A 2007 survey in The Beaver (since renamed Canada’s History) listed Confederation poet Duncan Campbell Scott as one of the ten worst Canadians of all time and was the inspiration for this trenchant biography by Montreal-based author Mark Abley. Wellknown for his non-fiction books, including The Prodigal Tongue: Dispatches from the Future of English, and several collections of poetry, Abley became curious as to why Scott, one of Canada’s most respected poets and men of letters of his time, would be part of such an ignominious list.
What Abley discovered shocked him: Scott had another career as a lifelong federal civil servant, rising to the influential post of deputy superintendent general of Indian Affairs from 1913 to 1932. In this meticulously researched biography aimed at the common reader, but certain to interest academic specialists as well, Abley notes: “So effectively did Duncan Campbell Scott perform his job that for a whole generation of Aboriginal people, his was the defining voice of Ottawa, the government stone face.”
Scott entered the federal service at age seventeen as a copying clerk through the patronage of Prime Minister John A. Macdonald, who responded to the appeal of his friend, Duncan’s father, the cashpoor Methodist minister William Scott. Through his hard work as a bureaucrat, the budding poet rose in the ranks to the post that would become his downfall.
Abley uses the literary device of a ghost to imaginatively spar with “the dead man.” In several chapters Duncan Campbell Scott appears to Abley in his living room as a prim middle-aged man dressed in a three-piece grey suit and “perfectly shined” black shoes. Both interlocutors turn out to have agendas. Abley confronts Scott with the harm he committed enforcing the government’s assimilation program to deal with the “Indian problem,” a program that included the residential schools, treaties, and racist propaganda. Meanwhile, the biographer does not repress his anger towards his subject’s actions. The dour, self-defensive ghost can only respond that he was “a creature of his own age.”
Scott’s “other” life included rising as an influential poet and man of culture in the capital city, Ottawa. He rubbed elbows with well-known figures such as the English poet Rupert Brooke and the Aboriginal writer-performer Pauline Johnson, whom he disliked for her outspokenness against the government’s policies.
He also endured a personal tragedy. His marriage to Boston violinist Belle Botsford produced one daughter, named Elizabeth,
who died of scarlet fever at eleven years old in a private boarding school in France. This loss didn’t change Scott’s attitude towards the residential schools he administered, where numberless Aboriginal children, taken from their parents, died of tuberculosis and starvation.
Poetry was where Scott expressed some empathy for his “wards,” in a vision that was elegiac, seeing them as a doomed race.
In 1929, after the death of his first wife, Scott, then in his mid-sixties, developed a friendship with an aspiring young poet from Ottawa, Elise Aylen. Within two years they were quietly married in the downtown house where he had lived for most of his life. She was by his side when he died there in December 1947 of heart failure.
Conversations with a Dead Man is a historical biography that challenges readers not only by revealing the dark side of the legacy of Duncan Campbell Scott but also by suggesting the need for this country to rethink the true meaning of being “civilized.”
— Anne Cimon (Read bio)
Anne Cimon is a Montreal poet and freelance journalist.