My Famous Evening

by Howard Norman

  July 9. The Haliburton House Inn is the only place I now stay in Halifax. I placed much of my noir novel about murder and spirit-photographs, The Haunting ofL., there. This morning I woke at five a.m., went next door to the main building, and sat in the library/sitting room. The small lobby and dining room were empty. I moved to another chair, then the sofa, and a word of Scots-Irish derivation, mallalorking, came to mind. It roughly means “restlessness before a journey.”

  I first came across the word in a Newfoundland-English dictionary, and have heard it used twice in actual speech. The first was at the ferry launch in Yarmouth. A quite elderly woman, reprimanding her daughter with a smile and shake of her head, said, “Can’t you stop your children’s mallalorking so damn impolitely?” The grandson had opened a suitcase and tossed a shoe into the sea.

  The second time was on a train from Halifax to Vancouver, the TransCanada route. I was sharing face-to seats with an elderly gentleman from Edinburgh. As we passed a stand of oak trees along a river—I think we were in Quebec—he pointed out to me a man and woman kissing in the shade of a tree. “I was a military surgeon thirty years,” he said. “I took in a lot of firsthand medical knowledge, you see. But …”—he nodded toward the amorous couple—“there’s no cure for that, now, is there, those mallalorking hearts and all. But don’t be fooled, the young don’t have a patent on it, now, do they?” He took out a flask of whiskey and I gladly accepted a swig.

  Restless, then, wanting to get on the road to Great Village, I read yesterday’s newspaper, waiting for breakfast.

  Out the window I could see thick fog over Halifax Harbour. Finally, the staff set out pitchers of orange juice, thermoses of coffee, muffins, fruits, cereals, milk. I had been duly warned by my travel companions not to wake them, nor to telephone Sandra Barry at some ungodly hour. I was not to hurry people. I sat at a corner table drinking coffee and reading today’s paper.

  There was a heading: “Smoke Haze Expected to Blanket Province.” The article began, “Most Nova Scotians will likely wake up in a haze this morning as smoke drifts over the province from forest fires burning in northern Quebec. ‘A haze of smoke had already crept up on Yarmouth and the Nova Scotia-New Brunswick border by Monday afternoon,’ said David Mason of the Maritime Weather Centre. ‘The smoke was expected to move eastward overnight and blanket the province by this morning,’ Mr. Mason said Monday evening.”

  There was another heading: “Titanic Spirit Voices, Come In, Please.” It turned out that a professional psychic medium named Alan Hatfield, from Pictou Landing, had spent the previous morning trying to record voices of some victims of the Titanic disaster in the Fairview Lawn Cemetery. At one point Mr. Hatfield claimed to detect a spirit saying, “The time is right.” “I know we have lots of cooperative voices today,” Mr. Hatfield said.

  My travel companions come in for breakfast around seven-thirty; Jane, Millan, Emma, and Sandra Barry, who has walked down from her apartment carrying a small travel bag.

  I load the car while they eat breakfast. We sit around till nine. As previously discussed, throughout the journey, woven into the conversation will be an ongoing Q & A concerning Sandra’s life and work. I already was quite aware of her accomplishments as an archivist, poet, historian, but soon learned of her natural kindness, her ability to size up and adapt to a naturally shifting domestic mood inside a crowded car.

  A few years ago, Jane, who had known and worked with Elizabeth Bishop in the 1970s at Harvard, had given a lecture at the Elizabeth Bishop Conference in Wolfville, and visited Great Village with Sandra Barry. They were already friends. Over the past weeks I’d been reading several years worth of Elizabeth Bishop Society newsletters, each a small anthology of criticism, disquisition, poetry, photographs. I had also read Sandra’s piece “The Art of Remembering,” in Volume II, Number 1, of the Nova Scotia Historical Review. In addition, in Collected Prose, I’d read Bishop’s own reminiscence, “Primer Class,” and stories, “Memories of Uncle Neddy,” and perhaps her most well-known prose, “In The Village.”

  And I’d read the poems obviously set in Nova Scotia, the astonishing “The Moose,” as well as “Sestina,” “Filling Station,” “Poem,” “First Death In Nova Scotia,” a few commentaries about each, and Lorrie Goldensohn’s highly regarded Elizabeth Bishop: A Biography of a Poetry. That is to say, I was just beginning to comprehend who this great poet was and the breadth of her accomplishment. I already knew of the centrality of Bishop’s work to my wife and, obviously, to Sandra Barry.

  In the car we listened to a cassette of Elizabeth Bishop reading her poems. Jane and Sandra laughed appreciatively at certain inflections and nuances that completely escaped me. In fact, dozens of references to Bishop’s life and writing went over my head. They had a shared Bishop “vocabulary,” is how I thought of it. Meanwhile, Emma and Millan piped in with comments and intelligent questions, in between chatting, taking photographs out the windows, listening to CDs, as the car breezed along the Bay of Fundy.

  From the start, however, my primary interest was in Sandra Barry. Who is she, this utterly unique woman my old aunt Helen would have complimented to her face, “You’re certainly an odd duck, now, aren’t you?” How had she come to Elizabeth Bishop in the first place? How had Sandra applied her own meticulous intelligence to bringing a small Nova Scotia village—Great Village—to readers with such vivid immediacy? How does she carry on, without even the basic sinecure of academic affiliation, or at best unpredictable support of any kind? I do not mean to suggest that I fancy Sandra as some sort of nineteenth-century scholar “throwback,” an archivist-monk scratching letters with a quill pen by candlelight (an enterprise she might prefer, actually), who can scarcely manage modern life. I only mean to say that why her passion and knowledge about Bishop’s childhood years sustains her, probably has some correspondence to how Sandra relates to her own childhood in the Annapolis Valley of Nova Scotia. In speaking with her, I wanted to develop, to some extent, a portrait of a freelance scholar, as Sandra herself put it ironically, “a somewhat marginalized occupation in a somewhat marginalized place.”

  “I should just hire you to give me a series of lectures about Bishop’s early life,” I said in the car.

  “Oh, no,” Sandra said, “this is much more fun.”

  After merely a few exchanges, what came to mind was yet another of my aunt Helen’s oft-used phrases, one meant to illustrate a certain generosity: “Her head was fairly brimming with news.” For in touring us through early twentieth-century Nova Scotia, I felt that Sandra, to quote Chekhov, was a “subtle practicioner of the anecdote.” She divvied out anecdotes of local history with a sense of almost gossipy anticipation, as if all we needed to do was speed up the car a little and we’d catch up with and witness the event she had begun to tell us about.

  “Oh, stop right here!” she said, for instance, as we drove through and past Great Village. “This is probably the exact point where Elizabeth got on the bus. You know, for her bus journey through New Brunswick down to Boston, the one she writes about in ‘The Moose.’” We all stared at the weedy edge of the road, as if deciphering the pressed image of Elizabeth Bishop’s shoes in the tamped dirt.

  Turning the car around, driving again through Great Village and past Elizabeth Bishop’s childhood home across from the gas station, we finally pulled up at the Blakie House, a sprawling Queen Anne Victorian. Standing next to the car, we looked out toward the Minas Basin. The sun backlit a hazy general thickness of cloud. There were also ribbons of smoke like jet trails on the horizon. “Definitely that’s from the Quebec fires,” Sandra said. “It’s been like this for a number of days now.”

  As it happened, we were among the first customers the new owners, Sarah Peterson and Michael Burnett, had at the Blakie House, located at 8 Wharf Road, Great Village, Nova Scotia. On the back of each of the traveler’s cards stacked on a table in the side hallway, it read OF INTEREST IN THE VILLAGE, listing “Eastern Bore; Elizabeth Bishop’s Cottage and four other Provi
ncial Heritage Sights; Layton General Store; Lowland Gardens; Strawberry U-Pick (In Season); Smith Holdings Antique; World’s Highest Tides—viewing all along the Fundy Shore.”

  Naturally, Sandra knew the entire history of the Blakie House and got the owners quite up to speed on it.

  After unloading suitcases, cameras, notebooks, my travel companions settled into their upstairs rooms, then began a tour of the house. I set out on a walk to the Minas Basin. The dirt road wound over a small bridge, then along an open field. Almost immediately I saw two juvenile bald eagles patrolling the creek. Later, when I mentioned these birds to Sandra, I was touched by how preoccupied she was with keeping to her job as tour guide. “Oh, I’m sure EB saw eagles whenever she walked down to the water.”

  “Now, Sandra, remember it’s you I’m most interested in. You, the biographer. Have you often seen eagles here?”

  Sandra looked at me askance, then realigned my priorities in a patient, professional tone. “Yes, I’m quite certain young Elizabeth would’ve seen eagles. She had the keenest eye.”

  Anyway, I continued on for half a mile or so to the long dike, then climbed it for a view of the Bay of Fundy. The water was roiling muddy red-brown, with half a dozen eddies twenty or so meters offshore, as if sea monsters were about to surface. There was a nipping wind. A lone sandpiper hustled along a thin stretch of beach. It looked to be stitching up the border between land and sea. Again, a phrase from Chekhov came to mind: “In the girl’s school there was an emergency seamstress always at the ready.”

  That evening after dinner at Blakie House, we sat in the parlor, with its high ceiling, scrolled mantel, piano, while Emma read from a book of Nova Scotian ghost stories. She put on her best eerie voice, finessed certain passages melodramatically. The story, as one of its sentences read, “caught the fright nicely.” However, Millan seemed skeptical, unable to credit the story, and was dubious about everyone else’s suspension of disbelief, or let us say susceptibility to belief in specters. “Am I the only one here who doesn’t believe in ghosts?” she said. Millan and Emma were at the time fourteen.

  “I think so,” Sandra said. “But who knows? Maybe something will happen on this trip to change your mind.”

  We all nervously laughed. A look of only slightly eroded skepticism, yet one not entirely absent of possibility and intrigue, crossed Millan’s face. Emma noticed this and seemed pleased. They’re great pals, intuitively perceptive about each other’s quirks, curiosities, affections.

  I stayed up until four a.m. quoting Sandra Barry in my moleskin notebooks.

  On the morning of July l0 at about 6:45, Sandra padded downstairs and found me in the library of the Blakie House. “Sleep well?” I asked.

  “Yes, very,” she said. “Very comfortable room. The most benevolent of ghosts, too.”

  “Oh, good.”

  “I see you have coffee.”

  “Yes, there’s some in the kitchen.”

  It was, perhaps, too early for formal conversation, but when Sandra sat down in the leather chair, I took out my notebook, and she looked resigned and willing. “Sandra,” I said, “where were you raised, where’d you go to school, were there any particularly beloved books?”

  “Oh, my.”

  “Sorry, I seem to have been up most of the night waiting for you, I suppose.”

  “Not at all. Let’s jump right in. Well, let’s see. I was born in Middleton, Nova Scotia, known as ‘The Heart of the Valley.’ That’s the Annapolis Valley, of course. When I was three, my parents moved us down the road a few miles to Bridgetown, known as ‘The Friendly Town.’ I did my own primer class at Bridgetown Elementary School.”

  “Did you experience your primer class anything like Bishop did hers?”

  “Not in exact detail, of course, no, but in general atmosphere, the ambience of rural Nova Scotia primer classes, yes. When I read her story ‘Primer Class,’ a lot came back to me from my own experience in school. What’s more, we moved to a nearby village called Paradise, and I did my grade one in Paradise School, which was very much like the Great Village schoolhouse, actually somewhat smaller. Then we moved back to Bridgetown, and from grade two to grade twelve I attended Bridgetown Elementary and Bridgetown High Schools. The high school had about four hundred students.”

  “To your mind, is homesickness locatable within a general sense of nostalgia in Bishop’s writings?”

  “There’s certainly much painful memory in her work. I realized that all over again when I read the collection of her letters, One Art. During her time in Great Village she did suffer a few actual illnesses. She was confined to bed for periods of time, kept out of school for various periods.

  “In her letters she expresses a kind of fond longing for Nova Scotia, and it’s there, too, in the poetry. In certain letters her nostalgia, if you will, for Nova Scotia is bolder, more exact. And, yes, I’d say painful. Now and then she expresses an urgent desire to visit Atlantic Canada. Something—childhood?—seems almost to summon her, though that sounds too mystical. A sad summoning, yet sometimes a happy one, too, for certain aspects of childhood, for life in general in a small village, Great Village.”

  After breakfast at the Blakie House, Sandra said, “Shall we go see Elizabeth’s house?” But as it happened, Emma, Millan, and I set out on foot, while Sandra and Jane stayed at the table to talk.

  Earlier in the summer, Emma had participated in a rigorous two-week residency at the Maine Photographic Workshops in Rockport, Maine, working exclusively in black-and-white photography. She took her camera everywhere. I had asked her to chronicle our trip, that is, to take photographs on request, as well as according to her own interests. Within a few minutes’ walk we arrived at the Great Village schoolhouse. Emma took photographs from across the road, the parking lot, closer yet. At that hour of the morning, much to our surprise, there was a steady traffic of trucks, including logging trucks, “out and back from Truro,” as one store-keep put it. Great Village is obviously set along a route of local and provincial commerce.

  Perhaps writer John Berger is correct, photographs are quotations, they cannot possibly recapitulate the entire narrative of a place. But they can evoke certain prototypes of experience. Sizing up the Great Village schoolhouse, Emma remarked, “Take away the phone wires and maybe that new truck, it’s hard to tell what year it is. It’s like I can almost see myself going to this school when Elizabeth Bishop did.” And that seemed right. The schoolhouse did engender what Berger called a “historical empathy.” The architecture had a timeless feel. The schoolhouse itself retains a utilitarian intimacy, quite a different thing from quaintness.

  “Me, too,” said Millan. “Maybe we say that because everybody’s talking so much about Elizabeth Bishop when she was a child.”

  In her article “The Art of Remembering,” Sandra writes:

  Her “Canadian schooling” had not been extensive, but the experience left a more positive mark on Bishop and formed the basis of one of her most delightful prose reminiscences, “Primer Class.” Bishop attended the Great Village School during fall-winter 1916-17, although for some of that time she was ill. “Primer Class” is a wonderful evocation of the fascinations and trepidations of a child experiencing her first formal schooling. The Great Village School, still standing and in use, was an impressive structure to her young mind: “The school (Bishop wrote) was high, bare and white clapboard, dark red roofed, and the four-sided cupola had white louvers.”

  Perhaps one of the most important and lasting experiences from this time was her introduction to geography: “Only the third and fourth grades studied geography. On their side of the room, were two rolled-up maps, one of Canada and one of the whole world. When they had a geography lesson, Miss Morash pulled down one or both of these maps, like window shades. They were on cloth, very limp, with a shiny surface, and in pale colors—tan, pink, yellow and green—surrounded by the blue that was the ocean. On the world map, all of Canada was pink; on the Canadian, the provinces were different colors. I w
as so taken with the pull-down maps that I wanted to snap them up, and pull them down again, and touch all the countries and provinces with my own hands.”

  The Great Village schoolhouse

  “Elizabeth Bishop loved maps, you know,” said Sandra later that day. “And just think of some of her titles, ‘North and South,’ ‘Questions of Travel,’ ‘Geography III.’”

  Joined at the schoolhouse, then, by Sandra and Jane, we all walked to the house itself. On the way, Millan and Emma, as if manifesting a predisposition toward intense nostalgia themselves, reminisced about certain of their grade-school teachers. These were hilarious, poignant, replete with vitriol, deep affection, detail. “I remember how Miss — was already in a bad mood by the time school started.” “I had this one teacher who thought she was such a fashion plate!” “I loved Miss —, she made us happy.” “My fifth grade teacher was evil.” The adults exchanged glances; naturally, we ached to tell our own stories.

  Sitting on the side porch of the house, I asked Sandra what it was like first visiting Great Village.

  “When my friends first took me to Great Village,” she said, “that fall day in 1990, I felt a synergism, I suppose, because so many levels were working at once. I connected deeply with Elizabeth Bishop’s art, the fact that Great Village is a beautiful spot, the fact that I was experiencing, though it was by no means simple, a direct link between art and life.”

  “So, each time you return, all that’s felt again, intensified, added to?” I asked.

  “Yes, it’s a visceral experience for me. I feel physically grounded when I come here. Again, its connected to childhood. Where I grew up in the Annapolis Valley, we were only a few minutes’ drive from the Bay of Fundy. While I had problems feeling connected to Bridgetown, I always felt something intrinsically real about the universe when I was standing at the edge of the Bay of Fundy. This is my most direct connection to landscape. In turn, when I saw the part of the bay around Great Village, I was stunned. It felt even more like the place I belonged than even the places I was raised.”