Tempered Days: A Century of Newfoundland Short Fiction

Lawrence Mathews is an associate professor of English at the Memorial
University of Newfoundland.

This anthology of 24 Newfoundland stories published between 1901 and
1994 aims to present “a historical cross-section” of Newfoundland
short fiction rather than “a selection of the ‘best’ stories.”

However representative these works may be, their literary quality is,
by and large, dreadful. Most are written as though Joyce, Woolf,
Hemingway, and Faulkner had never lived. Here’s a sentence that
appears, without irony, in a story published in 1950: “She had given
the pure, true love of a guileless heart into the keeping of a darkly
handsome stranger.” There are many examples of bathos, sentimentality,
improbable coincidence, thesis-driven plotting, groaningly obvious
symbolism, and oversimplified characterization. And then there are the
surprise endings: a major character is, in the last paragraph, revealed
to be blind; a man who has been planning the murder of his wife is
murdered by her. This is, to put it kindly, not the stuff of which
literary tradition is made.

Very few stories meet any reasonable criterion of professionalism. One
that does is Helen

Porter’s “The Summer Visitors,” a witty rendering of an
Americanized Newfoundlander (and the only story to make use of that
radical modernist technique, the unreliable narrator). Perhaps the best
is Carmelita McGrath’s “Jack the Trapper.” Almost alone among the
writers in this “cross-section,” she understands that handling
language with a poet’s care is essential to making fiction live. And
that’s about it. Two or three shorter pieces are competently executed

but very slight. For prurient interest, there’s Percy Janes’s
mean-spirited depiction of a Margaret Laurence surrogate in “Encounter
in England,” but it’s as badly written as most of the rest. (Janes
is apparently unfamiliar with the notion of subtlety.)

Over the last ten years or so there has been an explosion of
Newfoundland literary talent not represented here: Wayne Johnston,
Bernice Morgan, Ken Harvey, John Steffler, Patrick Kavanagh, Lisa Moore,
Michael Winter. This volume stands as sad testimony to the fact that
this explosion is a true Big Bang, creation (nearly) ex nihilo.