The British-Canadian poet Robert W. Service (1874-1958) was born this day 150 years ago. I’m quite certain I posted on him here many years ago, but later trashed it in a one-time frenzy a while back when I decided to prune back un-read posts. But I can hardly ignore this benchmark! And by now, the Travalanche section on literary people has grown substantially, so we give it another go.
I can’t recall how I first learned about this quirky fellow, but I’ve certainly known about him since my young manhood. Either I acquired one of his books (second hand) or stumbled on him while idly kicking around a library. There is no substitute for that, by the way. I still do it, when I’m near one. Walk into a library with no objective, just as one browses in a store, or surfs the internet, just to see what I will randomly stumble over. I’ve learned much I mightn’t have learned otherwise in this fashion. You’ll forgive me for the profanity I hope, but it’s the diametric opposite of the fucking algorithms that are converting everyone into closed-minded, incurious tribalists. Get out of your comfort zone! Now! TODAY!
Anyway, I instantly cultivated great affection for this populist poet’s best known work, which is best described as rhymes of the Frozen North. Service lived in Whitehorse and Dawson roughly from the years 1904 to 1912, in the wake of the Alaskan Gold Rush. His work has been compared to Kipling’s, and I always mentally pair him with Jack London. Its strong western flavor also calls to mind writers like Bret Harte. I recently learned that Service was a favorite of Jean Shepherd, by the way — he used to love to read him over the radio.
Service was British by birth, born in Lancashire, raised in Scotland. He came to North America as a young man, bummed around the entire West Coast, from California all the way North. A lot of the time he worked as bank clerk (much like our good friend Mr. O. Henry). When stationed at a bank branch in Whitehorse, he was part of a group that recited things like “Casey at the Bat” to kill those cold dark evenings. Having dabbled in poetry all his life, at this stage, Service decided to apply himself seriously, having grown tired of reciting the same old ones over and over.
Service’s best known poem is almost certainly “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” which was included in his best selling book The Songs of a Sourdough in 1907. It was adapted into silent movies in 1915 and 1924. The latter version, starring Lew Cody had to have been at least a partial influence on Chaplin’s The Gold Rush. The movie Dangerous Nan McGrew (1930) starring Helen Kane, was clearly a riff on it. Clyde Cook starred in a 1931 parody called The Shooting of Dan the Duck. Tex Avery clearly loved the poem: he adapted it into two animated cartoon shorts, Dangerous Dan McFoo (1939) and The Shooting of Dan McGoo (1945). There is a reference to it in the song “Put the Blame on Mame”, sung by Rita Hayworth in the movie Gilda (1946). The very Canadian Guy Lombardo adapted the poem into a song in 1949. As late as 1964, Margaret Rutherford recited the poem as Miss Marple in the movie Murder Most Foul. And Ronald Reagan was still reciting the poem when he was President in the 1980s.
Service’s second best known poem is — get this — “The Cremation of Sam McGee”. Haha, why tinker with a successful formula?
After his Yukon period, enriched by his phenomenal book sales, Service moved to France, where he covered World War One for the Toronto Star, and wrote several novels and other works. In 1942, he had a cameo in the movie The Spoilers by that other Homer of the Great White North, Rex Beach, which allowed him to cavort with the likes of John Wayne and Marlene Dietrich. This was back when poets of the page could be stars. Today, along with other accessible poets like Kipling, Burns, and Longfellow, Service is largely sneered at by intelligentsia, and unread by everyone else. But take it from an old vaudevillian. Stay corny, my friends. It won’t keep you young, but it will keep you from caring.