Prisoners of the North (36 page)

When the hectic summer came to an end and the tourists as well as prospectors and traders had departed, the bank’s business dropped off. Those who were left behind made their own fun, and the winter season was marked by a round of dances, concerts, at-homes, receptions, and other community events. In those days, long before radio and television, when the movies were silent, the art of elocution flourished.

When Service recalled those days, he remarked with his usual diffidence, “My only claim to social consideration at this time was as an entertainer, and a pretty punk one at that. I could sing a song and vamp an accompaniment, but mainly I was a prize specimen of that ingenuous ass, the amateur reciter.” His repertoire included those old standbys “Casey at the Bat,” “Gunga Din,” and “The Face on the Bar Room Floor.” These soon became stale from repetition, and Service was at a loss until the town’s leading journalist, Stroller White, suggested he recite something of his own. After all, he recalled, Service had once submitted a poem to the
Whitehorse Star
during his days in Victoria.

The suggestion intrigued the would-be rhymester. He knew he wanted a dramatic ballad suitable for recitation. But what? He needed a theme. What about revenge, he asked himself. “Then you have to have a story to embody your theme. What about the old triangle—the faithless wife, the betrayed husband?.… Give it a setting in a Yukon saloon and make the two guys shoot it out.”

But that was too banal. Service realized he needed a new twist to an outworn theme. It struck him then to “tell the story by musical suggestion.” It was a brilliant concept and one that would help transform the one-time hobo into a wealthy celebrity.

On a Saturday night, returning from one of his many nocturnal walks, he passed an open bar. The sound of revelry gave him his opening line: “A bunch of the boys were whooping it up …” Excited by this idea, and not wanting to disturb Leonard De Gex, the bank manager, and his wife, he crept down the stairs from his room above the bank, entered the teller’s cage, and started to complete the ballad. Unfortunately, Service wrote in
Ploughman of the Moon
, he had not reckoned with the ledger keeper stationed in the guardroom, who, on hearing a noise near the safe, thought it was being burgled. He levelled his revolver and “closing his eyes pointed it at the skulking shade.” Luckily, Service wrote, “he was a poor shot or ‘The Shooting of Dan McGrew’ might never have been written.”

The story is pure hokum. When, in 1958, I challenged him on it, Service cheerfully admitted to making it up. “I’d
like
to say he fired a shot at me,” he said. “And I’d say it too but there are men still living who were there and I can’t get away with it, you see.” But of course he did get away with it. The story of the scene in the teller’s cage went unchallenged for years.

Service finished his ballad but could not recite it at the church social; it was too raw and, its author remarked to me, it contained “too many cuss words.” Then, one evening, he encountered a big mining man from Dawson, portly and important, who removed his cigar long enough to remark, “I’ll tell you a story Jack London never got,” and spun a yarn about a man who cremated his pal. A light bulb flashed in Service’s mind: “I had a feeling that here was a decisive moment of destiny.” He left and went for a long, solitary walk. On that moonlit evening, his mind “seething with excitement and a strange ecstasy,” the opening lines of “The Cremation of Sam McGee” burst upon him, and soon “verse after verse developed with scarce a check.” After six hours, the entire ballad was in his head, and on the following day “with scarcely any effort of memory” he put the words down on paper.

It makes an appealing and romantic story, this sudden inspiration on “one of those nights of brilliant moonlight that almost goad me to madness” and it certainly jibes with the title of his memoirs. Service liked to suggest that it was all play and no work for him, that he never needed to correct his first drafts, but the facts, certainly in the case of “Sam McGee,” are at variance. Here is the first stanza that Service claimed poured out of him intact on that moonlit evening:

There are strange things done in the Midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee.

Grubbing through the Yukon Archives, James Mackay came upon the original draft of the ballad, which shows how carefully Service would polish and refine his work:

There are strange things done after half past one
By the men who search for gold;
The arctic histories have their eerie mysteries
That would make your feet go cold
The Aurora Borealis has seen where Montreal is
But the queerest it ever did spot
Was the night on the periphery of Lake McKiflery
I cremated Sam McKlot.

In this early version of the ballad, we can see Service struggling to develop the galloping rhythm that gave his work such an appeal to platform performers. Here he introduced the inner rhyming that is not present in “McGrew” but marks so many of his later ballads. Each of his lines is seven beats long, divided into two sections; the first four beats contain the inner rhyme: “The Arctic trails have their secret tales” while the next three beats repeat, amplify, or expand the original statement, “that would make your blood run cold.”

Service’s audiences were used to this pattern through the nursery rhymes of childhood (“Jack and Jill,” “Old King Cole,” for example) and school-book standbys such as “The Wreck of the Hesperus.” Service himself was brought up with this metre, and in his ballads he rarely departed from it. But it must have galled him in later years to realize that these twin efforts, which he tossed aside in a drawer with his shirts, should be the ones that would enshrine his reputation. He wrote some two thousand verses and published at least a thousand, but these two ballads, along with “The Spell of the Yukon”—a phrase he put into the language—are the only ones that are still remembered, and all from that first collection. Of the three, the one he loathed, “The Shooting of Dan McGrew,” is still the most often quoted.

The two ballads are quite different. “McGrew” preserves the theatrical unities; it takes place on a single set, the Malamute Saloon, and in “real” time: the entire action occupies not much more than ten minutes. “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” by contrast, is acted out like a wide-screen movie. It moves through time and space along the Dawson Trail to Lake Laberge, and it depends entirely on its Yukon environment (“And the heavens scowled and the huskies howled and the wind began to blow”). “McGrew,” by contrast, is that old standby, the Western shoot-’em-up, or it seems to be.

Service’s personal lexicon was crowded with short, blunt words that fitted his subjects. In “McGee,” for instance, there is scarcely a word longer than two syllables, and the exception “cre-ma-tor-ium” is spelled out thus for bizarre and comic effect. Service changed “search for gold” to “moil for gold” and made that unexpected verb his own. It is so intrinsically connected to the ballad that I doubt any writer would dare use it for fear of being called a copycat. (Curiously, one Service scholar, Edward Hirsch, managed to get it wrong when he quoted the line as “men who toil for gold.”) Occasionally, when Service couldn’t find an offbeat word to suit his purpose, he made one up. Thus, in “McGrew,” the stranger’s eyes “went rubbering round the room.” It’s not in the Oxford dictionary as a verb, but it certainly fits.

The author of “McGee” was not above adding a bizarre and mystic note to his work—as when he flings the frozen corpse into the roaring furnace of a derelict steamboat, the
Alice May
, which lies rotting on Lake Laberge (or Lebarge, as he spells it), to pin down the rhyme. There was indeed a derelict steamer,
Olive May
, rotting away at the southern tip of the lake not far from Whitehorse, which Service would have encountered on one of his lonely walks. As a youth he had been fascinated and horrified by the stories of martyrs burned at the stake in Foxe’s
Book of Martyrs
, and that surely was in his mind when he revised the ballad, with McGee thawing out gratefully “in the heart of the furnace roar” and providing Service with a tag line that always brought a laugh from his audience: “it’s the first time I’ve been warm!”

Some critics believe that “McGee” is the better of the two ballads; certainly it has received as much applause. There is little doubt, however, that it has been outdistanced by “McGrew,” and I believe a case can be made that of the pair “McGrew” is a superior work.

What is it that gives this piece of verse so much staying power? Service saw it as a drama in three acts. In the first, he sets the scene, introduces the characters, and supplied the tension. A solo game is in progress (solo, which resembles pinochle, is rarely played today), and here we meet the villain, Dan McGrew, and his girlfriend, the faithless Lou. The door is flung open and a stranger, “dog dirty and loaded for bear,” stumbles into the bar, flings down a poke of gold, and stands everybody a drink. We don’t know who he is, but he gets our respect when he staggers over to the ragtime piano.

Now the second act opens, and it is here that the tale is lifted above the standard Western ballad. Service’s decision to tell the tale of McGrew’s villainy and Lou’s betrayal gives the story its power. He himself was a musician, self-taught on the piano, the banjo, the ukulele, the guitar, and the accordion. We can hear the piano in our minds as the ballad progresses. The man arrived from the creeks turns out to be a gifted musician (“My God How That Man Could Play!”). The music sets the scene in what Service calls the Great Alone: the ice-sheathed mountains, reflecting the soft blaze of the Aurora, tell the story of one man’s loneliness, a man driven by his own hunger for gold to the exclusion of all that is natural. The music brings back the memory of a home dominated by a woman’s love, a woman “true as heaven is true” and superimposed on those features is the ghastly rouged face of the strumpet clinging to McGrew. The music modulates to a softer tone followed by an intense feeling of rage and despair, and then, as McGrew coolly continues to play his hand, rises to a crescendo as the audience hears the cry for revenge hidden in the chords that crash to a climax.

The third act follows. The stranger whirls about on his piano stool, his eyes “blind with blood,” points to McGrew as a “hound of hell,” and the inevitable gun battle follows as the lights go out momentarily and a woman screams through the blackness. The two antagonists lie crumpled on the floor as Lou flings herself upon the body of the dying stranger, clutches him to her breast, and plants kisses on his brow.

Service, of course, has no intention of continuing with such a melodramatic and saccharine ending. That was never his style. He has a sardonic surprise: Lou’s embrace is simply a cover for her avarice. As the man from the creeks is breathing his last, she has been searching for the same poke he tilted on the bar a short time before. Service has the final line: “The woman that kissed him and pinched his poke was the lady that’s known as Lou.”

The twist ending was a Service trademark, more suited to his ballads than to his lyric poetry, which he continued to compose without any thought of publication while he went for long tramps in the woods with a book of poetry in his pocket, usually Kipling. One day, he was standing on the heights above Miles Canyon when a new verse popped into his mind. He called it “The Spell of the Yukon.” In the month that followed he wrote something every day during those lonely walks. “I bubbled verse like an artesian well,” he remembered. Then, suddenly, all inspiration ceased.

He did not realize that hidden away in his bureau drawer lay the seeds of future triumphs. He came upon his “miserable manuscript” one day and decided to show it to Mrs. De Gex, his landlady. She thought his rhymes were “not so dusty” and suggested he combine them into a pamphlet to send to his friends at Christmas: “it would be such a nice souvenir of the Yukon.” Of course, she remarked, he’d have to leave out the rougher poems—“McGrew” and “McGee”—and also such efforts as “My Madonna” and “The Harpy,” which reflected Service’s fascination with fallen women and the seamier side of life.

Since the bank had given him a hundred-dollar Christmas bonus, he decided to follow her suggestion and have a hundred copies printed to give to his friends as “my final gesture of literary impotence … my farewell to literature, a monument on the grave of my misguided Muse.” He was finished with poetry for good; he would study finance and become “a stuffy little banker.”

He could not foresee that this slim volume would be his epiphany: the mild bank clerk would be transformed, phoenix-like, into a figure of towering reputation for what was, in truth, a mere grab bag of verses old and new, some previously published, others resurrected and revised. In spite of the title,
Songs of a Sourdough
, half of the poems in the collection had nothing to do with the Yukon. Several, indeed, dealt with the Boer War. None of that seemed to matter to the three million readers who eventually bought the book as edition after edition rolled off the presses. More than half a century later the critic Arthur Phelps noted of Service that “no anthology of Canadian verse dare leave him out. No academic critic knows what to do with him. He has become an event in the working annals of Canada on his own terms.”

Service kept the “coarse” poems in the collection—the ones that Mrs. De Gex wanted him to leave out. He retained “The Harpy,” in which he wrote sympathetically about a prostitute from her own point of view, and “My Madonna,” where a painting of a woman from the streets ends up in a church being worshipped as the Virgin Mary. He was not an ardent feminist, but he did treat women with understanding. To him, the Yukon itself was feminine. In the opening line of “The Law of the Yukon” the land is “she.” Service sees her as a celibate earth mother longing for men who are “grit to the core” (“Them will I take to my bosom, them will I call my sons”).