The Man Who Played Himself Down (Canada's Own Kipling)

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I have always had a fascination for the output of poet Robert Service (1874-1958).

Born near Glasgow, he caught the wanderlust for the New World. Arriving in British Columbia he thought of himself as a “cowboy”, but soon was near destitution with slim prospects for employment. He worked his way down the west coast to California and back to B.C.- handyman, ditch digger, street beggar, boarder in a brothel, farm labourer, post office clerk.

The dreamer had encountered some grim realities full on. An advertisement came to his attention for a clerk’s position with Canadian Bank of Commerce. The chance to be a gentleman. Positions at Victoria, Kamloops, Whitehorse and Dawson in the early 1900’s. Interesting young bachelor. Dances and dinners to brighten the gloom of the northern winters. Invitations to recite interesting pieces or to render a tune on the piano at the community hall.

In his memoirs and ultimate autobiography Service would confess his total lack of ambition and mediocre performance at work, but this was really camouflage for a surprisingly shy young man. He was given to frequent long night walks where his imagination took flight, largely upon the topic of the Klondike Gold Rush at the end of the last century. He could see the desperation, ill-preparedness and over-riding greed of the hordes who took to the deadly Trail of ’98.

Soon he had penned two pieces that would haunt him in later years. It seemed that these would always be his trademarks, The Shooting of Dan McGrew and The Cremation of Sam McGee. They were included in a collection entitled Songs of a Sourdough(1907). “A bunch of the boys were whooping it up…”

A book agent on a train trip west had taken a transcript and chose to read portions (McGrew) to some fellow male passengers:

‘It’s poetry. It’s unusual, and it’s Canadian and it might even sell. When I finished, bedlam broke loose- and everybody spoke at once. Some of the men even quoted lines that stuck in their memory.” (Robert Bond).

The banking career was over. Eventually this single book would make Service the wealthiest of all North American poets. But it was the work of a spirited “fibber” with no hands-on experience of the rigours of the frozen North. He made up for this deficit by taking the tortuous water route counter-clockwise from Edmonton to Mackenzie River to the back door of Dawson (1911-pulling a river barge, paddling his beloved canoe).

Consequently the following book showed greater realism and heart – Rhymes of a Rolling Stone (1912).

Service was soon to be through with the North – a total of only eight years, but life-transforming years.

The remainder of his life reads like a collage of several adventuresome lives. War medic. War correspondent. Bohemian artist in the underbelly of Paris. Young husband with a delightful estate on the French Coast. Hollywood and Klondike themes brought to screen. Desperate evacuees from Nazi-occupied France. Monte Carlo. Every phase has its associated book of poetry. All of the story has been preserved in fine fashion by Pierre Berton in Prisoners of the North (2004).

And speaking of Rudyard Kipling...