When, in response to the ringing of the doorbell, Mr. McNamara (not his real name) opened the front door of his house on St. George’s Street (north of Bloor in central Toronto), the man standing in the shadows on the wooden front porch, having simply said by way of introduction “You, McNamara?,” clicked open a switchblade and walked him into the hall and then through an archway into the parlor. There, along with their mother, the two daughters of the house, dressed in bathrobes and their hair in curling pins, were sitting watching TV. The intruder, moving swiftly into the center of the room, grabbed the younger daughter by the curling pins, yanking her roughly to her feet and prodding her ample midriff with his knife, and turned to the rest of the family and uttered the inimitable words: “I’m not kiddin’.” So far as I could later make out, that total of five words was all that was said until Mrs. McNamara, leaping to her feet, started berating the intruder, screeching at him inter alia that he really ought to be ashamed of himself. It’s hard to know how the whole confrontation might have unfolded had not one of the other two students, who, like me, were renting rooms on an upper floor in the house, heard the doorbell ring and come down to see who was there. He was a rather gangly and clumsy Canadian eighteen-year-old who was busy failing his first year of medical studies and had, not uncharacteristically, been dozing on his bed. He came thundering down the stairs, tripped over his feet on the last section, and came tumbling down into the hallway. Unnerved by the commotion, the intruder had panicked and fled, jumping into a car and tearing away, while the clan McNamara poured out, yelling and screaming, onto the porch but failed, in the excitement of the moment, to catch the car’s license number.
This was the version of events that I and the third lodger, a rather more diligent medical student from Trinidad, were able to reconstruct in the days that followed. Neither of us had been in at the time and a couple of Toronto policemen were wrapping up their investigation and delivering a stern warning to McNamara when we got back. He had emigrated from Ireland to Canada in the 1930s and it turned out that he had been selling Irish Sweepstakes tickets, a practice illegal in Ontario at that time. Word had apparently got out on the street that he had to have a ready stash of cash on hand in the house, one ripe for plucking without any likelihood of the police being summoned. Mrs. McNamara, however, unaware of her husband’s illegal activity, had immediately called the police. The truth of the matter then tumbled out, leading to a noisy row between the couple and a prolonged period of tension in the family.
This aborted holdup was one of the more exciting events to punctuate the rather even tenor of the second academic year (1954–55) of my studies at Toronto. By the beginning of that year I had settled into research and, in largely uninterrupted fashion, was keeping my nose to the academic grindstone. Having moved out of the graduate residence on campus where I had spent my first year, I was now comfortably ensconced in the McNamara’s house, a clean, well-kept, early twentieth-century structure with a wooden porch on the street side and a small garden (yard) in the back. My daily routine was quickly established and took on a certain almost liturgical regularity. Each day, by nine o’clock at the very latest, having with the other two lodgers been served a pretty good breakfast, I would be on my way to campus, walking south on St. George’s Street, turning east on Bloor, and making my way past the array of small shops on one side and the university’s football stadium and political economy building on the other until I got to the corner of Avenue Road. There I turned right, crossing the road and making my way past the Royal Ontario Museum and Victoria College, to arrive at the library of the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, which fronts onto Queen’s Park Crescent East not too far north of the Ontario Legislative Building. The Pontifical Institute functions, along with the University of Toronto’s nearby Centre for Medieval Studies, very much as the unofficial heart of medieval studies in North America. It was founded in 1929 by Étienne Gilson in collaboration with the Congregation of St. Basil, a Roman Catholic religious order. Originating in France, the latter had developed into an international order with a mission in secondary and tertiary education and with houses, schools, and colleges spread across Canada and parts of the United States. In the nineteenth century, it had founded St. Michael’s College, originally a freestanding university but now (though still retaining its degree-granting authority in theology) one of the constituent colleges of the University of Toronto. The institute is situated at one end of the St. Michael’s campus and, in my day, several Basilian fathers served on its faculty. It possesses a splendid reference and research library in matters medieval, and it was there that I was spending most of my days seated before a microfilm machine and painstakingly transcribing by hand, from microfilm of the four extant manuscripts, the text (and manuscript variants) of a hitherto unprinted but quite major reform tract written in 1403–4 by Pierre d’Ailly (1350–1420), a philosopher-theologian, sometime chancellor of the University of Paris, bishop, cardinal, and one of the leading ecclesiastics of his day. The work called for a good deal of patience. My initial task was the decoding of the heavily abbreviated late-Gothic cursive script in which the scribes had written. The manuscripts were fairly crabbed and occasionally messy (one looked on the microfilm as if some reader had spilled his soup on it). Moreover, given the fact that the meaning of the standard abbreviations sometimes fluctuated (depending on the region from which the particular scribe hailed), some of them were quite ambiguous. As none of the manuscripts was an autograph, I had to have recourse, accordingly, to the “genealogical” or “common faults” method, which relies on the presence of faults, omissions, differences in word order, and other textual variants in order to identify the relationships among the various manuscript renditions of the common text. That approach revealed that the manuscripts fell into two groups of two, neither possessing an obvious priority over the other, so I chose to base my critical text on the manuscript that needed least correction. In accordance with the normal requirements for a critical edition, I indicated in the footnotes all the variant readings present in the other manuscripts. The object in so doing was to liberate the reader from total dependence on the editor’s judgment. With all variants available to him, he (the reader) could second-guess the editor’s judgment and, in effect, construct a different preferred version of the text if he so wished.
When finished and printed in 1964 as a lengthy appendix to my first book (The Political Thought of Pierre d’Ailly), the Latin treatise in question ran to some hundred pages. It had taken me months to transcribe it properly and a few further months to run down and identify the provenance and accuracy of the myriad of unidentified or poorly identified references and loose quotations from other works embedded in the text. Dull old stuff, I suppose, not only to those who are not themselves medievalists, but also, I was to discover later, to some who are. Subsequent service on selection committees charged with the task of evaluating applications for research awards of one sort or another has brought home to me the disappointing lack of appreciation evinced even by scholars at large for basic palaeographical and editing work of the sort in which I was engaged in Toronto. I have found, indeed, that in comparison with other work it tends to be bracketed as a bit dreary, perhaps even unimaginative. It was not the sort of work I myself planned to pursue for the long haul; my own compelling interest lay, not in the establishing of texts, but in the interpretation of what they had to say. But it still struck me as being work of fundamental importance and as an appropriate point at which to launch my scholarly endeavors. I needed to be able to decode and read sources that had yet to make their way into print. I also needed to have printed texts of reliable accuracy at my disposal. Many printed medieval sources are still available only in early (late fifteenth-, sixteenth-, and seventeenth-century) versions marred by scribal misreadings and textual corruptions of one sort or another. One common fault, for example, is the inclusion as part of the text of marginal annotations that the manuscripts reveal to be the work of some later reader and not of the original author. Sometimes the printed text comes through as simply garbled on quite central points. Such was the case with the wording of a crucial section of the Dialogus of the great late-medieval philosopher-theologian William of Ockham, the only printed version of which dated to 1614 and which, as a young scholar, I was called upon to translate into English as part of an important anthology of political writings drawn from the medieval Muslim, Jewish, and Christian traditions. By leaning on the canonistic texts to which Ockham was referring in the corrupt section, I was able to propose a plausible emendation of the garbled printed text that had the virtue, at least, of rendering it intelligible. Intelligible it may have been, but it was not, as it turned out, accurate. Years later, a distinguished Ockham scholar was to solve the problem by exploring the manuscript tradition (involving no less than fifteen manuscripts), and that threw a redemptive light on the jumbled section of the 1614 printed version.
So I don’t regret the long and often dreary hours I spent on my own editing project. Among other things, working on the project taught me to find my way around such fundamental and challenging sources as the Pseudo-Isidorean Decretals, the Corpus Juris Civilis, and the Corpus Juris Canonici, these last two being the great, standard collections of Roman and canon law. While teaching me, moreover, to be on my guard when making use of early-modern printed editions of medieval works, it also taught me the patience, discipline, and attention to detail that, in my anxiety to get to the heart of a given author’s intent, I had previously probably lacked. None of this, of course, would have been possible without the invaluable, yearlong course in Latin palaeography that I had taken the previous year with Fr. Joseph Wey, at that time already laboring away at the formidable task of producing from multiple manuscripts the first critical edition of Ockham’s Quodlibetal Questions that was destined to appear in print only a quarter of a century later. In that course, after confronting the mysteries of Roman cursive script (looking for all the world as if a chicken with inky feet had scuttled across the page) and the impenetrably patterned beauty of ninth-century Beneventan script (unpunctuated and continuous and reminiscent of certain types of Victorian wallpaper), the crabbed complexities of the late-medieval Gothic cursive with which I knew I would be dealing came almost as a relief. While the marvelously clear and often quite beautiful nature of the ninth-century Carolingian miniscule (the source of the lowercase letters in our modern print) stood out as nothing less than a major cultural achievement.
Palaeography was not my only academic preoccupation during that first year at the Pontifical Institute. Apart from the overall history of medieval philosophy, on which Étienne Gilson lectured with great energy and lucidity, I had the benefit of a few tutorials in Thomistic metaphysics that Fr. Gerald Phelan, a gifted teacher, was kind enough to give me, along with a wonderfully energetic seminar on Aquinas’s ethics given by the German Dominican scholar I. Th. Eschmann, and a tightly-focused seminar offered by Fr. Armand Maurer on a section of Ockham’s Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard that related largely to epistemological issues. I also had to devote more time than I had expected to preparation for teaching the discussion sections of the basic course in Canadian government offered by the Department of Political Economy. Believing that I would do well to acquire some teaching experience while I was at Toronto, I had been brash enough to approach the chairman of that department (in which, after all, I was not enrolled) to see if there was any possibility of my doing some teaching in political philosophy, which I saw as one of my strengths. It turned out that political philosophy was taught at Toronto only as an upper-level course for majors, and it was small enough not to require discussion sections. But they were still looking rather frantically for someone to teach the sections attached to the large and basic Canadian government lecture course and, paying no attention, it seemed, to my ignorance of the subject, had offered me the job on the spot. Without quite realizing what a scramble it would involve or how much time it would take, I signed on. At the time I was only twenty-one and looked younger than my age. So I took the precaution, when teaching my first classes, of wearing a suit and tie to distinguish myself from the students. And even that did not prevent one rather cheeky young woman at my first class from asking me with ill-concealed incredulity if I was really “the professor.”
Stressful though it could sometimes be, I think that taking on the task was, on balance, a valuable experience. It certainly brought home to me the educational challenges public (in Canada, “provincial”) universities had to face when operating with nonselective systems of admission. The University of Toronto was a very large institution even then (it enrolls approximately eighty-three thousand students today). Introductory freshman courses of the sort that I was teaching in served the ancillary but sorely needed function of weeding out those students who could not cope with university-level academic demands. Among the students taking the Canadian government course, the range of ability and the quality of school preparation was enormous. In the discussion sections I taught, I had a number of truly gifted students. But the range of performance was depressingly wide and, during that year, I had to fail more students and give more “D” grades than in any subsequent time in my teaching career that spanned some forty-three years and four different institutions. Teaching the course also had the advantage of requiring me to read up on Canadian history more diligently and to acquaint myself at greater depth than might otherwise have been the case with Canadian politics and the characteristic pressure points in its constitutional structure. It was good to know that Canada is more of a confederation than a federation, with fewer powers in the hands of the central, federal government than is the case, for example, with the United States. It was also good to know how comparatively new it was as a nation-state; it was brought into existence by the British North America Act of 1867 and was less than a century old when I taught that course. And I was startled to learn in 1953 that it had reached its full territorial extent only four years earlier when (by a rather small margin) Newfoundland and Labrador had voted by referendum to become part of Canada. In some ways, indeed, the Canada I encountered still had a somewhat unfinished feel about it, though I did not share the bluntly negative appraisal handed down by an Australian friend who was working towards an MA in the University of Toronto’s English Department. A sardonic fellow whom a couple of years at Cambridge and two further years teaching at one of the older English public schools had turned into something of a snob, he had come to dread returning to a homeland that he now viewed as irreparably provincial. So he had postponed his return home by going to Canada, only to react to it so negatively that he was now beginning to think that, by comparison, Australia looked quite good after all. He, I, and Robert Woof (an English friend and future Wordsworth scholar of note who, like me, was the recipient of a Goldsmiths’ Company’s Commonwealth Scholarship) had decided to spend the Christmas of 1954 at a (rather downscale) Ontario ski resort, only to be overtaken by an unexpected thaw and to find, equally to our dismay, that the nearest town was a dry town. As we lay on our bunks, then, listening to the unwelcome rain falling on the roof and sharing (in paper cups) a providential bottle of Scotch that our Australian friend had had the foresight to bring with him, he delivered himself of the condescending (if memorable) dictum: “Canada! What after all is it? No more than a railway in search of a nation!”
To me, happily, it was a good deal more than that. Toronto, though a less exciting and cosmopolitan city than it is now, and still somewhat monocultural (Scots Presbyterian) in feel, was, and is, an impressive, clean, and handsome city. In the early 1950s the massive inflow of immigrants that was eventually to transform it was only just getting underway. If suburban sprawl was already happening, I was not conscious of that fact, for my time was spent in the city’s center. That was not as yet marked by the great clustering of high-rise buildings that dominate its skyline today. The core area around the Ontario legislature and the university had a spacious feel, fronting out onto the wide, ceremonial boulevard of University Avenue and onto Queen’s Park Crescent, replete with plenty of trees and open green space. Bloor Street was already developing into a reasonably upscale shopping area and, along with Bay and Yonge Streets, it sported plenty of small places where one could eat quite well at reasonable prices. Nightlife, such as it was, was still rather cramped in style by the persistence on the books of a complex set of blue laws governing what alcoholic beverages one could drink, at what hours, and in what places. Sundays, as a result, had a heavy, subdued, and soberly nonconformist feel to them.
Although this was the occasion for a certain amount of derisive ribaldry among the American students at the university—“Toronto the Good!” they would sneer—it made little impact on me. I was too busy soaking up a new and appealingly vibrant cultural atmosphere, one comparatively unburdened by the sort of class consciousness that seemed still to weigh so heavily on English life, and one not marked by the social restraint and conversational obliquity so evident in parts, at least, of England. I may have been the first layman from abroad to go to study at the institute, and Fr. Reginald O’Donnell, a classicist who was the senior palaeographer there and the long-standing editor of its admired journal Mediaeval Studies, took me under his wing. Treating me as a colleague rather than a student and counseling me about what I needed to learn, he also introduced me to a broad array of faculty, not only at the institute itself but also at St. Michael’s College. As the Basilians also had colleges in Rochester, New York, and Houston, Texas, the people I was meeting (along with a sprinkling of Europeans) were Americans as well as Canadians, and that was true also of the graduate students I got to know at the institute and in the University of Toronto at large. And I was delighted (relieved?) to find them refreshingly straightforward and encouragingly welcoming. Through the good offices of a Canadian friend at Corpus, Gary Clarke, who turned out to be the scion of a prominent Toronto family, I also had the pleasure of meeting some people who did not move in university circles. Gary’s family ran the highly respected publishing house of Clarke, Irwin & Company, and they were kind enough to fold me in with other, far more important, guests at sumptuous Sunday lunches at their home.
As I remember it, then, my adjustment to life in the New World proved, by and large, to be quick, easy, and basically trouble free. From time to time, when jarred by the inevitable instances of ugliness that go with city life, by the gaucheries sometimes evident in Canadian and American student behavior, or by the oblique flickers of anti-British resentment that one occasionally encountered (soon to be replaced, among Canadian academics at least, by a singularly unattractive form of knee-jerk anti-Americanism), I would feel twinges of homesickness, a wistful nostalgia for the comparative reticence of English discourse and for the beautiful variety of England’s insular countryside to which I had become deeply attached. But I was young and, it seems, flexibly adaptable, and I quickly felt at least as much at home in Canada as I had in Ireland or as I was to feel, later on, in the United States. Further than that, and stodgy though Toronto could sometimes be, I was moved by the unaccustomed sense of possibility (partly illusory, it may be, but not altogether so) that seemed to dwell in the very air one breathed. I could not help being struck by the fact that Jane Timmins, one of the Canadian graduate students I had come to know, and one who, unlike the others, lived in a fine house in the fashionable Rosedale area north of Bloor, was one of the Timmins family which, only a few decades earlier and starting with nothing, had made a mining fortune in the northlands and after whom the small town of Timmins was named. Serving as best man at the wedding of Frank Howley, a recent English immigrant and older brother of Barbara, a graduate of Bellerive School in Liverpool who was one of our crowd at Oxford, I detected among the many English immigrants who were present on that occasion a similarly intoxicating sense of liberating possibility that they had found lacking in the Old Country (however attached to it they might be) and that had nudged them into making the wrenching but life-changing decision to leave family and homeland behind and to seek a new life across the Atlantic.
There was a parallel to all of this in the more cloistered world of higher education. One of the striking things evident there was the freedom students enjoyed of being able to delay for years the sort of choice about the specific specialty on which they proposed to concentrate that in England they would have been obliged to make at high school. At both the undergraduate and graduate levels, Canadian and American students enjoyed greater freedom to experiment and to change their minds about what truly interested them. Not for them, as with us, the Procrustean tracking into specialties in the high school years, with undergraduate work taking on, accordingly, some of the characteristics of the graduate course of study in North America. If that meant, of course, that it could both take them longer to come to terms with what exactly it was that they wanted to do and take them longer to attain a degree of mastery in the finally chosen specialty, no lasting penalty seemed in general to attach to that. In one or two fields, of course, and classics was one of them, there were some attendant drawbacks that should properly be weighed in the scales when judging the two systems. The mastery of the ancient languages made possible (or once made possible?) by the English public school practice of starting schoolboys on Greek and Latin in their tender years is simply not present among those who pick up the languages later and is (was?) sometimes the occasion for ill-placed condescension on the part of British classicists towards their American (or Commonwealth) colleagues. But here the observations made by Sir Kenneth Dover in his memoir while lauding the quality of the students he taught in a seminar at Stanford are apposite. Having noted that “it is . . . hard for any Classics department in an American university to find candidates in the home market who have what I would regard as a good knowledge of Latin or Greek,” and having readily acknowledged that this “may shock people who went through a Classical education like mine,” he also goes on to insist that this is but “one side of a coin whose other side shines brighter.” “One consequence of the American approach [of postponed choice and late specialization],” he adds, “is that when they embark on graduate school [in Classics] they are capable of bad linguistic mistakes, their recall of vocabulary is weak and their ability to translate simple English into Greek or Latin poor by the standards of a British sixth form. But if they are highly intelligent, strongly motivated and passionately interested in the subject—and my Stanford students possessed those virtues—their ignorance (sometimes mistaken for stupidity by thoughtless British critics) does not matter, because when they are not sure of something, they look it up.”
When I first read those words, I could not help thinking of John Deck, a fellow student at the institute who, during a rather hardscrabble undergraduate education, had acquired a decent knowledge of Latin and Greek, and who was undoubtedly one of the most interesting friends I made in Toronto. An American of German descent who hailed from a gritty area in Buffalo, New York, he was an eccentric figure and a bundle of contradictions. Possessed of a warm heart and a keen philosophic mind, he also made much of his (alleged) ethnic and religious prejudices, speaking dismissively of “Polacks” and labeling contemptuously as “neo-Catholicism” the mildly liberal “Commonweal Catholic” tendency evident at St. Michael’s College. Whether he believed any of this, I could never really tell. He liked to shock people and was possessed of the sort of sly and sometimes cruel sense of humor that led him, for example, to attach (the not altogether undeserved) nickname of “Vapid” to an eagerly obvious Canadian graduate student from one of the Maritime provinces who in later life was destined to enter national politics and even to serve a term as Canadian Secretary of State for External Affairs. One of the eldest among six or seven siblings, John was already over thirty when I met him, had developed a strong interest in the Neoplatonism of late antiquity, and was just about to begin work on a rather challenging dissertation on Plotinus, later developed into a book entitled Nature, Philosophy, and the One: A Study in the Philosophy of Plotinus (1967). By any standards this was pretty refined and recondite stuff, and when he described to me the trajectory of his own higher education to date, I was astonished. Both as an undergraduate and then, again, as a graduate student, he had needed to drop out for a year or so to make some money working on the railroad. He had done it, first, to help finance his own studies and then, later, to help put a younger sister through college. It was, to me, a bit of an eye-opener that the American and Canadian approach to higher education was flexible enough to permit a student to do what he had done without imperiling his academic future. In the Britain of those days, John would never, in all probability, have graduated from university, let alone managed to complete a PhD, embark upon an academic career, and succeed as a scholar pursuing a very demanding academic specialty. That he was able to do so called, of course, for dogged determination and the passionate interest to which Dover alludes. But in the Britain in which I had grown up, interest and determination notwithstanding, the goal for which he had striven would almost certainly have eluded his grasp.
Such things made a deep impression on me. So, too, did the comparatively porous nature at the time of Canadian and American class distinctions. Such distinctions of course existed, and have perhaps become firmer over the course of the sixty years since the 1950s. But what in my English youth had seemed to be phenomena rooted in nature itself were now revealing themselves to me as no more than matters of shifting convention. Hallowed convention, it might be, but still no more than that. Naïve on such matters as I still doubtless was, this realization came to me as a bit of a revelation, perhaps even as something of a life changer. Having, over the course of two years, become accustomed to the variety and fluidity of Canadian and American life (which often brought back to mind the comfort and ease I had felt in Irish society), I was to find it difficult henceforth to take with total seriousness the traditional, class-conscious rigidities of English life. After I had returned from Canada in 1955 and was thrust into the highly traditional, old-fashioned, and sometimes stilted culture typical of officers’ messes in the British Army, rather than becoming an unselfconsciously acculturated participant, I found myself slipping into the role of a somewhat detached (though not, I hope, too judgmental) observer. For me, what sociologists have described as the fundamentally dialectical nature of human society was hoving dimly into sight. The ultimately human-invented norms that had come to be externalized in society were beginning to lose for me their objectivized status and, with that, ceasing now to be effectively internalized in the consciousness.
Though such sociological notions were unknown to me at the time, such, so far as I can reconstruct them, were the feelings that overtook me during that first, important, and exceedingly stimulating year in Canada. In some ways it was a year of intellectual and emotional decompression after the highly pressured and demanding run-in to Schools and it was certainly a year filled with a multitude of new experiences. I had been in Toronto for no more than a couple of months when I met a beguiling American girl, Dana Breslin by name, though for some reason she preferred to go by the nickname of “Mike.” I immediately fell for her. This proved not to be the best of ideas. She was a transfer student at St. Michael’s College, a bit older than the usual undergraduate, and was beginning, I now realize, to set her mind on marrying and settling down. As a footloose twenty-one-year-old, I was neither a likely nor a convincing candidate for the pertinent role. But we did succeed in attaining to an affectionate friendship. She and her younger sister Cathy, at that time a freshman at St. Michael’s and later to become a journalist and novelist, solicitous about the likelihood of my spending a lonely Christmas marooned in Toronto away from home, insisted with great kindness on my going home with them to the States for the holidays. Home for them was Pittsfield, the small town that functions as the county seat for Berkshire County in western Massachusetts, and Mike, owning a car, folded me into the carload of American students she was driving part of the way to their various destinations. The drive down was, for me, a very interesting experience, my first glimpse of southern Ontario, northern New York state and northwest New England. Having driven south on the Queen Elizabeth Way and crossed over into the United States, we headed east in what was rapidly becoming a winter wonderland, and on through what seemed to be the endless reaches of upper New York state. Like most Europeans, I had always, and almost instinctively, thought of New York in terms of the city itself and was fascinated to find out that it encompassed large and beautiful expanses of rolling agricultural land as well as the largest protected wilderness area in the East. At some point, I can’t recall where, we crossed over into Vermont and began the descent on Old Route 7 into western Massachusetts. By the time we got there the snow was falling heavily and it was hard to see much of anything. When Route 7 merged with Route 2, at what I now realize was Field Park in Williamstown (the place that was destined, later on, to be my home for more than half a century), Mike pointed to the left and mentioned the presence there of an old and small liberal arts college called Williams. Somebody else in the car added, rather dismissively, that it was a “rich boys’ college” and a bit of a “party school.” While I now know that neither designation was altogether accurate even at that time, it remains the case that in a reputational survey published in the mid-1950s that ranked the better-known liberal arts colleges, Williams was not ranked among the top group, academically speaking, but slotted in well behind such celebrated women’s colleges as Wellesley, Smith, and Mount Holyoke.
The Breslins had lost their mother a few years previously and their widower father, Dr. Breslin, a much beloved pediatrician in Pittsfield, could barely restrain his delight in having all three of his daughters at home—the youngest was finishing her high school years at a boarding school near Albany, New York. What ensued—at the first American home I had ever visited—was a wonderful, snow-clad, Hallmark card type of Christmas season, reminiscent of the sort of Dickensian white Christmas I had dreamt of as a child. The girls and I were invited to parties thrown by old friends of theirs; we also went tobogganing, I enjoyed my first (rather shaky) experience of ice skating, and Dr. Breslin and I played violin duets together—more fun to play, doubtless, than to listen to. After Christmas, Mike and I drove down to New York City, staying with Toronto friends in Bronxville but spending a good deal of time in the city itself. It was my introduction to the wonders of Grand Central Station, Rockefeller Center, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Central Park, and midtown Manhattan in general, still lavishly decorated for the holiday season, with Fifth Avenue packed with shoppers and tourists. In comparison, even at its best, Toronto seemed a quiet and sedate sort of place.
Among the many other friends I made that first year, two stand out. Both were members of the English faculty at St. Michael’s College. And both stand out because of their expressed sympathy with the New Critical approach to literature. For, at that time, with the exception of Northrop Frye at Victoria College, the Toronto English faculty seemed in general to be wedded to something closer to a history of ideas approach to literary works. The first, and more junior of the two, was an American, Donald Theall by name, a Yale graduate who had been drawn to do his PhD work at Toronto by the presence of Marshall McLuhan on the faculty there. Marshall McLuhan was the second of the two friends I have in mind. Theall had imbibed his New Critical views in New Haven and McLuhan had done so in Cambridge, where he had been a student of I. A. Richards and F. R. Leavis. Both Theall and McLuhan were destined to move into more complex and ecumenical intellectual territory—Marshall to become something of a controversial public intellectual and Donald to chair the English Department at McGill University in the province of Québec and, later, to serve as president and vice chancellor of the newly founded Trent University in Ontario.
During my own Toronto years, the Thealls had two small children for whom, from time to time, I would babysit so that they could get a night out. Though I never babysat for the McLuhans (they had six children), Marshall used to invite a small group of us graduate students around to his house on Saturday evenings. Though the ostensible idea was to work our way together through part of Aquinas’s Summa theologiae, those sessions tended to evolve rapidly into an occasion for listening to our host hold forth in return for drinking his beer. He was a very lively, imaginative presence, and it may serve to convey some general sense of the feel of our discussions if I report that when one, with a “No, but . . . ,” indicated a measure of disagreement with one or another of his sweeping generalizations, Marshall’s eyes would characteristically light up, and, with an animated “Yes, and . . . ,” he would incorporate one’s disagreement within an even larger and bolder synthesis.
While my own compelling interests lay elsewhere and were more traditionally historical in nature and certainly more sublunary than his, through those discussions and my reading of Explorations, a journal he ran in collaboration with Edmund Snow Carpenter (an anthropologist at the Royal Ontario Museum), I did get an invigorating sense of the lively intellectual currents coursing through Toronto that were eventually to give birth to what is sometimes called the “Toronto School of Communication Theory.” Grounded ultimately in the pioneering work at Toronto of the classicist Eric Havelock and the economist Harold Innis, then developed by Carpenter, McLuhan, and (at some remove) Northrop Frye, the school has been described as forwarding “the theory of the primacy of communication in the structuring of human cultures and the structuring of the human mind.” When I knew him, McLuhan had already published The Mechanical Bride (1951) but was only just beginning to hit his stride in the new field, and major contributions of his such as Understanding Media and The Medium is the Massage were not to appear before the 1960s. But the imagination, boldness, and intellectual vitality that were to fuel his subsequent rise to controversial prominence were already clearly on display.
In comparison with such heady soaring of the spirit, my own pressing intellectual concerns at that time were a good deal more earthbound. But they, too, were energized by the dawning realization that in coming to the Pontifical Institute I had entered into an intellectual and scholarly world different in kind from the one whose atmosphere I had breathed at Oxford. That was true in relation both to the philosophical and to the historical work being pursued there. So far as philosophy went, it was heavily Thomistic in intonation with the strain of Thomism dominant there being what is sometimes labeled as “existential,” as opposed to the “transcendental Thomism” of such as Karl Rahner and Bernard Lonergan, or the “Wittgensteinian” or “analytical” Thomism later to be favored in England by philosophers like Anscombe, Geach, or Anthony Kenny. Wittgenstein, indeed, I cannot recall anyone at the institute even mentioning. If metaphysics was dead, nobody there seemed to have seen the obituary. It was a far cry from the analytical philosophical tradition so totally dominant at Oxford as to suggest that any other approach was démodé. Even the philosophic jokes were different. And if the differences in historical approach were not quite so dramatic, they were nonetheless real. In the University of Toronto History Department, Bertie Wilkinson and Michael Powicke were certainly pursuing the familiar approaches to medieval history to which I had been introduced as an undergraduate, but, given the sort of work I was to pursue at the institute in the history of philosophy and ecclesiology, I was to find myself inducted into the less insular world of international Catholic scholarship, German and Italian as well as French. It was all very stimulating and served as an instructive piece of consciousness raising about the degree to which particular institutional settings or cognitive communities as well as differing national traditions can, across time, shape, invigorate, or (less positively) insulate particular intellectual orientations, historiographic no less than philosophical.
The primary challenge confronting me as I deepened my familiarity with later medieval philosophy was, however, a somewhat more confined one. It was that of identifying a thesis topic substantial enough to meet the requirements for the Oxford DPhil. I was planning on doing and one that focused especially on the area of political thinking. I consulted, therefore, with Étienne Gilson, whose knowledge of the medieval intellectual scene was truly encyclopedic. He promptly suggested three possibilities, each of them involving the study of a particular thinker of importance whose works had not as yet been adequately explored and about whose thinking we really needed to know a great deal more. The first was Guido Vernani (d. ca. 1345), the acerbic critic who launched a frontal assault on Dante’s Monarchia while referring to its author condescendingly and dismissively not by name but simply as ille homo (“that fellow”) or quidam (“a certain person”). The second was Juan de Torquemada (1388–1468), the great papalist propagandist at the time of the Council of Basel (1431–49) whose Summa de ecclesia was to become a very influential high-papalist classic. The third was Pierre d’Ailly (1350–1420), not exactly a household name today but a nominalist philosopher of Ockhamist inspiration who, as a philosopher, was of much the same order of prominence in his day as Marin Mersenne or Bishop Berkeley were to be in the seventeenth century. My choice did not prove to be a difficult one. Vernani’s work struck me as too slight to warrant full-scale thesis treatment. Torquemada, though essentially an ecclesiologist rather than a political thinker, looked a good deal more promising. But E. F. Jacob at Oxford, when I consulted him on the matter, indicated that he was sure (incorrectly, it turned out) that Torquemada was already being worked on “somewhere,” as he put it, “in the Americas.” Even had he not given me that cue, I was already beginning to think that d’Ailly would be a better choice. A prolific writer and expansive thinker whose writings (well over a hundred of them) ranged across philosophy, theology, ecclesiology, theopolitics, and even geography (Christopher Columbus turned out to have read and annotated several works of his in that last area), he represented an appropriately large topic and a bracing interpretative challenge. The more so in that, in the years of his maturity, having been chancellor of the University of Paris, he went on to become a bishop, cardinal, and one of the leading churchmen who, at the Council of Constance (1414–18), helped engineer the ending of the Great Schism of the West. One of his major writings, moreover, the Tractatus de materia concilii generalis (1403/4), which adumbrated the reforming role in the Church of regularly assembled general councils, had never been printed and was to afford me the opportunity the following year to put my palaeographic skills to use and to produce a critical edition. So I opted for d’Ailly and made plans to spend most of the summer of 1954 amid the incomparable holdings of the Widener and Houghton libraries at Harvard, familiarizing myself with the philosophical, political, and ecclesiological contexts within which d’Ailly had done his thinking and embarking upon a preliminary canvas of his formidable body of writings.
But as the 1953–54 academic year drew to a close, I had another and more exciting obligation to meet before settling down to that task. One of the requirements of my Goldsmith’s Travelling Research Scholarship, and one provided for in the scholarship stipend, was that I should take time out to familiarize myself by travel with the new continent in which I was temporarily domiciled and with its peoples. With that on my mind, I jumped at the opportunity when a Canadian graduate of St. Michael’s, now studying law at the university, asked if I would be at all interested in partnering with him on an extended, exploratory trip out West. At the time, it was not uncommon for West Coast purchasers of American cars, who did not want to await delivery by rail from Detroit, to arrange to have their new car driven out directly from the factory and delivered to the car dealer through whom they had made the purchase. The plan, as my friend envisaged it, was that we should try to get such a delivery assignment, thus giving us a free trip to the West Coast, and then link up with his sister and her friend who had both been working as nurses in the desert resort town of Palm Springs and who were now ready to return home to Canada. Though they owned a car, they (and their parents) were nervous about their undertaking the long, cross-continental drive by themselves. Once we connected, the idea was to put in three weeks of leisurely touring throughout the Western states before heading east for home. Despite some predictable glitches, the plans eventually came together, and in May (the Canadian academic year ends comparatively early), we found ourselves leaving the General Motors factory in Detroit and heading out to our destination in Los Angeles, driving nothing other than an elegant white Cadillac, replete with the prominent fins that were the distinguishing feature of that year’s models. I have often wondered since about the odd fact that the car’s odometer was not connected, so that, almost a week later, having put in long days of fast driving, and having crossed the continent diagonally from Michigan in the northern Midwest to Los Angeles in southern California, we delivered the vehicle to the dealer with its odometer registering something less than a hundred miles. About that the dealer in question evinced neither curiosity nor concern. All he wanted to do was to reassure himself, by means of a minute inspection, that there were no signs of pebble scratches on the body of the car.
The federal legislation initiating the construction of the splendid interstate highway system of controlled access freeways that now exists, lay still at that time two years in the future. The roads, then, on which we drove across the country, and especially so in the West, were simply ordinary two-lane affairs, or two lanes with a third passing lane. As we drove on them across extended stretches of flat desert, or quasi-desert land, I was often struck by how comparatively deserted and extraordinarily straight they were. The Romans would have admired them. Leaving Detroit, we cut across Indiana to the town of Terre Haute and thence to St. Louis, where it was, I believe, that we picked up old, historic Route 66, which we were to follow most of the way to the West Coast. Terre Haute, an unexceptional sort of place, sticks in the mind because at the time it struck me (an essentially coastal sort of fellow apt to feel uneasy when definitively out of reach of large stretches of water) as somehow representing the dead heart of the vast continent we were traversing. And Route 66, as it threaded its diagonal way from Chicago, through Kansas, Missouri, and Illinois, and then pushing on through Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona, all the way to Los Angeles, linking together rather than bypassing what seemed like an endless stream of small rural or quasi-rural communities, opened up for me a better window into the heartland of America than would travel today on the much superior, closed-access highways of the interstate system. Dubbed “The Mother Road” by the Steinbeck of The Grapes of Wrath, it had become either the via dolorosa or “the road to opportunity” for the countless Okies who, in the mid-1930s, had tried to escape along it from the terminal miseries of the Dust Bowl. Punctuated by a counterproductive oversupply of billboards and more than amply equipped with cheap motels and old, run-down campsites, it was to furnish me later on with the imaginative landscape across which I mentally traced the pubescent peregrinations of Nabokov’s lovely Lolita and against which I set the tumescent tendernesses of his Humbert Humbert.
I much regret now that I didn’t take more photographs along the way or at least keep some sort of a record or journal of our travels that summer. But I no more had the temperament at that time for journal or diary keeping than I do now, and I must rely on my somewhat jumbled memories to reconstruct the complex trajectory of our movements.
The girls had a much clearer idea of what they wanted to see than did we and, since the car was theirs, we sheepishly fell in with their plans. Summer temperatures at Palm Springs rise, I gather, into the unbearable zone and, in those days at least, the whole town more or less shut down for the summer months. When we left, it was the morning after many of the bars had put on drink-off sessions of what seemed like bacchanalian proportions. The first leg of our journey took us to the casinos, wall-to-wall slot machines, and high-kicking showgirls of Las Vegas, the Nevada resort town that was then considerably smaller than it is today but no less terminally tawdry. That behind us, we drove on to take in Lake Mead and the engineering marvels of the Hoover Dam in the northwest corner of Arizona, and, that under our belts, moved on to the stunning vistas afforded by the Grand Canyon. Following that, we spent a couple of enjoyable days with friends of the girls who owned a beautifully spacious modern house somewhere in the northern reaches of the state before threading our leisurely way up through the mountains of Colorado on the western side of the Continental Divide. Emerging eventually from the mountains, we settled into the long trip back to the coast again in order to spend some time exploring San Francisco, to the grace and beauty of which I was to become very attached during my repeated visits there later in life. But what, above all, I carry with me from that first visit has nothing to do with grace and beauty. It is, rather, the surreal and vivid memory of drinking some tropical-type cocktail graced with a miniature, collapsible parasol in a nightclub of heavily Hawaiian inspiration. There, the tables were grouped around what looked like a retired swimming pool, with the band playing on a raft moored in the middle. Intervals were signaled, as soon as the band’s raft had been pulled to the side so that they could exit to the bar, by the onset of a fake thunderstorm accompanied by a tropical downpour happily confined to the pool itself. It was all as bizarre as it was memorable.
From San Francisco we made our way slowly up north, exploring the beauties of northern California and coming back to Route 101 where it becomes a scenic coastal road, often in full view of the Pacific, and continuing on into the state of Oregon. For some reason, rather than continuing north across Washington state and up to Seattle, we turned east at the Columbia River and the small town of Vancouver, and drove across Oregon into the mountainous country of Idaho. There, in response to his pressing invitation, we lingered for a very interesting overnight stay with the family of an American who was a student at the University of Toronto. His father was involved in the mining business and his home was in a secluded valley where some rare, exotic, and valuable metal (I can’t remember which) was being extracted. It was the first functioning gated community I had ever encountered, a company town with a claustrophobic atmosphere and one that came close to being a heavily guarded compound. Driving on from there, we made one last extended stop so that we could take in the incomparable sights of Yellowstone National Park. After dutifully viewing the dramatic show put on by Old Faithful, we committed ourselves to the long grind of the eastward journey home. This was to take us across the seemingly empty Big Sky country of Montana, the austere beauty of which I loved, and thence, via the almost equally enormous reaches of South Dakota, into Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, and on, eventually, into Canada. Though for this stretch, increasingly anxious as I was to get back to Toronto, my memory of the precise route we took is really quite hazy.
Amid all the novelties of that long trip, all the unexpected revelations of the different ways in which people lived, as well as the new and often arresting sights seen, two very basic impressions had been forming in my mind. They seemed to crystallize during the latter part of our travels, and especially so during the long and monotonous transit across Montana and South Dakota. They amount, I fear, to little more than tired clichés, but they hit me then, understandably, with no little force. First, the sheer immensity of the United States, even if one brackets the South and Southeast, which fell outside the ambit of our travels. And, added to that, beneath the occluding carapace of commercially and media-reinforced uniformity, the marked variety of conditions under which people pursued their daily lives. To get a real sense of this, or so I concluded, one had to experience the country from the ground. Crisscrossing it by air from coast to coast, however frequently, simply doesn’t do the job. Second, and complexly related to the first, the cultural rootage of the persistent strain of isolationism that across time rises and falls in American life but never really goes away.
Neither as a schoolboy nor as an undergraduate at Oxford had I been markedly political in my concerns. I could not help being conscious, of course, of the huge international upheavals spawned by the dawning of the Cold War era and by the inception of the endgame for the great European colonial empires: the Berlin blockade and airlift; the Korean War (when my brother Vincent was recalled for service but discharged again before being shipped out); the Mau Mau insurrection in Kenya which trailed on from 1952 to 1956, an exceedingly brutal struggle on both sides; as well as the bloody but ultimately successful British and Commonwealth Malayan counterinsurgency campaign that was mounted in 1948 in response to the revolt staged by the (largely Chinese ethnic) Malayan Communist Party. This last was a major campaign which ground on even after the ending of colonial rule and peaked around the mid-1950s when, especially under General Templer’s successful leadership, the tide was turned. In the end it was to cost over 4,000 casualties among British and Malayan forces, around 1,800 of them fatalities. All of this I was aware of, but it was only after I had begun to live abroad that I began to focus more intently on such international upheavals, great and small, and upon the repercussions they generated in the sphere of domestic politics, whether in Britain, France, or the United States. In the last case, the fallout from the loss of China to Communist rule was still in 1954 generating intense partisan rancor and serving to encourage the depredations of the House Committee on Un-American Activities as well as Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.
In the spring of 1954 I had begun to follow closely the climactic battle of Dien Bien Phu in Indochina. It had culminated on May 7 in General Giap’s stunning and decisive defeat of the French and French Foreign Legion forces dug in unwisely on what turned out to be a killing field. I had admired President Eisenhower’s wise refusal to commit American ground forces on the French side in what was essentially, after all, a failing campaign of imperialist reconquest. And, realizing that the French defeat was likely to have enduring repercussions that would be global rather than simply French in their impact, I had been intent on following the unfolding of the Geneva peace talks. But as we pushed eastward across Montana and South Dakota I could find out little or nothing about it from the regional newspapers we picked up or from the regional radio broadcasts we listened to. For that part of the country, the historic French defeat and the ongoing challenge of dealing with the Indochina situation might never have existed. In fact, Indochina itself might never have existed while even France did no more than hover uncertainly on the margins of consciousness. That this should be so was for me something of an eye-opener. And it certainly gave me some minimal comprehension of why isolationism, in the American heartland at least, might exert so ready an appeal.
Back in Canada, having parted from my travelling companions in Welland, Ontario, I spent a few days in Toronto getting my stuff together before departing for my summer’s work in Cambridge, Massachusetts. After several intensely social weeks cooped up in a car with three other people, I was more than ready for a stretch of quiet time by myself, but I had promised to visit the home in New York state of an American graduate student I had come to know in Toronto and, as a result, I spent a couple of days at Canandaigua and was introduced to the beauty of the Finger Lakes region. I had also promised at least to stop by the Breslins’ home in Pittsfield, where I promptly came down with some sort of infection and ended up in bed with a fever—much, I could not help ruefully feeling, to the delight of the Breslin girls who threw themselves with great enthusiasm into the role of playing nurse. Being increasingly anxious to get started on my summer’s work, I left for Cambridge rather earlier than Dr. Breslin wanted me to and while I still felt a bit drained and weak. Fortunately, I recovered quickly and settled down in a rather dingy rented room on Oxford Street, not that far from Harvard Yard, a room not altogether unlike the one on the Abingdon Road that I had inhabited as an undergraduate.
That done, I quickly settled into a rather productive routine. Each day I would make my way across to nearby Massachusetts Avenue where I would breakfast at a drugstore counter before making my way down to Harvard Yard and the Widener Library. A letter of introduction from Fr. O’Donnell of the Pontifical Institute cleared the way for the generous provision of both a reader’s pass for the Harvard libraries and a carrel of my own in the Widener stacks. There I settled, and there I spent that entire summer, more or less, beginning with some contextual reading and with a canvass of the secondary literature on Pierre d’Ailly. The latter did not prove to be voluminous, the most important pieces of work being a couple of doctoral theses dating back to the closing decades of the nineteenth century. The first, by Paul Tschackert, was a solid German thesis that printed in its appendices some of d’Ailly’s shorter tracts; the second, by Louis Salembier, was a Sorbonne thesis written in Latin. The interpretative perspective from which these two scholars had viewed d’Ailly’s thinking was very outdated and often misleading, but they did provide a useful introduction to nearly the full range of his writings. Salembier, in particular, provided an extensive descriptive calendar of most of those writings, which proved to be invaluable as I set about the task of trying to skim through d’Ailly’s entire oeuvre and, that done, embarking on the challenging task of reading, with due care and attention, those of his writings that seemed most pertinent to his political thinking.
I was a rather solitary figure most of the time, eating lunch and dinner by myself at one or another of the many inexpensive eating spots surrounding the Yard while I kept up with the news via the Christian Science Monitor, to which I had become attached. Cambridge at that time was enjoying a good phase; it was not the rather tacky and druggy place it was to become for a while in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was crowded, lively, and cosmopolitan, and I was much stimulated by the vibrancy of its atmosphere. Having explored the campus and its environs, I discovered the Foreign Students Center, then located on Brattle Street, and fell into the habit of going there on the weekends in order to enjoy a bit of social life. It was an animated place, thronged with students from all over the world, and it organized, among other things, outings, picnics, parties, trips to the shore, and, on most Saturday evenings, informal dances. It also served, less attractively, as a bit of a magnet for a group of somewhat predatory long-in-the-tooth graduate students (or fringe hangers-on), one or two of whom had come to Harvard as older undergraduates on the GI Bill immediately after the Second World War, had stayed on to do graduate work, and were now stuck at the ABD (“all but dissertation”) stage of their doctoral studies and seemed likely to remain permanently stuck at that stage. Living hand to mouth on a shifting array of part-time jobs, they seemed wholly trapped within the magnetic field of Cambridge student and quasi-student life, unable to break free of its spell. It was my first encounter with the “professional student” phenomenon evident, I suspect, on the fringes of most big research universities, and it wasn’t reassuring.
But it was at that same Foreign Students Center that I met a nice, attractive, and rather genteel Lebanese graduate student who was doing a PhD in biochemistry at Boston University. Her name was Faiza Fawaz. We became good companions that summer—dancing, eating out together, or eating in her apartment meals that she herself cooked, and going to the theater and to the outdoor concerts of the Boston Pops Orchestra. Over the years, if intermittently, she would write to me (or, in later years, email me) to give me updates on her doings—her struggle with the rheumatoid arthritis that forced an interruption in her PhD studies; her marriage to a Danish chemist whom she met at the Yale Graduate School when she returned to the United States to complete her studies; their appointments at Brown University, he as the head of the Chemistry Department and she, having added to her PhD an MD, as clinical professor of medicine and chief of rheumatology at the Memorial Hospital of Rhode Island; their eventual retirement to the Mediterranean climate of Santa Barbara on the California coast; and, most recently, a deeply saddening goodbye message, alerting me to the fact that she was dying of pancreatic cancer.
My stay at Cambridge came to an abrupt end several days before I had planned to leave. I awoke one morning to the sound of torrential rain and of powerful winds buffeting the house. They presaged the arrival of Hurricane Carol which made its disastrous landfall in the greater Boston area, did a good deal of damage in Cambridge itself, and left us for two or three days without electricity. It was impossible to get any work done, so I packed up and left for Toronto just as soon as the Greyhound long-distance buses got going again. In my last couple of weeks, however, I had had the pleasure of meeting some of my distant cousins on the Curran (my mother’s) side of the family. My sister Molly turned out to have been in correspondence with one of them and, when they heard I was in Cambridge for the summer, they made contact. So I had had a pleasant weekend visit to Cape Cod, where my distant cousin, Catherine (Curran) Dennis, lived with her husband Ralph. Ralph owned a car dealership and she taught English at a private school in the vicinity. In 1958 when my wife and I were married in Connecticut, she, Ralph, and her brother Peter Curran and his wife (the latter lived in the greater New York area) were among the guests. And, over the years, Catherine, a rather refined person with intellectual and artistic interests, would drive up to Williamstown with a friend to visit the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute and stop by our place for lunch or tea.
While I was still at Cambridge, other distant cousins on the Curran side organized a get-together over dinner somewhere in South Boston. In the 1870s and 1880s, their forebears had immigrated to America from the Ballycasey area in County Galway and the recent generation, at least, seemed to have done quite well. One, I recall, was a doctor, and another a lawyer. The evening we spent together, a lively and enjoyable one, was marked, however, by two discordant moments, the second of which was quite revealing. The oldest person present, a rather grim-faced matriarchal figure, first brought the conversation to a temporary halt by looking at me rather bleakly and pronouncing that I didn’t “seem very Irish.” I wasn’t sure what that was supposed to mean. None of them had ever been to Ireland or, indeed, to Britain. If they viewed the latter with a degree of ancestral suspicion, the former they saw entirely through the distorting and romanticizing lens of the Irish American experience. Distance in their case had certainly bred enchantment. The second discordant moment was rather different. It was occasioned by the current antics of Senator Joseph McCarthy, at that moment presiding in his capacity as Chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, over the controversial Army-McCarthy hearings. The Currans of the diaspora were all clearly enthralled by the tangled soap opera that was playing out for weeks on national TV and was, in the end, to prove to be McCarthy’s undoing. And they wanted to know what I thought about the whole affair. Unfortunately, I was foolish enough to oblige. Had I known then that a Gallup poll taken earlier in the 1950s had revealed that no less than 50 percent of Americans approved of the Senator’s despicable tactics, I might have been more cautious or diplomatic. But, having peered from the Canadian side of the border at the bizarre goings-on over which McCarthy was presiding, and sharing the (somewhat condescending) Canadian perspective on that and related aspects of American political life, I had come to view with alarm and revulsion the career-destroying depredations involved. That view I was innocent enough to share with my Irish American cousins only to find, to my astonishment and dismay, that they all seemed to be staunch McCarthy admirers. It was only in the wake of the subsequent lively and reasonably good-natured dinner table discussion that it dawned on me that while McCarthy was no Bostonian, they still regarded him with quasi-tribal ethnic pride as “one of us.” He was, after all, an Irish American of staunchly Catholic persuasion, and they seemed to take his deplorable antics as, above all, an admirable instance of “stiffing” or “putting it to” the WASPs. Years later, viewing Edward R. Murrow’s “A Report on Senator Joseph McCarthy,” my cousins’ attitude came once more to mind. On that later occasion, I was struck by the fact that McCarthy’s physical appearance, demeanor, and typical rhetorical moves were not unlike those characteristic of a certain rather boozy type of Irish American parish priest with whom they must have been comfortably familiar.
Having already discussed the scholarly endeavors that occupied me during my second year in Toronto, I need now, and by way of conclusion, refer to the most important thing that happened to me that year. It was the joy of meeting and getting to know my future wife. Going with some other graduate students to the St. Michael’s College snack bar for coffee one afternoon, just before the start of the Christmas vacation, I saw a friend sitting with and chatting up two or three undergraduate women. We hastened to join him and, introductions having been made, lively conversation ensued. One of the undergraduates was a very attractive girl, blond-haired, blue-eyed, intellectually acute, and possessed of a smile so radiant that, for the sun, it had to be cause for envy. Claire-Ann Lamenzo by name, she turned out to be an American from Manchester, Connecticut, just outside the state capital at Hartford. Her Italian American father was an insurance executive in Hartford (working with, or under, none other than the poet Wallace Stevens) and her Yankee Irish mother owned and ran a nursery school. Claire-Ann was an English major and when, in conversation, it became clear that she was of New Critical interpretative sympathies (an approach I found puzzling because of its essentially ahistorical nature), I suddenly realized that she was the student whose praises my friend Don Theall had been singing. She had taken two courses with him and another (Tennyson) with Marshall McLuhan, for whose six children, I was later to learn, she had been courageous enough to babysit, being herself the second of six. Attempts to organize the group as a whole to go on to dinner having proved abortive, I was delighted to have her to myself, eating Wienerschnitzel at a new Austrian-style restaurant on nearby Bay (or Yonge) Street. We seemed instantly to have hit it off and went on to talk and talk, about what I can’t remember (there seemed no lack of topics), for three hours and more before calling it a night. She was due to fly home first thing the next day, and I promised myself to see more of her the following semester.
“The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men” do indeed, however, “gang aft agley.” She, it turned out, had an off-and-on relationship with a somewhat older fellow who was on the English faculty at a liberal arts college in Hartford, and that relationship turned on again so sharply during the course of that Christmas vacation that when she returned to Toronto in the new year she was engaged to be married and, accordingly, off limits to me. From time to time I would bump into her with groups of her friends and we would chat a bit. But that was that. Fortunately, it wasn’t to be that for too long. After her fiancé visited her in Toronto and she, in turn, returned home to visit with him in Hartford, they decided to break off the engagement and I was free, accordingly, to get to know her better. In the latter half of the spring semester I lost no time in doing precisely that. With increasing frequency, we began to spend time together. We explored Toronto, ate at small, inexpensive places around the city, and, as the short Toronto spring made its presence felt, would go out to Toronto Island, picking up sandwiches and making picnics on the shore of Lake Ontario. And we talked. Oh, how we talked!—about the courses she was taking, in art history as well as English, about the sort of historical work I was intent on pursuing, about our families, about our childhood and youth, about our hopes, fears, and aspirations, about practically everything under the sun. As we talked, and as time went on, it gradually became clear that we had been moving, without quite realizing it, from lighthearted friendship or mere infatuation into something deeper, and something that was beginning to lean yearningly towards the elusive hope of permanence. Our companionship had an open and natural feel to it. She was (to use or misuse later parlance) a firmly grounded, well-centered sort of person with a calm intelligence that was less purely academic than mine and with a strong, down-to-earth strain of commonsense on which, over the years, I have come to rely. As a younger girl, she had studied and performed ballet at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford and she proved to be a lovely, graceful dancer. I was also entranced by her spontaneous joie de vivre (her performance of the Charleston was a thing to behold), and I began to think of her as my very own version of Chaucer’s Blaunche, the Duchess, and mentally to apply to her the lovely lines of his that I had memorized romantically at school.
I sawgh hyr daunce so comlily,
Carole and synge so swetely;
Laughe and playe so womanly,
And loke so debonairly,
So goodly speke and so frendly,
That certes y trowe that evermor
Nas seyn so blysful a tresor.
This was all, of course, quite wonderful. But across it fell the lengthening shadow of my imminent departure. I had already booked my passage in early July for home and was trying to face up to the prospect of putting my academic work on hold for a couple of years while I discharged my obligation of military service in the British armed forces. Though I had received, earlier that year, the unsolicited offer of a faculty appointment at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, and though, even without having completed the PhD, I could probably have found a position at some small Catholic college in the United States, the idea of staying in either country in order to avoid the obligation of National Service in England simply did not arise. Although in the post-Vietnam era the thought that I would have been ashamed to do anything of the sort may well seem a bit quaint, that was, in fact, the case. And, Irish though they were, my parents would have shared the same feeling. My brothers Vincent and Noel, after all, had put in their time in the army and Royal Air Force, respectively, and in the end we were together to have put in almost a decade of full-time military service and I don’t know how many further years of service in the active reserve. I was, moreover, acutely conscious of the fact that I had received a first-rate education largely at the expense of the British taxpayer and, even apart from the legal requirement, I felt strongly that I, more than most, owed the country the duty of a period of service.
As we began, then, to brood about our uncertain future, we began to think accordingly—“plan” would be too strong a word—of Claire-Ann’s going to England to do some postgraduate work after she finished up at Toronto in the spring of the following year. More proximately, we began to think of spending a farewell vacation together in Québec City, where I could board the ship sailing for home. And that we did, both of us lining up cheap accommodations at Laval University, she in a women’s residence and I at a men’s equivalent. So my time as a travelling student in Canada was to end early in July 1955 on a highly poignant note. The weather cooperating, we spent a wonderful week together, exploring Québec City and its environs, eating inexpensively at one or another of the many interesting little cafés there, reading and sunning ourselves on the Heights of Abraham overlooking the St. Lawrence River, the site of General Wolfe’s great victory in 1758 during the Seven Years’ War and now one of Canada’s national urban parks. We even got dressed up one day to go for drinks and dancing (a “tea dance”) at the stately old Château Frontenac Hotel. The week ended with my reluctant departure on the Canadian Pacific liner, the Empress of France, and that climactic moment, however miserable, was fraught with romance. The ship had sailed earlier in the day from Montreal, where almost its whole complement of passengers had boarded. It was simply to slow down in the river off Québec where the remaining passengers (I think there were only three of us) were to be taken out by tender to the ship. When we showed up at the quay, the sailor manning the tender permitted Claire-Ann to accompany me out to the ship. He did so, less, it turned out, from the goodness of his heart than because he wanted to try to put the make on her, which he lost no time in doing as soon as I was out of sight. Darkness was already falling as we left the quay and chugged out into midstream, there to hold until the Empress of France, painted creamy white all over except for a checkerboard pattern on her funnels, emerged from the gloaming, looming over us and steaming slowly alongside with a hatchway open just above sea level to receive us passengers. Frantic goodbyes hastily exchanged, I scrambled on board and struggled mightily to get up to the open boat deck in order to wave a last farewell. But I was too late. By the time I made it to the rail, the tender was already slipping away into the dusk and I was left with an overwhelming sense of loss.
It is a telling fact, my love of being at sea notwithstanding, that I can remember nothing at all about that long Atlantic voyage retracing in reverse the route from Liverpool along which I had sailed so excitedly two years earlier. Nothing at all, that is, except the turmoil of my inner feelings, for I was overcome by an enormous surge of doubt. What had I done? Why had I permitted old-fashioned notions of duty and honor to trump something that now seemed infinitely more important? Was I not, after all, being wholly unrealistic? What if, for perfectly practical reasons, Claire-Ann was unable to make her way to England? And, if she could do so, why should I take it for granted that I would not by then have been posted overseas to some currently uninviting location like Malaya or Cyprus? Why, moreover, should I believe that the inevitably fading memory of our time together would be enough to sustain her across a full year of separation? She was, after all, a very attractive girl; the one thing she would not lack on a university campus would be attentive male company. Would not the most likely endgame be the receipt, after a while, of a species of “Dear John” letter, fraught, no doubt, with nostalgic affection, but firm in its negativity about any possible future for the two of us? Such was the welter of thoughts and emotions that overcame me during that long and miserable Atlantic transit. Only when we sighted at last the emerald green coast of Ulster and began to slip down into the Irish Sea on the final leg for home did my unaccustomed gloom begin finally to lift. But until that moment I felt, in a way that I had never felt before and have never felt since, altogether alone and utterly bereft.