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IT’S NEVER OVER
Morley Callaghan
Introduction by
Norman Snider
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Callaghan, Morley, 1903-1990
It’s never over / Morley Callaghan ; introduction by Norman Snider.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-55096-157-7
I. Title.
PS8505.A43I8 2011 C813'.52 C2011-907132-0
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Estate of Morley Callaghan, 1930, 2011
Introduction copyright © Norman Snider, 2011
This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Contents
Introduction
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
End Note
Q&As, Related Reading, Resources
Morley Callaghan’s Toronto Noir
1.
It was an electrifying time for writing. Morley Callaghan was a rising twenty-seven year-old novelist with a Paris and New York reputation and an instinct for the provocative. He had dealt with incest ( An Autumn Penitent), lesbianism ( No Man’s Meat), and gang warfare ( Strange Fugitive.) In 1930, he published, in New York and Toronto, his second novel, It’s Never Over. Callaghan’s darkest book, it is one of the most original of his stories, an extraordinary meditation on sexuality, on possession as an abscess of the spirit, and violence.
This bleak yet exhilarating tale demonstrates that Callaghan stands with the William Faulkner of Sanctuary or that “poet of the tabloid murder,” James M. Cain, whose The Postman Always Rings Twice this novel anticipates by more than a decade.
Callaghan, however, did not miss a tabloid career writing for Thrilling Detective; he is no perpetrator of sex and murder pulp fiction; the killing and execution he depicts in It’s Never Over take place off-stage, at the beginning of the story and the sex he describes is not Faulkner’s corncob rape or Cain’s “jungle lust,” though, in the context of the morality of the times, the candid sensuality of his characters is definitely illicit and has the gravest social consequences. Moreover, the connection he makes between sex and violence places Morley Callaghan in the company of the hard-boiled bunch that Edmund Wilson called “The Boys in the Back Room.” Ring Lardner, Cain, John O’Hara, Hemingway, James T. Farrell. Like Callaghan, this crew of writers who emerged in the late 1920s and early 1930s, with one or two exceptions, came from the world of journalism. Their stories came out of combat reporting, the sports world, show biz, and the crime beat.
Newspaper reporters were the day laborers of the intellectual world and proud of it. They shared H.L. Mencken’s hostility to cant, piety, and pietistic institutions. They were more than likely to be found in the back rooms of nightclubs and saloons and police stations as they explored the less polite precincts of the culture. Iconoclastic, they did not see themselves as stenographers to the established orders of society.
The novels of this school often emerged from a vanishing staple of newspaper writing, known as “the human interest story,” stories fueled by a sense of injustice, outrage at the undeserved fate suffered by an embattled individual. For Morley Callaghan, the ruggedest of individuals himself, a political liberal, and a anarchist in spirit, the individual and the individual’s soul were of singular importance in God’s creation.
2.
Toronto in the 1920s. The violence of the Great War is a recent and searing memory; the city still reels from its aftershocks. Fred Thompson, a high school friend of the protagonist, John Hughes, is found guilty of murder and is hanged at the Don Jail while a sullen but not unruly crowd mills outside. Thompson, once a high-minded young man, disillusioned by the war in the trenches, had devoted himself to drink, to partying.
Quick to anger, he had killed a policeman who had slugged him in a speakeasy raid, smashing him on the head with a chair.
Where a writer like Cain detailed the beginnings of a relationship that ended up in the electric chair, Callaghan depicts the ruinous moral and psychological effects the murder and subsequent execution have on Hughes, on Fred’s sister Isabelle, and on his fiancee Lillian. John Hughes, an aspiring oratorio singer and something of an intellectual who reads Mencken’s American Mercury, drops Isabelle out of cowardice and snobbery, and starts sleeping with Lillian.
(Callaghan expertly depicts this event in a fresh and quite startlingly matter-of-fact fashion. Hughes announces to Lillian that he wants to “love” her. In the parlance of the time, he means he wants to have sex. She wants to have sex, too, and immediately rents an apartment on the outskirts of the city where neither of them are known and they begin to meet there and make love. Just like that. No moral trepidation. Just the desire to be out of the public eye so that they can be who they want to be, do what they want to do.)
Isabelle, sister to the hanged man, believing herself ostracized from polite Toronto society, instead of retreating to a convent, transforms herself into an apostle of evil and turns her sexuality to destructive ends. After bedding down other men, she seeks out Hughes at his rooming house, imposes herself on him, and succeeds — as she seems to want to — in both costing him his room in a respectable house and his job as a basso soloist in a church choir. More and more Isabelle seems in the grip of the imp of the perverse. She informs Lillian of what’s happened and Hughes loses her too. Isabelle and Lillian set up an informal cult of two feeding on the memory of the dead Fred; Callaghan implies that the relationship is also lesbian. Believing that Isabelle is bent on destroying both himself and Lillian, Hughes loses control of himself and goes right to the brink of murder but the Toronto weather be
ats him to it. As her psychic wound, the obsession with the hanging of her brother, has festered, so too has she began to waste away physically, becoming more vulnerable to the natural elements. She dies of pneumonia, a kind of wintering away of the spirit, instead. In a sense, these events all stem from the destruction of Fred’s self-respect in the trenches. It’s the war that’s never over.
Callaghan’s attitude is unflinching. “A hanging draws everybody into it,” he writes, “It takes hold of some stronger than others. Some are sentimental and some are hard, but they’re all crucified in their own way.”
3.
Read in a new century, It’s Never Over — for all its focus on obsession and on the hanging spirit at the heart of the city — exudes period charm. The men wear hard derby hats and winged collars; they carry gold watches in their vest pockets. Professional baseball is played on Toronto Island. Single men room with families. Young couples canoe for enjoyment in the pure waters of Lake Ontario close to a dance hall by the Scarborough Bluffs. There aren’t many automobiles: the book’s characters either take the streetcar or walk. Folks don’t lock their doors at night. Some local landmarks remain: Hart House, St. James Cathedral, the Bloor Viaduct. But Callaghan doesn’t overdo the local color in a breast-beating, nationalistic fashion; he just describes what the characters see around them as they move through their lives. His small city on a lake is completely specific yet somehow universal because, as Edmund Wilson writes, what the characters see is “made most effectively to merge with the uncomfortable personal relations, the insoluble emotional problems, the stifled guilt that at last takes possession in the dark lie of an insane fixation.”
If Callaghan’s stance is unflinching, his prose is not. In a delicately lyrical style, Callaghan distills a potent brand of nostalgic local description. In the era before malls, the characters walk through slush as it melts on the sidewalks in front of the department stores at Queen and Yonge; moonlight glints on the roofs of the garages in the East End, and a cold wind is always blowing up from the Lake.
And it’s more than the weather that’s chilling.
Toronto is a place rife with intolerance. Here is a chill composure among the people, in their eyes, the way they walk. Little Belfast, a city strained with a palpable tension between Catholic and Orange Lodge Protestants. Hypocrisy is inlaid in the climate. Errington, the Protestant landlord who throws the Catholic Hughes out of his house because of his sexual delinquency is, in a stroke of delicious irony, a dogmatic socialist, a loudmouth “progressive.” His belief in a better world doesn’t prevent him from making it his business to get in touch with Hughes’ Protestant employers and getting him fired. Callaghan calls Errington “really a hard Puritan”; that is to say, a total piece of shit.
Oh, those Presbyterian blues.
The cruel side of social condescension is a theme that informs Callaghan’s fiction from It’s Never Over to Such Is My Beloved, The Loved and the Lost, The Many Colored Coat and A Time For Judas. For all the expansive and outward feel of his work , It’s Never Over is totally in tune with Northrop Frye who wrote that Canada is a garrison society; that is, the local gentry are forever looking for a reason to throw the unworthy out of the fort and into the cold. It’s a concern Callaghan shares with that other “Irish” writer, John O’Hara. His garrison stories of social disgrace were set amongst the country club cliques of small town Pennsylvania. Callaghan wrote of the humiliations of the aspiring middle class of Toronto and English-speaking Montreal. Though both novelists’ characters are more at risk of social or financial ruin than of violent death, death is likely to follow on the heels of social rejection. In Appointment in Samarra, the alcoholic autodealer Julian English is a suicide by carbon monoxide. In It’s Never Over, Isabelle Thompson dies of pneumonia brought on by the self-neglect caused by social ostracism. It is no accident, given their minority status, that this sense of shame and social rejection is felt by Irish Catholic writers on either side of the border.
Callaghan is never more convincing than in just these scenes of humiliation. In O’Hara, the character is likely to be thrown out of a bar; in Callaghan, he or she is liable to be thrown out of their job. But Callaghan’s characters, as Max Perkins said to him in a letter, “are true, and interesting not as representatives of certain classes, but as individuals.” Callaghan is by far the superior psychologist. He’s better able than O’Hara to portray the dark states of mind of his outcasts as they tramp the winter streets. Callaghan approaches the great Russian, Dostoevsky, in his sense of the drama of possession, for Isabelle is possessed by and is pursuing what Jean-Paul Sartre would later describe as a phantom that is an all too real parasite — a parasite within — “like a rat within a rat” — that feeds on her anguish and her weariness until it kills her.
Callaghan’s originality is increased by his depiction of the way possession as parasitical social shame moves in the precise fashion of a sexually transmitted disease from the promiscuous Isabelle to John to Lillian. The trio are connected by their bodies, their very flesh in the morbid progress of possession as it traps them in the shadow of death. This is sustained insight of a very high order.
All the same, these characters caught up in such high drama are quiet sinners. John Hughes is a grown-up choir boy, so high-minded he won’t stoop to singing popular songs. Rather than dump Isabelle and go on his jolly way, he is forever tied to her by guilt and shame and the ghost-like memory of her hanged brother. Hughes succumbs to her vamp-like charms protestingly, reluctantly. The sexual act that ruins his life is all over in seconds; he doesn’t even enjoy himself that much. And when Hughes sleeps with Lillian, at Isabelle’s behest, she keeps her fists tightly clenched throughout. In this world, even the damned are inhibited.
Nonetheless, it is just this connection that Callaghan makes between sex and death that creates exhilaration. After all, it is this emotional juncture that unleashed the dark energies of European romanticism from Laclos to Wilde. What’s striking is to see the Toronto novelist portraying dangerous, fatal liaisons against the Scots Presbyterian backdrop of the 1920s.
The minor characters impress as well. Father Mason, the whisky priest who walks Fred Thompson to the gallows would do the same for many another doomed prisoner in Callaghan’s succeeding novels. In It’s Never Over, he talks John Hughes out of murdering Isabelle. (Another novelist might have thought of bringing the story full circle by letting Hughes whack the girl and end up in the death row cell formerly inhabited by his friend.) Paul Ross is another victim of both the war and Isabelle’s charms. Abandoning his architectural studies, he travels small-town Ontario selling magazines door-to-door on the strength of his tales of the horrors of the trenches, which he has reduced to a Fuller Brush Man’s sales’ talk. Unlike John Hughes, he can take his pleasure of Isabelle and then just keep on partying.
Callaghan doesn’t moralize about such behaviour. As far as he’s concerned, Fred Thompson’s mortal sin resides solely in his turning his back on his belief in himself as a unique individual as a result of his experience of the mass slaughter of the war. His death and his sister’s are a direct result of his abandoning his own self-respect. The only other character who proposes a similar denigration of the individual is the Communist John Hughes encounters in a seedy rooming house after he’s been thrown out by the respectable Eddington. Hughes is infuriated when the guy enunciates his theory of the paramount important of the masses over any individual existence. One senses that Callaghan shares his rage. It is the collective opinion of respectable Toronto that has destroyed Hughes’ life.
As for Callaghan’s resemblances to and parallels with writers like Cain, Farrell, and O’Hara, it’s possible to push too far. As a writer, he was his own man almost to the point of solipsism. His characters are far more reflective and genteel than Cain’s or Farrell’s, and not as grand and socially glib as O’Hara’s. John Hughes is no Studs Lonigan and he is passive compared to the general run of noir protagonists, yet he compels our interest.
In the last words of the novel, the cityscape and the emotional landscape merge in an exceptional bit of writing as Callaghan uses the Toronto climate to symbolize the final distance between his characters:
“They were at the corner where the car stopped. The wind was blowing and Lillian was holding her hat with one hand and her coat with the other. A car was coming and they went to speak, but the wind carried the words away. It was such a cold wind it was more important Lillian should not miss the car than they should go on talking.”
4.
Callaghan’s novel is a book with a relevance that is not only peculiarly contemporary but of perennial value. All ages and all generations must deal with death and tragedy whether as a result of war or terrorism or the garden variety disaster that visits all of us at one time or another. The sentimentality of the Victorians has been replaced by a therapeutic sentimentality that asks for “closure.” Morley Callaghan’s novel refutes this Wal-Mart optimism, this forlorn hope that one can “move on” from a devastating, tragic event such as a brother’s hanging and emerge from it innocent once again, without scars. There are some things in life so awful that they stay with you forever. It’s Callaghan’s belief that the only remedy is a kind of unflinching hope that faces up honestly to despondency and even despair. Time moves on but the hanging is never over, in the heart.
Norman Snider, Toronto
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