“Oh, no, priests are not psychiatrists,” George had answered. “I can handle this myself.”
Looking back on this exchange years later, Ian was in two minds about George’s reaction. On the one hand, this was the pride of the fighter pilot speaking, the knight-errant of the skies, the self-reliant contrarian dependent only upon his own skill and knowledge of his aircraft, disdainful of teamwork and collaboration, the outsider in spite of his own strictures, who had once declared proudly that he was not a ‘Company Man’. On the other hand, Ian reflected, George was laboring, solo as always, against the stigma of mental illness, at a time when it was as much a taboo subject as unwed motherhood. Mental illness had not yet found its Clara Hughes.
Pressed against the window pane, Ian regarded a world outside his home racked by excess, betrayed idealism, cultural discontinuity, ideological conflict and sporadic violence. Vietnam and Kent State, the Symbionese Liberation Army and the Baader-Meinhof Gang, the 1968 Paris student riots, the farce of the Californian ‘Summer of Love,’ the drug-induced deaths of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and a host of rock royalty were troubling, while the strident demands of feminist activists, the ruthless suppression of civil rights during the older Trudeau’s October Crisis in 1970 and the pandering of the liberal media’s offensively smug chattering classes to the coming ‘youthquake’, with all its ‘admirable energy’ and ‘youthful exuberance’ all filled him with distaste. He was never one of them himself. His own church, drifting uncertainly into agnosticism, began to experiment with its age-old liturgy, using as justification the Second Vatican Council’s liturgical reforms. The old ways were under attack: propriety yielded to permissiveness, the ‘personal’ became ‘political,’ as dirty linen was conspicuously washed in public, and not even the Scouts were immune to the revisionist tendency of the time, with their founder denounced as an imperialist, their code of values derided as militaristic, puritanical, sexist, and outdated. Trust no-one over thirty, said radical-chic activists, the sixties’ equivalents of the ‘cancel culture’ of today’s woke activists and their devoted followers. Now in his final year as an Arts student at Trinity College in Toronto, Ian Whitgift had been temporarily seduced by the misanthropy of Philip Larkin and by Sylvia Plath’s anger before rejecting both of them. He became a contrarian like his father, finding peace of mind in the college’s magnificently austere chapel, and solace in the company of like-minded conservatives, but even more in communion with his books. In silent empathy, he read T.S. Eliot:
The pain of living and the drug of dreams
Curl up the small soul in the window seat
Behind the Encyclopedia Britannica.
And yet such flinching was, he acknowledged regretfully, the prerogative only of the child. An adult, especially a Spartan adult, had to face what Matthew Arnold had discovered on his honeymoon, when he heard, at Dover beach a century before, the sound of the Sea of Faith in retreat, revealing to him and his contemporaries that the world
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
A hundred years since, he brooded, the brave new world forecast by progressive visionaries had failed to materialize. The world was an arid spiritual wasteland that technology had created: Zyklon-B gas, the urban terrorist, the nuclear bomb. After Auschwitz had come the gulag and napalm, and so it would continue until the myth of human perfectibility was replaced by the understanding of human fallibility and the rule of love. Until that time, how could an escapist with a love of imaginative literature hope to find his place in such a world? Things fall apart, said Yeats; the centre cannot hold.
