Manticore

by Robertson Davies

  As I look back now I see that, although I knew a good deal about sex, I had retained an unusual innocence for my age, and I suppose it was my father’s money, and the sense of isolation it brought, that made my innocence possible.

  I told you what Netty had said about “Anglican guff.” She was scornful of what she called “Pancake Christianity” because we ate pancakes at Shrove; she used to snort when my parents had lobster salad on Fridays in Lent and always demanded that meat be sent up to the nursery for herself. She never, I think, quite forgave my parents for leaving the wholesome bosom of evangelistic Protestantism. Church matters—I won’t call it religion—played a big part in my growing up. We were attached to St Simon Zelotes, which had the reputation of being a rich people’s church. It wasn’t the most fashionable Anglican church in the city, but it had a special cachet. The fashionable one, I suppose, was St Paul’s, but it was Broad Church. I suppose you are familiar with these distinctions? And the High Church was St Mary Magdalene, but it was poor. St Simon Zelotes was neither so High as Mary Mag, nor so rich as Paul’s. The vicar was Canon Woodiwiss—he later became an Archdeacon and finally Bishop—and he was a gifted apostle to the well-to-do. I don’t say that sneeringly. There always seems to be a notion that the rich can’t be devout and that God doesn’t like them as much as He likes the poor. There are lots of Christians who are all pity and charity for the miserable and the outcast, but who think it a spiritual duty to give the rich a good snubbing whenever they can. So Woodiwiss was a real find for a church like Simon Zelotes.

  He soaked the rich for money, which was fair enough. At least once a year he preached his famous sermon about “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” He would explain that the Needle’s Eye was the name of a gate to Jerusalem which was so narrow that a heavily laden camel had to be relieved of some of its burden to get through, and that custom demanded that whatever was taken from the camel became the property of the Temple. So the obvious course for a rich man was to divest himself of some of his wealth for the church and thereby take a step toward salvation. I believe that in terms of history and theology this is all moonshine and Woodiwiss may even have invented it himself, but it worked like a charm. Because, as he said, following on from his text, “with God all things are possible.” So he persuaded his rich camels to strip off a few bales of this world’s goods and leave the negotiation of the needle’s eye in his capable hands.

  I didn’t see much of the Canon, though I heard many of his wonder-working sermons. He had the gift of the gab as few parsons do. But I came much under the influence of one of his curates, who was named Gervase Knopwood.

  Father Knopwood, as he liked us to call him, had an extraordinary way with boys, though on the face of it this seemed unlikely. He was an Englishman with an almost farcically upper-class accent and long front teeth and an appearance of being an elderly schoolboy. He wasn’t old; probably he was in his early forties, but his hair was almost white and he had deep furrows in his face. He wasn’t a joker or a jolly good fellow, and he played no games, though he was tough enough to have been a missionary in the Canadian West in some very difficult territory. But everybody respected him, and everybody feared him in a special way, for his standards were high, he expected the best from boys, and he had some ideas that to me were original.

  For one thing, he didn’t pay the usual lip-service to Art, which enjoyed more than sacred status in the kind of society in which we lived. I discovered this one day when I was talking to him in one of the rooms at the back of the church where we met for the Servers’ Guild and Confirmation classes and that sort of thing. There was a picture on the wall, a perfectly hideous thing in vivid colours, of a Boy Scout looking the very picture of boyish virtue, and behind him stood the figure of Christ with His hand on the Scout’s shoulder. I was making great game of it for the benefit of some other boys when I became aware that Father Knopwood was standing at a little distance, listening carefully.

  “You don’t think much of it, Davey?”

  “Well, Father, could anybody think much of it? I mean, look at the way it’s drawn, and the raw colours. And the sentimentality!”

  “Tell us about the sentimentality.”

  “Well—it’s obvious. I mean, Our Lord standing with His hand on the fellow’s shoulder, and everything.”

  “I seem to have missed something you have seen. Why is it sentimental to suggest that Christ stands near to anyone, whether it is a boy, or a girl, or an old man, or anyone at all?”

  “That’s not sentimental, of course. But it’s the way it’s done. I mean, the concept is so crude.”

  “Must a concept be sophisticated to be a good one?”

  “Well—surely?”

  “Must the workmanship always be superior? If something is to be said, must it always be said with eloquence and taste?”

  “That’s what they teach us in the Art Club. I mean, if it’s not well done it’s no good, is it?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never been able to make up my mind. A lot of modern artists are impatient of technical skill. It’s one of the great puzzles. Why don’t you come and see me after the meeting, and we’ll talk about it and see what we can find out.”

  This led to seeing a lot of Father Knopwood. He used to ask me to meals in his rooms, as he called a bed-sitter with a gas-ring in a cupboard that he had not far from the church. He wasn’t poison-poor, but he didn’t believe in spending money on himself. He taught me a lot and put some questions I have never been able to answer.

  The art thing was one of his pet subjects. He loved art and knew a lot about it, but he was always rather afraid of it as a substitute religion. He was especially down on the idea that art was a thing in itself—that a picture was simply a flat composition of line and pigment, and the fact that it seemed also to be Mona Lisa or The Marriage at Cana was an irrelevance. Every picture, he insisted, was “of” something or “about” something. He was interesting about very modern pictures, and once he took me to a good show of some of the best, and talked about them as manifestations of questing, chaos, and sometimes of despair that artists sensed in the world about them and could not express adequately in any other way. “A real artist never does anything gratuitously or simply to be puzzling,” he would say, “and if we don’t understand it now, we shall understand it later.”

  This was not what Mr Pugliesi said in the Art Club at school. We had a lot of clubs, and the Art Club had rather a cachet, as attracting the more intellectual boys; you were elected to it, you didn’t simply join. Mr Pugliesi was always warning us not to look for messages and meanings but to take heed of the primary thing—the picture as an object—so many square feet of painted canvas. Messages and meanings were what Father Knopwood chiefly sought, so I had to balance my ideas pretty carefully. That was why he got after me for laughing at the Boy Scout picture. He agreed that it was an awful picture, but he thought the meaning redeemed it. Thousands of boys would understand it who would never notice a Raphael reproduction if we put one in its place.

  I have never been convinced that he was right, and was shocked by his idea that not everybody needed art to be educated. He saved me from becoming an art snob, and he could be terribly funny about changes in art taste; the sort of fashionable enthusiasm that admires Tissot for thirty years, kicks him out of the door for forty, and then drags him back through the window as an artist of hitherto unappreciated quality. “It’s simply the immature business of assuming that one’s grandfather must necessarily be a fool, and then getting enough sense to realize that the old gentleman was almost as intelligent as oneself,” he said.

  This was important to me because another kind of art was coming to the fore at home. Caroline, who had always had lessons on the piano, was beginning to show some talent as a musician. We had both had some musical training and used to go to Mrs Tattersall’s Saturday morning classes, where we sang and played rhythm instruments and learned some b
asic stuff very pleasantly. But I had no special ability, and Caroline had. By the time she was twelve she had fought through a lot of the donkey-work of learning that extraordinarily difficult instrument that all unmusical parents seem to think their children should play, and she was pretty good. She has never become a first-rate pianist, but she is a much better than average amateur.

  When she was twelve, though, she was sure that she was going to be another Myra Hess and worked very hard. She played musically, which is really quite rare, even among people who get paid big fees to do it. Like Father Knopwood, she was interested in content as well as technique, and it was always a puzzle to me how she got to be that way, for nothing at home encouraged it. She played the things young pianists play—Schumann’s The Prophet Bird and his Scenes from Childhood, and of course lots of Bach and Scarlatti and Beethoven. She could wallop out Schumann’s Carnaval with immense authority for a girl of twelve or thirteen. The mischievous little snip she was in her personal life seemed to disappear, and somebody much more important took her place. I think I liked it best when she played some of the easier things she had learned in earlier years and fully commanded. There is one trifle—I don’t suppose it has much musical value—by Stephen Heller, called in English Curious Story, which is a very misleading translation of Kuriose Geschichte; she really succeeded in making it eerie, not by playing in a false, spooky way, but by a refined, Hans Andersen treatment. I loved listening to her, and though she tormented me horribly at other times, we seemed to be able to reach one another when she was playing and I was listening, and Netty was somewhere else.

  Caroline was glad to see me at weekends, because the house was even gloomier than before our mother died. It wasn’t neglected; there were still servants, though the staff had been cut down, and they polished and tidied things that never grew dim or untidy because nobody ever touched them; but the life had gone out of the house, and even though its former life had been unhappy, it had been life of a kind. Caroline lived there, supposedly under the care of Netty, and once a week Father’s secretary, an extremely efficient woman from Alpha Corporation, called to see that everything was in good order. But this secretary didn’t want to be involved personally, and I don’t blame her. Caroline was a day-girl at Bishop Cairncross’s, so she had friends and a social life there, as I did at Colborne College.

  We rarely asked anybody home, and our first attempt to take over the house as our own soon spent itself. Father wrote letters now and then, and I know he asked Dunstan Ramsay to keep an eye on us, but Ramsay had his hands full at the school during those war years, and he didn’t trouble us often. I rather think he disliked Carol, so he confined his supervision to questioning me now and then at school.

  You might suppose my sister and I were to be pitied, but we rather liked our weekend solitude. We could lighten it whenever we pleased by going out with friends, and people were kind about inviting us both to parties and such things, though during the war they were on a very modest scale. But I didn’t want to go out much because I had no money and could get into embarrassing positions; I borrowed all I could from Carol but didn’t want to be wholly in her clutch.

  What we both liked best were the Saturday evenings when we were together, because it had become the custom for Netty to devote that time to her pestilent brother Maitland and his deserving young family. Carol played the piano, and I looked through books about art which I was able to borrow from the school library. I was determined about this because I didn’t want her to think that I had no independent artistic interest of my own, but as I looked at pictures and read about them, I was really listening to her. It was the only time the drawing-room showed any hint of life, but the big empty fireplace—the secretary from Alpha and Netty agreed that it was foolish to light it during wartime, when presumably even cord-wood was involved in our total war effort—was a reminder that the room was merely enduring us, and that as soon as we went to bed a weight of inanition would settle on it again.

  I remember one night when Ramsay did drop in, and laughed to see us.

  “Music and painting,” said he; “the traditional diversions of the third generation of wealthy families. Let us hope you will both become discriminating patrons. God knows they are rare.”

  We didn’t like this, and Carol was particularly offended by his assumption that she would never do anything directly as a musician. But time has proved him right, as it does with so many disagreeable people. Carol and Beesty are now generous patrons of music, and I collect pictures. With both of us, as Father Knopwood feared, it has become the only spiritual life we have, and not a very satisfactory one when life is hard.

  Knopwood prepared me for Confirmation, and it was a much more important experience than I believe is usually the case. Most curates, you know, take you through the Catechism and bid you to ask them about anything you don’t understand. Of course most people don’t understand any of it, but they are content to let sleeping dogs lie. Most curates give you a vaguely worded talk about keeping yourself pure, without any real hope that you will.

  Knopwood was very different. He expounded the Creed in tough terms, very much in the C.S. Lewis manner. Christianity was serious and demanding, but worth any amount of trouble. God is here, and Christ is now. That was his line. And when it came to the talk about purity, he got down to brass tacks better than anybody I have ever known.

  He didn’t expect you to chalk up a hundred per cent score, but he expected you to try, and if you sinned, he expected you to know what you had done and why it was sin. If you knew that, you were better armed next time. This appealed to me. I liked dogma, for the same reason that I grew to like law. It made sense, it told you where you stood, and it had been tested by long precedent.

  He was very good about sex. It was pleasure: yes. It could be a duty: yes. But it wasn’t divorced from the rest of life, and what you did sexually was of a piece with what you did in your friendships and in your duty to other people in your public life. An adulterer and a burglar were bad men for similar reasons. A seducer and a sneak-thief were the same kind of man. Sex was not a toy. The great sin—quite possibly the Sin against the Holy Ghost—was to use yourself or someone else contemptuously, as an object of convenience. I saw the logic of that and agreed.

  There were problems. Not everybody fitted all rules. If you found yourself in that situation you had to do the best you could, but you had to bear in mind that the Sin against the Holy Ghost would not be forgiven you, and the retribution would be in this world.

  The brighter members of Knoppy’s Confirmation classes knew what he was talking about at this point. It was clear enough that he was himself a homosexual and knew it, and that his work with boys was his way of coping with it. But he never played favourites, he was a dear and thoroughly masculine friend, and there was never any monkey-business when he asked you to his rooms. I suppose there are hundreds like me who remember him with lasting affection and count having known him as a great experience. He stood by me during my early love-affair in a way I can never forget and which nothing I could do would possibly repay.

  I wish we could have remained friends.

  (6)

  People jeer at first love, and in ridiculous people it is certainly ridiculous. But I have seen how hot its flame can be in people of passionate nature, and how selfless it is in people who are inclined to be idealistic. It does not demand to be requited, and it can be a force where it is obviously hopeless. The worst fight I saw in my schooldays was caused when a boy said something derogatory about Loretta Young; another boy, who cherished a passion for the actress, whom he had seen only in films, hit this fellow in the mouth, and in an instant they were on the ground, the lover trying to murder the loudmouth. Our gym master parted them and insisted that they fight it out in the ring, but it was hopeless: the lover ignored all rules, kicked and bit and seemed like a madman. Of course nobody could explain to the master what the trouble was, but all of us supposed it was a fight about love. What I know now was that it was real
ly a fight about honour and idealism—what Dr von Haller calls a projection—and that it was a necessary part of the spiritual development of the lover. It may also have done something for the fellow who was so free with the name of Miss Young.

  I fell in love, with a crash and at first sight, on a Friday night in early December of 1944. I had been in love before, but trivially. Many boys, I think, are in love from the time they are able to walk, and I had cherished my hidden fancies and had had my conquests, of whom Toad Wilson was by no means the best example. Those were childish affairs, with shallow roots in Vanity. But now I was sixteen, serious and lonely, and in three hours Judith Wolff became the central, absorbing element in my life.

  Caroline’s school, named for a Bishop Cairncross who had been a dominant figure in the nineteenth-century life of our Canadian province, had a reputation for its plays and its music. Every school needs to be known for something other than good teaching, and its Christmas play was its speciality. In the year when I was sixteen the school decided to combine music and drama and get up a piece by Walter de la Mare called Crossings. I heard a good deal about it because it had a lot of music and four songs in it, and Caroline was to play the piano off stage. She practised at home and talked about the play as if it were the biggest musical show since Verdi wrote Aida for the Khedive of Egypt.

  I read the playbook she had to work from, and I did not think much of it. It was certainly not in the Plain Style, and I was now much under the influence of Ramsay’s enthusiasm for unadorned prose. It was not a Broadway kind of play, and I am not certain it is even a good play, but it is unmistakably a poet’s play, and I was the most deeply enchanted of an audience that seemed, in a variety of ways suitable to their age and state of mind and relationship to the players or the school, to be delighted by it.

  It is about some children who are left to their own devices because of a legacy. They have an aunt who has strict educational theories and expects them to get into hopeless messes without her guidance; instead they have some fine adventures with strange people, including fairy people. The oldest child is a girl called Sally, and that was Judith Wolff.