But he went on with his tireless search. He wandered around in the neighbourhood between Phillips Square and St. Patrick’s. He wandered in the strong morning sunlight. It was warm and brilliant. It melted the snow. But he couldn’t find the little church.
COMMENTS BY EDMUND WILSON
The Canadian Morley Callaghan, at one time well known in the United States, is today perhaps the most unjustly neglected novelist in the English-speaking world. In his youth, he worked on the Toronto Star – Toronto is his native city – at the time when Ernest Hemingway had a job on the same paper, and, through Hemingway, who took his manuscripts to Paris, some of Callaghan’s early short stories were accepted by Ezra Pound for his little magazine Exile. Maxwell Perkins of Scribner’s was impressed by these stories and had them reprinted in Scribner’s Magazine, which later published other stories by Callaghan. His novels were published by Scribner’s. Morley Callaghan was a friend of Fitzgerald and Hemingway and was praised by Ring Lardner, and he belonged to the literary scene of the twenties. He appeared in transition as well as in Scribner’s and he spent a good deal of his time in Paris and the United States. But eventually he went back to Canada, and it is one of the most striking signs of signs of the partial isolation of that country from the rest of the cultural world that – in spite of the fact that his stories continued to appear in The New Yorker up to the end of the thirties – he should quickly have been forgotten in the United States and should be almost unknown in England. Several summers ago, on a visit to Toronto, I was given a copy of the Canadian edition of a novel of his called The Loved and the Lost. It seemed to me so remarkable that I expected it to attract attention in England and the United States. But it was never published in England, and it received so little notice in the United States that I imagined it had not been published here either.
I want to… speculate first on the reasons for the current indifference to his work. This has no doubt been partly due to the peculiar relation of Canada to England and the United States. The Canadian background of Morley Callaghan’s stories seems alien to both these other countries and at the same time not strange enough to exercise the spell of the truly exotic. To the reviewer, this background has much interest and charm. Montreal, with its snow-dazzling mountain, its passionate winter sports, its hearty and busy bars, its jealously guarded French culture, and its pealing of bells from French churches, side by side with the solid Presbyterianism of its Anglo-Scottish best people, is a world I find pleasant to explore. It is curious to see how much this world has been influenced – in its language, in its amusements, its press – by the “Americans,” as they still call us, and how far – in, for example, its parliamentary politics and its social and moral codes – it rests on somewhat different foundations. But Mr. Callaghan is not writing about Canada at all from the point of view of exploiting its regional characteristics… he does not even tell the reader that the scene of the story is Montreal. The landscapes, the streets and the houses, the atmosphere of the various milieu are known intimately and sensitively observed, but they are made to figure quite unobtrusively; there are no very long descriptions and nothing like “documentation.” We simply find ourselves living with the characters and taking for granted, as they do, their habits and customs and assumptions, their near-Artic climate and their split nationality. Still less is Mr. Callaghan occupied with specifically Canadian problems. The new and militant Canadian nationalism – in these novels, at least – does not touch him; he is not here concerned with the question of “what it means to be a Canadian.” And the result of this has been, I believe, that a public, both here and in England, whose taste in American fiction seems to have been largely whetted by the perpetrators of violent scenes – and these include some of our best writers as well as our worst – does not find itself at home with, does not really comprehend, the more sober effects of Callaghan. In his novels one finds acts of violence and a certain amount of sensuality, but these are not used for melodrama or even for “symbolic” fables of the kind that is at present fashionable. There are no love stories that follow an expected course, not even any among those I have read that eventually come out all right. It is impossible to imagine these books transposed into any kind of terms that would make them acceptable to Hollywood.
The novels of Morley Callaghan do not deal, then, with his native Canada in any editorial or informative way, nor are they aimed at any popular taste, Canadian, American or British. They center on situations of primarily psychological interest that are treated from a moral point of view yet without making moral judgments of any conventional kind, and it is in consequence peculiarly difficult to convey the implications of one of these books by attempting to retell its story. The revelation of personality, of tacit conflict, of reciprocal emotion is conducted in so subtle a way that we are never quite certain what the characters are up to – they are often not certain themselves – or what the upshot of their relationships will be… These stories are extremely well told. The details, neither stereotyped nor clever – the casual gestures of the characters, the little incidents that have no direct bearing on their purposes or their actions, the people they see in restaurants or pass on the street – have a naturalness that gives the illusion of not having been invented, of that seeming irrelevance of life that is still somehow inextricably relevant. The narrative moves quietly but rapidly, and Mr. Callaghan is a master of suspense… The style is very clear and spare, sometimes a bit commonplace, but always intent on its purpose, always making exactly its points so that these novels are as different as possible from the contemporary bagful of words that forms the substance of so many current American books that are nevertheless taken seriously. Mr. Callaghan’s underplaying of drama and the unemphatic tone of his style are accompanied by a certain greyness of atmosphere, but this might also be said of Chekhov, whose short stories his sometimes resemble… one’s tendency, in writing of these novels, to speak of what the characters “should have” done is a proof of the extraordinary effect of reality which – by simply presenting their behaviour – Mr. Callaghan succeeds in producing. His people, though the dramas they enact have more than individual significance, are never allowed to appear as anything other than individuals. They never become types or abstractions, nor do they ever loom larger than life. They are never removed from our common humanity, and there is never any simple opposition of beautiful and horrible, of lofty and base. The tragedies are the results of the interactions of the weaknesses and strengths of several characters, none of whom is either entirely responsible or entirely without responsibility for the outcome that concerns them all. But in order to describe his book properly, one must explain that the central element in it, the spirit that pervades the whole, is deeply if undogmatically Christian. Though it depends on no scaffolding of theology, though it embodies an original vision, there is evidently somewhere behind it the tradition of the Catholic Church. This is not the acquired doctrine of the self-conscious Catholic convert – of Graham Greene or Evelyn Waugh. One is scarcely aware of doctrine; what one finds is, rather, an intuitive sense of the meaning of Christianity… The reviewer, at the end of this article, is now wondering whether the primary reason for the current underestimation of Morley Callaghan may not be simply a general incapacity – apparently shared by his compatriots – for believing that a writer whose work may be mentioned without absurdity in association with Chekhov’s and Turgenev’s can possibly be functioning in Toronto.
November 26, 1960
Questions For Discussion And Essays
1. Many anglophone Canadian writers have envied the strong sense of national and cultural identity that is shared by Quebecois storytellers. For Callaghan, as the critic Ray Ellenwood has pointed out, the whole issue is a red herring. There is no doubt that he is rooted in Toronto, but his novels are not in any way nationalist or regionalist. Though the city in The Loved and the Lost, the world of the mountain and the world of the river, are accurately described with feeling, Montreal is never named, suggesting
to the dismay of some that Callaghan has been deliberately “continental” from the beginning. Political questions arise in his novels, but mostly as elements of a specific situation between two or three people, their character and not the politics being at stake. Does this mean that Callaghan is a profoundly Canadian writer, so secure in his own identity that he need make no issue of national or regional matters, or is he, this creature, a so-called insecure continentalist?
2. Callaghan’s Catholicism expresses itself in unorthodox ways. He is, perhaps, a kind of miscreant, “on the fringes of a religion and yet dependent on it.” He once told an interviewer: “At the end of your life, the whole question should be, ‘How did you manage to get along with people?’ If you say, ‘Well, I lived my life in the desert, loving God,’ to my temperament that doesn’t mean anything. Okay kid, you’ve dropped out, you’re a saint in the desert, you’re a hermit... but you know nothing about human beings. From my view, you know nothing about love. And if you know nothing about human love, to me, in my stupidity, you can’t know anything about divine love. I hate the person who loves the idea, you know. I don’t believe in that kind of love.” If The Loved and the Lost is to be read as a love story, discuss it as such in light of Callaghan’s remarks.
3. Self-discipline does not appear to be one of Callaghan’s values. He presents it as the enemy of passionate intensity and human involvement. He himself has said about McAlpine: “He made a mistake; I think he should have stayed with the girl. There should have been something in his heart that would over-ride any attitude. When you’re really good you don’t have to think. The trouble is, he thought.” In other words, a reason for doing something need not be reasonable. Discuss.
4. The critic Milton Wilson wrote: “The special talent of Morley Callaghan is to tell us everything and yet keep us in the dark about what really matters. He makes us misjudge and rejudge and misjudge his characters over and over again; we end up no longer capable of judgment, but not yet capable of faith.” Which, of course, leaves the reader uncertain about what moral stance to take toward a given character, leaves the reader in a state of ambivalence and ambiguity. Is this a strength or a weakness in Callaghan’s work?
5. Does Callaghan’s prose style, his determination that prose should “be like glass” – that the writer himself should not be there, should not in any way stand between the reader and the word – only serve to deepen that ambiguity, that ambivalence – for the reason that the author is never there to instruct or direct? The reader is on his or her own. And is this “being on your own” not, finally, the state of all his so-called “criminal-saints” – his heroes and heroines, and if this is true, is it possible that that is the bond he seeks, a bond between reader and character as criminal-saints? And does that imply that the reader who does not get this, is simply too tied to conventional narrative needs, the conventional wisdom, always remembering that today’s avant garde is tomorrow’s academic staple? Discuss.
6. Around the time of publication, 1951, several reviewers, suggested that Callaghan, in The Loved and the Lost, was attempting to solve the so-called “race problem” – and that having tried, he had failed. Discuss how this is a complete misreading of the novel.
7. Callaghan more than once declared that the great sin that preoccupied him the most was a man or woman’s failure to realize their potential. “The great trick in life,” he told Robert Weaver, “is to remain on an even keel – and somehow or other be able to draw yourself together and realize your potentialities as a man. And the great sin is to not realize your own potentialities.” McAlpine begins, as a tolerant liberal, by supposing that he can maintain the integrity of his character and develop his potential while operating among men and women who would exploit and corrupt his talent, corrupt him. He suffers, as does Peggy, from what some call innocence, but if it is innocence, it is innocence as unawareness. Would it be true to say that it is Peggy’s unawareness that beguiles McAlpine and that it is his unawareness that leads him to betray her – ( which is why who actually killed her is of no consequence to the story ) – so that the potentialities inherent in their lives are lost? Discuss.
Related Reading
Callaghan, Barry. Barrelhouse Kings. Toronto, McArthur & Company, 1998.
Callaghan, Morley. A Literary Life. Reflection and Reminiscences 1928-1990. Holstein, Exile Editions, 2008.
Conron, Brandon. Morley Callaghan: Critical Views on Canadian Writers, No. 10. Toronto, McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1975.
Cameron, Barry. “Rhetorical Tradition and the Ambiguity of Callaghan’s Narrative Rhetoric.” The Callaghan Symposium, University of Ottawa Press, 1981.
Ellenwood, Ray. “Morley Callaghan, Jacques Ferron, and the Dialectic of Good and Evil.” The Callaghan Symposium, University of Ottawa Press, 1981.
McDonald, Larry. “The Civilized Ego and Its Discontents: A New Approach to Callaghan.” The Callaghan Symposium, University of Ottawa Press, 1981.
McPherson, Hugo. “The Two Worlds of Morley Callaghan: Man’s Earthly Quest,” Queens Quarterly, LXIV, 3 (Autumn 1957). 350-365.
Orange, John. Orpheus in Winter: Morley Callaghan’s The Loved and the Lost. Toronto, ECW Press, 1993.
Snider, Norman. “Why Morley Callaghan Still Matters,” The Globe and Mail, 25 October, 2008.
Walsh, William. A Manifold Voice: Studies in Commonwealth Literature. London: Chatto & Windus, 1971.
Wilson, Edmund. O Canada: An American’s Notes on Canadian Culture. New York, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, l964.
Of Interest on the Web
www.editoreric.com/greatlit/authors/Callaghan.html
– The Greatest Authors of All Time site
www2.athabascau.ca/cll/writers/english/writers/mcallaghan.php
– Athabasca University site
www.cbc.ca/lifeandtimes/callaghan.htm
– Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) site
www.bookrags.com/morley callaghan
– The Morley Callaghan Study Pack
Exile Online Resource
www.ExileEditions.com has a section for the Exile Classics Series, with further resources for all the books in the series.
THE EXILE CLASSICS SERIES ~ 1 TO 29
THAT SUMMER IN PARIS (No. 1) ~ MORLEY CALLAGHAN
Memoir & Essays 5.5x8.5 280 pages 978-1-55096-688-6 (tpb) $19.95
It was the fabulous summer of 1929 when the literary capital of North America had moved to the Left Bank of Paris. Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, Robert McAlmon and Morley Callaghan... amid these tangled relationships, friendships were forged, and lost... A tragic and sad and unforgettable story told in Callaghan’s lucid, compassionate prose. Also included in this new edition are selections from Callaghan’s comments on Hemingway, Joyce and Fitzgerald, beginning in that time early in his life, and ending with his reflection on returning to Paris at the end of his life.
NIGHTS IN THE UNDERGROUND (No. 2) ~ MARIE-CLAIRE BLAIS
Novel 6x9 190 pages 978-1-55096-015-0 (tpb) $19.95
With this novel, Marie-Claire Blais came to the forefront of feminism in Canada. This is a classic of lesbian literature that weaves a profound matrix of human isolation, with transcendence found in the healing power of love.
DEAF TO THE CITY (No. 3) ~ MARIE-CLAIRE BLAIS
Novel 6x9 218 pages 978-1-55096-013-6 (tpb) $19.95
City life, where innocence, death, sexuality, and despair fight for survival. It is a book of passion and anguish, characteristic of our times, written in a prose of controlled self-assurance. A true urban classic.
THE GERMAN PRISONER (No. 4) ~ JAMES HANLEY
Novella 6x9 64 pages 978-1-55096-075-4 (tpb) $13.95
In the weariness and exhaustion of WWI trench warfare, men are driven to extremes of behaviour.
THERE ARE NO ELDERS (No. 5) ~ AUSTIN CLARKE
Stories 6x9 159 pages 978-1-55096-092-1 (tpb) $17.95
Austin Clarke is one of the significant writers of our times. These are compelling st
ories of life as it is lived among the displaced in big cities, marked by a singular richness of language true to the streets.
100 LOVE SONNETS (No. 6) ~ PABLO NERUDA
Poetry 5.5x8.5 232 pages 978-1-55096-108-9 (tpb) $24.95
As Gabriel García Márquez stated: “Pablo Neruda is the greatest poet of the twentieth century – in any language.” And this is the finest translation available, anywhere!
THE SELECTED GWENDOLYN MACEWEN (No. 7) GWENDOLYN MACEWEN
Poetry/Fiction/Drama/Art/Archival 6x9 352 pages 978-1-55096-111-9 (tpb) $32.95
“This book represents a signal event in Canadian culture.” —Globe and Mail The only edition to chronologically follow the astonishing trajectory of MacEwen’s career as a poet, storyteller, translator and dramatist, in a substantial selection from each genre.
THE WOLF (No. 8) ~ MARIE-CLAIRE BLAIS
Novel 6x9 158 pages 978-1-55096-105-8 (tpb) $19.95
A human wolf moves outside the bounds of love and conventional morality as he stalks willing prey in this spellbinding masterpiece and classic of gay literature.
A SEASON IN THE LIFE OF EMMANUEL (No. 9) ~ MARIE-CLAIRE BLAIS
Novel 6x9 175 pages 978-1-55096-118-8 (tpb) $19.95
Widely considered by critics and readers alike to be her masterpiece, this is truly a work of genius comparable to Faulkner, Kafka, or Dostoyevsky. Includes 16 ink drawings by Mary Meigs.
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