Watson Kirkconnell

Watson Kirkconnell's paternal ancestors derived their surname from the village and ruined monastery of Kirkconnel. They were Presbyterians, spoke Galwegian Gaelic, wore the Clan Douglas tartan, and farmed near Kirkcudbright, in Dumfries and Galloway.[7] Due to what Kirkconnell later dubbed, "the almost universal holocaust of Scottish archives during the Reformation",[8] his genealogy could not be traced with complete accuracy or linked, as he strongly suspected was the case, to a cadet branch of the Clan Douglas or Clan Maxwell lairds of Kirkconnel.[9] In, "an almost imperceptible little ripple in the vast tide of Scottish immigration that flowed into Canada", Walter Kirkconnell (1795-1860), the poet's great-grandfather, sailed for the New World in 1819 and settled as a pioneer in Chatham Township, Argenteuil County, Quebec. As a result of a 1953 search made at Kirkconnell's request by the Scottish Council, he learned that everyone named Kirkconnell had similarly joined the Scottish diaspora and that no one with the same surname still lived in Scotland.[10]

At the time, Chatham Township was largely being settled by Gaelic-speaking evictees and voluntary immigrants from Perthshire (Scottish Gaelic: Siorrachd Pheairt). Walter Kirkconnell accordingly married one of them; Mary McCallum, the daughter of John and Janet (née McDiarmid) McCallum, from the farmhouse known as "Carnban" in what is now a ruined and completely depopulated village in Glen Lyon (Scottish Gaelic: Gleann Lìomhann).[11] Reformed worship in Chatham Township continued the 16th-century practice of exclusive and unaccompanied Gaelic psalm singing in a form known as precenting the line. In her old age, Mary (née McCallum) Kirkconnell, despite having gone blind, could still sing all 154 Scottish Gaelic Metrical Psalms from memory.[12]

Kirkconnell's maternal great-grandfather, Christopher Watson, emigrated from Alston, Cumberland to Upper Canada in 1819 and became a schoolmaster in York, later renamed Toronto. Christopher's youngest son, Thomas Watson, had adopted his father's profession and taught at the schools in Allanburg, Beachwood, Lundy's Lane, Stamford, and Port Hope, Ontario. In 1851, Thomas Watson had married Margaret Elma Green of Lundy's Lane, a woman descended from Welsh-American United Empire Loyalists, as well as more recent British immigrants to Canada with both German and Spanish roots.[13]

Kirkconnell's parents, Thomas Kirkconnell (1862-1934) and Bertha (née Watson) Kirkconnell (1867-1957), were living in Port Hope, Ontario when their earliest children were born. [14]

Watson Kirkconnell was born on 16 May 1895 in Port Hope, Ontario, where his father, Thomas Kirkconnell, was headmaster of Port Hope High School.[15] Kirkconnell was a sickly child and was accordingly delayed entry for two years into Port Hope Public School and only began taking classes at the age of seven.[16] Despite the delays, Kirkconnell proved to be very academically gifted pupil and was twice allowed to skip a grade.[17]

Kirkconnell later credited his love of poetry to the influence of his maternal grandfather, Thomas Watson, who he later described as a, "grey-bearded... pillar of the local Methodist church". Thomas Watson used to reward his grandson by giving him one cent for every stanza he memorized from Divine and Moral Songs by Isaac Watts. Kirkconnell later recalled, "From an entire volume thus committed to memory, I gained considerable cash, indelible recollections of many edifying verses, and an indelible love of prosody. Neither of us dreamt that back of several of Watts' poems lay the fine Latin hymns of the Polish Jesuit Kazimierz Sarbiewski (1595-1640)."[18]

Kirkconnell further recalled that his "first awareness of small town journalism came" after his "second Christmas-time promotion". The Port Hope Guide reported that "a local lawyer" had angrily protested during a school board meeting that his son has not been similarly promoted and accused Watson Kirkconnell of having been "shoved", solely because his father was the headmaster of Port Hope High School. For this reason, the Kirkconnell family felt both vindicated and overjoyed the following summer, after the same newspaper published the results of the Provincial "Entrance Examinations". These proved that the headmaster's controversial son had scored, "nearly fifty points higher than anyone else in town or county."[19]

At the age of twelve, Kirkconnell asked for and received both baptism and membership in the Port Hope Baptist Church. According to J.M.R. Beveridge, "Thus began his commitment to Christianity which, although subjected to periods of doubt, sometimes perhaps even approaching despair, survived and matured. Throughout his adult life he played an active and on many occasions leading role in the Baptist denomination."[20]

Also as a child in Port Hope, Kirkconnell's interest in geology was sparked by attending a lecture about local prehistory, Ice Age glaciers, and the Glacial Lake Iroquois by Arthur Philemon Coleman of the University of Toronto. Afterwards, Kirkconnell recalls, "walking and cycling through the countryside now took on a new meaning", and after the family moved to Lindsay, Ontario in 1908, Kirkconnell continued to research local prehistory and how it had shaped the landscape.[21]

By the time he graduated high school, Kirkconnell had learned Latin, French, German, and Greek, and had been exposed to works of comparative philology. He later wrote, "The labours of my lifetime have been more in the field of language study than in any other."[22]

In 1913, at the urging of his father, Kirkconnell began studies at his father's alma mater of Queen's University at Kingston. Even though mathematics had been his best subject in high school, Kirkconnell proceeded to honours in Classics and graduated as a double medallist in Latin and Greek. He received a Master of Arts degree in 1916.[23]

On 4 August 1914, Kirkconnell was attending Queen's University at the outbreak of World War I. Although he enthusiastically hoped to see combat in France, he chose to delay enlistment until after his graduation.[24]

His brother, Walter Kirkconnell, enlisted in the Royal Montreal Regiment on 5 August 1914. After training in the mud of Salisbury Plain, Lt. Walter Kirkconnell was killed in action during the Battle of Amiens on 8 August 1918, when the Canadian Corps platoon under his command ran into a German machine gun nest in a grain field near Villers-Bretonneux.[25]

In August 1916, Kirkconnell volunteered for active service on the Western Front. In November 1916, however, after being personally requested by Major P.G.C. Campbell and shortly before he was to be shipped overseas with the 253rd Battalion, Captain Kirkconnell was ruled unfit for combat duty by three successive Medical Boards.[26]

A deeply disappointed Captain Watson Kirkconnell spent the rest of the war guarding POWs and civilian internees at Fort Henry and at Kapuskasing internment camp, both in rural Ontario. While serving as camp paymaster at Kapuskasing, Captain Watson Kirkconnell helped prevent a prisoner uprising and, on two occasions, he also discovered and foiled attempts to tunnel out of the camp.[27]

During the fall of 1919, Captain Kirkconnell accompanied 445 POWs and internees from Fort Henry and Kapuskasing internment camp aboard the S.S. Pretorian, from Quebec City to Rotterdam, pending their repatriation to the Weimar Republic. Kirkconnell later recalled, after surrendering his prisoners to the neutral Dutch armed forces, "That they bore me no ill will for my performance at Fort Henry and Kapuskasing seemed clear when on the wharf my former prisoners called for, 'Three cheers for Captain Kirkconnell', and gave them lustily."[28]

Despite years of grief over the combat death of his brother, Watson Kirkconnell later wrote, "Generally speaking, I could feel little animus against our German prisoners. Guarding them was simply a job. It was their duty to try to get away and our duty to prevent it. The ingenuity that they displayed in their attempts to escape was being duplicated by our men in German captivity."[29]

In 1922, Kirkconnell accepted the offer of a faculty position in the English Department at Wesley College. Kirkconnell taught English there for the eleven years, before switching to the Department of Classics for the next seven years. The experience for him proved life changing.[30]

Like many other English-speaking Canadians of his generation, Kirkconnell had been brought up to believe in the superiority of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants and accordingly opposed allowing any further non-British immigration into Canada. His experiences as a professor in the multiethnic and multilingual city of Winnipeg, however, exposed him to world literature, and caused him to begin making radical teaching innovations.

For example, Kirkconnell believed that, not only the Icelandic sagas and the Elder Edda, but also the Old Irish Táin Bó Cúailnge and the Old Saxon Heliand, "threw light on Beowulf, the Battle of Maldon, and the Caedmonian Genesis", and advocated teaching all of those texts together.[31] While seeking background literature while teaching a course on Geoffrey Chaucer, Kirkconnell discovered and fell in love with the Middle Welsh poetry of Dafydd ap Gwilym, whom he called, "a great contemporary of Chaucer, with a feeling for nature that was beyond the reach of the London vintner's son."[32] Kirkconnell felt similarly when he discovered the Medieval Latin poetry of the Wandering Scholars and the Medieval Hebrew poetry of Solomon ibn Gabirol and Yehuda Halevi.[33]

It was finally the 1925 death of his wife while giving birth to twin sons changed his views completely.

As both a tribute and a memorial to his late wife, Kirkconnell selected and translated poetry from forty different languages in collaboration with distinguished literary scholars, such as Albert Verwey, Douglas Hyde, and Pavle Popović.[34] He eventually published the volume European Elegies in 1928. In the process, Kirkconnell came to believe that treating the languages, cultures, and literatures of White ethnic immigrants with respect would instill in them a sense of loyalty and gratitude to their adopted country. In later years, he often used the metaphor of a tapestry to express these views.[35] Among Canadians of White ethnic ancestry, Kirkconnell is remembered with gratitude for his successful advocacy for their social acceptance in what was still an overwhelmingly Anglophile country.[36]

Kirkconnell accordingly continued publicizing and making translations of the national poetry of European immigrants. For example, his collection A Golden Treasury of Polish Lyrics was published by The Polish Press, Ltd, in Winnipeg in 1936. Kirkconnell dedicated the book, which included his translations in chronological order from Jan Kochanowski to Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska, to the memory of Marshal Józef Piłsudski, about whom Kirkconnell also composed a funeral ode. The title page describes Kirkconnell as having been made a knight of the Order of Polonia Restituta by the government of the Second Polish Republic.

Beginning with the poetry composed by Icelandic-Canadians living in Manitoba, Kirkconnell also translated and publicized verse by recent immigrants to Canada and their descendants, whom he sometimes termed, "New Canadians", from Icelandic, Italian, Polish, Ukrainian, and Canadian Gaelic.

Also during the interwar period, Kirkconnell sought to return John Milton to his pedestal by translating and publishing what had long been believed to been Milton's many sources of inspiration from Christian poetry and verse dramas in other languages.[37]

During the Second World War, the Soviet newspaper Trud attacked Kirkconnell for being both an anti-communist and a Ukrainophile, and accused him of being "the Führer of Canadian Fascism".[38] Meanwhile, so vocal were Kirkconnell's criticisms of Stalinism and of Soviet war crimes that Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King seriously considered acting to protect the Soviet-Canadian military alliance against Nazi Germany by silencing Kirkconnell with an Order-in-Council.[39]

After World War II and during the beginning of the Cold War, Kirkconnell wrote a poem defending Draža Mihailović, harshly denouncing the Serbian Chetnik General's show trial by Josip Broz Tito's Soviet-backed Yugoslav Partisans, and eulogizing the General's execution by firing squad on July 17, 1946. Kirkconnell wrote the poem because he believed that General Mihailović was innocent of both Chetnik war crimes in World War II and of collaboration with the occupying Axis forces and that his "trial" was nothing more or less than a Stalinist witch hunt.

During both the early years of the Cold War and the PROFUNC counterintelligence operation, Kirkconnell was recruited as a secret informant for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Security Service regarding fellow university professors and students suspected of links to the Communist Party of Canada.[40] Kirkconnell was also extremely critical, however, of Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose activities he considered to have done more damage to anti-communism than good.[41]

From 1948 to 1964, Kirkconnell was the ninth President of Acadia University. He had originally expected to be, "a full time administrative officer", but found himself repeatedly drawn back into the classroom.[42]

Kirkconnell was unable as he aged, however, to shed the White Supremacist beliefs still commonly held and taught in the Canadian elite and educational system during his youth. During the 1960s, he accordingly accused believers in racial equality of having views with no basis in modern science. This is why Kirkconnell's vision for multiculturalism in Canada was never able to widen enough to include the cultures, languages, or literatures of Indigenous Canadians or those of other non-Whites.[43]

Kirkconnell also became, as he aged, a vocal conspiracy theorist. In 1959, he accused water fluoridation of being a Communist mind control plot. The elderly Kirkconnell also became a vocal adherent of both anti-Semitism and Holocaust revisionism.[44]

In 1968, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada "for his services at home and abroad as an educator, scholar and writer". In 1936, he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

He died at Wolfville, Nova Scotia in 1977.[45] Hungarian Helicon, his last collection of verse translations of Hungarian literature was published posthumously in 1986. His private papers are preserved at the Acadia University Archives, through which Gordon L. Heath was able to document Kirkconnell's secret role as an RCMP informant during the early Cold War.[46]

• János Arany: Bards of Wales - translated by Watson Kirkconnell
• They’ve Walled up Every Window ... - One of Tibor Tollas's poems in English, translated by Watson Kirkconnell
• Woodsworth, Judith (April 2000). "Watson Kirkconnell and the "Undoing of Babel": a Little-Known Case in Canadian Translation History" (PDF). Meta. 45 (1): 13–28. doi:10.7202/004618ar – via Érudit.
• Meister, Daniel (16 December 2013). "Watson Kirkconnell". The Canadian Encyclopedia (online ed.). Historica Canada.
• Coleman, Heather J. (2016). "Watson Kirkconnell on "The place of Slavic studies in Canada": a 1957 speech to the Canadian Association of Slavists". Canadian Slavonic Papers. 58 (4): 386–397. doi:10.1080/00085006.2016.1239858. S2CID 164230353.
• Meister, Daniel R (10 February 2020). "'Anglo-Canadian Futurities': Watson Kirkconnell, scientific racism, and cultural pluralism in interwar Canada". Settler Colonial Studies. 10 (2): 234–56. doi:10.1080/2201473X.2020.1726148. S2CID 213470837.
• Meister, Daniel R (2021). The Racial Mosaic: A Pre-History of Canadian Multiculturalism. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press. ISBN 9780228008712.
• Archives of Watson Kirkconnell (Watson Kirkconnell fonds, R1847) are held at Library and Archives Canada. Fonds consists of three drafts of the translation from Ukrainian of The Poetical Works of Taras Shevchenko.