Why Are You So Good?
I was twenty-four, newly minted as an openly gay man and an atheist back in 1969 when I went to live in London, ostensibly to do a doctorate, although in reality the PhD was just an excuse for living in Britain and becoming a famous writer and never returning home to my father’s Canada.
I found a flat in Hampstead, close to the Heath, half a block from the garden in which Keats wrote Ode to a Nightingale a hundred and fifty years before.
My landlady, Miss Louise Smith, was tiny and white-haired. She always wore a pastel-colored suit, with sensible shoes and flesh-colored elastic stockings. A bunched abundance of white blouse blossomed at each wrist and there were different pins at her throat each day, pretty ones – opal or amethyst or amber surrounded by worked silver. Never a cross.
She always called me “Mister Bartram” and pottered around much of the day attending to hundreds of cuttings of red and white fuchsias, in tiny pots and large ones, at different stages of growth. They began life in what she called the “Garden Room”—once the dining room, since my flat was once the kitchen and scullery of this three-story, red brick row house.
The Garden Room was unfurnished, except for a few table-trays of fuchsias which overflowed onto the floor and spilled out of house onto a little flagged terrace. They bushily crowded the gravel path that ran between my window and high wooden fence that separated me from our architectural mirror next door. They filled the walled flowerbed beneath my own bow window, and threatened to invade the patch of lawn behind the house with its brief path and retaining wall and pair of steps and further piece of treeless grass above.
“They give you hope, you see,” she told me. “They come up every year.”
She had her piano and received her students in the front room; I heard them thumping and occasionally singing, always her own soprano, sometimes mingled with the equally quavery voice of a student. She showed me her brochure. It advertised the services of a “Miss Roberta Smith,” and quoted various critics in praise of the sensitivity and color and tone of her playing at the “pianoforte,” a word I had rarely seen, beyond the writings of Jane Austen. Was Roberta perhaps her sister, now deceased?
On my first day, when I agreed to take the flat, she looked up at me through bulbous glasses that made her blue eyes protrude from her pink round face. She studied me in the sunlight for what seemed a long time: the gaze of the innocent. I looked back at her, feeling both impure and impatient at such scrutiny, as if all the acquired hardness of my heart lay exposed. The examination passed. She accepted my tenancy along with five and a half guineas for my room and cold-water kitchenette and rudimentary shower and the separate “plug” as she called it, meaning the toilet. There was a door into the garden and a “knack” to flushing the “plug”. I couldn’t work it at first, and had to pee outside until the plumber came and taught me.
Some previous tenant had pasted bright circles of tissue paper on one wall, some blue, some red, in ascending order of size. ‘I’ll write to the boy about the circles,’ she declared. I think we both knew that nothing practical would come of that intention. I partly covered them with maps, sixteenth century renderings of London.
I loved my flat. I loved that tiny garden. I loved how primitive all the arrangements were, how lacking in Canadian comfort. I loved being at the back of the house, so private. I loved my location, around the corner from Keats House, with its famous public memories and its private stirrings of time and space, space and time. If time is only another word for space, I thought, then the veil between me and those other inhabitants of this street was thin indeed: Keats and his garden and his fantasy girl, his imaginary love. And I loved Miss Louise Smith, not least for the innocent deception of her sister’s brochure, and her repetitive fuchsias, and our hallway encounters, often philosophical.
“It’s only money,” was a refrain.
One day she told me a story about a young man in an open-topped sports car. She had been carrying her wicker shopping basket and there was a five pound note on top; —“and you know, he reached over and seized the basket and accelerated away,” knocking her onto her face.
“But it was only money, wasn’t it?”
She was not injured, not seriously at any rate.
“But why would any young man do a thing like that?” she asked, looking up at me in the dim front hall. Although she “could see it in his face, you know, a hardness.”
Why indeed, I wondered; and I wondered as well what she may have seen, or not seen, in my own face, when she scrutinized me for so many long seconds in the sun, and then decided to accept me.
**
It was nighttime, on October 4, my birthday. I had come home from some college event. I’d had a pint or two to drink. It was drizzling slightly. I wasn’t drunk but I was feeling useless and low and lost. I didn’t want to do a Ph.D. The string of acquaintances I’d worked so hard to find weren’t really friends. I was in the city of my dreams, but nothing was different: no sudden gusts of inspiration, no furor poeticus, no rush of wonderful words.
I went out into the garden beyond my kitchen door and sat on the damp stone steps. No moon.
And then, as I sat feeling sorry for myself, I felt a living presence about three feet in front of me, slightly to my right. It was not an interior feeling. It was as if someone was present with me in the garden, right there.
That was it, the whole experience. No words, no message, nothing visual, nothing dramatic—but nonetheless it felt real. I was in the presence of the living God in whom I did not believe.
“Why are you so good?” I whispered into the soft urban dark.
Slightly embarrassed and uncertain about what else I should do or say, I repeated the question.
“Why are you so good?”
Then I stood up and went into my lighted kitchen, putting an end to the interview, but greatly cheered.
I paused at the door.
I’d read every novel that those famous converts, Muriel Spark and Evelyn Waugh, had ever written, so I knew exactly what to do.
“Tomorrow I’ll become a Catholic,” I said, more to myself than to him.
And I went through with it—although that’s a separate, much more complicated, story.
**
Why are you so good?
That’s an unusual question in conversion literature. Mostly people ask who the supernatural visitor is, or what they’re supposed to do; and sometimes they demand proof that the visitation is of God, or that the promise will be kept.
Why are you so good?
Maybe I was marvelling at the sudden apprehension of a reality only occasionally felt in my life back then—that life is good, that creation is good, and possibly—remotely—that I myself might be in some sense good, if the Unseen God cared enough about me to appear here, now, in this place.
Which may be why, fifty years later, in writing about what turned out to be a turning point in my life, it’s Miss Louise Smith who takes up most of the story, with her superabundant fuchsias, which give you hope, you see, and her sweet upward-tilted face and bulbous glasses, and the long, long moment in which she peered up into my face before deciding to accept me, the gaze of the innocent, the gaze of the good: the presiding angel of the house, and of my life, back then.
