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BY MICHAEL GNAROWSKI

Most readers know Robert William Service as the author of two signature poems: “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” and “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” two ballad-like verse narratives that, it may now be said, anchor Service’s first published collection of verse, which he called Songs of a Sourdough.1 The popularity of the two ballads was quickly established, and they were frequently quoted, recited from the stage and on the radio and, in one case, made into a short film. More knowledgeable readers may be able to identify Service as the premier poet of the Canadian North or, as he became known, as the Bard2 of the Yukon, a role that Service took on readily, making the spell of the North an almost hypnotic reference in his early collections of verse.

His contemporaries were only too happy to grant Service “poet in residence in the North” status and accept him as one with the hardy types who braved unimaginable hardships to join the gold rush and, in Service’s immortal phrase, “to moil for gold.” This series of mining discoveries that drew thousands into the brutal environments of Alaska and the near-Arctic of the Canadian North also inscribed the word Klondike on the map of the imagination and acted as a powerful stimulus to the creative urges of Service.

We know that he was born in 1874 of British stock, although there was a strong element of the Scottish in his roots, and the iconic presence of Robert Burns and the border ballads of Sir Walter Scott remained strongly established in his mind. Throughout his life and his writing career, Service maintained a careful reticence about the biographical facts of his life,3 so much so that even some reference works are at a loss as to dates and events of his circumstances. His biographer, Carl Klinck, saw fit to refer to him as “this otherwise unknown man.” What is particularly curious is that even his publishers were either bullied or persuaded to join in this act of authorial privacy and were content to reveal precious little by way of biographical notes or introductory remarks about their markedly prolific author who had managed to draw to his writing if not to himself a large and loyal readership.

The jacket of Bar-Room Ballads (1940).

Robert William Service (the “William” eventually disappeared from the covers and the title pages of his many books) was a Lancashire lad whose family, due to an improved financial situation, moved to Glasgow where Service was educated at Hillhead public school. Thus, dipped into a Scottish environment, Service saw himself as a Scotsman, linked in spirit to the great Scottish bard Robert Burns, and thus inclined to work Scots vernacular into his verse, endowing his best piece of prose writing, the romance The Trail of Ninety-Eight (1910)4 with a Scottish flavour. The question of Service’s national identity would dog him and his biography during his entire career. Most contemporary reference works recognize that Service was British by birth, sometimes being more specific and calling him a British-born Canadian poet. This suggestion of ambiguity would continue to haunt his placement in literature and may explain, if only in part, how poorly he has fared in literary history.

School was not always a happy experience for Service who proved to be independent-minded and a not particularly attentive pupil much given to daydreaming and fantasy and the reading of adventure stories. At the age of fifteen he was expelled from school and forced to enter the world of employment. He first secured an apprentice clerkship in a ship chandler’s office, but soon after found a very junior position with the Commercial Bank of Scotland. Unbeknownst to him, this early experience in banking would serve him especially well and usher him into employment with a Canadian bank and a posting to Canada’s North, but not before, as a newly arrived immigrant, Service would taste hard work as a labourer on a farm near Duncan, British Columbia.

He arrived in Canada on an “emigrant” ship in 1896 and travelled by train westward across great expanses of country, nursing romantic notions about carefree travel and adventure in North America. It was not to be quite the life he had fantasized about as far back as his adolescent days in Scotland. Here Service’s story became a mixture of all the awkwardness, social maladjustment, and difficulty of an immigrant fitting into a seemingly classless new world environment in which Service found himself trying to adapt and to feel at home. He undertook all kinds of work, most of it manual, and seemed to thrive on the sheer physical demands of haying, harvesting, and looking after animals. Some of this appealed to him because it demanded personal fitness, something that became a bit of an obsession with him in later years.

But Service did not settle down or put out roots in the new land. The “drifter” urge that became a powerful undertow in his life pulled him into a kind of benign vagabondism that sent him southward into the United States. What little we know of this fairly extensive period of Service’s life survives as echoes and recollections that went into the making of his later writing. We must bear in mind that Service left Scotland for Canada at the age of twenty-two, and that after arriving in Canada he spent at least half a dozen years as an itinerant labourer and hobo doing odd jobs before he found his way back to Canada, specifically Victoria, British Columbia. There, seriously at loose ends and almost penniless, he was prompted by a stranger to try his luck by applying for a job at the bank across the street from the park bench where he found himself. He applied, and very likely on the strength of his past banking experience in Scotland, he was hired by the Canadian Bank of Commerce, transforming himself, late in 1903, from a guitar-strumming hobo and jack of all trades into a bank clerk with a regular wage. A year later the bank sent him to Whitehorse in Yukon Territory, and his fate and his fiction were, so to speak sealed. Service was locked into a future that would make him widely known as the Bard of the Yukon, even though he had missed the gold rush by some five years. He was thirty years old.

Earlier on, in the course of the years of his so-called vagabondage, Service had heard from time to time of the excitement of the Klondike Gold Rush. The discovery of placer gold in the Klondike River occurred in 1896 and occasioned the gold rush of 1897–98. When Service arrived in Whitehorse in 1904, the tumult and the shouting had pretty much died down, but yarn-spinning old-timers were still about and their stories quickly captivated the young bank clerk. He was struck by the powerful scenery, the sense of brutal adventure, and the rich vein of local lore that fired his imagination. Although most of the prospectors who had made the gold rush such a colourful event in Canadian history had moved on, stories of lucky miners striking it suddenly rich, of gambling on a grand scale, of ruffians, con artists, and harlots, lingered on and were happily told and retold by grizzled northerners given to embroidering their long memories.

The title page of Rhymes of a Red Cross Man (1916).

Somehow, sometime, someone had mentioned in Service’s hearing that the Klondike needed its own Bret Harte (1836–1902), the American writer who had successfully used the California gold rush of the mid-1800s as material for his stories such as those collected in The Luck of Roaring Camp (1870), with titles like “The Outcasts of Poker Flats,” the tone of which echoed eerily for Service. And, of course, the success of Jack London (1876–1916) with The Call of the Wild (1903) and White Fang (1906), to name only two gripping adventure stories fuelled by London’s experiences in the North when he was one of the thousands who swarmed into the Yukon gold fields, very likely prompted Service to try his hand at his own brand of tales of the Northland (as he liked to call it) — only his would be recounted in strongly rhythmed verse.

Service had discovered a talent for rhyming and versifying at an early age. He had also scribbled and published occasionally what he described self-deprecatingly as newspaper verse during his vagabond travels. Now, established in a steady job, and with not a great deal available as entertainment or diversion, he settled into a cabin and into writing in his free time. Harte and London were near contemporaries, and although Service had not had the benefit of an extensive education, he was a reader and had his literary models in the likes of Rudyard Kipling, Robert Burns, Walter Scott, and Robert Louis Stevenson to draw upon.

After his stint in Whitehorse, Service was transferred to Dawson City, but all in all, he did not have a particularly long stay in the North. A few years in the teller’s cage at the bank, some travel and solitary writing in his Dawson City cabin, resulted in a sheaf of poems about which Service felt good enough to be prepared to pay out of his own carefully husbanded savings for its publication. Although biographically Service is not all that forthcoming, he does tell us something of what his life in the Northland had been like, which gives us an insight into how certain poems came to be written, and the style of life that had occasioned them.

At this point in his life Service was in his thirties, and except for much rambling travel mostly along the Pacific coast and in Mexico, the occasional piece of fugitive verse published somewhere in a newspaper, and work at the bank, Service had neither a profession nor a career to call his own. The saving step would be authorship of some kind duly enshrined in book form. The first stepping stone of what would become a wildly successful career as a writer was a clutch of thirty-three pieces of verse, mostly cast in Service’s idea of what a ballad might be, a form that one attempt at definition described as “the name given to a type of verse of unknown authorship dealing with episodes or simple motifs rather than sustained themes written in stanzaic form more or less found suitable for oral transmission.” What also must have appealed to Service with his notions of itinerant minstrelsy was that the ballad lent itself to recitation or song.

Appropriately his first book was called Songs of a Sourdough, and his second Ballads of a Cheechako. In one fell swoop Service had pushed two obscure terms into the limelight of the English language, with sourdough meaning a grouchy or peevish individual, and cheechako meaning a greenhorn or novice. Both terms appear to have been current among the hard-bitten mining folk of the gold fields of Alaska and the Yukon. Northland, another special word, carried with it the ethos of that near-Arctic roof of the American continent, and it was an ethos that Service took happily and readily as his own.

For Service verse-making became a kind of minstrelsy that blended easily with the uncomplicated music that so attracted him. In addition, the North of the gold rush had its own saloon culture echoing richly with song, dance, and sentiment. A recent archaeological find has brought up a music-playing machine, perhaps an early version of the gramophone, which was recovered from the sunken wreck of a riverboat in the Klondike River. Disks on this machine have survived with two pieces of popular music from that time. Hitherto unknown, the pieces were “My Onliest One” and “Rendezvous Waltz.” Clearly stuff of Service’s time, and for Service, verses were ballads, and ballads meant music.

Once launched on this stream of composition, a regular outflow of collections of verse followed for the rest of Service’s creative life, with the evocative use of words such as rhymes, carols, songs, ballads, and lyrics artfully used in the titles of new collections of verse. Critically speaking, though, one discerns a definite falling off in quality and inventiveness in his writing after the appearance of Rhymes of a Rolling Stone (1912) and Rhymes of a Red Cross Man (1916).

Earlier, on the heels of the success of his first collection of verse, Service had decided to try his hand at fiction. He crafted a romance adventure that was published in 1911 as The Trail of ’98 with the subtitle A Northland Romance, which ranks as one of his better achievements in prose writing, dependent as it is on the flavour of the gold fields. It also hinted at his penchant for what became known as the “romance” genre in which Service worked with notable success for fifteen years. Not only did his fiction find a readership, most likely helped by his reputation as a highly readable and entertaining versifier, but it also gave him entry into the burgeoning domain of the world of movies where his romances lent themselves readily to being made into films.

Service had honed his storytelling skills with his ballad stories, which he had salted with intriguing and colourful characters with names like One-Eyed Mike, Muckluck Meg, the Dago Kid, and Blasphemous Pete. It was an easy step into the riff-raff and apache5 lives of the Paris underworld. Shady adventure romances were the kind of material sought after by Hollywood’s movie mills, which in their turn were a rewarding source of a goodly portion of Service’s growing wealth. Reticent as he tended to be about his private life, he had no compunction about referring to himself as “rich.” And that he clearly was. From a house in a seaside village in Brittany to a luxurious two-storey apartment in a chic district of Paris to an equally self-pampering flat in Monte Carlo and life in Nice and on the French Riviera, all suggest considerable wealth.

When Service arrived in Paris in 1913, one has a sense that he hoped to become part of the avant-garde literary and artistic community that was beginning to establish itself in that unique city of the arts. The bohemianism of Paris life attracted him greatly, but the wanderlust that had taken him widely in the world still tugged at him, and we find that Service, who had developed some skills in journalism reporting on the Balkan wars, was also successfully sending in reports on travels by bicycle and walking in rural France to a Toronto newspaper. But what Service really craved was acceptance by the literati of the time. It seems that this was not to be and Service had to suffer unjust rejection, in one instance being told by an envious contemporary that his writing was not bad for newspaper verse, and in another case showing the handsomely designed Rhymes of a Rolling Stone to an eminent British man of letters who, without bothering to open the book, told Service that he admired the binding. Unable to win serious acceptance among the bohemians of the Latin Quarter, Service cultivated a coterie of journalists who were resident in Paris and with whom he had a sense of affinity.

Robert and Germaine Service in Paris, October 1913.

In 1913, Service met a young Frenchwoman, Germaine Bourgoin, younger daughter of the owner of a distillery. They were married in June of that year, and Service entered upon a very happy but very different style of life. One supposes that he had also noticed the ticking of life’s clock when he decided, as he tells it, to get “hitched.” He was almost forty and confessed to a friend that he thought the time had come “for the greatest of all adventures — Marriage.” We can get an idea of what they settled into from his second novel The Pretender: A Story of the Latin Quarter (1914). That year the Great War was upon Europe and the world, and Service dutifully sought to do his share. Too old for the trenches, he did journalistic work writing for the Toronto Star and then found himself in the medical service, driving an ambulance and caring for the wounded. The result was a collection of verse, both patriotically stirring but with overtones of regret for the suffering and the death, and with a pacifist sentiment.

Service in uniform in 1916.

After the end of the First World War, Service’s writing career entered a new and radically different phase. The verse-making continued at a steady pace, but the major effort was directed to the writing of fiction. Between 1922 and 1927 he produced four novels which, as mentioned earlier, won favour in Hollywood. In 1928, having developed problems with his heart, Service published a celebration of physical fitness with Why Not Grow Young? or Living for Longevity. Although he was only in his early fifties, what is evident is that Service had entered the last phase of his life. The verses kept coming, sadly not particularly original, mainly personal and domestic in their inspiration, and predictable in their tone and sentiment. That the summing-up was coming was signalled by the publication of The Complete Poems in 1933. This was followed by two autobiographical volumes, Ploughman of the Moon: An Adventure into Memory in 1945 and Harper of Heaven: A Record of Radiant Living (1948). Later Collected Verse (1960) appeared after his death.

Service displaying his muscles in a photograph that appeared on the jacket of Why Not Grow Young? (1928).

Service spent his declining years happily as a long-time resident expatriate in France and died of a heart attack at his cottage in Brittany on September 11, 1958. He left a legacy of a sensible outlook on life that permeated a large body of work in which there is a tolerant interplay between what is not always entirely good or wholly bad, and in which gentle irony was his instrument of fine persuasion. There is a modest credo in these lines:

Aye, though a godless way I go,

And sceptic is my friend,

A faith in something I don’t know

Might save me in the end.

Notes

1. First published in 1907 by William Briggs of Toronto and T. Fisher Unwin in London, and also in the same year in its American edition under the title of The Spell of the Yukon by Barse and Hopkins in New York and F. Stern & Co. in Philadelphia. All in all, quite remarkable for a first book, but then its enormous appeal may be gauged by the fact that the Canadian edition had been reprinted thirty-one times by 1911.

2. The idea of a “bardic” identity would have appealed to Service whose penchant for the ballad, which he associated with minstrelsy and the notion of the poet as a kind of itinerant entertainer who accompanied his narratives with music — the guitar or accordion in Service’s case — would have blended nicely with his sense of Celtic tradition.

3. Although Service wrote and published two ample volumes of autobiography, these tend to focus on incidents and travel adventures that formed an important component of his life, but the connected narrativity that one normally expects to find in life writing is tightly controlled and not inviting or revelatory of Service’s human side.

4. While the title of the book printed on the cover reads The Trail of Ninety-Eight [:] A Northland Romance, the bibliographically correct title since it appears on the title page reads The Trail of ’98 {;} A Northland Romance. What is noteworthy is that this first and best major work of prose fiction by Service was illustrated by Maynard Dixon (1875–1946), an American painter and illustrator largely of western themes whose origins in California and much painting of the American West and Southwest celebrated territory through which Service had drifted in his hobo days and for which he had an affinity. An appropriate if unusual choice. Dixon, not unlike Service, was also a self-taught artist.

5. The term apache was current in the 1920s and 1930s and was used to describe pimps and hustlers and the general — usually male — low-life of the Paris underworld.

The front jacket of Harper of Heaven (1948).

Select Bibliography

Principal Works of Robert William Service

Poetry

Songs of a Sourdough (1907)

Ballads of a Cheechako (1909)

Rhymes of a Rolling Stone (1912)

Rhymes of a Red Cross Man (1916)

Ballads of a Bohemian (1921)

The Complete Poems of Robert Service (1933)

Bar-Room Ballads: A Book of Verse (1940)

Rhymes of a Roughneck: A Book of Verse (1950)

More Collected Verse (1955)

Later Collected Verse (1960)

Prose

The Trail of ’98: A Northland Romance (1910)

The Pretender: A Story of the Latin Quarter (1914)

The Poisoned Paradise: A Romance of Monte Carlo (1922)

The Roughneck: A Tale of Tahiti (1923)

The Master of the Microbe: A Fantastic Romance (1926)

The House of Fear: A Novel (1927)

Why Not Grow Young? or Living for Longevity (1928)

Ploughman of the Moon: An Adventure into Memory (1945)

Harper of Heaven: A Record of Radiant Living (1948)

About Robert Service

There is considerable fugitive journalism about Service, but Carl F. Klinck’s Robert Service: A Biography (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1976) remains the best study to date of a remarkable life.

Frontispiece photograph of a mature, healthy Service that appeared in Ploughman of the Moon: An Adventure into Memory (1945).