GEIST
Volume 20 Number 81 Summer 2011
FEATUREs Postcard Lit
A visit to the winners’ circle: three image-inspired short-short stories that scooped First, Second and Third prizes in the 7th Annual Geist Literal Literary Postcard Story Contest
Leslie Stark, Jen Currin, Leslie Vryenhoek 42
Instrumentation
A fresh look at discarded technology, from a photographer who disassembles gadgets, lays out the bits “almost like a family portrait,” then drops them from the ceiling
Todd McLellan 45
An account of banging, crashing, yelling and general mayhem in a fifthwheel trailer at a quiet RV park, then a 911 call, then a swarm of guys in uniform
One Night at the Oceanview
J. Jill Robinson 54
Life in Language
A profile of Jay Powell and Vickie Jensen, partners in life and in four decades of work with west coast Aboriginal groups, documenting and teaching endangered languages
Constance Brissenden with Larry Loyie 58
The Geist Foundation PUBLISHER Stephen Osborne SENIOR EDITOR Mary Schendlinger assistant publisher Michal Kozlowski associate editor C.E. Coughlan e xecutive Patty Osborne circulation manager Kristin Cheung assistant EDITOR Chelsea Novak editorial assistant Sarah Hillier administrative assistants Jordan Abel, Jenny Kent, Kazuko Kusumoto, Daniel Zomparelli interns Andrea Bennett, Becky McEachern, Lauren Ogston, Jennesia Pedri, Dan Post editorial board Bartosz Barczak, Kevin Barefoot, Trevor Battye, Jill Boettger, Brad Cran, Melissa Edwards, Robert Everett-Green, Derek Fairbridge, Daniel Francis, Erinna Gilkison, Helen Godolphin, Leni T. Goggins, Lily Gontard, Michael Hayward, Gillian Jerome, Brian Lam, Sarah Leavitt, Sarah Maitland, Thad McIlroy, Ross Merriam, Billeh Nickerson, Eric Peterson, Leah Pires, Leah Rae, Debby Reis, Kris Rothstein, Norbert Ruebsaat, Jane Silcott, Paul Tough, Michelle van der Merwe, Carrie Villeneuve, Kathy Vito accountant Mindy Abramowitz, cga advertising & marketing Clevers Media cover Eric Uhlich web architects Metro Publisher composition Vancouver Desktop distribution Magazines Canada printed in canada by The Prolific Group first subscriber Jane Springer managing editor emeritus Barbara Zatyko PUBLISHED BY director
Support the Geist Writers and Artists Fund:
geist.com/donate
N OT E S & D I S PATC HE S
Stephen Osborne 10 Banker Poet
Norbert Ruebsaat 14 Heart and Soul
Daniel Collins 15 Phallic Blessing
James Pollock 17 Northwest Passage
Rhonda Waterfall 18 Saltspring to Étaples Myrl Coulter 21 Room Ten David Milne 22 Tugboat Nocturne F I N D I N GS
27 S. Bear Bergman, Unholy Disconnect; Doug Savage, Tarting Up Your Cubicle; Jonathan Ball, Clockfire; Craig Silverman, Hash Brownies Were Not Consumed; Salvatore Difalco, Better than TV; Sully, November: Virginia Woolf Dress; Paul McLaughlin, Why She Fights; Holy Old Dynamiting Jesus; David Lester, Tragic Act of Spin Doctoring; R.M. Patterson, First Supper; Rebecca Kraatz, Nurse Agnes; Jeff Lemire, No Excuses Boys!; and more CO M M E N T
Alberto Manguel 71 Metamorphoses Stephen Henighan 73 Divergence Daniel Francis 75 Sex, Drugs, Rock ’n’ Roll and the National Identity
D E PA RT M E N TS
George Webber 4 In Camera
Letters 6
Misha Glouberman & Sheila Heti 24 Charades Geist staff & correspondents 77 Endnotes, Noted Elsewhere, Off the Shelf
Meandricus 87 Puzzle
Melissa Edwards 88 Caught Mapping
On the cover Photograph of a disassembled rotary telephone by Todd McLellan, from “Instrumentation,” page 45.
Cover design by Eric Uhlich Geist is printed with vegetable-based inks, on 100% recycled paper. Subscriber copies are mailed in oxo-biodegradable plastic wrappers made by EPI Environmental Products Inc., in accordance with standards set by ASTM International, which develops international voluntary consensus standards.
IN CAMERA
Unit A, Ninth Floor A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know. —Diane Arbus
D
iane Arbus was one of the most influential photographers of the twentieth century.
She was a tiny woman, delicate, waif-like, with enormous green eyes and a curiosity that drew her into intimate, unseen and forbidden places, where she created portraits of startling power. Her work has challenged and inspired generations of photographers. In 1967 her photographs were featured in New Documents at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The critic John Gruen described her work as “brutal, daring and revealing.” Near the end of July 1971, Arbus committed suicide in her New York apartment. The autopsy concluded that she had swallowed barbiturates and slashed her wrists. Arbus’s lover, Marvin Israel, art director for Harper’s Bazaar, found her body in the bathtub. She was forty-eight years old. A year after her death, in 1972, she became the first American photographer to have her work exhibited at the Venice Biennale. Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph (a book compiled by her daughter Doon, and Marvin Israel), which accompanied the Museum of Modern Art travelling exhibition, has since been hailed by critics as one of the masterworks of post-war American photography. On a Friday afternoon in September 2009, I visited the Westbeth apartment building in the West Village of Manhattan, where Arbus had moved after the breakup of her marriage to Allan Arbus. The building had once been part of a Bell Laboratories site, and was converted into live-work spaces for New York artists in the late 1960s. The courtyard of the Westbeth is grey and cavernous. I could hear the faint oblique sounds of footsteps and voices nearby. A spacious gallery on the ground floor was filled with large paintings by the artist Paul Muryani, who was sitting behind the desk. I asked him if he had ever heard of Diane Arbus. “Yeah,” he said, “I was living here on the night she killed herself. The cops said to me, ‘Hey kid, do you want to come in and see this?’ I was about ten years old. I went and had a look.” Paul Muryani was now forty-seven years old, just a year younger than Arbus had been when she died. Later I spoke with the building manager, who said that Arbus had lived in Unit A on the ninth floor, but he didn’t know the apartment number. He phoned a maintenance man, who took me up to the ninth floor in the elevator. It was just about 4:00 p.m. when we walked from the elevator along the hallway over to Unit A. The polished linoleum shimmered like the surface of a bathtub. I stopped, held my camera very still and released the shutter. When I got back to Calgary I looked in my copy of Diane Arbus Revelations, a compilation of Arbus’s work published in 2003, and found on page 207 a little sketch of a floor plan that Arbus had made of her apartment in the Westbeth. She had lived in #945. —George Webber Page 4 • GEIST 81 • Summer 2011
Unit A, ninth floor, Westbeth apartment building, New York, September 25, 2009.
George Webber’s most recent book is Last Call, published in 2010 by Rocky Mountain Books. His photo essay “Vanishing Point,” in Geist 77, is a finalist for a 2011 Western Magazine Award. See more of his work at geist.com. Summer 2011 • GEIST 81 • Page 5
GEIST Geist is published four times a year by The Geist Foundation. Contents copyright © 2011 The Geist Foundation. All rights reserved. Subscriptions: in Canada: Individuals $27.80 (4 issues); Institutions $31; in the United States: $35.80; elsewhere: $35.80. Visa and MasterCard accepted. Correspondence and inquiries: subscriptions@geist.com, advertising@geist.com, letters@geist.com, editor@geist.com. Include sase with Canadian postage or irc with all submissions and queries. #210 – 111 West Hastings Street, Vancouver, BC Canada v6b 1h4. Submission guidelines are available at geist. com. issn 1181-6554. Geist swaps its subscriber list with other cultural magazines for one-time mailings. Please contact us if you prefer not to receive these mailings. Publications Mail Agreement 40069678 Registration No. 07582 Return undeliverable Canadian addresses to: Circulation Department, #210 – 111 West Hastings Street, Vancouver, BC Canada v6b 1h4. Email: geist@geist.com Tel: (604) 681-9161, 1-888-geist-eh; Fax: (604) 677-6319; Web: geist.com Geist is a member of Magazines Canada and the Magazines Association of BC. Indexed in the Canadian Literary Periodicals Index and available on microfilm from University Microfilms Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA. The Geist Foundation receives assistance from private donors, the Tula Foundation, the Canada Council, the BC Arts Council and the BC Gaming Branch. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Periodical Fund (CPF) for our publishing activities.
special thanks to the tula foundation
www.geist.com
LETTERS
Clos e-up s loved Annabel Lyon’s intimate profile of Edith Iglauer (“Eye for Detail,” Geist 78-79). I read it on my iPhone this morning and not even the tiny screen could prevent me from finishing it. —Ivy Young, Roberts Creek BC Read the full profile of Edith Iglauer at geist.com.
I
Thank you for George Fetherling’s wonderful profile of Don Stewart, proprietor of MacLeod’s Books in Vancouver (“Man of a Hundred Thousand Books,” No. 80). It is perfect; perfectly true. Yes, Stewart is a scholar trapped in the role of a bookseller. And his colleague Bill Hoffer was a feudist. Terrific job. —Alan Twigg, BC BookWorld, Vancouver A great in-depth article about a fellow bookseller. I have talked to Don, but after reading this I get a much better sense of the man in a business that has become very challenging. Congrats, Don, and thank you for allowing a story of your life to be shared. —Duncan McLaren, St. Catharines ON Read the full profile of Don Stewart at geist.com. B eing Norma l love Taylor Brown-Evans’s comic “In the Centre,” about being enrolled in a school for kids with disabilities (No. 78-79). Who knew that being “normal” could be a disadvantage? Well . . . actually, I write and tour oneperson shows about living with bipolar disorder, anxiety and psychosis, and I know that humour is the way to engage people. —Victoria Maxwell, Halfmoon Bay BC Read “In the Centre” at geist.com.
I
Page 6 • GEIST 81 • Summer 2011
T he H enighan E ffect fter reading Stephen Henighan’s (very well-written) article “Phony War,” about climate change and the food shortages to come (Geist 77), I just can’t keep my fingers still. I’m glad he’s got his head out of the sand, but his nihilism makes me want to drown myself in glacial meltwater. It’s the epitome of the “every-man-for-himself,” city-slicker attitude. Growing our own food, as Henighan’s enlightened friends suggest, is most definitely the single best strategy to save ourselves from the coming chaos. But if couples in Toronto think that just means moving north, building a fence and starting a farm, we face a bleak future indeed. It takes more than two people to productively cultivate a sufficient diet, and if you’ve got six or seven on a big plot of land it can be damn well fun. I’m not suggesting a commune, though, either. Community gardening is the answer you’re looking for. The system in Toronto is not so great, granted— plots are in awkward places around town, and then there’s the question of where to get started if you’re new to the game, and government support is lagging. But a huge number of people in Ontario are passionate about grassroots community gardening. Dismissed as quaint, homely hobbyists, most realized long ago that growing our own food is a necessity, and they are struggling against the status quo to realize the shift we need. Don’t wait for the city or the province to lead the way on this; their support will come round in ten years when the demand for soil and water toxicity tests skyrocket, and they have to hire more environmental technicians and community landscapers. I agree with Henighan that the problem is overwhelming, and that the collapse
A
LETTERS
of the system we know is inevitable. But savvy individuals like him are just going to have to lead the way for others. If the community garden in your neighbourhood is small and crappy, make it bigger. If the people who work there are strange, bring your friends and family along to help break the ice. I don’t know where we’re going to put millions of hungry, displaced Americans three decades from now; but if we have our shit together when they get here, we’ll have a much better shot at working it out. It’s going to be a grassroots revolution, so grab a shovel. Henighan’s writing is wonderful, by the way—it’s just the message I wanted to hash out this time. —S. Butler, Kingston ON I am so glad to read this article, as depressing as it is. Henighan is such a lucid, honest writer. Even the worst darkness acquires a glitter when he writes about it. We all do our hopeful little bit—but our civilization is doomed, and the world our children will know. I was in Detroit a couple weeks ago and struck by this—the empty houses and roads and endless parking lots are the evidence of a fallen empire, but not just an American empire—it is ours too. It is our consuming, capitalist, refusing-toface-reality empire. Particularly chilling is Henighan’s image of well-armed Americans surging north. The only way that climate change can be halted is by massive governmental and societal shifts—laws as well as consciousness. No government on the planet has the will to do this. Even Norway, so green in many ways, is a major investor in . . . the Alberta tar sands! Yikes. Thanks as ever, SH! —Karen Connelly, Toronto In his essay “The BookNet Conspiracy” (Geist 78-79), Stephen Henighan warns that book sales figures compiled by BookNet Canada
will drive book publishing decisions to the point where the work of new and interesting writers will be ignored. As a working book editor, I find this alarmist scenario unrecognizable. Sure, we think hard about potential sales, but we have been doing that since Gutenberg and we had good methods for assessing sales long before BookNet came along. In fact BookNet is not that helpful; many publishers have quit subscribing because they found it is not accurate enough. And while it’s true that the financial squeeze on publishers caused by big retail, declining reading rates, bad economic conditions, etc., has made us ever more sales-conscious, we are not so brutally stupid that we think sales can only be predicted by past performance. It’s not just Carol Shields: every season books that shouldn’t do well take off, and vice versa. There are thousands of examples. We know this truth better than anyone else because our companies live or die by it. That is why we will never just go by the numbers and will look at every good manuscript that comes before us and try to figure out if it is going to be this season’s unexpected hit. The accountants would like the world Henighan imagines to be true, but by the time they have been through one publishing season they learn with absolute finality that it’s not and never will be, as long as writers are writers and readers are readers. —Anonymous, Cyberspace Read Stephen Henighan’s essays at geist.com. Wave Theory he 20th Anniversary Geist Collector’s Issue (No. 78-79) is beautiful. Thanks so much. It looks like I won’t be the only one thoroughly enjoying it—my two-year-old was
T
Summer 2011 • GEIST 81 • Page 7
LETTERS
quite inspired by the photograph accompanying “The Lost Art of Waving.” —Amy Girard, Burnaby BC Read “The Lost Art of Waving” and Stephen Osborne’s other writings at geist.com.
Attribution love Jane Silcott’s story “Lurching Man,” about a late-night encounter (No. 78-79), and I appreciate her honesty throughout. I’m confused on just one point: what’s an “adjectival person”? —Merope Hoopus, Ottawa Jane Silcott has favoured Geist with a number of stories whose subjects take adjectives. Visit geist.com to meet “Natty Man” (No. 60) and “Gangly Man” (No. 69) as well as “Lurching Man.”
I
Comings and G oings n opposing immigration to Canada by Asians and Blacks, Stephen Leacock was “a man of his time,” as Daniel Francis writes (“Canada’s Funnyman: The Flip Side,” Geist 76). This view might be a little more understandable had Leacock not been an immigrant himself. It reminds me of a day I stood on a Toronto subway platform, when two men started taunting a Pakistani man in a security guard uniform. “Why don’t you go back where you came from?” they roared in the broadest possible Scottish accents. —Nigel Spencer, Montreal Read Daniel Francis’s essays at geist.com.
I
B rain Wave emory Test,” Veronica Gaylie’s story about her mother at the
“M
Page 8 • GEIST 81 • Summer 2011
LETTERS
Brain Centre (No. 78-79), is beautiful, witty and whimsical, but most of all, touching in the way it brings us the light and love of Mrs. Gaylie. Her physician should get a copy of the story—it may be the best notes he will ever have about how to provide good patient care. Thanks for warming my heart. —Shirley, Vancouver Read “Memory Test” at geist.com. Ru s h Hour f all that many Rush fans really were Ayn Rand fans, as Derek Fairbridge suggests in his review of Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage (at geist.com, and in No. 78-79), Atlas Shrugged: Part 1 would have done better at the box office. The key value in the film, though, is the moral warning against wearing open-chested kimonos in public. That danger cannot be overstated. —James Baker, Vancouver
I
P l anet M om egarding Jill Boettger’s review of the anthology Double Lives: Writing and Motherhood (at geist.com, and in No. 71) . . . You mean I am not the only crazed, anxious writer out here alone in parenting wilderness? Thank the Lord! Sometimes I’m sure I’m the only sleepless madwoman with deep thoughts, relentless ambition and not a stitch of true solitude to hack away at them. —P. Portal, Victoria
R
send your letter to: The Editor, Geist letters@geist.com Fax 604-677-6319 #210 – 111 W. Hastings Street Vancouver, BC v6b 1h4 Letters to Geist may be edited for clarity, brevity and decorum. Authors of published letters will receive a Geist Map, suitable for framing.
Summer 2011 • GEIST 81 • Page 9
Notes & Dispatches Banker Poet Stephen Os borne
Robert Service, once the wealthiest author in Paris, died in 1958, but there he was outside the window of the Café Kathmandu
W
hen the well-known poet Robert Service appeared on the sidewalk outside the Café Kathmanduon a Friday evening last summer, he had been dead for more than fifty years; those who recognized him or, as they said later, thought they recognized him, presumed that the man they recognized must have been someone who bore a likeness to the “real” Robert Service, who was not real at all or at least not real any longer since the death of Robert Service in 1958, but the man seen outside the Café Kathmandu that evening surely could not share in the authorship of “The Shooting of Dan McGrew,” “The Cremation of Sam McGee” or any of the well-loved verses Page 10 • GEIST 81 • Summer 2011
written or composed by the Robert Service who died in 1958 on the 11th of September. We were sitting at the window table in the Café Kathmandu, my companion and I, eating Bhende Chili chicken, prawns Jhingey Maachhaa and green salad dressed with miso when we saw or recognized Robert Service for ourselves on the sidewalk, only a few feet away on the other side of the glass, leafing through a copy of the Georgia Straight with his wife or girlfriend at his side, a younger woman with strawcoloured hair, who rested a hand on his forearm and leaned toward him as she studied the newspaper. The Georgia Straight restaurant critic had assigned a
Golden Plate to the Café Kathmandu in the Asian Cuisine category, and it occurred to us that Robert Service and his wife or girlfriend might be reading the reviewer’s opinion of the Café Kathmandu before deciding whether or not to enter. The two of them remained on the sidewalk for some time; so long in fact that we stopped noticing them, and would have forgotten them entirely had they not eventually stepped right up next to us and peered over our heads into the Café Kathmandu through the window, only inches away from us, to which a menu had been taped offering passersby in the second person your chance to discover authentic Nepali food for the first time: Choilaa, your choice of tender shredded chicken or pork s immered with a distinctively Kathmandu-style spice mix with lemon, garlic, onion and fresh coriander; Aaloo achaar, chilled sesame-lemon potato salad flavoured with Himalayan peppercorns and fenugreek; Bhutuwaa, your choice of goat, chicken or tofu marinated in savoury spices and pan fried; Bhatmaas, toasted soybeans, quick-fried with fresh ginger, garlic and chili garnished with fresh coriander; Momo, steamed dumplings with savoury fillings of vegetable or pork, served with tomato and cilantro chutney; Kothay, golden fried dumplings, crunchy on the outside, succulent filling on the inside, with your choice of vegetable or pork, served with tomato and cilantro chutney; and as I mentioned, Bhende Chili, which my companion and I order every time we visit the Café Kathmandu, our choice of savoury marinated chicken or tofu
photo: SAM MCGEE’S CABIN, WHITEHORSE, by mandelbrot
N OT E S & D I S PATC H E S
cubes (we always choose the chicken), sautéed with onions and green and red peppers, along with Jhingey Maachhaa, fat prawns rolled in spices and sautéed with garlic. But neither Robert Service nor his wife or girlfriend paid any attention to the menu taped to the window glass; they continued instead to peer in over the top of the menu and over our heads into the depths of the Café Kathmandu. Seeing Robert Service close up and from slightly below the chin, a view not duplicated in the many portraits of Robert Service that can be found on the internet, we were certain that he couldn’t be anyone other than the Robert Service, the most successful, if not the greatest, of the Banker Poets and the only one of the Ambulance Poets known to have liberated a town in the First World War: a short, wiry man in pale trousers and a creamy shirt tucked in at the waist. He carried
a fanny pack or belly bag slung on a wide belt over his shoulder in the insouciant way that men in photographs similarly dressed in the 1920s might sling a cardigan sweater casually over a shoulder. His hair was combed straight back to reveal the narrow forehead and the widow’s peak, and the mischievous look, a “gleam” that never left his eyes even in photographs taken in his old age, in a perfect oval face, the long, straight nose with the slightest swelling at the tip; you could say that he was almost a smug-looking man, a man with the look of someone who maintained himself at a degree of removal; he had always been the quintessential observer of himself, a role that he played throughout his career and his life, which became the same thing for him after the success of Songs of a Sourdough, and Ballads of a Cheechako, two slim volumes, the royalties on which amounted to five times his salary at the Imperial Bank of
Summer 2011 • GEIST 81 • Page 11
N OT E S & D I S PATC H E S
Commerce in Dawson City, and soon made him reputedly the wealthiest author living in Paris, France, according to an item on Wikipedia that says he liked to dress as a working man and walk the streets, blending in and observing everything around him. My companion and I did not comment on these or any aspects of the life or career of Robert Service while he and his wife or girlfriend continued to peer into the Café Kathmandu over our heads; we seemed to have made a silent pact to ignore him, and her, if possible, in order to preserve our so-called personal space at the window table at the Café Kathmandu, where we had been regular customers and well known to the proprietor since shortly after he opened the place five years ago on this section of Commercial Drive badly in need of a clean well-lighted place with interesting good food such as that listed in the menu taped to the glass above our heads. We were thinking these or other thoughts when Robert Service strode directly into the Café Kathmandu through the front door, having turned away from the window, we presumed, without our noticing, leaving his wife or girlfriend waiting on the sidewalk by the still open front door, and at just this moment the proprietor of the Café Kathmandu came out from the kitchen carrying a jug of water; he paused at the counter as Robert Service approached jauntily with one hand thrust out in a jaunty manner; the word jaunty comes to mind as the term that Robert Service often applied to himself in both of his autobiographies: “jauntily I walked,” he might write, as he might as often write, “gladly the sun smiled”; he was undaunted all his life by the pathetic fallacy, often conjoined to the inverted predicate favoured by editors at Time magazine: “resplendent were leaf and blade,” he once wrote, “a jocund wind Page 12 • GEIST 81 • Summer 2011
trumpeted.” When my companion and I looked over again, Robert Service was entering the men’s washroom; moments later we were deep in conversation. When we looked up there was no sign of either of them, inside the Café Kathmandu or out on the sidewalk, and neither my companion nor I have seen Robert Service or his wife or girlfriend since.
T
he proprietor of the Café Kathmandu had never heard of Robert Service, he said, when he came by our table with the water jug and I informed him of the identity of his illustrious visitor. Furthermore, he said when I pressed him, he had never heard “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” or “The Call of the Yukon.” I recited a few well-known lines to test his cultural memory— there are strange things done in the midnight sun by the men who moil for gold, a bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute Saloon—but nothing rang a bell with the proprietor of the Café Kathmandu, who had been a citizen for more than a decade and was a wellread man familiar with the works of Margaret Laurence, Alice Munro and Mordecai Richler; the first Canadian books he read, he had told me once, were biographies of Louis Riel and William Lyon Mackenzie, and Stanley Ryerson’s Marxist history of Canada. Later in the week I dropped in at the Café Kathmandu with a recording of Johnny Cash reciting “The Cremation of Sam McGee.” I would have thought that Robert Service was mandatory reading for new citizens, I said to my friend the proprietor, and explained that whereas other, betterknown Banker Poets such as T.S. Eliot and Walter de la Mare achieved a certain literary status, Robert Service achieved great wealth and enormous
N OT E S & D I S PATC H E S
fame; two of his poems became Hollywood movies, and he played himself in The Spoilers, with John Wayne and Marlene Dietrich, as Robert Service, a poet sitting in a saloon in Alaska, at work on a poem, as he explains in the movie to Marlene Dietrich, the madam of the saloon, about a lady who’s known as Lou, and in the movie it is Marlene Dietrich who gives the poem its famous title, “The Shooting of Dan McGrew.” None of the other Ambulance Poets, I said to the proprietor of the Café Kathmandu, of whom there were so many— Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, e.e. cummings, Harry Crosby, Dashiell Hammett, et al.—ever liberated a town, as Robert Service liberated the town of Lille, France, in 1917. There is no question that Robert Service led a charmed life: he was able to pop off three or four poems at a time during a stroll in the countryside; he wrote his autobiography twice, and in the second one he had the opportunity of describing himself writing the first one. I had chosen the Johnny Cash recital of “The Cremation of Sam McGee” for its celebrity lustre, despite the cowardly revision that Johnny Cash makes in the second line, when he says toil for gold rather than moil for gold, a point of difference outside the scope of my discussion with my friend the proprietor of the Café Kathmandu, who, I admit, was not impressed by “The Cremation of Sam McGee” although he was suitably impressed to hear the voice of Johnny Cash reciting it accompanied so to speak by the large photographs of the mountains of Nepal that decorate the walls of the Café Kathmandu. I don’t understand this poem, he said: it invokes the midnight sun in the first line and then tells a story that could only happen in the darkness of winter. I admitted that this was a weakness in the poem that I had detected in childhood but learned quickly to overlook. Aha,
said my friend the proprietor of the Café Kathmandu, there you have it! I told him that Robert Service had taken the name Sam McGee from a man who lived in Whitehorse in 1905. When the poem became famous around the world, so did the real Sam McGee, who was haunted for the rest of his life by the story of his demise and cremation on the shore of Lac Labarge.
I
n 1903, Robert Service fell in love with Constance MacLean, the daughter of the first mayor of Vancouver, the man who established the city treasury by fining the operators of bawdy houses twenty dollars each. Constance MacLean spurned the advances of Robert Service and is unnamed in both of his autobiographies, but the first poem sold by Robert Service, to Munsey’s Magazine in New York, which earned him five dollars, names her five times in six stanzas describing her entrance at a country dance. The poem opens with a rancher who chewed his supper in a cheerful sort of way, and murmured, There’s a dance on for tonight, and closes, as do many of the works of Robert Service, with an envoi: And their hearts will ever beat a sad refrain For the one thing they can’t forget, the One they’ll e’er regret, The dancing, fair, entrancing Miss Maclean. A photograph of Robert Service liberating the town of Lille, France, and another of Robert Service posing with Marlene Dietrich can be seen in Robert Service: Under the Spell of the Yukon, by Enid Mallory (Heritage House). Stephen Osborne is publisher and editor-inchief of Geist. He is also the award-winning writer of Ice & Fire: Dispatches from the New World and dozens of shorter works, many of which can be read at geist.com. Summer 2011 • GEIST 81 • Page 13