Thanks. Oh. You’ll probably know that Tarney made his point with your Dad. We’re getting a seventeen-foot cruiser instead of a third open boat. Another outboard, mind you, but a deep hull and a cabin. More freight, and a nicer ride if the lake kicks up, which I hear it can do even in summer.”
They both chuckled. George Thurman and his brother-in-law were the best of friends and long-time hunting partners as well as boss and staff, and Uncle Tarney’s work record was impeccable, but every spring at outfitting time for a wilderness assignment the head of Thurman Engineering liked to nit-pick the specs. This year he had complained about the expense of running a deep-hulled, high-speed freighting cruiser. A tank of gas every time it ran the lake! And it would be a temptation to a crew of young bloods. They would be racing it all over the lake, maybe even trying to water ski.
“What did Tarney say?”
“He said there would be too much freight to move any other way, just keeping us all in food, let alone hauling lumber and gas and equipment, and that the lake was too cold for water ski-ing. Way too cold. But it wasn’t entirely your Dad’s annual clamp down. Valerie’s typewriter got a couple of Tarney’s figures mixed up and your Dad was going too fast to spot it when he was sorting out the reports.”
“Was it Tuesday they got this straightened out?” The phone was close enough to the stove for Michael to reach out for the coffee pot and fill the cup Peter had left handy. The day was coming together nicely. He’d much rather be doing something connected with the upcoming survey than study.
Dan was thinking for a moment. “What’s today? Right, Friday. I think it was Tuesday. How did you know?”
“I was in New Westminster for supper Tuesday night. I thought that Pop was somehow thoughtful. Tarney didn’t say anything, though. I guess he knew you’d tell me sooner or later. And anyway, I think Dad likes to fuss like that at this time of the year because he can’t go out on that kind of a job any more. It’s his way of grabbing a piece of the action. And when the weather’s been like this, who can blame him?”
“It is great. I hope it stays for the trip up. We hear the snow is taking its time leaving parts of the Cariboo.”
“It’ll be gone when we get to the lake. But that still won’t make the water any warmer for water ski-ing. I’ll call you later, hopefully with a chainman in the bag.”
“Got anyone in mind?”
“Not at all. But I feel lucky. In weather like this, what healthy, thinking, young student would turn down the chance of a summer in the mountains?”
“You’re right. First guy you ask, he’ll reach out for his duffle bag and ask where the truck is. Catch me later.”
Michael took his pants and his cup to the bathroom, washed and shaved and got half-dressed while he drank his coffee, then came to the kitchen to finish dressing while he ate one quick sandwich of bread and cheese. He took an apple from the fridge for his squall pocket, grabbed his briefcase from beside his bed, and strode for his car, out on the street at the front of the house. His exam was at one.
Nice of Carpenter to phone and give the chance to a student, Michael thought as he drove straight ahead toward Blanca Street, and why had he been pinned down so hard by the great hairy arm of God to make sure he was still there for the phone call?
He felt so healthy now that it was hard to believe it had happened, and so destructively. It was an event to describe to Jacob, who would know where in the books such things were defined. With the operations of the dark night of the soul there was always the problem that each hard moment seemed like the worst that had ever happened, but even allowing for this rule of thumb, Michael knew he had just been through something which was for him grander than usual. Not for Yvonne, of course, nor for Jacob or Gisela, probably, but for Michael Thurman, quite. He thought of what the propheter Jeremiah has said about feeling as if his bones were crushed. It had been just about that bad. Quite the honour, Michael thought wryly, now that the holocaust was over. The evergreen forest on the university endowment lands side west of Blanca shimmered in the morning sun. Coming out of the dark night, Michael felt like Adam taking his first look at the Garden of Eden.

Chapter Three More remote preparation,especially for the reader

2008-07-20T15:39:00.000-07:00

Throughout five years of reflection and speculation, the foregoing is only a token of the thought, on my topic alone, that passed through the mind and heart of Yvonne Gagnon Cameron, daughter of the legendary Philippe and the equally renowned Camille, sister to their remarkable children, and mystic and spiritual director in her own right. There were many more scenes, many more conversations with a large variety of people including Philippe, who sometimes chuckled and at other times was very thoughtful over the question. In some of those thoughtful times as well, to those who knew the signs, he was in a great deal of spiritual pain. Therefore, so was Yvonne, for after all it was in her very house, with its view of the ships and the mountains and the Point Atkinson Light, that Jacob had, so to speak, his vision. So, long were the hours that her spirit laboured to give birth to clarity to Jacob’s thoughts on the matter, and genuine success to his quest. In his youth, for all the understanding which generally made him a sounder thinker than so many of his peers, he inevitably seemed to think of his sought for authors task as easier than it had to be

Take, for example, Jean-Paul’s assurances. First, he had promised Angus that he would be open to any West Coast writing that was up to standard. Then, perhaps a little overrun by Jacob's conviction that he could find a chronicler for Philippe, Jean-Paul had said he would give his best attentions to such an author. Was that not a virtual guarantee of publishing? From his Grandpere’s writing history - of the early days -and his father’s profession, Jacob knew how difficult it was for author to get a manuscript even sympathetically read, let alone published. Yet here was a powerful and respected publisher offering Monday morning over a clean desk, or his fireside on a Montreal winter’s evening, with a brandy at his elbow and Beethoven on the hi- fi, when the subject was already perhaps his major hero, a man to whom, in a sense, he owed his profession and perhaps his faith? The cat was in the bag, said Jacob, for what prospective writer could resist such a promise? Or, as Michael Thurman had put it, Jake Cameron spent his days at UBC like a hunter on high ridge no one else knew was stocked with blue grouse, with a champion spaniel at his side, full of expectations. Besides film, Michael’s other passion was hunting. He was a big lad, too even larger than Jacob and an excellent hunter and fisherman. Perhaps these skills had something to do with it being he that found our narrative biographer.

And speaking of our author, I must admit that I am not getting to him too quickly, am I? My apologies to him and young Michael, and to the more ordinary practices found in the writing of ordinary novels, where the hierarchies of theology, at least in this century, do not usually obtain. And my apologies to the reader, if he thinks I have misled him. But that is how it is, in the spiritual life: youth counts more in potential than in act, while it is age and experience, all other factors being Divinely accommodated, that possess charity, wisdom and grace in their most interesting degrees. Thus my early preoccupation with Yvonne, and her elders and peers so that the later concentration on Jacob and Michael and so forth will not disturb the real priorities. Similarly, therefore, my introduction to the adventure passes through the eyes of a mature woman and householder, so that the upcoming tour of the wilderness will not support a setting and symbolic reference more dominant than it should be. And finally, there is the most important question; that of spiritual agony, of the infused variety, and its compensating joys. Due to the novelists’ traditional ignorance of the writings and experiences of the great mystics, the heritage of our fiction and drama is likely to have left the reader unprepared to limit the spiritual life of young men to its proper perspective, especially when they seem more gifted, learned, and responsible than the young men of most of our modern writing, and in fact are precisely the sort of youths John of the Cross spoke about in his Spiritual Canticle, when he speaks of virtues and gifts acquired in the cool mornings, signifying the earlier years.

But back to Yvonne, who knew all about Jacob and Michael’s gifts, but also, cautiously, grasped the limitations of their inexperience when it came to commissioning someone to report on the soul of a man who knew the highest levels of the spiritual life as familiarly as Christ had known the highways of Palestine. Jacob and Michael were lovely boys and sound Christians, but they had not been raised to that level of perfect prayer the mystics called the spiritual marriage. In that way, in a sense, Jacob did not know what he was getting into, or rather, what he was hoping to get someone else into. He was a good student of the interior life, and knew by theory the horrific aspects of the fifth and sixth mansions, as St. Teresa called them, or the dark night of the spirit, as St. John of the Cross said, but theory was not the same as complete experience in any field and this disparity was nowhere so pronounced as in the mystical life. It seemed to Yvonne that Jacob actually believed that talent, studiousness, and sincerity were sufficient to Philippe’s would-be chronicler, that he could not seem to realize that the job was only there for someone who was not only called, but chosen, to walk the same valley of the shadow of death, just like Philippe.

She herself would not have demanded such a standard, as she knew how much it cost. Nor did Angus, who would trade all of Shakespeare’s sonnets for a morning’s conversation with his father-in-law, and understood the literary value of a faithful transcription of Philippe’s purely natural life. But Jean-Paul was another story. To repeat, he was opposed to vest-pocket hagiography, parlour Catholicsm, hot-house spirituality, when the question was Philippe Gagnon’s life with Christ. But of course, Yvonne fully realized, so was Jacob opposed to such a beginner’s viewpoint. What Jacob could not comprehend - who could, at twenty-two? - was that Jean-Paul would not have anything to do, either, with the recorded observations of even the proficient. These might not be faulty by misguided excess and a too facile, pseudo-comprehension of a soul in the state but they would be less than adequate by omission.

“Only perfection can comprehend perfection,” Jean-Paul had become fond of saying. “Betancourt is not interested in bringing out an adequate version of Philippe’s adventures. That would only cloud the picture, and add little, if anything, to what Philippe has already done himself, His own teaching is plain enough, as well as sublime. What could some relatively good but imperfect work add to that? It would be only a curiosity piece, in a sense, a species of insult, and of no interest to those who already have a devotion to Philippe’s books.” This and like speeches he gave seriously, to be capped off by a wink, or smile, and a parallel to what he had earlier said about Lemelin and western story-tellers. “Find me a saint, mind you, and of course Jacob would have his way.” Then he would grow serious again. “Anyway, is not that the meaning of his inspiration? God does not have to be as skeptical as a publisher. He might indeed have something very interesting up His sleeve.”

The last time Jean-Paul had said these things to Yvonne had been the immediately previous Christmas, when Jacob, due to one of Cupid’s sharper - and final - arrows, had been considerably distracted from his search. Jean-Paul, being a bachelor, liked to travel at Christmas, Also, as a music lover, he was interested in the development of Jacob’s singing voice. So he had come west to hear Yvonne’s church choir and Jacob’s solo singing at midnight mass. He was impressed with Jacob’s voice, and also with the young lady Jacob seemed to be courting very seriously, and he thought it was probably a good thing that Providence had provided Yvonne’s literature-minded son with something else to think about. He went so far to say that perhaps it was the Lord’s way of consoling Jacob while he disappointed him over the other matter. Philippe, after all, had just come out with his third volume on the Virgin Mary - it was on Betancourt‘s Christmas list -while adultery and fornication seemed to be increasing as material for modern novelists to discuss - not with much sense of disapproval or understanding - and Jean-Paul had to wonder, from a professional viewpoint, if the novelists and the theologians had ever been farther apart, and how long it would be before they could get back together. So what Jean-Paul had said about God having something up his sleeve, he had said after Yvonne had insisted that Jacob’s retirement was only temporary.

“He works in cycles, she said. “As the grace comes. He is getting to a certain plateau with his voice studies, and the problems with Adrianne will level out in time. Anyway, Jean-Paul, after the road of his romance is a little easier to walk, then he will have been deepened more, and will better understand what he is looking for. She had smiled herself. “You are not always skeptical. Perhaps it is what you are looking for too."

They had been sitting by Yvonne’s fireplace, though the fire was not burning, as that Boxing Day was bright and clear, and the time was just before lunch. “Possibly, possibly,” Jean-Paul said. His traveling weather had been good too, for the most part; he had come by train, to reclaim, he said, his feeling for the country, and also to think about the French who had had moved out from the St. Lawrence, in years past, to explore, trade, trap, map, fight, and. evangelize the continent. He had a history series in mind, had even gone so far as to discuss a volume or two of it with Jerome Gagnon, Yvonne’s youngest brother and Jean-Paul brother-in-law. Jerome was then a history teacher at the University of Ottawa as well as the recognized future official biographer of Philippe. Jean-Paul had gone to see Jerome because he knew he would enjoy himself some historical writing by a man whose mind, Jean-Paul was convinced, had a grasp of every square yard of North America - “You have never seen, Yvonne, a house with so many maps in it." But Providence had a deeper purpose, I might add, as Jerome was to stay only another half-dozen years at Ottawa, after which he moved west and encountered the same young man Michael Thurman and the reader is about to meet. In subsequent years, Jean-Paul enjoyed dwelling on the coincidence, as it was the last time he had talked to Jerome before Michael’s discovery, and he had been somewhat brusque with Jerome’s then preference for John of the Cross over La Verendrye and Henri Chatillon, guide for Francis Parkman’s journey over the Oregon Trail.

Like any publisher, his mind had to be in several places at once, and Yvonne, he knew, was settling him down. Her presence had a way of moving the heart within itself. Her words, too, did strange things to the spirit. “You reaffirm my faith that Jacob’s idea is possible of realization,” he said. “But if I thought about it too much, you know, I might become too overwhelmed to think about anything else. If I do not keep the business going now with lesser matters, there will be no Betancourt later to publish the greater subject. For the sake of the future, could you try to persuade Jerome to change his mind?”

Chapter Two Remote Preparation

2008-07-20T15:37:00.000-07:00

One of Yvonne Cameron’s favourite places for thinking about Jacob’s scheme was her own living room. The Cameron house lay down the Point Grey northern slope, a few hundred yards above the beach at Spanish Banks, with a view from half the rooms of English Bay and the entrance to Vancouver Harbour. Such a large outlook of sea and the North Shore mountains was helpful to any meditation, of course, but it was particularly appropriate to the subject of Jacob’s writer. Such a skill, if it was come from the nation’s westernmost University, already had a most engaging setting to contend with. How would Jacob persuade a native son or daughter to become fascinated with an eastern geography? Spiritual landscapes were undoubtedly more important than physical landscapes, it was true, but a youngster was not likely to be convinced of this. British Columbia - Yvonne had lived there for a decade following the Second World War, - was a magnificent backdrop. The more sensitive an author - and sensitivity was enormously important to Jacob’s plans - the more likely he or she would want to devote every energy to celebrating the Pacific province.
Nor was setting the only factor, There were two centuries of white man’s history alone, and from a story-teller’s aspect, only a fraction of it had been explored. The logging of the massive timber, the fishing of the silver hordes of salmon, mines, furs, big game hunting, coastal ships and ocean vessels, mountaineering, missionaries, the growth of industry, education, the arts, immigration, Indians, British Empire versus Canadian or American ideals, railway and road building, ranches, orchards, politics: it was all there, yet who could name half- a-dozen quality novels that had come out of British Columbia? The province with everything, Angus Cameron was fond of saying, except a colony of writers. Angus was her husband. He had been raised on a dairy farm in the Fraser Valley. He was a medical student when he met her, then a doctor, but after the war he turned to literature as a profession. If Jacob ached for a Homer for his grandfather’s adventures, Angus - although he appreciated Jacob’s desires - would like at least a Callaghan, a MacLennan, a Richler, a Davies, for the West Coast. He was not, by the way, ungrateful for such as Haig-Brown, Birney, or Emily Carr, but he had the epic inclination, and his convert’s faith burned deep and strong. He firmly believed that a single first class imagination could produce a shelf of books as long as Walter Scott’s, out of two centuries of New Caledonia, and twice as true.
But in the years since he had finished his English studies and begun teaching at UBC, he’d yet to come across a student, as far as he could see and hear, who had the required soul. Jacob’s youth made him more optimistic about his peers than Angus could be for his students. Good teachers, fair critics, a screenwriter, possibly excellent journalists, had all sat under his gaze, or had been reported through the perceptions of his cronies, but there had been no evidence of Jacob’s “first class imagination”. Perhaps some minor poets, short story writers, even novelists of the sort more interested in sensibilities than drama, but no Thackerays, Dickens, Trollopes, real Hemingways (as opposed to the frequent imitations) George Eliots, Jane Austens. There had not even appeared yet, a Fitzgerald, who certainly could have thrived on the dream life of Vancouverites.
Sitting in another of the living room chairs, Angus had nattered on along this theme for years, before Jacob had his inspiration with the concern of a professional educator, afterward with the more intensified speculations of a father who was used to giving counsel to his son. “There must be something in criticism,” Angus often said. “We seem to have to do an awful lot of it, without producing anything new ourselves. We labour away - why? - to maintain the ancient standards, which so far tell us we’ve yet to see the star of literature really rest over this province.”
Angus had his own intuitions, obviously, born out of his original war-time expectation that he would settle down after the war closer to his wife’s family. Part of his own rationale for moving back to the West was the hope that the coastal province was about to sprout some writers he could help, not only by criticism and support, but as a funnel to the publishing family he happened to be related to by marriage . Betancourt et Fils, having been founded to publish Philippe’s first book, was fundamentally French in language and theological in spirit, but Jean-Paul, the “Fils” part of the outfit, had promised Angus that he could widen his horizons for the right material. Jean-Paul would prefer specifically spiritual writing - Betancourt had a rock-solid reputation with universities and religious, overseas as well as North American- but he was almost as ambitious for imaginative literature as Angus. Moreover, Yvonne knew well, Jean-Paul had faith in Angus’ pedagogical abilities to inspire good writing.
Jean-Paul had a puckish sense of humour, though, on occasion . “What your west coast really needs,” he was fond of saying, “is not a MacLennan, but a Lemelin. Your trees are so big, your mountains are so high: you need someone to bring your people down to size. Find me another Lemelin and my presses are yours.”
Angus, mind you, could appreciate that point of view, not only as a shrewd observation on the pagan and un-Christian overtones of much western thinking, but as recognition of the genius of the Quebec author. Angus pondered at length the merits of his favourite English-Canadian writers, wondering if they were as good as their British examples, but his regard for Lemelin’s achievements was rarely shaken. The wit of the continental French had been matched: parry, cut, and thrust. And in terms of the preservation of man’s basic vitality, and the normalcy of that needing a real integration with the Church, Lemelin was far superior - or luckier - than much of the so-called French brilliance. As for James Joyce - or those aspects of him some of his students seemed inclined to worship - well, Angus would listen more carefully to those who had also taken the time to read Lemelin.
But these were discussions and thoughts that had passed between Angus and Jean-Paul before Jacob’s inspiration, and had always to do with novels which had nothing to do with the life of Philippe Gagnon, friend of Jean-Paul’s father, Samuel, and, as I have said before, author of the theological classics that had given birth to Betancourt and Son. Jean-Paul and Angus, mostly by letter and telephone, sometimes by a visit to east or west, were talking about native British Columbia writing about British Columbia - in those post-war years, remember, a land of little publishing of its own fiction - not about the incredible scheme that had lodged itself in the mind of young Jacob Cameron,
Or shall we say, had been infused therein? Jean-Paul was inclined to respect Jacob’s idea, and knowing plenty of theology himself, knew enough to be awed by its significance. The very first time he heard of Jacob’s plot, in fact, he said, with unimpeachable candour, that the thought had crossed his mind years before, to be dismissed. The reason was simple: if Philippe was not already writing such stories, as distinct from his didactic works, they could not be written, which probably meant that God did not want them written: all the elements essential to a genuine discovery of the secrets of the interior life were best handled in text book fashion. Also, fiction, by being a kind of fabrication, should have nothing to do with the accounts of mystical phenomena, which must be subject to the scrutiny of historical truth. And finally, the capacity for writing novels and a profound interest in sanctity had not been part of the history of literature. Jean-Paul, like his father, although for different reasons, was even wary of most hagiographers, with their faults of partial vision, so he was adamant against the possibility of a substitute vision - in other words, to him, no vision at all.
But Jean-Paul appreciated Angus’ dreams for west coast development in literature - as a publisher subject to the graces of state he had to be aware of historical evolution - and was at least open to lesser fiction, so he was partially prepared for Jacob’s bombshell, when it came. Jacob had made a joke about it: Angus’ dream had been a John-the-Baptist among ideas, to make Jean-Paul ready for the Lord’s real plan.
Jean-Paul, being no dummy, had made his own joke in return. “That may be so, but if your father’s idea is a John the Baptist, yours is a Jesus that’s going to be one hell of a longtime coming. The writer you’re thinking of is like something better than the strawberry. Doubtless God could make such a man, but doubtless God never has. Yet.”
“Would you publish such a man if God did? In English?”
Jean-Paul had known very well what Jacob meant, but, as I said, he had a puckish sense of humour. “You think God would make such a man in English? To deal with your grandpere?
Now Jacob was just eighteen that year, so the swift lines of a reflective man were not always at his command. He could be quite forgiven, then, the huge grin that had arisen on his broad, well-chiseled Scottish face as he leveled his retort at his Gallic challenger. “God made a man in French to deal with John of the Cross.” Jacob meant, of course, Philippe.
Jean-Paul had smiled with respect. “With lines like that, are you so sure you’re not the novelist you’re looking for?”
“I have no feeling for it in myself. Only in others.”
Jean-Paul had nodded his learned head. He was, after all,only a publisher. He understood how it was to possess a grand idea, either before or after its development, without having the ability to give it flesh. Or was Jacob simply suffering from his lack of the intimate knowledge of an example? Angus had obviously made him excited about scholarship and criticism. Suppose he were to become acquainted with a good novelist? Jean-Paul aired these questions, but Jacob only shook his head. At eighteen, he had his peace of mind from appreciating original literature. The idea of creating it left him blank and confused, and not in the way he knew already to be spiritually healthful. Besides, he needed all his energy to study what his grandfather had said, and the souls he wrote about, and then to explain the great creative work he believed could be written. God, he thought, had made that all quite clear.
And so Jean-Paul nodded, and wrily said he hoped that Jacob’s discovery, and its fulfilled result, would come in his, Jean-Paul’s, life-time. It would be an honour to publish such a work and fitting, as Philippe’s books had started his father’s business.

Posted by the kootenay ranger at 10:49 AM

Labels: chapter two

Chapter One Not Always the Cruelest Month

2008-07-11T11:15:00.000-07:00

As the oak grows from the acorn, the mustard tree from the tiniest of seeds, the giant Douglas Firs of the Pacific Coast of Canada from a cone the size of a man's thumb, so great events often arise from incidental occasions. Thus, five long years of searching for his grandfather's biographer came to an end for Jacob Cameron, one sunny morning late in April, on the campus of the University of British Columbia, simply because his friend Michael Thurman was looking for a book about making films.
Why was this discovery so significant? Well, even in that year, when Philippe Gagnon was only sixty-seven and very much alive, men - and women - said he was likely to be a canonized saint, and therefore young Jacob believed that well-written stories of his grandfather's adventures, both natural and spiritual, would add significantly to the quality of English literature, a subject he hoped to teach as a college professor. And why was Michael's picking up the film book so incidental? Well, for one thing, the book was not part of any of the material he was supposed to be studying for any part of his last exam of his last year. And, for another, it did not turn out to be the book he was actually looking for. But that was all right. Finding the right storyteller for Jacob was, at that point in their mutual history, much more important than finding any old book for himself. In no uncertain sense, Michael was unearthing such a writer for his own sake, because throughout those five searching years Jacob had never been convinced that he, Michael, was not the providentially intended biographer, and thus an author of books, while Michael was equally sure that his own real literary ability went no further than screen writing. In finding Nick Taylor, Michael freed himself from Jacob's expectations.
This was no small feat. In his own quiet way, Jacob Cameron exerted a lot of pressure on those who knew him best, especially amongst the conscientious. After feeling the pressure for five long years, Michael was very happy to unload it where it belonged.
Why did men believe that that Heaven's ultimate honour might one day be conferred upon Philippe? The answer is complicated, as Philippe delighted and instructed many men and women in many different ways - or confronted and rebuked, if occasion called for it - as he was a man of a variety of talents and interests. Yet the answer is also simple, even if it takes the rarest, deepest, wisdom to understand it, because Philippe also had the single most desirable ability that can come to man in this life, that is, he could be transformed precisely into Our Lord Jesus Christ, exactly as this phenomenon is so scientifically and exhaustively described by the Carmelite mystic, John of the Cross.
I use so many adjectives and superlatives to emphasize that I am not speaking figuratively. In this particular claim of Jacob's - and mine - there is no metaphor, no simile, no analogy of any kind. Jacob and all the other witnesses saw, and sometimes heard or touched, a literal fact, although of course the reader must appreciate a considerable amount of rather profound theology to understand just how God made such a thing happen, and specifically he must be able to grasp the difference, in metaphysician's language, between a substance and an operation. If the reader does have such an understanding, let his faith accept history. For all that he usually looked, moved, and sounded like any ordinary man, just like you or me, Philippe from time to time turned into the Lord. An other Christ indeed, when circumstances required.
Now as Jacob did not live in St. Jean de la Riviere, PQ, nor was Philippe his spiritual director, he had not been a frequent witness of this remarkable occurrence in his Grandpere. (Actually his Grandpere by adoption.) In fact he had seen it only twice that he was sure of, on two separate trips to St. Jean while he was stationed in the East, at the infantry school at Camp Borden, and possibly a third time, but when he was younger, just an adolescent experiencing profound emotions because of his parents' death in a car accident. For someone of college age, Jacob had grown into a pretty solid theologian in his own right, and he was cautious about claiming religious experiences for which he felt he did not have scientific certitude.
These unusual sightings had left a lasting impression, a something deep in his soul which gave him useful clues about his purposes at university and his scholarly life afterward. In this, he had realized from his first weeks on campus, he was more fortunate than many of his peers, and old beyond his years, although not in an especially sententious fashion. He had no little sense of humour.
He would have known much of this, of course, in the ordinary way, simply from knowing his acuired grandparents, from reading some of his Philippe's writing, and from living his teenage years in the household ruled over by the Gagnon's oldest daughter and her husband, a much wiser couple in every way than the pair to whom he had been born. But the spiritual experiences around Philippe had put icing on the cake, as it were, and confirmed him in his conviction of finding a proper story teller.
Oddly enough, Jacob pretty well confined his hunt to the campus of the University of British Columbia and its sprawling campus above the Strait of Georgia and the north bank of the mouth of the Fraser. This was somewhat strange, of course, because Philippe had spent almost all of his life in Quebec, so someone studying on the West Coast was as far away from French Canada as a prospective chronicler could be. But that is how it is with intuition: sometimes there is not much respect for the ordinary ways of logic.
Or is that entirely correct?
Assuming that Jacob's inspiration was divine, perhaps we can discern the mind of God admitting the magic, to a young writer, of the greener sheen of farther fields. On the other hand, if we are only humanists, let us attribute Jacob's great conviction to the abundance of young talent he found on the UBC campus, and perhaps also to the philosopher David Hume's dictum that the true test of a culture's worth was the foreign opinion rather than the domestic.
I am not, by the way, assuming for a moment, that a humanist will like such an avowedly theological work as this one. But the book's being a novel suggests that I should allow for an untheological mind finding its way into it. In either case, Jacob felt very strongly that his discovery would be made on his own campus, and among his own generation.
He had been elsewhere distracted, it is true, because of some of the imaginations he had encountered in his wanderings, and also because he did not like to be stuck on his own opinions, especially in such an important matter, but always his deepest hopes seemed to summon him to expect to find his mysterious chronicler meandering in his favourite academic headland, in a building, perhaps, or strolling along one of the malls. Year by year, he never gave up looking there. His mother often said that even his failures would make an interesting collection of tales, marking the various reasons people, particularly students, would not understand Christian perfection. This list in itself, Yvonne Cameron said, was something he should try to write, in fiction of course. Just as Jacob inclined to wondering if his sought for biographer was not Michael Thurman - whenever Michael realized it - so Yvonne often felt that Jacob should think about having one more talent than he credited himself with. Whether he could handle his Grandpere's most significant moments might be a question, but he certainly seemed to comprehend his own friends and acquaintances. His catalogue of their frailties might not add much to the literature of mysticism, but it would do so to the tools of moral theology. And he had such a skill with the pen, her golden-haired giant, and such a concern for the classic novelists, that one could think of Philippe's history as his own assignment.
But, as the family understood from Philippe's own instruction and example in the matter of the various literary skills, the lights of the different arts lay only where the Muse lit them. The Aristotle of the Poetics had been no Homer, nor even an Aeschylus. The incredible theology of Aquinas had only occasionally found its way into poetry. Perhaps the greatest of autobiographers, Teresa of Avila, was no dramatist. And John of the Cross, such a brilliant and profound commentator for his own poetry, had been unable to write a personal history, unless, of course, you saw this in his Spiritual Canticle. Her father had not been able to turn his discourse into stories, least of all about himself.
Thus it seemed that, when all was said and done, when it came to particular writing ability, Jacob was only a critic.
Novels, short stories, plays, of course, are formal, hopefully universal and objective, methods of getting a man's life into print, for the benefit of those who would never know him personally. They are not the same thing as tales in a family's oral tradition, of which there were many about Philippe, nor the same as letters and journal records, of which there were indeed many by him, as Jacob was well aware. In fact it was the existence of this primitive literature that made him confident that his scheme was practical, and something with a more intimate texture than an official biography would provide.
I should make it clear that this last kind of book about Philippe had long been considered the province of his youngest son, Jerome. There were two reasons for this choice: one, that Jerome had early shown a profound interest in history, especially the history of the Church; two, if there were to be any hagiography, it was to be done by someone from within the family, who would know what he was talking about. Philippe had always had time and compassion for journalists - men of the world trying to talk to the world, but book writers attempting to tackle the spiritual life and holiness he regarded by a different standard. But, as people said, that was easy when a man had children and friends like Philippe Gagnon's. As some families were known for wealth, or artistic talent, or science or athletic or political ability, the Gagnons and their offshoots were stamped with remarkable goodness, not unlike the first generations of a religious order. "The other Dominic" Philippe was sometimes called, and only his height kept him from being compared too identically with such a sawed-off shotgun as Ignatius Loyola. He had fathered so much, spiritually speaking, that it was more unusual than the opposite, one could say, that a scheme such as Jacob's had been waiting on the third generation.
Here I must extend my preamble to bring up another distinction, and perhaps after that we can take up Michael Thurman's adventure in the north basement of Brock Hall, the student union building of those days. Remember that I said that Jacob believed that his dream might augment the study of English literature? This means a number of things, one of them being, as Yvonne often thought, that Jacob was naive about the general run of English professors, but for our purposes one thing most emphatically: that Jacob was not anxious to add to the fortunes of French Canadian literature. In fact he was concerned that if someone beat him to the chronicles of Philippe in French, his hopes for an English language renaissance would be scuppered, and all his anxieties wasted.
There was a chance of this, actually, thanks to one member of the St. Jean household, neither Philippe nor Camille, who also kept a journal, in French, in a rather fulsomely narrative fashion. If it ever fell into the hands of a good novelist of that language, it would not be that difficult to beat the West and the anglophones to the draw, Jacob was often sadly convinced. Yvonne, on the other hand, was inclined to smile at such a fear. Jacob was too occupied with his grandfather to realize that the authoress of the dangerous diary was no threat to his intentions. Most of her record had to do with Camille.

Prologue

2008-07-03T09:01:00.000-07:00

My name is Geoffrey Haldane, and for most of my working life I have not been a novelist, but a newspaper reporter and editor, that is , a journalist. Nonetheless, back in the ‘Sixties I began to be provoked to think of becoming some sort of story-teller, so I started to keep notes, make little sketches, sometimes even attempt a lengthy draught, all dealing with a large group of interesting characters I began to meet shortly after I returned from the second session of the Second Vatican Council. I was covering those eventful deliberations for the Toronto Gazette, the newspaper I had worked for since my graduation from the University of Toronto, St. Michael’s College, and until I ran into the first of these remarkable people, especially as my editors and much of the public had been very happy with my reports, I was expecting to monitor the Council to its end.
But man proposes, God disposes; I met Jacob Cameron, and I did not go back to Rome. You could say, borrowing from secular parlance, that Jacob made me an offer I could not resist, although at the time I never thought of this opportunity as having anything to do with telling stories. I was simply given the chance, as far as I could see at the time, to become part of a group of people, more or less a family, that were not only devoutly Catholic, as I had tried to be, but in addition went so far as to take Christian perfection and the spiritual life seriously. In fact these people were so dedicated to such a pursuit that God had been good enough to take them seriously, with some rather wonderful results. In discovering them, and their greater sense of life on this earth, as well as in Heaven, I was like a painter who had come upon a brighter, deeper, kind of light. Or like a musician who runs across a new sound, such as he had hoped might exist, but not quite dared to believe in.
Of course there was a price to be paid for my being incorporated into such an enterprise, even though my role, relatively speaking, was to be only a small one. And Jacob was good enough to warn me about this, pretty well from the onset of our friendship. I was going to have to take on the deeper waters, or some of the deeper waters, of the real spiritual road, what the theologians call the passive part of the interior life. Ah, yes, the dark night, as John of the Cross so aptly put it. A bitter, black, and painful bit of business from time to time, but how eminently useful, how precious to God and man.
Certainly it has been precious to me, on my own account. People may write all they want of the view from the top of a mountain, or of an ocean panorama, or some spectacle of art or architecture, of battles or scientific breakthroughs, but in my experience – which has not, by the way, been devoid of some of these other things – there is nothing like the sight of an ordinary backyard, or street corner, or simply a bedroom, wall, after the passing of a good moment or two of that divine hammerlock, that most penetrating mental and physical assault, that peculiar piece of misery deep in the soul that is caused only by God, and always goes deeper in its purpose of purgation than anything than can be caused by man.
There are varieties of depth, of course, as well as intensity and duration, just as there are varieties among consoling visions and experiences, and I would not want it said that I thought I knew the entirety of God’s possibilities in these areas of the theological life. In fact the best I can say for myself is that God has been good enough to provide me with a few experiences and insights, just enough to have something for myself in the midst of those more profoundly favoured and also to have the necessary means by which to understand and appreciate their lives, well enough, at least, to be able to write about them. One can get a great deal out of reading about the mystics even though his spiritual experiences are according to the ordinary life of grace only — if this were not so I don’t see how I would be writing what I’m writing — but it is not a good idea to try to write a lot about them without some experience. Perhaps one can have a special calling in this regard, as there is no stopping the will of God, and his profound respect for his own creations, but can’t see myself at this point how it would work out well.
The principal problem here is not visions and so on, as of course, as it is well known, the magisterium of the Catholic Church is bound to deal with such things, when the need arises, and therefore it can write as much as it deems necessary. It can do so, and it must do so, sometimes to approve, sometimes to condemn. It also, of course, can and must discourse on the dark night in all its form and degrees, wherever and whenever such comment is useful or necessary, because anything caused by Almighty God is a subject requiring the Church’s attention, for she is mediator of the Divine Truth for the sake of ignorant and contumacious man, always in need of instruction and correction. So that if the Church, God forbid, were to fail to offer sound and fulsome comment, she would fail her obligations to Our Lord Jesus Christ, her very life and founder, and for such a failing He would have to punish her.
What I am suggesting here regarding caution is the habit of individuals, somewhat too common in our age, of equating quite ordinary human trial and suffering, the results either of nature or vicious men, with a purgation that only God can create. Often enough these are the same people who will actually deny the very real purgation of purgatory or the everlasting punishment of hell. And sometimes they are the same people who teach and insist that the consolations and empowerments of the mystical life are obtainable by will, and without strict obedience to the rigours of moral theology.
This is not to say that God cannot, or will not, grant certain contemplative favours, even quite profound contemplative favours, to those who are, objectively speaking, grave sinners. But this can be only at the beginning of their interior lives, and probably, I would say, from that unique combination of Divine justice and mercy which gazes upon the youthful histories of those who have begun life in less then perfect, or even morally and theologically adequate, family and educational environments. Having been brought up myself, by God’s kindness, in a most excellent situation, I must admit that I was in honest fact somewhat puzzled, even occasionally tempted to disbelief in some of the subjects of special graces I was later brought to deal with. What must Saint Peter have thought when he first gazed upon the man who had been Saul of Tarsus?
But God is God, as the Moslems say, and He does what He will to whom He will, and only fools argue with His decisions which flow always, of course, from His unlimited love. He simply wants men to be much better than they at first want themselves to be, and sets up certain training courses accordingly. Some yield to His intentions, some do not, but in either case He has done His part, and this part always includes our need for Him to remind us that our ways are not necessarily His.
Which brings me back to the beginning, when I said that I had not always been a novelist, and that I had not reported on the Second Vatican Council in its entirety, but had left that assignment after the second session. It was a very exciting business, of course, and my education, to say nothing of my passion for Church history, had given me about as good a preparation as a young journalist could ask for. I made some good and lasting friends among some of the clergy present, and was often envied for the inside track this gave much of my reporting, but as with so much that happens at Rome, the Council was, in part, a school for theory, while what Jacob Cameron offered me was a school, in fact an entire diocese, for practice, with an entire, large, family and its numerous satellites thrown in. And I mean entire in its dictionary sense: whole, complete; not broken nor decayed; neither castrated nor unqualified.
This is not to say there were absolutely no problems within these organizations — in some ways rather profoundly integrated, each with the other — for in this life all men and women, old and young, are somewhere between Adam’s Paradise and Christ’s Heaven, and troubles and difficulties must lie along the route. And each generation must make its own the wisdom and competence of those who went before, in and through the distractions and temptations of the times.
And speaking of temptations, I must admit that it seems, awfully attractive to me to spend a lot of time here telling about my first days with Jacob Cameron. All in all — and that is no merely casual expression — those were the days when the first phase of my life ended and the next began; ordinary grace, as wonderful as it had been to me started to fuse with extraordinary grace, with the activity of God himself, in fact, and no man can be censured for wanting to rejoice and celebrate the difference. In fact it is the general inexperience of the difference, or lack of articulation when the difference has actually occurred, that keeps the world and even Christ’s One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, insofar as its functioning members are concerned, in such swamps of sin and mediocre virtue. Simply, there can be no better way of identifying with the Cross, on a day in and day out basis, than through the dark night of passive prayer. It is God’s great gift, and I see no harm, personally, in all men praying to be given at least a little of it. What could be more effective daily tonic? It has the most effective power for overcoming sins, and nothing has more value in creating a real sense of the power of God over our souls, or of the love of our neighbour, for it is the mystic more than anyone who fulfills Christ’s command to bear one another’s burdens, being the soul that can actually wear the sins of another in his own bones. (I am saying nothing here, however, to the prejudice of the infinite power of the Mass, and the prayer of souls attending who are in the state of grace.) And this burden, if God permits, can last all day long. Or even all night.
This might sound terrible, but there is a great wonder in it all, and a firm retention of the light of wisdom that the Lord of the Universe has infused throughout his creation, not only in created nature, but in men and women as well.
So, Jacob Cameron being such a doorway to this greater adventure, it is rather tempting to devote a lot of time to him as he was when I met him — he was by then a young professor of philosophy — and I would have a very good time as well with the recollections of my own new education. But I think I should remain where the Muse first found me, firmly in the grip of my initial inspirations, which were all about Jacob, the family that had raised him, his friends of the moment, and his new friend he had been looking for as assiduously as Telemachus had searched for his father, Ulysses, and, until the appointed tine of connection, with about the same sort of luck. This is all very well sifted information, chewed over thoroughly, discussed, analyzed, and tested through a consortium of the most loyal, orthodox, aesthetically sensitive and moral souls, utterly in the complete mind of the Church, that an author could ask for. And many others who are not quite so theologically oriented, but have their own religious and artistic insights and energies, have also been most helpful, for of course no man who works with words can shape his text without constant dialogue and working examples, and this text could never have come about without the help and patience of all those who have had ears to hear me out, and the spirit to perform, if only some of the time in some cases, just as God would have them do.
I will say this about Jacob, though. It was he who persuaded me to make the permanent move from Toronto to the West, to a very lively little city — that was to become even more lively — in the south-eastern corner of British Columbia. There his uncle was running a small university, and Jacob had become convinced, through some sort of intuition, I think, that I would be of help to him if I were to take over the daily newspaper there, if I were to become its editor. This circumstances enabled me to do, even though I was not at all pleased with the idea of leaving Jacob not too long after I had found him. But as I said, he came from a family of extraordinary people, and, in a sense, he was quite competently replaced. Or rather his spirit was replaced. And of course I never lost contact with him, if only because I found myself, once I had taken up the sketches, in regular need of his corroboration or filling in of the blanks that others created. Then too, Jacob found ways and excuses to visit our corner of the universe, and often enough these encounters were, in their own way, just as productive as our first one. And always they provoked the sketches that led to what, in this final form, lies before the reader good enough, and strong enough, to take it up.
Lay on, good soul, and let the chips of the mind fall where they may,

Sterling , British Columbia
October 29,1992