Poets seldom achieve widespread popularity and wealth, but Robert William Service did. His humorous and accessible poetry reaped a worldwide audience and made him famous — so famous that the Yukon cabin he lived in from 1909-1912 is a tourist attraction and historical site, preserved to this day. Movies and animated films have been made from the yarns he wove throughout his poetry and novels. Performers like Hank Snow, Jim Ratts, Country Joe Macdonald, Johnny Cash, and humorist Jean Shepherd have recorded his poetry. A Canadian postage stamp bears his image. Streets and public schools have been named in his honor, and he even played himself in the 1942 film, The Spoilers, with Marlene Dietrich.

Best of all, he was a pipe smoker. His autobiographies and poetry are filled with the mention of pipes, one poem entirely dedicated to the subject of pipe smokers:

Service has high regard for the character of pipe smokers. Perhaps more important is his delivery: easy and pleasant to read. While considered mere doggerel by the literary elite, Service's poetry tells stories in narrative style with precise rhythm and memorable imagery. Northrop Frye, a prominent literary theorist/critic, said it was not serious poetry but popular poetry. He was certainly accurate on one count: Service was enormously popular. He was called "the Bard of the Yukon" and "the Canadian Kipling." In Ploughman of the Moon (1945), the first of his two autobiographies, Service said, "Thus early I discovered that I would rather win the approval of a barman than the praise of a professor."

Early Service

Born in England in 1874, Robert Service wrote his first lines of poetry on his sixth birthday. After high school, he attended college at the University of Glasgow to pursue a degree in English literature, but he lasted only a year. He became quickly disenchanted with higher education, especially after writing a paper calling into question the sexual purity of Ophelia in Hamlet. His interpretation was called "obscene" by his professor. Service immediately challenged that teacher to a fight, but his invitation was declined and he left school shortly afterward, his enthusiasm for education drowned as thoroughly as Ophelia herself.

He became a banker, but he wanted to experience the great outdoors. At age 21, he traveled to Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada, to become a cowboy. He drifted through California and the Western states, doing menial jobs as a farm laborer or store clerk and barely surviving, all while meeting colorful characters who would eventually become part of his poetry. He did return to his schooling briefly at Victoria College. His motivation was to impress a young lady who wanted an educated husband with a secure future. Unfortunately, his school enrollment did not fulfill those requirements, the relationship did not advance, and Service quit school again.

He cowboyed around Vancouver Island until, in 1903, he took a job as a bank clerk in Victoria. A year later, the bank sent him to work in their Yukon Whitehorse branch. Whitehorse had been established in 1897 as a campground for prospectors on their way to Dawson City and the Yukon gold rush.

One night as he took his customary walk, he passed a saloon, and the sounds of revelry brought a phrase into his head: "A bunch of the boys were whooping it up." He knew he had something and rushed to the bank to write it down, and such was his hurry that he was mistaken for an intruder by the bank guard and was shot at, though not hit. Unfazed, he wrote through the night, and by morning one of his most famous poems, "The Shooting of Dan McGrew," was complete. Here's the first stanza:

A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute saloon;
The kid that handles the music-box was hitting a jag-time tune;
Back of the bar, in a solo game, sat Dangerous Dan McGrew,
And watching his luck was his light-o'-love, the lady that's known as Lou.

No pipes appear in this poem, though they are integral in many others. It's a narrative about loneliness, love, and betrayal, with just a bit of humor and irony mixed in. Even more humorous is his next poem, "The Cremation of Sam McGee," which begins:

Now Sam McGee was from Tennessee, where the cotton blooms and blows.
Why he left his home in the South to roam 'round the Pole, God only knows.
He was always cold, but the land of gold seemed to hold him like a spell;
Though he'd often say in his homely way that "he'd sooner live in hell."

Sam complains constantly of the cold, and when he becomes ill and obviously about to die, his partner promises to cremate his remains. As serious as the subject may sound, it's handled with humor, and the poem became one of Service's most popular. He composed it quickly while walking around the woods one night, writing it down the next morning.

The Beginnings of Success

He continued writing, much of his poetry inspired by the tall tales and stories he heard from the colorful characters living in that wild part of the world. When he had built a large enough collection, he sent a manuscript to his father in Toronto with payment to have it printed into booklets that he could give away as Christmas gifts. His purpose was merely to amuse his neighbors and friends, but his poetry had a life of its own.

In the shop that was printing the booklet, the printers were amused and started reading the poems out loud as they worked. A salesman who enjoyed the poems decided to see if they were worthy of more widespread publication. Using the galley proofs from Service's booklet, he quickly sold 1700 copies in advance.

Service was surprised to receive a check for ten percent of the sales royalties. That book, which he had titled Songs of a Sourdough (1907), went through seven printings before its official release. It was renamed The Spell of the Yukon and Other Verses by a U.S. publisher, presumably to take advantage of the popularity of Jack London's gold-rush stories and novels. It was immediately successful, and the printer in Toronto sold 15 printings of Songs of a Sourdough in 1907. By 1917, it had been reprinted 43 times. That book alone would earn Service $100,000 (a little more than $3 million in today's currency).

That's quite a change in fortune for someone who has mostly been challenged just to afford meals. The bank transferred him to Dawson in 1908, where he met and talked with veterans of the Yukon Gold Rush, which had already passed 10 years previously. These miners were full of memories and stories and Service listened. That year he published his second book of verse, Ballads of a Cheechako, and it too was enormously successful.

A Professional Writer

When his employer decided to transfer him back to Whitehorse in 1909, he quit to become a writer fulltime and rented the two-room cabin that would later become an historical landmark. He sometimes walked through the woods all night, he slept days, and he would go for days without leaving his writing den. After five months, he had finished his first novel, The Trail of '98, and sold it to a publisher. Like his two previous publications, it was an immediate best-seller.

His concentration was intense, and he describes his writing process during that time in Ploughman of the Moon:

I used to write on the coarse rolls of paper used by paper-hangers, pinning them on the wall and printing my verses in big charcoal letters. Then I would pace back and forth before them, studying them, repeating them, trying to make them perfect. I wanted them to appeal to the eye as well as to the ear. I tried to avoid any literary quality. Verse, not poetry, is what I was after — something the man in the street would take notice of and the sweet old lady would paste in her album; something the schoolboy would spout and the fellow in a pub would quote.

Service was now unequivocally a rich man. He traveled to Europe, enjoying Paris and the French Riviera, and he moved to Paris in 1913. That year he married Germaine Bourgoin, who was 13 years younger, and they would remain together until his death at age 84. She lived to be 102.

Service tried to enlist at age 40 when WWI started, but his varicose veins caused him to be turned down. He experienced the war as a correspondent for the Toronto Star, and in 1916 he was arrested in Dunkirk, France, near the Belgian border, mistaken as a spy and nearly executed. After that, he worked as an ambulance driver and stretcher bearer, and he turned those experiences into a book of war poetry, Rhymes of a Red Cross Man, in 1916. Though a civilian, he received three medals of commendation for his service.

When the war ended, Service continued living in Paris, where he would enjoy the sophisticated wardrobe and habits of a wealthy man during the day, but dress in workman's clothing and hang around the roughest of dive bars in the seediest parts of town at night, socializing with the working class people he was most comfortable with and always listening to their stories.

Through the 1920s, Service wrote mainly thriller novels like The Poisoned Paradise (1922) and The Roughneck (1923). In the 1930s he visited the USSR and wrote a satirical poem about Lenin, "Ballad of Lenin's Tomb," which the Soviets did not appreciate. An excerpt may explain why:

Where Lenin lies the red flag flies, and the rat-grey workers wait
To tread the gloom of Lenin's Tomb, where the Comrade lies in state.
With lagging pace they scan his face, so weary yet so firm;
For years a score they've laboured sore to save him from the worm.
The Kremlin walls are grimly grey, but Lenin's Tomb is red,
And pilgrims from the Sour Lands say: "He sleeps and is not dead."
Before their eyes in peace he lies, a symbol and a sign,
And as they pass that dome of glass they see - a God Divine.
So Doctors plug him full of dope, for if he drops to dust,
So will collapse their faith and hope, the whole combine will bust.

His works were never translated or printed in Russian, and he was omitted from the world literature taught there. In WWII the Nazis also hated him, because he had satirized Hitler in verse as well. He fled France before the invasion, during which German troops arrived at his home to arrest him. Authoritarians don't respect satire, at least not when it's aimed at them.

He and Germaine lived in California during the war, and he would often visit troops and recite his poetry to help boost morale. They returned to France after the war and found their home utterly destroyed, but they rebuilt and lived there for the rest of his life, which was busy. He continued writing at a solid pace, publishing six more books.

Robert Service, Pipe Smoker

Two of his books were autobiographies, Ploughman of the Moon (1945) and Harper of Heaven (1948). Harper of Heaven was unavailable for review during research for this article. There may be more about his pipes in that work, but his first, Ploughman of the Moon, contains 33 references to his pipe smoking, though not with details. He often describes lighting and smoking a pipe, but does not mention brands and only once references a shape from the time he gave up poetry to pursue sports before moving to Canada:

[My] chums were stout lads who read nothing but the sporting papers, drank beer and affected an exaggerated manliness. I played up to them, buying a bull-dog pipe and tilting my bowler at a sporting angle. I must say I felt better living physically than mentally. My thoughts went outward instead of inward, dwelling on food and drink and keeping fit.

Further in regard to pipes in that book, his father figures prominently and was an obvious influence:

All evening he [Service's father] would read his paper and smoke. In smoking, too, he carried out his passion for economy. He smoked clay pipes that cost a penny each. He would cut and mix his own tobacco, and when his pipe was smoked he would knock the dottle onto the mantelpiece. When he loaded his pipe again he would carefully place the ashes on top. Then when the pipe got too dirty he would bury it in the fireglow and bake it clean. He always bought the Evening Citizen, which he read from beginning to end. For half an hour he would peruse it; then light his pipe and puff for another half-hour. As he smoked in silence his eyes would seem stern with reverie, though I don't think he had a single thought in his mind. But he surely enjoyed his pipe and his paper.

Service also remembered a great aunt who smoked a pipe:

I remember an old lady, a sister of my grandmother. She had a face as delicate as a cameo, and she was handsome in an aristocratic way. But she wore a mutch, and she used to sit by the fire with a cutty pipe in her mouth, smoking strong tobacco that savoured of the pit.

His own preferred tobaccos remain a mystery. His autobiography mentions tobacco in the time he was saving to move to Canada: "... I had to save money. No more chocolate bars and sweet biscuits. Except for tobacco, laundry and necessary clothing, I did not spend a penny." Also from that time period, he does mention shag tobacco: "I spent my sixpences in music-halls. I loved the unexpectedness of the show, its rich vulgarity. It went with lager beer, pork pies and shag tobacco."

In his book, The Pretender (1915), his characters are loosely based on himself and Germaine: "While Anastasia plies her daily routine, her husband, the writer, takes a walk, pausing at times 'to fill (with reverence) the meerschaum pipe, which is colouring as coyly as a sun-kissed peach.'"

The Poetry of Pipes

In his verse, pipes are often mentioned, but merely as part of the background. For example, "While the Bannock Bakes" opens with a pipe: "Light up your pipe again, old chum, and sit awhile with me." His poem, "The Logger," does likewise: "In the moonless, misty night, with my little pipe alight..." Another poem, "Contentment," inexorably links pipe smoking with that emotion:

In "The Ballad of One-Eyed Mike," a pipe is once again a symbol of contentment and the opportunity to think:

This is the tale that was told to me by the man with the crystal eye
As I smoked my pipe in the camp-fire light, and the Glories swept the sky;
As the north lights gleamed and curved and streamed, and the bottle of "hootch" was dry.

His poetry is filled with dozens of references to pipes, always as part of the environment, always essential to peace of mind, always a comfort. Robert Service lived a full and long life, one of activity and adventure, success and triumph. His poetry was the most commercially successful of the century and continues to be appreciated today. Always dedicated to the common man, always scorning the elite, he spoke with a unique voice that resonated with the common threads of living for everyone everywhere, and he did it with a dash of humor, a dollop of disrespect, and an affection for those who toil for day-to-day survival.

References:

• Poem Hunter
• The Famous People
• Britannica
• Ploughman of the Moon, An Adventure Into Memory (1945)
• The Complete Poems of Robert W. Service (1933)
• The Best of Robert Service (2003)