From Most of What Follows Is True: Places Imagined and Real. Published by University of Alberta Press and Canadian Literature Centre in 2019.
I should acknowledge at this point that there is an argument to be made that a writer’s only responsibility is to tell a compelling, convincing story. That fiction operates on a plane that, while it may look and feel something like reality, is actually separate from the world of facts and history, and is not beholden to either of these concepts. Some would argue that a story is like the rain: it falls where it falls and is constrained by no rules beyond the gravity of a writer’s skill. Its only job is to hold a reader’s attention. Bringing in issues of fact or history or authenticity are beside the point.
I should acknowledge that, although my own approach has always been very different, I once believed this was a perfectly reasonable view for other writers to hold. And I can pinpoint exactly the moment I was forced, against my own inclinations, to revise my belief in this matter.
It was at a literary festival reception somewhere in the United States almost twenty years ago. I was talking to a festival-goer who had no idea who I was, which is generally my experience of literary events in the US. I mentioned I was from Newfoundland and was expecting the usual blank stare, but her face lit up. “Oh,” she said, “I know all about Newfoundland.”
“You do?” I said, and I’m sure my face registered my surprise.
“Yes, absolutely,” she insisted. “I just read The Bird Artist. Do you know it?”
“I do know it,” I told her. “And I hate to break it to you, but you know nothing about Newfoundland.”
Before I go any further, I feel the need to quote Kurt Vonnegut here. He once said, “Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armour and attacked a hot fudge sundae.”6 Wise words that should give any critic or Kreisel lecturer pause. But the sorry fact of the matter, my friends, is that I am about to strap on a suit of armour and take a medieval swing at a hot fudge sundae. So, I invite you to take what follows with Vonnegut’s words in mind.
The Bird Artist is a novel by the American writer Howard Norman, published in 1994. It was well-reviewed when it appeared and was nominated for the National Book Award in the US. I started the book years ago but wasn’t able to finish it, put off by the glaring inaccuracies it contained. I went back to it for the purposes of this lecture, hoping I had misremembered it somehow, that over the intervening years I had exaggerated the degree to which the book misrepresents Newfoundland. As it turns out, the opposite was true.
Ostensibly, the book is set in Witless Bay, a small outport on the Avalon Peninsula, shortly before the First World War. I say ostensibly because, beyond using Newfoundland place names, the world of The Bird Artist bears absolutely no resemblance—I am not overstating this—literally zero resemblance to the Newfoundland of the early 20th century. Every aspect of its life and culture, from the smallest details to the most central truths of the place, are misrepresented or adulterated or deleted.
The narrator is Fabian Vas, a young man who has found an escape from the oppression of his parents’ unhappy marriage in drawing the seabirds on the coast. And our troubles with the novel begin with him. On page three, he tells us “I discovered my gift for drawing and painting birds early on. I should better say that someone had filled the margins of my third-form primer with…sketches.”7 Let’s leave aside the fact that the likelihood anyone in Witless Bay had a “third-form primer” in 1912 is close to nil. It’s Fabian’s voice here that rings completely false. “I should better say?” Yes, Fabian. You really should.
His mother, upon discovering her son’s sketches, remarks that it is “awfully nice to learn something so unmistakable about one’s offspring.”8 I am trying to imagine a situation in which any Newfoundlander, at any time in history, would refer to their own youngster as “one’s offspring.” Everyone in the novel speaks in a mid-century, mid-Atlantic accent, despite the fact that language and speech is one of the most distinctive aspects of Newfoundland culture. Norman offers a nod to that fact when the family travels to Nova Scotia and a local tells them that they speak “God’s English, with some evidence of Newfie in it.”9 I don’t know what the Nova Scotian was hearing, but let’s just say the evidence isn’t discernible in the text. When someone says, “I neither champion nor repudiate my life thus far;”10 or “She kindly said she’d pick it up for me;”11 or “Darling, can you buy a fish for supper,”12 it doesn’t exactly scream “Newfie.” (As a side note, no one seems to know exactly how that derogatory term for Newfoundlanders originated, but it wasn’t in common usage before the 1930s at the earliest.)
In Norman’s Newfoundland there are “villages” rather than outports. People row dinghies instead of rodneys or punts or dories. The main characters—born-and-bred Newfoundlanders, I remind you—have names like Alaric, Romeo, Botho, Boas, and Odeon. There is no shortage of unusual and exotic names in Newfoundland, and I have gone out of my way to make use of them in my own writing. But these names are German, Italian, Dutch, Hebrew and Greek in origin, groups that had no real presence in Newfoundland at the time. The chance of all of them being represented in a single outport is zero.
There is talk of someone shooting at racoons, though there are no racoons in Newfoundland. There are orchards and potluck meals and store-bought bottles of milk, there is fresh lemon for tea, there is a market where local fishermen buy fish for their own supper. There is a sanatorium in the little outport of Garnish. There is a statue of Marconi in St. John’s. And my personal favourite: Fabian’s father was born and raised in Buchans—my hometown! Doing some elementary math, that would mean he was likely born there somewhere between 1870 and 1880, which would be quite a trick since Buchans did not exist before the late 1920s when the mine opened.
Everyone in Norman’s Witless Bay attends the local Anglican church, which is odd when you consider the fact that Witless Bay sits on what is known as the Irish Loop. The first official Newfoundland census was conducted in 1836 at which time Witless Bay had a population of 542, of whom 540 were Roman Catholic. The population has fluctuated in the years since, but that ratio has remained fairly constant. There has never been a place of worship in Witless Bay other than the Roman Catholic church. But there is no mention of Catholics in the novel. Even Moravians from the neighbouring outport of Renews have a walk-on part at a funeral, but the Catholics don’t get a sniff. (It probably won’t surprise you to hear there are no Moravians in Renews, which in reality is also a Catholic community. The Moravians are a German sect with a significant history in Labrador, but they’ve never had a presence on the island. The author appears to have added them in this instance—he writes that their religion had “travelled down from Labrador”13—for “colour.”)
Even with something as basic and obvious as the food people eat, The Bird Artist swings and misses. And swings and misses. These people have freshly baked scones for breakfast, for Chrissakes. I had never heard of scones before I moved to Ontario in my twenties. They drink coffee when they get up in the morning and in the afternoon and at night. Coffee, Fabian tells us, “was what you came into out of the cold.”14 No, you fecken well did not. Tea is what Newfoundlanders drank. In the winter they might occasionally have cocoa. Coffee was almost as rare as scones in those days.
At one point the Vas family sits to a supper of sea bass with lettuce and tomatoes from Fabian’s mother’s garden. No such supper was ever eaten in Newfoundland at the turn of the 20th century, or any other time. It is true that every household in Newfoundland had its own garden, but the only things hardy enough to thrive in that climate and to last in storage through the winter are root vegetables. So the lettuce and tomatoes are possible though unlikely, at best. But it’s that sea bass that really sticks in my craw.
People eat a lot of sea bass in this book. It’s the only fish Newfoundlanders can stomach, to judge by The Bird Artist. The codfish—the heart of Newfoundland’s economy and diet, the sole reason for European settlement in the first place—gets about as much acknowledgement as the Catholics of Witless Bay. It’s mentioned in passing in a reference to “codfish trappers,” but Norman gives more attention to the “lobstermen…tuna and sea bass fishermen out in the before-dawn or evening hours…”15 He appears in this instance, as he seems to in many others in this book, to be thinking of New England. There are tuna in Newfoundland waters, but to the best of my knowledge there was no commercial tuna fishery before the 1950s. There has never been a sea bass fishery for the simple reason that there are no sea bass in Newfoundland waters. I’ve never seen or tasted one. No one I know has ever heard of it being caught or served here.
Lobster also plays an odd role in the book. To be fair (and to my own surprise when I looked into this) there was a lobster fishery and canning business beginning in the 1870s, though it was concentrated on the south and west coasts. And it was so marginal an undertaking as to be almost invisible compared to the cod fishery, which employed the vast majority of people and fed them all. More to the point, lobster was not a part of the local diet except in dire circumstances.
This is a story so common in Newfoundland that it’s become a cliché: only the poorest and most desperate families ate lobster because shellfish are bottom feeders. And they often hid the shameful evidence of their desperation by burying the shells. But in Norman’s 1912 Witless Bay there is a “chowder restaurant” called Spivey’s where the signature dish is—you guessed it— lobster. The local fisherfolk spend most of their “free time” at Spivey’s. It was “especially popular,” Fabian tells us “on ‘Family Night’ as it came to be known, which was Sunday.”16 The chef personally delivers the lobster dish to his customers, calling out “Presentation!” and holding the tray above his head as he moves through the tables. Then, with a flourish, reveals the crustacean lying under a cloth napkin. “Sometimes,” Fabian tells us, “this drew applause” from the patrons.17
Again I say: Not fecken likely.
For most of the last four hundred years, outport Newfoundland operated on the truck system in which a local merchant gave supplies and equipment to fishermen on credit with the stipulation they sell their season’s catch to the merchant. The merchant set the prices for the supplies given out in the spring and for the fish taken in the fall. In good years, a fisherman could expect to do slightly better than breaking even. It was not unheard of for people to spend their entire lives in debt. The work of surviving in these communities—for men, women and children—was unrelenting. It was a subsistence economy in which there was no real surplus, in which cash money rarely figured. Which is why those gardens of root vegetables were so important. The potatoes, carrots, cabbage and turnip were stored in root cellars and eaten through the winters. Without that store, people literally would have starved.
There were no restaurants where fishermen and their families paid for and were served lobster under cloth napkins. There were no General Stores where people popped in to buy bottled milk. Women did not use, as Fabian’s mother does, skin creams from France. In those days, people made clothing and curtains out of burlap sacks so as not to waste the material. In the poorest parts of Newfoundland, many youngsters went without shoes. But Fabian’s mother, a fisherman’s wife, “would spend a ritual half hour standing in front of her closet, riffling through [her] dresses, greatly amused.”18
Fabian’s mother may be amused by the sartorial decadence at her fingertips. I, on the other hand, am not.
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6 The Telegraph, "Kurt Vonnegut: Best Quotes" 23 September 2014. 7 Howard Norman, The Bird Artist, 3. 8 Ibid, 4. 9 Ibid, 174. 10 Ibid, 49. 11 Ibid, 49. 12 Ibid, 78. 13 Ibid, 111. 14 Ibid, 16. 15 Ibid, 27. 16 Ibid, 57. 17 Ibid, 59. 18 Ibid, 50.
