Inside the Order

When I was a final-year undergraduate in English and philosophy, I had a course with a fascinating and learned cleric who subsequently became a mentor: Brocard Sewell of the Carmelites of the Ancient Observance (a Roman Catholic religious order more commonly referred to as the Whitefriars). Sewell’s area of expertise was fin-de-siècle writing—aesthetes and decadents both known and mercifully obscure—and he inspired in his young charges a passion for detective work, sensible prose and tolerant attention to the marginalized. He was postmodern before they invented the word.

Sewell was keenly interested in the art of auto-biographical fiction; he directed my thesis on that subversive and mad purveyor of arcane and recondite prose (and this long before Conrad Lord Black), Frederick William Rolfe or Baron Corvo. Sewell once observed in class that each of us present had within us the capacity to write one book: our autobiography. Fortunately for Canadian letters...