The Governor General's Three Solitudes: The Canadian Geneses of John Buchan's "Sick Heart River" (Critical Essay‪)‬

Sick Heart River (1941) was John Buchan, Lord Tweedsmuir's, last novel, published in the year after his death near the close of his term as Canada's Governor General. It is set mainly in the Canadian north, and in the introduction to his 1994 Oxford University Press edition of the novel, University of London scholar David Daniell argues that it is a seminal work of Canadian literature, despite the fact that"[h]istorians of Canadian literature have ignored it" (p. xix). One mason for this, Daniell believes, is because "there does not seem to have been any input into Buchan's novel from other Canadian literature" (p. xix). "We must ask," the editor writes, "what Canadian literature of any significance there was before 1939 to influence Sick Heart River. The surprising answer is that there was, effectively, none, in the sense of books written with an awareness of being specifically Canadian" (p. xx). It is not possible to fully engage this latter, highly debatable point here, nor do I aim to assess the worthiness of Sick Heart River for inclusion in the canon of pioneering Canadian literature. I would, however, like to point out one prominent source of Canadian literary influence on Buchan' s novel which Professor Daniell has overlooked, The Poetical Works of William Henry Drummond (New York: Putnam, 1912; repr. as Dr. W. H. Drummond's Complete Poems, Toronto: McClelland, 1926).