The Strangers' Gallery

by Paul Bowdring

  A choice, then, the archivist’s dilemma: Perpetua or Nano, as black and white as the mini-habits before my eyes, as it always has been and always will be, habitually, perpetually; to keep or to throw away, to remember or to forget, je me souviens or j’oublie. But what choice did I have, really. I had quietly taken my vows long ago. And though Miles had not left behind any papers, he had left me—willed me—not only his newspapers and books, but a technological marvel to accomplish the task.

  All of this had been bequeathed to me, personally, in a short handwritten will, Sister Nano said. We were standing on the rug in the centre of the large hushed drawing room beneath the candy-coloured Pindikowsky ceiling. In one corner, in a glass case, was a small Irish harp. A nineteenth-century prototype record player that Sister Perpetua called “the Regina” stood in another. On the floor among the boxes of books was an old black manual typewriter, a Remington Noiseless Standard No. 6, which seemed to be noiselessly speaking to me.

  I recalled reading that Henry James would only employ a secretary who used a Remington, and would often dictate his work, not even bothering with handwritten drafts. He had described the Remington as one of America’s greatest contributions to civilization.

  I spent so much time looking at the typewriter that Sister Nano had time to tell me the story of its life. It had been their father’s typewriter. He rescued it in 1932 after the riot at the House of Assembly in Bannerman Park when it was thrown out the window by one of the rioters, smashing through the glass and crashing against a tree. A friend at the printing shop had managed to reconstruct it, but it still wore the scars of its ordeal. It looked heavy, but the thought of what it was telling me to do was heavier still, so I swung my gaze away from it and onto the Regina, the reigning Queen.

  The Regina was not from Regina, where Sister Nano had spent most of her life, as I had at first foolishly thought. It was, of course, named after the Virgin Mary—these were the Sisters of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary—and it had been brought to the convent from Renews, on the Southern Shore, Sister Perpetua informed me. It sat atop a handmade wooden cabinet in which about two dozen large metal disks were stored horizontally on separate shelves, with the name of each piece of music written on the shelf below each disk.

  “Sister Nano teaches music,” said Sister Perpetua. “She has been playing ‘Kathleen Mavourneen’ on the Regina. Do you know it? John McCormack used to sing it.”

  “No, I’m afraid, not,” I said.

  “It was her brother’s favourite tune, though he probably never heard it on the Regina. Shall we play it for him, Sister—for Mr. Lowe, I mean?”

  “Yes, of course,” said Sister Nano. She was a tallish, shy, youthful-looking woman with silver wire-framed glasses and grey-blue eyes. Several years older than Miles, if I remembered correctly, she must have been close to eighty, though she easily could have passed for sixty. I imagined her as a young Mother Theresa, doling out Newfoundland salt fish to hungry, but bemused, Saskatchewan farmers in the Depression years, a story Miles had told me many times. Perhaps she had even taught some of them how to cook it.

  “How long did you know Brendan?” she asked softly, as Sister Perpetua was removing a large grey metal disk, as big as a pizza, from one of the shelves.

  “Close to twenty years, I guess. He did a lot of research in the Archives after he retired.”

  “He was a good man,” she said, “but he lost his faith.”

  Though this might have sounded like a cold-marble epitaph, it was said more with sadness than coldness or judgment. Resignation, even. The tone of it, in fact, seemed to suggest that this was something that happened to everyone, even to her perhaps. The odd thing was I had seen Miles as someone who had more faith than most—though a childlike faith, perhaps—as someone who, like his namesake, St. Brendan, would have set sail across the Sea of Darkness in the second skin of a leather boat.

  Sister Perpetua was vigorously cranking the Regina, and when she finished, it responded faithfully with what sounded like an elaborate music-box version of “Kathleen Mavourneen.” I had been expecting a voice, a John McCormack-like voice, but I soon realized that the machine was not an old-fashioned hi-fi, but something akin to a player piano.

  Sister Nano walked over to one of the sofas and sat down on the edge of it with her hands folded in her lap. When she saw me looking at her, she gave me a shy smile. Sister Perpetua was standing tall, straight, and proud beside the Regina. Over her head, on the wall, was a large, oval-framed, sepia-toned picture of some ancient Sister Superior, looking very severe and very superior. The Regina came to a halt before the tune was completely over, but Sister Perpetua made no move to crank it up again.

  She led me into the chapel to see the Veiled Virgin, a finely sculpted head of the Virgin Mary carved from flawless, pure white, statuary marble by Italian sculptor Giovanni Strazzo. Here was the real reigning queen of the convent, I guessed, seeing Sister Perpetua’s pride and delight in describing it to me. The serene face and downcast eyes of the Virgin looked out from behind the marble folds of a mysteriously translucent veil. Acknowledging our professional bond, perhaps, though she had humbly described herself as an amateur archivist, she very painstakingly pointed out Signor Strazzo’s signature, in black letters, cleverly hidden behind the sculpture at the back. The Pindikowsky ceiling in this room was of a more tasteful gold-leaf design. At the front of the chapel was an altar made from the same world-renowned Italian marble—from Carrara, Tuscany, she informed me—as used for the Virgin.

  “I think I can get all the books in the car,” I said, as we re-entered the drawing room. “And the typewriter. I’ll have to send a van to collect the newspapers. Would Friday afternoon be okay?”

  “That should be fine,” said Sister Perpetua. “We put them in the storeroom behind the museum.”

  After I had loaded all the boxes in the car, I stood in the large foyer thanking the two sisters and saying my goodbyes. Bright noonday sunlight was pouring in through a window behind me, colouring their faces, and I turned to face a large stained-glass window above the front door. No images of angels or saints, just stylized flowers and leaves, and a motto, in black Latin script, at the bottom.

  “Not words but deeds,” translated Sister Polonius, unintentionally issuing advice and instruction.

  But I was charged, burdened, with both words and deeds. Foul deeds, forbidden archival deeds. Foul deeds will rise, I thought, fearing the worst, a vision of the black Remington Noiseless Standard atop an imposing stack of black notebooks rising up before me out of the innocent flowers and leaves. With 120-odd notebooks, more than half of which were filled with the clamorous words of Brendan “Miles” Harnett, it would take a typist like myself, I estimated, whose keyboarding skills were even more primitive than that typewriter, about 60-odd man-years to produce a typescript. Will rise, I thought again, as I backed out the door, but I was thinking of Henry James and his typist as I walked toward the car.

  I spent the next weekend, all weekend, going through Miles’s books. Judging by sheer quantity, his favourite book, it seemed—the horror, the horror—was The London Book of English Prose. The irony for Murphy, as he used to say. He had such a hard-nosed, bitter attitude toward the English; or I should say the British, to be sure we include the Scots, at least Lord Amulree. There were numerous copies of The London Book scattered throughout the three hundred or so books he had left me, three dozen or more, in various editions, going all the way back to the first in 1932. Many of these were probably books left behind by students over the years, in classrooms, in exam rooms where he’d been invigilating, or in his office, where he’d spent hours talking to his students, where he’d done most of his teaching, he said, where, he once admitted to me, he had offered a few of them a drop of Jameson on occasion. For which he finally paid the price.

  Of course, Miles was able to separate politics from literature, the English from the English prose
. If he had a political persuasion, as he said himself, it was patriotism, pure and simple, supposing there was such a thing. His patriotism, however, seemed closer to religion, or theology, rather than politics. A quixotic and ultimately inexplicable ideology (perhaps even for him), akin to a belief in resurrection and eternal life, it was an evangelical cauldron always on the boil—bubble, bubble, toil and trouble—a strange and exasperating amalgam of preaching, remembrance, contentiousness, love, and grief, and perhaps above all, melding the entire mix, hope. We must live in hopes, supposing we die in despair might be the only way to sum it up. He might have lost his faith, but he hadn’t lost hope.

  The next book that caught my eye was a hardcover first edition, Volume III, of Orwell’s Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters. It had the same picture on the dust jacket, Orwell’s unsigned National Union of Journalists ID card, as the paperback Miles had lent me long ago. “Mr. George Orwell of the Tribune” peered out at me again with that penetrating, all-knowing, ironic look. This was the volume that contained a loving description of Orwell’s favourite pub, the imaginary “Moon under Water”—he might have been describing the Travers Tavern, a place without all the “modern miseries”—and the essay “Notes on Nationalism,” oft-quoted by Miles. On the last page of this essay, Miles had underlined: patriotism is an inoculation against nationalism. At the bottom of the page, he’d written: “Backside cicatrized.” There were dozens of annotations, along with underlinings and other markings, throughout the entire book.

  Perhaps this will be even better than papers, I thought. I’d read a review last year in the American Archivist of a biography of a pioneer archivist by a latter-day acolyte. The book had been based almost entirely on the thirty-thousand-odd volumes in the archivist’s personal library, housed in a converted barn in the Berkshires of New England, which the deceased’s widow had made available to the biographer, or, to be more precise, based pointedly on the thousands of lines marked by archivally correct bronze book darts, and on the thousands of archivally incorrect critical annotations in the margins of the books. “Not written, but constructed,” a “mere commonplace book,” was how the reviewer had described the so-called biography, and he’d gone on to deconstruct it most ruthlessly, not at all impressed by this painstaking, if perverse, act of reverential scholarship.

  The collection Miles had left me was much smaller, of course, but perhaps it would make up for its lack of volume, or volumes, with a splendid proliferation of markings and annotations. There were an amazing number of first editions. A complete set of Henry Fowler—the fearsome fowler of befoulers of the King’s English—was what I noticed next, first editions of The King’s English, Modern English Usage, the Concise Oxford, and the Pocket Oxford. But in all of these, after a cursory look, I came across just a single note. “O Henry!” Miles had bemoaned, in response to the fowler’s blast at ironists, “dealers in irony,” an aversion that seemed so strong it might have been drug dealers or pimps he was talking about. Or traitors to their country. Irony, he said, was “un-English.” In the preface to Modern English Usage, Fowler’s most well known book, Sir Ernest Gowers had revealed that Fowler (sixty-eight in 1926, when the book was first published) used to steel himself against the alien ironists with a two-mile run at seven o’clock in the morning, regardless of the weather, followed by a jump in a cold pond.

  Alas, I soon discovered that a single word or note or mark—an asterisk, a checkmark, an exclamation (a verbal hoot), an underlining, a lonely line—might be the rule rather than the exception. In the nearly eight hundred pages of Prowse’s History, for example, there was nothing to be found but a lone asterisk, albeit a big sunshiny one, next to a footnote fantasia on “the public grindstone,” Prowse’s sly metaphor, it seems, for the quarrelsome character of the political discourse in the country. In Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, Miles had etched a large red checkmark next to the line: “For ignorance is the first requisite of the historian—ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art.”

  I became immersed in Miles’s well-worn, faded red, hardcover copy—a 1939 first edition—of Thomas Lodge’s Dictatorship in Newfoundland, his “Little Red Book,” as Miles called it. It was the third time I’d read it. Though Miles had attacked Lodge and his hare-brained agricultural scheme “to turn Newfoundland into Holland,” I had the feeling that he’d had a grudging respect for Lodge, at heart an old agitator like himself, one who’d had the nerve to label his compatriots dictators. He questioned the claims and recommendations of the Amulree Report and the motives of the last Newfoundland administration in accepting it. He questioned the whole Commission of Government paternalistic project, in fact—moral or economic or political or whatever it might have been.

  Miles was only sixteen when Lodge’s book appeared, and he didn’t come across it, he told me, until his sabbatical sojourn in England, when he was forty-five years old. On the very last page of Dictatorship in Newfoundland, Thomas Lodge muses, if briefly, about the “spiritual price” Newfoundlanders paid for the material benefits bestowed by the Commission of Government regime. Miles had doubly underlined “spiritual price” and, in large red capitals on the blank bottom half of the page, had written: “Check my account, Thomas, you wise old fool.”

  I had a closer look at The London Book of English Prose, “selected and ordered”—Miles had underlined ordered—by Herbert Read and Bonamy Dobrée, so far the only book besides Orwell’s with multiple marks and notations. Miles told me that he had used the book with students in all years, grads and undergrads, throughout his entire teaching career. He first began using it in his English classes at the college on Parade Street in 1952. At the top of every page of an essay by Charles Lamb—a hilarious lampooning of Scotsmen—Miles had inscribed, like running heads, the name Amulree. In the text itself, he had underlined: He does not find, but bring—a comment, no doubt, on Amulree’s dubious method of reporting.

  Miles had told me, however, that his favourite part of The London Book was not any particular prose selection, but the introduction. It began with an epigraph from Molière, in which Monsieur Jourdain expresses his surprise on learning that he has been speaking prose all his life, and ended with the immortal line, There is something immoral about bad prose, which Miles had doubly underlined. Was this, then, I wondered, why Miles had avoided—feared—writing prose?

  Like Monsieur Jourdain, however, he had spent his entire life speaking prose, the type characterized by Read and Dobrée as dramatic prose, oratorical prose: first, as a teacher of literature for twenty-five years, then, getting his second wind, as the old race-walker might put it, as haranguer emeritus at the Travers Tavern for twenty more—forty-five years in all, five more than Monsieur Jourdain.

  I have written some of it down, recorded some of this oratorical splendour, because, as I suspected, he wasn’t doing it himself. Perhaps he was simply following Read and Dobrée’s advice that such prose was “meant to be declaimed to an audience, and not to be read.” But doubtless their great literary judgment, their great moral aesthetic, had hung like the Sword of Damocles above his head.

  Read and Dobrée’s introduction was rich with advice, ripe with wisdom, but it was all dispensed with a droll, deprecating humour. Their placement of pieces, they admitted, was arbitrary because most writing was “mixed in motive,” so it was “mixed in the course of the book” as well as “in the writer’s mind.” Miles appears to have been more than pleased to find both history and fiction under Narrative, and to hear that: history seems to be the kind of writing most susceptible of mixed motivation (underlined in red ink in several copies).

  Referring to the arbitrary nature of their classifications, especially in the case of passages with mixed motives, they concluded: “It must even be confessed that in these instances our temptation has been to put the passage where the reader (and naturally the author) would least expect to find it,
and thus we might find fiction under philosophy, philosophy under fiction, and pathos everywhere.”

  Pathos everywhere was doubly underlined. Yes, looking back at Miles Harnett now, recalling the face that he presented to the world, sometimes fierce and full of conviction, sometimes sad and tormented and hurt, but always hopeful and dignified, everywhere is where he found it.

  But perhaps Nairn’s London was the real London Book. A small tattered paperback, its orange-brown pages falling out, I came across it at the end of my lengthy perusal of Miles’s library, at the very bottom of the last box of books, tucked, appropriately, between a pair of plaster casts of his feet that probably had been taken to make insoles for his orthopedic shoes. It was the only artifact he’d left me besides the typewriter. Miles had once said that race-walking had ruined his feet. His name was written on the heel of each cast, and June 19, 1974, was marked on the soles. Perhaps because I had missed Miles’s memorial service, had had no formal opportunity to grieve or say goodbye, the forlorn sight of those mould-spotted plaster casts of the man’s feet brought tears to my eyes. Pathos everywhere, indeed. Perhaps I could have them melted down and used to make a death mask for the Archives, I thought, but it was a bit late for that.

  I got completely lost in Nairn’s London. An eccentric 1966 guide to the city by one Ian Nairn, which Miles had most likely picked up and used during his sabbatical in 1968–69, it probably had more notes and marks on it than all the other books combined. Inside the front and back covers were monthly exchange-rate computations for the British pound. On the half-title page was an address and telephone number for a house on Milton Park in Highgate, where he may have rented rooms.