Autobiographical Commencement Speech
by Georges Bugnet
Wings written for school newspaper for the Graduating Class 1945
Provided, I suppose, that you pray: “Thy will be done”, and try to listen often enough, and respond sincerely, to your conscience, life, like a Christmas tree, becomes fully ablaze and loaded with marvels of all shapes and colors. Mine is no exception: Had any gypsy, when I was twenty-one and elector, truly told my future, I would have laughed in her face. It would have sounded too unbelievable.
Claude Bugnet, my father, came out of a long line of small farmers in the country, not far from the Swiss border, but chose to live in cities selling, for large firms, over half of France, good Burgundy wine. Here, I may remark that the drunkards are rare in lands where wine is taken at meals. He was still following his trade when 88 years old, finally resigning, and dying at 89.
Amiens, in Picardy was the birthplace of my mother. She came from middle class people. As far as I know she is still living. The last and only news we received from France since 1940 assured that she was in good health. That letter was mailed at Toulon just before the Germans occupied it.
Coming to personal adventures, my first look on our speck of dust whirling into space among the stars, which we call our earth and find quite large, was in a town, Châlon-sur-Saone, in Burgundy, where, according to those lengthy French birth certificates, I was born in February 1879. I was educated mostly, I believe, at home: my parents giving good example of truly human life, that is holding moral values above material ones, adding also the spiritual substance because they were Christians, of the Catholic faith. As for instruction, I attended between the ages of 4 and 20 a round half-dozen schools and colleges, besides tasting, at 20, a year of military service. Then, I entered the University of Dijon where, having obtained a B.A. degree I wanted to have it raised to a M.A. For some years I kept at it, transferring my course to the Sorbonne in Paris and finally to the University of Lyons. At that time my ambition was to become a University professor.
Another ambition was within me and this one was not thwarted. In early 1904, after three years of courtship, and having won at last a solid and well paid position as chief editor of a newspaper, I married, thus becoming a “we”.
Soon after, wonderful tidings reached us. According to literature officially published by the government of Canada, the north westerly parts of America were the new Eden awaiting humanity. There were authentic facts, figures and photographs. They seemed to prove conclusively that with ordinary luck one could make around $25,000 in five or at most ten years, and with good luck, up to $50,000. Well; once those $25,000 were caught and brought back to France it meant 100,000 francs. During some months we debated the pro and con, finally deciding to have a try at it.
The dawn of 1905 beamed on us at Saint=Boniface, Manitoba and how cold it was! Then we discovered a first flaw in what we had thought were carefully prepared plans. The Dominion government did not forget to stress, in the pamphlets sent to France, the fact that Canada is a bilingual country where French as well as English is an official language; also that large numbers of French-speaking Canadians were established in the West. We soon found out that French was not at all official on most farms in Manitoba. We thought we had better go to a French-speaking landowner in order to acquire that practical knowledge of agriculture of which we were woefully ignorant. So we went to Letellier, on a 500-acre farm.
Here comes an amusing memory. One day, a six-months-old calf having escaped in the pastures, I grabbed a rope and started in pursuit, to the great enjoyment of my wife. It was a kind of marathon race, full speed, at perhaps 30 miles an hour, until the calf, quite exhausted—and so was I—allowed me to pass the rope over its head. Then I heard the voice of the farmer calling “leave the calf alone!” I could hardly believe my ears. But he was really standing down there and repeating the same command. Next, I saw him enter the barn and come out leading the mother cow which at once let out a great bellowing. The calf left me to join her, while I, feeling perfectly foolish, and sweating all over, meekly followed.
Early next fall, hearing that Alberta was neither so cold in winter nor so hot in summer, we took another jump, landing at St. Albert, past Edmonton. People were talking about the Peace River country. A railroad line should go there someday. We looked over a map.
Utterly unacquainted with the ways of railroad building in the West, we guiltlessly took for granted that as they do in Europe, even to piercing holes through mountains, they were bound to follow the straightest line. Consequently, I went in search of a good quarter of land located on, or near, that expected railway and not too far from French-speaking people. After days of roaming I reached a beautifully wild region, know to Indians as “Onion Prairie”, discovered in it the piece of land we had dreamed of and coming back sixty-five miles to Edmonton, had it entered at the Land Office on the 10th of October, 1905—We are still on it.
Thus, we came to be the first settlers in the most westerly part of that township—56-3-w.5. Apparently, there was not any other homestead between us and the Pacific Ocean. Having blazed the trail from Lac La Nonne, that is from the north-east, we never knew, for months, that some miles to the southeast were other pioneers, the Carlins and the Persons.
You may perhaps picture us: A young man of twenty-six , his still younger wife holding a little baby, and almost crying at the forbidding sight, the challenge of the dead keepers of the soil: tall black stumps everywhere dotting the land; and the worldly possessions of the invaders consisting of a few kitchen goods, a pony, and five one-dollar bills. Perhaps I should mention that counted as kitchen goods was a .22 rifle and that game was then plentiful, mostly rabbits.
However, hope was beckoning. It did last for some five years; not the hope of going back to France with $25,000, but we looked forward to live, once the hard and feverish pioneer work completed, the life of well-to-do Canadian farmers. Starting with oxen, after five or six winters, we began to perceive that the Dominion Government must have been quite an optimist to represent homesteading in Western Canada as a get-rich-quick proposition. President W.A.R.Kerr, of the University of Alberta, did not put it so mildly. In his review of my last novel which portrays the unsung disaster of some of the brave and yet vanquished heroes of those days, he calls that immigration literature ”fantastic puffery”.
On our place, wheat—Club or Red Fife—was usually caught by frost. We tried to improve our situation, got a $500 loan and bought eleven head of young cattle. We promptly lost nine of them. A drunken trapper had spilled salted strychnine balls all over the southwest corner of our quarter. Still we kept on clearing and breaking the soil. (Oh, that powerful oxen team!) But, finding that after all, life is even better than a good living, we chose to draw from our land pleasure rather than profit. As a good crop, and steady, children came, up to nine of them. To make enough to raise them was all we asked for, and they grew most healthy, bigger than ourselves and well-behaved. They are now scattered all over Canada, and even “somewhere in England.” (note written in copy… (son- John in Canadian Forces WWll )
Seeing that success did not come from what we had counted upon but glided in rather oddly, and wearing an unforeseen garb, this present pattern of the story may be cut short. It can be displayed, much the same or better, by many pioneers of those days. If four out of five newcomers were unable to stand the grind and turned back, hardier ones replaced them. The district was soon well settled, mostly at first by Swedish immigrants. Instead of eight, we had only three miles to a new post office for which Mr. E. Carlin picked the name of Rich Valley. Homesteads were fenced, roads were built, the main one going south to meet, at Gunn, the new railroad skirting the shore of historic and picturesque Lac Ste. Anne (first school in Alberta,1862, mission school of course.) Around 1910, we built our own public school—and not a bit of French taught in it. Our first teacher was Mr. Webb, now of Goldthorpe.
The French element quite swamped, and English being the only language publicly employed, we had to learn it, here and there from our neighbors, who, in 1916, judged me proficient enough to be planted on the school board, where they have since kept me, seemingly until death will grub me out. Much later, in 1936, with the formation of large educational units, the representatives of Belvedere and Lac La Nonne school districts chose me (Rich Valley delegate) as one of the four candidates for subdivision two of Lac Ste. Anne School Division. Thrown into this new field, I found myself elected by the ratepayers of 16 districts and steadily re-elected in 1938, 40, 42 and 44.
As the first collaborators were: G. Tomlinson, J. Morrison, (both also still on the board), D. Munro (died last year) and R. Berry. We chose as secretary F.W. Wiggins (still at it). Newer members: Sullivan, McLeod, Oppert-Hauser. Successive superintendents: Hollingshead, Aikenhead, McDonald, and McKay.
The reader, no doubt, has perceived the “I” used instead of the “We”. It cannot be helped, because the following adventure singled me out for a very different sort of pioneering.
Many settlers do remember the big winter at the end of the second decade of this century. While not as tough as that of 1906-07 it was, mainly on account of the deep snows, sufficiently bad to impede most of the customary winter work. Being small farmers, our elder children always willing to help, the necessary chores were quickly done. For the first time in 15 years a great deal of leisure imposed itself upon me. Part of it was employed in the evenings, as usual, in teaching French. I tried to add Latin and Greek to the programme but a complete lack of enthusiasm caused me to withdraw that. Here, I must explain that having developed, from the age of 10 until 26, an increasing taste for the languages and thoughts of Greek, Latin, German and French masters (and even though I forgot a great deal of these languages) ancient and modern ideas remained an ever-growing source of intellectual life. To which, recently, the literatures of Canada, of England, of the United States, had mixed new ferments.
Then, all at once, at past 40, an extraordinary and violent, fit seized me.
When my family, during that winter, began to see me filling, without previous plans, somewhat like a lunatic, sheet after sheet of writing paper with a story that had to build itself as it went, they must have wondered; “Is it madness coming upon him? No doubt it was a kind of frenzy. Eating was irksome, sleeping seemed a waste of time. Hard work? Yes, but how deep an inner delight, yet not always unmixed with nerve racking pangs. It lasted three months, until the middle of April, when seeding work had to be attended to. Luckily the story was finished.
Near the middle of the year, news reached me of a national contest, open to Canadian writers of the French language for the best novel. Excellence in writing needs intense application. During the next winter I retouched, polished, and re-polished my text and finally sent the carefully pencil-copied manuscript to Montreal. Weeks later, it was announced that this novel had won the highest praise but—not the money. Yearly, the Quebec government awards cash prizes to writers, English and French, but, as it was with the returns from farming, my financial star always remains so baleful and adverse, that even today, when my name appears in books, reviews, newspapers, usually wearing the tag: “our” great writer, etc., it is still perfectly useless for me to apply for any of those awards. The reason given is that moneys coming from Quebec taxpayers have to stay with them.
Please understand that this is not a purely personal grievance. As far as I know, not one our best Canadian authors can, as an author, make a living within Canada, still less with French Canada alone. Thus, on writing also, I cared for pleasure and not for profits.
The second of my novels, Nipsya—and all grade VI pupils from Winnipeg to Vancouver know this—was translated into English by Constance Davies Woodrow. That edition was published in December 1929, both in New York and Montreal. Its largest sale during four months earned me a royalty of $1,360 and as much to the translator. But, early in 1930, the great depression wave rolled over the publishers. They went bankrupt. Yet they were able to pay ten cents on the dollar and I duly received $136.00. And equal sum was paid to Mrs. C. Davies Woodrow. An amusing side was that all other works by far better authors—one was by George Bernard Shaw—had much smaller amounts to their credit. Undaunted, Mrs. Davies-Woodrow undertook the translation of other books of mine but, when still quite young, death struck at her, and Canada lost a great poet.
Since then I have not tried to get in touch with another translator. They will come as soon as our country will outgrow its inferiority complex, its colonial spirit, it habit of importing its reading and thinking from outside, and begin to assume an adult, national sense, able to discern, as do older nations, that the richest, highest, most everlasting yield is enclosed in its own intellectual attainments, and above all in arts and letters—that is a part of moral spiritual, reapings in which, however, no nation appears keenly interested.
Even if this literary harvest did not aim at quantity, yet you, dear reader, may want to know how a farmer could also be a writer. The truth is, first, that I wrote only during the winter months, and next that as soon as our boys wanted to have their own try at the land, we let them go at it. Besides, due to budding fame, I was asked, in 1924, to take over the editorship of the French weekly published at Edmonton and I stayed on the job, four days a week, until 1929, strained eyesight forced me to resign. Therefore, although still having my home on the farm, I was not really farming anymore. Too often was I told that it would be foolish to try again and compete with thousands of better farmers, when able to grow a rarer crop very badly needed in our country.
As for the real value of that Rich Valley grown crop—half a dozen volumes: one of poetry, two of essays, three novels, and a number of shorter writing—even if all the critics, today have rated it, some as “good”, most as “excellent”, “exceptionally fine”, and a few as “unequalled”, all of which is not necessarily accurate, we must not forget that only the future can safely decide. Not unlikely, in some two hundred or three hundred years the best of the great writers of today will be held as pioneers; our great grandsons will probably be taught that we were those quaint old voices who first attempted to speak not merely in English, or French, but in Canadian.
Meanwhile, destiny had also picked on me as a pathfinder to blaze another trail, and of course I looked upon it, at first, for a source of profit.
In common with many people we had a taste for flowers, trees and shrubs. Our Experimental Farms were extolling this kind of improvement for homesteads. They gave a list of what they thought hardy. To Brandon and Indian-Head, the nearest in those days, we went for young plants, cuttings, western ripened seeds, and started a small nursery. The trouble was that my financial star was watching upon this too. We made a bit of money out of it, yet after some years we thought we had better let that nursery grow wild. So here again, leaving jaded profit behind, I went on breaking the trail, urged by pleasure, a never-failing companion.
It had not taken a long experience to discover that what was hardy at Indian-Head was not always so in Rich Valley and, for a while, I was tempted to believe it had been a mistake to have chosen land in the lowest part of the vale, where frost would blacken nice looking Manitoba plumbs before they were ripe. Then the idea came to me that Indian-Head, after all, had not the harshest climate on earth. Borrowing books from the University of Alberta I began a study of plant geography. The upshot was that by spending perhaps fifty three-cent stamps, I received year after year thousands of seeds coming from the toughest parts of the world. Most of them did not furnish satisfactory progeny, but some have proved very valuable. Yet, this was only ground work. From discovering plants, I entered into forging them. (And here please take note that I have nothing at all to sell.)
Really, I feel convinced that my calling is and always was, to work for the benefit of my fellow citizens and not to both about private gain save, of course, the constant happiness abundantly found in the handling of a beloved task. There is always inside of me a lurking fear that if I tried to turn my deeds into money something unpleasant would happen. On the other hand, as long as wealth comes in fame and in fun, it can apparently stream in endlessly. There is also another advantage in this kind of labor. As a rule, people grow old, lifeless, because they meet with a disheartening prospect. ‘What is now worth doing when the best we can do is done?” Fortunately, were I to live as old as Sir Wm. Mulock, I could yet say: “The best I can do is still to be done.”
This needs explaining. Many people, somehow, do confuse grafting with what is commonly called cross-breeding. In grafting you simply glue on an existing tree a bit of another tree, which was also precedingly existing. Thus, you do not at all bring a new plant into the world. Graffage (graftage)is very useful in my work. It has interesting sprouts. Visitors always sharpen their sight when beholding a branch of hawthorn loaded with red fruits growing out of the flank of a saskatoon.
Now, to “cross” is to mate the female part of a flower-stigma pistil-ovary with the male port pollen of the bloom of a similar, and yet different plant. Out of this mating, the ovary of the female may form a seed. Out of this seed a child may grow, an entirely new plant, partly taking after its mother, partly after its father and, which, until then, nature had never seen.
To further illustrate this kind of art we will use a comparison. Suppose that someone wanted to build up a breed of horses especially fit to withstand our western Canadian climate. He may start with a mare, selected among the small, but tough and wiry, Indian “cayuses” and have her bred to a stallion of a larger size. Quite likely, at say, four years, their offspring would not be of sufficient weight. But, preserving through three or four generations, some twelve years or more—a horse of fairly good quality might be obtained.
Slow work? —yet with trees and shrubs, the progress here requires a longer time.
In this invention of new plants for the Canadian North, making particular use of Luther Burbank’s and N.E. Hansen’s hybrids, most of my cross-breeding has selected, as first molds, the sturdiest specimens of stone-fruits: plums and cherries. To a lesser extent, apples, roses, ornamental and forestry trees are also included.
When satisfied that an Alberta-made novelty has proved its worth under rather rough treatment on my place, it is sent out for testing in various parts of the West. Reports, so far, have been always good. In an article published some years ago, in a volume edited by the American Rose Society, I pointed out that “my idea is not so much to add new varieties to the gardens of the city-dwellers as to produce tough stuff for my fellow farmers who have no time to coddle tender plants.” That is why my grounds look like a wild and surrounded by tall exotic pines. No youngster has any business here who cannot vie with native vegetation. Hence, the success, elsewhere, of those that made good under such harsh and long honing. Hence also my belief that they will be able to hold their own again Nature and bring to future generations not only pleasure but also—especially some forestry trees—a very great income. Another expected result, of no small importance, is that once farmers know that they can easily have those tough and useful friends which make a real home, and once they set them around, then the incessant shifting and jumping, which is the bone of our western agriculture, will largely cease. When moving to seemingly greener pastures, a farmer can take away with him anything he wants, but not well-established trees.
To enter into the detail of this industry would require many pages. The short space left must bring a conclusion.
It is now fairly clear why we were sent here, and to say, as pioneer farmers, we had enough to live on and raise a large family. The numerous grandchildren, seemingly all bright enough, are still growing more numerous. We can hope that a bumper crop of children may also be of high grade. Had we remained in France, this yield, almost certainly, would have been much smaller. And had our farming turned really successful, there could not have been much time left for anything else.
As a Canadian writer, only by long living and lone thinking in the heart of our strong and magnificent Canadian nature could I discover unbeaten paths and picture them in books which English and French consider as “genuine products of the Canadian soil.”
As a plant breeder, I thought, at first, our location not at all suitable, yet, out of the very failure in those first attempts to grow “hardy” plants, arose the discovery that we had been led to a most carefully selected spot to manufacture special stuff, possibly the hardiest in the world.
In these times of terrible wars, when the human insects are making such a mess of the dwelling place, I feel glad to see the rest of the universe still moving in majestic and beneficent order, and I wonder if there is, here below, a better “job” for a small human microbe than that of endeavoring to obtain for the benefit of his fellow men, a few new favors, a few clean gifts, through patient co-operation with that mysteriously and immensely creative partner, which some call God, and some others Nature, meaning, after all, the same thing, the same unfathomable entity, the powerful, and shy, Lender of Life.
–Georges Bugnet