The writing of Newfoundland historian Patrick O’Flaherty has been calledMemorial University
Patrick O' Flaherty was a university English professor, historian and author who played a significant role in the exponential growth in the past few decades of Newfoundland letters and literature. As an author, he wrote 15 books, and as an academic, he introduced courses on Newfoundland literature and established and edited the bi-annual journal Newfoundland and Labrador Studies (NLS). He led the way in treating the province's literature as a serious, legitimate subject, in the process "invent[ing] a category altogether," as Rex Murphy wrote in 2006.
"He was not just a Newfoundland writer and critic but a builder of culture," said historian and author Dr. Peter Neary, who knew Dr. O'Flaherty from boyhood and co-produced two books with him.
Dr. O'Flaherty died Aug. 16 while swimming in a pond in Keels, Bonavista Bay, Nfld.; he was 77. His death, and the subsequent three-day search for his body, made national headlines.
His publications included many firsts and notable achievements. The Rock Observed (1980) is a foundational book in Newfoundland studies. The text reached back to 1497 and included letters, diary entries and odes; here and in all things, Dr. O'Flaherty knew his own mind and expressed it clearly. "His acid comments on Farley Mowat and his 'love affair with the island' contrast with his warm appraisal of George Cartwright," reviewer Jim Lotz wrote in The Atlantic Co-operator. Mr. Lotz's review also opened by noting Newfoundland is "hardly known" as a "hotbed of literature" – how profoundly that has changed, and how industriously Dr. O'Flaherty marshalled that advance.
"I recall what a genuine lift there was when the book came out," Mr. Murphy wrote in the National Post, after learning of Dr. O'Flaherty's death, recalling how Newfoundland writers such as Ted Russell, Harold Horwood and Ray Guy were "treated as literature, models to be studied and imitated."
Another feat was his historic trilogy Old Newfoundland: A History to 1843 (1999), Lost Country: The Rise and Fall of Newfoundland, 1843-1933 (2005) and Leaving the Past Behind: Newfoundland History from 1934 (2011). Reviewing the second book (although this could stand for all three), Robert J. Harding wrote in NLS that "Lost Country looks intimidating: it is long, comprehensive, and deeply rooted in primary sources. However, O'Flaherty's study is highly accessible, energetically written, and surprisingly straightforward. Readable, fluid, exciting."
One could argue with Dr. O'Flaherty's take on history, which was ardently nationalist, but not his meticulous research. For example, there was probably no copy of any Newfoundland-published 19th-century newspaper he had not read. He brought diligence, muscle and voice to historic prose.
Other publications included By Great Waters, the first anthology of Newfoundland writing (1974, with Dr. Neary); Part of the Main: An Illustrated History of Newfoundland and Labrador, again with Dr. Neary, and composed before the age of digital photography, with its 438 illustrations coming from collections located all over the world, and all permissions worked out by letter exchange; short-story collections including Summer of the Greater Yellowlegs (1987); two novels, including Priest of God (1989); the travel guide – of a sort – Come Near at Your Peril (1992), with "opinionated and hilarious commentary," according to Atlantic Books Today; and the memoir Paddy Boy (2016).
His industry was tremendous and his writing witty, tight, concise, diverse and of quality.
Deeply though he delved into academia, Dr. O'Flaherty had broad interests, including geology; in fact, he was so very well-rounded that, for example, he was a judge on the academic quiz show Reach For the Top in the mid-1970s.
He was also physical and outdoorsy. He gardened, fished and sawed junks.
And he was politically active. In the 1979 federal election, he ran against John Crosbie in St. John's West. He also ran once provincially. But that wasn't his real calling. He viewed politics through a Johnsonian lens; the work of Samuel Johnson was an early and lifelong serious scholarly interest and he would often quote from The Vanity of Human Wishes: "They mount, they shine, evaporate, and fall." Also fond of Joyce and Orwell, he had a rapier wit and the Newfoundland gift for irony and paradox.
Patrick Augustine O'Flaherty was one of six children born to Jane and Gus in Burnt Pond, Northern Bay.
In 1954, he came into St. John's to board at St. Bonaventure's College, and here met Dr. Neary, who was from Bell Island – this was the only place in Newfoundland where they could complete Grade 12 and then take the Nova Scotia public exams. They had one teacher who spent an entire semester on Milton's Lycidas, an educational tactic they both thought remarkable, and which Dr. O'Flaherty referenced in his wonderful short story Stuck on Ophelia.
He moved on to Memorial University College, where his cohort was the first post-Confederation generation, the first from many families able to have such educational opportunities, largely owing to new initiatives from the federal government. Thus, he was a student and later professor in the Memorial University (MUN) English department when it was quite a department, with a literary ethos created by luminaries such as George Story (The Dictionary of Newfoundland English), Ron Seary (Family Names of the Island of Newfoundland) and Paul West, the British-born, American-residing author of more than 50 books.
He earned a BA (honours) from Memorial University College in 1959, when he was just 19, an MA there the next year and a PhD from University College, London, in 1963, although he only very recently published his thesis, on the poet John Pinkerton (1758-1826).
He taught briefly at the University of Manitoba before coming to MUN in 1965, and becoming department head from 1982 to 1987. He retired in 1995, just 55, leaving the security of the university to write full time – which he did, and to the last.
He has a short story coming in the fall Newfoundland Quarterly; and was scripting a rebuttal to The Economist on its coverage of Muskrat Falls, a megadevelopment that concerned him. He had been raising textual alarms about the project for years, in his A Skeptic's Diary, for Independent News, or letters to The Telegram, where he wrote in 2011: "Confederates used to describe Canada as a 'family.' But this family has a big bully in it. And we're stuck next to it … All tremble and bend a knee when Quebec throws a fit. We are very small potatoes."
Dr. O'Flaherty also co-founded the Writers' Alliance of Newfoundland and Labrador in 1987, served on the Canada Council for the Arts (1981-84) and sat twice on the Governor-General's Awards jury for fiction. He was inducted into the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council Hall of Honour in 2003, received the Order of Canada in 2007 and an honorary degree from MUN in 2011.
Open-minded, a lover of rational argument and repartee, Dr. O'Flaherty was "a brook that flowed in many directions," Dr. Neary said. "He was very interested in the natural environment of Newfoundland, in winds, waves, tides, landscape. Newfoundland as a place was always of huge interest to him. Newfoundland was almost a person to him, a force."
Dr. O'Flaherty married Frankie O'Neal, with whom he had three sons, in 1962; they divorced in 1992. In 2000, he married Marjorie Doyle; he leaves her and sons Keir, Peter and Paddy.