With Axe and Flask: The History of Persephone Township from Pre-Cambrian Times to the Present

Thomas M.F. Gerry is chair of the English Department at Laurentian
University and the editor of Arachne, Laurentian University’s
bilingual interdisciplinary journal of language and literature.

Persephone (pronounced “purse-foan” by long-time inhabitants)
Township is the setting of Dan Needles’s popular Wingfield Farm series
of one-man plays. Needles’s narrator, Raymond Denton, contextualizes
the chronologically arranged events of With Axe and Flask by referring
to Walt Wingfield’s fictional universe and by integrating activities
in Persephone with historically documented materials. The happy result
is that the reader senses real people behind the stereotypes.

Needles cleverly attains satire’s goal of making us realize that we
are laughing at our own follies. He structures the book as an authorial
quest, reviving and amplifying a local history that the narrator’s
grandfather wrote. Whereas Alice Munro’s Del Jordan declines a similar
chore, Needles’s Denton takes up the challenge of reworking his
grandfather’s book. Only one copy of the book survived, it seems, and
that is because it was used to support the furnace oil tank in the
basement of Larkspur’s Anglican church. Positioning himself on a bar
stool in Larkspur’s Commercial Hotel, and with the help of the
town’s librarian, Denton conducts his reading and research.

All other copies of the original With Axe and Flask were buried with
Denton’s grandfather, in the first-mentioned of many episodes of book
destruction in Persephone Township. According to the grandfather’s
obituary, he “had erred in assuming that the passage of time had
clouded people’s memories about certain incidents and personalities
and that it was safe to place these matters under a public lens.” His
grandson is similarly naive, of course, and thus begins the book’s
exploration of how personal memories and interpretations of events
become staunchly defended facts.

Denton bolsters his “history” with quotations from the historian,
Michael Bliss, and Northrop Frye, the latter of whose works, Denton
admits, he has never read. Perhaps the Bliss influence resulted in With
Axe and Flask’s acute analysis of Canadian railway scams past and
present. The book, a deserving winner of the 2003 Stephen Leacock
Memorial Medal for Humour, offers much more than a good laugh.