The unforgiving Newfoundland landscape, so central to Annie Proulx's The Shipping News, almost didn't appear in the film version. John Travolta wanted the film shot in Maine, but the author stood her ground. She tells Aida Edemariam why there is no other place quite like it
The Shipping News nearly didn't get filmed in Newfoundland, the island off eastern Canada where much of the novel is set. John Travolta - objecting to Canadian tax collectors and believing in comfortable weekends - was determined that it should be filmed near his 20-bedroom house in Maine. Annie Proulx, author of the Pulitzer prize-winning book, was equally determined that it should not, and balked at signing the contract. In the end, after detours involving Billy Bob Thornton and various versions of the script, The Shipping News was made, with Kevin Spacey in the lead, and Judi Dench, Julianne Moore and Cate Blanchett as co-stars. In Trinity Bight, Newfoundland.
And thank goodness. Newfoundland (pronounced Newf'n-land) is a vital character in Proulx's book about Quoyle, a lumpen, failed and just-widowed American newspaperman who returns with his children to the Newfoundland of his ancestors, where he begins, slowly, to heal. No stunt double could match the location. As Proulx says, drily: "Newfoundland is different from any other place. Maine does not look like Newfoundland."
Her statement belies the fervour with which she always describes her first encounter with the place, in wind and sleet, in mid-July: "I don't think I'd been on the island for seven or eight minutes when I was just struck viscerally. It was this real, physical force. I liked this harsh, bony, bare, empty, cruel and beautiful place so much I could not bear it."
It's not the most welcoming vista; to fly in, you skim over the choppy grey Atlantic, then dip towards snow and ice punctuated by black rock. On seaside cliffs, the wind has blown so hard for so long that the trees are no more than chest-high, gnarled into natural bonsai called tuckamore. Blizzards can howl out of clear blue days, chased by gale-force winds; rainbows apologise bashfully for June sleet.
Spacey's experience when he first landed, of a crawling three-and-a-half-hour drive in blinding snow, was not so different from Quoyle's arrival in the novel, the character he plays. Also shared was Spacey's terror of hitting a moose. There are about 125,000 moose in Newfoundland, and about 600 moose collisions a year. They can weigh nearly a ton and it's not an encounter everyone survives.
Towering icebergs - "with cores of beryl, blue gems within white gems", as Proulx has it - break off Greenland's glaciers and drift southwards, studding the horizon until early summer. Treacherous as they melt and destabilise, they crack in the night, booming across the bays. Minke whales still come inshore every year and filming had to stop in the middle of one of Judi Dench's scenes when someone yelled "Whale!" and everyone rushed to see.
Farming is nearly impossible. The land is rock and peat bog. "There's only a bloody inch of soil in places," says Proulx, who lives in Wyoming. "People go out and drain the bogs and make very high raised beds to grow potatoes. That's the only soil they can find."
It's all unfortunate for Quoyle, who's afraid of water and dreams of the car accident that killed his philandering wife, but finds there's no way to get to work except by boat. As a new reporter for the local paper, the Gammy Bird, he's assigned car wrecks and the shipping news. He's forced to face his demons.
Proulx spends a few weeks each year in Newfoundland. She has a house there, on the Great Northern Peninsula, the long finger of land that Leif Eiriksson, son of Eirik the Red, bumped into in 1000AD. Newfoundland proved too much for the Norse, who lasted a couple of decades. The next European to turn up was John Cabot, an Italian sent by Henry VII in 1497. Cabot found the sea "swarming with fish, which can be taken not only with the net, but in baskets let down with a stone".
Newfoundland was Britain's oldest colony. Raleigh's half-brother, Humphrey Gilbert, took formal possession of the "great English ship moored near the Grand Banks . . . for the convenience of the English fishermen" in 1583, and Clement Attlee's Whitehall released it in 1948. Money from the cod fishery built stately homes in the west country and south-eastern Ireland and funded the first Waterford crystal factories. But in Newfoundland itself, only the capital, St John's, ever saw much of the wealth; as a Newfoundlander might say, life on the island has always been "wonderful hard".
Newfoundlanders are shaped by battle with their province; the Quoyle character just does it faster. Most fished, or were connected to fishing. And sealed, and still do. Historically, pirate captains found that Newfoundlanders made good crews. Quoyle's ancestors were wreckers who lured ships on to the inlet- puckered, hostile coast, then took their pick of the booty.
Lasse Hallström, director of The Shipping News, comes from 15 generations of Swedish sea captains, and wreckers . "One of my ancestors was supposedly decapitated for his crimes," Hallström told Premiere. "I have pirate blood. Isn't that cool?"
Yet Newfoundlanders have over the centuries also been heroic rescuers. And the 6,656 travellers rerouted to Gander (population 10,000) on September 11th have told again and again of Newfoundland hospitality - common knowledge in Canada, and just as true in less disastrous times. It's as though Newfoundlanders have found generosity and a sense of humour to be effective survival tools in the face of constant hardship.
There was no road across the island until the 1960s, and the inlets freeze in winter. Place names tell the story: Gripe Point, Bad Bay, Bleak Island, Misery Point, Wild Bight, Breakheart Point, Famish Gut, Savage Cove, Confusion Bay, Bareneed, Empty Basket, Dead Man's Bay . . . and, in a characteristic twist, Baie d'Espoire (Bay of Hope in French, but in the Newfoundland accent, or "Newfinese", Bay Despair).
More hopefully, there's Heart's Content and Comfort Cove, not to mention Nick's Nose Cove, Come-by-Chance, Blow-me-down, Lushes Bight, Ha Ha Bay, Run-by-Guess, Bleak Joke Cove, Snake's Bight and Dildo. Nearly half of the Newfoundlanders' ancestors hailed originally from Ireland, the rest from the the south-west of England. There are some coastal villages - locally called outports - where you can still find a well- preserved 17th-century Dorset accent, seeded, of course, with the unique Newfoundland vocabulary. Any idea what a slieveen, a duff, an angishore, a faddle or a drook are? Proulx has said that she "literally slept with [the Dictionary of Newfoundland English] for two years".
Incest and sexual abuse loom large in Proulx's book (the Gammy Bird has a dedicated sexual abuse reporter). This angered many Newfoundlanders. "They didn't like the fact that an outsider was writing about it," says Proulx. "But Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath is, to this day, loathed in Oklahoma - but of course he never went to Oklahoma and he got some big things wrong. I have not had any complaints from people that the facts are distorted or that what I wrote about simply could not happen."
Go online, and you'll find Newfoundland readers who admit that she's hit a nerve.
In 1948, only 52.3 per cent of Newfoundlanders voted for confederation with Canada, and many of the population are still anti- Canadian. Mainland Canada, in turn, makes "Newfie" jokes, and the Gammy Bird's proprietor speaks for all Newfoundlanders when he warns Quoyle fiercely: "I hates a Newfie joke."
Confederation brought benefits, but at a price. The government refused to provide amenities to many far-flung communities, insisting they be rationalised - hence the iconic image in The Shipping News of a two-storey house, entire, being dragged across the ice. Even more unbelievably, houses were floated across bays and deposited on new foundations. Newfoundland is littered with ghost villages rotting back intothe bog.
Now outports are dying all over again. Cod stocks have been severely depleted, partly due to large-scale commercial fishing by EU countries, and in 1994, the year after The Shipping News was published, the Canadian government declared an indefinite moratorium. Thirty thousand Newfoundlanders were made jobless in a province that is already the poorest in Canada.
Over the last seven years, Proulx has seen "massive change. You used to have thriving outports with all age groups visible, men fishing, the old guys waiting on the dock to see the fish boats come in, people employed in the fish-cleaning and packing factories, other people drying squid, kids running up and down taking horses to pastures.
"All that has pretty much disappeared, and an entire age group, say from about 20 to 40, is suddenly missing. All the men have had to go to the mainland to look for work."
But Newfoundland is fighting back. Fishermen are farming scallops, salmon, mussels, whelks, sea cucumbers, sea urchins. Oil has been found, and nickel. The US $20 million or so the film generated is very welcome. And there's tourism. Walking through parts of Gros Morne National Park is like walking through the beginning of the world. Dead evergreens dripping with lichen lean bodily into the wind, sending ripples through the bog to which pitcher plants, orchids and waist-high ferns cling. And on the horizon are the red Tablelands, high, acidic and bare, where the mantle of the earth has punched up through the crust.
"It's one of the great places in the world," says Proulx. "It's worth a trip from the ends of the earth." - Guardian Service
The Shipping News is scheduled to open on April 19th.