Prisoners of the North

by Berton, Pierre

  Strangers encountering Service at the height of his fame were astonished to discover that he was not the rough, profane roustabout they had envisaged from his poetry. How could they identify this quiet, almost inconspicuous gentleman as the author of “The Shooting of Dan McGrew”? In Hollywood, the casting department of The Spoilers, in which the poet played himself, objected that he was “not the Service type.” In Toronto, a reporter schooled in Service’s best-selling ballads wrote that “his face is mild to the point of disbelief.” Service agreed. “My face is much too mild,” he said, “for one who has been a hobo, ‘sourdough poet,’ war correspondent, and soldier.” He might have added ranch hand, ditch digger, and dishwasher in a brothel.

  My mother, who arrived in Dawson in 1908, made a point of hurrying down to the Bank of Commerce as soon as Service was transferred there as a teller. She and a friend had thought of him “as a rip-roaring roisterer,” she remembered, “but instead we found a shy and nondescript man in his mid-thirties, with a fresh complexion, clear blue eyes, and a boyish figure that made him look younger. He had a soft, well-modulated voice and spoke with a slight drawl.”

  Service in Hollywood with Marlene Dietrich on the set of The Spoilers, made up to look young. The casting department said he wasn’t “the Service type.”

  Robert Service could never escape the Yukon, no matter how much he tried. Of all the verses he wrote—and the number exceeded two thousand—the one he really loathed was the first one he published, which brought him the fortune he craved and the fame he despised. “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” owed as much to the American Wild West as it did to the Canadian North. Service in fact hadn’t even reached the Klondike when the famous ballad first made its appearance in Songs of a Sourdough.

  Now, almost a century later, it has become the best-known folk ballad of our time, shouted, whispered, roared out, and recited by half-inebriated monologists (including me) at a thousand parties and from a hundred stages—satirized, rewritten, set to music, parodied, praised, sneered at, and condemned. It is an abiding irony that so much of Service’s work that excited interest at the time of publication has been forgotten, but “Dan McGrew” and its companion ballad “The Cremation of Sam McGee” have survived.

  For the fifty years following his arrival in the Yukon, Service continued to churn out verse, much of it highly popular—his Rhymes of a Red Cross Man was on the New York Times best-seller list for almost two years—but it irked him that the first work he wrote at that time turned out to be the most enduring. “I loathe it,” he told me toward the end of his life. “I was sick of it the moment I finished writing it.” But for all of his long career he was asked to recite it, time and time again, and he did, almost to his dying day.

  What might be called the Dan McGrew Industry began a decade or so after the ballad appeared in print. “Is there a Doughboy who has not heard ‘The Shooting of Dan McGrew’?” Louis Untermeyer asked in The Bookman in 1922. Among the tens of thousands who committed it to memory were the Queen Mother, the Duke of Edinburgh, and former president Ronald Reagan. Bobby Clarke, the Broadway comedian, parodied it on the stage in Star and Garter. Miss Marple, Agatha Christie’s fictional detective, quoted from it in one of the TV episodes that carried her name. Billy Bartlett, the British music-hall satirist, made a recording of it. So did Guy Lombardo, the bandleader. Tex Avery, the animation genius, spoofed it twice, in 1929 as Dangerous Dan McFoo and again in 1945 as Dangerous Dan McGoo, the title character being a cartoon dog. Hollywood turned the ballad into two silent films. The first, in 1915, was marred by a happy ending; the second, in 1924, starred Barbara Lamarr and Mae Busch, then the reigning queens of the silver screen.

  Hollywood made two movies based on “The Shooting of Dan McGrew.” The first, shot in 1915, had a happy ending. The second (above) was faithful to the original.

  “Dan McGrew” has been parodied again and again, often obscenely (“And there on the floor on top of a whore lay Vancouver Dan McGrew”). There is at least one gay version (“And there on the floor with his arse-hole tore …”) that made the rounds of the mining camps in the Depression days and later. There is a hip version by Turk Murphy’s Jazz Band. More recently, a new company, Pied Piper Productions, has been promoting its own version of the ballad with hand-carved puppets. The Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s version, with music by Hair’s Galt McDermott, is still in the repertoire, the first-ever production of a ballet with a Canadian theme, while a recent novel by Robert Kroetsch, The Man from the Creeks, takes as its title a familiar line from the ballad.

  Service was that curious mixture, a public figure who was always an intensely private man. When an article in The Times of London listed his name among the poets who had been killed in the Great War, he made no effort to correct it (the confusion arose because one of his brothers was killed at the Somme). “It rather pleased me that my efforts of self-obliteration had succeeded,” he recalled. He was living in Nice at the time, where few of his neighbours knew who he was. “I enjoyed the irresponsibility of living in a foreign land where one is an onlooker, and cares nothing for the way things are run as long as one’s comfort is assured.”

  His biographer James Mackay has called the poet’s autobiography, Ploughman of the Moon, “a masterpiece of obfuscation.” It contains not a single date and no proper names except those of his four elderly aunts. He does not tell us when or where he was born and raised, or who his spouse was; he simply refers to her as “the wife.” The rest of the names in the book are entirely fictional. He refers scarcely at all to his mother and does not name any of his nine siblings. In spite of this, or perhaps because of it, Ploughman is a highly readable book, full of anecdotes, many of them exaggerated since Service was never one to let the truth get in the way of a good story. His second volume of memoirs, Harper of Heaven, is equally murky.

  As a result, his biographers have been faced with the maddening task of trying to figure out who was who and where was where from Service’s vague accounts of his career. The first two—Carl Klinck, 1976, and G. Wallace Lockhart, 1991—did their best but in the end gave up or got it wrong. One can only applaud the investigative work of Mackay, who managed to untangle the more baffling aspects of Service’s literary career.

  In spite of his soft accent, he was not born in Scotland, as so many of his fans have assumed, but in Lancashire, in January 1874. Four years later the family moved to Glasgow, but two of the Service boys, Robert and his younger brother, John, were off-loaded to live with their uncle, the postmaster of Kilwinning, an Ayrshire market town some twenty-four miles southwest of Glasgow. Apparently the burden of handling five boys and five girls was too much for Emily Service. In his autobiography Service makes no mention of John or indeed of any of his siblings. As a small boy he kept to himself and recorded in Ploughman hearing his grandfather remark, “Yon’s a queer, wee callant. He’s sooner play by himsel’ than wi’ the other lads.” That was true, Service wrote. “Rather than join the boys in the street I would amuse myself alone in the garden, inventing imagination games. I would be a hunter in the jungle of the raspberry canes; I would be an explorer in the dark forest of the shrubbery; I would squat by my lonely campfire on the prairie, a little grass plot where the family washing was spread. I was absorbed in my games, speaking to myself or addressing imaginary companions.” He looked forward, he remembered, to bedtime where he had “the most enchanting visions” of “shining processions of knights and fair ladies.”

  Here were the early clues to that wanderlust that would set Service off, always on his own, on voyages of exploration to distant climes, a solitary witness soaking up local colour or living vicariously through the lives of strange and, to him, exotic people. They also provide an insight into the role-playing that marked his adult life and his habit of choosing whatever costume he believed would allow him to merge with the background in those communities he sought out. When his royalty cheques raised him to the level of the wealthiest poet in Paris, he was not above depicting himself as
a penniless scrivener in worn clothes, scarcely able to make ends meet. In that case his Scottish parsimony helped create the illusion.

  “A ravenous reader” as a child, he gobbled up the works of every adventure writer from Captain Marryat to Jules Verne, not to mention Burns and Kipling, the only poets with whom he felt comfortable. There was more than a hint of the future rhymester when on his sixth birthday at a family feast he asked his grandfather if he might be allowed to say grace. Without waiting for an answer, he bowed his head and began:

  God bless the cakes and bless the jam;

  Bless the cheese and the cold boiled ham;

  Bless the scones Aunt Jeannie makes

  And save us all from bellyaches. Amen

  In Ploughman, Service noted that this first poetic flutter “suggests tendencies in flights to come. First it had to do with the table, and much of my work has been inspired by food and drink. Second, it was concrete in character and I have always distrusted the abstract. Third, it had a tendency to be coarse, as witness the use of the word ‘belly’ when I might just as well have said ‘stomach.’ But I have always favoured an Anglo-Saxon word to a Latin one, and in my earthiness I have followed my kinsman, Burns. So, you see in that first bit of doggerel there were foreshadowed defects of my later verses.”

  Young Service did not see his father, a failed banker, for four years until the family was reunited in Glasgow, thanks to a legacy received by his mother. The balding figure with the mutton chop whiskers and “the reddest face I ever saw” failed to make an impression. “I cannot reproach him for his failings,” Service was to write in a revealing passage, “for they were my own—laziness, day dreaming, a hatred of authority, and a quick temper.… I hated to work for others and freedom meant more to me than all else. I, too, was of the race of men who don’t fit in.”

  Service was not popular at school. “I was too much of a lone dog and I disliked games.” But these were some of his happiest youthful years. He wrote some poetry for small publications, dabbled in amateur theatrics, and for a time he had his future set on becoming a professional elocutionist, practising his craft, complete with gestures, in front of a mirror as so many of his avid readers would do when his own ballads appeared.

  He left school in 1888 at the age of fourteen and took a job as apprentice in the local branch of the Commercial Bank of Scotland. “It was obvious,” he remembered, “that I had no vocation for banking,” but it suited what he always insisted was his “prejudice against hard work.” It was an easy job and “I tried to make it still easier. I dawdled over my daily errands and dreamed over my ledger. I made rhymes as I cast up columns of figures.” Was he really such a good-for-nothing as he makes out? James Mackay, examining such records as exist, suggests that he was well thought of by his superiors and was “a diligent, if unspectacular employee.” Service’s description of his banking career, such as it was, is another example of his lifelong practice of using self-deprecation to enhance his personal narrative.

  It is this that makes him such a contradictory figure. Was he the solitary dreamer who drifts through his autobiographies? The lazy layabout doing his best to avoid hard work or, indeed, work of any kind? There is more than one suggestion that this was a pose to cover up what he constantly referred to as his inferiority complex or to assuage the guilt that nagged at him because he didn’t think of himself as a real poet.

  Service portrayed himself as a lonely wanderer, and that rings true. He thought nothing of deserting his family for weeks, even months, to travel to unlikely corners of the globe. The Yukon made him famous, but when he had the opportunity to return to his old Klondike haunts after the Second World War, he bowed out, sending his wife and daughter in his place. There is no evidence that he ever had a close or intimate friendship with anybody—no one to whom he could pour out his heart or relive old times. There are some hints of a schoolboy love in Glasgow and an affair, later, in Kamloops, B.C., but only hints. When Service came to write his memoirs he avoided such personal touches. He married, he tells us casually, because he needed a wife; fortunately he selected one who indulged his solitary inclinations. His parents and his siblings are all distant figures in his life; he barely recognized those he encountered in his later years. Who, then, was the real Robert Service? Who was that masked man? He was, I suggest, whomever you wanted him to be or what, at any moment, he decided to be. As a poet, his credo was to give the public what it wanted; as a human being, all he asked was to be left alone.

  The book that changed Service’s life was Morley Roberts’s The Western Avernus: Toil and Travel in Further North America. Roberts, who had worked on the Canadian Pacific Railway in the construction period, seduced Service with his portrait of western Canada in the early 1880s. Service went to the Canadian immigration office and stocked up on pamphlets about the prairies—pamphlets that marked the beginning of the Liberal Party’s immigration propaganda, which brought a million newcomers to the West. “Cattle ranching; that was the romantic side of farming, and it was romance that was luring me.” Service’s instinct told him that in quitting his bank job after seven years and making a clean break from the Old World he was doing the right thing. “I knew a joy that bordered on ecstasy as I thought: ‘I too, will be a cowboy.’ ”

  That was the first of his many roles. He bought a big knife with a spring blade, which he called a scalping knife, and also an air rifle so he could practise for hours being quick on the draw. His ambitions knew no horizons: “Henceforth I would be a fellow of brawn and thew. I would work in mines and sawmills, in lumber camps and railway gangs, on ships and ranches. I would run the gamut of toil. But before all I would be a cowboy.”

  He needed a costume—he would always need a costume—and he settled on a discarded Buffalo Bill outfit that his father had bought second-hand at an auction, together with a pair of high-heeled boots, a set of chaps, and a Mexican sombrero. He booked a steerage passage on a tramp steamer headed for Halifax, and there at the dockside, as his friends were bidding him farewell, his father appeared and handed him a small package. Service, who shunned displays of emotion, hurried aboard ship before opening his parting gift. It was a small Bible. He never bothered to read it but he kept it all his years, “the one possession that no one ever tried to steal.”

  He never saw his father again, although the old man wrote to him many times. In his final letter he begged his son to pay him one last visit. “Even if you cannot come just write and say you will.” But Service never answered, and when his father died of a stroke, “I must confess I felt a sense of relief.” The poet did not have much family feeling, then or later. He showed little curiosity about his ancestors, his immediate forebears, or his siblings, some of whom would give him up for dead in the years to come.

  No sooner had he reached Canada than Service unpacked his Buffalo Bill costume and wore it constantly. The train that took him across Canada was crammed with immigrants like himself, all attired in such a variety of outlandish outfits that his own caused little comment. He had come to the new world to be a cowboy, but when he reached the end of his journey near Cowichan on Vancouver Island, his first jobs were disappointingly mundane—picking up acres of stones for a future farm and weeding endless rows of turnips.

  It was monotonous, back-breaking work. Service endured it because he found the surrounding scenery so magnificent. He revelled in “the blue purity of the sky, the mountains that rose to meet it, the unexplored bush that came right down to the clearing … a dream world worthy of a dreamer.” Later he moved north to a farm near Duncan, a three-mile tramp through the woods. He lived in a shack, the most remote in the Cowichan Valley, where his chores were minimal and his isolation gratifying. Primed by a newly discovered hate for hard labour, he “energetically cultivated laziness,” or so he says in his self-belittling memoir.

  That fall of 1896 he moved again, milking a herd of Holsteins for a dairy farm; but in November, when the frost-caked mud was knee-deep in the yard, he decided to head south toward
California. “I was pleased to see how I had risen to the occasion. I could earn my bread by the sweat of my brow.… I was not a little proud, and ready for the next phase in the adventure of living.”

  For the next year Service drifted about the American southwest, living like a hobo, taking odd jobs, and dreaming away the weeks and months without any firm plan. Within a month in Seattle his grubstake of one hundred dollars had dwindled to half. Thanks to a rate war he got himself a narrow steerage bunk for a dollar on the SS Mariposa bound for San Francisco. Service found himself jammed into the hold with a dozen others; “the air was so thick you felt you could slice it like Camembert.” Everybody aboard that wallowing craft was deathly ill, including Service, who was so exhausted that when the man on the bunk above him vomited on his upturned face, he did not have the energy to turn his head away. It was not an auspicious introduction to the sunny south.

  In San Francisco he found a room at the base of Telegraph Hill for fifty cents a day. He haunted the sleazier dives of Chinatown where he could buy a beer and watch a stage show for ten cents. After a month and close to destitution, he was overcome with a “first feeling of fear.” The misery he saw, the derelicts and down-and-outers with whom he rubbed shoulders filled him with disgust. “Frankly, I was scared.”

  He answered an ad on a blackboard offering two dollars a day for labourers. He took it without knowing what it entailed and found himself shipped by train to a contractor who put him into a gang driving a half-mile tunnel through the wall of San Gabriel Canyon to the Sacramento Valley. In the dank and murky bowels of the earth he toiled ten hours a day until, happily, he was transferred to another dawn-to-dusk job shovelling gravel. When at last he quit he was given a pay-cheque for twenty dollars, which he found he could not cash. He discounted it to a stage driver for half its value and slept that night in a chicken house.