Books: Rhyming Was His Ruin

PLOUGHMAN OF THE MOON — Robert Service— Dodd, Mead ($3.50).

“I was always in love with rhyme,” confesses Robert Service. “If two lines could be made to clink it seemed to go a long way to justify them. . . . Rhyming has my ruin been. With less deftness I might have produced real poetry.” Many a middle-aged American would not trade The Shooting of Dan McGrew or The Cremation of Sam McGee for all the “real poetry” in the language. Robert W. Service rarely shows up in the better anthologies or in college English courses.

But in money-talking terms of copies sold, he is a ranking American poet.

Readers of his autobiographical Plough man of the Moon may be surprised to learn that Rhymester Service was once a Scottish bank clerk. Born in Lancashire, England, he was brought up in Scotland by his grandfather and three Bible-addicted spinster aunts.

As a boy, young “Wullie” Service went to work in a bank and began writing verses during office hours. Even then his attitude toward his craft was that of an artisan. His favorite technique was to plot the meter, write down the rhyming words at the end of each line, last of all fill in the lines behind them. In one of his early poems “there was a couplet I liked” : Love’s exultant roundelay Issues in a wail of pain.

“In fact I was so tickled with it that, being Scotch, I saved it up and used it on three later occasions. . . .”

“Where Are You Going To?” When he reached 21, Service shipped for Canada to begin his life as a rolling stone. Freedom was his obsession, and in the New World he found plenty of it. One day, in the brawling San Francisco of Barbary Coast days, he stared at his last $10 bill, and asked himself: “Young fellow, where are you going to?”

The answer was the Yukon town of Whitehorse—as a bank clerk once more, but a bank clerk with what he calls an “author complex.” In Whitehorse he was not particularly popular. (“I have never been popular. To be popular is to win the applause of people whose esteem is often not worth the winning.”) His one social accomplishment was his recitation of Casey at the Bat, Gunga Din, The Face on the Barroom Floor.

One day he decided to compose some thing of his own for use at a church concert. “It was a Saturday night, and from the various bars I heard sounds of revelry.

The line popped into my mind: A bunch of the boys were whooping it up, and it stuck there.” That night, in the teller’s cage of the bank, Service wrote his famed Shooting of Dan McGrew aided by the bank guard who fired at him, under the impression that he was a burglar.

The Bard of Whitehorse. A month later, walking home from a party in the moonlight, a new line came to him: “There are strange things done in the midnight sun. . . . Though I did not know it [The Cremation of Sam McGee] was to be the keystone of my success.” For more than a year “McGrew” and “McGee” lay with a sheaf of other manuscripts among Service’s shirts. At last his “author complex” drove him to send them off to a publisher with oo to pay for 104 their private printing. The composing-room crew, who set up the ringing, romping lines in type, were so enthusiastic that the publisher returned Service’s $100 and decided to take a chance on the book himself. He claims that Songs of a Sourdough sold 1,000,000 copies.

Thereafter, Bank Clerk Service answered to the epithet of “Bard” and became Whitehorse’s leading celebrity. After repeating his first success with Ballads of a Cheechako and a popular novel of the Gold Rush, The Trail of ’98, he was free to live and wander as he liked.

Now waiting in Hollywood to return to his French home, Autobiographer Service is in no rush to bring his reminiscences up to date. (Ploughman of the Moon is only the first half of Robert Service’s autobiography. He ends it as he sets off for the Balkans as a pre-World War I correspondent for the Toronto Star.) He is “only 70.” “If I am allowed,” he says, “I may write the second half of my life when I am 80. Perhaps it will be the more interesting.”