“Forty-five out of five hundred,” he roared. “Forty-five out of five hundred, nine per cent. Four hundred and fifty-five marks missing. Two hundred and five marks short of barely passing. Can you imagine the gall? I suffer from a ninety-one per cent character deficiency. Ninety-one per cent of my character just isn’t there.”
He called out to me from the bottom of the stairs. “It is not you who has been judged, boy,” he said. “It is your father, your poor father. I want you to tell Headmaster Reeves that I have judged his character to be fifteen out of five hundred. No, no, that’s too much. Tell him I have judged his character to be absent altogether. Zero. Null. That’s his mark for character from me. Tell him that as far as I can tell, he has no character at all.”
Marks for school subjects were assigned by the teachers who taught them, but Headmaster Reeves judged the character of every boy in the school, so I had expected a low character mark, if not one quite so low, for my “interview” with him had not gone well. (Each of us went to see him near year’s end for our character interview.) He said I had a tendency for “romancing,” by which he meant day-dreaming. The other teachers reported to him that I was often caught at my desk staring at lists of names I had composed that had my own name at the bottom. Convinced, for instance, that I would myself write a history of Newfoundland as Prowse’s grand-father had done, I compiled this list of Newfoundland historians: Judge John Reeves, The Reverend Lewis Amadeus Anspach, The Reverend Charles Pedley, The Reverend Philip Toque, The Reverend Moses Harvey, Judge Daniel Woodley Prowse, Joseph Robert Smallwood. I compiled a list of Newfoundland’s prime ministers, a line of succession that ended with me: The Right Honourable Sir Joseph Robert Smallwood, K.C.G.M., P.C., M.H.A. Reeves assured me, laughing at his own cleverness, that no one as “benighted” as me would ever “be knighted.”
I read a lot of books that Reeves deemed to be improper, that is to say books written by non-Englishmen. I read The Last of the Mohicans, Huckleberry Finn and Moby Dick.
At the time of my interview with Reeves, I had heretically been attempting a book not even written by someone who spoke English, War and Peace, a copy of which I had got as a Christmas present. I fancied that I would one day write a book that did for Newfoundland what War and Peace had done for Russia, a great, national, unashamedly patriotic epic.
“You’re a great reader, aren’t you, Mr. Smallwood?” Reeves said. “Always going about with extracurricular books beneath your arm. And what books they are, too; big books for a boy your age. Every time I see you, I say to myself, There goes little Smallwood, another load of books beneath his arm. What’s he up to, I wonder, what’s he thinking? I tell myself that in a way, it’s a good sign, all this extra reading. He must be confused, he must be searching for something in those books. He’s no ordinary young man, he doesn’t take things at face value. He wants to know, what’s the expression, he wants to know what makes things tick?”
This was one of his favourite rhetorical devices, to pretend to be groping for some phrase, to be unschooled in the ways and expressions of the world, so preoccupied was he with more important things.
“I was like that once. I used to ask myself, what are they called, the Big Questions. I fancied I could understand the answers.”
He looked at me as if he was waiting for me to agree or disagree with this assessment of myself. All I could think to do was raise my eyebrows.
He performed a series of ironically dismissive gestures: adjusted his glasses, smoothed his moustache, put his hands on his hips.
“You’ve got a book there now,” he said. “Let me see it.” He held out his hand.
“War and Peace,” he said in a tone of weary amusement, as if he had so often countered its claims to greatness that to do so again would be a waste of breath. He moved the hand that held it up and down appraisingly, then shrugged. He held it out at arm’s length. “Perhaps the greatest novel ever written by perhaps the greatest novelist of all time,” he read, laughing slightly. “Oh my, oh my, oh my. Now, Mr. Smallwood, you probably read that, ‘The greatest novel ever written,’ and you say to yourself, Imagine if someone said that about a book of mine. That’s it, isn’t it?”
He spoke this last sentence in a sympathetic tone, as though he was inviting me to confide in him, as if to say I need not be embarrassed about owning up to it, here was my chance to get it off my chest, to unburden myself; as if to say he knew what it was to labour under such prideful illusions as believing oneself to be destined for greatness.
“Leo Tolstoy,” he read, “1828–1910. So where is Leo perhaps-the-greatest-novelist-of-all-time Tolstoy now, Mr. Smallwood? Can you tell me that, where is poor old Leo now?”
“Right there,” I said, pointing at the book. He raised his eyebrows in mock acknowledgement of my quick-wittedness. Then he reached again into the desk and came out with a large, leather-bound edition of the Bible, which he placed side by side on the desk with War and Peace. He bent slightly forward over the desk, extended his hands like a merchant displaying his wares or like a magician inviting you to see that his props were exactly what he said they were.
“Well?” he said, looking up at me with a kind of canny smile.
“Sir?” I said, pretending not to know what he was getting at.
As if my reaction had confirmed some hunch of his, he put the Bible back in the drawer and handed me my War and Peace.
“You’re planning to write the great Newfoundland novel, is that it?” he said. “War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. Fish and Chips by Joey Smallwood.”
He stood up and turned his back to me, looking out the window.
“Pride goeth before a fall, Mr. Smallwood,” he said. “I was myself once full of pride. And pride is the greatest of all sins, the sin over which the first war was fought, the sin because of which Lucifer and his rebel angels were driven out of heaven and cast into the pit of hell. I want you to remember that. You can go now.”
Fielding’s Condensed
History of Newfoundland
Chapter One:
LANDFALL
We intend our history to be the story of the island of Newfoundland since the geological formation which bears that name first rose above the surface of the sea.…
The earth’s crust cools …
John Cabot discovers the island on June 24, 1497. He believes he has found Cathay, now known as China, to find a shortcut to which he had set out thirty-five days before. He returns to England and tells King Henry VII that he has found the land of the Grand Khan and will surely find the Grand Khan’s kingdom if Henry will finance a second expedition. The king agrees. Cabot leaves for Newfoundland and is never seen again.
In 1534, Jacques Cartier circumnavigates Newfoundland, proving it to be an island, which he manages to convince his crew is as great an achievement as doing what he set out to do, namely, discover a passage to the East Indies. This explains his later remark, inscrutable to many, that the quality he prizes most highly in a sailor is gullibility.
In 1583, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, the half-brother of Sir Walter Raleigh, sets out in search of a passage to the Orient, but settles for claiming Newfoundland in the name of Queen Elizabeth I. Upon leaving Newfoundland for England, he takes with him a piece of turf and a small twig, symbols of ownership which, unlike him, remain afloat when his ship sinks in the mid-Atlantic.
Judges
ONE OF MY FATHER’S most prized possessions, for all the scorn he heaped on Newfoundland, was his copy of A History of Newfoundland by Judge D. W. Prowse, published in 1895. It was one of the world’s great histories, he said, though he doubted it would ever be so acknowledged outside of Newfoundland.
He was as awed by Prowse’s prowess with numbers, his tables, graphs, charts and columns of statistics, as he was by Prowse’s prose, which had the conviction and lucid eloquence of court decisions, judgments rendered and explained, effects painstakingly traced back to causes. It read like some great argument written to confound appeals to higher courts, though th
e argument was often lost amid the mass of detail. It was, as Prowse confessed in his foreword, not complete, it could not be at even ten times its eight hundred pages, for the instant he finished writing it a moment of history went unrecorded and even in what was written there were gaps, implausibilities, unsatisfying explanations and conjectures, though he believed that all of the latter were at least theoretically correctible and the only impediment to the perfection he had set out to achieve was time and the availability of documents. Four centuries of island history were encompassable, the judge believed. A Hansard-like transcription of our past could be set down, if only there was time.
To me, it was as if the History contained, not a record of the past, but the past itself, distilled, compacted to such density that I could barely lift it.
My father revered the History, not so much because it justified the ways of Newfoundland to the world, or because it denounced England for its three-hundred-year exploitation of Newfoundland, though that it did both he greatly appreciated, but because it was the concrete product of a man who had succeeded in doing in life the thing he considered most worth doing.
“Do you really think my grandfather’s History is a great book?” Prowse asked me after class one day, just before the Christmas break in Lower Fifth, two years into my stint at Bishop Feild.
“Yes, I do,” I said. “My father has a copy. He thinks it’s a great book, too.”
“Oh, really? Would your father like to meet my grandfather, do you think?” Prowse said, flashing me that smile that always accompanied such displays of unasked-for generosity. “He could autograph your father’s copy of his book.”
I told him I would ask my father that Sunday when I went home to visit.
My father seemed almost terrified at the thought of meeting the judge. “No, no, my God, no,” he said, as if I had made some dreadful blunder, pacing about the floor of the front room, shaking his head, worried that Prowse might already have arranged the meeting and the judge might be expecting him. I assured him this was not the case, but asked him why he did not want to meet someone whose work he so admired.
“I don’t know why,” my father said. “I don’t want to meet a man like that, that’s all I know.”
“Meet not the judge lest ye be judged,” my mother said.
“Here,” he said, handing me his copy of the History, “you go with young Prowse to see the judge and have him sign my book. Tell him Charlie Smallwood says hello.”
Nine years before, in 1905, the judge had begun revising his History, not just to include the years that had passed since the publication of the first edition, but to correct the many mistakes that had been brought to his attention and the sight of which set down in print kept him awake at night, and to take into account new documents that had come to light, documents ages old of which there seemed to be no end.
I walked with Prowse to the judge’s large old house on Military Road, followed him up a set of stairs to a study where we found the judge all but buried in the detritus of scholarship, his desk a chaos of maps and charts, the crude, curiously blunt and rounded maps of primitive cartography, the floor littered with massive volumes, colonial registries and Blue Books. It seemed the walls were made of books; on top of the shelves books were piled until they touched the ceiling; slats of light came shining through the piles of books that blocked the window. “Grandpa,” Prowse said after knocking briefly on the door, “this is Joe Smallwood, a friend of mine from Bishop Feild.”
The judge seemed pleased to be interrupted. He swung around in his chair and, smiling broadly, held out his hand for me to shake. I made my way among the books scattered on the floor and took his hand. “Pleased to meet you, sir,” I said.
“Pleased to meet you, boy,” he said. He looked in good-natured confusion at Prowse, then shook his head and looked back at me. The house was cold; he was dressed in a buttoned tweed overcoat and red scarf, the latter just discernible through his long white beard.
“Joe’s father likes your book,” Prowse said, “and Joe was wondering if you would sign a copy for him.”
Prowse opened my father’s copy of the History on the desk in front of the judge, and the judge, as if indulging some delusion of ours, shrugged and grinned and signed his name in the place Prowse pointed to with his finger and beneath that wrote four lines that I could not make out.
“You follow that advice,” he said, tapping what he had written, “and you won’t go wrong.”
I nodded.
“Who did you say owns this book?” he asked me.
“My father,” I said.
“That rascal,” the judge said, and for a second I thought my father had been afraid to meet the judge because they had met before. Prowse winked at me and shook his head. The judge looked around the room. “I’ll never get it done,” he said in the cheerful manner of someone who merely wants to impress upon you the scope of his ambition and really has no doubts that he will succeed.
“You know what I would do if I had the time, boy,” he said to me. “I would write about one man, like Rousseau did, like Boswell did, one representative Newfoundlander. And do you know who that representative man would be?” I shook my head. “Cluney Aylward,” he said, leaning back as if the better to see if I shared his view that Cluney Aylward, whom I had never heard of, was a representative Newfoundlander. “He was a great man,” the judge said. “A learned man, of course, foremost in his field, a scholar, but a man of the people, too, a leader the likes of which we’ll never see again. I would follow him around and write down everything he said and did and everything other people said about him.”
“Joe and I had better be going, Grandpa,” Prowse said, and again the judge looked confused, shook off his confusion, grinned indulgently. “Remember, boy,” he said. “The question is, What has made us what we are and what will be our fate? That is the question I wrestle with every day, here at this desk.” Then he bade us goodbye.
“Who’s Cluney Aylward?” I said when we were downstairs. “There is no Cluney Aylward,” Prowse said, grinning broadly. Then he explained that the judge, because of a stroke his family believed had been brought on by his exhaustive labours on his book, thought he was back working on the first edition of A History of Newfoundland, a delusion that not even showing him a copy of the first edition inscribed with his own name could shake for long. It was years since he had done any real work on the revised edition, though he went every day to his study and wrote page after page of illegible scrawl that his family had long since stopped trying to decipher. He had filled hundreds, thousands of pages with this scrawl. It was as if the judge were writing in some language that no one else could understand, a language of his own invention, the only one in which he could properly complete his book; as if he had advanced in his art to the point of inscrutability and now was writing for no one but himself. He did not know he suffered from this agraphia but rather believed he could still write and was writing as he moved the pen across the page.
As for Cluney Aylward, though the judge, humoured by his family, would go on for hours about his accomplishments, his stature as a Newfoundlander, there was no record anywhere of a man by that name. He was apparently a stroke-inspired fiction.
“And you know when you said ‘my father,’ ” Prowse said, “and he said ‘that rascal’? He thought you meant my father. He thought you were me. I don’t know who he thought I was today.”
I was angry with Prowse for playing such a trick on me and on his grandfather, but mostly I was in a panic as to what to tell my father. I thanked God he had declined to come and tried not to think of the scene that might have taken place if he had. I opened the book to the title page. Here was my father’s History, defaced by the author himself.
“I can’t bring it back to him like this,” I said. “You can’t make out a word of this, not even a letter, what will I do?” The signature, though illegible, was signature-shaped at least and, appearing below
“D. W. Prowse” on the title page, could
, Prowse supposed, pass for a signature, but the rest, he contritely admitted, was a problem for which he was to blame. He’d ask his father to help, he said, though that would mean letting his father know he had done something he wasn’t supposed to do, namely, bring people to the house to see the judge, his condition being something they were trying, not very successfully, to keep secret. Luckily, it was still several days before Sunday, and Prowse told me to leave the book with him and he would figure out what to do with it. I reluctantly went back to Bishop Feild without the book, leaving it in Prowse’s hands and wringing a promise from him that he would do no further damage to it.
Two days later, on Friday, he brought it back to school with him and gave it to me. There was a “translation” beneath the judge’s scrawl that read: “For Charlie Smallwood. I was glad to hear from your son that you enjoyed my book so much. He and my grandson are great friends at Bishop Feild, as you and I might have been had we gone to school together.” Also, there was a note addressed to my father, signed by Prowse’s father, explaining that the judge suffered from a palsy so severe that his handwriting was illegible to all but his closest relatives.
“I hope your father wasn’t too upset with you,” I said.
“Not too upset,” Prowse said, ruefully rubbing his backside and grinning. I was greatly relieved, though I worried that Prowse’s father might have laid it on too thick and that my father would now relent and ask to meet the judge.
On Sunday, I brought the book back to my father, who at first seemed greatly pleased with the dedication.
“Not condescending at all, is it?” he said. “He sounds as though he means it. ‘Friends as you and I might have been had we gone to school together.’ A very kind thing to say. A very gracious thing to say.”
The Colony of Unrequited Dreams Page 5
