The Danger Tree
Memory, War, and the Search for a Family's Past
by David Macfarlane

List Price: $13.95
Pages: 320
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0802776167
Publisher: Walker & Company

Holding a B.A. from the University of Toronto, David Macfarlane writes a regular weekly column for Canada's Globe and Mail, for which he won a National Newspaper Award in 1997. He is also the author of one novel, Summer Gone, which won the 1999 Chapters first novel award and was a finalist for the prestigious Giller Prize. It is available in paperback from Anchor Books. He has also published several short stories and poems. In addition to six gold National Magazine Awards, he has won an Author's Award for Magazine Writing—making him the recipient of more Canadian National Magazine Awards than any other writer. Macfarlane lives with his wife and two children in Toronto, and is at work on a book about the marble quarries of Carrara, Italy.

Written by Hal Hager, Hal Hager & Associates, Somerville, NJ

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Q: How did you go about reconstructing the lives and deaths of your Goodyear forebears? To what extent did you rely on your own memories; to what extent on documents and records; and to what extent on your own imagination?

DM: I realized that the stories I had heard my Newfoundland relatives tell when I was a child were disappearing, because a generation was dying out. I interviewed anyone I could find who had firsthand memories of the generation and the family about which I was writing. In some instances, I was able to amplify those memories by research in archives—Newfoundland has some wonderful archives at Memorial University in St. John's. But I also decided that where I couldn't fill in the story through interviews or research, I would use certain fictional elements and techniques. I didn't want to bend the truth, but in places where no one knew the truth, I decided to let storytelling take precedence over historical exactitude. I gave myself the freedom to do this by basing the entire book on the kind of storytelling that my Newfoundland relatives enjoyed so much.

By way of explaining my technique, I can tell you about a decision I made as I was actually writing the book. When I came to the death of the youngest son, Raymond, I knew parts of the story. I had also gone to archives in St. John'uld. In the end, Raymond was a lowly soldier, and there's no information, really, about how he actually died in that battle. He was only one of many hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of young men who were killed that day. So, as I was writing, I realized that I had to make a decision about what kind of book this was going to be. I could have said, "Maybe he died this way; maybe he died that way. It's possible that this occurred; it's possible that that occurred." Or I could just have gone on with one story in the way I think my grandfather might have. And that's what I did. I made an educated guess about what the circumstances of Raymond's death might have been. Whether or not this may or may not have actually happened, it's my version of what happened, and it's as close as I could get.

Q: Do you follow in the footsteps of your mother and her family in "lamenting the present and mourning the past"?

DM: Not exactly. I am distrustful of nostalgia for the past. I'm certain, for instance, that it is about a thousand times better to be poor in Newfoundland today than it was, say, in 1935. And, of course, we are a little wiser about the kind of hysterical nationalism that gave rise to World War I—in large part because we know the horrible consequences of that war. On the other hand, I think it's appropriate to mourn the things we've lost—I suppose because in mourning them we are really trying to hold on to them.

My great-aunt Kate's weeping spells were a way of doing just that, for herself and for anyone who witnessed them. And I think that the First World War comes up again and again in this way, because it is so sad and tragic a story and was such a waste. It's important that we remind ourselves that this may be not only about the First World War but perhaps about war in general, and about the way that we suffer beyond the family losses—the broader, bigger loss, the more unknowable loss...the loss of what might have been, the loss of all that young energy, the loss of all that creativity. The First World War stands, I think, as emblematic of that. What is most shocking about what happened to my family—five boys went overseas, three were killed, and two were wounded—is that it was by no means extraordinary in Newfoundland. It really was the loss of a generation. The great sadness with Newfoundland is that the raising of its own regiment for the war led directly to Newfoundland's abandoning its dream of nationhood. It's an enormous, enormous, enormous what-might-have-happened, had that war not occurred. And so one is just haunted by what might have occurred and never did.

Q: What is Newfoundland's place in Canada today? Do mainland Canadians still look down upon Newfoundlanders as "Newfies"? Are Newfoundlanders still insular and distrustful of other Canadians?

DM: Newfoundland, of course, is now a Canadian province, but the debate and vote in 1948—49 that decided confederation with Canada were very bitter, and in the end, very close. Newfoundland voted to join Canadian confederation by a margin of only 51 percent to 49 percent, and so nearly half of Newfoundlanders (my grandfather among them) were extremely reluctant Canadians. For them, Newfoundland's association with England and, in fact, with what Newfoundlanders call "The Boston States"—New England—was always much closer than with Canada. Today, this bitterness has diminished to a great extent, but it still lurks in the background. Newfoundland is really a great "What-if." We shall never know what it might have become.

I think the Newfie thing has, for the most part, passed, although it still hangs on to a degree in remote corners. There's a kind of comic element to the Newfoundlander that certain elements of Newfoundland tourism, for instance, play up as quaint and folksy. So the outsider's view of the drinking, boisterous Newfie does still turn up. But it has mostly disappeared, in part because Newfoundland has proven itself in so many ways within the context of Canada. For instance, the best comedy in Canada, really some of the most brilliant comedy anywhere, comes out of Newfoundland. There is a group of comedians called Cod Co., for example, who have become a mainstream hit with their regular TV show on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. And there has been an explosion of literary creativity in Newfoundland—including Wayne Johnston and Donna Morrisey—and a resurgence of painting. I think the literary developments have much to do with the great storytelling tradition of Newfoundland‹that Celtic ability to spin a good yarn.

How does Newfoundland feel about the rest of Canada? Well, the generation that fought the confederation battle in '48—'49 has largely passed, so we're now dealing with Newfoundlanders most of whom have grown up as Canadians. So it's not so much of an issue, except that Newfoundland is an island and island people always seem to be distrustful of enormous mainlands that keep wanting to overpower them. One still hears Newfoundlanders refer to people who aren't from Newfoundland as Come-from-Aways. You know, the outports of Newfoundland were so isolated, even from one another, that even the language of the people who settled there was kind of frozen in time. In Newfoundland, the fishermen came from Devon, Cornwall, and other West Country locales, and their accents just stayed in place. My grandfather used to boast that when the Newfoundland Regiment was under canvas in Egypt in the First World War, he could go around outside the tents and just by listening to the voices know what villages the soldiers came from. That's disappearing, largely because there are roads connecting the outports now, and also because of radio and television. But still the accents were extraordinary. I have a tape recording of my grandfather speaking in the early sixties, which I took to a linguist at the University of Toronto, to identify the accent. He was puzzled by it but eventually said that if he had to guess, he would say it was something like an eighteenth-century Cornish accent.

Q: Speaking of dialects and accents, you don't seem to make an overt effort in the danger tree to exactly reproduce your ancestors' accents. yet one does obtain a sense of the idiosyncrasies and tones of speech.

DM: The reason the book is structured the way it is has exactly to do with the use of dialect and accent, or more precisely, with my non-use of dialect and accent. I've always been troubled by the fact that I can't actually do accents. If you asked me to speak with a Newfoundland accent now, I couldn't do it. For some reason, it escapes me. When I started to write this book, I wanted to convey the charm of the way my relatives used to speak, and a lot of that had to do with their accents. But I found myself feeling very uncomfortable doing something on paper that I couldn't actually do in speaking. What I decided to do in the place of accents was to write these circuitous stories that mimicked the way my grandfather used to tell his stories, beginning somewhere and then going all over the place for a good half hour, or three quarters of an hour, and then miraculously returning to where he had started out. That was my way of getting at his method of storytelling without actually trying to reproduce the family accents on the page.

Q: What is the continuing presence in your life, and the life of your family, of the three lost brothers, the three surviving brothers, and Kate?

DM: We live near the University of Toronto, and my great-uncle Hedley's name is on a memorial there. I make a point of stopping and reading it—three times—whenever I pass. To that extent, I guess I'm still haunted by the three dead brothers. They stand for the greatest loss of war—the unfulfilled potential, the what-might-have-been. I don't teach my kids about the Goodyears, but I hope when theyre a little older that they'll read The Danger Tree, because it's important for them to understand that they have a real connection with history—that it's not an abstraction.

Q: Do you have plans for additional books, whether nonfiction or fiction, having to do with newfoundland or your families (the Goodyears and the Macfarlanes)? Don't the Macfarlanes, for all their legendary silences, deserve a book of their own?

DM: I'm currently at work on a nonfiction book about the marble quarries in the Carrara region of Italy, where I lived when I was in my twenties. I do think of returning to Newfoundland as a subject for a novel—perhaps set at the time of the Second World War. It's a history that not many people know. My mother was at university in St. John's during the war, and there were actually blackouts in the city because of the presence of German U-boats. As for the Ontario side of my family, the Macfarlanes, it may be that they are present in my novel, Summer Gone, which Anchor Books is publishing in paperback in August 2001.

Excerpted from The Danger Tree © Copyright 2010 by David Macfarlane. Reprinted with permission by Walker & Company. All rights reserved.

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