While reading The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, and especially upon finishing it, I needed to know just how historically accurate the narrative was -- the Joey Smallwood of the book fit more or less with the bits I know about the actual first Premier of Newfoundland, but if the acid-penned, hilariously ironic Sheilagh Fielding did exist, I wanted to learn more about her. A google search led to this essay by the author, Wayne Johnston, and the following revelation:
The Colony of Unrequited Dreams is a dramatic rendering of the spirit of a people and a place, an island that in 1948 came within a hair's breadth of achieving nationhood and that it still longs for to this day. It was written in the belief that in this story of Newfoundland, this love story whose two main players are characters inspired by Joe Smallwood and the wholly imaginary Sheilagh Fielding, readers everywhere would see reflected their own attempts to crawl out from underneath the avalanche of history with their human individuality intact.I also happen to be listening to Pat Conroy's My Reading Life right now, and early in that book Conroy makes the case that Gone With the Wind is a masterwork, perfectly capturing the South's transition from separate society through the tragedy of the Civil War to ultimate confirmation of its indivisible union with the Northern States, and I don't think that it would be overstating it to say that The Colony of Unrequited Dreams is Newfoundland's Gone With the Wind; if Scarlett O'Hara is the embodiment of the South's transition, then Smallwood embodies the Rock's; if Rhett Butler is a dramatic foil, then so too is Sheilagh Feilding.
But that's not to say that this book seems derivative in any way -- The Colony of Unrequited Dreams is epic and sweeping and wholly original. Through excerpts from the actual A History Of Newfoundland From The English Colonial And Foreign Records by D.W. Prowse and a highly ironic fictional history written by Fielding, a historical overview of the island is provided that gives context to the narrative. Through Smallwood's first person life story and Fielding's journals and newspaper columns, the capital-H-History of the time and place is made intimate and personal. On top of this intriguing structure are the words themselves -- the sentence-by-sentence beautiful writing and Newfie humour had me riveted on every page.
A view of Newfoundland from offshore:
It was hard to believe Newfoundland was an island and not the edge of some continent, for it extended as far as the eye could see to east and west, the headlands showing no signs of attenuation; a massive assertion of land, sea's end, the outer limit of all the water in the world, a great, looming, sky-obliterating chunk of rock.And a typical, to my ear typically Newfie, turn of phrase that made me chuckle and wince in equal measure:
I well understood my father's horror of domesticity, of entrapment and confinement. The thought of nights in some fetid breeding bed while the products of other such nights lay listening in the next room or outside the door I found so revolting that I vowed I would never marry.The Colony of Unrequited Dreams is a love-letter to Newfoundland and beautifully achieves the author's goal (from the same essay as above): It is about the human character and human emotions inherent in and often masked by historical events and by the written record we call "history." This book has my highest recommendation -- if only Sheilagh Fielding actually existed; how I would love to immerse myself in her newspaper columns.
It's easy to forget that Newfoundland was a
British-run colony, like Bermuda or Singapore, until 1948 and it would not have
occurred to me that St. John's had a firm social structure with "the
quality" entrenched with all of the power. Yet, even those prominent
citizens were subservient to the Brits who held the real power as this speech
by Smallwood's (British)boarding school headmaster illustrates:
"Think of it, (Reeves) said, "many of you are descended from people who couldn't even make the grade in Ireland, a country of bog-born barbarians, or in Scotland, whose culture peaked with the invention of the bagpipes. My God, it boggles the mind. If you lot are the elite of Newfoundland, what must the rest be like? Smallwood here we may think of as the riff-raff's shining star. Try to imagine someone in comparison with whom he would seem to be a shining star. No, the mind balks, it is beyond imagining. The riff-raff are out there, we know by extrapolation from Smallwood that they exist, but luckily for us, we cannot picture them."
It is not unbelievable, then, that those who were not "the
quality" would have suffered a life-long inferiority complex:
In 1915, I had what today would amount to a grade nine education. I would one day have a legion of learned men answering to me, deferring to me, terrified of me; Oxford-educated lawyers, Harvard-educated doctors, university professors, civil servants, all afraid to lift a pencil, and with good reason, without first clearing it with me. I would one day, in the House of Assembly, make the Sorbonne-educated leader of the opposition look like a fool. But I never stopped believing, deep down, that these men were my betters, my true superiors; nor, I now realize, did they.I'm going to assume that today this leftover colonial thinking has been excised from Newfoundland but I am intrigued by Johnston's claim that there are still those Newfies who regret that the 1948 referendum led to joining Confederation instead of independence. At the time, it's easy to see what joining Canada gave to Newfoundlanders -- especially for those subsistence fishermen in the far-flung outports. But it's also true that, with its offshore oilfields and other natural resources, the island could likely be a self-sufficient nation today. The bigger question remains: Would the U.S. have coveted its strategic location enough to continue making overtures? Would they have simply annexed it?
It also makes me think about Quebec -- their independence votes have been shot down, yet today they are goverened by the PQ separatist party who are saber-rattling for another vote. How many kicks at the can do they get? What would an independent Quebec look like? They certainly aren't as self-sufficient as Newfoundland at this point. And what is it about Canada that makes provinces think hey can just secede? Going back to Gone With the Wind, do we need a civil war to cement our borders? In the end, my Canada includes both Quebec and Newfoundland; these unique societies within the whole are necessary and synergistic.
*****
Another, unrelated to the political, scene that struck me in The Colony of Unrequited Dreams was Fielding's report of the practise of mummery:
He did thereby incite to pursuing me another member of the troupe known as the Horse-chops who rode a kind of hobby-horse, which consisted of a stick with the figure of a horse's head on top, a head that had movable jaws with nails for teeth, which I heard snapping viciously behind me. All this took place as though set to music, the balance of the troop having holed up in the kitchen, from whence could be heard the horrible accordion, the spoons and some sort of dreadful drum...
Mercifully, the mummers departed our house only minutes later, going next door, where the inhabitants, unable to repel them, affected pleasure at the sight of them to save themselves, and thus were stuck with them for a night throughout which, my father assured me, nothing sustained them but our prayers.I appreciate that this was a part of the satirical history of Newfoundland, but the nail-toothed Horse-chops filled me with such dread that I had to rack my brain for where I had encountered him before, and it was in fellow Newfie Michael Crummey's book Galore, wherein Horse-chops is used to anonymously make accusations of a secret affection between two of the characters:
On the eve of the Feast of the Epiphany he fell in with a group of mummers that included Horse Chops, a man covered in a blanket, a wooden horse's head on a stick before him. The eyes were painted at either side of the head, one black and one blue, the jaws of the horse driven through with nails for teeth and tied with leather strings so they snocked together. Horse Chops was a seer who could answer any question put to him. At every stop a mummer wearing a crown of spruce boughs chose one member of the household as a victim, asking Horse Chops the most embarrassing questions he could dream up. No subject was too lewd or personal, no question was taboo. Secret loves and affairs, unpaid debts, illegitimate children, ongoing family arguments, sins buried and unconfessed, all were fair game.Something about this Horse Chops inflames my imagination ("inflames" might be the quite correct word -- I'm thinking that another book I've read in the last year had a group of mummers burning down the house of a family who refused them entry but I can't figure out which.) There's something almost Jungian about that image to me, and that's why I've quoted both references at length here -- hopefully I'll figure out what the third reference was.
