The Strangers' Gallery (25 page)

But here I was, nevertheless, in a very risky spot, away from my regular routine, feeling vulnerable and insecure—and having my hair cut! What strength I had being taken away. Raylene was halfway through my regular cut, and we hadn't said a word since our brief exchange regarding how she would proceed. Her stylist's touch was very light, and my distracted thoughts were insulating me even from that, so much so that she might have been cutting someone else's hair rather than my own.

Here he was, the self-styled Mr. Rowe, and his author, his father, had not given him any lines. Nothing to say, or no way to say it. Raylene as well, it seemed. Two halves who did not make a whole.

In the mirror, Raylene seemed to be smiling as she worked, though it was bright and busy in there, not easy to pick things out. Once or twice, when our eyes met, there was more of a smile, it seemed, as if she knew what I was thinking, perhaps even who I was—son of a father she had never known, one I myself had never really known—and I realized then that it was not me whom she wanted to meet, to know, but him…and it was too late now, too late now.

In the mirror, the old man, the Snowman, was melting, and his children, half-brother and half-sister, credulous and incredulous adults now, were still watching and waiting.

14.
THE STRANGERS' GALLERY

If a man cannot forget, he will never amount to much.

—
Søren Kierkegaard,
Either/Or

D
epartment of History

Royal Military College
Sandhurst, England
4 October 1995
Archives and Special Collections
University of Newfoundland
Queen Elizabeth Avenue
St. John's, Newfoundland
Canada

To Whom It May Concern:

I am writing a biography of one of my esteemed relations, Sir Henry Hugh Tudor, a third cousin of mine on my mother's side of the family, whom history—even the
DNB
—seems to have quite forgot, unjustifiably, I believe.

It will be called “Sir Henry Hugh Tudor: a Military Life,” and though I will probably tie it up at the point where he retired from active military service—in 1925, after his stint in Palestine—I am aware that he spent the next forty years of his life on your shores and, in fact, died and was buried there more than thirty years ago.

I am wondering if you would be so kind as to forward me a complete list of the documents pertaining to Sir Henry that you have in your esteemed research library and archives. Your assistance would be most appreciated and will, of course, be dutifully acknowledged in my forth-
coming biography.

Yours most sincerely,
Ian Nowottny
Professor Emeritus
P.S. Please see enclosed notes and queries.

Fum, fo, fi, fe
, I smell a hagiography…Though our esteemed director comes into the building off and on for a meeting or an important briefing, while he is recovering from his dysfunction I have been given the job of replying to the numerous research supplicants from the four corners of the Commonwealth and the USA. He finds it painful, he says, even to grip a pen or punch a keyboard. And punch it he does; you can hear him, when he's healthy, many modules away.

I must say, though, I love writing these letters—at least the first drafts, which, of course, I rarely send. They allow for much more freedom of—I was going to say
expression
, but I guess I mean, most particularly,
emotion
. Yes…so much more freedom of emotion
than articles, columns, minutes, and reports, even diaries and journals, which one worries will be left behind—archived, even—for someone to read someday. I can see why the early novelists liked the epistolary form. I'm way behind in my correspondence, though. The epistle above arrived several weeks ago, and I spent most of the day inditing a reply.

Dear Professor Nowottny:

Thank you for your letter of October 4 and for your kind reference to our research institution, ripples of whose reputation seem to have reached your shores. I apologize for taking so long to reply. Things have been rather hectic here in recent months, with staff leaves and illnesses, including that of our esteemed director. Also, since the advent of electronic mail, research queries seem to have quadrupled, and it is sometimes difficult to distinguish the tourists from the true travellers, so to speak, the professional researchers such as yourself from the swarms of amateurs.

Unfortunately, I must report that there is very little documentation on Sir Henry Hugh Tudor in our collections—only a thin vertical file in the Research Library and the manuscript of his self-published WWI diary,
The Fog of War
, in the Archives. The file contains merely newspaper clippings, photocopied pages from several books on Newfoundland history and Irish history—the war of independence and the Black and Tans in particular—and from various directories, encyclopedias, and biographical dictionaries (with the exception of your
Dictionary of National Biography
, as you point out).

Tudor's only connection with Newfoundland prior to his coming here seems to have been that the Newfoundland Regiment was under his command in 1918, in the final months of WWI. In
The Fighting Newfoundlander
, a history of the Regiment, G. W. Nicholson gives a detailed account of its military engagements under Tudor and documents the Major's admirable restraint in the conduct of his duties. He quotes Tudor as saying at one point in a battle: “Absolute murder, boys; do not attempt it. Consolidate and defend the ground already taken.”

Nevertheless, I have scanned the material we have on hand and can at least confirm the following:

Tudor did live in Newfoundland for forty years. He arrived in 1925, when he was almost fifty-four years old, died on September 25, 1965, at the age of ninety-three, and was interred in the Anglican Cemetery on Forest Road in St. John's on September 27. His family remained in England—a wife, a son, and three daughters. When he first came here, he lived in Bonavista, a small fishing community about 150 miles from St. John's, and was involved in the fishery as a representative of a British firm called Holmwood. He initially worked with a Newfoundland company called Templeman's. Then he moved to St. John's and worked with fish exporter H. H. Barr, in whose Circular Road house he took up residence. There are references to four other St. John's addresses in the vertical file.

Our manuscript copy of Tudor's diary,
The Fog of War: recording the experiences and impressions of an artillery officer during 4 years of the First World War
, corresponds with your copy—129 pages, self-published in mimeograph form in 1959, six years before his death. There is a reference, however, in one of his September 1965 obituaries (anonymous, but obviously by an acquaintance of his) to another document: “He had written his memoirs and promised to show me the manuscript but they were never published nor was I given an opportunity to read them.” We have been unsuccessful in trying to locate this document; the obituarist may have confused it with the war diary, but, as I said, he obviously knew Tudor and would have known that it had been published six years before. There is no evidence in our files to support the contention that Tudor kept a diary during his time in Ireland.

Finally, you are no doubt aware that there are Tudor papers in the Belfast Public Record Office and the Royal Armoured Corps Tank Museum in Dorset.

I wish you every success in your endeavours, and if I can be of any further assistance, please do not hesitate to write.

Yours most sincerely,
Michael Lowe
Archival Assistant

Too bad General Tudor didn't show the same restraint in his command of ex-soldiers, the Black and Tans, in Ireland after the war as he showed while commanding soldiers on the battlefields of France. In 1920, when the Irish insurrection was at its height, he was dispatched to Ireland and put in control of the Royal Irish Constabulary, the Dublin Metropolitan Police, the Intelligence, and the Secret Service. Recruited to shore up the police force in Ireland, the Black and Tans were so named because, in their motley dress of army khaki and police black, they looked like a pack of Irish hounds. “Tudor's toughs,” as the recruits were called, began to behave like a roving pack of wild English hounds. Two opposing commanding officers in the Irish war of independence—one with the IRA and the other with the British army—agreed on one thing at least: that General Tudor backed the atrocities of the Black and Tans to the hilt. “The greatest blot upon Britain's name in the twentieth century,” one British historian has written.

So perhaps it's not so strange that Tudor hasn't yet made it into the
DNB.
“There is no political power without control of the archive,” as Derrida said; and a dictionary of “national” biography is nothing if not an archive, is it not? Neither has Thomas Lodge found a home in there. One of the original British members of the Commission of Government, author of the infamous tract
Dictatorship in Newfoundland,
he had been banished to the British archipelago
of
Personae Non Gratae
upon publication of this 1939 memoir-cum-exposé of his time in Newfoundland, brief though it was.

But they've been dead for only a few decades; hardly enough time to forget, let alone forgive. Give them a drowsy century or two. Even Sir Humphrey Gilbert, the notorious “pederast butcher of the Irish,” as one Newfoundland historian has described him, is in there. Like General Tudor, Gilbert did loyal service in Ireland, putting the fear of God into the Irishmen who came to petition him from Beyond the Pale (that part of Ireland not under English control), lining the path to his tent with the heads of their countrymen impaled on stakes.

Of Major General Sir Henry Hugh Tudor, then, Mr. Smokescreen, and his forty-year, self-imposed exile in Newfoundland—a second life, really—there is, in the end, not much for an archivist or an historian to say. There are only Derridian traces, impressions, shadows, wisps of smoke from the General's smoke shell. “Such was the fog of war due to our smoke shell.” Such is the fog of history, the fog of a life, the fog of archivy.

Derrida—in Anton's, view, at least—had deconstructed the whole concept of archival science, archival authority and authenticity, original records, archival
truth
. Authority, authenticity, originality, truth—this was nowhere to be found, he claimed, or perhaps it was everywhere. In any event, all we have are traces, or “arcitraces,” traces upon traces, traces of traces of traces. A mere “twinkling of presence,” said an archivist-reviewer (poetically chiming in, in our professional journal) of Derrida'a anarchist book,
Archive Fever
. I wondered whose side he was on.

All of us, archivists or not, so the theory goes, are busily arcitracing, feverishly archiving, religiously recording, leaving our marks, our tracks, our signs, which could be any kind of human expression whatsoever; all of them a
fonds
, none of them a
sous-fonds;
all the world a text, no
hors-texte
; a zillion texts, and neither originals nor copies, authentic nor inauthentic, only
different
.

But, as always (you may or may not be happy to hear), we at least have all those wisps, traces, and twinklings conveniently gathered together for us in one small bundle by our most popular popular historian, an entertaining biography of the potted or canned variety—like one of those cans of Newfoundland fog for sale in craft shops for tourists and nostalgic expatriates. It is a short chapter of a book entitled
Mysterious and Illustrious Visitors to Newfoundland,
not one I would recommend to Dr. Nowottny, by K. M., an old friend of Miles's. I will just call him K. M., the initials of his real name, for he writes under the pseudonym Lester Freeborn. Who knows why? Something to do with his mysterious origins, perhaps. But everyone knows who he is. He attends public receptions at Government House and writes his real name on the introduction card for the receiving line.

Earlier this week, I was invited to a reception there in his honour, a sort of unofficial launch, on the occasion of the publication of
Mysterious and Illustrious Visitors
, his twentieth book.

Are you, as I am, when reading biographies, authorized or unauthorized—and I don't just mean the new, experimental ones, in which the writer sometimes “interviews” the deceased subject, but even the most conscientiously scholarly ones—often visited by a certain spirit of unreality, a sense of unease, an unwilling suspension of disbelief, a suspicion that this is all made up, that there is no other way to do this than to make it up?

This unease, this suspicion will dog you like a shadow while reading
Mysterious and Illustrious Visitors
, another strangers' gallery of “lost Vermeers.” Indeed, when I read Lester's tales, the musings of Theseus in
A Midsummer Night's Dream
come to mind: “More strange than true. I never may believe these antique fables…” I wouldn't go so far as to say that he “gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name,” but I sometimes find myself checking my ears and eyelids.

There are about two dozen visitors in Lester's book, all given exactly ten pages each—how does he do it?—all tailored from the finest whole cloth. Besides Tudor, there is Trotsky, local habitation at the Cochrane Hotel in St. John's; the future King William IV, the Sailor King, at St. John's and Placentia; Audubon at Bay St. George; General Haig at St. John's; the Reverend John “Amazing Grace” Newton, on the
Greyhound
in a winter storm on the Grand Banks; Polish painter Alexander Pindikowsky at Heart's Content and St. John's; Cyrus Field, also at Heart's Content; Lord Northcliffe at Grand Falls; Admiral de Ruyter, in St. John's; Philip Henry Gosse, father of Newfoundland natural history, and of the more famous Edmund Gosse, father of
Father and Son,
which is about him and his father, at Carbonear; Father (later Bishop) James O'Donel, the first Catholic priest to be sent to Newfoundland, banished to that “howling moral wilderness” in 1784; Captain Cook, Captain Bligh, Lord Nelson, and Benedict Arnold, all at the notorious Ship Tavern in St. John's; and a few other worthies that I can't recall.

Oh, yes…Whitbourne's mermaid closes the book. She should have appeared at the beginning, to set the tone for the rest of it. (Interestingly, Whitbourne's
A Discourse and Discovery of Newfoundland
and Shakespeare's
A Midsummer Night's Dream
were both published in 1623.) All Lester's visitors have in common, really, is that they came and went, left their traces: ceiling frescoes, a diary, a hymn, an illegible signature on a hotel register, sacked settlements, hanged mutineers, illegitimate children, hand-painted illustrations of insects, a transatlantic cable, a painting of the great auk.

I once attended a talk at the Colonial Building sponsored by the Newfoundland Historical Society (that other, lesser historical society) in which the speaker, an academic historian, was asked to explain the difference between popular history and academic history. After a choreographed pregnant pause that included a long sip of water, a blinking, studied look at the ornate ceiling, and much movement of the muscles of his face, he replied wittily that popular history had a much higher percentage of hangings, bastards, and mistresses. Lester was certainly obsessed with these, along with secret diaries, love letters, and every shade of sentimentality, coincidence, and retributive irony.