The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (22 page)

“Explain your terms,” he said. I thanked God I had met Grimes. I told him what I understood socialism to be, what its aims were and how they could be achieved.

“Comrade Smallwood,” he said, “there is, in what you say, more bullshit than Bolshevism.” I thought I had failed the interview until I saw him holding out his hand. “There are two things we never have enough of at the
Call
. One is money and and the other is reporters willing to work for next to nothing. You don’t look as though you have the former, so I guess you’ll have to be the latter.” I blinked at him in confusion. “You’re hired,” he said.

Fielding did not apply for a job there, but she was soon doing some freelance pieces for
The New York Times
. She frankly admitted she would not need regular work for a while, having been given a substantial “going-away bribe” by her father. But she spent time with the
Call
crowd and helped me fit in with them, for though they professed the same world-view as I did, they had, I discovered, more in common with her than they did with me.

There were dozens of reporters at the
Call
, some of them my age. We all but lived in the ramshackle loft warehouse that had been the paper’s home for years despite having been swarmed by rioters and fire-bombed several times. There were still scorch marks on the ceiling of the newsroom.

We sought out the cheapest eating places we could find, the Three Steps Down Cafeteria in Greenwich Village, the Russian Bear Tearoom, the Fourteenth Street Automat. On Friday, payday, we swarmed Child’s Restaurant on Twelfth Street and, while arguing socialism, fed ourselves to bursting on sixty-five-cent four-course meals.

The others knew about Hotel Newfoundland and were already inclined towards seeing Newfoundlanders as predisposed to oddness by the time Fielding and I came along, and it must be said that nothing about us made them less so. I was taken up by the others as something of a mascot. Some of them were Jewish and got a lot of mileage out of my story about how all the Jews of St. John’s had turned out to see me off. Then there was the fact that I was Jewish-looking, a Jewfoundlander, they called me, or sometimes just Jewfie, or Joey the Jewfie, always affectionately, though my attempts
to get them to take me more seriously only made them less inclined to do so.

They would mispronounce Newfoundland on purpose just to get me to pronounce it properly, which they for some reason found hilarious and would repeat to one another, mimicking my hyper-earnest expression as they put the stress on
land
. “NewfoundLAND,” Pincus Hockstein would say to Eddie Levinson. “Not
NewFOUNDland
, not
NEWfoundland
, but
NewfoundLAND
, like
understand
, understand?”

The women were like none that I had ever met before. Compared with them, Fielding was withdrawn and reticent. Dorothy Day took one look at me when we met at Child’s and, right in front of the others, declared that I was a virgin, “a virgin if I ever saw one,” she said, as though she were unmasking me as some sort of fraud. I was too dumbstruck to deny it and, in any event, the change in my complexion confirmed her diagnosis. The table erupted in laughter, as though they had just discovered that, sitting in their midst, was the oldest, or possibly the last, virgin on the planet.

“Now tell us, Joey,” Dorothy said. “Are you saving yourself for some young thing back home who, in exchange for a kiss, extracted from you the night before you left a promise of engagement, or is it just that you haven’t yet worked up the nerve to ask some girl to bed?”

I prayed for a touch of the wit by which I had undone Fielding years ago, but none was forthcoming. Instead, I was saved by Fielding herself, to whom they had taken as if she was playing well some role they were familiar with but liked, Fielding with her silver-knobbed cane, her — to me — suddenly acquired political scepticism, her affected aloofness, her eloquence, her irony.

“He may not in matters carnal be an adept,” Fielding said, putting one hand on my shoulder, “but Smallwood is a true socialist. He has a horde of influential enemies and” — she took them all in with a gesture of her cane — “a handful of inconsequential
friends. Besides, Dorothy, how do you know that I am not the tutor in matters carnal of the alluringly emaciated man you see before you?”

They were quoting her in no time. “Well, if it isn’t Smallwood’s tutor in matters carnal,” they said when they saw her. They were bemused by her professed lack of commitment, political or otherwise, and teased her about working for such an “establishment” publication as
The New York Times
.

They seemed too Grimes-like to me right from the start, their interest in socialism too theoretical, and I told them so. They saw themselves as advancing the cause of some worldwide movement to whose real-life effects they had not given much thought, while I was mainly interested in how socialism could be of benefit to Newfoundland, a view they dismissed as too parochial.

We argued for hours, Fielding drinking more than any of us but rarely speaking.

“Newfoundland,” I told them one night, “will be one of the great small nations of the earth, a self-governing, self-supporting, self-defending, self-reliant nation, and I will be prime minister of Newfoundland.”

“And I will be president of the United States,” Pincus said, laughing, raising his glass to me.

“I will,” I said, standing up, which I was just barely able to do, swaying, though I was only on my second drink.

“This woman here can hold her liquor better than you can,” Dorothy said.

“There is more of me to hold it in,” said Fielding, though whether in defense or further mockery of me I wasn’t sure.

“You are looking at the future prime minister of Newfoundland,” I said. They looked me up and down, and as if the disproportion between what I was and what I claimed I would become was just too much for them, burst out laughing all at once.

“What about you, Fielding?” Dorothy said. “Is it your mission in life to further the ambitions of Smallwood here?”

“It is my mission in life,” Fielding said, “to further no one’s ambitions but my own. Once I have decided what they are, I shall pursue them relentlessly.”

“How would you describe your world-view?” said Dorothy.

“I am a phlegmatist,” said Fielding.

I was presumed to be from the working class because of my appearance, my accent, my lack of formal education, my social clumsiness, my eagerness to please and be accepted. I did nothing to disabuse them of this notion, said nothing about my middle-class grandfather or uncles or my time at Bishop Feild. I was in their eyes something of a catch, a legitimizing presence in the newsroom. The more shabbily and unfashionably I dressed, the more out of place I looked among them, the better, as far as they were concerned.

Most of them lived better than was warranted by what they were paid for working at the
Call
, so I suspected that, like Fielding, they were being kept in money by their parents. Many of them were from quite well-to-do families, on sabbatical from lives of privilege to which they openly admitted they planned to return someday.

I did not describe life in my father’s house. When they told stories of their own self-imposed, recently endured privation, flashing their socialist credentials, I said nothing. But I let slip that my mother was a Pentecostal.

“Pentecostals,” Dorothy said. “Aren’t they the ones who speak in tongues and thrash about on the floor like epileptic auctioneers?” I felt I had given myself away. Pentecostalism. The religion of the poor.

I told them they, or rather we, were not really poor, because we could stop being poor anytime we wanted to, whereas the poor thought their poverty would last forever. What I really meant, but did not say because I feared it would make me seem like too much of an authority on the subject, was that the worst part of poverty is that you believe you can no more shed it than you can your personality
or character, that you see your condition as a self-defining trait that, no matter how much money you come into, you can never divest yourself of or, worst of all, hide from other people.

“Here’s to a world in which no one feels they have anything to hide,” said Dorothy, sincerely. We all drank to such a world, and we all knew it was me that we were toasting.

Fielding’s Condensed
      
History of Newfoundland

Chapter Nine:
THE PROBLEME OF THIS NEW FOUNDE LANDE

Sir John Berry submits his census of the island to the king, who, in his famous Proclamatione Regardynge the Colonye of New Founde Lande, declares: “… it be certaine from the informatione contained in the census that the probleme of this New Founde Lande in tyme will solve itselfe. It is cleare that human life in this wilde place cannot be sustained and that the planters will either leave or by attrition perishe. I do hereby decree that they be not molested but lefte to encounter whatever fate or variety of fates as may please Almightye God.”

It is because of its belief in the settlers’ right to self-determination that England is slow to respond to the invasion of Newfoundland by France in 1696.

After every English settlement except Bonavista and Carbonear is destroyed, England decides to fortify her colony. The two countries struggle for ownership of Newfoundland until 1713, when, under the Treaty of Utrecht, England recognizes France’s historical right to part-ownership of Newfoundland by giving to France what
it believes to be a worthless stretch of coastline, the northeast one-third of the Newfoundland shore. England can be excused for this so-called blunder, for the only people who advise against it are the settlers who have lived on the shore for years and are to be supplanted by the French, and so can hardly be expected to give an honest estimation of its worth.

A Modest Proposal

T
HOUGH
I
HAD COME
to New York as early in life as I could, I had come too late to be part of the heyday of the
Call
or the socialist movement in America. It was not long before I realized that like the Socialist Party itself, the
Call
was on its last legs. Just as I was arriving on the scene, hyper-earnest, idealistic, the others were starting to reconcile themselves to the idea that to be an American socialist was to adhere to an ideology that, though righteous, would soon be out of favour for all time, a lost, just cause.

I had been two years in New York when the paper folded and, though it soon after resurfaced as a weekly, I was not rehired. One of the results of the decline in the fortunes and membership of the party was that socialist newspapers all over started shutting down and what few reporters were left found themselves unemployed. I had had the company of like-minded people for the kind of rare, short time that in your youth you think will never end.

I managed to make some money freelancing for what few socialist publications there still were and, with Fielding’s help, for
The New York Times
and other mainstream papers, but because I had no full-time job, I had time for doing what I had really come to New York to do anyway, to make speeches, the result being that while my standing in the decimated party rose steadily, I grew progressively more destitute.

I was soon spending more time at the non-paying avocation of stump-speaker than I was reporting. I was much valued by the party as a speaker because I could pass for a lot of things that I was not. I was not Jewish, but because of my nose and dark features I could pass for Jewish, a Jew of inscrutable heritage once my accent was factored in, but a Jew nonetheless and one preferable to the real thing, the Jewish intellectuals who in the East Side ghettos could not hold an audience because they were so clearly not ghetto-born themselves.

I was not really working class but, luckily for the party, I was starving (I would not accept money from Fielding, no matter how much she insisted) and every day wore the same suit of clothes, so I could pass for working class. The other socialists, who dressed down for their speaking engagements, always looked enviously at me as if they wondered how I managed to look so uncultivatedly shabby and so authentically emaciated. The party would have lost a valuable asset if I had succeeded in becoming as well-fed, well-clothed and well-rested as those on whose behalf I campaigned day after day, but fortunately the one thing that poverty did not diminish was my ability to elude good fortune.

Because of my Newfoundland accent, I could pass for an Irishman, a Welshman, a Scot. The Chameleon, Fielding called me, but it was really the audiences that changed, each one mistaking me for something different.

One thing I could not be mistaken for was black, but that did not stop Charlie Ervin from choosing me from among the thinned ranks of his “stumpers,” proclaiming me a “specialist in race relations” and sending me to Harlem. Fielding went with me and, as she had done along the waterfront in St. John’s, went about
rounding up an audience for me, standing on street corners with her cane held aloft and proclaiming: “Joseph Smallwood will give a speech in five minutes on the subject of socialism, a speech that none of you will soon forget, the likes of which you have not heard before and may not hear again.…”