"Shadowy Mountains and Sounding Seas": A Memoir by Father M. Owen Lee [1]

Father Owen Lee
ca. 1960

I was the first PhD candidate in the Faculty of Arts at the University of British Columbia, and thereby hangs a tale, which I hope may be briefly told, of two remarkable men.

FATHER HENRY CARR^[2]

In the nineteen thirties, even though religious denominations at UBC were, as a result of the University Act of 1908, allowed to teach only their own ministerial candidates and forbidden by law from participating in the work of any of the university faculties, the Archdiocese of Vancouver hoped to establish a Catholic college on the UBC campus.  And as the community of priests to which I belong, the Basilian Fathers, had successfully established Catholic colleges on provincial campuses in other Canadian cities, the Archbishop of Vancouver (William Duke) sent out an invitation to our Superior General, Father Henry Carr, to explore the possibility of doing the same in Vancouver.

Henry Carr C.S.B. (1955)
Credit: UBC Archives (Record no. 5.1/429)

Father Carr promptly paid several visits to Vancouver, but his initial request was refused by the University, and no real progress was made until the late forties, after  Norman MacKenzie had become President of UBC.  MacKenzie had known Father Carr at the University of Toronto and respected his achievement as President of St. Michael’s College and co-founder, with Étienne Gilson, of the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies there.  In 1950 President MacKenzie invited the internationally respected Gilson to give a lecture at UBC on "The Place of Mediaeval Studies in the History of Western Civilisation," [3] and that paved the way for Father Carr’s return when, the next year, he was finally releived of his duties elsewhere [4] and was free to come to UBC on a permanent basis.  An administrator of long experience, a Professor of Philosophy, originally trained in Classics, Father Carr was by 1951 a diminutive, gravel-voiced man in his seventies, feisty and full of zeal but far from well, already suffering from the effects of a debilitating and as yet undiagnosed case of diabetes.

How was he to found single-handedly a college in what was then thought a distant city where Catholics were a distinct minority, on a campus that, almost to a man, didn’t want him, in a Department of Philosophy that attempted to thwart his every purpose?  As it turned out, it was the Department of Classics that came to his aid.  Colonel Harry Logan, Head of the Department, offered him, with what Father Carr later called "unfailing and understanding kindness," a lecturer’s appointment teaching Cicero, Juvenal and Beginner’s Greek.

It was a humble enough position, and it meant  teaching subjects that Father Carr had not taught for some forty years.  But there was more humbling to come: after his very first class Father Carr was told by a regretful President MacKenzie that the previous evening the Senate of the University, not at all pleased that a Catholic priest was going to be lecturing on campus, insisted that Father Carr could not do so as long as he wore clerical dress.  Father Carr, not one to be undone by such an obvious ploy, promptly borrowed a grey suit and a tie (a most unusual garb for a Catholic cleric at the time) and continued his new career.

His cause was soon taken up by the UBC students, who, like students everywhere, were looking for a reason to oppose the administration: they thought it unconscionable that a distinguished Canadian academic should be so humilated, should in effect be denied status and identity, by their university.  The rumour of this soon spread to other campuses.  It wasn’t long before Father Carr was teaching again in the collar he had worn in the classroom for over fifty years.

When the second semester came, President MacKenzie honoured him with a special luncheon at the Faculty Club, introducing him as "one of the very greatest teachers in Canada."  And within a decade UBC had set up a Department of Religious Studies.  As Colonel Logan put it: "The UBC faculty and Senate arrived at a rational interpretation of the clause in the University Act of 1908," and added: "One cannot but realise the importance of the role [Father Carr] played in the acceptance by the university of the concept that religion must be included within the area of curricular studies."

Father Carr taught Classics and Philosophy at UBC for five years, all the while proceeding towards his dream of founding a Catholic college on the campus. He recruited two bright young Basilian priests from Toronto: James Hanrahan to teach in the university’s Department of History, and Elliott Allen to teach, in the face of some opposition, in the Department of Philosophy.

I sang at Father Carr’s funeral.  He died full of years, with honorary doctorates from many universities.  UBC, in conferring on him the degree of Doctor of Laws honoris causa, called him "a scholar of outstanding attainment, who throughout a lifetime devoted to the education of Canadian youth has been an inspiring and challending teacher, a fearless champion of Catholic principles, and a leader of great vision and discernment."  His body was brought from Vancouver to be buried in Toronto, where he is still spoken of with affection and awe.

Enter our second unforgettable character — Malcolm McGregor. A familiar, indeed commanding, figure on campus, both friendly with,  and feared by,  his students, often seen striding with his Greek shepherd’s crook, he  was tall, athletic (a vocal advocate of field hockey and other rugged sports),  American-trained but fiercely proud of his joint British and Canadian citizenship and Scottish  ancestry, and internationally known for his solid contribution to the splendid four-volume Athenian Tribute Lists.

As Colonel Logan’s successor as Head of the Department of  Classics, McGregor had firm ideas of what was, in a word he often used, "proper."  A confirmed Hellenist,  he may have been no lover of things "Roman" (Roman Catholic, that is), but tolerance was one of  his  pre-eminent virtues.  He was  also  determined to expand the horizons of the Department of Classics on his campus. He suggested to Father Carr that the Basilian Fathers send to UBC a potential PhD candidate who was "a Classics man."

I was that graduate student, a newly ordained priest.

When I arrived in Vancouver in the fall of 1958, a Detroiter awed by my first glimpse of Pacific mountains and sea, I  found that Father Henry  Carr had made St. Mark's College a reality.

St. Mark's College in the early 1960s.
Credit: UBC Archives (Record no. 1.1/1483)

It was a splendid new building on Chancellor Boulevard, built with funds raised by the Catholics of Vancouver, designed by architect Peter Thornton, and comprising a men’s residence, a chapel, a library, a Newman Centre for social gatherings and educational events, and a grand piano that  was virtually at my own disposal.  For while Classics was the academic field chosen for me by  my Basilian superiors, music was always my chief delight, and I had in my memory, and under my fingers, a thousand or more songs by Jerome Kern, George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, Cole Porter, and their like. The students at the Centre, grouped around the piano in a spacious room that offered a spectacular view of Burrard Inlet, were happy to have me for their sing-songs.  But I’m not  sure that either Father Carr, or Professor McGregor,  knew quite what to make of me.

In his office in the Buchanan Building, Malcolm  McGregor (it  seems strange, even after forty years,  to be calling him by his first name!) told me that I would soon prefer mountainous Vancouver to my native (and depressingly flat) Detroit.  It was, he said, a landscape in which his favourite Athenian, Thucydides, might have felt at home. He hoped that I would carry on the monumental work in Greek epigraphy he had begun at the University of Michigan, continued at Cincinnati,  and brought to fruition at the University of British Columbia.

He also decided that, even after  first-class standing in a four-year Honour Course in Classics at the University of Toronto, and after gaining  an MA with honours from that same institution, I could still profit from taking two undergraduate courses at UBC that Toronto could not have bettered —  one of them (Herodotus) [5] taught by him, and the other (Classical Archaeology)[6] team-taught, and expertly I  must say, by him and his promising assistant, C.W.J. Eliot.  Professor Eliot (I could not then,  and cannot to this day,  call him by his more familiar name "Willie") was himself pursuing a PhD in Classics, and at  the very University of Toronto I had just left. [7]  I suspected  that  there might be some animus in UBC’s Classics Department against  the more venerable but, at the time, less venturesome  assemblage  of scholars  back East.

It was certainly clear from the start that  Classics at UBC was determined to make the training of its first doctoral candidate something of an event.  Professors McGregor and Eliot lost no time in assigning me nothing less than the Harvard Reading List, and in supplementing it with much additional material —  dialogues of Plato and speeches of Aeschines that weren’t expected of Harvard candidates, and the complete plays of Terence. (I’ve always suspected that this last assignment was given me because I had said rather unwisely that there wasn’t "a laugh in a carload" in Roman comedy.)  I must have looked glum when I left McGregor’s office that day.

But reading my way through the Oxford Book of Greek Verse with Geoffrey B. Riddehough was a great pleasure. Toronto hadn’t given me  much lyric poetry  to read, and the portly Professor Riddehough was a man who, however  reclusive, wanted and perhaps needed someone with whom to talk about the poetry he loved. If I was less enthusiastic about reading all of Tacitus’  Histories with Patrick Guthrie, it might have been because I was beginning to feel that literature, not history, was going to be my concern when the time came to write the dissertation. Then again, it might have been because of the truly terrible  coffee Professor Guthrie and I drank in his office on rainy days while reading of the deadly doings of Galba, Otho, and Vitellius.

I was always sorry that the only professor along the Classics corridor in the Buchanan Building with whom I never had an opportunity to read was the gentlemanly W. Leonard Grant, a true man of letters, and that the beloved Colonel Logan was by then retired. Both men were, however, to be sources of strength  to me when, in my second year at UBC, the time came for writing the dissertation.

Professor McGregor was saddened,  but not surprised,  when I told him  at the end of that first year at UBC, that I wanted to write a dissertation not on Athenian constitutional history, but on a literary topic. I was considering an examination of the whole Western tradition of the myth of Orpheus. He had serious doubts about the subject's being "academically appropriate."  I was nonetheless able to  point out that I would be following a precedent set by W.B. Stanford in his pioneering book, The Ulysses Theme (1954), and that Indiana  had recently given its blessing to a similar dissertation on the tradition of the myth of Teiresias. [8]  Professor McGregor somewhat ruefully conceded that a dissertation on such a subject might be "proper," and assigned me Geoffrey Riddehough as my mentor for the future.

Meanwhile I passed the requisite exams in French and German, and on the Harvard-plus Reading List. That left the fall of my second year to dispatch the examinations in my special field (Greek Music) and special author (Lucretius), and the dreaded oral comprehensive. (When, at the last-named ordeal, I volunteered too much information on the things I knew something about —  parabasis, krypteia, enharmonic quarter tones  —  the examiners would quickly shift to something I didn’t know about  —  lectisternium, euhemerizing, and, strangely enough, apocryphal gospels in Greek.)

The UBC library at that time was generally well supplied with the necessary materials for a graduate student in Classics, but not  for my far-ranging subject, and I had been told in no uncertain times by a dictatorial lady librarian that as a graduate student  I also had "no special privileges."   Fortunately, through  the  summer of 1959 I had amassed, in the libraries of distantToronto, a wealth of material on Orpheus.  I  plunged in medias res with the dissertation, beginning with what was to be its central section, that on Orpheus and the origins of opera, and I found that completing the rest of it was a matter of only six or seven weeks. Orpheus, from the first mention of him in a fragment of Ibycus to his  then-contemporary appearances in the works of Jean Cocteau and Tennessee Williams, was a figure that meant many things to many ages in Western culture.

There was much to say, and in my room at St. Mark’s, overlooking a vista that strongly evoked Homer’s "shadowy mountains and sounding sea" [9]  I found that  the dissertation  almost wrote itself.  I was able to make a short trip to Berkeley’s splendid library  to follow every lead I’d found in Vancouver, as far as I could.  I  was also busy pastorally, giving regular conferences at three convents and doing weekend parish work at such far-flung places as Squamish and Woodfibre, Comox and Cumberland. Some members of the department regarded these activities as unusual for a doctoral candidate, and I suppose they were.

Professor McGregor, no longer the formidable man I had first met, thought my quick progress with the dissertation "quite acceptable": a dissertation was not intended to be a candidate's magnum opus, but only a demonstration that he could do  independent work and document it satisfactorily.  All the same, I knew he was disappointed in me.

As  mine was the first dissertation in Arts ever presented to UBC’s  Faculty of Arts and Sciences (a separate Faculty of Arts was created in 1964),  and as it touched on literature, philosophy, art, music, and other matters, auditors from many departments were in attendance at its defence. [10]   I remember making my opening statements seated at a desk, and then being told (I’m not sure now by whom) that I was expected to remain standing throughout  the defence. That  had probably  been demanded of previous doctoral candidates,  all of whom had written dissertations on scientific subjects requiring demonstration. But it was something of  an imposition for me: shortly before the defence I had injured a leg climbing down the bluff at Newton Wynd to swim in English Bay, and I was still walking on crutches. Several faculty  members apologized afterwards for the imposed condition. But I was supported in the course of the defence by enthusiastic responses from Earle Birney, of the Department of English, [11]  and his interventions silenced the occasional hostile question directed at me by members of some departments, especially Music, who thought I was encroaching on their respective turfs. [12]

Earle Birney (1963)
Credit: UBC Archives (Record no. 7.1/9)

The defence was successful, the typed dissertation was accepted the next morning by the intimidating lady librarian (that was the toughest of all tests), and, as I recall,  that same day  I boarded a plane for Toronto, where I was already a week late for my new teaching duties at St. Michael’s College.  Dean Gage [13] had told me, when he formally announced my doctoral status, that doctor  meant "teacher," and that the University of British Columbia expected me to take my teaching seriously.  I did.

Walter Gage (1958)
Credit: UBC Archives (Record no. 1.1/12212)

I was not able, immersed in teaching in Toronto, to attend the congregation at UBC that granted me my degree, and,  as it turned out,  I did not return to Vancouver for almost forty years. In the meantime I put the skills I had learned at UBC to good use, teaching and writing on the Classics in Toronto, Houston, Chicago, Berkeley, and Rome. I became something of an expert at teaching Roman comedy, eliciting "laughs by the carload"  from my Plautus and Terence classes. Catullus and Horace were my special interests at first, but eventually I found myself teaching about the Trojan War year-in and year-out. Homer and Virgil became my life. Ironically, Tacitus, the first classical author I read complete, was to be the only writer I never taught in the original language.

Eventually, Orpheus was to become something of a personal symbol: the famous Attic frieze  depicting his loss of Eurydice graced the  cover of my first book, on Horace’s Odes; my book on Virgil’s Georgics bore the title Virgil as Orpheus; my latest book, on opera, bears the subtitle From Orpheus to Ariadne. All three of them drew on the dissertation  I wrote at UBC. [14]

As the years passed Professor Riddehough continued to write me, always careful to address me as "Dr. Lee."   A man of  many  religious,  and parareligious,  interests, he was never able to call me "Father,"  nor did I ever ask it of him.  Professors Grant and Guthrie died in 1967 and 1972 respectively, but I sometimes saw Professor Eliot in Toronto and at meetings of various classical associations, where we spoke less of Beazley’s work on red and black figure Attic vases than of matters operatic. He was by then  president of the University of Prince Edward Island.

Professor McGregor lost his beautiful wife Marguerite, of whom I have the most glowing memories, in early 1989 while he was in his own last illness. [15]

Malcolm and Marguerite McGregor, June 1985, on the occasion of Malcolm’s receiving his honorary degree.
Credit: CNERS Archives

 I was happy to be able to tell  him,  by letter, that I would remember him and his Marguerite at the site of ancient Troy, which I was determined  to see at last  that summer. His daughter Heather told me later that my words had touched him. Certainly  I hoped, when I stood on the hill of Hissarlik and looked out across the "sounding sea"  towards Virgil’s Tenedos, [16]surveying the "windy plain" [17] where Homer’s  noblest Trojan of t hem all met his death, that my remembering Professor McGregor on that site may have compensated him for the disappointment I was to him three decades before.

Of all those who taught Classics at UBC from 1958 to 1960 I  remember best  that fiercely intelligent, sturdy, swaggering Scots-Canadian,  who was whole-heartedly dedicated to education,  and who loved the Classics with all his soul.

FOOTNOTE 1

[1]   All annotation is mine.  R.B.T.

FOOTNOTE 2

[2] This account is indebted to E.J. McCorkell, Henry Carr -- Revolutionary (Toronto 1969) 136-137, and J. Hanrahan, "Father Carr in Vancouver," Canadian Catholic Review 3:11 (1985) 14-20 at 17-18.

FOOTNOTE 3

[3]   This was delivered in November 1950.

FOOTNOTE 4

[4]   Specifically at Saskatoon, where he had founded St. Thomas More’s College.

FOOTNOTE 5

[5]   Specifically Greek 306: Greek Historians, which also allowed for Thucydides.

FOOTNOTE 6

[6]   This was Classical Studies 430, first listed in the Calendar for 1957-8, and in fact designated as "open to advanced undergraduates and to graduate students."

FOOTNOTE 7

[7]   He obtained this degree in 1961, and his dissertation, The Coastal Demes of Attika, was published the following year by the University of Toronto Press

FOOTNOTE 8

[8]   This was by P.R. Readings, The Tiresias Tradition in Western Literature, Indiana University, 1959; see Dissertation Abstracts 19 (1959) 2337-8.

FOOTNOTE 9

[9]   At Iliad 1.157 Achilles uses this expression (OU)/REA/ TE SKIO/ENTA QA/LASSA/ TE H)XH/ESSA) to identify the distance that lies between Troy and his native Phthia. 

FOOTNOTE 10

[10]   This occured at 3 p.m., Wednesday 21 September 1960, in Buchanan C256.

FOOTNOTE 11

[11]  Birney (1904-95) was at UBC between 1946 and 1965, in the Department of English, and later that of Creative Writing. 

FOOTNOTE 12

[12]   The Department of Music was represented on the committee by G.Welton Marquis (1916-85), Head of Music 1958-72.

FOOTNOTE 13

[13]   Walter Gage chaired Lee’s oral examination, although the Dean of Graduate Studies, Gordon Shrum, is listed as Chair on the official programme for the event.  Gage, since 1948 Dean of Administrative and Inter-Faculty Affairs (what today might perhaps be called a Vice-President), could only recommend to the Faculty of Graduate Studies that the dissertation be accepted.

FOOTNOTE 14

[14]   These books are: Word, Sound and Image in the Odes of Horace (Ann Arbor 1959), Virgil as Orpheus: A Study of the ‘Georgics’ (Albany 1996), and A Season of Opera: From Orpheus to Ariadne (Toronto 1998).  There are two articles by Father Lee based on his dissertation: "Orpheus and Eurydice: Some Modern Versions," Classical Journal 56 (1961) 307-13, and "Orpheus and Eurydice: Blueprint for Opera," Canadian Music Journal 6 (1962) 23-36.  The definitive modern study of Orpheus by a classical scholar is C. Segal, Orpheus: the Myth of the Poet (Baltimore and London 1989).

FOOTNOTE 15

[15]   Malcolm McGregor married Marguerite Blanche Guinn in June 1938.  He had met her at Princeton while he was at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1937-8 working on the first volume of The Athenian Tribute Lists, published in 1939.

FOOTNOTE 16

[16]   Cf. Aeneid 2.21-22.

FOOTNOTE 17

[17]   The epithet "windy" (H)NEMO/EIJ) is frequently applied to Troy itself in Homer’s Iliad; e.g., 3.305 and 8.499.