By Paul Weinberg
TORONTO, Jan 11 2000 (IPS)

More than half a century ago, the people of Newfoundland narrowly and reluctantly joined the Canadian confederation.

That 1949 referendum left deep despair and division among the culturally distinctive people on Canada’s Atlantic Coastemotions still feltand which figure prominently in Wayne Johnston’s recently published memoir, “Baltimore’s Mansion.”

Novelist and writer Wayne Johnston, the latest star of the Canadian literary scene, is himself a Newfoundlander, a region which is among the poorest in Canada but which has produced its share of painters, writers, musicians and, most prominently, humourists and comedians arising out of the island’s Celtic tradition of storytelling.

“Baltimore Mansion” recalls that citizens at that time were give a choice by their British overseers – join the bigger neighbour to the west and south, with which they had geographic if not personal ties, or regain self- government and independence.

The split in the population pitted pro-confederate “townies” in the capital city of St. John’s and the surrounding Avalon peninsula against the anti-confederate “baymen” in the fishing communities in the rest of the province.

Newfoundland, was settled in the 17th century by European settlers from Ireland and the west of England. By the 19th century it had become a self-governing dominion, much like Canada and Australia under the British Empire and Commonwealth.

But debts accumulated from the Great Depression of the 1930s, the building of railways and the support of an armed regiment of soldiers fighting alongside the British in the First World War resulted in bankruptcy and government collapse.

Forced to beg for financial assistance from the mother country, it reverted in 1934 to colonial status through what was called a commission of government.

Johnston writes passionately in his memoir and previous novels about a people with a distinct culture, music and dialect of English, who because of economic and historical circumstances have remained in the shadows of larger and more economically-developed countries.

Until after the Second World War, a large number of Newfoundland families lived primarily off the lucrative fishery in the Grand Banks in the Atlantic ocean.

That changed starting with the armed conflict with Germany and Japan when Canada, Britain and the US all had major military U.S. bases in the colony, creating, temporarily, full employment.

But over-fishing by large companies and poor management by the Canadian department of Fisheries and Oceans since 1949 led to the decline of what had been an incredibly rich resource, forcing young people in these local communities, called outports, to seek employment in the capital city of St. John’s or – more likely – outside the province.

Exports have remained the most important generator of economic growth for Newfoundland, namely fish, lumber, oil (stemming from the Hibernia off-shore development) or artists.

Part of the cultural tradition of the region is reflected in an immensely popular national Canadian satirical television show, This Hour has 22 Minutes,

which is essentially an irreverent Newfoundland take on the Canadian political scene.

Much like his father, an agricultural technologist who left Newfoundland and then came back to work for the federal fisheries department in St. John’s, Johnston has done his own traveling away from home, settling permanently in Toronto.

He recently told interviewers from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) that he wouldn’t have written a word if he had not left the province.

Johnston’s most important novel is probably “Colony of Unrequited Dreams,” a fictionalized account of the life of Joey Smallwood, a controversial politician who led Newfoundland into Canada and served as its first premier for almost two decades.

It depicts an unrequited emotional love affair between Smallwood and a character of Johnston’s own creation, a female journalist and school chum, Sheilagh Fielding – who could be interpreted as representing Newfoundland itself in all of its moody querulousness.

While praised in various literary quarters, including The New York Times – which seems to have helped to make “Colony of Unrequited Dreams” a best-seller in Canada – the novel has been the subject of some criticism by people who knew Smallwood personally.

One of them is Rex Murphy, a former Newfoundland politician who has become a prominent and highly opinionated commentator on CBC, the host of a national open line show, and a frequent book reviewer.

Addressing Johnston’s novel, Murphy wrote in the Globe and Mail, a national daily, that the Smallwood depicted in the novel comes across as “sensitive, love conscious and tormented,” or in other words “more of a 1990s type of guy.”

Murphy is not sure that Smallwood, obsessive about his “mistress,” politics, all his life, was capable of such an inner life.

In the process, the reviewer tells us that Johnston, in romanticizing the premier, has robbed Smallwood of the personal characteristics that made him a dominant, domineering and larger- than-life figure in Newfoundland politics.

But Murphy does give Johnston his due in a major respect, saying that “Johnston has written here as feelingly and as well as anyone of Newfoundland’s dilatory and bitter jaunt to the 20th century.”

Excerpt: