Prisoners of the North

by Berton, Pierre

  Harper of Heaven was published in 1948 after the Service family returned to France and eventually exchanged Nice for Monte Carlo. (In Brittany, their winter residence, Dream Haven, had to undergo extensive repairs as a result of the German occupation.) Service’s second volume of autobiography is a rambling piece of work, as much a travelogue as a memoir. Subtitled A Record of Radiant Living, it covers his career following the Yukon period. But by the time it appeared, “the old codger,” as he called himself, was approaching seventy-five and giving some thought to the hereafter, as the quatrain on the book’s title page suggests:

  Although my sum of years may be

  Nigh seventy and seven,

  With eyes of ecstasy I see

  And hear the Harps of Heaven

  With worldwide reviews that ranged from “a tough, violent book” (London Daily Herald) to “this gem of a book” (Seattle Post-Intelligencer), one might have expected Service, with sixteen bestsellers to his credit, to take life easy after a long and successful career and spend his declining years lazing about as he always insisted he wished to do. On the contrary, he plunged into a veritable orgy of creation. Between 1949 and 1958 he published nine original books of verse with the alliterative titles that had become his trademark, such as Songs of a Sun-Lover, Rhymes of a Roughneck, Lyrics of a Lowbrow, Carols of an Old Codger. He also published More Collected Verse and Later Collected Verse and a new edition of Why Not Grow Young.

  For all that period, Service wrote a verse a day while still indulging in his three-hour walks every afternoon. He didn’t need to write for money. The royalties kept coming. It was as if Service had taken a new lease of life and was writing as much for himself as for his dwindling audience. “The writing racket is not what it used to be,” he remarked at the time, “but this old codger still sells.” James Mackay has noted, “… it is ironic, that much of his best work, truly sublime poetry, should come at a time when Robert was no longer fashionable.”

  The poet in his final years surrounded by family and friends.

  When I interviewed him in Monte Carlo in 1958 he was well past his eightieth year, having published at least one thousand poems with perhaps as many unpublished. I was appearing on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Sunday night flagship program Close-Up at the time and was assigned to visit him in Monaco to prepare a half-hour television interview. There was some difficulty in clearing the assignment since several members of the corporation’s upper echelon kept insisting that Service was dead. However, a letter from the poet himself cleared that up: “For me this will probably be a unique television show as I am now crowding eighty-five and the ancient carcass will soon cease to function. For that reason I hope you will bring it off successfully. My home here makes a nice setting for an interview, which if well planned could be quite attractive.”

  Patrick Watson, my producer, and I arrived with a television crew in May. The poet met us at the door of his Villa Aurore, overlooking the warm Mediterranean, and introduced us to his wife, Germaine. He was casually dressed in a sleeveless sweater and slacks—a small, birdlike man with brightly veined cheeks, a sharp nose, and a mild, Scottish accent. We had started to discuss the interview when Service held up his hand.

  “It’s all arranged,” he said. “I spent the week working it up. Here’s your script. I’m afraid you’ve got the smaller part because, you see, this is my show!” He handed me two sheets of paper, stapled and folded. “It’s in two parts,” he said. “We can do the first after lunch. Now you boys go back to your hotel and you [to me] learn your lines. I already know mine, letter perfect. Come back this afternoon and we’ll do it.”

  I looked at Watson. This is not the way spontaneous television interviews are conducted. He gave a kind of helpless shrug and we left.

  “What do we do now?” I asked.

  “I guess we’d better read what he’s written,” Watson said.

  What Service had written, it turned out, was pretty good—lively, witty, self-effacing, romantic: “I’m eighty-five now and I guess this will be my last show on the screen. Oh, I’m feeling fine though I’m a bit of a cardiac. In middle age I strained my heart trying to walk on my hands. After sixty a man shouldn’t try to be an athlete. Only yesterday I was talking politics to a chap on the street. I’m ‘Right’ and he was ‘Left’ so we got to shouting, when suddenly I felt the old ticker conk on me, and I had to go home in a taxi, chewing white pills. Say, wouldn’t it be a sensation if I croaked in the middle of this interview?”

  When we returned, Service was easily persuaded to submit to an unscripted interview. But whenever one of my questions coincided with one in the script, he gave me a word-perfect answer, and that included the line about croaking on television. Service, the old actor, even managed to make that sound spontaneous.

  In between set-ups, the poet and I talked about the Yukon. He remembered my mother very well and talked about Lousetown, the tenderloin district across the Klondike River. “We used to go down the line every Saturday night,” he said, employing a euphemistic colloquialism that was still part of the jargon in my mining-camp days.

  In the interview that was spread over three days we went over some of the highlights of his career, including the intervention of the bank inspector who had first sent him to the Yukon and so changed his life. “He was the God in my machine,” said Service. “I often wished I had thanked him before he died.” We talked about his various adventures such as his days with the Turkish Red Crescent, when he worked in the cholera camp at San Stefano. “I couldn’t stick it any longer. I deserted, really,” Service admitted. He told of his time in the Paris slums. “I went with the police gang and they took me all through every part of Paris that was disreputable,” he said, thus disputing the stories in his own autobiography. “I got to know that side, the seamy side of Paris, better than any writer of the time knew it,” he said, a little proudly.

  And we talked about “The Shooting of Dan McGrew,” which he insisted he loathed. “It’s not exactly what I would call tripe, but there’s no poetry—no real poetry to it to my mind,” he said, and added, “I don’t write poetry anyway so there’s no use talking like that. Here I am—crucified on the cross of Dan McGrew. There you are.”

  The author interviewing Service at his Monaco home in the spring of 1958 for the CBC’s flagship program, Close-up. The poet died three months later.

  Yet when the time came to recite for television his best-known work, he showed an eagerness that belied his own critique. “I’m looking forward to it,” he said when we arrived on the third morning to get his verse and his voice on film. He was in great fettle and his eyes were bright as he began, “A bunch of the boys were whooping it up …”

  When the filming was complete, Service with great ceremony opened a bottle of champagne that he had put aside for the occasion. All during the filming he had been an enthusiastic interview subject, lively and ebullient.

  “It’s made me young again,” he said. “I’m just living it.” Now, as we toasted him, he seemed cast down.

  “Is it really over?” he said. “Haven’t you got any more questions? I could go on, you know.” But the crew was already packing up the equipment.

  “Oh, I do wish we could go on,” said Service. “I wish it didn’t have to stop.” He stood in his dressing gown in the doorway of his villa, and the wind catching the silver of his hair and blowing it over his face gave him an oddly dishevelled look.

  “I wish it could go on forever,” said Robert Service, and I caught, briefly, the memory of the telegraph operator, running along the riverbank, pleading with us to stay just a little longer.

  The interview was shown in June and was a great success. The scene that caught everyone’s fancy was Service’s “spontaneous” remark about croaking in front of the cameras. It was indeed his last performance. That September in his Dream Haven in Brittany, his heart finally did give out, and the bard of the Yukon was buried under the sun he loved so well and far, far from that lovely but c
hilly domain that in capturing him would give him fame and fortune.

  Afterword

  The five disparate characters who make up this chronicle—a builder, an explorer, a titled lady, an eccentric, and a poet—are unique. At first glance they seem to have had little in common save for their links with the North. On closer inspection, however, we can see that they shared certain traits that made them exceptional. They were all rugged individualists—impatient of authority, restless, energetic, and ambitious. They were secure within themselves—and driven by a romantic wanderlust that freed them from the run-of-the-mill existence on which they so often turned their backs.

  They belong to an era when the going was tough and travel was a challenge and sometimes a hardship. Joe Boyle, arriving at Carmack’s Post on the Yukon and finding himself among a group of stranded tenderfeet, goaded these incompetents by threatening and cajoling to work their way on foot with him through the mountains in the worst possible weather to the nearest seaport. They gave him a gold watch for that.

  Vilhjalmur Stefansson spent his Arctic career trotting for thousands of miles behind a dog team, rarely taking his ease on the sledge.

  Lady Franklin never encountered a mountain she didn’t want to climb and thought nothing of crossing Van Diemen’s Land on foot on a journey that had killed those who came before.

  John Hornby made a fetish of his ruggedness, doing everything the hard way, trudging for fifty miles through a Barrens blizzard and boasting about it.

  Robert Service, who survived the Rat River trail, made a habit of working out every afternoon until his doctors slowed him down.

  They lived by their own rules, these five—flouting authority, contemptuous of regulations, confident of their own instincts and abilities. Boyle played catch-me-if-you-can with the military and political authorities who tried vainly to hem him in. Stefansson resisted all efforts to pull him out of the Arctic and instead of going south, as ordered, headed farther into the North. Jane Franklin had her own ideas about her husband’s fate and when these were ignored took on the job of searching for him herself. Hornby was a wild card who exulted in his role and died tragically, rejecting sensible advice, while Service shunned the dictates of society and went his own way, a loner to the end.

  They were all loners. Did any of them have the kind of intimate friend to whom one can pour out one’s heart? There is little evidence of that in their varied sagas. In all too brief moments Boyle enjoyed a relationship of sorts with Queen Marie, and also, perhaps, was at ease with his old friend Teddy Bredenberg in his dying months, but there is little indication of any traditional understanding. Like the others, he was not a family man. He was quite prepared to run off to sea with scarcely a word to his kin, nor was either of the marriages into which he plunged successful. The two offspring he did not abandon were in awe of him, but their relationship cannot be described as close.

  Stefansson enjoyed several lengthy affairs, but he scarcely mentioned the novelist Fannie Hurst, who was his mistress for seventeen years. He refused to recognize his son, Alex, the product of his liaison with the capable Inuit widow Pannigabluk. His four-year romance with Betty Brainerd faded after he ignored her letters to him. It is clear that he put his work and his ambitions first; his various relationships came close to being afterthoughts. Only after he had done with exploring did he take the time and trouble to marry. He rejected outward intimacies. They were, as his friend Richard Finnie remarked, out of keeping with his image as a rough, independent explorer. He would have recoiled had he heard his wife remark publicly, as she did after his death, that she had enjoyed the best sex of her life with him.

  Jane Franklin in her youth had many aspirants after her heart but only one companion in her later years, her fanatically loyal niece, Sophy Cracroft, who, one suspects, was more of a nurse than an intimate. Her personal relations with the husband whose memory was to dominate her life for nearly thirty years seemed casual, marked as they were by long separations, especially when she was exploring the Mediterranean, which occupied a full year after he was recalled to England, before coming home to him.

  It is impossible to think of John Hornby as having an intimate relationship of any kind. Critchell-Bullock does not fit the bill; he could never inveigle his partner into any kind of serious conversation. The ribald stories that male friends often exchange were anathema to Hornby. Olwen Newell was prepared to marry him, but he put her off, explaining that he was not the marrying kind. When, years later, he finally made a stab at proposing, she found an excuse to reject him.

  Service was a loner all his life. In later years he had difficulty recognizing his own siblings. He went off to Canada on a whim, rejecting his father’s attempt at farewell at the dockside, and on another whim turned up unexpectedly on the doorstep of his mother’s Alberta home, to be greeted after a dozen years’ absence no more emotionally than with a peck on the cheek. In his memoirs he suggests that he married because he “needed” a wife. He made a good choice because she indulged him when he wanted to be left alone. He went off to exotic and little-known corners of the globe such as Tahiti and Soviet Russia, but he did not take her with him. During the Second World War, when he was exiled to Canada, he did not bother to travel back to the Yukon, which was the basis for his fortune. His wife and daughter went off in his stead.

  Restless, rugged, independent loners—this is the culture shared by these prisoners of the north. There is one other quality: all, in their own ways, were driven by an ambition that they achieved during their lifetime, or thought they had. In the end that ambition turned out to be a chimera.

  Boyle wanted to build the largest gold dredges in history, and he succeeded, over the skepticism of others, only to find his empire taken over by others. His relationship outside the Yukon with the romantic Romanian queen contributed to that loss, and the bitter truth was that the true love for which he yearned could never be more than an unfulfilled longing.

  Stefansson was determined to be the greatest of all Arctic explorers. He came close, but he tried too hard; his theories about the “blond Eskimos,” his loss of the Karluk, his attempts to colonize a small island off the Siberian coast still continue to sully his reputation.

  Lady Franklin moved heaven and earth to achieve her ambition—to enshrine her husband as the true discoverer of the Northwest Passage. When the appropriate plaque went up in Westminster Abbey shortly after her death, she seemed to have succeeded. But in recent years, the revisionists have downgraded Franklin’s achievements and bestowed the accolade on Robert McClure.

  John Hornby in his day was seen as a legendary, albeit tragic, figure hailed while being mourned as the epitome of the romantic Englishman, facing hardships and surviving trials in unknown country. But over the ensuing years that legend has been torn to shreds.

  Of these five, Service is to me the most interesting and baffling. In his lifetime he overcame the put-downs of his critics and emerged as the people’s poet. If that was his ambition, he succeeded only partially. It surely must have galled him to realize, at the end, that the only lasting works he produced were his first two published poems, “Dan McGrew” and “Sam McGee.” All the others, including his much-praised wartime poems, have lost much of their lustre. When one reads Service’s memoirs, a Shakespearean sort of phrase pops into the mind: Methinks the poet doth protest too much. He tells us again and again that he’s a rhymester, not a “real” poet. Does that mask an unstated desire to be something more? He pretends that he is lazy, that he is shy, that he suffers from an inferiority complex. He constantly plays down his work as mere rhymes, ballads, and songs. “I’m afraid of these big fellows,” he says in reference to “real” poets. That can be seen as his way of saying that he is afraid to take a chance, to attempt any other style than the one that made his reputation. In my view, Service had nothing to be ashamed of, yet one suspects that there may have been moments when he could have wished to be likened to Wordsworth or Shelley and seen by his snootier critics as something more t
han a profiteer from his Northern ballads.

  For all of his career, Service considered himself a Northerner. His poems identified him as a true sourdough, and his struggle over the Edmonton Trail confirmed it to himself. That was true in various ways of the others as well: Boyle in his trademark uniform, garnished with gold nuggets; Stefansson creating his miniature iglu on the Dartmouth campus; Jane Franklin soaking up every available scrap of Arctic lore; Hornby appropriating the Barrens as his own domain.

  They belonged to a vanishing era, these five—one that was fading fast. There can never be another Klondike-style stampede. Today the Chilkoot Pass is for sightseers who go on to Dawson by bus or automobile. The thrill of discovery that once lured explorers has been replaced by the thrill of stranger discoveries in outer space. The bush plane, the snowmobile, and the radio have made another Franklin-style search unnecessary while at the same time diminishing the hazards of the Barrens.

  There are still men and women among us who are captivated by the North, but not in the way these five were: willing prisoners who for a time gave themselves to it heart and soul, driven by the kind of passion that bespeaks a love-hate relationship. The North, in its turn, gave them something they might hope for but did not expect—a measure of immortality. It was, I think, a fair exchange.

  Acknowledgements

  I want to express my gratitude to the dedicated team of associates who have worked with me on most of my books of narrative history: Elsa Franklin, producer and organizer; Barbara Sears, research assistant; Janet Berton, editorial backstop; Janice Tyrwhitt, editor; Janet Craig, copy editor. Without this meticulous and dedicated quintet, I could not have brought these works to fruition. To it, I must also gratefully add the name of Amy Black, Doubleday’s associate editor, who oversaw the manuscript on its journey to the printed page.