Lost classics and guilty pleasures
Louise Penny on Sarah Binks
Compiled By Davis Macklin and Andrea Caron
The questions we asked each writer are as follows: Is there any book that you would nominate for “Lost Classic” status? (That is, something you consider brilliant, but which no one seems to read anymore.) Also, what would your literary guilty pleasures be?
I’m a genius, I’m a genius
What more can I desire,
I toot upon my little flute,
And twang upon my lyre.
That Sarah Binks, the “Sweet Songstress of Saskatchewan,” has become a lost classic is indeed an indictment of our time and perhaps even temperature. Sarah, her genius captured in Paul Hiebert’s 1947 book Sarah Binks, spent her all-too-short life corralling words and producing poems in a sort of divine frenzy unequalled in literature, culminating in her win of the Wheat Pool Medal.
In writing his authoritative biography, and adding valuable insight to the Binksian Collection, Professor Hiebert visited the literary outposts of Quagmire, Pelvis and Quorum, Saskatchewan as well as Vertigo, Manitoba in order to interview the people who inspired Sarah — people who would be legends in this land, if they hadn’t been completely forgotten, like Miss Rosalind Drool, Mathilda Schwartzenhacker, Ole the hired man and, of course, Rover the dog.
Despite her massive and early success (barely an issue of the Horsebreeders Gazette was published without at least one poem by Sarah) the poetess never forgot her roots, as illustrated in the deeply moving, if not actually fertilizing work, “The farmer is king!”
The farmer is king of his packer and plough,
Of his harrows and binders and breakers,
He is Lord of the pig, and Czar of the cow
On his hundred and sixty-odd acres.
Professor Hiebert calls upon every last source he can possibly find so that we might better understand and appreciate Sarah’s unique talents. His sources include Dr. Taj Mahal, who studied railway timetables and temperature charts to gain valuable insight into Sarah’s talents, as well as Professor Marrowfat and even Mr. Justice Linseed, who wrote his own “lost classic,” Eighty Years on the Bench.
As we all now know, Sarah’s big break came because of the happy and natural co-joining of poetry and farm animals, as has happened so often in the past. The great literary contest sponsored by the McCohen and Meyers Stock Conditioner Company has become legend at the Quagmire Agricultural Society Fair. The announcement, read by the 13 Schwartzenhacker sisters in Swine and Kine magazine, gave the simple 12 rules, including that the contest was free and all Sarah must do is send as many poems as she liked, accompanied by labels from the stock conditioner.
And so Sarah convinced her father to double the horse’s rations of conditioner, and even ordered Ole to take some in his porridge, such was her determination to win. As always, Sarah’s genius would make itself clear. Not only did she win, but a number of the Bink’s livestock also came away with ribbons. In fact, the ribbon of Dairy Queen is among the most prized in the Binksian Collection.
Sadly, Sarah’s life came to an untimely end.
It makes me scratch myself and ask,
When shall my powers fade?
It puts me severely to the task,
To face this fact undismayed.
Happily for Sarah, but unfortunately for lovers of remarkable poetry, she never really had to face the fact. Her powers remained undiminished to the end, when her combined love of Scotch mints and a slight fever conspired to snuff out the muse, and the actual woman. Bearing down on the mint as she was taking her own temperature, she cracked the thermometer and swallowed all the mercury. Sadly, again, had Sarah not been using a horse thermometer she might still be with us today. But she was, and she isn’t.
Paul Hiebert grew up on the prairies and at one time taught school in Saskatchewan. He went on to get a B.A. from the University of Manitoba and his Ph.D. from McGill. He was Professor of Chemistry at the University of Manitoba when he wrote Sarah Binks in 1947. In fact, he wrote many of the poems first and would recite them to great amusement and acclaim, always claiming they’d been sent to him by the great Sarah Binks. When undergrads and fellow professors began pressing him for details of this woman, he produced the book, which went on to win the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour.
He, and we owe a huge debt to Sarah Binks, the Sweet Songstress of Saskatchewan.
Now, my guilty pleasure. Does People Magazine count? If so, great, but my genuine guilty pleasure are Star Trek books. Ta da. The humiliation is complete. There is no explaining this and I won’t even try, though I blame society.
Louise Penny was an award-winning journalist with CBC Radio for many years, working in, among other places, Winnipeg, where she was host of “Afternoon Edition”. Her first novel, Still Life, was an honouree at the Dagger Awards in Britain and immediately made best seller lists in Canada. It’s been sold internationally and has been translated into many languages, including German and Russian. Still Life will be published in the U.S. this summer as a lead title for St. Martin’s Press. Her second book, Dead Cold, will be published this fall.
