(1849-23 June 1937), author. (J. J. Macdonald, John J. Macdonald; used pen name James MacRae) Born east of Alexandria, GC, on Lot 24, in the 2nd Concession of Lochiel Township. Parents: John James Macdonald, who was a native of Glen Garry, Scotland, and his wife Flora McRae, who was a native of Kintail, Scotland.

     By his own statement, his only school attendance was for a few months in the Christian Brothers’ school in Alexandria when he was about nine years old. The obituary claim that he attended “Common School” for three or four years can accordingly be dismissed. Except for two periods in Lancaster Township, he worked on the farm at home till he was about twenty. In his autobiographical notes he includes a few recollections of the primitive farming of the era and place. Thereafter, he set out in the world, and like so many of the young GC men of his time, travelled widely in search of employment. He worked on grading for railway construction in Indiana, and on the Grenville Canal, and in 1873 was on a surveying party operating north of Huntsville, Ont. He was sufficiently involved in surveying at this time to take the preliminary examinations as a surveyor. In 1875, when he was in his mid-20s, he came to the area of St. Marys, Ont., which was to be his home for the rest of his life. He was a farm worker in the St. Marys area for about nine years, then operated a farm on shares for about two years, then farmed on his own from 1886 till 1918, when he sold the farm, which was in Downie Township, and moved into St. Marys town. He next worked for four years at a factory in St. Marys. Thereafter, as a retired man, he followed his studies and his literary interests, and was a steady reader at the St. Marys public library. He was a lifelong abstainer from alcohol and tobacco. The impression given by his writings is of a pleasant man, shrewd and even rather hardbitten, and almost certainly a most interesting conversationalist.

     He died aged 88 at his home in St. Marys. He was a Roman Catholic, and in his writings is highly combative against what he saw as criticism of his church. He was married about 1880 to a native of Ireland whose Christian name was Bridget Louisa, and whose surname seems to have been McDonald, the same as his own. She is said to have been “of pure Irish blood” (Deacon), and died in 1935. Their daughter Louise, Sister Mary of the Incarnation, predeceased her parents. John James Macdonald was survived by four children: (1) another John J. Macdonald, who at the time of his father’s death was living in Montreal, (2) Minnie, who at that time was at home, and unmarried, (3) Flora, Sister Margaret Mary, and (4) Margaret, Sister M. of the Annunciation, Monastery of Our Lady of Charity, Toronto. In 1974, G. I. D. Cameron was unable to trace survivors of the family.

     His first book published was Poems. Written by John J. Macdonald, a Native of County Glengarry (n.d., n.p., 1877?; pp. 64). His next book, nearly a half century later, was An Ideal Courtship (Toronto, The Ryerson Press, [1923]; pp. 43). This book, published under the pen name James MacRae, consists of a narrative poem set in GC. It has been suggested that he took the MacRae name for this purpose from his mother. Next, in 1928, he published his Poems and Essays (Toronto, Ru-Mi-Lou Books, 1928; pp. 132) under the name of John J. Macdonald. He also published letters to the editor, and we may guess that some of the poems saw newspaper publication. The following work, sometimes mentioned in print, seems not actually to have been published: his Complete Poems, 1930.

     He was one of four poets satirized for their allegedly bad verse in William Arthur Deacon’s The Four Jameses (Ottawa, The Graphic Publishers, Limited, 1927). Deacon reissued the book in 1953 with some changes, and there was still another edition, in 1974, with an introduction by Doug Fetherling. Deacon (1890-1977) was a celebrated early Canadian literary critic, important in the building up of awareness in Canada of the value of having a national literature, and the necessity of making sure it was a good one. The Four Jameses is remembered as “that rare thing in Canadian literature: an underground classic.” (Fetherling) On Deacon’s death, it was defined as his “best-known” and “most durable” book. (William French) In fact, all but unreadable, it exploits Canadians’ guilt about their supposed provincialism, and barely conceals Deacon’s unhappiness with himself, presumably on the same grounds. As an individual, Deacon seems rather futile, and to have been the kind of man described as “Pooterish,” from a character in the Victorian comic novel, The Diary of a Nobody. He corresponded with Dorothy Dumbrille, but she is said to have destroyed a quantity of his letters because, having typed them when he had been drinking, they contained most unsuitable abuse of individuals.

     Individual lines and phrases in Macdonald’s poems are often skilful, and there are some longer passages of sustained value. He had, however, the greatest difficulty in maintaining consistently good judgment. One of his best works is his 160-line poem, “Binding Race,” which describes in rhyming couplets a competition between two migrant workers in the harvest fields. Anticipating the rural poems of Robert Frost in its conviction of the importance and richness of farm life and farm traditions, it is marred by roughness and an implausible ending, but it has many vigorous and even accomplished passages, and is a splendid vignette of life in an older rural Ontario or even the American Midwest. It was written in 1878 but not issued within a book till 1928. The location is not specified, but it is described as a place heavily settled by Scottish Highlanders. That could well be GC, but one may suspect he also borrowed from experiences elsewhere, including the St. Marys area. And even the U. S., for the competition of the “Binding Race” could have been easily rewritten as a chapter in the American regional classic Herbert Krause’s grim, superb study of the Minnesota harvest fields, The Thresher (1946). Much in Deacon’s criticism of Macdonald was valid, so far as technical mastery of literary methods goes, but the critical reader of the “Binding Race” must wonder, also, what Macdonald could have done if he had fallen into company at a relatively early age with someone who would have undertaken to be his editor and literary guide.

     The large vocabulary, competently employed, of Macdonald’s writings contains few hints as to his lack of formal education. “He had a remarkable memory and when he read some passage that appealed to him strongly, he committed it to memory.” (obituary, St. Marys) He was a great admirer of the Montreal Roman Catholic newspaper, the True Witness, which he had known from early years, and which seems to have provided him with a part of his education. The exhausting life of an Ontario farmer must have left him little opportunity over the years for study. He needed a mortgage to get started in farm ownership, and he grimly remarked that while he and his family worked hard, the farm’s “mortgage worked hardest of us all.”

     Macdonald came to attention again in 1974, when the Globe and Mail published a long op-ed page article on Macdonald by the industrial chemist and GC historian and collector G. I. D. Cameron of St. Catharines, Ont. Macdonald’s autobiographical notes (in prose, not verse) made up the core of the essay. According to report at the time among the GC observers, Cameron had earlier attempted unsuccessfully to get Eugene Macdonald to print it in the Glengarry News, following which Cameron carried off the coup of having it published in the principal Canadian newspaper of the time. Eugene Macdonald was a fierce, unaccommodating man in his defence of what he considered the highest quality in journalism, but for once he erred in deciding what was quality.

     John James Macdonald was the brother of William J. Macdonald.

     G. I. D. Cameron already mentioned (George Ian Douglas Cameron) grew up in GC, graduated from the University of Torornto in the 1940s, and died 7 Aug. 1988 at Lancaster. His roles in life included managing a paper mill in India in the mid-1960s. With Ewan Ross he was the co-author of a history of Williamstown High School.

The St. Marys Journal-Argus 24 June 1937, Glengarry News 9 July 1937 * article on Macdonald repr. GN 25 Jan. 1929 from The St. Marys Journal-Argus * G. I. D. Cameron, “A Farmer-Poet’s Unadorned Tale of Life and Song,” Globe & Mail 14 Dec. 1974 (with two line drawings of Macdonald, one based on Macdonald’s photograph, the other a more imaginative sketch of an old-style farmer); a version of Cameron’s article appeared also in The St. Marys Journal-Argus 16 Oct. 1974 * article on Macdonald by Edward S. St. John, Glengarry Highland Games programme 1995 * MacGillivray & Ross 516, 521 (with portrait) * Dorothy Dumbrille, U, 5 (mentioned) * It has not been possible to identify him with any certainty in the St. Finnan’s records * Examination of the Registry Office files for the farm lot of his birth (where Macdonald ownership ceased in 1929) has provided no further useful information about the family * There is a photograph of Macdonald in his 1928 volume and in Deacon’s 1927 volume, and he appears in line-drawings of a grouping of the four poets as frontispiece to Deacon’s 1953 volume and on the cover of Deacon’s 1974 volume. * William French’s obituary tribute for Deacon, Globe & Mail 9 Aug. 1977 (with portrait) * review by Marcus Van Steen, Ottawa Citizen 31 Aug. 1974, of 1974 edn of The Four James * G. I. D. Cameron: death notice, Standard Freeholder (ND); private information