Richard Gwyn - Smallwood: The Unlikely Revolutionary

ALSO BY RICHARD GWYN

The Shape of Scandal: A Study of a Government in Crisis (1965)
The Northern Magus: Pierre Trudeau and Canadians (1980)
The 49th Paradox: Canada in North America (1985)
Nationalism without Walls: The Unbearable Lightness of Being Canadian (1995)

Copyright 1968, 1972, 2015 by Richard Gwyn

Afterword copyright 1999, 2014 by Richard Gwyn

This edition published by arrangement with McClelland & Stewart, a division of Random House Canada Limited.

First US edition by Skyhorse Publishing 2015

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Print ISBN: 978-1-62914-726-0
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-63220-128-7

Printed in the United States of America

In life as in art, a clown is the most complex of characters: a buffoon who laughs to keep from crying, a political propagandist who cloaks his message with humour, a freak who has turned a physical defect into a livelihood.

Joseph Roberts Smallwood is a deadly serious clown. His natural talent for mimicry, his studied command of repartee, and his uninhibited zest for living have made him Joey, the Canadian folk hero, part rustic savant, part licensed national jester. Behind the wit, the quick passion, and the easy emotion is Joe Smallwood, the lonely visionary who has spent almost seventy years pursuing a dream: a revolution that would give his island the material and intellectual benefits the rest of North America takes for granted.

As a clown, Smallwood is in many ways typical of his race. Newfoundlanders have suffered more and for far longer than any other white people in North America. By turns sentimental and cynical, they have endured their lot by laughing at it. Their humour is antic and unself-conscious, and they have a Celtic gift for expressing it.

Smallwood the visionary is unique in Newfoundland. Although life there, at once cosy and cruel, has been a breeding ground of character, during four hundred years of recorded history the colony and province has produced few exceptional men. The struggle for survival exhausted ambition and creativity; the handful whose talent endured, such as the poet E. J. Pratt and the painter Maurice Cullen, lived their lives and made their names elsewhere. Smallwood is the exception. He chose to stay in Newfoundland. It was there that he became an exceptional man. He is the only Newfoundlander to have done so.

Smallwoods love for Newfoundland has always been total and uncritical. For nearly thirty years in the political wilderness, he endlessly wrote and talked about Newfoundland; for more than twenty years as Premier he bluffed, bullied and cajoled his people into sharing his quixotic belief in a brighter future; in old age he has become a living museum of Newfoundland history.

For those born there, this poor bald rock, as Smallwood once described his island, is easy to love. It is a hard land. Since the coming of the white man, one species of human beings, the Beothuk Indians, and one animal species, the Great Auks of the Funk Islands, have been wiped out. Perhaps by coincidence, the national flower is the carnivorous pitcher plant. The winters are long and fog-bound; the summers are chilly and brief.

Yet Newfoundland has a rare beauty. The rolling hills of the West Coast evoke the highlands of Scotland; the long dark clefts in the South Coast and the Northern Peninsula are as dramatic as the fjords of Scandinavia; the barren lands of the east, lightly covered with moss and sprinkled with free-standing, pink-grey boulders, are a northern mirror of the harsh, pure hills of Greece. The precious summer sun turns the sea translucent blue and aquamarine and, above the patches of kelp, to a royal purple. In winter, slate grey seas tear at slate grey rock; in spring, the hulks of icebergs bump along the shore like polar cathedrals.

The magic of this faery land forlorn, however, lies not in its landscape or its seascape, but in its people. The best-tempered, best-mannered people walking, wrote A. P. Herbert, who fell in love with Newfoundland during a wartime visit there, gay, good-hearted and generous; tolerant, temperate, tough, God-fearing. The novelist Paul West has called them a community of Irish mystics cut adrift on the Atlantic. With fewer divorces, fewer suicides, and less crime than any other region of the country, Newfoundland rightly calls herself The Happy Province.

Gentle mystics are poor politicians. Too small to attract the attention of the outside world, and too poor to be able to buy it, Newfoundland struggled alone for four centuries. It won independence at the price of bankruptcy, until failure and poverty conditioned Newfoundlanders to accept hardship as their immutable national heritage. Smallwood taught them to hope again, first by his words and later by his deeds.

Simple ambition inspired his decision to remain in Newfoundland instead of emigrating to the mainland as thousands of his countrymen have done. Only in that singular society could he, with his background and uncoordinated array of talents, hope to rise to the top.

That pursuit of personal power and glory was given shape and substance by Smallwoods revolutionary purpose. He has expressed his purpose in different ways at different times, and always in heightened prose: We can be one of the great small nations of the earth; We are going to be either a glorified poorhouse or else a self-supporting province, independent and proud; This is our land, this is our river, this is our waterfall. Newfoundland first. Quebec second. The rest of the world last.

Smallwoods ambitions for Newfoundland have been as extravagant as his ambitions for himself. This book is an attempt to describe his successes and his failures. It is a personal and political study of the author and architect of Newfoundlands union with Canada, and its Premier for nearly a quarter of a century. More than this, it is a study of a Canadian revolutionary.

Joseph Roberts Smallwood made this book possible by granting me his full co-operation. He was unstinting with his time and with his hospitality, and for both I am deeply grateful. He bears no responsibility for my judgments, nor had he any say in shaping them.

In the Authors Note to The Shape of Scandal , I wrote: To use a phrase which is a clich but which happens to be entirely accurate, this book could not, and would not, have been written but for my wife, Sandra. Smallwood also belongs to Sandra. She began as researcher and finished as editor during a final tortuous two months in which we slimmed and reshaped a sodden mass of two hundred thousand words to its present, bearable length. Not least, because she is a Newfoundlander, her insights inspired many of my own.