Prisoners of the North (40 page)

At that moment she gave a scream as a smiling peasant woman greeted them. “Welcome, Monsieur,” she said. “I’ve been expecting you.” At that, Service wrote, knowing that the jig was up, he turned to his bride and confessed, “I’m a miserable deceiver.”

Service was in his mid-seventies when he wrote
Harper of Heaven
, and much of the confusion in that romantic tale can be laid to his memory of events that had taken place some thirty-five years before. One cannot discount, however, his long practice of mingling fact with fiction in the interest of getting a better story. His account of dealing with the mayor of Lancieux for his Dream Haven is pure invention. He did not buy the house until some time after his marriage, and he bought it with the help of his wife, who was accompanying him on a boat trip. They spotted it by examining the houses on the heights above the shoreline. The actual negotiations were carried out through a real estate agent.

Germaine, the young woman Service picked out of a crowd during a parade in Paris. He decided she was the wife he “needed.” She lived to be 101 years old
.

Germaine certainly knew her husband could afford the purchase. During their courtship he did not tell her that he was an impoverished poet but that he was a journalist in the pay of a Toronto newspaper, which was true enough. Later, a girlfriend revealed to Germaine’s mother that he was a famous poet who had written about the
incineration
of Sam McGee. Service even got the details of his honeymoon wrong. It did not take place weeks or months after his marriage but the very next day. In telling the story of Dream Haven, Service was doing what he always did: giving the public what it wanted.

The Services spent a romantic summer at Dream Haven in 1914, the year his novel
The Pretender
was published. He thought it his best work to date but was disappointed when it did not achieve the success of his earlier books. The Great War ended their idyll in August. Service tried to enlist but was rejected because of varicose veins in his legs. He was probably more valuable to the Allied cause as a war correspondent, but the implacable Canadian censor, Lieutenant Colonel Ernest J. Chambers, didn’t see it that way. Service, who had volunteered for the Red Cross in order to get closer to the action, was dispatching on-the-spot reports to the
Ottawa Journal
, the
Toronto Star
, and other papers, which irked Chambers.

“I cannot turn the car in that narrow road with the wounded lying under my wheels,” Service wrote in 1916 from France. “Two mangled heaps are lifted in. One has been wounded by a bursting gun. There seems to be no part of him that is not burned.… The skin of his breast is of a bluish colour and cracked open in ridges—I’m sorry I saw him.”

That would never do. The authorities were doing their best to present the war as a kind of manly picnic, an adventure for young men who wanted to prove their mettle in combat. Horrified by Service’s plain speaking, Chambers forced the
Journal’s
editor, P. D. Ross, to pledge that the poet’s material would be expurgated or at the very least sanitized. “The more I see of Robert Service’s matter from the front,” Chambers wrote, “the more impressed I become that it is of a character to seriously interfere with recruiting in Canada.”

The home in the little Breton fishing village that Service called his “dream haven.”

A severe attack of boils put Service out of business as an ambulance driver but gave him time to produce another volume of verse during his convalescence.
Rhymes of a Red Cross Man
was a smashing success. It was, as a writer in
The New Yorker
later noted, “by far the most popular book of poetry published in this country.” In 1917 and 1918 it headed the non-fiction lists. In
The Dial
, Service was praised as “a poetic phenomenon. More or less ignored by the critics,” Whitter Brynner declared, “he has won a vast following. And it seems to me time for a fellow craftsman to protest that in this case the public is right.… We have been inquiring for the poetry of war. In my judgment, here it is.…”

Service’s war poems differ radically from those of such English war poets as Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves. He was not interested in tactics or strategy or the philosophy of war. There are no officers in
Rhymes;
the ordinary soldier holds the spotlight.

Jim as lies there in the dug-out wiv ’is blanket round ’is ’ead,
To keep his brains from mixin’ wiv the mud;
And ’is face as white as putty, and his overcoat all red,
Like ‘e’s spilt a bloomin’ paint-pot—but it’s blood.

After the book was translated into Norwegian, Carl J. Hambro, a literary critic who was to become president of the League of Nations, took issue with a colleague who had translated a collection of war poems but had not included any by Service: “This in spite of the fact that the note is one of the most unusual and the voice one of the most masculine in the entire orchestra of war.” In one literary quarterly, the
Texas Review
, an academic made clear his belief that the Canadian Kipling was a genius in his own right. “Kipling failed utterly to contribute anything of poetic value to the literary output of the Great War,” he pointed out.

After the United States entered the war, the ambulance corps was disbanded. In February 1918 Service’s life lost its radiance. Germaine had given birth to twin girls, Doris and Iris, the previous year. Now, while the little family was visiting the Riviera, Doris, aged thirteen months, died of scarlet fever. It was a blow to the poet, who marked the tragedy with a tender poem, a cry of anguish that was never published.

My little girl, whose smile so right
I’ll see while sight endures
This life of mine I’d give tonight
Could I but ransom yours.

Five months later, as he confessed to a friend, he could not think of her without bursting into tears.

The Canadian government, meanwhile, offered him a dream job: to tour the war front, reporting on the Canadian Expeditionary Force. He travelled about with a Cadillac, a driver, and an officer guide with freedom to go anywhere he wished, inspecting field kitchens, forestry camps, airfields and hospitals. Back in Paris, with the war winding down, he embarked on a new book that he planned to call “War Winners,” all about unsung heroes. He was pounding away on his Remington one morning when he heard the clanging of hundreds of church bells and realized the war was over. That night he took the manuscript and tore it into tatters. “No more war. Not in my lifetime. Curse the memory of it. Now I will rest and forget. Now will I enjoy the peace and sweetness of Dream Haven.”

Paris was suffering from a housing shortage, but Service managed to secure a two-story, five-bedroom flat on the Place de Pantheon by bribing the concierge. He equipped the large upper studio as a library to contain the one thousand books he had purchased on his most recent trip to London. Now the man who had once walked barefoot down the highways of California to save shoe leather took on the persona of a “plutocratic poet,” complete with tailored suit and monocle. “People in Paris accepted it without derision and I made an effort to live up to it. Behind it I concealed my inferiority complex. Screwing it in my eye I looked superciliously at the world.”

With the stock market rising, he realized he was “in danger of becoming a millionaire, a fate I would not have wished on my worst enemy.” He felt a sense of shame: it wasn’t fair to make so much money. Since he could do nothing about it, he launched into a new book,
Ballads of a Bohemian
, the most autobiographical of his works in verse and the least successful. The manuscript was completed by Christmas 1919, but his publishers did not print it until 1921. Meanwhile bank stocks plummeted and Service, who had considered taking a flyer in real estate, instead bought life annuities, which would keep him secure for the rest of his life.

At about the same time, a movie studio bought the film rights to “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” for five thousand dollars, and the normally canny poet decided, on an impulse, to blow the money on a family trip to Hollywood. There, his mother, whom he had not seen for a decade, joined the family from Alberta, and Service determined to fulfill his ambition to visit the South Seas. He set off all by himself to Tahiti and spent the next two months lazing and wandering about the islands, gathering background for a novel that eventually became
The Roughneck
.

His introduction to the film world had persuaded him that he should write more novels, hoping that they would become successful motion pictures, which in turn would provide a larger audience for his books. Service may not have been the first novelist to understand the value of this literary cross-pollination, but he was certainly a pioneer in that field.
The Poisoned Paradise
, published in 1922, was a minor critical success, and the newly formed MGM turned it into a motion picture starring Clara Bow.

The Services were back in Paris by the fall of 1922.
The Roughneck, A Tale of Tahiti
was published the following year. Service immediately started another novel,
The Master of the Microbe
, and followed it with
The House of Fear
. Both books were thrillers, urged on him by his mother, who had a penchant for detective novels. Long out of print, they are barely remembered today. He launched the bulk of his prose writing just as the age of Hemingway began. His prose now seems dated and to many young readers may have seemed dated then, as this passage from
The Poisoned Paradise
suggests:

“I’ve had enough,” he cried, and his eyes flashed in his white face. He wrenched the bottle from the man’s hand. “You swine, you! Where I come from there are men who would give their heart’s blood for a mouthful of that wine you’re wasting like filthy water.”

Service had no illusions about his detective novels, which were very successful at the time. “I was fed up with this form of imaginative debauch,” he wrote. “These four thrillers had purged me of my passion for pulpwood fiction.”

He spent night after night in the slums of Paris, soaking up local colour for his fiction. As usual, he disguised himself in old clothes and wore a stained beret on his head, a costume that astonished an old friend from the United States who came upon him by accident as he explored the alleyways. “Why, Rubbert,” he exclaimed, “what part are you playing now?”

“I’m an
apaché,”
Service told him. “You don’t want to be seen with me. As a matter of fact I’m documenting myself on the underworld. Dressed as I am, I go to places you would never dare to enter.” That’s how he tells it in
Harper of Heaven
. Years later when I met him in the poisoned paradise of Monte Carlo, he told me the police had taken him around the area in a squad car.

In Hollywood and the South Seas, Service had gained twenty-five pounds. To regain his waistline he threw himself into a rigid regime of dieting, vigorous exercise involving much weight lifting, and two hours daily of gymnasium workouts. Each afternoon he took a brisk three-hour hike and in the evening indulged in amateur boxing. In January 1924 he turned fifty and, because he planned to enter a boxing tournament, decided to undergo a medical checkup. His doctor was shocked. In developing his muscles, Service had injured his heart. He had entered the doctor’s office playing one role—that of a superbly muscled athlete with bulging biceps and a washboard stomach. He slunk out in a different guise: “I walked wearily with what I thought was a look of pathetic resignation. I even imagined that passersby were regarding me with pity.”

On the doctor’s advice he spent three seasons at a health resort, changed his diet and his lifestyle, and, of course, produced a book about it entitled
Why Not Grow Young? Keeping Fit at Fifty
. He gave up alcohol, tobacco, chocolate, red meat, and coffee until “he hummed like a top with health.” He chewed every mouthful of food thirty times, brushed his teeth three times a day, and he claims began eating an astonishing number of potatoes—twenty-two thousand a year or an average of sixty a day—as well as quantities of cabbage and onions. “The potato is my standby,” he wrote; “I love the candour of the cabbage and the exquisite irony of the onion.”
Why Not Grow Young?
is the only one of Service’s works that he names in his two autobiographies. Today it would take its place on the shelves with the rising tide of self-help books that have made fortunes for their authors. But in 1928 it was a failure and caused a break with Service’s English publisher, Fisher Unwin, who refused it. If Service’s novels were behind the times, his book on health was certainly ahead of them.