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
