‘of course I was only an onlooker for I can’t dance’ ‘of course I was only an onlooker for I can’t dance’: the 1911-1919 diary of Gordon Christian Eby, Mennonite farmer Edited by Paul Tiessen and Anne Eby Millar Based on a transcript of the diary by Anne Eby Millar Introduction and notes by Paul Tiessen l MLR Editions Canada 2007 ‘of course I was only an onlooker for I can’t dance’: the 1911-1919 diary of Gordon Christian Eby, Mennonite farmer ISBN 0-9681676-2-4 Diary copyright © 2007 The Estate of Gordon Christian Eby Introduction and notes copyright © 2007 Paul Tiessen Drawings copyright © 2007 Matthew Tiessen All rights reserved Printed and bound in Canada by Pandora Press Special thanks to Friends of Joseph Schneider Haus and to Susan Burke, Manager and Curator, Joseph Schneider Haus Volumes in the MLR Editions Canada series (General Editors: Miguel Mota and Paul Tiessen), drawn from archives and published in limited numbers for scholars and general readers by MLR Editions Canada (c/o Department of English and Film Studies, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario N2L 3C5 Canada), include: Wyndham Lewis and Expressionism by Sheila Watson (2003) L.M. Montgomery’s Ephraim Weber: Letters 1916-1941 by L.M. Montgomery (2000) Our Asian Journey, a novel by Dallas Wiebe (1997) Refining the real Canada: Homer Watson’s spiritual landscape, a biography by Gerald Noonan (1997) Ephraim Weber’s Letters Home, 1902-1955: Letters from Ephraim Weber to Leslie Staebler of Waterloo County by Ephraim Weber (1996), with Friends of Joseph Schneider Haus (Kitchener, ON) The 1940 Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry (1994) Dorothy Livesay and the CBC: Early Texts for Radio by Dorothy Livesay (1994) Malcolm Lowry and Conrad Aiken Adapted: three radio dramas and a film proposal by Margerie Bonner Lowry, Fletcher Markle, and Gerald Noxon (1992) The Road to Victory: radio plays by Gerald Noxon (1989, with Quarry Press Kingston, ON) ‘On Malcolm Lowry’ and other writings by Gerald Noxon (1987) Teresina Maria, a novel by Gerald Noxon (1986) ~ Contents ~ Preface and Acknowledgements ... iii Mapping the modern world from pre-war Berlin to post-war Kitchener: an Introduction to Gordon Christian Eby’s poetics of life and language ... v Names ... xliv Works Cited ... xlix Notes ... li The Diary ... 1 First volume, 1911-1912 ... 3 Second volume, 1912 ... 87 Third volume, 1913 ... 143 Fourth volume, 1913 ... 149 Fifth volume, 1914 ... 243 Sixth volume, 1915 ... 257 Seventh volume, 1915 ... 267 Eighth volume, 1916 ... 281 Ninth volume, 1917-1918 ... 315 Tenth volume, 1918 ... 335 Eleventh volume, 1919 ... 347 I got up around 5 oclock, had breakfast, got started for Hamilton at 5.39 a.m., fine scenery, morning sun, the river at Freeport, waving grain fields, hills & woods - I stopped 35 min. at Rockton - had breakfast & read awhile, fine wheeling from Galt down good macadamized road. The view of Dundas from the mountain is the prettiest view I have seen since looking from Brocks monument at Queenston Heights. Leo Longo and his sister Rosy were here from Waterloo, brought us a present of fruit candys etc. - I gave them a lemon from our tree, with a branch of about 6 leaves attached - they will place it in their show window, also gave them some apples and pears. Ed and dad helped me to drag the pig out, then just as dad was sticking the pig, Benney came out being only a few feet away from us, he stood tight against the wall, looked at us made kind of a sour face and said “auch nit,” meaning au don’t. - but unlike the other boys when they were small he didn’t run for the house and yell but only went a few feet away and waited to see it all. Dad woke me at about 4.30 a.m. to get ready for the Toronto Ex. I, Dad & Jim started to walk up to the station a little before 6 oclock. - after we were up about 20 min. Clarence, Gord, Herb, Alton Filzing, Wess Michel, also came - this makes a bunch of 8 who are going to the Ex. - we got the 7.20 train - went off at the Union Depot - went through a few aisles of Simpsons store & through about all the flores of Eatons - had lunch at Eatons. Us boys were on the moving stairs & the elevators at Eaton’s. But Dad didn’t go on those things so we went down again & went up the steps with him. Got to the Ex. grounds about 1 oclock. Had dinner at Birds - afternoon seen livestock - Midway - all were in to see the diving girls - most of us boys were also on the Roler Coaster & the Chute the Chutes - met George & Charley at the coaster. Our bunch had our picture taken in the auto. Rained a little during grandstand performance evenings - but fireworks was fairly good. “The Burning of Rome” (Train was crowded on road home, a lot of us were in the baggage car. We got home at 4 oclock mornings.) I milked & seperated the milk, then wrote this ... ~ Preface and Acknowledgements ~ Anne Eby Millar (see also AEM) produced the first typed transcript of Gordon Christian Eby’s eleven-volume diary. Subsequently, I made stylistic and other alterations based on my own reading of the original manuscripts. Then she and I collaborated on further refinements. Also, Anne helped me at many points during my writing the Introduction. In responding to my questions about the life and work of the diarist – her father – she offered not only background information and interpretative detail, but also steady moral support and encouragement. In particular, the Names section following the Introduction is based fully on her recollections. In the absence of an index, this Names section provides reference points helping to identify some of the dramatis personæ of Eby’s realm, especially during the pre-war years. Sam Steiner, archivist for the Mennonite Archives of Ontario at Conrad Grebel University College – where Anne and other members of Eby’s family placed the diary and related documents for safe-keeping – introduced me to Eby’s work in the late 1970s when I was working on Berlin, Canada: A Self- portrait of Kitchener, Ontario before World War One (1979). For that, and for his subsequent support, I am grateful to him. Eby’s letters from which I quote in my Introduction, and those letters and postcards that I have added to the war and post-war sections of the diary (where they are in italics), are part of the Eby Collection in the Mennonite Archives of Ontario. For copyright information about the diary and other material in the Eby Collection, please contact the archive. The difficulty in making Eby’s particular voice audible in a sustained way became apparent in 1982, when American anthropologist James M. Nyce published a large portion of the diary, from its opening entry in 1911 to the end of 1913 (see The Gordon C. Eby Diaries, 1911-13: Chronicle of a Mennonite Farmer ). Nyce, all the while giving us critical entry points into the diary through his Notes and Introduction, tried not to intervene in Eby’s punctuation practices. Hence, Nyce’s transcript does not transmit, for example, Eby’s frequent use of the end of a line as a natural breaking or breathing point. The present transcription also falls short of conveying the texture – the feel – of the original. However, we experiment with another approach. Although it is risky, of course, to ascribe any intention to Eby’s “breathing” habits, we do try to make Eby’s text more accessible by attending to the rhythm and pacing of his line. Thus we have introduced short dashes where breathing or other breaking points seem to invite a pause or a shift in the focus or the momentum. Of course, as Nyce points out, it is impossible to convey in print what Eby crafted by hand (Nyce 6). Square brackets in the diary indicate our editorial interventions. Round brackets signal that those are Eby’s comments, even though they might not necessarily have been bracketed in the original; they may simply be comments iv “of course I was only an onlooker” occurring in some area of his margins. Sometimes, too, Eby used round brackets on his own, and we have retained those without comment. In my Introduction, too, I attempt to make Eby’s diary more visible – in its rhythms and playfulness, its tone and its assumptions, its spirit and its ambition: elements that make Eby’s writing and the bustle of his world so compelling. I attempt to make visible, too, some of the themes and the tropes that run through the diary, and to convey some sense of what so poignantly accounts for the difference between the robustness of the opening entry and the apparent wistfulness of the closing entry. In 2002 an Edna Staebler Research Fellowship, sponsored by Friends of Joseph Schneider Haus National Historic Site, enabled me to bring my long- standing interest in Eby’s work into focus with my project, “Gordon Christian Eby’s poetics of life and language: Mapping the modern world, from pre-war Berlin to post-war Kitchener (1911-1919).” I am very pleased to acknowledge the Friends’ – and Edna Staebler’s – wonderful support, which finds fruition here. Eby’s diary, still not widely known, is a great historical resource and also a significant text in its own right. It can be celebrated as one of Waterloo Region’s outstanding cultural documents of the early twentieth century. My own interest in Eby’s diary stems from a variety of sources, including my ongoing exploration of “Mennonite” cultural traditions in Canada, in many cases literary and artistic projects that have been overlooked by other scholars and so have remained obscure, embedded in public or private archives.