All Else Is Folly. Peregrine Acland
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blurbs from Ford Maddox Ford, John B. Watson, and Frank Harris, conceals the trench full of dead and dying men.
After a brief stay in the fall of 1922 at Michigan’s Battle Creek Sanitarium, the elite health resort run by Dr. J.H. Kellogg, Acland expressed an interest in looking for work as a writer in Toronto. He returned to the Queen City, and by 1924 his health was definitely improved: so much so that Acland weighed “pounds in street clothes,”22 nearly his weight when he went off to France. It speaks to the extent of Acland’s war injuries that it took him nearly eight years to recover a semblance of his former strength.
In Toronto Acland lived first at the Windsor Arms, then at an address on Charles Street East, but his specific means of support remains something of a mystery. Years later, Acland would claim that he had twenty years’ experience in the [advertising] agency field, suggesting he began in 1922 or 1923. December of 1925 found him working in advertising in New York, where he wrote Peabody that his career was going well, “but it is only a means to an end — scribbling.”23 He and Mary were living in a Fifth Avenue apartment two blocks north of Washington Square, an address they held until at least the 1929 publication of All Else is Folly. Acland’s means must have been substantial: he was successful enough to employ a young woman named Katherine Yates Sanborn as his literary secretary.
In the decade that followed the publication of his novel, Acland appears to have abandoned whatever dreams he would have had of a literary career. While uncertainty caused by the Great Depression may have played a role in his decision, it must be recognized that Acland was doing quite well. During the economic crisis, he rose to prominence within J. Walter Thompson agency, to this day one of the largest and most influential advertising agencies in the world. By 1938 he was manager of their operations in Toronto, and his salary, approximately fourteen thousand dollars a year, was roughly three times that of a Member of Parliament.
And yet, Acland gave it all up to serve again during the Second World War. No longer young or fit enough for soldiering, he took a position as advisor, press officer, and secretary to his father’s old friend, Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King. Acland worked in that capacity until just after King’s retirement, overseeing the transition period to successor Louis St. Laurent. He then returned to Toronto and the advertising world, where he became manager of the Day, Duke & Tarleton agency; his appointment was announced in the January 28, 1949, New York Times, accompanied by a striking portrait taken by Yousef Karsh.
Peregrine Palmer Acland died on Saturday, May 11, 1963, in Sunnybrook Hospital, Toronto, presumably of cancer; his obituary solicited donations for the Canadian Cancer Society in lieu of flowers. He is buried beside Mary, his wife, in Toronto’s Mount Pleasant Cemetery. The couple had no children.
* * *
All Else is Folly was not Acland’s first attempt at a Great War novel. In the summer of 1918, he had completed, then destroyed, several chapters of a book intended to “knock everything from Ian Hay to [Henri] Barbusse into a cocked hat.”24 The little that is known about the composition of All Else is Folly comes in the form of an author’s note, dated October 23, 1929, and appearing only in the second and third Canadian printings. In it, Acland reveals that the novel “was first written nearly two years ago” and had since undergone several rewrites.
More than one contemporary critic referred to All Else is Folly as the work of a gifted amateur, and that assessment holds up eighty-five years later. Despite its faults, the work is an important, significant, and unusual book within both the narrow confines of the Canadian War novel as well as within the larger scope of the realistic war novels that were published during the interwar period.
If one were to imagine Canada’s Great War novels as a line with the extremely naïve and jingoistic on one end and the pessimistic and realistic on the other, Acland’s All Else is Folly would occupy the middle ground. It is the first of our nation’s realistic war novels, anticipating those that would follow — Charles Yale Harrison’s Generals Die in Bed (1930) and Philip Child’s God’s Sparrows (1937) — while at the same time being even-handed enough to appeal to those who guided Canada through the war. All Else is Folly can be read in either light. Indeed, it was; how else could such a novel appeal equally to Canada’s wartime prime minister, Robert Borden, and the pacifist Bertrand Russell?
Perhaps the origins of Borden’s favourable view of the novel are easy to trace: the bricklayer who becomes Falcon’s batman is named for him, after all, and the protagonist offers explanations for the man’s behaviour twice:
“But he couldn’t be angry with Borden. He knew Borden too well. If there had been a mistake it couldn’t have been Borden’s fault.”
“Borden watched over him like a Mastiff. No, like a brother.”
What are we to make of this? In the British Great War novel tradition, the brass hats and political leaders are the enemy of the fighting man, unsympathetic to his plight, and the source of his misery. So is it horribly inauthentic for a Canadian “anti-war” novel to absolve one of the political architects of the war? Could any other war novel of the period claim such disparate champions?
To dismiss All Else is Folly as romance is to misread it; to classify it purely as anti-war is to misunderstand it. As the novel’s subtitle suggests, it is both. All Else is Folly is a work of dualities, be it the prime minister who becomes a batman, the Colonel who becomes a private, or the protagonist himself who is simultaneously “built for action” but has “meditative eyes,” and who is ultimately cleft in two by artillery — whether Allied or German, we are not told — while between the lines in no-man’s land.
The second and final McClelland & Stewart cover, issued late in 1929.
Ford concludes his preface by praising Acland’s ability to capture and convey the atmosphere and emotion of battle. “I wish I could have done it as well myself,” writes the author of that Great War tetralogy Parade’s End (1924–28). He ends with the statement “that it will be little less than a scandal if the book is not read enormously widely.”
For one brief season, it was read widely, appearing in multiple editions throughout the English-speaking world, and then the novel faded from view. Might it be that All Else is Folly fell victim to the more dominant narrative of the war, written by the likes of Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, and Wilfred Owen, and perpetuated by literary critics like Paul Fussell, where the more desolate, the more grim, the better, at least in literary circles? Or is the cause of neglect found in our very own soil? More than any other in Canada’s history, the First World War is held aloft as the event in which nationhood began to take root. How then is it that all novels written by Canadian veterans of the conflict quickly fell out of print? How is it that only one, Harrison’s Generals Die in Bed, returned and remained consistently in print? How is it that Canadian students read All Quiet on the Western Front while the Great War novels of veterans Peregrine Acland, Philip Child, W. Redvers Dent, and Will Bird are unrecognized?
A scandal, indeed. It is hoped that this edition, the first in more than eight decades, will at long last bring this most central of Canada’s war novels back to prominence.
Notes
1 William Arthur Deacon, “W.A.D. Says Acland Novel One of the Best in Europe or America,” The Ottawa Citizen, October 5, 1929: 13
2 Roger Irwin, “Fiction Holds Own Against Encroaching Books of Fact,” The Globe, December 17,1929: 19.
3 Peregrine Acland,“My Life, War Adventures and Poems,” Pearson’s Magazine, October 1918: 326.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 Peregrine Acland, “Spring in the Foothills,” The Canadian Magazine, April 1913: 546.
7 John Masefield, letter to PA, February 4, 1915, Peregrine Acland fonds, LAC.
8 lfred Noyes (1880–1958), English poet and short story writer. Though a pacifist, he enlisted, believing that war was justified against an aggressive enemy.
9 William