The Governor General's Three Solitudes: The Canadian Geneses of John Buchan's "Sick Heart River"

Sick Heart River (1941) was John Buchan, Lord Tweedsmuir's, last novel, published in the year after his death near the close of his term as Canada's Governor General. It is set mainly in the north, and in the introduction to his 1994 Oxford University Press edition of the novel, University of London scholar David Daniell argues that is a seminal work of literature, despite the fact that[h]istorians of have ignored it (p. xix). One mason for this, Daniell believes, is because does seem to have been any input into Buchan's novel from other literature (p. xix). We must ask, the editor writes, what of any significance there was before 1939 to influence Sick Heart River. The surprising answer is that there was, effectively, none, in the sense of books written with an awareness of being specifically Canadian (p. xx). It is possible to fully engage this latter, highly debatable point here, nor do I aim to assess the worthiness of Sick Heart River for inclusion in the canon of pioneering literature. I would, however, like to point out one prominent source of literary influence on Buchan' s novel which Professor Daniell has overlooked, The Poetical Works of William Henry Drummond (New York: Putnam, 1912; repr. as Dr. W. H. Drummond's Complete Poems, Toronto: McClelland, 1926). Much background material for Sick Heart River was suggested to Buchan by a journey to the Arctic he undertook in 1937. Like many future politicians, Buchan became convinced that the north held a vast storehouse of economic wealth in natural resources. He made broadcasts in Canada concerning his tour, and he published segments of his travel observations in the Sunday Times in December, 1937. (1) In his Times articles, Buchan conveys his fascination for the South Nahanni river, the prototype for the Sick Heart. Since the turn of the century, rumours of lost gold mines and verdant tropical valleys had lured adventurers and prospectors to the river, the southwest corner of the Northwest Territories. One tale of northern treasure-seeking Daniell reveals as a source for Buchan's work, not until now fully recognized (p. xv), is The Golden Grindstone (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1935) by Angus Graham. This book is a record of the 1897-1899 northwest adventures of the entrepreneur, George Mitchell, and Buchan draws upon for impressions of the north and its inhabitants. (2) In Sick Heart River, the ailing, retired British lawyer, politician, and sportsman, Sir Edward Leithen, takes on, at the instigation of friends, the challenge of finding Francis Galliard, a young, hugely successful New York financier who has disappeared, possibly into Canada, to retrace his roots in Quebec, and also to escape the pressures and constraints of office. Once in Quebec, we later discover, Galliard hooked up with a half-breed guide, the Scots-Cree Lew Frizel, and become embroiled in Lew's own quest for the Sick Heart. Leithen tracks Francis and Lew with the aid of Lew's brother, Waskesieu game warden Johnny Frizel. When Leithen and Johnny arrive in Francis's ancestral territory near the St. Lawrence river, Johnny speaks with a local and is described as being deep in converse in the habitantpatois (p. 46). Later, when Leithen comes upon the exhausted, half-dead Galliard in the far north, Buchan writes that Galliard, delirious, speaks in the slurred of Quebec ... was a torrent of (p. 93). On each occasion, Daniell rather literally glosses as to the (pp. 215,217). Strictly speaking, of course, there is really no such thing as a habitant patois which would be native to any area of Quebec. The habitant, or rural peasant proprietor people of old stock, would speak a French dialect (not a patois) marked by archaism. The corruption of the French language used by habitants would occur in conversation between French and English speakers in efforts to make the French intelligible to the English. …

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