The Strangers' Gallery
Page 16
The projectionist said he was the only one in the building, perhaps in the whole province, who knew how it worked. It was temperamental, he added, and it sometimes took him an hour to get it up and running. When he finally did, after only about half an hour, the 16 mm film roared to life with a booming newsreel voice backed, appropriately, by a Beethovenian score. But it was our fatherland, our glorious new industrialized “burn your boats” fatherland, that unreeled before our eyes. Perhaps the Only Living Father of Confederation, as the avuncular Smallwood liked to call himself in his sunset years, had never actually said, “Burn your boats.” He always denied it, said he had once given “the longest speech in Newfoundland’s history” in support of our fishermen and the great glorious Newfoundland fishery, but every feverish frame of those films shouted those infamous words.
Also, in 1983, Miles discovered an unknown Richard Squires diary—or some excerpts from a diary, dated January 17, 1936—buried among the papers of a former member of Miles’s traitorous Bow-Wow Parliament. Apparently, the diary had not been among Squires’s Midstream papers. Attached to it was a note from an anonymous donor, which said: “Joey Smallwood is supposed to have all Sir Richard Squires’s diaries but he doesn’t have this one, and he has never had it.”
“Squires might have been a sleeveen,” Miles said, “but he wouldn’t have sold the country down the drain. He knew what was going on, and this diary tells us all about it. The commissioners were afraid of him, you know. They had him under surveillance. They thought he had a shadow government in waiting and was plotting their overthrow, trying to engineer a coup. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that they tried to do away with him.”
Around eleven o’clock I went over to the Arts Building cafeteria for a coffee, and on my way back I noticed that the John Lewis Paton memorial shrine, which used to face us as we came in through the main door of the library, had been unceremoniously moved to the side, into the shadows. Displayed inside a normally illuminated, but now unplugged and dusty, glass case, on top of a sort of mini-altar, is a graven image of the saintly John Lewis Paton, our founding father, president of the university from 1925 to 1933. It is as a lapsed Catholic, I’m sure, and not as an alumnus or an employee of this great institution of higher learning, that I always feel a Pavlovian urge to genuflect as I walk past this shrine, or expect to see flowers or votive candles placed in front of it.
Was Father Paton in disgrace? I wondered. Had someone made a major archival discovery and taken unilateral symbolic action? It would not have come as a great surprise.
Back at my post, I took out the John Lewis Paton file. Father Patron, as Miles is fond of calling him, is described in one item in the file as “among the greatest of British public school headmasters, with Arnold of Rugby, Sanderson of Oundle, and Thring of Uppingdam.” Needless to say, the English public school became the model for the new colonial university, established in 1925. “He eschewed all honours,” we are told, “both academic and public. He wanted no biography written of him, no picture painted.”
No biography was necessary, according to a Newfoundland Quarterly article, for “his whole life, a complete biography, can be summed up in five words—he went about doing good.” Perhaps a hagiography would be in order, but even that would be difficult, for, according to the DNB, Britain’s Dictionary of National Biography, he “destroyed his personal papers to ensure the fulfilment of his wish”—more like a phobia, it seems to me—“that no memoir of him should be written.”
Destroyed: the last word an archivist wants to hear. Lost, misplaced, withheld…well, there’s still hope. And this wholesale pre-emptive strike, archivally speaking, on the part of Father Paton, of the line of Arnold, Sanderson, and Thring, has left us all feeling not merely disappointed but a little suspicious as well.
Paton never married, and his sister Mary, who came with him to St. John’s in 1925, was his lifelong companion. She “moved unobtrusively in the background of his life,” the Newfoundland Quarterly tells us, “content with her role of making sure her brother was reasonably well fed and clothed, and that his household had some semblance of order.” This was more difficult in the wintertime, apparently, for he was in the habit of giving away his overcoat to anyone who needed one. And he would sometimes refuse supper, “except for a lettuce leaf and a glass of water.”
They returned to England in 1933, and when Mary died in 1945, he moved in with another sister. I’ve often wondered if Mary had left behind any papers—any letters. The British exiles in the colonies were great letter writers: witness the almost daily Hope-Simpson letters home, describing “colonial mankind” with a kind of empathetic revulsion. It was in these very letters, in fact, as I mentioned before, that Miles had come face to face with his final grim Recognition.
While reading some of these letters one day, I had a poignant, revelatory Recognition of my own. Here is Lady Hope-Simpson, writing to her son Edgar on March 26, 1934:
“Mrs. Lodge [wife of Commissioner Thomas Lodge] and I went to the Colonial Building one day…and I remembered that Daddy [Sir John, her husband] had told me I should have a look at the library. There are three rooms full of all sorts of books, some most interesting. But in the midst of them sits an old grey lady in possession. Nothing will move her—this found, little, dusty antiquity. There she sits amongst the big books; she is far too frail to move—just looking at them—and remembering old times. She is supposed to be the librarian, but she has never even catalogued the books. But she will talk by the hour about the history of the island.”
This is the mysterious woman variously referred to as “Miss Morris,” “Lizzie Morris,” “the legislative librarian,” and “the state archivist”—perhaps the first of our noble line! “A member of the Ryall family,” as one writer remarked—perhaps a humorous reference to her regal bearing, which seems to have soured Lady Hope-Simpson’s visit to her kingdom. This Ryall family, though, were merely the caretakers of the House, and Miss Morris shared their humble basement quarters. During the Great Riot of April 1932—at the height of the clamour, according to Miles’s father—she could be heard playing the piano.
Brendan Harnett, Sr., had witnessed the entire event, having been given the afternoon off work to take part in what one historian has called “the merchants’ revolution.” Sir Richard Squires was back in power; in the election of 1928, he made what has been called “the greatest political comeback in the history of the British Empire,” but he was still up to his old tricks. This time, however, he was accused of stealing money from a sacrosanct pot—a fund for veterans. A crowd of close to ten thousand were on the doorstep of the House, out for blood.
Miss Morris was playing Liszt, said Brendan Harnett, Sr., when the mob broke into the building at the basement level. An amateur musician himself, he recognized the lyrical Liebestraum, “Dreams of Love,” and the rhythmic La campanella, “The Little Bell.” It might have been a bit late to raise the alarm, however; the rioters,
at that point, seemed intent on razing the building, burning it to the ground. They were looking for Sir Richard, who was hiding in the basement. They were ransacking the rooms, including the legislative library. They broke into the Ryall chambers, seized Miss Morris’s piano and dragged it out into the park, where Brendan heard someone play one of Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance marches, “Land of Hope and Glory”—a mob with a sense of humour—before the instrument was smashed to pieces. Amidst the mayhem, Squires fled the building, barely escaping with his life. Brendan saw books flying out through the smashed windows—thrown not by the rioters but by Miss Morris, hoping to save her precious books from being burned. The rioters were foiled in their attempts to set fire to the building, however, and there is no record of which books were saved or lost.
But what would Mary’s letters tell us? I wondered. Not just about her, but about her brother, his less saintly side. I have a feeling that Father Paton, like Father Dewey, had a less saintly side.
This speech was the very first document, in fact, passed along to me by the Right Trusty Miles Harnett, in 1978, about a year after his “retirement,” when he began his laborious archival investigation into Newfoundland affairs.
“Ever seen this?” I remember him saying, in a guttural whisper of alcohol breath—and it was only eleven o’clock in the morning. “There are things in this place best left alone,” he added, as he slid the offending item under my nose and remained hovering over me as if he expected me to read the entire thing on the spot.
“Thanks. I’ll have a look at it later,” I said, after quickly perusing a paragraph or two. He looked offended and went about his business. In the few months he’d been working in the Archives and the Research Library, I had perhaps been over-helpful, over-solicitous, and he was already beginning to regard me as a fellow traveller. Perhaps I was, but I had only skimmed the document when he had first shown it to me.
Today I took it with me when I went to lunch. In his address at Chatam House, Paton, who had retired as university president in 1933 and returned to England, began by saying that wherever he went he was “regarded with a sort of suspicion, as though, coming from Newfoundland, I must be a ‘grafter.’ The national character is under a shade, and for that reason I shall start with some sort of description of the common folk as they are.”
He then reflected, like some permanently bemused and nostalgic anthropologist, on the simple-hearted and simple-minded natives, the noble savages, he had just left behind: fieldwork reflections that would become the cornerstone of Miles’s “moral anthropology” thesis, expounded in a lecture to the Prowse Society many years later.
In describing our recent Island ancestors, Anton’s and mine (I sometimes forgot that his father was a Newfoundlander as well), Paton went on at length: “Think of them,” he said, “living in their little settlements along the shore, which they call ‘outports,’ in wooden houses, with their fishing ‘flakes’—the platforms on which the fish are cured—and their wharves and vessels, between the sea on one side and the forest on the other, looking as though either one or the other would devour them.…Each man builds his own house and makes the furniture for it; he builds his fishing flakes and wharves; he builds his own schooner. They also build their own churches. They handle very little cash. Fish is a sort of currency among them.…I want you to know that there are other things beside [sic] graft in the Newfoundlander. These men strike me always as big children. Moved by fairy tales and often superstitious, misled by the politicians who make promises, ready for what they call the ‘givings-out’ when the elections come on, and led by the nose by designing men just because they have no guile in them but too much of that charity which believeth all things.…Finally, I had wished to say something of the poetic vein in the Newfoundlander. We shall not understand him unless we know this side of him—the big, simple-minded, brave, big-hearted fellow who—”
Spirit! Show me no more! I croaked in Dickensian anguish into the dead air of the faculty lounge. The clock on the wall, however, was not showing the stroke of midnight, but 2:15 p.m. I was glad to see that the place was empty, everyone else having finished their lunch and gone back to work, which was where I should have been. I wasn’t sure if I was addressing Paton or Harnett—perhaps neither, perhaps both. It was Harnett who had disinterred this Ghost of Newfoundland Past—the first of many, but of his past, not mine. At least that was what I had thought at the time. But when I use our letterhead paper now, and read that stern archival injunction at the foot of the page—Respect des fonds—it is perhaps as much a personal imperative that I feel as a professional one.
But enough, kind Spirit. Show me no more.
10. THE TRAVERS TAVERN
Thus in the narrative of his island adventures he tells of how he awoke in terror one night convinced the devil lay upon him in his bed in the shape of a huge dog.
—J. M. Coetzee, “He and His Man”
“I didn’t think there were people like him still around,” Elaine said to me on our way home after I had introduced her to Miles Harnett one evening in the fall of 1977, in the courtyard of the Colonial Building. This was only a few months after I’d first met him myself, but she was echoing the sort of dismissive sentiment that I’d already heard many times, and would, in the years ahead, hear many times more.
So it was not so innocently that I replied, “What kind of people is that?”
“Anti-Confederates,” she said, using a label that, almost fifty years after Confederation, had all but disappeared from everyday political conversation, had been consigned to the history books, as they say, though most of our generation still knew what it meant.
Miles was, no doubt, a dyed-in-the-wool anti-Confederate. “Anti-Confederate Man,” I once heard one of my colleagues disparagingly describe him, cleverly assigning him a permanent place in the fossil record of the Great Political Chain of Being. Many other disparaging epithets have been used to ridicule and abuse the quixotic and enigmatic Brendan “Miles” Harnett. One could easily get lost among the appellations: the De-commissioner, the Great Rememberer, Chief of the Pine Tribe, Prime Minister of the Indignation, Cuffer-in-Residence at the Travers Tavern. And these are magnanimous compared to others I’ve heard: kook, crank, and drunkard not the worst of them.
But from the first, I sensed that there was a lot more to him than that. He was far from being a fossil or a crank of any kind. He was a complicated, living, breathing (if with difficulty) being, evidence for my inchoate belief, which would take shape slowly over the course of my archival career, that the most fundamental archive of all was the archive of the soul, surpassing even the peat bog and amber in preserving the past, though much more inaccessible, impenetrable, even—no less, perhaps, to its owner—and obviously not susceptible to the usual formal archival processes of intervention: appraisal, acquisition, arrangement, description, and preservation. There is much debate these days in the archival journals and in the profession at large about the public historian, the independent scholar, and his private records, his personal fonds. But how is the archivist to deal with souls?
Judging by the names given our public buildings, monuments, and streets—memorial libraries, universities, stadiums, and boulevards, war memorials—you’d think we were a whole nation of Great Rememberers; but in Miles’s view this practice belies a great and grievous propensity, capacity, and desire to forget.
I had introduced Miles and Elaine on a beautiful evening in late September. Elaine and I had been walking around downtown. Coming up Military Road, on our way back home, we stopped in front of the fountain in the courtyard of the Colonial Building. There were a lot of people strolling around, some sitting on benches watching the fountain, and we sat on one end of a bench without at first noticing who was on the other. All I had ever seen Miles wear was a beige raglan, and I hardly knew what he wore underneath, for he never removed it when he was doing research in the Archives, sometimes never even unbuttoned it. Only his haberdasher, Mr. Wilansky, would know for sure. That evening he had on a blue blazer with grey pants, a white shirt, and the usual flowery cravat. I recall thinking that there was a very British look about him. There were rumours that his ancestors were English, not Irish, as he claimed.
In the few months that I’d known him, however, I had never he
ard him say one good word about the British, but many, many uncomplimentary words—some downright unrepeatable, in fact, in the years ahead. Brits, as he called them—not ordinary Britons, but the ruling classes—were a preposterous, galling, and offensive lot, from Sir Humphrey Gilbert in the sixteenth century, who had arrogantly taken possession of Newfoundland for his monarch, to the founder of the Newfoundland Monarchist League in the twentieth. Miles had a mental catalogue of Brits as detailed as Philip Henry Gosse’s Entomologia Terrae Novae, the first scientific treatise on Newfoundland insects.
In the Archives, doing research, he was all business, never taking no for an answer, as persistent and aggravating as the late-summer wasps circling the garbage bins outside. In his new role as retired independent scholar, he had all day, and though he knew that I didn’t, he seemed to be deliberately challenging me by silently repudiating that workaday fact. But that evening at the Colonial Building he was all charm, if a sinister, aggressive sort of charm, like a drunk wanting to kiss a lady’s hand. And wit: he seemed to have discovered a sense of humour, something he hadn’t yet revealed to me. It occurred to me that it was because Elaine was with me, and this was perhaps partly true. An audience brought out the performer in him. These two sides of him, the serious researcher and the comic performer, alternated like his beige raglan and black overcoat, the former worn from June to December, the latter from December to June.