THE COMPLETE STORIES
OF
MORLEY CALLAGHAN
Volume One
Introduction by
Alistair MacLeod
The Complete Sories of Morley Callaghan. Exile Classics Series, no. 22-25. Introductions by Alistair MacLeod (v. 1), André Alexis (v. 2), Anne Michaels (v. 3), and Margaret Atwood (v. 4). Includes bibliographical references.
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Introduction
All the Years of Her Life
An Enemy of the People
No Man’s Meat
The Fugitive
A Predicament
A Country Passion
The Chiseler
Watching and Waiting
A Sick Call
A Cap for Steve
Now That April’s Here
Very Special Shoes
Lunch Counter
Rejected One
Old Quarrel
The Shining Red Apple
The Voyage Out
Soldier Harmon
The Young Priest
Mr. & Mrs. Fairbanks
An Escapade
Rigmarole
An Autumn Penitent
Dates of Original Publications; Questions for Discussion and Essays; Selected Related Reading; Of Interest on the Web; Editor’s Endnotes
INTRODUCTION
by Alistair MacLeod
These stories by Morley Callaghan represent the work of one of Canada’s premier writers of short fiction. They are realistic stories and they are true to a credo he established and developed for himself at a surprisingly young age — when he was in his early twenties. Readers of That Summer in Paris cannot help but be impressed by how young Callaghan was when he formed his literary opinions, how well read he was, how determined, how stubborn and how alone. In the sometimes nostalgic That Summer in Paris, the life of Morley Callaghan before he went to Paris is almost more interesting than the fabled period actually spent in that great city and the subsequent years that later developed.
The early Morley Callaghan, he tells us, was a young man who was basically an athlete. He played baseball, he played football, he boxed. He was a smart but indifferent student. But he read and he read a lot. He had friends with whom he could converse on the subjects of left hooks and fastballs but in the area of his literary interests he was basically alone. He was, perhaps, as isolated in the city of Toronto as was Sinclair Ross on the vastness of the prairies. Perhaps it was partially due to his personality or the manner in which he viewed his home city of Toronto. In Toronto, he tells us, “were many poets, a group of painters called the Group of Seven, and no doubt many great readers and scholars. But in those days it was a very British city. I was intensely North American. It never occurred to me that the local poets had anything to do with me.”
While he was basically happy and “wonderfully at home in my native city,” the intellectual and spiritual part of him, “the part that had to do with my wanting to be a writer,” was private and solitary. He had no one to talk to.
Even at this early age he had already established strong views regarding the literature he read and the literature he hoped to, someday, write.
He disliked much of the contemporary writing he encountered. He rejected “show-off writers; writers intent on proving to their readers that they could be clever and had some education.” He believed that such writers were motivated by vanity and such vanity should be beneath them “if they were really concerned in revealing the object as it was.” He felt that many contemporary writers “used language to evade, to skip away from the object, because they could never bear to face the thing freshly for what it was in itself.” He was suspicious of metaphor. He yearned to tell the truth clearly in words as “transparent as glass.” “I remember,” he tells us, “one time at twilight, sitting at the typewriter in the sunroom of my parents’ home. I could smell the lilacs. A night bird cried. A woman’s voice came from a neighbor’s yard. I wanted to get it down so directly that it would not feel or look like literature.” Such scenes and others like them, he felt, were beautiful in themselves and had no need to be “written up.” “A literary guy,” he felt, would “spoil it” and draw attention away from the object at hand to focus instead on the cleverness of the author.
This was Morley Callaghan, twenty years of age, writing by himself in the city of Toronto. Sometimes he used a typewriter and sometimes he wrote in longhand. He was lonely and opinionated and yearning, perhaps, for a kindred spirit. Then one day while writing his assigned story in the library of the Toronto Star, he “looked up and there was Hemingway, watching me. I imagine he had time on his hands and was looking for someone to talk to. Though years have passed I still wonder what brought him to me.”
They began to talk about literature. Hemingway was equally sincere and fierce in his opinions. At the end of the conversation he asked Callaghan how old he was. He was twenty to Hemingway’s twenty-seven. “You know you are very intelligent,” said Hemingway. “Well thanks,” said Callaghan uncomfortably, “for people I knew in Toronto didn’t say such things to each other.”
Hemingway asked if he wrote fiction and if he would show him a story. Hemingway offered Callaghan the proofs of the first edition of In Our Time. They read each other’s work. Callaghan felt that Hemingway’s paragraphs “were so polished they were like epigrams, each paragraph so vivid, clean and intense, that the scene he was depicting seemed to dance before my eyes.”
Hemingway said to Callaghan, “You’re a real writer . . . All you have to do is keep on writing.” A literary friendship had begun. “My life was taking a new turn in those encounters,” writes Callaghan, “for at last I had found a dedicated artist to talk to.”
If Callaghan had not encountered Hemingway, perha
ps he would have continued on his dedicated path towards realistic fiction by himself. As has been mentioned, his ideas were already formed and he was prodigiously determined. But Hemingway offered a young man at, perhaps a crucial juncture in his life, great encouragement and he did so with authority. “He spoke so casually but with such tremendous authority, that I suddenly couldn’t doubt him,” writes Callaghan. Everything Hemingway did, he did with authority.
He was Callaghan’s first reader and first true literary friend. When he was leaving Toronto, Callaghan lamented, albeit with tongue-in-cheek, that he was losing his readership — a readership of one. “No,” said Hemingway. “Remember this. There are always four or five people somewhere in the world who are interested in good new writing. Some magazines are starting up in Paris.” Once again he spoke with convincing authority. He “sounded like a bishop,” writes Callaghan, “and again I believed I only needed to wait.” Obviously Callaghan did more than “wait.” He was aggressive in his own right and fiercely determined as has already been mentioned. But he had received a certain kind of validation concerning himself and the work he was producing and that which he hoped to produce in the future. He had found a fellow-traveler who was self-reliant and authoritative and somewhat contemptuous of those who chose to pay him little heed. During his time in Toronto, Hemingway’s colleagues at the Toronto Star thought little more of him than they did of Callaghan, whom they hardly knew at all. “Whatever you do, don’t let anyone around here tell you anything,” he said firmly to Callaghan. A new window had opened up for the Canadian writer. “I knew in my heart that I had touched the world beyond my hometown,” he wrote, before his own departure for Paris. He was firmly on his way.
The stories in this volume indicate how strongly he persevered. They are realistic to the core in their presentation of “lives lived” during their time of composition. Most of them seem to come from the 1950s, but in fact several are from the late twenties and early thirties. They are “clean” in Callaghan’s intended sense and metaphor or “fancy” writing is at a minimum. Some of them are short and others quite long but all of them depict the lives of ordinary people and the author never draws attention to himself.
Most of the stories are urban in their settings because Callaghan was himself an urban person and the city was the area of his major interests. In the stories set outside the city, rural lack of anonymity is generally a curse rather than a blessing. In “No Man’s Meat,” the locals despise Mr. and Mrs. Beddoes for their easy life, their cottage, their maid, and the fact that they never do anything. They make faces behind Mr. Beddoes’ back when he is on the dance floor, and Mrs. Beddoes suspects “the farmers on the hill laugh easily at us.” Mr. Beddoes responds: “Let them laugh, they never feel, nor think; they’re part of a hard rocky soil that’s only good for timber.” The Beddoes “who had been trying for years to be orderly” are bothered by their sloppy neighbors with their run-down buildings, their half-tilled fields, their imperfect clothing and haphazard grooming. It is a scene of mutual non-respect.
In “A Country Passion,” the dim-witted central character and his mentally challenged girlfriend are on a first name basis with the sheriff and the staff at the local jail. Sometimes they play checkers together while incarcerated. In the opening scene the central character is planning to take his girlfriend, who is twenty-nine years his junior, downtown to buy some underwear before she is sent to an institution in Barrie. During their relationship he has discovered that her current underwear is made of sacking. He, himself, is about to be sentenced to life imprisonment, but after being arrested he escapes and then phones the sheriff and notifies him of his whereabouts.
In “An Autumn Penitent,” the “sporting women,” who come from Toronto to entertain, are singularly unimpressed by the quality of the liquor and the quality of the men they see before them. “What’s the matter, you old hick?” says Miss Shipman to Joe, when he fails to respond to her efforts at arousal. In this story the dark spectre of country incest also rears its head.
In “Watching and Waiting,” a jealous lawyer and his much younger wife move to the country so he can “be alone with her.” “There they lived like two scared prisoners in the house that was screened from the lane by three oak trees.” He is so far from the city he can only go in three days a week and his practice fails. His jealousy deepens and in a final scene, heightened by country wind, rain, mud and darkness, he is shot in a case of mistaken identity. Obviously escape to the bucolic countryside is not, for Callaghan, the answer.
In the splendid “An Enemy of the People,” Miss Luella Stevens is done in by the community in which she has lived for sixty-eight years. This is a tremendously well-rounded story, fully developed and strong in its characterization. In the end the central character is rejected not by those who know her too little but by those who know her too well. Still, the anonymity of the city is not for her nor for her fellow parishioners. One feels compassion for all of them at the end.
In the city, Callaghan’s urban hand is unfailingly sure. Many of the stories deal with young people. Children in their relationships with their parents. Lovers who are young and sometimes confused. Couples who are newly married and face uncertain futures.
Frequently urban poverty is the source of many of the central issues. Not the grinding poverty of the hopeless poor but the budgetary poverty of ordinary families. The dying young woman in “A Sick Call” lies in a tiny bedroom that “looked like a little girl’s room.” In “A Cap for Steve,” the father, Dave, is “awed by the broadloom and the fine furniture” of the rich man’s house. He is embarrassed by his old windbreaker and angered to realize that the rich man doubts he can afford two dollars for his son’s cap. When he looks in Steve’s face he sees “the memory of how difficult it had been to get an extra nickel, the talk he heard about the cost of food, the worry on his mother’s face as she tried to make ends meet.” At the story’s resolution the son says to his father, “With that man the cap was — well it was just something he could buy, eh Dad?”
In “Very Special Shoes,” eleven-year-old Mary Johnson has saved the quarter she earns each Saturday until she has reached the magical price of the red shoes she has seen in the store window months before — $6.00. Her mother, who is more seriously ill than Mary realizes, says, “Your father is going to have a lot more expenses soon. Why, he’d drop dead if he found I’d paid six dollars for a pair of red leather shoes for you.” After Mary tearfully prevails, she is sent to her room, while her mother tries to reason with Mr. Johnson. From the next room she hears her father’s angered response. “Are you serious? Money for luxuries at a time like this?” His tone becomes explosive. “Are we going crazy? You’ll take them back, do you hear?” But eventually he relents. After her mother’s death, Mary is forced to send her red shoes to the shoemaker to have them dyed black so that she might appear “proper” at the funeral. They are the same but not the same. In her childish heart she “wanted them to last a long time.”
In “Old Quarrel,” a girl loses her best friend because she borrows a hundred dollars to give to her boyfriend who leaves town. Nearly half a century later the pain lingers illusively. In “The Shining Red Apple,” the apple merchant is fascinated by a boy’s longing for the forbidden fruit which, it seems, he cannot afford. In “Soldier Harmon,” the boxer is satisfied with his life but his girlfriend, who works at Woolworth’s, his parents and manager yearn for more money so that they can enjoy better lives. Mr. and Mrs. Fairbanks, in the story of the same name, quarrel over her unexpected pregnancy. Before the marriage he had said, “With the two of us working we’ll get along in fine style.” But now that would change. “They would be poor,” thinks Mrs. Fairbanks. Suddenly she said, “I don’t want to have a baby. . . . I tell you I won’t have a baby. We’ll do something. Besides, we’re too poor, and it would just mean a lot of misery and maybe more children afterward. We can’t afford it.”
Many of the young people in these stories still live with their parent
s. For those who are children there is always the tension and possible disappointment resulting from the clash between children’s wishes and parental authority. Sometimes the children, as young adults, are disappointments to their parents in such stories as “All the Years of Her Life,” “The Chiseler,” and “Soldier Harmon.” Religious bigotry makes things much worse than they might have been in “A Sick Call.” The dying woman’s family “wouldn’t have anything to do with her” after she marries the young man whom she loves. In “The Rejected One,” a young man brings home his girlfriend, hoping for his family’s approval, only to be met by strong rejection. At the end he is torn between the forces of his family and the girl he feels he loves. In “The Voyage Out,” a young man has been keeping company with his girl for a month. On a certain night he hopes she will invite him into her house so that they might become more intimate. As they tiptoe into the house they hear her father cough. “We’d better not tonight,” she whispered. “They’re still awake. You’d better go quick.” The story concludes with a moving conversation between the central character and his older brother who fears his girlfriend may be pregnant. The central character is bothered by the power of sex — by his own yearning and by the advice and results he sees around him. But he is young and hopeful. “And then he was filled with awe, for it seemed like the beginning of a voyage out, with not much he had learned on this night to guide him.”
Many of these stories are filled with such sexual tensions. Tensions between the unmarried and those who are married. Jealousy abounds. There is adultery, promiscuity, prostitution, and casual encounters of a casual nature. There are those who leave heterosexual unions for same-sex relationships. There are sexual yearnings which are not fulfilled. Callaghan handles such material in a low-key manner. He is revelatory without being strident. Generally he is non-judgmental and exhibits a remarkable sympathetic empathy — especially in situations that invoke the young.
Approximately one quarter of these stories have something to do with the church or members of the clergy. They are seldom overtly religious, often featuring instead events which take place within the four walls of church buildings. Sometimes they are humorous as in the case in “A Predicament” and, perhaps, less so, in “An Enemy of the People.” Some of the characters are genuinely religious and some are not. Some see church functions as social events. There are evangelicals. There are Baptists, Methodists, Catholics and Anglicans. All of them are practicing or nominal Christians. Probably the best realized of these characters is Father McDowell in “A Sick Call,” a man both motivated and bothered by his own small deception. His is not an easy task as he tries to accommodate religious yearning, dogma and the fierceness of love.
The Complete Stories of Morley Callaghan: Volume One Page 1
