The following is the fifth and final installment in a series of excerpts from an essay by Stan Dragland (and conversation between Stan (SD) and Agnes Walsh (AW)) published in Brick 68 (Fall 2001). Mother of Pearl: Agnes Walsh and Halldór Laxness (continued from October 22). Agnes Walsh is the author of In the Old Country of My Heart which she recorded for Rattling Books in 2003. Between October 31 and Nov 4 Walsh will be appearing in Iceland with traditional Newfoundland singer and narrator Anita Best.
Mother of Pearl: Agnes Walsh and Halldór Laxness (continued from October 22)
AW:
After the reading of “When I Married Halldór Laxness” Stan asks “What does all this mean?” And now I suppose I could ask the same of his writing about my poem. What does it all mean to have your work poked at like that? Well, the first reaction would be flattery, sure, since he has said nothing bad about it. He has paid attention and thought it worthwhile to get in under the skin of the poem and check out the blood-flow, so to speak.
I have never thought of myself as an intellectual yet I do not consider myself a slouch in the world of ideas either. In the same way that I couldn’t “take” to classical music much in my life but rather got interested in black jazz (I mean free-form jazz) early on, so I liken my literary pursuits to jazz over classical training. I quit school at the end of Grade 9 because I was bored. I was learning nothing there and plenty by reading on my own books supplied to me by an American sailor who worked for Naval Intelligence in Argentia, himself a high school drop-out from Brooklyn.
What I’m trying to get at here is that I do not analyze classically/intellectually but can appreciate work that comes from those who do. My reading has always been all over the place but my writing pretty much stems from here, from this place, even when I go as far afield as Iceland, or say Portugal.
Stan and I met through literature and folktale. He asked about a play I worked in entitled Jack Meets the Cat, based on a folktale from Pius Power Sr. of Southeast Bight, Placentia Bay. Stan liked the cassette of this play. He liked it a lot and I always loved working on it. When Stan and his family moved here I watched how he became part of life here. Not just literary life but part of the landscape, the rhythms, the people. He never seemed like an outsider to me and I can be touchy about that. To people from away and how they see us. When he told me what he was up to with writing this piece I was especially pleased that he picked this poem. I’ve always loved this poem, if I can say that about my own work. For me it is as clear as a bell about my feeling of connectedness to place, to writing, to love, to sex. Stan seemed to understand my writing from “inside a saga” that is literature and that is connectedness to place. He also seemed to understand my falling for a writer’s work and how it was ok to gush love for Laxness and write about marrying him. I know that great writers’ works can change your life. If not, I’d never have left Placentia, and leaving was essential to my life as a writer. Leaving and returning.
I see that Stan recognizes in Newfoundland a uniqueness that is worth checking out. I think my work is a small part of what Stan is interested in here. In the same way that I thrilled at reading about Newfoundland in a Danish novel translated into English so I do thrill at someone taking an interest in my work. Laxness paid tribute to the writers of the sagas believing that without their legacy Iceland would have remained just another Danish island. I come nowhere close to saga or Laxness size but my drop in the bucket of writing in Newfoundland is, I believe, important to a sense of self and place for us here. I read no Newfoundland writers growing up, let alone a Newfoundland saga. I thought you had to be British to write. I thought you had to be high-brow to have anything worth saying. I thought like that because of the ignorance of the educational system that I left behind me. It was only on my return that I discovered folktale and that I had relations composing ballads that are still sung today.
Stan paying attention reinforces that sense of pride of place. It is more than an ego boost. I read a lot of literary biographies and studies of writers’ works, critiques of poems of, say for instance Elizabeth Bishop, by academics and writers who want to know how her life influenced her writing and some is very helpful and some is downright silly. I had a professor once write about line in a poem of mine. The line was about children pencilling beards on Queen Elizabeth. The professor wrote that it was a show of cross-gender, homo-erotic child play. Well, I don’t mind that, and she could be correct but I saw it more as a show of “up the monarchy.” Who’s to say who’s right? Really, the writer is only half right because life, and especially the creative process, is never so simple as we alone see it.
I think Stan is right that the poem is a story. I hope the story is a poem too.
SD:
When Agnes and I were done, there were a few questions and comments. One of the comments was oblique to our presentation. It was a typical rumination about the love-hate ambivalence felt by many Newfoundlanders for their place. To lift the heart, there’s the intricate elemental landwash and layers of distinctive culture; to make it plummet there’s the have-not economy, with notorious giveaways by Newfoundlanders themselves, and heartrending out-migration. Fierce pride and low self-esteem. A compact, cynical variation on this bind appears in William Rowe's novel, Clapp's Rock, when Percy Clapp, a Joey Smallwood figure, speaks of
that bizarre form of pride of place possessed in embryo by all poor and isolated peoples (don’t ask me why -- it defies reason -- I only use the materials at hand), the belief that they are in some paradoxical way better than all the other peoples and countries to which they feel inferior.
Somewhere behind such ruminations is almost always the humiliating 1933 resignation of Newfoundland’s responsible government by a country honourably bankrupt but badly run, followed by over a decade of colonial rule and then, in 1948, confirmation of subordinate status by absorption into another nation. Only to become a national joke. Many Newfoundlanders, Agnes Walsh among them, have understandably never become Canadians, not in spirit. There is a Newfoundland nation, but nobody can have it.
Not much a CFA (Come From Away) can say about such affliction other than to commiserate. And watch for signs of healing humour. There is a Newfoundland branch of subversive minority humour, and one fork of the branch is a sophisticated and eloquent self-disparagement, a far cry from the patronizing Newfie joke, that outsiders attempt at their peril. After the formal session, the ruminator told a joke on Newfoundlanders that I´d have too much sense to repeat even if I could remember it.
During the question period another man had tried in various ways to ask me something that I wasn’t getting, so, one-to-one, I asked him to try again. It turned out that he was wondering about identity, about the status of CFAs like ourselves who aren’t absorbed by the culture. "It's not love and hate for me,” remarked another man, a historian from the U.S. with thirty years of residence in St. John’s, "it’s love and bewilderment.” My questioner was an Engineering professor of about the historian’s vintage, but from Denmark. Both were sharing this slightly bemusing, not-disagreeable sense of arm’s-length residence, this conviction that it’s preferable to live here in a mild sort of exile than to be anywhere else. I suppose the engineer was wondering what I’d have to say on the subject since Agnes had endorsed me as one who “became part of life here.” I was touched by that, though it wasn’t the sort of literary observation I’d invited. I wasn’t looking for compliments. In any case, I was surprised to feel the endorsement actually push me further out. I told the engineer that I sometimes feel a sort of panic here, wondering what foolishness induced me to commit to a society whose patterns and assumptions I’ll never intimately understand.
Well, Ugla of Eystridaldur, the heroine of Halldór Laxness’s The Atom Station, has this to say as she prepares to return to Reykjavík from her home in northern Iceland: “I had long begun to count the days until I could once again leave home, where I felt an alien, and go out into the alien world, where I was at home.” “Where do you come from?” That’s a standard question in most of Canada. In Newfoundland it’s more likely to be “Where do you belong?” A much tougher question, enough to lift you off whatever patch of the very earth you’re standing on. Where do I belong? Alberta, no question. But I won’t be going back there except to visit.
Still turning all this over a few days later, I arrived at the obvious: identity can’t be conferred. A stickler like Agnes approves of my way of checking Newfoundland out? Good, that’s a plus, I’m encouraged to keep at it. But looking at these good, open-minded, attention-paying men, the historian and the engineer, I see myself a quarter of a century hence, a lot more rickety but still loving and bewildered, fascinated and pissed off -- torn like a true Newfoundlander, yes, but for different and distancing reasons. The best I can hope is that the years turn me into an oyster. You know -- alien grit invades my shell and torments me to surround it with the best of myself.
The End of this 5 part series.
