Baltimore's Mansion: A Memoir

Providing a strong echo to The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, Johnston’s memoir covers much the same historical ground as his fictionalized life of Joey Smallwood. Baltimore’s Mansion, which won The Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction, focuses on the changes in Newfoundland’s fortunes as they are registered in the lives of three generations of Johnstons: Wayne’s grandfather Charlie Johnston, a part-time fisherman and blacksmith; Charlie’s son Arthur, a fisherman and passionate opponent of Confederation with Canada, who nonetheless finds himself working for the federal Department of Fisheries after Newfoundland joins Canada; and Johnston himself, who ends up leaving Newfoundland as he develops his vocation as a writer.

Johnston’s memoir is framed by the image of Lord Baltimore’s mansion, which was built for the first Baron Baltimore at Ferryland in the early seventeenth century and is presented by Johnston as an archetypically futile attempt to establish a purchase in a hostile, unnurturing environment. Baltimore’s Mansion is a powerful elegy for a past way of life and for the road not taken—Robert Frost’s famous image being a recurrent theme of Johnston’s writing about Newfoundland. The book is filled with memorable scenes—some remembered, some imaginatively reconstructed—that capture the essence of a more or less bygone life: a scene in which Arthur ruptures his spleen when their cart overturns as he and his father bring home ice that they have chopped from the shore and they have a near-brush with death as they make their way home during a snow storm, and an epic journey to St. John’s to buy a new anvil.

If Charlie is mythologized as a sort of outport Hephaestus characteristic of a pre-modern, pre-Confederation Newfoundland, Wayne’s father Arthur is no less mythologized for his quixotic championing of an independent Newfoundland. Playing on the mythological resonances of the Avalon Peninsula and of his father’s name, Arthur Reginald (King Arthur), Johnston celebrates his father as “the patron of a lost, just cause,” who, in his passionate opposition to joining Canada, evokes the myth of the exiled king. As Arthur finds himself in the ironic position of representing, as a federal fisheries inspector, the very political entity he resisted joining, Johnston poignantly but also humorously registers the painful transition of Newfoundland from a country to province. Finally, the memoir is also a reflection on Johnston’s own apprenticeship as a writer and the place of Newfoundland at the imaginative centre of his vocation, as well as the dawning realization that he must leave his home province in order to be able to write about it.

The lives of the Johnstons are, in a way, a microcosm of the changing fortunes of Newfoundland, uneasily making an adjustment to an unforgiving modernity, and at the heart of the narrative are the divisions caused, both in the family and in Newfoundland as a whole, over the 1948 referendum. Johnston skillfully evokes the intense passions that swirled around the decision to join Canada, anatomizing this epochal psychic split and chronicling its painful implications for both sides. Much of the memoir details Johnston’s obsession with penetrating a family secret, the reality behind a rift between Arthur and Charlie, which he suspects is rooted in their differences over the Confederation vote. As Johnston gradually unravels the enigma over the course of the book, he comes to recognize the irrevocable course of history, the sense that the independent Newfoundland that he so movingly eulogizes in Baltimore’s Mansion is gone forever: “No path leads back from here to there.”