The explanation, of course, was simpler: he was drunk, or at least he’d been drinking. But all his faculties seemed sharp and clear—indeed, more acute and livelier than usual. I thought he hadn’t noticed me at first for he was peering up at the House through what looked like opera glasses and seemed to be talking to himself. Then he lowered them to his lap and surprised me by addressing me in French, albeit a very workmanlike French.
“Bonsoir, Monsieur Lowe,” he said. “Michael…Michel…Madame. Desolé…I was thinking out loud. I can’t think in French, I have to say the words.”
“Votre français est très bon,” I said, in my own workmanlike French.
“Merci, Michel, merci.”
“Brendan, this is Elaine Morry,” I said. “Elaine…Monsieur Brendan Harnett.”
“Enchanté!” he said, standing up and bowing slightly. I half expected him to take her hand and kiss it, but he sat back down and launched into an explanation of his solitary musings.
“A few years ago I was sizing up the old building,” he said, “as is my wont, and I was thinking that what we need up there over that porch—the portico, as the architects call it—is an inscription, a motto, maybe a proverb, anything besides that foolish British coat of arms. We could put a line or two in that big blank space above the Ionic columns. Now what could we use? I asked myself, and a couple of old proverbs sprang to mind: Say nothing, saw wood. Nofty was forty when he lost the pork.
“But then I thought of the inscription on the House en nouvelle France—notre France, Quebec. Je me souviens, it says. And I thought: yes, yes, o’ course. Mais pas je me souviens, mais j’oublie, J’OUBLIE.”
He said this with a slow whispered intensity, and a wry, boyishly mischievous smile.
Though the bare biographical details would tell you nothing, really, as they might appear someday in the Dictionary of Newfoundland Biography, they are as follows: Brendan “Miles” Harnett was born in St. John’s on the twenty-fifth of March 1923. He completed his high school education at St. Bon’s, enrolled in Memorial University College in 1941, and graduated with a diploma in English literature in 1943. As the marathon race-walking champion of St. John’s during his university years, Brendan had earned the nickname “Miles.”
Though the College became a degree-granting institution in 1949, Miles chose to finish his undergraduate degree and do an MA at the University of Toronto. He left Newfoundland to do just that when we joined Canada in 1949. He continued with his athletic career in Toronto as well, twice completing the grueling forty-mile walking race between Toronto and Hamilton in just over seven and a half hours, good for a top-ten finish on both occasions.
At the university he had both Northrop Frye and E. J. Pratt as teachers. Pratt had already won two Governor General’s Awards for poetry before Newfoundland became a part of Canada, and he won another in 1952 while Miles was still a student in Toronto. Pratt was on the verge of retirement by that time, however, and spent a lot of class time telling his students tales of the old days, especially the oft-repeated tale of the Universal Lung Healer, the concoction he’d created and sold to earn enough money to pay his tuition to the University of Toronto.
Miles’s father, Brendan, Sr., was from Harbour Main. He came to St. John’s in 1914 to enlist in the Newfoundland Regiment but was rejected because of his asthma. The ailment probably saved his life, for the first Newfoundland Regiment contingent, the Blue Puttees as they were called, suffered enormous losses in the First World War. Miles would be refused in 1940 for the same reason. His father remained in St. John’s and got a job as a printer’s devil. While not as bad as the euphemistic “theatre of war,” a printing plant was still a dangerous performance venue for an asthmatic, and Miles’s father died there of an asthma attack at forty-one.
Miles was only ten years old when the Commission of Government was inaugurated in the ballroom of the Newfoundland Hotel on February 16, 1934, and had just turned twenty-six when Newfoundland joined Canada in 1949. The political district of Harbour Main-Bell Island, however, his father’s old home district, had the second-highest vote for independence in the referenda of 1948, and its representative at the National Convention of 1946–48 was an advocate of union with the United States. But Brendan, Sr., like Brendan, Jr., had no real interest in politics, practical politics, that is, realpolitik, though he brought home copies of every newspaper that was printed at the plant and read and saved all of them, a huge archival hoard that Miles is still sitting on.
Miles’s mother was a librarian and had grown up in St. John’s. Like Elaine’s mother, she had worked at the Gosling Memorial Library, but was no longer there in 1949 when Ida began working there as a student. There is a picture of his mother in the Encyclopedia of Newfoundland and Labrador, a group photograph that was taken, Miles told me, just after she began work at the library in 1936, the year after it opened, the year after her husband died. She has that wistful, skeptical, vulnerable, but pertinacious look that Miles seems to have inherited from her. I have never seen a photograph of his father. His family—he has one sibling, a sister, who joined the convent at an early age—were voracious readers of the many books that his mother, with her liberal borrowing privileges, would bring home from the library almost every day.
When Brendan Harnett, MA, came back to Newfoundland in 1953, he began teaching in the Memorial University College English department, moving to the new campus in 1961. He taught for twenty-four years, minus a year’s sabbatical in England, before being asked to resign in 1977 because—not to put too fine a point on it—he was sometimes too drunk to teach his classes. The wonder of it was why this had taken so long, though a student in his Romantics course once told me that his drunken lectures were the most inspiring. This had inspired me to enroll in his Romantics course in the fall of 1968, only to discover, on the day I turned up for class, that Professor Harnett was on sabbatical.
Hoping to take the course the following year, I switched to an introductory course in classics. In my final undergraduate year, though, in the fall of 1969, I wasn’t able to fit the Romantics course into my schedule, as the department head was intent on fattening me up for graduate studies with courses in textual criticism, bibliography, Old English, and critical theory. So I never did encounter Miles in the classroom. When I finally did meet him, about eight years later, he was lecturing on another subject altogether.
It was 1977, an eventful year—an annus mirabilis, perhaps. I’d been working at the Archives for about two years by then, and in the summer Miles started working in there as well—as a “private investigator,” an “independent scholar,” a “public historian,” as he variously described himself, depending on whom he was talking to. He had retired from teaching in the spring, he said, and he began to spend almost as much time in the Archives as I did. I was an employee, however, and he, as he liked to say, was “a free man.” Free, in those first few months, to fill up my days with his endless queries.
Coincidentally, Joey Smallwood had also retired in 1977, after dragging out his vainglorious political career to the bitter end, and taking his Great Liberal Party into retirement with him. Though Miles, like his father before him, had never been involved in politics in any ordinary, practical way and had never met Smallwood (though he claimed to have read everything he ever wrote), in 1966 he found himself in a meeting room with the man at Confederation Building—that “inland lighthouse,” as Miles called it, the guiding light for all those who had burned their boats.
It was the first time he had ever been inside its doors. The occasion was a “revival meeting” of the Newfoundland Historical Society, of which Miles was, or had been, a member. The society had been dormant for four years, and at this meeting Smallwood was elected its new president. Right then and there, Miles told me, the idea of an alternative historical society occurred to him—not an alternative to the Newfoundland Historical Society so much as to King Joey Smallwood himself, to the society, the poli
tical culture, that he had created, to L’État c’est moi. This was to become the Prowse Society, though it didn’t really see the light of day until Miles’s own retirement eleven years later.
Nineteen sixty-six was another eventful year, officially designated Come Home Year to coincide with the opening of the Newfoundland section of the Trans-Canada Highway. An attempt had been made to “Finish the Drive in ’65,” but construction was a year behind schedule. Smallwood had conceived of the idea of the Great Return in 1964: a tourism extravaganza disguised as a patriotic appeal to the estimated two million expatriate Newfoundlanders and their descendants, about four times the Island’s population, to return to the fatherland, the old homeland. The idea was not new. Newfoundlanders had been emigrating from the homeland in large numbers for a long, long time, and an Old Home Week had been organized by a group of expatriates in the Boston States in 1904 to, as they put it, “bring together the exiled sons and daughters of Terra Nova, that they might meet again.”
The highlight of all the 1966 events was the official opening of the highway on July 11. A motorcade with Premier Smallwood and Prime Minister Lester Pearson left Confederation Building and drove out to the provincial halfway point of the Trans-Canada Highway, about ten miles west of Grand Falls, where the prime minister unveiled a 60-foot shaft made of granite from Smallwood’s Confederate hometown of Gambo. This granite shaft, Miles said, couldn’t have been a more appropriate symbol of Confederation, and of our entire association with Canada in general, past, present, and to come, than if he had conceived of it himself. Not that we hadn’t been complicit, he added, in providing a welcoming anus mirabilis. Seventeen years later, in 1983, the year of the Sir Humphrey Gilbert quatercentenary, Miles was inspired to write a letter to the editor proposing the erection of a 120-foot obelisk—“The Great Shaft”—on the site where Gilbert had formally claimed Newfoundland for Britain.
In 1977, a tide of Newfoundland nationalism was on the rise, though misguided, meretricious, and a bit late, in Miles’s view. The “Newfoundland Renaissance” had been proclaimed the previous year in the pages of a mainland magazine, albeit by a Newfoundland journalist in exile. Strangely enough, though maybe not, as this nationalism was a-building, monarchism began to rear its ugly crown. Smallwood had left the political scene only to be replaced very quickly by another Harnett nemesis, Lady Jacqueline Barlow, head of the Newfoundland Monarchist League, a devotee not only of the Royals but also of Labrador retrievers—“Little Newfoundland” dogs, as they were called. On the surface, this was an odd boxed set of devotions, but they seemed perfectly compatible to Miles.
According to an interview in her vertical file in the Research Library, Lady Barlow and her husband, British architect Sir Christopher Barlow, moved from the mainland to Newfoundland in Come Home Year, and she must have thought that she was coming home. Born in Cheshire, England, in 1929, she had been presented to the King and Queen at court when only a teenager. Upon her arrival in Newfoundland, she quickly noticed that almost every house had a portrait of the Queen. The idea for the Newfoundland Monarchist League must have occurred to her right then and there; ironically, the same year the Newfoundland Historical Society was revived and the idea for the patriotic Prowse Society occurred to Miles. She formally founded the league four years later, and was crowned chairperson in 1973.
The league went quietly about its business until the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977. Well, not that quietly. Lady Barlow refused stamps at the post office if they didn’t bear a picture of the Queen, drove around town with a large Union Jack flying from the antenna of her car, and held festive dinners on the Royals’ birthdays. The league marked the Silver Jubilee by collecting over four hundred thousand signatures from all over Newfoundland on a Declaration of Loyalty to the Crown. It was a Declaration of Independence in reverse, signed by four-fifths of the population, formally claiming Newfoundland for Britain all over again, a fitting prelude to the 1983 Gilbert celebrations. Assembled in red, white, and blue binders, bound with a gold cord and packed in a box weighing fifty-five pounds, the declaration was presented to the Queen at her summer residence at Balmoral by Newfoundland veterans of both world wars. The Queen sent Lady Barlow a Little Newfoundland dog as a reward for “a jolly good effort.”
“Here’s something for your vertigo files, best read supine,” Miles said to me one day in the Research Library Reading Room, showing me the report in the Evening Telegram of Lady Barlow’s loyalist coup, the first major inflammatory initiative in a campaign that would drive him to complete distraction. He would, quite literally, be “vexed to nightmare,” in the words of his favourite poet, Yeats. “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last…?”
That same evening, on Miles’s personal invitation, I attended my first meeting of the Prowse Society and became the unofficial secretary—very unofficial, and certainly not on his invitation—of an organization that Miles said had existed, at least informally, for more than ten years. It had no official membership, no officers, no dues, no constitution, no publications, and no meetings as such, but if you happened to be at the Travers Tavern when the spirit moved him…well, you could sip your drink and listen to “President” Miles Harnett rant and roar, like the “true Newfoundlanders” of traditional song. A full forty verses on almost every occasion. But I’m being unfair. Sometimes there were good reasons for his roaring: new torments, old indignities, enormous provocations. Nightmares.
Besides Lady Barlow’s Declaration of Loyalty, there was the twenty-eight by forty-two-foot Union Jack, second-largest in the world, made in Hong Kong and raised on a specially built flagpole in Cupids, Conception Bay, by the Newfoundland Monarchist League in 1981 to honour Prince Charles on the occasion of his marriage to Lady Diana. Whether the site was chosen for its auspicious name, with all its cute romantic connotations, or, more likely, because it was the site of Britain’s first colonial plantation in the New World, founded by John Guy in 1610, the newspaper report in Lady Barlow’s file did not say. The flag was large enough to be wrapped around an entire house in St. John’s in 1983, during Queen Elizabeth’s official visit on the occasion of the Gilbert quatercentenary.
Miles was not joking about the nightmares. As he was asthmatic, they usually left him gasping for air. One night he dreamt that his own house had been wrapped in something heavy and dark. He couldn’t see and he couldn’t breathe, both in the nightmare and when he woke up. Awakened by a loud noise in the middle of the night, he found himself in complete darkness. He always slept with a night light on, but a car had struck a utility pole nearby, cutting off his electricity.
In another dream, he was lying in an open casket, wrapped like a mummy in Union Jack bunting, and people were filing by, himself included, in a long, long line. “Hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions,” he heard someone behind him saying—he was sure he knew who it was, but he couldn’t turn around—as they were going up the steps of a ransacked building that looked like the old House after the Great Riot of 1932. Someone was playing a funereal air on a piano beneath a tree in Bannerman Park next door.
But the worst one of all was “the Old Dawg,” as he called it, a version of the Old Hag, I guess: a recurring nightmare in which he seemed to be awake and pinned to the bed by an old woman sitting on his chest, an old hag with the black face of a Newfoundland dog. Not even a crucifix, apparently, could deal with that one. The only cure for it, he’d been told, was to drive nails through a shingle and lash it, nails up, to his breast.
These days Miles is known less as an anti-monarchist and more as a Newfoundland nationalist, though patriot is what he prefers to be called, when he consents to being called anything at all. On September 13, 1946, when Anton was just in swaddling clothes and I hadn’t even been born, the twenty-three-year-old Miles Harnett drank his first bottle of Dominion Ale, brewed practically next door at the Bennett Brewery, at the Travers Tavern, where the Newfoundland House of Assembly had first sat, though n
ot at its present location. It had moved from Duckworth Street east to Water Street west that same year. He sat at the bar by himself, for he didn’t know a soul in the place and was very shy. He listened to a radio broadcast of that afternoon’s speeches from the floor of the National Convention. He sat at the bar for hours, stayed late into the evening, and drank many more Dominion Ales.
Miles had just begun working as a proofreader at the same Water Street printing establishment where his father had worked all his life. He had already worked for three years at a clerical job in the Commission of Government civil service, in Home Affairs and Education. The Travers was just up the street from the printing plant, and Miles would go there almost every day after work, which usually ended around six o’clock. Being a young bachelor—perhaps even an eligible one, though he would remain single all his life—
he would often stay on and have his supper at the tavern, then listen to the speeches from the National Convention, meeting to decide Newfoundland’s future. Forty-five members had been elected in June 1946—the first general election in Newfoundland in fourteen years—and began sitting on September 11.
The radio broadcasts were on the government station—vonf, the Voice of Newfoundland frequency—whose home was on the top floor of the Newfoundland Hotel. The radio voice people began to hear with the most frequency, however, was that of Joey Smallwood, who used the broadcasts to promote his dream of Confederation with Canada—“pimping for Confederation,” as Miles put it. Joey knew how to use the airwaves better than anyone else. Before and during the war, his radio show, The Barrelman, also on vonf, had been the most popular radio program in Newfoundland. Joey’s voice, his mesmerizing oratory, would go on to become the Voice of Newfoundland, drowning out practically all other voices after 1949.
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