The Strangers' Gallery (31 page)

“How was it?” I asked.

“V
ery
goot
,” he said emphatically, as if he were deliberately mimicking himself. Then he refilled his coffee cup and picked up the thread of his story.

“Jule had been sent to Deventer, too, to avoid scandal, but of course everybody knew. Everyone in Holland knew about bastards. Black tulips they called us behind our backs—they were silent on the subject, very discreet. It was probably no different anywhere else. We Dutch may be famous for our tolerance, but not so famous perhaps for our tolerance of bastards. Catholic or Protestant, it was all the same.
Bastardy
was a sin, a stigma, a scar, a big secret that everyone knew but you. Like Kafka's Joseph K., I was guilty of something, but I didn't know what. They might as well have put yellow stars on our clothes like they did with the Jews. Perhaps orange stars. After the war, the women who slept with German soldiers—some had Nazi bastards!—were put on display in the public squares. Their heads were shaved and painted orange. Jule said they might as well have done that to her. She said my father might just as well have been a Nazi. If you'd been a Nazi baby, she said to me, I'm sure it wouldn't have been much worse. I would make her laugh with my Anton Mussert salute.

“Sieg Heil!” he shouted, and his arm shot out, startling me and all the other patrons. He turned his head toward them and smiled. “Just joking,” he said.

“Yes,” he continued, “perhaps for the moeders it was worse. Black tulips were the flowers of disgrace and shame. They were not displayed at home in a vase. They were hid away, sent away to homes and convents, to grandmothers, aunts and uncles. In the convents they gave birth with their faces behind screens so they never saw their babies. They were quickly snatched away.

“Jule was fourteen when the Germans invaded, nineteen when they were driven out, when she met my father. Hail, the prince, the conquering hero! He came on a tank bedecked with flowers, on a glorious morning in May. When the Canadian soldiers entered our cities, our starving crazy people poured out to greet them. Over three hundred thousand people in hiding. The carillon played ‘O Canada.' No one had heard church bells for years. Jule said she saw him on that very first morning. She threw her bouquet to him over the heads of the crowd—not tulips, but lilacs, her favourite flowers, which forever after for her had the scent of sadness. But it was late summer before she saw him again, if for sure it was the same man. Everyone was delirious in those first few days.

“During the May Day celebrations last spring, the fiftieth anniversary of the Liberation, when the Canadian soldiers marched through the streets of Amsterdam, one of them turned and laughed at a woman carrying a sign saying, ‘Are you—?' I forget the name. ‘Are you my father?' He laughed and pointed to the man behind him. Some of them think it's a joke. I wanted to grab him by the collar, but he was a grey-haired old man, a smirking old man with medals on his chest, being honoured by my countrymen. For them, Canadian soldiers are heroes, salt of the earth. They laid wreaths on the grave of the Unknown Soldier. The Unknown Soldier has a different meaning for me, for the thousands of us left behind. We were abandoned, rejected by our fathers, and most of them knew they had abandoned us.

“Of course, you can imagine what it was like, what a time and place for sowing wild oats, as they say. I would have sowed wild oats myself. The soldiers entered a country empty of men. They were sent to labour camps—some women, too—the Jews to concentration camps. The young girls climbed on top of the tanks, kissing and embracing the soldiers, giving them flowers, as they made their victory ride into the liberated cities. They were expected since September, when the south of Holland was freed, but they were stopped at the Arnhem bridge, couldn't get across the last river.”

“Wasn't there a movie about that?” I asked, and it struck me as a trite, unfeeling question as soon as I had asked it, as if the mere existence of some Hollywood spectacular could somehow compensate for all that pain.

“
A Bridge Too Far
may be the one you mean,” he said. “But there was a better one made at Arnhem right after the war, with real soldiers from the Arnhem battle in it. Three hundred thousand of our people died in the war, a third of them Jews. Some of Jule's friends were Jews. They all died, every one of them, more than two-thirds of all Dutch Jews. Anne Frank was only the famous one. Amsterdam was called ‘Jerusalem of the North.' There were no ghettos. The Jews were part and parcel, as you say, of our society. We are a country of merchants, after all. And Jews, of course, are very good merchants, the soul of business, some people say. But this is anti-Semitic, no?

“Yah…we admire our merchants more than our artists, though that is not how we are seen to be. But the poor painter shivering in his garret is a fact. There is the well-known drawing by Pieter Bloot. We were taken to see it at the British Museum when we did our grand art history tour. And when do you think this work was done? Why, in 1640, at the height of our Golden Age, in the midst of what someone called our “embarrassment of riches,” cultural riches. The poverty of our artists is more embarrassing for me, and the wealth of our merchants. Poverty for the Dutchman is not a virtue. The riches we admire most are money, gold, filthy florins. We all know now what Van Gogh's paintings are worth. In 1990, his
Dr. Gachet
fetched the highest price ever paid for a painting, $82.5 million US. And what did he get for his paintings, two hundred and fifty years after Pieter Bloot? Nothing at all. No one would buy them.

“The Golden Age was full of hungry painters, and not just unknown ones like Bloot. Even Rembrandt, our greatest, was bankrupt at the end of his life. He ended up an employee of his mistress, Hendrika, and his son, Titus, who were art dealers. Art dealers made a lot more than painters, who were only tradesmen, artisans. They were often the sons of masons and millers, cobblers and weavers, and earned the same wages, maybe even less.

“Vermeer died bankrupt, too, in 1675, seven years after Rembrandt. He owed the baker over six hundred guilders. He made only two hundred guilders a year. Delftware painters made four times more. An art historian who searched records for the Golden Age in the archives of Delft, Vermeer's city, painted a different
View of Delft
. He said the average price of a painting was seventeen guilders. Ordinary people were patrons. Everyone bought art because it was cheap, but not just for the art. Paintings were objects of exchange, speculation, a form of currency. Painters themselves could buy anything with them, and used them to pay the butcher and the baker.

“In Bloot's
The Poor Painter Shivering in His Garret,
not only the painter is shivering, but his wife and child, too. They all look wretched, cold, hungry, staring at him as he paints, wondering if the painting will sell. When Vermeer died at forty-three, he left a wife and eleven children. When Rembrandt died, all he owned was his clothes, his canvasses, his paints and brushes. The artist at the easel in Pieter Bloot's picture looks just like Rembrandt van Rijn.”

“
Is that the actual title of the painting?” I asked.

“The drawing, yes,
The Poor Painter Shivering in His Garret
. You can see it in
The
Story of Art
, a very famous book, a very interesting book, by the Englishman Ernst Gombrich. As an art history student, I had to read it. It was already in twelve editions, and in Dutch and every other language, when I first read it twenty years ago. It begins, I remember—it made a big impression on me—‘There really is no such thing as Art. There are only artists.' Art with a capital ‘A' he calls a fetish.

“Bloot's drawing, I remember, is at the very end of the chapter on Dutch seventeenth-century art. But it's strange. There is no reference to it in the book, no mention of it at all. It just hangs there, a small, black-and-white picture at the bottom of the page, like a footnote to art history for which there is no explanation. Why is it there? What does it mean? If there are only artists, what about Pieter Bloot and all the other poor painters shivering in the garrets of the Golden Age?

“But that is art history for you,” he concluded—at least I thought he was concluding—as we were on our way out the door of Vincent's café. “As you can see, it's like any other history. The forgotten outnumber the ones we remember. And we forget a lot of other things, too. You have heard of
tulpenwoede
?

“Tulip wood?”

“No, no…not trees. Flowers…tulips…tulip fever. The Golden Age was more about gold than art. Tulip fever was gold fever, a Dutch gold rush. At the height of the Golden Age, people were more crazy for tulips than paintings, though they traded in paintings, too. Painting is a sort of currency among us, as someone said about your country's fish. But they paid for tulips much, much more. The richest tulip, Semper Augustus, sold for five thousand florins, more than Vermeer earned his whole life. Sixteen hundred was the most Rembrandt got for a painting. Tulip trading was so intense, so crazy, through the whole country that the government put a stop to it.
A decree was issued saying that fifty florins was the most anyone could charge for a tulip, any tulip. So
tulpenwoede
came to an end, just like that. But now there were hundreds of varieties, and fifty florins was still three times as much as the average price of a painting.”

We went out through one door and in through another, the entrance to the video store next door. I don't watch movies or TV much anymore; my mind wanders, looking for something to do. Anton is not a big fan, either, but he has a lot of time on his hands and sometimes rents a movie to fill it. He loves to browse in the video store, reading the empty sleeves on the shelves as closely as he reads covers in a bookstore. He is very discriminating, seems always to be searching for a certain thing, and can easily spend an hour or more trying to find it. More often than not, though, he comes away with nothing at all.

“We'll go,” he said softly, coming up behind me and putting his hand on my shoulder. I had stopped pretending to browse after about ten minutes and spent another ten looking out through the window at the snow swirling across the park and listening to the loud and over-solicitous young woman at the counter—Gemma, perhaps—helping her customers with their picks. Gemma's Top Ten Picks were listed on a sheet of bristol board on the wall. Speaking as if from a script, she had the same lines for every customer's question.

“Oh, it's bittersweet, one of those movies you either love or you don't.” She always did. “Oh, it's
sooo
good. I
really
loved it. I've seen it
three
times.”

She called out to us as we were leaving. “Did you find what you were looking for?” she asked.

“Yah, I think so,” Anton replied with an air of dubious certainty. Same question as the last time we were here, same puzzling answer. Leaving without it, even though he had found it.

In the porch he stopped abruptly to read a poster on the door, a message for those who were scurrying home with their video treasures thinking that everything was right with the world. It transfixed him like an ominous crow against a bank of freshly fallen snow.

“Lost Children/
Les enfants disparu
,” it said. Below this were two black-and-white, passport-like photos: one of a boy eight years old, born the same month and year as Anton, May 1946, who had disappeared in October 1954—lost, or dead, for more than forty years. The other photo was of the same boy as a fifty-year-old man, a computer-generated likeness, a computer-generated hope.

“
Verloren hoop
,” Anton whispered, one of those Dutch phrases that sounded so close to English I thought I knew what it meant. Or was I just hearing the sound of a thought inside my head? There is no end to hope, forlorn or otherwise.

I would come across this phrase again, not long after Anton left, in a new book on General Haig. (A devastating exposé. Miles, unfortunately, never got a chance to read it.) A historian discussing Haig's part in the Battle of the Somme, and Beaumont-Hamel in particular, had used the phrases
verloren hoop
and
les enfants perdus
to refer to the “lost troop” of Royal Newfoundland Regiment volunteers, just children, really, over eight hundred of them, sent to their deaths in France by General Haig on the first of July 1916.

He had examined and compared the war records in the archives of every country in the Commonwealth, as well as those in Washington, DC, and concluded that there had been a systematic cover-up and falsification of the records. Not only had Haig falsified the record of his own military career, he said, going so far as to rewrite, after the war, an already finely spun war diary, but the official historian himself, an old friend of Haig's, had produced a multi-volume work,
History of the Great War Based on Official Documents
, that was also nothing but propaganda, fiction, and lies. He had altered original documents, extracted and destroyed others, documents that later might have revealed the cover-up.

“One of the great archival scandals of the century,” declared a reviewer of this book in our own scholarly journal. “The implications are extremely troubling,” he concluded.

Double, double toil and trouble
.
Archive
fever,
twofold, it seems to me. (No need to call in Dr. Derrida.)
The will to remember as strong as the will to forget.

17. THE HILLS OF OLD WYOMING

It is a well known fact that there is often more interesting
history in the Songs of a country than in its formal political
records and State documents.

—
Gerald S. Doyle
, Old Time Songs and Poetry of Newfoundland

I
was back at
the Dewey files again this morning. Another slow Saturday, knee-deep in January, but perhaps not the old-fashioned winter everyone was expecting. After a month of cold temperatures and constant snow, the weather has turned warm again. Old two-faced Janus has given us a springlike weekend, temperatures in the teens, and our two-faced colleague, taking advantage of the fine weather, perhaps, was off on another mental-health holiday.

There was hardly a soul around, in fact, and without micro-manager Milton looking over my shoulder, I had time for a bit of leisurely reading. I became immersed in a paper on “the Doyle Songbook,” as most of us refer to it, which I was copying for the files. Two songs in particular, Otto Kelland's “Let Me Fish Off Cape St. Mary's” and Art Scammell's “The Squid-jiggin Ground,” were the subject of the paper by folklorist Dr. Olaf Skinner, delivered at a recent Learneds Conference in St. John's. It got me thinking about my father, who had worked for Gerald S. Doyle in the late forties and early fifties. Doyle was the legendary collector of Newfoundland folk songs and creator of the eponymous songbook, formally known as
Old Time Songs and Poetry of Newfoundland
.

“The Doyle hymn book,” my father used to call it, according to Hubert. The only hymns he knew, Hubert says, and he could play every tune in the book. “The Squid-jiggin Ground” and “Let Me Fish Off Cape St. Mary's” were his favourites, and he played them on the mouth organ, not the church organ. He had a whole collection of mouth organs, one in every key. They were among the few things Mother kept after he died. It was an instrument I associated more with the Old West than the New Founde Lande, with the streets of Laredo rather than the coves of Newfoundland, with campfires along the Chisholm Trail rather than on the beaches of the Cape Shore.

Hubert's favourite way of remembering, or conjuring up, our father (usually when he was drinking) was as a doting parent catching capelin for us with a cast net at Logy Bay—though he hated capelin—and playing tunes on the mouth organ as we sat on beach rocks around a driftwood fire roasting capelin on sticks, the closest we ever got to home and hearth. Perhaps it was his way of belatedly reconciling himself to this man—Our Father, who art probably in Hell, Hubert's least kindly judgment on him—this man who'd had another family besides us, perhaps two others, perhaps more. My “memories” of him, as I said before, are most likely only stories I was told and pictures I'd seen, and I wasn't told much of anything till long after he died. If I had what's now referred to in the psychiatric literature as “repressed memories,” it was probably my mother who had repressed them and not me. I had grown up and gone through school, in fact, knowing as much about the history of my father as I did about the history of the fatherland, which was hardly anything at all—about as much as Anton knew about his father.

Gerald S. Doyle, a manufacturer and distributor of patent medicines, had begun gathering unpatented songs on his travels around Newfoundland early in the century. He was not, however,
the
Newfoundland pioneer in this conjoint pursuit of peddling and poetry. No less a figure than E. J. Pratt had led the way, as early as 1907, though he was not consciously pursuing poetry at the time, but merely a university career. In 1907 he was still serving as a young Methodist minister on Bell Island, where he concocted his Universal Lung Healer and earned over three hundred dollars as a medicine man, more than his annual salary as a man of God, peddling it in the outports along the northeast coast in the summer, and earning enough money to get him into the University of Toronto in the fall. If he had not gone there, claims his biographer, “he would never have been a poet,” a vocation in which he earned much greater currency.

In 1927, Doyle began publishing his songbook, with ads for his products, and distributing it to Newfoundland households free of charge. After the war, my father abandoned his sedentary office job with Gerald S. Doyle Ltd. and took to the road in his station wagon as one of the company's travelling salesmen, covering the Southern Shore, the Cape Shore, and St. Mary's Bay, distributing the patent medicines and the songbook. A second edition had been published in 1940, this time with music. The first edition looked more like a book of poems. A third edition appeared in 1955, the year my father died. Doyle died the following year.

Stranded for two days in his station wagon on a bleak, snowbound stretch of road on the unpopulated west side of St. Mary's Bay, my father fell asleep with the engine running, trying to keep warm, and died of carbon monoxide poisoning. The car was loaded down with patent medicines: Dodd's Kidney Pills, Mecca Ointment, Doyle's Cod Liver Oil, Sloan's Liniment, Hobson's Worm Wafers, Brick's Tasteless, and Dr. Chase's Nerve Food, the advertisement for which read, “Why men crack when on the highway to success.” There were a few other salesman's wares as well, black-market “dry goods” items that he apparently sold on the side: boxes of condoms, for instance, a used sample of which Hubert once found beneath the front seat of the station wagon, along with a pair of women's underwear. In the glove compartment was a rolled-up handwritten manuscript, a scribbler-scroll bound up with plastic bands. It contained over five hundred Newfoundland proverbs, most of which I had never heard before. Had the old man been secretly planning to do for the proverbial history of Newfoundland what Gerald S. Doyle had done for its musical history?

Hubert liked to imagine him, at the end, consoling himself with music, taking out his mouth organ and playing the elegiac bars of “Cape St. Mary's.”
Take me back to my western boat
…If, indeed, there is a song in the Doyle songbook that comes close to sounding like a hymn, “Cape St. Mary's” is the one. With its arhythmical musical form, funereal tempo, a cappella incantations, and its almost religious feeling, it seems to exist beyond time and place, yet is entirely a song
of the earth.
Elaine's father had called it “the national anthem,” but it seems more like the anthem of a country that has never been, or will never be again. Like “Amazing Grace,” or that old Shaker hymn “Bright Morning Star Arising,” it is a song that doesn't seem to need musical accompaniment. It's either the essence of music or somehow beyond it, a transcendent reverie or lamentation, a “spiritual” in the deepest sense of the word.

But alas, like the old man, the song may have had a secret, more worldly life—at least according to folklorist Dr. Olaf Skinner.

“Let Me Fish Off Cape St. Mary's,” like “The Squid-jiggin Ground,” is another “composed/traditional” Newfoundland folk song, as Dr. Skinner calls it, by which he means that, unlike most songs identified as “traditional,” its composer is still known to us. But it has already blended in with the traditional repertoire, and most people would probably say it is a traditional folk song. And you'd think it was written by a man who'd spent all his life as a fisherman. But no. Otto Kelland, who composed the song in 1947—it came to him, he said, “right out of the blue”—had not spent his life in that insecure occupation, but in the so-called security profession, first as a policeman for fifteen years and then as head of Her Majesty's Penitentiary for twenty-five more. I suppose we archivists might be considered by some to be part of the security profession ourselves, though we are always trying to strike a balance between locking things up and granting visiting rights, between preservation and access.

Doubtless, being in prison for such a long time, in whatever capacity, would make you long to be out on the water. Or, indeed, out in any wide open spaces. The lone prairie, for example. Consider this. What would our fathers, Elaine's and mine, have made of this bit of scholarly jigging? At the mere thought of repeating it, I can hear them roll over in their graves. In his Learneds Conference paper, “Composed/Traditional: Two Songs from the Doyle Songbook,” Dr. Skinner points out that “Let Me Fish Off Cape St. Mary's” bears a striking similarity to “The Hills of Old Wyoming,” a tune composed eleven years earlier, in 1936, and used on the soundtrack of a Hopalong Cassidy movie.

So much for the national anthem—but at least it's evidence for my mouth organ associations. It was the only instrument I had ever heard played in Westerns. And, I have to confess, when I did eventually hear “Cape St. Mary's” played on the mouth organ, I had the eerie feeling that it sounded absolutely right.

But let me fish for a few moments. Maybe some tunes sound as if they are beyond time and place, space and time, because they actually are; but if you happen to be on the right frequency sometimes—not tuned in but tuned out—they can, as Otto Kelland said, come to you right out of the blue. And not the blue hills and blue skies of Old Wyoming.

Lost in this meditative cast, I was interrupted by a strange dishevelled-looking man of the cloth inquiring about some real hymns, not the traditional music variety, but the Reverend John “Amazing Grace” Newton's.

“Do you 'ave the
Hauthentic Narrative
and the
Olney 'yms
?” he asked.

Obviously an exasperating mouthful for those who aspired to “proper” aspiration, with the risk of both dropping and adding an
h
in the same breath, not to mention being fooled by a silent
l
as well. At this very university, in the mid-sixties, non-standard English-speakers, especially improper aspirators (typically, descendants of West Country English fishermen from around the Bay), were still being fished out and subjected to linguistic filleting in speech classes—English as a second language for native speakers. Non-native English-speakers, however, who couldn't land the word
salmon
, for example, without hooking an
l
as well, or who regularly transposed their
l
's and
r
's, were regarded simply as charming. What was it about the mis-aspirated
h
that caused so much exasperation and concern?

Yet, surprisingly, though he dropped and added his
h
's, this gentleman pronounced the name of the English village where the hymns had been penned like a native Englishman. Perhaps he had visited
Own
-ey, or had even tended a flock in those parts; perhaps he had been educated in the Mother Country. My Olney
l
had been silenced as a graduate student, as a result of my work on crazy William Cowper, he of the silent
w. Coo-
per had not only lived in Olney, but in John Newton's house, and had collaborated with him on the
Olney Hymns.
He wrote about a third of them, in fact.

Our man of the cloth—stained, tattered, wrinkled, and wet cloth, an embarrassingly big wet patch just below his belt—had yellowish, sleep-encrusted eyes and spiky, straw-coloured hair. He could have been a wasted aging front man for an evangelical punk rock band, or a pathetic scarecrow, though if I were a crow, I don't think I could have summoned up even a sympathetic pretense of fright. Or perhaps the poor soul who stood before me was the crazy William Cowper himself, reincarnated.

I avoided the mock-authoritarian Mr. Stickler routine we sometimes put students through for their own good: Did you check the catalogue? Do you have the call number? Did you fill out your request slip? etc., etc.

“I'll check the catalogue,” I said helpfully, knowing that we did have both books, but needing call numbers for the slips. I wrote the numbers on there for him.

“You'll need to fill these in,” I said. “Do you have a library card?”

“No, I'm just writing a sermon,” he said. “We used to 'ave the 'yms 'fore the church burned down.”

The church burned down, I thought, and began to recall something I'd read in the paper a few weeks ago about a church burning down under suspicious circumstances somewhere out in the evangelical heartland: White Bay, Baie Verte, Green Bay, Halls Bay, that area. A burning, literally, evangelical minister had been found outside his burning church, rolling around in the wet grass, trying to douse the flames on his clothes. He claimed that he had gone down to the church in the early evening, an hour before the service, and found an intruder dressed like a mummer setting the fire with newspaper and lighter fluid. The alarmed arsonist had then thrown lighter fluid over him, he said, and set his clothes on fire.

From what I remembered, this suspect was never found, and the minister was later charged with doing the deed himself—setting both the church and himself on fire. But before he was charged and tried, someone had tried to administer justice vigilante style by firing several bullets through the windows and walls of another church down the road where the same minister was preaching.