The Eternal
Forest
II. Sample
Passages with Archival Photos
This new edition of The Eternal
Forest contains several additions of
interest: a lengthy preface (1994)
by Mr. Woodcock, archival photos, a
life of Godwin, historical notes,
and extracts from Godwin’s personal
journal.
The protagonist of "The Eternal
Forest" is called "the Newcomer",
who is really a projection of George
Godwin himself. The Newcomer is in
his early twenties. He has just
recently come to Canada and built a
house in the forest near a small
community on the north bank of the
Fraser River in what is now called
Whonnock. (Godwin refers to it as
"Ferguson's Landing"). There is only
one person in the community who is
the Newcomer's equal intellectually,
and that is Old Man Dunn. They soon
become close friends. The
conversations between these two men
often explore the theme of life in
Canada. What kind of people live in
Canada? What are their values? What
kind of society have they created?
How does this society compare with
England's society?
The following passage is typical of
the exchanges between the two men.
It probes England's legacy and the
kind of society which seems to be
emerging in Canada. 'Is this the
best that we can do?', Dunn (and
perhaps Godwin?) seem to ask.?
Is Dunn's view of things accurate?
Is the Canadian society he describes
(in 1913) already rough-hewn into a
form from which it is destined never
to escape? Is Canada currently (I am
writing this in 2005) recognizable
in Dunn's view of things? "The
Eternal Forest" is a provocative
book.
"Every time white men enter
a new land God gives them another
chance," he (Dunn) went on. The old
man thumped his two hands down upon
his legs: 'Think of it! Think of
this country! Here there is
everything-an ideal climate, mineral
wealth, billions of feet of
magnificent timber, great waterways,
fertile soil-everything. A race of
wise men, settling here, could have
made of this country a Garden of
Eden. It is the Garden of Eden. And
what have they done with it?'
The young Englishman (Newcomer or
Godwin. Ed.) returned the old man's
enquiring stare with a hint of
embarrassment. He was thinking:
'Well, and what have you done with
it? With this corner, this ranch,
overgrown, neglected, this by-word
of t\he settlement?'
The Newcomer said: 'You could
scarcely expect a race of Platos.
After all, one must march by the
slowest.'
'In the Old World they have
inherited their social evils from
the days when men knew little of
statecraft. And now they are
cudgelling their brains how to rid
themselves of that rotten legacy.
But here, in Canada, they had a
clear field. They could have built
grand cities and towns.' He snorted
his contempt. 'They will tell you
that they have done so; but where in
Europe will you find slums worse
than those of Old Quebec, Montreal,
or Winnipeg?'
The old man thrust his beard
forward: 'Eh? Or in Vancouver
itself, a town, built overnight?'
'They've handed their heritage over
to the grafter, the land-grabber,
the commission-snatcher. They've
sold themselves to the big
corporation which has no soul and is
out for profits. And their
politicians?-Riddled with graft!
'Yes, that's what they've done to
Canada. And now the few men who are
thinking clearly are seeing it. Yes,
their universities have bred a few
thinkers-McGill and Toronto. But the
damage is done.'
Old Man Dunn turned towards the
young Englishman and put a gnarled
hand on his leg: 'You're starting
out to make a home out of the bush,'
he said. 'You look forward to seeing
a return for your work and for your
investment. If you make this place
your permanent home, you will raise
your children here. British
children, Canadian-born they will
be. Well, what are your prospects?'
The Newcomer made a mental note that
Old Man Dunn overlooked one
factor-work. If one worked one would
be bound to make good. Work, say,
like that fellow Johansson.
'I know what you are thinking,' said
the old man, 'you are thinking that
you will win through by hard
work-that hard work always has its
reward: Samuel Smiles stuff. Well, I
hope you do. This country needs,
more than anything else, settlers
from the Old Country. Aye, and from
the rest of Europe too.'
He paused: perhaps he had spoken too
freely, perhaps it was hardly fair
to damp the ardour of this man just
starting to fight the bush.
'When I came here thirty years ago,'
he went on, slowly and without the
passion which had made his deep
voice boom as he denounced the evils
which had crept into the new land.
'I worked hard.' He waved his hand
towards the field where grazed a
Holstein cow. 'I cleared twenty
acres of heavy timberland; I planted
trees and berry bushes. I raised
livestock'.
He shrugged his heavy shoulders:
'Now I do just sufficient to keep me
and the wife going. My time is put
in reading and thinking-and trying
to make folk see the way things have
gone and the way they are going.
Behind my back they call me The
Sage. But they don't mean that to
signify that they respect me. No.
They think I'm a lazy old man,
that's all.'
And Old Man Dunn rose stiffly.
'Well, let 'em,' he concluded. 'Let
'em! Little folks, in a little
settlement, with little minds and
little ideas-when they've got any
ideas at all!'
The Newcomer picked up his sack and
set off. As he came out onto the
dusty road, now pencilled with giant
shadows from the inclining sun, the
gaunt figure of Johansson came into
view. Johansson, swinging his great
hands like clubs. Johansson, a day's
work done, going to milk a cow, to
saw wood, to add a little to that
fencing, to do a bit of hoeing. They
walked together in silence.
This talk with Dunn was the first of
many such talks, talks from which
the Newcomer was able to sketch in
the life of this rugged old miner
until, at last, he saw Dunn clearly
against his variegated background.
The dreamy pony-boy in the Yorkshire
pit. The old parson who saw in the
coal-smeared boy the making of a
scholar. Those long nights in the
dingy cottage spelling out the Greek
grammar by candlelight. The
encouraging words of the old
scholar. The dream of Durham
University. The mine disaster that
took away the bread-winner, and the
years in the mine, first as
pony-boy, then as hewer.
All this was a matter of time and
growing intimacy. In the end the
whole pieced together as the odyssey
of a frustrated man. The first
adventure overseas, the burly young
man in revolt against intolerable
conditions, seeking a new land; and
the fair and slender girl standing
beside him on the deck of the
emigrant ship.
Yes, all this Old Man Dunn sketched
in, bit by bit, casually. 'For a
time I worked in the lead mines of
Nebraska.' And he would hold out his
hand which shook with an incipient
palsy. 'Yes, that's why I quit that
work: poison. A man can stand it
just so long-but no longer.'
And that episode when he and his
wife had gone south to Florida. Blue
skies and golden orange groves, but
no market for the fruit. And the
ache for the sound of British
voices. And then the trek to the
North-West.
Failure, in a word.. Restlessness,
the eternal quest and defeat. And
yet defeat without surrender.
'In the philosphy of the Western
world,' he would declaim, 'men
worship material success. The how
don't matter, so long as a man can
steer clear of the penitentiary.
What he is, nobody ever asks. They
say, 'What's he worth?' That's their
criterion in this country. Nobody
cares whether he has harmed the
community, whether he has fleeced
simpletons, worked raw grafts,
pushed the country a bit further
along the road to damnation. They
worship money success and that's all
there is to it. Canada has become
the land of the commission-snatcher
and the back-scratcher. She calls
out for workers. What she really
means is that she is running short
of mugs to rob.'
But it was Old Man Dunn's failing
that he did not select his
audiences. He proclaimed his
doctrine (that service was the root
principle of any community claiming
to be civilized), and he boomed his
denunciation of the men who took,
but gave not in return, whoever
might be listening.
In that way he made a mortal enemy
of Carlton Tidberry, MLA, the member
of the Legislative Assembly in whose
constituency Ferguson's Landing lay.
To be called a 'no-good grafter' to
his face was too much for Mr.
Tidberry. It happened to be true."
(p. 97 ff. "The Eternal Forest",
1994 edition).
How Archival Photos are used in this
novel
Photos had no place in Godwin's
original (1929) The Eternal Forest,
but I believe they have a place in
the 1994 edition. They help the
reader to appreciate visually many
of the things which Godwin
describes. In a number of cases I
have included archival photos from
approximately 1910 side by side with
counterparts from 1994.
Two important themes in The Eternal
Forest are Godwin's critique of
British Columbia society and his own
personal growth which was largely
fostered by his contact with nature.
Following are six photos (or sets of
photos). The first three pertain to
B.C. society (1. ambitious
architecture; 2. Aboriginals; 3.
real estate). The last three
illustrate Godwin's inner growth
through the influence of the forest.
(4. the B.C. rainforest; 5. Mount
Baker; 6. Flashbacks in the
rainforest: the Inner Temple Law
Court in London, England.
The first photo below shows the old
Vancouver CPR Station about 1910;
the second photo I took in 1994. It
represents the same vista.
1. Ambitious Architecture:
Old CPR Station, Vancouver
"And now has come Vancouver: young,
raw, unsophisticated; arrogant like
a lad newly in long pants, conscious
of departed childhood and deceived
by budding virility into belief in
its maturity.
Skyscrapers, shouldered by old frame
buildings of discoloured wood, rough
streets with wooden sidewalks right
next to macadamized thoroughfares,
canyons of Portland stone through
which surge the unending tides of
motor traffic. A railway terminus
vast as a Byzantine cathedral, and
banks housed more magnificently than
any London or Paris can show." (The
Eternal Forest, p.109)
2. Aboriginals: native
people gathered for a potlatch,
Quatsino, Vancouver Island, about
1910
"Through the glass of the window
Lulu watched the scene below. A
temporary encampment was set on the
boards of the train depot: a dozen
or more families of Indians,
oblivious of everything about them,
contriving to make themselves
comfortable on their baggage.
She noticed that they had divided
themselves naturally into family
groups. There were a number of
women. Some were young, with bright
and comely faces. These stood
against the station wall, their
papooses tightly strapped to their
back. Others were old, immensely
old, with the faces of mummies and
eyes that no longer sparkled, but
were dull and fish-like. Women who
had ripened and faded young, women
with old faces scarred by a a
thousand wrinkles, so that they
looked like forgotten winter apples.
(...) p. 112
"Patient people, folk of a
fast-dying race which has given
place to the white usurper. A people
who have lost both land and
religion." (The Eternal Forest, p.
115)
3. Real Estate: Godwin's
Satire of Customs, Mores and People?
and bust cycles which he observed in
Vancouver
"The several real estate
booms which had hit the West had
sent land prices soaring (...).
Lots changed hands four, five and
six times a day. Men dealt in them
as men deal in stocks and shares on
the Stock Exchange, dealt in them as
men deal in groceries.
Everybody was rich, or seemed so,
and every car was crowded with happy
buyers being whirled out to see the
land they were buying, the land
which was to make them rich quick.
It was the only business being done
in the city.
Outlying shack villages caught the
mad fever. Pittsville on the Pitt
River (a dump of wooden shacks with
a general store, a third rate hotel
and a tar-papered pool room) boldly
proclaimed itself a city in the
making."(p.136)
Above: on the left is an
advertisement which I found in a
newspaper from circa 1910. On the
right is an extract from The Eternal
Forest.
The Eternal Forest contains
portraits of numerous characters.
The following is Godwin's portrait
of Fuller, an eccentric chicken
breeder.
"Everywhere the settlement hummed
with life, but nowhere more actively
than on Fuller’s chicken ranch. It
was, like its owner, plain but
exceedingly efficient. The house,
square and unpainted, was ugly; the
land had been defaced by long, low
colony houses for the flocks of
white Leghorns. White wings were
everywhere--the only beautiful
things in the place. From sun-up to
sundown there was incessant
cackling.
Most of the folk at Ferguson’s
landing raised chickens: Fuller
alone made them pay. He was
certainly under the patronage of the
deity of the fowls. His snow-white
birds developed none of the maladies
which annually ravaged the flocks of
less protected ranchers. He never
had gapes or roup among his flocks;
never did one of those proud pullets
so far forget herself as to contract
prolapsus of the oviduct. But the
gods, even the gods of the fowls,
are jealous gods; they exact a
price. Fuller had grown every year
more and more like an egg: his head
was a brown egg with eyes, ears,
nose, and mouth. Even worse, when
his little wife had her babies, they
took after their father. Their
little faces were like eggs too:
white eggs, too big for their little
bodies.
He was busy about his incubator
sheds, where the floors were a
yellow carpet of teeming life.
Hundreds of baby chicks, moving,
scrambling, jostling.
Fuller watches them with his sharp
eyes. “The survival of the fittest
is the law of life,” he says, “but I
could never see why one shouldn’t
help it along. A chick that can’t
barge hard enough to fill its crop
will grow to be a poor loafing sort
of hen with no vitality.”
He stoops and picks up a tender ball
of golden fluff. Its little head,
with its bright, beady eyes, is
between thumb and forefinger. It is
dead. He has helped along the law.
Yes, Fuller is the only man who
understands chicken farming. “Those
other fools keep hospitals,” he
says.
“At two years,” he would declare, “a
hen has done her job of work, Then
she is ready for the crate and the
Chinese dealer at Sapperton.” (p.
75-76)
4. The impact of the forest
on Godwin
This photo shows the kind of forest
which Godwin came to know intimately
during his years in Canada. Here are
two sample passages from The Eternal
Forest.
"Long days in the silence of the
bush, sawing wood. Perfect stillness
everywhere. Beauty all around. A
symphony in greens and browns. And
the smells! Scents of the aged
earth. Moist, living smells that
touched the nerves and evoked
emotions that belonged to a time
long, long ago. The smell of the
past, the first smells at which the
nostrils of the first man quivered."
(p. 155)
"The shirted figure, bare-chested,
lithe, swung the axe. And the axe
spoke: a tongue of living wood
spurted from the wound in the tree's
side, the tree vibrated,
passionately resentful. The bush
watched.
The alders were felled easily
because they were young and their
green and grey mottled bark,
beautiful as the skin of snakes,
concealed a soft, sappy wood. They
reeled under the blows, groaned,
swung drunkenly, and spun
earthwards. With bent and twisted
branches they throbbed for a moment
like living things feeling the
agonies of death, and came to rest.
The giant Douglas firs were no such
easy game. Their corrugated trunks,
fluted from base to summit,
symmetrical as Corinthian columns,
soared up into the sky and spread
branches like great dark and velvety
fans against the leaden sky.
Against these, even the axe lost
sense of power: it became a pigmy
tool wielded by a pigmy hewer. For
these are the mighty ones of the
bush, the worker told himself, the
aged fathers of the forest. They
have looked upon the Valley through
the centuries." (p. 34)
5. Mount Baker
The following passage comes near the
end of the book. Godwin and his wife
are trying to decide whether to
remain in Canada or return to
England.
“But, damn it, where does all this
work lead to? We both work like
slaves and, confound it, we get
nothing out of it.”
But for all his grumbles, he had
come to love the bush. It drew him
mysteriously—the strange quietness
of it, working, day after day, with
the bush at the back of him, and
below, the valley with the wide and
tranquil river; and far beyond,
again, the rolling land that swept,
green and dappled, to the violet
horizon in Washington State across
the border.
He had come to know every detail of
that scene and every varying mood of
it. He knew exactly how Mount Baker
gleamed when a faint haze hung over
the Valley. It was like a floating
island at those times. It was not
hard to see it as a fairy castle set
in the clouds; its white, conical
head was easily conjured into a
turret of ivory.
But while the beauty and the
solitude, which had given him a
perspective of life, called, drawing
him, magnetically, to stay there in
the bush forever and forever, the
other side of him irked to get back
to the hurly-burly of
civilization--the civilization he
yet hated.
They talked their future over many
times. And, as is ever the case,
advanced not one step towards the
solution of their central problem:
the education of the boy and the
founding of a secure future.
In some way, both felt that they had
been cheated. Certainly they had
been deluded, listening to the bland
talk of the Vancouver real estate
men, reading their lying literature
which made ranching in the Valley
appear as a picnic in the garden of
the world. (p. 191)
6. Flashbacks in the
rainforest: the Inner Temple Law
Court in London, England.
In the forest of British Columbia
Godwin has many flashbacks to places
in England which were familiar to
him. This photo shows the Fountain
Court at the Middle Temple Law Court
in London, England. Godwin studied
law there briefly before moving to
Canada. The following passage is
found near the end of the book.
Godwin ("The Newcomer") has no money
to pay his property taxes so he pays
the government by working on a road
gang. At lunch break one day he
disappears into the forest and reads
Charles Lamb's Elia. This reading
triggers the following flashback:
"He could hear the fountain now, the
fountain in the old, leaf-strewn
court where the pigeons walked with
confidence and the old plane trees
cast their shadows. Sometimes it
played, and sometimes came a porter
and shut off the stream. That always
disappointed the idlers resting at
the midday hour. They would be there
now: that is, if England was really
true, and not merely the shadow of a
dream.
Queer, the evocative power of words,
little wriggly things. Symbols, yet
much more: magicians that conjured
up the past and things forgotten,
flooding the mind with memories,
stirring emotions dormant and
forgotten. And sounds: with them it
was the same.
Talking water. Water splashing from
the fountain. Water singing through
the bush, dancing over shale
boulders. Water lapping under the
bow of a boat; the drowsy monotone
of little waves breaking upon golden
sands in summertime; the mournful
clang of bell-buoys over grey,
troubled waters; the haunting, eerie
hoot of foghorns across
slow-heaving, leaden seas." (265)
George Godwin's Private
Journal
Godwin never meant to publish this
journal, but it is a valuable piece
of Canadiana. The first of the
following extracts from Godwin’s
journal satirizes the narrowness of
a certain kind of upper class
Englishman in Canada. The second
tells of Godwin’s appreciation of
Wagner’s music.
(1) “When I first met
Jackson-Woodville he must have spent
thirty-four of his sixty years in
the Dominion, yet the fetters of his
caste still hung close about him.
Thirty-four years is a considerable
length of time but J.-W. might have
landed in Montreal yesterday for all
the change that has come about in
his narrow, limited outlook on men
and affairs.
He still views the spacious world
through the little window of class
prejudice. Contact with men of all
kinds and conditions has availed
nothing.
The seed was sewn In a county
rectory, at a public school and in a
university, and it has indeed
flourished. He will remain convinced
that an English Gentleman is, by
natural right and beyond all
question of doubt above all his
fellows. J.-W. would divide mankind
into two great and
ever-to-be-separated classes: (a)
those of his own class and in this
category he includes others who
qualify for special reasons (the
introductory remarks are telling):
“So-and-so. Nice people. Father is
Ambassador to Whaloobollo.” Or: “Thingamee.
Fine shot, Thingamee. All round man.
With me at Balliol.”
On the other hand, should the
subject come under the second
category of less distinguished
mortals, J.-W. will use a very
different kind of introductory
remark: “Honest little fellow,
Hobbs. Great worker.” Or: “Very
decent man, Boggs. He gets through
more work than any man I know.
Wife’s no good. Etc.” (p. 308)
(2) “My other consolation (at public
school) came with the evening chapel
service. I sang in the choir and
would find consolation in the music.
The words of the Te Deum conveyed
some vague promise to me of future
compensation for present ills. The
poetry of the psalms stole over me.
I found a sensuous enjoyment in the
volume of the organ music. I was
anything but religious but those
services were to me at that time
what the music of Wagner came to be
some years later. They took me to
the verge of the unknown, quickened
in me hitherto unknown emotions, and
intensified a longing, hardly
recognized by myself, to love
something. In these moments of
emotion I ached to pour out a
love--how, or upon whom, I knew not,
but this knowledge would come
later.” (p. 304).
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