The Strangers' Gallery (18 page)

“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.

The file on Paton is thin, as one would expect, but there are some very interesting things in there. The most interesting is a copy of “an address given at Chatham House, London, on January 22, 1933 [
sic
, obviously 1934], Mr. E. R. Peacock in the Chair,” printed in
International Affairs
in May 1934. None other than the “Right Trusty” Lord Amulree himself was in a chair in the audience, and in his speech Paton took the opportunity to praise his meritorious judgment as delivered in what he called “the Blue Book,” more commonly known as the Amulree Report, chapters and verses of which had become almost proverbial wisdom here in the fatherland since its release just a few months before.

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 heard 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.

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.