The Strangers' Gallery

by Paul Bowdring

  But remembering and forgetting, when our hearts are pure, our passions cool, our work ruled by a disinterested rigour, are just two sides of the same archival coin, bearing the inscription, perhaps, In archives we trust. You have to trust us, gentle reader. To borrow a few lines from Henry James, perhaps the shortest he ever wrote: “We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of—” Well…he said art, but we could say archives. Faced with the everyday, burdensome, anxiety-ridden obligation to preserve the past—our knowledge of it depends almost entirely on written documents—imagine the constant pressure under which we archivists labour. As a professional group, we can’t be far behind dentists, out there on the suicidal edge, feverishly obsessing over what to save and what to extract—to annul, as we euphemistically refer to it.

  Besides written documents, of course, there is a scant visual and aural archive; there is the scattered honourable, if unreliable, witness still stumbling about; and there is the barely breathing, and even more unreliable, oral tradition. But, as I say, this record is very small; documents, documents, documents are all, the unpublished ones the main focus of our concern. What to keep and what to throw away: select or reject, preserve or annul? In his famous Thesaurus of 1852, the scholar Roget, not to be fooled, quite rightly included annulment under heading 693: Destruction, along with its companions extinction, elimination, eradication, annihilation, liquidation, suppression, silencing, and extermination.

  Although I’m fond of saying that archivists, like misers, never throw anything away, I’m really just talking about our instinctive selves, and especially my hoarding, pack rat, magpie self. It may come as a surprise to learn that, in the profession at large, the opposite is closer to the truth: we throw almost everything away. In the cavernous archival holding rooms, in an anonymous, fortress-like building that we share with municipal and provincial government archivists down on the old military base in Pleasantville, records released from numerous sources, of diverse provenance, await their fate. (Holding pens, Anton calls them; he was amused to discover that the city’s largest slaughterhouse is right across the street.)

  Picture us down there, if you will, prowling and scowling upon Prowse’s “great rubbish heaps of unpublished records,” like Dickens’s hard-hearted old dustman, John Harmon, “a very inquisitive character…regarding what was found in the dust.” Estimates vary, but it is safe to say that less than 10 percent of the documents in the holding pens survive the slaughter. Perhaps only 5 percent, perhaps only 2.

  Being just off the boat himself, when Anton first began reading Cormack’s Narrative of a journey across the island of Newfoundland, the only one ever performed by a European, he was much amused by what he called the “cock-a-hoop” subtitle. This time round, however, he was more put off than amused. Its embarrassing vaingloriousness seemed to him to discredit our intrepid explorer’s putative scientific aims and humanitarian concerns: to document the geology of the interior and to locate the last surviving members of the persecuted Beothucks. The fact of the matter is, I said to him—I was reading a slew of commentaries in the Cormack file and was feeling rather authoritative on the subject—Cormack, as well as practically every other amateur performer, every other Boy Scout venturing into the Newfoundland wilderness—explorer, adventurer, missionary, mapmaker, sportsman, geologist, et al.—had either an aboriginal or a native, i.e., settler, guide with him every step of the way. One historian has gone so far as to say that Judge Daniel Woodley Prowse’s list of these guides in his 1905 Newfoundland Guide Book is one “which has always seemed to me like Homer’s Catalogue of the Greek heroes in Book 2 of the Iliad.”

  In the middle of his trip, Cormack had to promise his Mi’kmaq guide, Joseph Sylvester, a European vacation, plus a barrel of pork and a barrel of flour for his mother, to dissuade him from heading south to his hunting camp for the winter and abandoning him to the terrors of the wilderness. The point of his fearless follower’s performance, his headlong rush, his two-hundred-mile, as-the-crow-flies dash across the interior of Newfoundland, was a mystery to his leader.

  Some historians have also cast a cold eye on Cormack’s performance. “The institution best adapted for the study of this impulse is the lunatic asylum,” said one. Cormack’s walk across the “mocking emptiness” of Newfoundland “seemed to prove nothing and to lead to nothing,” said another. He was “blazing a trail across Newfoundland that nobody else would follow,” said a third, as recently as fifteen years ago.

  I was now beginning to wonder, however, if Cormack would be the first and last European to face the “mocking emptiness” of the wilderness of Newfoundland. Perhaps Anton was planning to be the second European to perform this feat, and the first without a guide. Perhaps his daily excursions on the hiking trails and forays into the domesticated wilds of Pippy Park were just warm-ups for a more daring expedition. But maybe the middle of winter, though the frozen ponds and lakes would be much easier to cross, was not the right time for such a trip. Indeed, for a soft European like Anton, a Nederlander from the pastoral dream that was Holland, perhaps no time was the right time.

  If, as one of our Cormack critics has remarked, “Cormack had read widely in contemporary English poetry and was schooled to see, in every vista, mere pastoral,” and, as a result, his experience of the Newfoundland wilderness resulted in a “bludgeoning of sensibility,” a descent from the sublime to the “monotonous sublime,” I hated to think what might happen to Anton. And it wasn’t just the preservation of his aesthetic sensibilities that I was worried about.

  Cormack was born in Newfoundland, but he’d spent his formative years in Scotland, a country with a landscape much like our own. Compared to Newfoundland, Holland was not so much a pastoral dream as a geographical or geometrical abstraction. To be frank, I could no more imagine Anton walking across Newfoundland than Euclid.

  The community of Cormack was a farming settlement created exclusively for veterans after the Second World War, hacked out of the wilderness on the west coast of Newfoundland not far from what was to become Gros Morne National Park, and named after the one and only William Cormack. Even before the notorious Resettlement Program of the 1950s and 1960s, there had been the notoriously absurd—at least from Miles Harnett’s point of view—Land Settlement Program of the 1930s and 1940s. As Miles had described it (for Anton’s benefit), it was a plan “to turn Newfoundland into Holland.” “Evangelical agriculture,” he called it. At the Travers Tavern one cold evening toward the end of February, about a month after Anton had received his last letter from the DVA and discovered that his father, at some point, might have lived in Cormack, Miles, in a very entertaining fantasia on farming, told us all about it.

  The next morning, in the Research Library, I went in search of the facts. I ploughed through the thick Cormack Community File and the Land Settlement Program file. In all, 340 families had been moved to 11 artificially created communities under the Commission of Government scheme. Cormack, as Miles said, had been the last. Though 217 veterans had applied, and 163 applications had been approved, only 92 had actually taken up the offer.

  Anton searched the government archives in the Colonial Building and discovered that 1 of the 92 veterans assigned a 50-acre tract of wilderness land on the banks of the Upper Humber River had the same name—William Peter Seviour—as one of the five soldiers named William Peter on the Nominal Rolls. They might not be the same man, of course, but the name Seviour, derived from the Old English sife (sieve), sounded auspiciously, or perhaps inauspiciously, right. At least his name wasn’t Deady, or O’Deady, pronounced “Dady” in these parts; if it were, I might have suggested consulting the Auspices.

  After a trial period, the Cormack soldier-farmers would receive a grant to their tract of land for a payment of five hundred dollars. It was a trial not all of them would get through. No farming experience was required, for the government provid
ed a twelve-month training course in Canada. Or was it a six-month course at the government’s experimental farm in Mount Pearl? It depends on which records you consult. And it was not only the length and location of the training course that they disagreed on, but why the Cormack farming settlement was such a failure. For fail it did, like every other agricultural settlement the Commission of Government established.

  For one historian, the reasons for failure were simply geographic and economic: limited access to markets and, after Confederation in 1949, competition from mainland farmers. Others make no mention of this, citing instead personal, social, occupational, almost existential, reasons. The ex-servicemen were just not temperamentally suited to farming. After an exciting life overseas, they could not stand the daily grind and the uncertainty attached to such a life. They had brought with them war brides who could not bear the isolation, loneliness, and privation, and they were tempted by softer, more secure jobs in the new urban centres of Corner Brook, Grand Falls, Gander, and Stephenville. One writer even humorously suggested that to name a farming community after the notoriously nomadic William Cormack—by nature, it seemed, an adventurer, a wanderer, a hunter and gatherer rather than a farmer—had sealed its fate from the beginning. Cormack’s rare agricultural pursuits, he said, had taken place in Prince Edward Island, British Columbia, and California, and for good reason. He had, after all, walked right across the Island, and had noted in his journal: “We did not see even the signs of an alluvial soil.”

  So signs, as Mother would say, Cormack had never attempted farming in Newfoundland.

  The abortive attempt to establish a Newfoundland Historical Society, whose goal was the preservation of Newfoundland’s terrestrial, as distinct from its celestial, history, took place, as I said, at the Athenaeum library on January 13, 1881, while the Royal Newfoundland Astronomical Society was successfully founded at the very same place just a few weeks later. Several interesting notions have been put forward to explain why another twenty-five years would pass before the Newfoundland Historical Society finally got off the ground. Even the weather was blamed for it—the worst Newfoundland winter on record, the Great Snow of 1880–81. An all-time record of 265 inches of snow fell that winter, keeping most people indoors. The only snow-clearing equipment was the shovel, and gangs of men were recruited by the government for this purpose.

  And on the first day of winter there had been signs and wonders. There is an observer’s report in the Astronomical Society’s files of “red rain” over Newfoundland on December 22, 1880, which, of course, became “blood-rain” and a “frightening omen” in the popular press of the time.

  Daniel Woodley Prowse himself had been present at the historical society’s first organizing meeting. He was elected secretary and appointed to a committee charged with the task of writing a constitution. But he seemed to have permanently postponed or forgotten his administrative mission, or perhaps ignored it altogether. Maybe the meeting had not gone well, and Prowse had seen the writing on the wall, or, to look at it more positively, perhaps the writing he saw on the wall was his own.

  Indeed, one historian has brazenly suggested that interim secretary Prowse decided to become a historical society all to himself—the ur-Prowse Society, you might call it—taking on the entire task of researching and writing Newfoundland’s history. In those intervening years, his eyes were most certainly on the earth and not the stars. In 1895, fourteen years after that first founding meeting, after laboriously rooting around in “the great rubbish heaps” of historical records—prodding and scooping, sorting and sifting—Prowse produced his seminal A History of Newfoundland.

  But, in the end, it remains a mystery as to why an astronomical society became a viable association in late nineteenth-century Newfoundland, while a historical society did not. Needless to say, the success of the one and the failure of the other—the stargazers ascendant, so to speak—had a high Recognition quotient for Miles Harnett. And Prowse’s History—his alternative project, if that’s what it was—his ringing condemnation of England’s four-hundred-year exploitation of Newfoundland, its second colony (after Ireland) being treated even worse than the first (if that were possible), is still, as I’ve said many times, celestial music to his ears.

  Part Five

  May 1996

  19. ON GOING A JOURNEY

  One of the pleasantest things in the world is going a journey;

  but I like to go by myself.

  —William Hazlitt, “On Going a Journey”

  On the first of May, we celebrated Miranda’s birthday. Anton and I brought presents, and he baked a cake, an almond torte that he said would be un repas complet. He covered it with a full complement of candles: twenty-seven, in primary colours—red, yellow, and blue. Only the very young, he said, get to have all their candles, but I noted that his sweet words no longer made her smile.

  He began a little mental game of mixing the colours, a skill-test for Miranda to earn her gifts. It was then that she surprised us by confessing to be colour-blind. She said she had never told anyone before. But she named all the secondaries, and most of the tertiaries, until she and Anton disagreed about “black.” And at that moment, through her kitchen window, in the still new, mid-evening Daylight Savings Time light, I saw “white” falling from the sky: May snowflakes, as big as apple blossoms, though we had yet to see any blossoms, or even leaves.

  I went out and gathered a bowl of snowflakes for her eyes—May water, Mother had called it, when we were young. She had more faith in it than holy water or Fatima oil, and used it to bathe and bless our styes. May water for styes, May snow for blind eyes. The colour-blind painter lay on her daybed, and I anointed her eyes.

  Anton lay on the daybed after Miranda got up. Adopting a puffed-up pose, he swirled his wine around in his bowl-like brandy glass, which he preferred to a wine glass. The idea of a daybed, a bed in the kitchen, on which you could idly stretch out while other people were working or talking, intervening at your leisure, amused him no end. This one lay parallel to the rectangular pine table around which we were sitting, and he liked to use it as a prop. He imagined it, he said, as le lit de justice, “the bed of justice,” on which the pre-Revolution French kings had haughtily reclined while listening to the tedious deliberations of le parlement, the judiciary body that dealt with royal edicts. The session itself, by association, became known as le lit de justice, which the king attended at pleasure, as they say, intervening at leisure with authoritative pronouncements and pearls of wisdom.

  Anton raised his glass of burgundy and issued a royal edict of his own.

  “Let us eat cake,” he said, and we did. Miranda blew out all her candles with a clever gust of breath—a downdraft—and we tucked into an almond torte dense as peat. Anton wasn’t kidding when he claimed it was un repas complet.

  My present, a blue African violet, was already on display on the kitchen table, and now Miranda opened Anton’s, a reproduction of Bruegel’s Netherlandish Proverbs in the form of a three-thousand-piece Ravensburger jigsaw puzzle. Proverbs themselves, of course, can be a puzzle, and early in the sixteenth century, Anton’s countryman, Erasmus, the most famous scholar of the age, published a four-thousand-piece collection of proverbs with accompanying explications, some essay-length. It had gone into an eighth edition by the time of his death in 1536.

  Bruegel’s Netherlandish Proverbs, Anton said, was the most famous proverb painting, or Wimmelbilder, of all time. Painted in the mid-sixteenth century, the golden age of proverbs, it illustrated over one hundred in common use. As part of his art history program, Anton had done painstaking research on Bruegel’s painting, finding a grand total of one hundred and twenty illustrations of proverbial expressions in the work.

  After finishing off the wine, we smoked a joint. It was the first time I’d been stoned in about twenty years. Miranda dug it out of a tin of Earl Grey tea, and it had a strong citrusy smell—even tasted—of bergamot. Her sister
, Ilse, had stashed it in there last December when she came home for a visit.

  We went into the living room and Miranda closed the curtains, then turned on a spotlamp and the lights of the Christmas tree. Though she never took it down, she said, till the snow left the ground, she would probably leave it up for good this year. She and Ilse had put it up, and she didn’t have the heart to take it down. She said it had become a sort of votive candle now. The tree was a bit foxy here and there, but it was still surprisingly green for the first of May.

  We moved the coffee table out of the way and lay on the rug in the warm twinkling glow. As I gazed up at the white spotlit ceiling, the normally imperceptible floaters in my eyeballs began a very conspicuous, bouncy, slow-motion dance, and I thought of my young dancing nieces, Deirdre and Terese, as orphaned in their own way as Miranda and Ilse.

  Anton, having snuggled under the boughs, told us the Story of Wassily Kandinsky and the Birth of Modern Art, introducing it in bright capital tones. Wassy, as he referred to him, as if they’d gone to art school together, was a Russian lawyer who had abandoned his legal career to become a painter. Modern art began, Anton said, in 1908, in Munich, in that one great apocalyptic moment when Wassy came home one night, late and drunk, and looked at one of his paintings sideways. The painting was sideways, that is—though Wassy was probably off kilter as well—standing on its side on the easel. Perplexed, he stopped and stared at it for a long time. Only when he approached for a closer look did he realize that it was his own painting, but reduced to mere patches of colour. He thought it was one of the most beautiful things he had ever seen.