My Famous Evening Read online

  ALSO BY HOWARD NORMAN

  NOVELS

  The Northern Lights

  The Bird Artist

  The Museum Guard

  The Haunting of L.

  STORIES

  The Chauffeur

  EDITED

  Northern Tales

  FOR CHILDREN

  The Owl Scatterer

  Who-Paddled-Backward-With-Trout

  How Glooskap Outwits the Ice Giants

  The Girl Who Dreamed Only Geese

  Between Heaven and Earth

  The Smelly Shirt of the Shaman Tiuk

  Diary of Father in Ice & His Soul in Heaven

  NONFICTION

  Don’t Forget Me

  MY FAMOUS EVENING

  MY FAMOUS EVENING

  Nova Scotia Sojourns, Diaries & Preoccupations

  HOWARD NORMAN

  NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC DIRECTIONS

  NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

  Washington, D.C.

  Published by the National Geographic Society

  1145 17th Street, N.W., Washington, DC 20036-4688

  Text copyright © 2004 Howard Norman

  Map copyright © 2004 National Geographic Society

  Photographs by Emma Norman

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, without permission in writing from the National Geographic Society.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Norman, Howard A.

  My famous evening: Nova Scotia sojourns, diaries & preoccupations / Howard Norman.

  p. cm. — (National Geographic directions)

  ISBN: 978-1-4262-0911-6

  1. Nova Scotia—Description and travel. 2. Nova Scotia—Social life and customs. 3. Nova Scotia—Biography. 4. Norman, Howard A.—Travel—Nova Scotia. 5. Authors, Canadian—Biography. I. Title. II. Series.

  F1037.N57 2004

  971.6—dc22

  2003068603

  One of the world’s largest nonprofit scientific and educational organizations, the National Geographic Society was founded in 1888 “for the increase and diffusion of geographic knowledge.” Fulfilling this mission, the Society educates and inspires millions every day through its magazines, books, television programs, videos, maps and atlases, research grants, the National Geographic Bee, teacher workshops, and innovative classroom materials. The Society is supported through membership dues, charitable gifts, and income from the sale of its educational products. This support is vital to National Geographic’s mission to increase global understanding and promote conservation of our planet through exploration, research, and education.

  For more information, please call 1-800-NGS LINE (647-5463), write to the Society at the above address, or visit the Society’s Web site at www.nationalgeographic.com.

  for David Wyatt

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION: Sudden Noir, Deeper Calm

  CHAPTER ONE: My Famous Evening

  CHAPTER TWO: Love, Death, and the Sea: Forerunners and Divinations

  CHAPTER THREE: A Birder’s Notebook

  CHAPTER FOUR: Driving Miss Barry

  EPILOGUE: Robert Frank Equals Late Autumn

  MY FAMOUS EVENING

  the bay coming in, the bay not at home

  –ELIZABETH BISHOP

  “The Moose”

  Are you for staying awake all night

  to talk about this place? I’m up for

  it, are you?

  –ANNIE DEWIS

  Advocate Harbour, Nova Scotia, 1978

  INTRODUCTION

  Sudden Noir,

  Deeper Calm

  IN 1979, I WAS HIRED TO WRITE A DOCUMENTARY FILM script, Trotsky in Halifax. The film never got made, but the research was a job well done, and allowed me to be apprised of yet another instance of history suddenly imposed on quotidian life. “Escorted by the authorities, yesterday the mysterious figure of Leon Trotsky suddenly arrived to our unsuspecting city,” one journalist wrote, with a slightly anxious air of melodrama. “Tongues were set wagging, our citizenry rapt with alarming curiosity.”

  Why did Leon Trotsky pass through Halifax on his way to the October Revolution? In 1915, the Vitagraph Studio in New York hired émigré Emile Vester to direct My Official Wife, a WWI spy drama. I have seen this fierce, clumsy, noirish film. One crucial sequence depicts a band of embittered revolutionaries meeting in a dank basement. Vester had decided that in order to provide authentic Russian atmosphere, he needed “nihilistic” types as extras in this scene. To recruit, Vester simply walked into a Second Avenue café and offered its habitués five dollars a day for their work in a feature film. This is the exact point where the “fact” of a real personage and the “fiction” of a film scenario were inextricably bound, for among the volunteers who jumped at the chance for a screen appearance was Lev Bronstein—that is, Leon Trotsky. Trotsky had spent nearly a year in forced exile in New York editing the Bolshevik newspaper Novy Mir (New World), and the job with Vitagraph offered a welcome supplement to his meager salary. He appeared in the studio roster as “Mr. Brown.” At one point in the film, if I recall correctly, Mr. Brown pounds the wall with his fist.

  To my knowledge, My Official Wife was never shown in Halifax, at least not in any commercial theater. But on March 28, 1917, the Norwegian America Line ship Kristianiafjord steamed into Halifax Harbour from New York with a general cargo assigned to T. A. S. DeWolfe and Son. Tsar Nicholas II had only just abdicated, and the port authorities had received order to arrest eight passengers aboard the Kristianiafjord—one of them was Leon Trotsky.

  Trotsky was taken before the military authorities, and a man named Dave Horwetz was assigned the duty of being Trotsky’s official Russian interpreter. A document from the Naval Control Office, April 3, 1917, found in the Public Archives, is titled, “Russian Socialists on board the s.s. Kristianafjorde.” The lengthy document itself says of Trotzki, Bronstein, age thirty-seven: “… traveling on card of Identity vised by the Russian Counsul at New York. He was President of the Workman’s Delegations in Russia in 1905, was imprisoned for a time, but got away to Austria and was a journalist in Vienna till the commencement of the War: he then went to Switzerland and on to Paris, remaining there about 20 months, doing journalistic work. From Paris he went to New York, via Spain, and has continued the same vocation. He states that owing to the new regime in Russia he is returning to assist the Government. He makes no secret of his Socialist ideas, which appear to be very advanced, and he seems to have been in touch with Socialists of every nationality. He has a large amount of Socialistic literature in his possession. He claims acquaintance with the present Russian Minister for Foreign Affairs: he is accompanied by his Wife and two sons of 12 and 9.”

  From the Citadel in Halifax, Trotsky was removed to an internment camp in Amherst. His internment dragged on for nearly a month, during which, according to the Halifax Herald, he “raged protested and hurled insults at the camp administration.” There were at Amherst eight hundred German prisoners, many of them sailors of sunken submarines. Trotsky addressed them, explaining the ideas of Zimmerwald and telling them of the fight against the Kaiser and the war that Karl Liebknecht had been waging in Germany. The camp resounded with his speeches, and life in it changed into a “perpetual meeting.” Finally, after much intrigue, bungling, and subterfuge, Trotsky left Amherst on April 29, followed to the gates of the camp by cheering German sailors and by the sounds of the “International” played by their orchestra.

  During her husband’s internment in Amherst, Mrs. Trotsky and her boys were ordered to remain in Halifax and given into the custody of Mr. Horwetz, who “took them to his humble home on Market Street.” Acco
unts of Mrs. Trotsky and her sons in Halifax are quite wonderful, though some are nastily biased and require to be looked at askance. Reading of her daily walks around the city, one is toured through Halifax with vivid immediacy; her presence is noted as “historical,” and one reporter even allows, “Seeing Halifax through this foreigner’s eyes is seeing it somewhat anew, albeit at times unpleasantly.” Mrs. Trotsky and sons watched workers passing into the boot and shoe factory of Robert Taylor and Company, which extended up Duke Street to Brunswick Street; this five-story brick structure “was considered to be a first-class factory with light, airy rooms and modern machinery, and later was used by J. and M. Murphy for the manufacture of clothing.” On Saturdays they watched horses and oxen toiling up the hill from the Dartmouth ferry, pulling market carts loaded with produce to be sold at the City Market, as the new market building had opened in July 1916 to replace the old Green Market held on the streets by the post office.

  Mrs. Trotsky could speak Russian, German, and French, but as Horwetz reported, her English vocabulary consisted of three words: “Speak you French?” While at the Horwetz house, she was bitter in her denunciation of her “house arrest,” insisting that she and her husband had committed no crime, were victims of the Tsar’s agents through the British and American governments, and once back in Russia intended to “denounce Canada” as well. Finally, Mrs. Trotsky and sons were allowed to take rooms in the Prince George Hotel on the southeast corner of Sackville and Hollis Streets.

  There is one especially telling anecdote, having to do with Mrs. Trotsky’s wish to buy a writing pad. Mrs. Horwetz, who accompanied Mrs. Trotsky almost everywhere, and Mrs. Trotsky went directly to Connolly’s Book and Stationery Store on Barrington Street, where the clerk showed Mrs. Trotsky a pad that had the entwined flags of the Allies emblazoned on the cover. “I want none of them,” she was said to have exclaimed in Russian. “I have no use for any flags, but the flag of real freedom!” Fortunately, as one article put it, “the clerk did not understand Russian.”

  Trotsky left Halifax on May 3 aboard the Scandinavian-American liner Helig Olav, en route to Copenhagen, allowed to sail only after a message from Kerensky, the war minister, had been received by British authorities urging that he be released to return to Russia.

  As I’ve mentioned, the documentary was never filmed. Yet during the research I had conversations with collectors of Trotsky memorabilia, historians of international law, and quite a few people who remembered Trotsky’s presence in Halifax, including one woman who had personally met Mrs. Trotsky. Day after day, night after night, I read about rumored plots to assassinate Trotsky, copied into a notebook fiery newspaper rhetoric, beneath which I knew had run a real current of political anxiety. A Mrs. Eddy, age eighty-three, said, “Goodness, all those foreign languages heard in the street!” (Perhaps all emanating from the Trotsky entourage!) In one newspaper article or other, I caught the phrase “the ship waiting to carry this Russian-Jewish revolutionary into the rapidly turning pages of History.” Finally, one late night as I looked across the harbor to the bleak edifice of the Nova Scotia Hospital and surrounding lights of Dartmouth, weeks of obsessing about Trotsky in Halifax instilled in me what Graham Greene called “a sudden noir of the heart.” It was a penetrating, ghostly sensation that the wind, the fog, the water, the old buildings of the Historic District, still carried voices from 1917, and that the city of Halifax would never relinquish its secrets easily. Naturally, the history of Halifax, like that of any city, contains opposing forces. As George Elliott Clark put it, “Halifax has some wild mysteries, some bad things have happened here, and not everything’s been written down yet. Beautiful city, though. Good people. Good town.”

  Researching Trotsky in Halifax also allowed me a framework within which to think about “atmosphere,” useful to later writing, especially of novels. To this day when I step from the Haliburton House Inn and walk down Morris Street to the harbor, I’m given to the possibility of experiencing a “sudden noir of the heart.” I wish the ghosts of 1917 would start talking so I could eavesdrop. Such thinking is by now natural to my character, habitual, sustaining. I am not a Haligonian; I am, however, as often as possible a visitor to Halifax, my favorite city. And part of why Halifax is my favorite city is its hospitality and even its indecipherable indifference to my particular imagination, ponderings, literary investigations.

  I think of the summer of 1979, too, as a time in which a city-rural axis fell into place, and, what’s more, while researching Trotsky in Halifax, I actually kept to a schedule: Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday I worked in Halifax, writing at night in my room at the Lord Nelson Hotel. On Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, I lived in a big, ramshackle house in Advocate Harbour, on the Bay of Fundy, compliments of the playwright Sam Shepard. Sam and I had met in San Francisco, did a reading together at Intersection; subsequently he offered me use of his house in Advocate Harbour. A letter he sent me offered detailed directions, a loving description of a neighbor, Scott Dewis, a warning, and advice. “The well is located in the back porch & I’d check it for dead mice before you start drinking the water,” he wrote. “The lobster season should be on by the time you arrive. And you can always get fresh lobster & boil them in a bucket. Really delicious. Ask Scott about where to pick some ‘Fiddle Neck Greens’ or ‘Goose Tongue Greens’—they’re all a real delicacy.”

  Back and forth, weekly, for three months, then, I drove the jeep out of Advocate Harbour along the Glooskap Trail to Truro, growing familiar with the villages, the landscape, the birds. I would then have lunch in Truro and continue south on l02 to Halifax. In 1984 my wife, poet Jane Shore, and I took our honeymoon in Nova Scotia. We drove from Halifax to the Margaree Valley, stayed at the Normaway Inn (still owned and operated by Dave Macdonald, whom I consider a local historian). We had a day before our reservation to catch the seven-hour Bluenose ferry out of Yarmouth, across to Bar Harbor, Maine.

  We decided to drive along Route 2, along the Bay of Fundy, and stop at Great Village, where the poet Elizabeth Bishop had spent part of her childhood in the home of her maternal grandparents. Eventually Ms. Bishop would set a number of remarkable poems and memory-pieces there. Jane had been a colleague of Elizabeth Bishop’s at Harvard and very much wanted to see this ancestral home. We more or less simply dropped in, and received a warm welcome from Mrs. Hazel Bowers, a distant relative of Bishop’s who was then living in the house. Hazel had taught school in Nova Scotia for thirty-two years; for nine years before her retirement she was principal of the Great Village School, which Elizabeth Bishop attended in 1916-17 (during which time a young man from Great Village had the duty of guarding Trotsky en route to Halifax). Hazel gave us a tour, served tea, and offered to put us up for the night, which we politely declined; later Jane remarked, more than halfway serious, “What if I saw her ghost?”

  The small house was located directly across from the old Esso gas station. A few days before our visit, the station had suffered a fire; ironic, to say the least, since Bishop’s poem “Filling Station” contains the line, Be careful with that match!

  Standing on the side porch, I though of how often I had driven past this very house, totally ignorant of its history and meaning. I didn’t mention it, mainly out of embarrassment. Well, things come round and round: eighteen years later almost to the day, I traveled with Jane, our fourteen-year-old daughter, Emma, her friend Millan, and Bishop’s childhood biographer, Sandra Barry, from Halifax to Great Village. (See “Driving Miss Barry,” p. 141.) Unloading eleven pieces of luggage at the Blakie House in Great Village, looking at Emma taking out her camera in order to chronicle her parents’ return and her introduction to this splendid village, the “timeless” backdrop of field and woods leading out to the Bay of Fundy, I thought to myself (with tiresome irony), “Well, some things naturally change and some don’t.”

  As for human beings in general, unless one is of Mi’kmaq Indian blood, all Nova Scotians, whether of Scottish, German, African, Irish, or French ancestry, are
“come-from-away.” Some families of European descent go back many generations, of course. In this light, since I first visited Nova Scotia in 1969, I must consider myself still in the fledgling “tourist” category, and perhaps always should. Some of my own ancestors, Russian and Polish Jews, those desperately inventive and fortunate enough to flee pogroms and fascism, landed for short periods in Halifax before moving on to points west in Canada and into the United States. But I can hardly claim provenance, and wish to avoid that fraudulent suggestion at all costs. I have always visited Nova Scotia, lived in Nova Scotia, because it is the place, with the exception of Vermont, I simply am most comfortable. Much has to do with the landscape and birds. And, over the last fifteen years, the writing of novels, which means that the actual experience of being in Nova Scotia is well-met with my imagining Nova Scotia in absentia. In turn, mornings when I am indeed in Nova Scotia, I often wake to immediately look out on the very landscape I’d been dreaming about; that is, the distance between unconscious and conscious is scarcely noticeable. At such moments one feels perhaps most fully realized.

  My Famous Evening is a book of selective memories. In terms of its literary nature, I adhere to Emily Dickinson’s advice, to “tell it slant.” Trying to find the most useful and gratifying angle of approach to the subject of “place,” as with any writing, involves the strenuous matters of form, style, what to include, what to leave out, what should metaphorically resonate and what should be described in almost purely expository prose. My belief is that, as Dylan Thomas said, “a book is like a life, most poignantly viewed by holding it up to the light, slowly turning it, catching its angles, but feeling the substance of the whole.” My Famous Evening is at least structured so that its chapters may be seen as intersecting facets of reminiscence: There are certain refrains, themes, preoccupations, and I placed birds in as many of the book’s nooks and crannies as possible. The book is divided into four chapters. Chapter One, “My Famous Evening,” has to do with the life and letters of Marlais Quire, a young woman who in 1923 left her home in Nova Scotia and traveled down to New York, in the decidedly ill-fated attempt to see the famous writer Joseph Conrad read from his works. Chapter Two, “Life, Death, and the Sea: Forerunners and Divinations,” features the collecting of various categories of folklore and plaits in failed romance to boot. Chapter Three, “A Birder’s Notebook,” is an homage to the Bay of Fundy and the Mi’kmaq hero-giant, Glooskap, and provides a few Mi’kmaq folktales about Glooskap. In Chapter Four, “Driving Miss Barry,” my ambition was—simply put—to profile a remarkable woman, researcher-historian-poet Sandra Barry, to characterize spending time with her in and around Great Village, a place she has written eloquently about, and allow Sandra, mainly via conversations, to provide a sort of “memoir.” The brief epilogue, “Robert Frank Equals Late Autumn,” comprises an October day’s collage-diary, a day during which the writer is solely preoccupied with the landscape photographs of the great Robert Frank. I entitled it “Robert Frank Equals Late Autumn” because I find a correspondence between the severe melancholy of these photographs and the mood engendered by the landscape, bleak weather, and light in October, November, and into early December in Cape Breton, more specifically along the Northumberland Strait as it opens northward into the Gulf of St. Lawrence.