The Strangers' Gallery (17 page)

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.

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: