Prisoners of the North (41 page)

Service published no new verse between 1921 and 1939, which helps explain why so many of his readers were convinced he was long dead. The “fresh fields of endeavour” that he hoped would add to his stature were abandoned when he was faced with a libel suit so flimsy that, as one biographer has noted, any current lawyer would dismiss it out of hand. A peer of the realm was suing him because he believed he was the Lord Strathbogie mentioned briefly in
The House of Fear
. The word “sanctimonious” attached to the fictional character was enough to cause the ninth Baron Strabolgi to threaten suit.

According to Service’s autobiography, the libel threat derailed him as a writer for five years. H. G. Wells, who was an admirer and an acquaintance, urged him to call the noble earl’s bluff and defend the suit. Service declined. “With my inferiority complex I would cut a pitiable figure. Though as innocent as a lamb I would give the impression of a sinister criminal.” The whole affair, which cost him ten thousand pounds, left him “with a feeling of disgust.… If authorship, I thought, exposes one to such injustice, then to hell with it.” During the thirties, after the family moved to the Riviera, Service gave no thought to writing. When the press reported him as dead, confusing him with a younger brother who had been killed at the Somme, he felt no concern. “I never bothered to deny it for I savoured a kind word, even if I had to pass on to win it,” he wrote.

He was content to remain anonymous. “Here, in a slum of Nice, no one had ever heard of me. I cultivated obscurity as assiduously as others strive for publicity. Very few of my neighbours knew that I wrote. I was just one of them, content to go on like that to the end.… I enjoyed the irresponsibility of living in a foreign land where one is an onlooker and cares nothing for the way things are run as long as one’s comfort is assured.” During this period, two volumes of his collected verse were published, but since his rhymes defied translation into French, his anonymity was assured.

At the end of the thirties he published
Twenty Bath-Tub Ballads
, both words and music, which he described as “a colossal flop.” But even as the book appeared, he began to consider another. In 1938 he booked passage, alone as usual, to the Soviet Union. He wanted to see for himself whether it was the paradise it claimed to be. In his two months in Russia, Service saw everything his Intourist guide permitted—from the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg to the corpse of Lenin, waxen in its tomb. He greatly admired the stoicism of the Russian people but came to despise the political system. When he returned to his family, he had the urge to begin writing again and started on a manuscript to be titled “Four Blind Mice,” an escape novel with a Russian setting. By the time he had written ten thousand words, however, he realized he didn’t know enough about the country to write a hundred thousand. Once again through Intourist, he went back, signed up for a cruise down the Volga, and continued on to Rostov-on-Don and then the Black Sea.

He had chosen a difficult and dangerous period to investigate the Soviet Union. On the very day he arrived at Odessa, August 23, 1939, Germany and Russia signed the notorious non-aggression pact and the spectre of war hung over the city. Odessa was blacked out; searchlight beams stabbed at the night sky. The next day, as part of his Intourist program, Service took the train to Kiev, determined to flee the country. There was a train leaving that night, but the Intourist girl was unable to find his passport among the pile in front of her. To Service, Kiev seemed like a prison. He could not sleep and began to experience a sense of panic. When the passport finally turned up the next day, he was able to take the noon train for Warsaw on the way to Berlin and Paris, only to find the German border closed. A Polish officer climbed aboard shouting, “We are now in armed conflict with the Reich. It is war, war, WAR!”

In Warsaw, Service was warned by the British consul to leave Poland at once. The sound of Luftwaffe bombs hammering the district of Praga assailed his ears and aroused his sense of drama. “Here was a book, a big book for my making—one of the documents of the war.” But as a British subject, he could not stay. He found himself crammed with half-drunken soldiers into a third-class compartment headed for Wilno. From there he went on to Latvia and then Estonia. A steamer eventually took him to Stockholm where he spent three anxious days, mostly in the office of a reluctant consul, trying to get a visa for Norway. Eventually he sat up all night in a third-class carriage to Oslo where he had to struggle to board another train to Bergen on the coast. There he faced an agonizing wait in the shipping office, trying to get passage on the Bergen–Newcastle run. It was, alas, fully booked. A young CPR ticket agent helped him out by persuading the captain and engineer to give up their cabins to Service and another Canadian whom he called Mrs. Moosejaw in his memoirs. Since the vessel ran on a ten-day schedule and the first whistle was already blowing, they were forced to make a dash for the wharf minutes before the
SS
Venus
pulled away.

Service at the typewriter. For almost twenty years he wrote not a word of verse
.

Now, after a hectic and nerve-racking two weeks, Service was at last able to relax, or so he thought. He took the train from Newcastle to London and hurried to the French consulate, only to learn that all visas had been suspended. “Despair! After all my tribulations I was stranded in London.” There was nothing he could do but queue up with hundreds of others, day after day, often in a chilly rain. After three weeks, with his passport at last restored and stamped, he was able to leave.

Back in Nice, he spent the winter “strutting around in Savile Row suits” and giving birth to another verse book,
Bar-Room Ballads
, his first in nineteen years, conceived during his many walks and reveries. Published in 1940 during the first year of the war it was, he wrote offhandedly, “neither better nor worse than any of my previous volumes and was received with the same gentle tolerance.”

“These poems will go over big in this dark hour when a bit of levity is needed to cheer a man,” the
Globe and Mail’s
critic wrote. Service himself was convinced that the collection would be his last literary effort. “I was growing tired of myself in the role of Rhyme-smith,” he wrote. Nor would he write any more novels of the “authentic type.”

With the fall of France in mid-June 1940, Service realized the time had come to leave the country. In spite of his self-confessed laziness, much of which was a pose, he acted in this instance with dispatch and decision. He reconnoitred the Breton coast town of St. Malo, discovered four tramp steamers evacuating wounded British troops, and learned shortly before sailing time that there just might be space for him and his family. Hurrying back to nearby Dream Haven at Lancieux, he ran into Germaine and Iris on a road jammed with refugees. “We’re going,” he told them. “There’s to be no sniveling. You must keep control of your nerves. You can only take one suitcase each and I give you half an hour to pack.”

They managed to board the
Hull Trader
, a coal carrier loaded with wounded, just half an hour before she sailed. Germaine and Iris were sent to the captain’s cabin and Service to a bunk forward, which he gave up to a soldier so seriously wounded that he died during the voyage. The poet made his way back to the captain’s cabin and found it jammed with female refugees and five babies squalling on his berth. He escaped to a deck strewn with wounded and crawled into the hold, where he lay down on a box of high explosives with more wounded men all about him. “Oh, what a gorgeous target we were!” wrote Service. “There were U-boats and mines to fret about. That water was just staked with disaster, and every moment of that night I lay awaiting the shock of being hurled to eternity.” But the trip was made without mishap, and the Services rented a flat in Chelsea as the first bombs in the prelude to the Battle of Britain began to fall on southern England.

In late July the Services sailed to Canada. The Canadian edition of
Bar-Room Ballads
had just been published, and its author was involved in the usual interviews, book signings, and receptions. Sitting in the lobby of the Windsor Hotel in Montreal, he watched a youngish man approach him cautiously. “He was good looking and well built with an air of professional prosperity,” Service recalled.

“Do you know who I am?” he said.

“No, I’m afraid I don’t,” Service replied.

“I’m your brother, Stanley,” the stranger announced, and, as Service wrote, “he told me so persuasively that I was forced to believe him. Twenty years do make a difference.”

In Vancouver, he was accosted by a good-looking woman who said, “Do you know who I am?” Service had no idea until she told him “I’m your sister, Agnes.”

“It took me quite a while before I got used to folks coming up to me and saying: ‘Hullo Bob, why I thought you were dead.’ Indeed, so many seemed to think that I had passed on I began to feel like a veritable ghost.”

In Vancouver, Service was reunited with a second brother, Peter, proprietor of the Sourdough Bookshop where Service’s two volumes of
Selected Verse
were much in demand. The bard himself would be much in demand in his five years of exile, especially in Hollywood, where the family spent the winter months. In the first four years the poet did not write a single line but was constantly called on to recite “The Shooting of Dan McGrew.” When it was learned that he would be present at the Sourdough Convention in Seattle in 1942 the demand for tickets was so great that two separate banquet halls in two hotels had to be reserved to handle the overflow crowds. When in the spring of 1945 he attended the premiere of
The Belle of the Yukon
, seated with the two stars of the movie, Dinah Shore and Gypsy Rose Lee, he stole the show by again reciting “Dan McGrew.” He was by this time something of a movie star himself, appearing in a cameo role in
The Spoilers
, starring John Wayne and Randolph Scott. Frank Lloyd, who had directed the movie version of
The Pretender
, talked him into appearing in a scene with the film’s co-star, Marlene Dietrich. Service was made up to look much younger than his sixty-seven years by the same makeup artist who had turned Boris Karloff into Frankenstein’s monster. The film was set in Nome, Alaska, not Dawson City. Service appeared as himself, scribbling away at a table when Dietrich as Cherry Malote, the gambling queen, approaches:

“Ah, I see you are writing a new poem, Mr. Service. About me?”

“No, not this time, Cherry. I’m writing about a Lady known as Lou.”

“Is there a man in the story?”

“Yes, a fellow named Dan McGrew. He’s a bad actor. He gets shot.”

“Ah, The Shooting of Dan McGrew, eh?”

Service spoke his lines more than a dozen times until finally the dramatic director was brought in to coach him. According to Service, when the scene was complete, Lloyd gave it his final assessment: “It’s lousy but we’ll let it go.”

Though Service continued to protest that he hated the poem and only took the movie job because his finances were low, he cheerfully recited “Dan McGrew” on the scores of occasions when he was asked to perform. Once again, he was playing a role, at least in his autobiography, as the Impoverished Poet. When he was given a cheque for $225 for his cameo in
The Spoilers
, he turned it over to the Canadian Red Cross, which was launching a nine-million-dollar fund-raising drive. “As play acting is not my regular line,” Service wrote, kicking off the campaign, “I do not wish to earn money in this way.” Some months after Pearl Harbor, he embarked on a five-month tour of army camps for the USO reciting “McGrew” and “McGee” to crowds of cheering soldiers.

By then, according to Service, “there was scarcely a day I could call my own.… I was becoming a busy man and I hated it.” The solution was to embark on a project that would give him an excuse to get out of business meetings, autographings, lunches, and lectures. That project was to write his autobiography—
Ploughman of the Moon
. It took a year, and because he had by then reached only the year 1912 in his narrative, he began a second volume,
Harper of Heaven
.

The North American version of
Ploughman
was published in September 1945 and the English edition a year later. The book became a best-seller, widely quoted in the popular press as usual, but treated with reservations by the literary elite. Stanley Walker, in the
New York Herald
, hit the nail on the head when he wrote, “Despite his frequent protestations it is clear that he regards himself as a highly romantic figure.” It was, in Walker’s view, “not a very good book.” But in spite of the overwriting and the clichés, “there is no getting away from it—he hit on something that somehow struck a response among millions of rhyme lovers, and thus became the singer of the Common Man.”