The Strangers' Gallery

by Paul Bowdring

  What a lark! What a plunge! as Mrs. Dalloway would say. A whole boxful of stuff had been left on the desk for my filing pleasure, with a big yellow stick-it that said DEWEY FILES, initialed M. D.—not Melvil Dewey, inventor of the vertical file, but Milton Dohey, chief reference librarian. Though he can be a bit officious at times, Milton does have a sense of humour. He just doesn’t want anyone sitting around, even on a quiet Saturday morning, waiting for students to make their tentative approaches or—the horror—reading a book. Milton, I thought, thou shouldst be filing at this hour.

  Unlike the solitary bottle of Newfoundland cod liver oil that had been displayed at the first world’s fair, the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London, the vertical file, first exhibited at the 1893 World’s Fair in New York City, was not greeted with derision. Just the opposite, in fact; it won a gold medal, though it was not Melvil Dewey’s main claim to fame. A nineteenth-century librarian-entrepreneur, regarded by some as the father of the modern library, he is better known as the inventor of the Dewey Decimal Classification (ddc), a revolutionary scheme for organizing books in libraries.

  Milton had also placed a stick-it on every document to be filed, every piece of paper in the box, with the name of the file it was to be placed in, or the name of a new file to be prepared. I’d been told that he insisted on vetting every scrap of paper that went into the Vertical Files. But there were many rogue files in there, even one on Father Dewey, who may have had a classification system for human beings as well as books—and Jews, Blacks, and women weren’t all that happy with their place in it. Of course, I had secretly placed a copy of the Brendan “Miles” Harnett Fonds, my perennial work-in-progress, in there for safekeeping, until I secured a permanent home for it in the Archives.

  The first item in the box was for the file on Sir Richard Squires, variously referred to by historians and other writers as the cat, the fox, the wolf, the chameleon, the eel, or the leopard of Newfoundland politics, as he seemed to have displayed at almost every stage of his career the proverbial characteristics associated with all these slick and sly and predatory creatures.

  As a graduate student in the early seventies, I had shared a house with a student named Squires—he never used his first name and I can’t recall what it was. He was doing a thesis on Sir Richard, but insisted he was no relation to Newfoundland’s world-class candidate for personification of the evils of parliamentary democracy, emblematic leader of that pack of politicians of the 1920s and early 1930s, who, as one of Joey Smallwood’s biographers wrote, “might have taken lessons in ethics from any pack of wolves.” (Smallwood, of course, had taken lessons from Squires himself.) But the biographer qualified this harsh judgment by saying that they were no different from politicians anywhere else in North America. Corruption was the “normal, ordinary, accepted” practice, he said; “the most infallible symptom of constitutional liberty,” as the Great Gibbon had more cleverly put it. It should be noted, however, that though Sir Richard had been accused of practically everything, he had been convicted of only one thing: tax evasion.

  What a lark! What a plunge! As he got up from the breakfast table every morning, Burford Neary, the other graduate student who shared the house, was fond of quoting Virginia Woolf in his best Joe Batt’s Arm/Bloomsbury accent. After wolfing down yet another plateful of leftover turr, he would head back upstairs to his room for another day’s work on his Woolf thesis. The house reeked of the oily acrid smell of turr, more pervasive than tar, as bad as if someone had just tarred the roof and left all the windows wide open.

  Every weekend during the spring hunting season Burford would go home to Joe Batt’s Arm, on Fogo Island, a place not far from another island, the Funks, a bare forsaken rock that had the largest turr—or murre, as they were ornithologically known—colony in the world. He would bring back a half-dozen for Sunday dinner, his Sunday dinner, for Squires and I were so put off by the smell of those fishy birds baking in their own oily juices—“Enough to make you Burf,” as Squires used to say—that we wouldn’t have anything to do with them. Burford had a huge appetite anyway, especially after his weekend expeditions, and didn’t need any help from us. Leftovers he ate for breakfast practically every morning of the week. By midsummer the man must have been half seabird, for he began to exude an unpleasant sort of smell himself.

  He was a strange bird at that. His room was wallpapered with Playboy centrefolds, all of which had the same mimeographed picture—from a book jacket, I believe—of the long, plain, pensive, melancholy face of Virginia Woolf pasted over the faces of the splayed but sprayed, prudently airbrushed, naked women. She was looking shyly away from the camera, as if she knew what was going on. He had explained to us matter-of-factly, without any trace of embarrassment or irony, as we helped him move in a new desk one day, that he needed this physical manifestation of Virginia to ground his exegesis of her airy, wavy, impressionistic—not to say insubstantial—prose, or else he was subject to a sort of esthetic vertigo. He needed her body, he said, to put it plainly, and left it at that. So, needless to say, did we.

  It was no surprise that Burford never finished his thesis, but, then again, neither did I. I had started two, in fact, one on the eighteenth-century poet William Cowper and another on the nineteenth-century poet John Clare, before a notice on the English department bulletin board in the summer of 1975 advertising a position for an archival assistant had led me permanently astray. Drifting and daydreaming through my days, after almost five years of graduate school, I think I secretly wanted to be led astray. The former director of the Archives, who interviewed me with my scant CV scrunched up in his hand as if he were intent on conveying exactly what he thought of it, nevertheless seemed greatly impressed by a particular graduate course I had listed, and grilled me on the details.

  The course, Textual Criticism, was one I had been required to take—“to fill in some of the black holes in your background,” as the head of the English department had put it. For my major paper I had examined, in rigorous chronological order, all the published versions of W. H. Auden’s infamous poem—in some quarters, at least—“In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” a poem Auden had “ideologically revised,” according to my professor. Though in a foreword to one of his books Auden denied that he had ever revised his former thoughts and feelings, “only the language in which they were first expressed,” he had, nevertheless, cut three full stanzas from his poem on Yeats. These had expressed the view that Time, or Posterity, “Worships language and forgives/Everyone by whom it lives,” a notion that even Miles Harnett might have swallowed if Auden hadn’t specifically extended the pardon to “Kipling and his views.”

  The director had asked to see the paper, and less than a week later I received a handwritten letter. My paper, he said, had convinced him that I had “a natural scholarly bent” and, above all, “a nose for documents.” I was to become the new archival assistant, one of four on staff, whose duties were “to assist, under the supervision of the director, with document appraisal, selection, accessioning, arrangement, description, preservation, and access.” I didn’t know whether I was pleased or not.

  You’d think I was one of the authors of the famed “Dutch manual,” that hundred-year-old landmark of archival literature penned by Anton’s countrymen Muller, Feith, and Fruin, “the Holy Trinity,” as we referred to them. Though they had come up from the polder instead of down from the mountain—there being no real mountain in Holland for them to come down from—their one hundred principles of archival practice are regarded as commandments to this day.

  The director’s letter concluded with what I thought to be some sort of commandment—or archival proverb, motto, or dictum. Neatly balancing the tasteful letterhead at the top (Archives and Special Collections), it said, at the bottom, in capitalized, bold, italicized Old English script, but en français: RESPECT DES FONDS. As I was quickly to find out, respect des fonds was what I would regularly be required to have a lot of, the most important archival vi
rtue of all, the most important commandment of all, according to Muller, Feith, and Fruin, in what they rather self-deprecatingly described as their “tedious and meticulous book.”

  Dewey be damned! was how I sometimes thought of the principle of respect des fonds, or le principe de la provenance, as others referred to it. As one of Dewey’s countrymen, a well-known archivist-historian, had put it in 1912, when Dewey’s new system was taking the library world by storm: “No decimal system of classification, no refined methods of library science, no purely chronological or purely alphabetical arrangement can be successfully applied to the classification of archives.” In other words, not to put too fine a point on it: keep it as you find it. Each fonds, or discrete archival collection, each group of records or files, was to be kept separate and intact, and in the order in which it was acquired, the order in which its creator kept it. No arbitrary or theoretical system of arrangement—Dewey Decimal Classification or anything else—was to be imposed on it. There were exceptions to this iron rule, of course, but, as both Elaine and I used to say, when there was still warmth and good will between us, when resignation and despair hadn’t eaten their way into everything, when we were still able to tease our troubles away, “As you know, archivists and librarians are very different.”

  Squires didn’t finish his thesis either. The dropout rate for graduate students, he once told us, as if anticipating what was coming, was even higher than that for first-years. But perhaps he had only made this up. Squires was fond of making things up. In retrospect, the career of politician Squires seemed a perfect subject for him, for the incredible and outrageous truth of it could easily absorb or outshine anything that student Squires could conjure up.

  It wasn’t only Squires’s name that was coincidental—if indeed it was. The three-bedroom townhouse we shared near the rear entrance to Bowring Park, which we rented for more than three years, was on Squires Avenue, named after Sir Richard. His former estate, Midstream—situated between South Brook and the Waterford River—was just down the road and is now part of Bowring Park. Our man Squires spent a lot of time poking around down there. Out on a walk in the park one morning, I’d seen him peering down into the old well of the former estate, as if for inspiration—it had been reconstructed as a heritage project and identified with a plaque—but in the end all this fieldwork didn’t do him much good.

  I accidentally ran into him outside the Avalon Mall about a decade later. This would have been about 1983. I came out through the main door and got into a taxi, and who should be driving it but Squires. He seemed genuinely overjoyed to see me. He said he still intended to finish his thesis, but had sunk into despair a few years ago when he’d discovered—a bit late!—that Smallwood, Squires’s lifelong disciple, had destroyed half of his master’s papers. This was, in fact, true. Not just rearranged, but destroyed! Smallwood had quite casually revealed this himself in a speech given in 1968, and published in a book of miscellaneous pieces about ten years later. (A handwritten copy of the original speech is in the Rockwell Kent Fonds. Perhaps Kent had liked it so much that Smallwood had given it to him.)

  Squires had been through more jobs than I’d ever seen listed on the French flaps of anyone’s long-overdue Pomes Penyeach. He must have mentioned a dozen or more on the way to the university in his taxi. But cab driving, he said, suited him to a tee—as truck driving seemed to agree with Anton. He even enjoyed all the waiting around, he said. It gave him lots of time to read.

  “Jesus, I miss this place,” he said, as he dropped me off on the sidewalk in front of the Arts Building. “I’m gonna get back to that thesis before long.”

  Dreams, empty dreams…I thought, recalling half-forgotten lines from the long-forgotten Cowper, from his best forgotten poem, “The Task.”

  And still they dream…Rings the world with the vain stir…of the thesis-making task, I added, to Cowper’s despairing but consoling immortal lines. Dreams, empty dreams.

  American artist Rockwell Kent had first visited Newfoundland in 1910, then came back here to live at the beginning of the First World War; but, probably because of his Pennsylvania German accent, he was suspected of being a German spy and deported in 1915. Smallwood had become aware of this while rooting around in the Squires papers in the early 1950s, and, to make amends, in 1968 he invited Kent back to Newfoundland for a state dinner. In his after-dinner speech, Smallwood had shamelessly described his archival hatchet job on Squires’s papers, which he’d found out were stored in a barn on the Midstream estate. With the family’s permission, he’d moved them to the basement of his premier’s residence, Canada House, on Circular Road, where he’d performed his culling job, his filleting work, the archival version of the head, guts, and soundbone dance. Very fishy, indeed, as student Squires had remarked, but I suppose Smallwood thought he was just carving a paper monument—in the words of what seems to be the favourite headstone inscription in this part of the world—“sacred to the memory of” his mentor, his hero, his political father.

  But this raises an important question: what other archival hatchet jobs had Smallwood performed? If he would do this to someone else’s papers, what would he do to his own? What would he do to Newfoundland’s papers? He who wanted a place more sacred in our memory than anyone else’s. He who was convinced, and tried to convince us, that Newfoundland history began with him, in 1949, or with the Great Referendum Victory of 1948, or with his Great Election to the Great National Convention in 1946; or perhaps with one of his Great Returns to Newfoundland—from New York in 1925, from London in 1927, from Montreal in 1945, or from Ottawa in 1947. Jesus, I’m beginning to sound like Harnett.

  There is, of course, the ultra-radical view held by the deconstructionist fringe of our very conservative profession that this culling and filleting, this archival housecleaning, goes on all the time. All the world’s a text and an archive is no exception, as is every fonds in the archive. A fictional text, they say, “a new literary genre,” even; an imaginative construction or reconstruction. A story with a narrator so unreliable he is reliable, told first of all by the “author,” the original creator of the text, and then by the author’s collaborator, the archivist, the recreator. According to this theory, the author, upon request, deposits a version of his story in the archives—includes, excludes, changes, destroys, fabricates, etc., as is his wont—and the archivist then appraises, values, selects, rejects, arranges, constructs, describes, restricts, etc. There is a “document fetish” alive and afoot in archive-land, say these archival theorists. That archival evidence is pure, primary, sacred, and trustworthy is a lie we have all chosen to believe.

  The house that became known as Canada House when it became the home of the Canadian High Commissioner in 1941—the name is still on the wrought-iron gates—was built as a private residence in 1902 and became Smallwood’s home and offices when he was elected Newfoundland’s first provincial premier in 1949. The year I was born, literally Year One for me, would become Year One for everyone else—if Smallwood had anything to do with it. We became Canadians, we would learn Canadian history, we moved with Smallwood into Canada House. We might be merely tenants, but we would still be in there, still have a place to lay our heads. Newfoundland history would begin here, and though the Colonial Building, Newfoundland House, was just down the road, across the park, it would soon be light years away.

  But not for everyone. In 1974, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Confederation, when I was still in the netherland of graduate studies, Miles Harnett had sardonically proposed in a letter to the editor (one that I hadn’t seen at the time, but is now in the Brendan “Miles” Harnett Fonds) that the Colonial Building be renamed Canada House. Not, however, with Je me souviens carved into the stone portico—the inscription on the front of the Quebec National Assembly—but J’oublie. He would re-enact this antic proposal for Elaine and me, in a most charming performance, in the courtyard of the Colonial Building three years later.

  I had no need to
forget: I was a clean slate, a naïf, historically speaking. When my mother used to refer to Newfoundland as “the country,” I always thought she was talking about Canada. But when I was sixteen years old and in my last year of high school, I was helping her fill out the 1965 census form, and I saw her scratch in, with her pre-Confederation fountain pen,“Newfoundland” as her “Country of Origin,” and “Newfoundlander” as her “Nationality.” Years later, as part of my archival endeavours, I would find myself examining the country’s last census report, taken in 1945, on which there were questions about x-rays and tuberculosis. Had she forgotten the wretched, painful, humiliating, disease-ridden past? Had she not looked forward to the glorious golden future? She would live, in good health and relative prosperity, to see a new provincial flag with a symbolic golden arrow pointing toward it. Why couldn’t she follow the signs? Had she not seen Our Saviour’s glowing progress reports?

  Almost immediately after Confederation, Smallwood had hired a Latvian filmmaker named Lucis to make an ongoing cinematic Progress Report (so-called) documenting this feverish industrialized future as he was creating it. Every scene of this propaganda serial had a rapturous, industrial-strength climax, with the simultaneous conception and birth of some great new cement plant, lumber mill, sealskin tannery, or chocolate factory. The films are in the Still and Moving Images collection of the government archives in the Colonial Building. Miles brought them to my attention in 1984, the year I was seconded to work down there.

  One dark and dreary afternoon in January, we followed a projectionist down to the bottom floor of the building to view the films on what he called a “flatbed projector,” which, he said, produced less wear and tear on archival films than a regular projector. I thought he had also called it “the Steambeck.” Indeed, when I first saw it, looming in the corridor, I was sure he had. It looked as if it needed not only a flatbed to transport it, but also steam to operate it. A small rectangular brass plate on top, however, said W. S. Steenbeck & Co., Hamburg, Germany, though there was no date of manufacture. If it had said, Edison Projector, U.S.A., 1896, I wouldn’t have been surprised. A picture of Buster Keaton taped on the wall above it suggested that it might be of 1920s vintage, but we found out later that the 1950s was closer to the mark. Evidently, it was too big to install in a room. It took up almost the entire corridor, and its mesmerizing array of knobs, levers, rollers, plates, and prisms looked like the console of a starship in a low-budget sci-fi film.