The Strangers' Gallery (32 page)

“Your church had a copy of the
Olney Hymns
?” I asked him.

“Yes, we did,” he said, “signed by the Reverend Newton 'imself. Lost in the fire…when the church burned down.”

I handed him the form to fill in for a library card, on which he had to put his name, address, and telephone number. On it he wrote “Rev. St. Croix,” and the name and address of an inn in St. John's.

“Where was the church?” I asked.

“Oh, that was my old congregation,” he said. “A long time ago.”

“Is this a permanent address?” I asked, pointing to the form.

“My sister's place,” he said. “I've been there for a good while. 'ow long can I 'ave the books?”

“I'm afraid you'll have to read them here,” I said. “This is just a research library and archives. Anyway, these are rare books. Even a lending library wouldn't lend these.”

I left a student assistant at my post, and after retrieving the books from the Vault and finding a pair of reading gloves that looked so dirty they would probably do more harm to the delicate pages than his sweaty bare hands, I led him to a table in the Reading Room and sat down with my file folders at the other end, where I could keep an eye on him. He must have thought it was only going to be him and the hymns, for he eyed me somewhat sulkily as I sat down and looked down the long table at him with the beady-eyed severity of an exam invigilator.

Looking like a grateful, spellbound grandfather who had just received a gift from his only grandchild, the Reverend St. Croix fingered the paper-and-metal identification medallions attached by string to the protective lavender boxes in which the books were enclosed, then gently untied the bows and lifted back the flaps to reveal his gifts: the
Authentic Narrative
, 3rd edition, 1765; the
Olney Hymns
, 4th edition, 1787. He began to mutter and mumble to himself as he licked the thumb of the cotton glove and turned the pages of one of the books. Neither of them has Newton's signature on it, but, if you'll excuse an inappropriate simile, they are still as rare and valuable as hell.

It may be hard to believe, but the acid-free, rag paper pages of these rare books are as white and supple as the day they were printed. Well, I exaggerate a bit, but compared to the pages of most of the books in here, which were printed in the last one hundred years—there's no comparison, really. As Colm said at our last meeting, most of these books, printed on high-acid, wood-pulp paper instead of cotton and linen rag, and no longer being sewn together but merely glued, probably won't even be around one hundred, perhaps even fifty, years from now. In spite of our best efforts to give them a good home, safe from their enemies—humidity, erratic temperatures, dust, and light—these books are just not going to last. They were born with a congenital flaw, so to speak, acid in the bloodstream, from the chemical processing of wood pulp. Many of them are already unstable and have been withdrawn. Their pages are breaking down, turning yellowish brown and brittle. Eventually, they will become so fragile that they will crack and crumble to the touch. As the bookbinder who repairs our books recently remarked to me, bookmaking—as opposed to filmmaking or record-making or printmaking—is the only craft whose developing technology has made things worse instead of better.

Contemplating all this, I must have been digging my elbows rather heavily into the hardwood of the Reading Room table, for my body began to pick up vibrations from the other end, not unlike those that seem to home in on your chest from the thumping bass-heart of some teenager's stereo in a car coming toward you a mile down the road. Looking down the long table, I saw that the Reverend St. Croix was no longer just quietly muttering and mumbling to himself. Staring reverently at one of the books, his head and hands were shaking and his white lips were trembling fiercely, perhaps even frothing. His whole body, in fact, seemed to be trembling, and I thought that he was either going to have an epileptic fit or start speaking in tongues, perhaps tongues of flame that would set these CO2 tanks firing and suffocate the lot of us. But he looked up suddenly and saw me looking at him, then settled back into what seemed to be a state of normal consciousness.

To maintain my watch, I'd been fighting a strong urge to urinate, and though I knew it would be a mistake to leave him alone with the books, I'd reached the point where I couldn't wait any longer. The reference librarians are coffee addicts; they have their own twelve-cup coffee maker and a bucket-sized can of Folgers coffee in the storeroom. Before starting work I'd downed a large mug from a pot that had, as one of them had put it, “real authority.” I got up quietly and walked out through the Reading Room door, then rushed past the main desk and down the stairs to the nearest bathroom, which was on the floor below. When I got back, as I had feared, the old bugger was gone—
Authentic Narrative
and
Olney Hymns
along with him.

I ran across the foyer and out through the main door. The courtyard was empty. A beautiful sunny springlike morning in January! Across the way was a suspiciously inviting copse of evergreens. I hurried across the courtyard and entered this small cultivated woods, where the air was warm and sweet-smelling, and, sure enough, there was the Reverend St. Croix seated on a bench with his raincoat open, his head thrown back, and his face looking heavenward, though his eyes were closed. One rare book lay closed beside him on the seat, and the other, open on his lap, looked like some great white mushroom in the glaring light. Except for his eyes, which he opened but didn't turn toward me, he didn't move a whisker as I slowly approached and sat down beside him on the bench.

“Those are rare books,” I said, in the gently officious tone I had spent twenty years cultivating. “You can't take them out of the library. If they get lost or damaged, they can never be replaced…and they shouldn't be opened in the sun.”

He ignored this and, half-turning toward me, said, just as gently, “Not too many people know that the Reverend Newton caught fish off the coast of Newfoundland and was almost lost in a storm, fish that was salted and stored away, fish that saved 'is life on the last leg of 'is trip, when 'is ship was becalmed and all they 'ad left was fresh water and salt fish. And 'e didn't have any slaves on that ship—like they say 'e did.”

He closed the book on his lap and laid it on top of the other one on the bench. He closed his eyes, turned his face heavenward once again, and intoned: “‘Amazing grace, 'ow sweet the sound,/ That saved a wretch like me./ I once was lost, but now I'm found,/ Was blind, but now I see.'” He turned to me and said, “That 'ymn was written that night in the storm, when 'e asked the Lord Jesus Christ for mercy.” Then he sprang up from the bench and strode off, but mercifully left the books behind.

I picked them up and laid them on my lap, my anxiety melting away like the snow dripping from the evergreens as I watched the wretched Reverend St. Croix descend the slope toward Elizabeth Avenue, cross the road and disappear into an empty wooded lot on the other side, another lost soul in search of a father, albeit a heavenly one. I tilted my own head back and closed my eyes, inhaled the warm, sweet, pine-scented air of the landscaped grove, and thought I heard the sounds of birds and chirpy human voices among the trees. I almost nodded off with relief, but my head fell forward and jerked me awake.

Back at my post, I located a brand new pair of reading gloves, opened the
Authentic Narrative
and began reading Newton's amazing account of his life at sea, which had begun at the tender age of eleven. It
had
included slave trading, but, at the other extreme, a startling—even more so to him—religious conversion aboard a ship called the
Greyhound
in a violent winter storm off the coast of Newfoundland on the twenty-first of March 1748. Although he might not have written “Amazing Grace” on that fearful voyage, as the Reverend St. Croix claimed, the many dangers, toils, and snares of that traumatic experience probably were the source of the world's most famous hymn, which first appeared in the
Olney Hymns
more than thirty years later, in 1779. He observed this day—the first day of spring, appropriately enough—as an anniversary for the rest of his life, noting it in his diary every year. The very last entry, in fact, was on March 21, 1805. The Old Blasphemer, as he called himself, died on the first day of winter, December 21, 1807, at the age of eighty-two.

At the end of the day, I went to the main library and borrowed Newton's
Thoughts Upon the African Slave Trade,
a new edition,
as well as the only biography of him they had on hand, one written about fifty years ago. In the stacks alongside it, I found another book by the biographer entitled
The Ancient Mariner and the Authentic Narrative
, published around the same time. I was much taken by his assertion in the preface that Coleridge had read Newton's
Authentic Narrative
—Coleridge claimed to have read everything, and the book had gone into eight editions by the time “The Ancient Mariner” appeared—and that when he was writing his most famous poem, he almost certainly had in mind the story of John Newton. The biographer had been so obsessed by this idea, in fact, that he had stopped working on Newton's biography to research and write this book on Coleridge.

I took out a collection of essays on “The Ancient Mariner,” a volume that was said to contain “the best criticism devoted to the poem written in the past twenty-five years,” but which reminded me of a brilliantly funny book I had read as a graduate student,
The Pooh Perplex
, a collection of essays parodying the various types of literary criticism. After I had read it, in fact, I was no longer able to take any type of criticism seriously anymore. I wouldn't go so far as to say that it was the reason I eventually gave up literary studies, but I began to realize that many, perhaps too many, academics took criticism more seriously than literature. The more one progressed along this road, if one wished to be taken seriously oneself, the more one had to read, and write, criticism rather than literature. Well, here I was right back in the thick of it, and all because some pyromaniacal evangelical had tried to steal two of our books.

In one of the essays, the highly esteemed literary critic William Empson, Mr. Ambiguity himself, author of that famous critical nostrum
Seven Types of Ambiguity,
described “The Ancient Mariner” quite simply and unambiguously as “a very good poem about the maritime expansion of western Europeans from the fifteenth century onwards.” But even more than that: as a guilty tribute to these visionary voyages and a consummate literary distillation, a symbolic summing-up, of the whole colonial enterprise.

I had thought that Empson had founded his whole critical theory on a rejection of this kind of criticism, historical and psychological, in favour of focusing the critical intelligence entirely on verbal nuance. But, again, I remembered Empson being described as the clown-prince, the clown-genius, the Shakespearean fool, of literary criticism, the readiest to make a fool of himself in public, treading a borderline between brilliance and absurdity, the sublime and the ridiculous. Indeed, the editor of the collection, in his introduction, had dismissed this particular critical foray as “charmingly outrageous.”

It was a psychology of guilt that Empson was proposing, for a history of conquest and colonization, with its attendant cruelty, exploitation, greed, and destruction. “The Ancient Mariner,” he said, was based on actual mariners' reports, including Newton's, that Coleridge had read extensively and plagiarized word for word, and these reports, plainly, reeked of guilt. But the intensity, the naked strength, of the language of these reports, was what made this poem so good—so good, in fact, that it was “as if English had been evolved quite simply to write this one poem.”

Well now. How's that for an exegesis?
Jesus.
Here was some flotsam and jetsam for the Maritime History Archive, something even Miles Harnett, the Ancient Beachcomber, may have overlooked. I imagined a pristine 1798 edition of the
Lyrical Ballads,
in which “The Ancient Mariner” had first appeared, displayed in a shrine-like case not unlike that designed for the bust of our university's founding father, and erected alongside him, or better still, displacing him, at the main entrance to the Archives. On the occasion of the book's two hundredth anniversary, in 1998, we would demand its return from the Bodleian, or wherever it was housed, as the Greeks had long demanded the return of the Elgin Marbles from the British Museum. It could displace Prowse's
History
, Amulree's
Report
, Cormack's
Narrative
, Doyle's songbook, Smallwood's
Book of Newfoundland
, etc., as our authentic narrative, our
ur
-narrative, our master narrative, our history and literature and scripture all rolled into one.

We could organize a year-long colonial celebration in 1998 to fill in the big hole that was looming among all the anniversaries leading up to the millennium: the Cabot Colonial in 1997, the Confederation Colonial in 1999, and the Viking millennium festivities in 2000. A travelling exhibit, perhaps, on a ship, a ghost barque, going from port to port like the
Matthew
or a Viking
knarr
, with simultaneous Ancient Mariner pageants at every tourist theatre festival from Cape Race to Cape Ray, from McDougall Gulch to Ha Ha Bay, from Cape Bauld to Cappahayden.

18. ARCHIVE FEVER

Is it possible that the antonym of “forgetting” is not
“remembering,” but justice?

—Y. H. Yerushalmi
, Zakhor

A
nton has become
obsessed with William Cormack. He has even begun to refer to his father, or the man he thinks might be his father, as “Mister Cormack.” Late last month, after receiving a letter from the Department of Veterans Affairs, he began to reread Cormack's
Narrative of a journey across the island of Newfoundland, the only one ever performed by a European
. Finding it as hard a mental trek as Cormack's torturous physical journey, he has consulted me frequently about the odd choices of words:
dykes, murals, savannas, paps, bosom, cleavage.
He has been searching for “the Bay of Despair” on the map. Cormack's
Narrative
was the first Newfoundland book in which I had encountered “the Bay of Despair” in print. It is, of course, marked somewhat differently on the present-day map of Newfoundland—Bay D'Espoir, the Bay of Hope—but Anton is adventurously multilingual and will, no doubt, eventually find it. I assured him it was there and left him to it.

Anton is always poking around in the basement and continues to find unusual things down there. Besides the snowshoes, he found a set of sleigh bells on a strip of leather, which he attached to the front door, a horseshoe hinged to a block of wood that he nailed to the side door as a knocker, and a large, plug-in picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus that would leave even a lapsed Catholic electrified. He plugged it into the wall at the head of his bed and uses the glowing heart as a reading light. If Cormack's long-lost box of maps and papers is down there, no doubt he will eventually find that as well. There are some unique historical records still waiting to be found.

The birch rinds on which William Cormack traced maps of the unknown interior of Newfoundland during his trek across the Island in 1822 were found in an old box by the librarian of the new Athenaeum library on Duckworth Street in St. John's on the morning of January 13, 1881, the day of the (first) founding meeting of the Newfoundland Historical Society. Also in the box were the papers of Cormack's Beothuck Institution, established in Twillingate in 1827 “for the purpose of opening a communication with and promoting the civilization of the Red Indians of Newfoundland.” These records and others were thought to have been lost forever.

“These things were inspected with great interest by the assembled gentlemen, who thought they would make a valuable start to the archives of the new society,” said a latter-day president. Indeed, this simultaneous finding and founding must have seemed extraordinarily auspicious, but, as it turned out, it would be another twenty-five years before the new society got off the ground. In the intervening years the old box, and everything in it, disappeared without a trace.

All the Athenaeum records, in fact, along with its large collection of books, newspapers, magazines, and artifacts, were most likely destroyed when the newly constructed building burned in the Great Fire of July 1892. Nevertheless, I would not be greatly surprised if Cormack's birch-rind maps, or his lost papers, were to turn up again. In my short archival career, I've seen my share of amazing finds. People phone all the time offering boxes of stuff they've found in old sheds and stores, basements and attics.

The records of the Royal Newfoundland Astronomical Society, for instance, were discovered in the basement of a house on Forest Road that was destroyed by fire. Left miraculously untouched inside a charred-green, four-drawer, metal filing cabinet, army issue, they were donated to the Archives. The society's files go all the way back to its founding meeting on February 8, 1881, also at the Athenaeum, and less than a month after the Newfoundland Historical Society's first meeting. They are now finally being processed, after being in our possession for a decade or more.

In the very first folder, original order, on faded royal blue stationery, is a letter from Her Majesty Queen Victoria bestowing royal patronage on the new society, and a congratulatory message from Britain's Royal Astronomer, Sir W. H. M. Christie, installed that same year, 1881, the eighth in a line that went even farther back than the most famous Royal Astronomer, Edmund Halley, installed in 1720. There is a complete list of Royal Astronomers in the files, with dates of birth, installation, and death, beginning with the not-so-well-known Reverend J. Flamsteed, installed in 1675, when Halley was only nineteen years old and had yet to discover his famous comet.

“Historical research value: minimal,” the accession archivist (now no longer with us) noted at the time the files were acquired, so they were given a low processing priority. But they were to have some personal research value, as it turned out, for among the files is a folder labelled “Blue Moon.”

It appears that the blue moon Anton's mother saw in the night sky over Noordwijk in late September 1950 was visible over most of western Europe and eastern North America. On the night of September 26, 1950, English astronomer Patrick Moore, in his observatory at East Grinstead, Sussex, noted in his observing log: “The moon shone with a lovely shimmering blueness—like an electric glimmer—utterly different from anything I have seen before.” Closer to home, on the very same night, a member of the Royal Newfoundland Astronomical Society filed an observer's report of a blue moon in the night sky over Newfoundland.

It was a true blue moon, one that appears only every seventy-five years or so, once in a lifetime, according to astronomers; not the bogus blue moon, the second full moon in a month, reported every few years nowadays, but neither true nor blue. Huge forest fires in northern Alberta, thirty or more, were the cause of it, according to some newspaper reports in the files. The fires were in an area of muskeg that had been smoldering for some time. When they finally got going, they produced an enormous amount of smoke. Trans-Canada Airlines pilots estimated the smoke track to be up to three hundred miles wide and twenty-five thousand feet high. The prevailing westerlies carried it east, creating “dark days” in some eastern North American cities. Like the dust from large volcanic eruptions, the smoke filtered out red light but let blue light through. There were reports of blue suns as well as blue moons. Most newspaper accounts, however, did not connect these celestial phenomena to the fires in Canada. Neither did Anton's mother, of course, though, ironically, she had seen the blue moon as an omen.

There have been others, but last month's letter from the Department of Veterans Affairs—“the DiVA,” as Anton calls it—will probably be the last. He's shown them all to me, and they do have a certain temperamental, self-important air, as if the DiVA
is
the prima donna of federal government departments, though it's probably one of the smallest and least important. This very appropriately named department is very secretive, very discreet, Anton says, even more protective of its veterans and their affairs than its Dutch counterpart. He who controls the Archive has the power, declared Derrida. Department officials are not giving out any personal information unless they're pressed, but they had at least agreed to confirm or deny any information Anton might give them. Their first reply to his inquiries, which he had received even before he arrived, was only a vague routine promise to look into his case.

Anton is still making his case for “full disclosure,” as he calls it, and is doing some detailed detective work to back it up. About 1,700 Newfoundlanders—1,200 men and 500 women—served in the Canadian Army, Navy, and Air Force in the Second World War, but Anton was informed by the DVA that there was no one named “William Peter” (or “William Peters”), the name his father gave his mother in the summer of 1945, on the Nominal Rolls. When he found out that the original Nominal Rolls for Newfoundland were in the government archives, however, he went over to the Colonial Building and had a look at them himself. Although he found no one on the list with the surname “Peter” or “Peters,” he did find five Newfoundland soldiers with the Christian names “William Peter.”

He sent all their names to the DVA, who confirmed that one of them had indeed served in the Canadian Army in Holland. And though they refused to say which one, and to provide Anton with his address, they did offer to forward a letter to this elusive veteran. Names and addresses are given out, they said, only if the serviceman is dead—and even then, they required proof of death and, furthermore, proof that the applicant, or supplicant, is related to the deceased.

So, in spite of everything, Anton still had reason for hope. He wrote a hopeful letter to one William Peter and sent it along to the DVA.

But if a death notice isn't waiting at the end of the road, I thought, there may be something even worse: rejection for a second time. Perhaps this is what Anton fears the most, for he left last month's letter on the hall table for several days before opening it. When he finally did, he seemed somewhat disturbed by its accidental (if, indeed, it was) revelation.

In keeping with the DVA's complex, if perhaps innocent, bureaucratic machinations, their latest response was arranged like a set of Russian dolls or Chinese boxes—a dead-letter archive, envelopes within envelopes within envelopes. There was the letter to his father, still sealed in its small, sad envelope, which was inside the letter and envelope he'd sent to the DVA. Both of these were inside the letter and envelope they'd sent to William Peter, which was inside the large envelope they'd sent back to him, with a note “regretting to advise that your communication came back undelivered, Addressee Unknown.” But some (careless? compassionate?) DVA official or office clerk had conveniently overlooked the fact that the letter they'd sent to Anton's father (though the name and address had been carefully blacked out) still had a legible post office stamp, with date and location—“Cormack, Newfoundland”—on the back. Being familiar with so many of these pathetic cases, and always having to adopt a tough, regimental approach, perhaps someone at the DVA had finally, mercifully, broken down and deliberately left it there to help him.

Anton first read Cormack's
Narrative—
“the undisputed classic of Newfoundland travel,” as it's been called—early last fall. It was the first Newfoundland book that he read, in fact, having fixed upon my much-prized 1856 edition (purchased at an auction at the Kirk) after a full day's browsing in my modest library of old and rare Newfoundland books. I've been collecting them since I started archival work over twenty years ago. In there are some quite rare first editions. Steadily, if haphazardly, Anton continued to work his way through my collection all fall.

I've begun to reread parts of them myself, frequently coming across books that Anton has started and abandoned: on the coffee table, the kitchen table, the chesterfield, the flush box; clinging to the edges of window ledges and shelves of various bookcases around the house. I don't mind this in-house scattering so much, but, as Anton seems to be even more absent-minded than I am, I've asked him not to take any books out of the house.

Among these books is a copy of Lord Amulree's
Report
, that tinderbox of Miles's psyche, containing the severe and unmerciful judgment of the Lord on the morally and politically wayward Newfoundland soul. It might have been a more original version of original sin that he'd found here, an
ur
-sin peculiar to this place.

Anton hasn't yet come across this merciless, incendiary document, and it might have been a barely conscious feeling of embarrassment or shame, deep in the recesses of my hitherto unashamedly apolitical consciousness—by Miles Harnett's rigorously patriotic standards, at least—that made me momentarily consider removing it from the shelves and hiding it from him.
Momentarily
, I must stress; the greater shame at the mere thought of such an archival transgression quickly shooed the lesser one out the door. But it just goes to show that even trustworthy professionals are not free from entertaining unprofessional impulses, unarchival urges, and are sometimes deeply troubled by the contradictory impulses said by Anton's favourite theorist, Derrida, to lie at the very feverish heart of archiving: the desire to remember and the inclination, the will, the need, to forget.