The Eternal
Forest
III. Recent
Reviews (1996, 2000)
“As soon as I read George Godwin’s
long-neglected novel, The Eternal
Forest, I had an extraordinary sense
of deja vu. I had “been there
before,” even if the times and
places were different... What
interests us most in this novel are
the portraits of human beings
struggling and sometimes by sheer
willfulness succeeding against both
the villainies of corrupt men and
the ever-returning, ever encroaching
power of the bush.”
(George Woodcock, Preface to The
Eternal Forest)
“Godwin writes with (...) an
appreciation of the enduring
spiritual value of woods and
wilderness. (...) gives a very good
sociological understanding of (early
BC).”
(Prof. Brian Elliott in BC
Studies. Summer, 1996)
“The Eternal Forest can best be
described as ‘The Great Fraser
Valley Novel.’ It realistically
depicts the erosion of rural,
community-based life in the Valley
by Vancouver-based capitalism. (...)
Rich in empathy and insights.”
(“Vancouver and Its Writers,” by
Alan Twigg)
“Should force British Columbians to
adjust their thinking about the
past.”
(BC Historical News)
“What a surprise this novel is! It
is written with white-hot outrage at
hypocrisy and double-dealing.”
(BC Bookworld, summer, 1995)
The following review by
Professor Brian Elliott (Dept. of
Sociology and Anthropology, U. of
British Columbia) appeared in “BC
Studies” (summer, 1996).
This new edition of a book which was
published originally by Appletons of
New York in 1929, provides a rare
glimpse into life in the Lower
Fraser Valley immediately prior to
the First World War. It is, in fact,
much more than a reissued novel.
Robert Thomson, an
academic-turned-publisher, and the
nephew of George Godwin, has added
greatly to the value of the original
text by providing extracts from the
author’s journal, recent and period
photographs, and a series of notes.
Passages from Godwin’s journal
enable us to understand more fully
the significance of particular
sections of the text--connecting the
voices of his characters to his own
political views, or the emotions of
the central figure in the novel to
the intimate details of his own
personal life. Taken together, the
journal extracts and the notes offer
the reader an unusual degree of
assurance that The Eternal Forest
can be appreciated not simply for
its aesthetic qualities but also as
a source of historical
understanding.
Godwin and his wife, Dorothy,
exchanged the comfort of their
middle-class milieu in England for
the romance of the pioneer life. In
1912 they arrived in the Fraser
Valley and sank their 500 pounds
sterling into a house and a few
acres of bush in Whonnock
(Ferguson’s Landing in the novel).
The Eternal Forest describes the
society they encountered. There are
the resourceful Olsens--farmers,
fishers, miners, and carpenters--who
have all the skills to endure and
prosper in the wilderness, and the
patient, humble Swede, Johansson,
who sweats and suffers but who
eventually owns a fine farm and the
first Ford in the district. Old Man
Dunn, the self-educated Yorkshireman,
is the local sage whose socialist
and cooperative views help shape the
collective critique of Vancouver
realtors, provincial politicians,
and all kinds of promoters and
boosters whose schemes bring ruin to
the gullible or desperate. There is
the voluptuous Mrs. Armstrong, who
takes in loggers and “serve[s] her
boarders’ fare out with the sauce of
sex” (60), and whose house resounds
with disorderly delights throughout
the winter months. The Church of
England vicar, Mr. Corley,
disapproves of Mrs. Armstrong, but
then he despises most of the
citizens of Ferguson’s Landing, for
few accord him any respect and fewer
still attend his services. He longs
for the certainty, hierarchy, and
decorum that he left. There is
Blanchard, the storekeeper
dispensing provisions and gossip and
mail, playing postmaster, thanks to
Bob England, an old-timer and
political broker who has secured
Blanchard’s appointment through his
connections in the provincial
capital. Such little acts of
patronage tie hamlets like the
Landing to the webs of influence
being woven in the cities. And on
the margins of this society are
others, identified as Red Men,
Orientals, Japs, and Hindus, viewed
by the settlers with condescension,
but also with fear.
Enter a couple referred to simply as
the ‘Newcomers’ whose experiences
and responses are essentially those
of George and Dorothy Godwin (...)
There is much to enjoy and admire in
this work. Godwin writes lyrically
about the landscape and especially
about the forest, mixing the
townsman’s newly-discovered joy in
physical labour and naive desire to
discipline and tame the bush with an
appreciation of the immense
resilience of nature and the
enduring spiritual value of woods
and wilderness. The Eternal Forest
tells of struggle and failure,
despair and defeat, but it also
records moments of profound
self-discovery. Newcomer was unsure
what he was seeking when he left
England. Specifying what he was
escaping was easy enough--the
stultifying rigidities of a class
society--but what was he looking for
and what did he find? In the
wilderness, for the first time, he
is able to think clearly about life.
Here it is reduced to stark
simplicity and that which is truly
important becomes plain. Towards the
end of the book though, there is a
more profound answer: Newcomer
experiences an epiphany.
Godwin’s novel documents an
individual’s failure and moments of
revelation, but it also records
collective experience, and through
it we can see how there emerged in
this province different economies
and different cultures--the
metropolitan and the rural--and how
their opposed interests became the
bases for a political order that
survived until very recently.
Exhausted by the effort of clearing
the land, unable to produce enough
from their small enterprises to
survive, some settlers were easy
targets for the promoters of
get-rich-quick schemes--buying land
where a railroad might stop,
purchasing shares in
never-to-be-realized oil fields in
the valley. They and others were
often forced to sell the plots in
which they had invested so much, and
when they did, they found targets
for their frustration--the Chinese,
who (they claimed) had taken over
Lulu Island and now dominated the
market for produce, or the Japanese,
who were buying up the farms. Old
Man Dunn explained: “It’s the Jap’s
purpose to get this Province by
peaceful penetration” (p. 92).
In this book we begin to appreciate
how the Fraser Valley became such a
fertile place for conservative
populism and even for outright
racism. Godwin puts the observations
about the Japanese into the mouth of
his least conservative character.
Old Dunn is not trying to incite
racial antipathy. But the same
cannot be said for articles that
appeared in Maclean’s while Godwin
(back in England) was polishing the
manuscript. On 15 October 1921, in
the first of two articles, “Will
Canada Go Yellow?” we find
statistics for the very area in
which Ferguson’s Landing (Whonnock)
lies, charting the growth of
Japanese ownership and reporting,
without challenge, the popular
theory that this was part of an
invasion being orchestrated from
Tokyo.
But this is not a political novel.
It is fiction woven from personal
experience containing acute and
verifiable observation of an
emerging society. It reflects,
naturally, many views that are today
regarded as outmoded, a few even
reprehensible. The reader can have
fun exploring Godwin’s own
sympathies not only by inferring
them from the text, but also by
checking them against the journal
extracts. Taken as a whole, this
book gives us a very good
sociological understanding of the
early struggles of the settlers, the
colonial culture they inhabited, and
the social relations that nurtured
their suspicion of the city,
corporate capitalism, and distant
government.
Robert Thomson is to be
congratulated for republishing this
book. It deserves a broad
readership.
Brian Elliott
University of British Columbia
Excerpts from a review by
Dr. Claire Campbell (Dept. of
History, U. of Alberta) for
“National History” (August, 2000).
The descriptive passages of the
surrounding forest are beautifully
written, sensual and evocative. We
see it, through the Newcomer’s eyes,
in all seasons and moods. The
alluring shimmer of summer; the
drumming of rain in the bush; the
feel of a damp forest floor. It is a
world so much more permanent and
meaningful than our own, with the
power of creation, beauty, and
destruction. It is here that
Godwin’s spiritual self finds
genuine succor, for the forest ‘got
hold of you and made you think, it
gave you your place in the universe,
taught you the significance and the
insignificance of man; it whispered
of God’ (207) Such reflections,
which constitute the most moving
passages of the novel, are even more
striking to the modern reader aware
that such places are rapidly
vanishing. (...)
(The roller coaster of boom-and-bust
in British Columbia’s economy sounds
oddly familiar--and rather
disconcerting--after recent
upheavals in global markets). The
settlers are caught between two
worlds, unable to control their
destinies: they participate in a
cash economy, but not successfully;
the ventures they hope will free
them from drudgery only tie them
more closely to the land for
subsistence. They are victimized by
the wily merchants, who venture into
the Valley only long enough to
exploit this longing for prosperity.
Godwin is virulent in his attack on
the city and the human society it
represents: it is a ‘rot’ (145)
which feeds on the weakness of human
nature, a world of arrogant
pretensions, alienated from the
eternal truths of the soil. (...)
This brings us again to the forest
interior. Here, at least, the power
of nature can offer redemption; here
people can experience spiritual
growth and intellectual revelation.
The forest is the only ‘character’
above reproach. But Godwin’s writing
departs from the pantheistic
naturalism of the late Romantic age
and almost prefigures some of the
beliefs of the modern
conservationist movement. His Nature
does not exist for us alone, to be
measured in terms of ‘resources’,
economic or spiritual. For the
Newcomer it is alternatively
uncaring or benevolent, silent or
communicative, depending of the
receptivity and frame of mind of the
one standing before or within it.
This is the forest of Emily Carr
paintings: rhythmic, animate, a
world of secrets and mysteries.
Why is the forest so much more
alluring, even now, with the coastal
forest a remnant of the stand even
in Godwin’s day? Is it evidence of
the author’s own heartfelt
relationship with the bush through
long hours of solitude? Or is it
something in the collective Canadian
imagination, cultivated or inherent,
which embraces portraits of Nature
as the universal? Whatever the case,
this novel is that rarest of
historical sources: disturbingly
relevant. Reading ‘The Eternal
Forest’ today one is acutely
conscious of contemporary battles
over the coastal forest, and of
natural regions across Canada. Who
will not see images of clear-cut
old-growth forest in the passage:
‘With each clang of the axe, it
seemed to call: “Beware! Oh, forest,
man is here; man, the destroyer.
Man, who eats your heart away,
ravishing your loveliness”’ 956).
And who will not wonder if we are
able--and worse, willing--to destroy
that which is our cultural taproot,
and most important of all, a thing
of wonder in its own right.
Claire Campbell,
University of Western Ontario, Aug.
2000.
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