I can still see him striding up Queen Street, bent slightly
forward from the hips like a horseman readying for the
jump. Indeed there was a good deal of the Cavalier
in Theodore Goodridge Roberts—in the mien and
in the very make and marrow of the man. No Roundhead
Theed! What a figure he would have cut with the
King’s Horse at Marston Moor. And some of
his verse (as Martin Ware’s collection proves)
suggests a kinship with the earlier and archetypal chivalry
of the Table Round. So it seemed to me when I
was very young. So it seems to me now.
For a bookish young lad who
lived inside the books he read, it was no small thing
to get to know a real, live writer whose books were
there to see on the shelves of Hall’s Bookstore
right here in Fredericton! How vividly I remember
some of those books—The Golden Highlander,
The Fighting Starkleys, The Red Feathers, The Harbour
Master. I remember buying his little poetry
chapbook The Lost Shipmate early in my first
year in High School and waiting eagerly every week for
T.G.R.’s column “Under the Sun” in
the Saint John Telegraph-Journal. But
it was not until my first year at the University of
New Brunswick that I actually met the man. His
youngest child—a daughter, Teddy—was a classmate
and early in our freshman year she had a party for some
of her friends at her home on Saint John Street.
Somehow (I am sure it was accident) I found myself in
a far corner talking my head off to T.G.R.. And,
to my undying gratitude, he not only listened but seemed
interested in the questions that tumbled out of me about
his books, about his brother Charles, and about Bliss
Carman whose poetry I had first come to love even before
my High School days.
I heard of those fabulous canoe
trips on the Saint John, of Charles and Bliss and Richard
Hovey at King’s College, Windsor, in high summer,
of the art of story-telling and something I never forgot
about, literary style: “Style may be the man or
it may just be a gift from heaven. But it always
has something to do with finding the correct
but unexpected word.” [Page xiii]
After that memorable evening
there were many more talks. I learned much about
writing in Canada past and present, and about what amounted
to the martyrdom of those daring and dedicated people
who tried in this hesitant young nation, still half-colony,
to live by the pen. Or, for that matter, by the
brush. I am sure that T.G.R. was terrified at
the prospect of his son Goodridge trying to make his
way as a painter (he would, if he could, have spared
his son the pain of his own long struggle). So
I’ll never forget T.G.R. rushing toward me one
spring day on Queen Street with the exultant cry “Goodie
is to be Professor of Art at Queen’s University.
And—you won’t believe it—he’s
to get three thousand dollars a year! (In those “dear
dead days beyond recall” that was a lot of money.)
It is not my intent to invade
Martin Ware’s territory and attempt to introduce
these poems or T.G.R. as a poet. Once upon a time
I had thought seriously about editing a new collection
of the poems. But Martin Ware came to Dalhousie
and wrote a Ph.D. dissertation under my supervision.
His chapter on the poetry of Theodore Goodridge Roberts
was the best critical appraisal of the work I had ever
read and in his research Ware had uncovered many poems
I have never before seen. Without doubt, Martin
Ware was the man for the job and I know that this volume
will ensure for Theodore Goodridge Roberts his rightful
place in our literary history.
I began with a hint of the
chivalric strain in T.G.R.. I shall conclude with
a story told to me by someone who was present (alas,
I was not) at a dinner party in Fredericton in the mid-thirties.
The hostess was one who liked to collect and count persons
of distinguished lineage and on this occasion she begged
her guests to say a word about their ancestors.
Several obliged with tales of Loyalist dignitaries—a
Judge in Vermont, a Colonial Governor in New Hampshire.
One guest claimed to come from a titled English county
family; still another referred to her collateral descent
from the Princess Eugenie.
The hostess, now all a-twitter,
turned to Theodore who had been sitting silent and with
darkening brow. “Tell us, Captain Roberts,”
said she, “tell us something about your ancestry.”
With one eyebrow raised and with a
sardonic melancholy in his tone, Theodore replied “Really,
you know, Mrs., really we haven’t been much since
the Wars of the Roses….”
I am told that there was no
more talk that night of the noble past. And it
is said that never again did Mrs. talk of ancestors,
her own or anyone else’s. [Page xiv]
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