The Breakwater Book of Contemporary Newfoundland Short Fiction

INTRODUCTION

When James Langer of Breakwater first approached me to edit an anthology of short fiction by Newfoundland writers, I accepted immediately. This will be fun, I thought. The ground rules, James explained, were (a) I could choose any ten authors and any ten stories and (b) there was no (b). The selection process was fun. It wasn’t difficult to decide on my roster of writers. In some cases I knew exactly which story of theirs I wanted. In other cases, I had the pleasure of rereading their books to discover the right piece for this anthology. And in three cases I ended up with work that is being published here for the first time. When I informed James of my choices, I was feeling quite pleased with myself.

That was then. Now, of course, I’m tasked with writing the introduction to something called The Breakwater Book of Contemporary Newfoundland Short Fiction. And I have the feeling that I’m involved in an entirely different sort of enterprise, one that requires argumentation, explanation, anticipation of attacks to be forestalled by clever counter-moves. A title that long, with its implicit claim of canon-forming authoritativeness, is just asking for it. Why these writers and not the twenty or so others for whom a reasonable case might be made for inclusion in such a volume? And in the case of these ten writers, why these stories and not others? Do the ten stories, taken together, make some comprehensive statement about the collective psyche of Newfoundlanders? Can they be used to trace the development of the short story in Newfoundland? What, my academic colleagues might ask, are the principles of selection that have governed my choices?

Yikes.

I’ve chosen stories based mostly on my personal taste, my sense of what, in the vast array of short fiction published by Newfoundland-based writers over the last three decades or so, is most successful in terms of aesthetic merit as intuited by me. Simple as that. I prefer prose that is energetic, intense, imaginative, sophisticated, witty. I don’t care about plot. I prefer characters who are complex and surprising; I don’t have to like them to enjoy their stories. I prefer fiction that has a serious thematic dimension but stops short of making pointed statements about the human condition. I prefer fiction that engages on an emotional level, that packs a punch, as people used to say. I love to immerse myself in the world that an author creates, to savour the unpredictable electric eccentricity that is the hallmark of a real literary artist.

It would perhaps be politic to assert here, with traditional editorial belligerence, that every story in this anthology possesses all of these qualities in spades. But that should be for readers to decide. And I’ve already indicated that factors not involving my personal taste may be involved. But these tend not to be the traditional ones. Gender balance? Not quite. (Six female authors, four male.) Newfoundland settings? No. (Two stories are set out-of-province.) Town and bay given equal time? Not really. (Five stories are set in St. John’s, three beyond the overpass.) Newfoundland-born authors? No. (In at least a couple of cases.) No, these additional factors are idiosyncratic, specific to the concept of the anthology as it evolved in my own mind. And perhaps this is the point at which we might segue into an account of how, exactly, I did arrive at my choices. Discussions of individual stories will be cunningly devised to avoid spoilers.

When I accepted James’s invitation, I knew one thing immediately: the first story in the anthology would have to be Elizabeth McGrath’s Fogbound in Avalon. (Since it was first published in 1980, that also solved the problem of how to define contemporary for purposes of this volume.) It’s an astonishing tour de force of verbal and emotional intensity, as its first-person narrator, forty-something Anne O’Neill, who has left her marriage and returned to St. John’s from the mainland after a sixteen-year absence, meets an old flame, connects with an old friend, and struggles to begin a new life in a place she knows intimately. Fogbound in Avalon first appeared in The New Yorker and was then collected in the 1981 edition of The Best American Short Stories. Elizabeth McGrath is the only Newfoundland-based writer ever to have appeared in either publication. In her Introduction to the 1981 anthology, Hortense Calisher calls the story a stunner, a word that she says could also describe the protagonist, who is Wry, fierce, tough. Calisher goes on to mention the bitterly intimate energy in the conversational tone of the narration, a phrase that captures perfectly the heart of McGrath’s achievement. Anne O’Neill is formidably articulate, and the story is studded with mini-epic catalogues of details relating to her own life and to the St. John’s setting, as character and place become inseparable in the telling. Fogbound in Avalon is McGrath’s only published story. It stands as a lonely precursor to the flowering of Newfoundland fiction that was to occur over the next three and a half decades.

I also knew that I wanted to include a story by Bernice Morgan, who is surely the most widely-read and best-beloved Newfoundland writer of her generation. She is of course known especially for her novels, Random Passage in particular, but she has also published a collection of stories, The Topography of Love (2000). The story that I decided would best complement Fogbound in Avalon—I was already beginning to think in such terms—is Vain Deceit, an account of another woman who moves to St. John’s, though in this case she is much younger, the place she leaves is Bonavista Bay, and the action is set mostly at the end of the Second World War. But similar themes emerge: Kate Foley, too, is unhappily married, looks back to an unfulfilled relationship (he died in the war), and on the day the war ends finds herself on the margins of the celebration that has taken over the streets, struggling to find her place in both the moment and her life generally. There is a sadness to the story’s denouement, though what Kate does could be construed as a welcome gesture of self-assertion. But it’s a poignant one. As with Anne O’Neill, disillusionment is mixed with a determination to carry on, to reinvent oneself.

After two female-centric St. John’s stories, I thought, time for a couple set somewhere else and written by men. (So now I was thinking in pairs.) The selection of both Michael Winter and Michael Crummey as contributors was a no-brainer. Though they’re now better known as novelists, both published excellent volumes of short fiction early in their careers. Winter, like his fictional surrogate Gabriel English, grew up in Corner Brook, the community which provides the setting for Deep in My Brother, a story comprising a series of loosely linked vignettes as the adult Gabe visits his family and generally reacquaints himself with the milieu of his childhood and adolescence. Gabe’s unconventional brother Junior, or June, is everything Gabe is not: a mechanic, an off-the-grid woodsman, a slightly deranged and unsophisticated free spirit who nevertheless possesses a certain larger-than-lifeness that makes him an amusing and fascinating character. But the story is more than a study of a single individual; Gabe’s parents are important figures, too, but more than that, Winter evokes an entire world, one very different from the downtown St. John’s of so much of his early fiction.

Michael Crummey’s What Possessed Him has none of the lightness of spirit of Deep in My Brother. Set in a nameless community that may be related to the Buchans of Crummey’s own childhood, it juxtaposes two episodes in the life of a man named Hayward. In his early seventies, he finds that he is dying of lung cancer; he thinks back to the time of the birth of his first child, some fifty years earlier. The story is a meditation on the values of integrity, fidelity, and love, and on the apparently arbitrary ways in which they colour our lives. Its climactic scene occurs when Hayward, at twenty-three, is faced with a choice that could alter his life irrevocably. Something possessed him to respond as he did. Fifty years later, as his death approaches, he contemplates that effect that his decision has had.

The next pair of stories is not really a pair. But I thought that, for different reasons, they belonged at the centre of this anthology. Ramona Dearing’s An Apology explores one of the major collective traumas in recent Newfoundland history, that caused by the sexual abuse scandal at Mount Cashel orphanage. It is, as far as I know, the only serious attempt to deal with this issue in fiction. Dearing’s striking artistic move here is to make her focalizing character a former Christian Brother. Gerard Lundrigan is on trial for crimes he is alleged to have committed decades in the past. Remarkably, he believes himself to be innocent, though hints are dropped that he is subject to self-deception. As the trial goes on, he develops theories about why his accusers want to frame him. The strength of the narrative lies in Dearing’s ability to make Gerard’s psychology credible. A partial answer to the implied question, What sort of man could perform such heinous acts? appears to be Someone who—like everyone else—sees what he needs to see in order to preserve his sense of self-worth. And perhaps the corollary would be: Just as Newfoundlanders, collectively, did during the long period when Mount Cashel was a house of horrors.

Kathleen Winter’s Darlings’ Kingdom is the obverse of An Apology. Its first-person narrator, Violet Wainwright, is for much of the story, a perceptive and somewhat acerbic observer of the neighbours who attend her going-away party. The premise is that she and her husband are about to move away from the small community of Pencil Cove; they have agreed to rent their house to Gus Darling, an obnoxious lout whose family reigns over the district, their kingdom. As the narrative moves toward its unpredictable yet appropriate conclusion, Violet confesses that I might not know how to love people…but I know how to love a place. And this story belongs here because of its unabashed celebration of that sort of love.

The next two stories do indeed form a pair. Jessica Grant’s Brute and Edward Riche’s Deer Friends are both very funny, though in different ways. Readers of Grant’s novel, Come, Thou Tortoise, will be pleased to learn that she hasn’t abandoned the device of the non-human narrator. In this case, it’s Big Cy, a pit bull mix whose adventures in western New York state include, most dramatically, the murder of a Labrador retriever and the establishing of a relationship with a human, one Grassy Noel Deshorties. But the heart of the story is the narrative voice, with its sophisticated human-level intelligence relaying to the reader a dog’s-eye view of the world. The brute may also function as metaphor, as an aspect of Grassy Noel’s own psyche or, equally possible, a representation of the human person who would become his partner.

Edward Riche’s Deer Friends is not-really-a-story. It’s an adaptation of a section of a novel-in-progress, a fact which explains why we get more information about some of the characters than would be customary in a conventional story; one would need the context of the entire novel to see the relevance of some of the details that seem somewhat extraneous here. But I wanted to include this piece because it’s satire, a form seriously underrepresented in Newfoundland short fiction. Riche takes no prisoners, as he lampoons the silliness of politically correct speech and its attendant ideology through the idea of a man who attempts to transition to a deer in Bowring Park.

The last two stories are very different from each other. Andrews’s West Orange is perhaps the most coolly cerebral narrative in the anthology, while Lisa Moore’s But Lovers with the Intensity I’m Talking About, published here for the first time, exhibits Moore’s trademark…Intensity. West Orange features a protagonist named McEwan, whom Andrews has described as an occidental who has retreated to the East. The action of the story is simple to the point of irrelevance: McEwan finds a roll of film on a beach, has it developed, engages in inconsequential conversation with a number of other characters, and finally wanders off by himself. The life of the story is in the meticulous descriptions of the mundane elements of the world as McEwan experiences it, explained in Andrews’s own commentary in this way: The story was meant to almost overflow with cause and effect, to establish rhythm, an ebb and flow that is constantly interrupted or accented by accidental patterns or, at least, patterns that are an expression of things that are so basic that they go unnoticed or are ignored. Andrews is, to the best of my knowledge, the most accomplished Newfoundland-based writer of short fiction who has not yet published a book. On that basis alone, a sample of his work would be worthy of inclusion here. But more than that, his writing can easily stand comparison with that of any established Newfoundland author.

Lisa Moore is another writer who could hardly have been excluded from this sort of book. One of her collections of short fiction, Open (2002), was nominated for the Giller Prize. Her new story, But Lovers with the Intensity I’m Talking About, with its powerful emotional dimension, both contrasts with West Orange and acts as a kind of counterweight to Fogbound in Avalon. Moore’s first-person narrator, Jim, is, despite differences in age and gender, similar in certain ways to Elizabeth McGrath’s Anne O’Neill. Neither character seems designed to be particularly likable, but both think, speak, and live passionately. Jim’s monologue is inspired by a chance meeting with Marissa, his girlfriend of some forty years in the past. His ruminations include comments on his marriage (he has settled), his career (a successful investment advisor, he has to deal with a high-powered female competitor), and especially his memories of the now un-enterable Eden of his early relationship with Marissa. The story raises basic questions of value, as does McGrath’s—how should one live one’s life, what in our experience is worth celebrating, how does the passage of time change our understanding of who we are?

So concludes our guided tour of the contents of this volume. The reader will note that there has been no attempt to pursue an overriding thesis about Newfoundland short fiction, no argument about how history and/or geography may have influenced these writers, no headscratchingly abstruse theories about the Newfoundland character or the Newfoundland sensibility. Excellent academic projects all, but completely beside the point when ten stories’ worth of excellent fiction is waiting to be enjoyed.

My thanks to the writers and their representatives, and to James Langer, Rebecca Rose, and all the folks at Breakwater who have made this book possible.

– LARRY MATHEWS

FOGBOUND IN AVALON

ELIZABETH MCGRATH

Neither Laurel nor I will ever be certifiable, I imagine, though, having put in, between us, going on a hundred years in this world, we have inevitably had a brush or two with the darker side of things. So this will not be a story of alienation. And to put your mind at rest, right from the beginning, we have never been in love with each other, in spite of having been reared in the most repressive of girls’ schools from the ages of five to eighteen.

Laurel and I, middle-aged, neurotic, still thin, still suffering, still fascinated by the world and ourselves in it, are friends. We were born on this rock, Newfoundland, and are fixed in the cracks of it, through and beyond the sparse topsoil, in a way that makes us neither want to nor be able to free ourselves, ever. Laurel, except for holidays in Europe and the Caribbean and occasional forays into New York, has been here all her life. I, Anne-Marie, onetime academic—Presentation Convent, Collège Sophie-Barat, Memorial, Oxford—am another kettle of fish.

For about twenty years we circled each other, meeting once a year when I came back from wherever I had been, tentative, polite, mildly admiring of each other, gradually spilling a bean here and a bean there until so many beans had been spilled that there was no going back from it. And we found ourselves, not unhappily, in that giggling communion characteristic of the passionate friendships of thirteen and a half. What we don’t know about each other now you could put in your eye. What is more, what she and I don’t know about the others on this rock isn’t worth knowing. When we put our heads together, and we frequently do, we can pool enough of everyone’s tatty little secrets to blackmail all the professions, including the oldest, the civil service, the clergy, and every House of Assembly back to 1855.

Just about everybody here is related by blood, marriage, or sheer tomfoolery to everybody else, and we all know our cousins to the third or fourth degree. At the rate we reproduce, emigrate, wander the world, and keep in touch, there is no secret service that can approach us. What may be called ESP elsewhere can be nailed down here by genealogy, and we are all expert. Yesterday morning Laurel was telling me that when they were five she and her twin brother took the diapers off the minister’s daughter to get a look at what was so carefully concealed. In the afternoon I called her and said, Hey, remember Daphne Green? Remember her? said Laurel. She’s the one Leonard and I took the diapers off. What in God’s name made you ask about her? "I’ve been hearing