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Michael Gnarowski — Series Editor
The Dundurn Group presents the Voyageur Classics series, building on the tradition of exploration and rediscovery and bringing forward time-tested writing about the Canadian experience in all its varieties.
This series of original or translated works in the fields of literature, history, politics, and biography has been gathered to enrich and illuminate our understanding of a multi-faceted Canada. Through straightforward, knowledgeable, and reader-friendly introductions, the Voyageur Classics series provides context and accessibility while breathing new life into these timeless Canadian masterpieces.
The Voyageur Classics series was designed with the widest possible readership in mind and sees a place for itself with the interested reader as well as in the classroom. Physically attractive and reset in a contemporary format, these books aim at an enlivened and updated sense of Canada’s written heritage.
ABOUT THE INTRODUCTION’S AUTHORS
Brian Busby is a literary historian, independent scholar, and writer. He is the author of Character Parts (2003) and A Gentleman of Pleasure (2011), a biography of the poet John Glassco. Busby is also the editor of In Flanders Fields and Other Poems of the First World War (2004), The Poetry of the Civil War (2006), and War Poems (2010).
James Calhoun served briefly as a reserve private with the Seaforth Highlanders of Canada. A book-collector and researcher with a particular interest in Canadian literature of the First World War, he lives in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia.
Introduction
First published during the summer of 1929, All Else is Folly joined a lengthening cortege of Great War novels that had been written by veterans of the conflict. The line was led by Under Fire (1916), a gritty and grim work for which Henri Barbusse was awarded the Prix Goncourt, and included such titles as John Dos Passos’s Three Soldiers (1921),
The cover of the Constable edition, the first to be published.
e e cummings’s The Enormous Room (1922), and Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk (1923). The most popular novel of the war, All Quiet on theWestern Front by Erich Maria Remarque, had preceded the publication of All Else is Folly by months; Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms would follow by mere weeks.
In the company of these canonical works and the many lesser titles of what came to be known as “the war book boom,” All Else is Folly stood out as something unique. Though published by the British house Constable, its author, Peregrine Acland, was a Canadian. While the Dominion’s veterans had already produced three Great War novels — The Major (1917) and The Sky Pilot in No Man’s Land (1919) by Cameron Highlanders’ Chaplain Charles Gordon (Ralph Connor), and The Fighting Starkleys (1922) by Theodore Goodridge Roberts, briefly aide-de-camp to Arthur Currie — they were the works of older men who had not seen prolonged front-line deployments comparable in either the intensity or duration to those of a first Canadian Division company commander.
Acland’s war record set him apart from his literary comrades. Awarded a Military Cross at Observatory Ridge (Ypres) and later distinguishing himself at the Battle of the Somme, his war experiences were as dramatic and harrowing as anything found in the fictional accounts of the more widely known novelists of the Great War.
Compared to Connor, one of Canada’s bestselling authors, and Roberts, brother of Sir Charles G.D., Acland was an unknown. The author of a small number of overlooked short stories and poems scattered about The Canadian Magazine, Maclean’s, Pearson’s, the Globe, and the Evening Record of Windsor, Ontario, he was very much a nonentity in the world of letters. Yet Acland’s novel managed to garner the support of some of the day’s most respected names in literature; those early English readers and reviewers could not have ignored the praise conferred upon the novel by Ford Madox Ford’s “A Note by Way of Preface.” Then at the height of his talent and influence, the novelist, poet, and critic was not in the habit of penning such things — indeed, he notes as much — stating that his motivation lies in the hope that “a very large public may be found for Major Acland’s book on both sides of the Atlantic.”
The Globe (Toronto), December 14, 1929.
When the American Coward-McCann and Canadian McClelland & Stewart editions of All Else is Folly followed the British edition a few weeks after its publication, the novel’s reputation was bolstered by further endorsements from prominent public figures. The philosopher and pacifist Bertrand Russell, the editor and publisher Frank Harris, and John B. Watson, the father of behaviourism, all lauded the novel. Their remarks were featured prominently on the North American dust jackets. Further words of praise from Robert Borden, Canada’s wartime prime minister, were featured in advertisements: “No more vivid picture has been painted of what war meant to the average soldier.”
All Else is Folly was reviewed widely, receiving acclaim in newspapers ranging from the Times of London to the New York Times to Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald. In Canada, the influential William Arthur Deacon praised All Else is Folly as “one of the cleverest, most straightforward war revelations in fiction form.”1 In the pages of the Globe, reviewer Roger Irwin held the novel above A Farewell to Arms, writing that the former had “won a place at the top of the war fiction produced in 1929 on this continent.”2
For a few months, at least, it might have seemed that Ford’s wish for All Else is Folly was coming to pass. And yet, despite all these accolades, neither Constable nor Coward-McCann chose to reprint. McClelland & Stewart’s Canadian edition enjoyed three printings — quite uncommon for the day — but was then allowed to slip out of print. The last bookstores ever saw of All Else is Folly came in the form of a rather inelegant edition, most likely issued in 1930, from discount publisher Grosset & Dunlop. All Else is Folly appeared and then disappeared over a six month period between the summer of 1929 to the spring of 1930 — its author never published another piece of fiction or poetry.
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Peregrine Palmer Acland did not come from a family of military men or novelists, though his family did have connections to the worlds of war and letters. His mother Elizabeth (née Adair) was the daughter of a Crimean War veteran. His father, Frederick Albert (F.A.) Acland, had worked for a number of English newspapers before he decided to leave England and settle in Canada. In 1883, weeks after his arrival in the Dominion, he secured a position at Toronto’s Globe, then moved on to other papers south of the border. At the time of Peregrine’s son’s birth — May 15, 1891, in Toronto — he was back at the Globe as news editor. He left for good in 1907, moving the family to Ottawa to take a job as secretary in the Department of Labour, under William Lyon Mackenzie King. In one respect it was a reversal in roles, the editor having hired King as a Globe cub reporter two decades earlier. The shift in power suited both men, with F.A. Acland moving on to become Deputy Minister of Labour and, later, the King’s Printer.
By his own account, Peregrine Acland was a bookish child. He earned early recognition for his writing in May 1904, within days of his fourteenth birthday, when he took first prize in a nationwide essay competition commemorating the centenary of the Battle of Trafalgar. “I was a disgustingly pasty-faced little bookworm, quite unable to
