The Rebel Angels

by Robertson Davies

  Would Murray think me a frill? Indeed he would. I was a soldier who had deserted his post. Murray’s notion of a clergyman was somebody who worked among the poor, not as efficiently, perhaps, as a trained social worker, but doing his best and doing it cheap. I don’t suppose that the notion of religion as a mode of thought and feeling that could consume the best intellectual efforts of an able man ever entered Murray’s head. But I had done my whack as the kind of parson Murray understood, and had turned to university teaching because I had become convinced, in some words Einstein was fond of, that the serious research scholar in our generally materialistic age is the only deeply religious human being. Having discovered how hard it is to save the souls of others (did I ever, in my nine years of parish work among both poor and not-so-poor, really save anybody’s soul?) I wanted to give all the time I could spare to saving my own soul, and I wanted to do work that gave me a little time for that greater work. Murray would call me selfish. But am I? I am hard at the great task with the person who lies nearest and who is most amenable to my best efforts, and perhaps by example I may persuade a few others to do the same.

  Oh, endless task! One begins with no knowledge except that what one is doing is probably wrong, and that the right path is heavy with mist. When I was a hopeful youth I set myself to the Imitation of Christ, and like a fool I supposed that I must try to be like Christ in every possible detail, adjure people to do the right when I didn’t really know what the right was, and get myself spurned and scourged as frequently as possible. Crucifixion was not a modern method of social betterment, but at least I could push for psychological crucifixion, and I did, and hung on my cross until it began to dawn on me that I was a social nuisance, and not a bit like Christ—even the tedious détraqué Christ of my immature imagination.

  Little by little some rough parish work showed me what a fool I was, and I became a Muscular Christian; I was a great worker in men’s clubs, and boys’ clubs, and I said loudly that Works were what counted and that Faith could be expected to blossom in gymnasiums and craft classes. And perhaps it does, for some people, but it didn’t for me.

  Gradually it came to me that the Imitation of Christ might not be a road-company performance of Christ’s Passion, with me as a pitifully badly cast actor in the principal role. Perhaps what was imitable about Christ was his firm acceptance of his destiny, and his adherence to it even when it led to shameful death. It was the wholeness of Christ that had illuminated so many millions of lives, and it was my job to seek and make manifest the wholeness of Simon Darcourt.

  Not Professor the Reverend Simon Darcourt, though that splendidly titled figure had to be given his due, because the University paid him to be both reverend and a professor. The priest and the professor would function suitably if Simon Darcourt, the whole of him, lived in a serious awareness of what he was and spoke to the rest of the world from that awareness, as a priest and a professor and always as a man who was humble before God but not necessarily humble before his fellows.

  This was the real Imitation of Christ, and if Thomas à Kempis didn’t like it, it was because Thomas à Kempis wasn’t Simon Darcourt. But old Thomas could be a friend. “If you cannot mould yourself as you would wish, how can you expect other people to be entirely to your liking?” he asked. You can’t, of course. But I had decided that the strenuous moulding of my earlier days, the prayers and austerities (there had been a short time when I went in for peas in my shoes and even flirted with a scourge, till my mother found it) and playing the Stupid Ass when I thought I was being the Suffering Servant, was nonsense. I had given up moulding myself externally and was patiently waiting to be moulded from within by my destiny.

  Patiently waiting! In my soul, perhaps, but the University does not pay people for patient waiting, and I had my classes to teach, my theologues to push toward ordination, and a muddle of committees and professional university groups to attend to. I was a busy academic, but I found time for what I hoped was spiritual growth.

  My greatest handicap, I discovered, was a sense of humour. If Urquhart McVarish’s humour was irresponsibility and contempt for the rest of mankind, mine was a leaning toward topsy-turveydom, likely to stand things on their heads at inopportune moments. As a professor in a theological faculty I have some priestly duties and at Spook we are ritualists. I am in entire agreement with that. What did Yeats say? ‘How else but in custom and ceremony are innocence and beauty born?’ But just when custom and ceremony should most incline me toward worship, I may have to contend with a fit of the giggles. Was that what ailed Lewis Carroll, I wonder? Religion and mathematics, two realms in which humour seems to be wholly out of place, drove him to write the Alice books. Christianity has no place for topsy-turveydom, little tolerance of humour. People have tried to assure me that St. Francis was rich in humour, but I don’t believe it. He was merry, perhaps, but that is something else. And there have been moments when I have wondered if St. Francis were not just the tiniest bit off his nut. Didn’t eat enough, which is not necessarily a path to holiness. How many visions of Eternity have been born of low blood-sugar? (This as I prepare a third piece of toast thickly spread with honey.)

  Indeed some measure of what might be called cynicism, but which could also be clarity of vision, tempered with charity, is an element in the Simon Darcourt I am trying to discover and set free. It was that which made it impossible for me not to take note that Urky McVarish’s picture of Sir Thomas Urquhart, looking so strikingly like himself, had been touched up to give precisely that impression. The green coat, the hair (a wig), and most of the face were original, but there had been some helpful work on the resemblance. When you looked at the picture sideways, under the light that shone so strongly on it, the over-painting could be plainly seen. I know a little about pictures.

  Poor old Urky. I hadn’t liked the way he pestered the Theotoky girl about virginity, and gentlewomen’s thighs. I looked up the passage in my Rabelais in English: yes, the thighs were cool and moist because women were supposed to pee a bit at odd times (why, I wonder? they don’t seem to do it now) and because the sun never shone there, and they were cooled by farts. Nasty old Rabelais and nasty old Urky! But Maria was not to be disconcerted. Good for her!

  What a pitiable bag of tricks Urky was! Could it be that his whole life was as false as his outward man?

  Was this charitable thinking? Paul tells us that Charity is many things, but nowhere does he tell us that it is blind.

  It would certainly be false to the real Simon Darcourt to leave Urky out of The New Aubrey. And it would be equally false not to seek out and say something friendly to the much-beset Professor Ozias Froats, whom I once had known fairly well, in his great football days.

  Second Paradise

  3

  “No, I cannot give any undertaking that I will not get drunk this time. Why are you so against a pleasing elevation of the spirits, Molly?”

  “Because it isn’t pleasing. It’s noisy and tiresome and makes people stare.”

  “What a middle-class attitude! I would have expected better from you, a scholar and a Rabelaisian. I expect you to have a scholarly freedom from vulgar prejudice, and a Rabelaisian’s breadth of spirit. Get drunk with me, and you won’t notice that the common horde is staring.”

  “I hate drunkenness. I’ve seen too much of it.”

  “Have you, indeed? There’s a revelation—the first one I have ever had from you, Molly. You’re a great girl for secrets.”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “It’s inhuman, and probably unhealthy. Unbutton a little, Molly. Tell me the story of your life.”

  “I thought I was to hear the story of your life. A fair exchange. I pay for the dinner: you do the talking.”

  “But I can’t talk into a void.”

  “I’m not a void; I have a splendid memory for what I hear—better, really, than for what I read.”

  “That’s interesting. Sounds like a peasant background.”

  “Everybody has a peasant background
, if you travel back in the right directions. I hate talking in a place like this. Too noisy.”

  “Well, you brought me here. The Rude Plenty—a student beanery.”

  “It’s quite a decent Italian restaurant. And it’s cheap for what you get.”

  “Maria, that is gross! You invite a needy and wretched man to dinner—because that’s what we call ourselves in the Spook grace, remember, miseri homines et egentes—and you tell him to his face that it’s a cheap joint, implying that you could do better for somebody else. You are not a scholar and a gentleman, you are a female pedant and a cad.”

  “Very likely. You can’t bounce me with abuse, Parlabane.”

  “Brother John, if you please. Damn you, you are always so afraid somebody is going to bounce you, as you put it. What do you mean? Bounce you up and down on some yielding surface? What Rabelais calls the two-backed beast?”

  “Oh shut up, you sound like Urky McVarish. Every man who can spell out the words picks up a few nasty expressions from the English Rabelais and tries them on women, and thinks he’s a real devil. It gives me a royal pain in the arse, if you want a Rabelaisian opinion. By bounce I mean men always want to disconcert women and put them at a disadvantage; bouncing is genial, patronizing bullying and I won’t put up with it.”

  “You wound me more deeply than I can say.”

  “No, I don’t. You’re a cultivated sponger, Brother John. But I don’t care. You’re interesting, and I’m happy to pay if you’ll talk. I call it a fair exchange. I’ve told you, I hate talking against noise.”

  “Oh, this overbred passion for quiet! Totally unnatural. We are usually begotten with a certain amount of noise. For our first nine months we are carried in the womb in a positive hubbub—the loud tom-tom of the heart, the croaking and gurgling of the guts, which must sound like the noise of the rigging on a sailing-ship, and a mother’s loud laughter—can you imagine what that must be like to Little Nemo, lurching and heaving in his watery bottle while the diaphragm hops up and down? Why are children noisy? Because, literally, they’re bred to it. People find fault with their kids when they say they can do their homework better while the radio is playing, but the kids are simply trying to recover the primal racket in which they learned to be everything from a blob, to a fish, to a human creature. Silence is entirely a sophisticated, acquired taste. Silence is antihuman.”

  “What do you want to eat?”

  “Let’s start with a big go of shrimp. Frozen, undoubtedly, but as it’s the best you mean to do for me, let’s give ourselves up to third-class luxury. And lots of very hot sauce. To follow that, an omelet frittata with chicken stuffing. Then spaghetti, again; it was quite passable last time, but double the order, and I’m sure they can manage a more piquant sauce. Tell the chef to throw in a few extra peppers; my friend will pay. Then zabaglione, and don’t spare the booze in the mixture. We’ll top off with lots and lots of cheese; the goatiest and messiest you have, because I like my cheese opinionated. We’ll need at least a loaf of that crusty Italian bread, unsalted butter, some green stuff—a really good belch-lifting radish, if you have such a thing—and some garlic butter to rub on this and that, as we need it. Coffee nicely frothed. Now as for drink—God, what a list! Well, no use complaining; let’s have a fiasco each of Orvieto and Chianti, and don’t chill the Orvieto, because God never intended that and I won’t be a party to it. And we’ll talk about Strega when things are a little further advanced. And make it quick.”

  The waitress cocked an eye at me, and I nodded.

  “I’ve ordered well, don’t you think? A good meal should be a performance; the Edwardians understood that. Their meals were a splendid form of theatre, like a play by Pinero, with skilful preparation, expectation, dénouement, and satisfactory ending. The well-made play: the well-made meal. Drama one can eat. Then of course Shaw and Galsworthy came along and the theatre and the meals became high-minded: the plays were robbed of their delicious adulteries and the meals became messes of pond-weed, and a boiled egg if you were really stuffing yourself.”

  “Is this an introduction to the story of your life?”

  “Just about anything leads to the story of my life. Well, here goes: I was born of well-off but honest parents in this city of Toronto, forty-five heavily packed years ago. Your historical sense fills in what is necessary: the war-clouds gathering, Hitler bestrides the narrow world like a Colossus and as usual none of the politicians know a bastard when they see one; war, and fear clutches the heart as Mother Britain fights bravely and alone (though of course the French and several other nations don’t quite agree). The U.S. stumbles in, late and loud. At last, victory and a new world rises somewhat shakily on the ruins of the old. Russia, once a wartime chum, resumes its status as a peacetime bum. During all this uproar I went to school, and quite a good school it was, because not only did I learn a few things and acquire an early taste for philosophy, but I met some very glittering and rich boys, like David Staunton, and some brilliantly clever boys, like your present boss Clement Hollier. We were friends, and contemporaries—he’s a few months my senior; he thought I was cleverer than I was, because I was a fast talker and could put all my goods in the shop-window, but I knew that he was really the clever one, though he had great trouble putting words together. He stood by me through a very rough time, and I’m grateful. Then I went to the University and swept through the heavens of Spook like a comet, and was such a fool that I had the gall to feel sorry and a little contemptuous of Clem, who had to work hard for a few not very glittering honours.

  “I gloried in the freedom of the University. Of course I had no idea what a university is: it’s not a river to be fished, it’s an ocean in which the young should bathe, and give themselves up to the tides and the currents. But I was a fisherman, and a successful one. Clem was becoming a strong ocean swimmer, though I couldn’t see that.—But this is too solemn, and here come the shrimps.

  “Shrimps remind me, for some reason, of my early sexual adventures. I was an innocent youth, and for reasons that you can guess by looking at my ruined face I never dared approach girls. But a successful young man is catnip to a certain sort of older woman, and I was taken up by Elsie Whistlecraft.

  “You’ve heard of Ogden Whistlecraft? Now acclaimed as a major Canadian poet? In those days he was what was called a New Voice, and also a junior professor at this University. Elsie, who had a lot of energy and no shame, was building his career at a great rate, but she still had time for amorous adventure, which she thought becoming to a poet’s wife. So one night when Oggie was out reading his poetry somewhere, she seduced me.

  “It was not a success, from Elsie’s point of view, because the orgasm for women was just coming into general popularity then, and she didn’t have one. The reason was that she had forgotten to lock up the dog, a big creature called Mat, and Mat found the whole business exciting and interesting, and barked loudly. Trying to shut Mat up took Elsie’s mind off her main concern, and at a critical moment Mat nosed me coldly in the rump, and I was too quick for Elsie. I laughed so hard that she became furious and refused to give it another try. We managed things better during the next few weeks, but I never forgot Mat, and took the whole affair in a spirit Elsie didn’t like. Adultery, she felt, ought to be excused and sanctified by overwhelming passion, but Mat had learned to associate me with interesting doings, and even when he was tied up outside he barked loudly all the time I was in the house.

  “The affair gave me confidence, however, and it was balm to my spirit to have cuckolded a poet. Altogether I didn’t fare badly during my university years, but I never did what is called falling in love.

  “That came later, when I went to Princeton to do graduate work, and there I fell in love with a young man—fell fathomlessly and totally in love, and it was a thing of great beauty. The only thing of great beauty, I should say, in my story.

  “I hadn’t had much emotional growth before that. The old university tale, to which you alluded puritanically last time we were he
re—the over-developed mind and the under-developed heart. I thought I had emotional breadth, because I’d looked for it in art—music, chiefly. Of course art isn’t emotion; it’s evocation and distillation of emotion one has known. But if you’re clever it’s awfully easy to fake emotion and deceive yourself, because what art gives is so much like the real thing. This affair was a revolution of the spirit, and like so many revolutions it left in its wake a series of provisional governments which, one after another, proved incapable of ruling. And like many revolutions, what followed was worse than what went before.

  “Don’t expect details. He grew tired of me, and that was that. Happens in love-affairs of all kinds, and if death is any worse, God is a cruel master.

  “Here’s the omelet. More Orvieto? I will. I need sustaining during our next big instalment.

  “This was a descent into Hell. I’m not being melodramatic; just wait and see. I came back here, and got a job teaching philosophy—which has always been quite a good trade and keeps bread in your mouth—and Spook was happy to reclaim one of its bright boys. Not so happy when they could no longer blind themselves to the fact that I was leading some of their students into what they had to regard as evil courses of life. Kids are awful squealers, you know; you seduce them and they like that, but they also like confessing and bleating about it. And I wasn’t a very nice fellow, I suppose; I used to laugh at them when they had qualms of conscience.