The Rebel Angels

"Could you face a lifetime of it? Listen, Sim, I won't have you treating me as some nitwit penitent. I'm not knocking the Order; they gave me what I asked for, which was the Bread of Heaven. But I have to have a scrape of the butter and jam of the intellect on that Bread, or it chokes me! And listening to Father Prior's homilies was like first-year philosophy, without any of the doubts given a fair chance. I have to have some play of intellect in my life, or I go mad! And I have to have some humour in life – not the simple-minded jokes the Provincial got off now and then when he was being chummy with the brothers, and not the infant-class dirty jokes some of the postulants whispered at recreation hour, to show that they had once been men of the world. I've got to have the big salutary humour that saves – like that bloody Rabelais I hear so much about these days. I have to have something to put some yeast into the unleavened Bread of Heaven. If they'd let me be a priest I could have brought something useful to their service, but they wouldn't have it, and I think their rejection was nothing but spite and envy!"

"Envy of your learning and intellect?"

"Yes."

"Perhaps that was part of it. Spite and envy are no less frequent behind the monastery wall than outside it, and you have an especially shameless mind that can't disguise itself for the sake of people who are not so gifted. But what's done is done. The question is, what do you do now?"

"I'm doing a little teaching."

"In Continuing Studies."

"They're humbling me."

"Lots of good people teach there."

"But God damn it to hell, Sim, I'm not just 'good people'! I'm the best damned philosopher this University has ever produced and you know it."

"Perhaps. You are also a hard man to get along with, and to fit into anything. Have you any other prospects?"

"Yes, but I need time."

"And money, I'll bet."

"Could you see your way -?"

"What do you want to do?"

"I'm writing a book."

"What about? Scepticism used to be your special thing."

"No no; quite different. A novel."

"I don't suppose you are counting on it to produce much money?"

"Not for a while, of course."

"Better try for a Canada Council grant; they back novelists."

"Will you recommend me?"

"I recommend quite a few people every year; but I'm not known for literary taste. How do you know you can write a novel?"

"Because I have it all clear in my head! And it's really extraordinary! A brilliant account of life as it used to be in this city – the underground life, that's to say – but underlying it an analysis of the malaise of our time."

"Great God!"

"Meaning what, precisely?"

"Meaning that roughly two-thirds of the first novels that people write are on that theme. Very few of them get published."

'"Don't be so ugly! You know me; you remember the things I used to write when we were students. With my mind -"

"That's what I'm afraid of. Novels aren't written with the mind."

"With what, then?"

"Ask Ozy Froats; the forty-foot gut, he says. Look at you – a heavy mesomorphic element combined with substantial ectomorphy, but hardly any endomorphy at all. You've lived a terrible life, you've boozed and drugged and toughed around, and you're still built like an athlete. I'll bet you've got a miserable little gut. When did you last go to the w.c.?"

"What the hell is all this?"

"It's the new psychology. Ask Froats. – Now I'll make a deal with you, John -"

"Just a few dollars to tide me over -"

"All right, but I said a deal, and here it is. Stop wearing that outfit. You disgust me, parading around as a man in God's service when you're in no service but your own – or perhaps the Devil's. I'll give you a suit, and you've got to wear it, or no money and not one crumb of help from me."

We looked over my suits. I had in mind one that was becoming a little tight, but Parlabane, by what course of argument I can't recall, walked off with one of my best ones – a smart clerical grey, though not of clerical cut. And a couple of very good shirts, and a couple of dark ties, and some socks, and a few handkerchiefs, and even an almost new pair of shoes.

"You've certainly put on weight," he said, as he preened in front of the mirror. "But I'm handy with the needle; I can take a reef or two in this."

At last he was going, so – sheer weakness – I gave him one drink.

"How you've changed," he said. "You know, you used to be a soft touch. We seem to have changed roles. You, the pious youth, have become as hard as nails: I, the unbeliever, have tried to become a priest. Has your faith been so eroded by your life?"

"Strengthened, I should say."

"But when you recite the Creed, do you really mean what you say?"