Formatting note:
In the electronic versions of this book blank pages that appear in the paperback have been removed.
THE EXILE CLASSICS SERIES, BOOKS 1–2 6
THAT SUMMER IN PARIS
Morley Callaghan
NIGHTS IN THE UNDERGROUND
Marie-Claire Blais
DEAF TO THE CITY
Marie-Claire Blais
THE GERMAN PRISONER
James Hanley
THERE ARE NO ELDERS
Austin Clarke
100 LOVE SONNETS
Pablo Neruda
THE SELECTED GWENDOLYN MACEWEN
Gwendolyn MacEwen
THE WOLF
Marie-Claire Blais
A SEASON IN THE LIFE OF EMMANUEL
Marie-Claire Blais
IN THIS CITY
Austin Clarke
THE NEW YORKER STORIES
Morley Callaghan
REFUS GLOBAL
The Montréal Automatists
TROJAN WOMEN
Gwendolyn MacEwen
ANNA’S WORLD
Marie-Claire Blais
THE MANUSCRIPTS OF PAULINE ARCHANGE
Marie-Claire Blais
A DREAM LIKE MINE
M.T. Kelly
THE LOVED AND THE LOST
Morley Callaghan
NOT FOR EVERY EYE
Gérard Bessette
STRANGE FUGITIVE
Morley Callaghan
IT’S NEVER OVER
Morley Callaghan
AFTER EXILE
Raymond Knister
THE COMPLETE STORIES OF MORLEY CALLAGHAN
Volumes One – Four
CONTRASTS: IN THE WARD / POETRY AND PAINTINGS
Lawren Harris
THE COMPLETE STORIES OF MORLEY CALLAGHAN
Volume Four
Introduction by
Margaret Atwood
Fiction, Poetry, Non-Fiction, Drama, Translation and Graphic Books
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.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-55096-304-5 (softcover v. 1).--ISBN 978-1-55096-341-0 (EPUB).--
ISBN 978-1-55096-342-7 (Kindle).--ISBN 978-1-55096-340-3 (PDF).-
ISBN 978-1-55096-305-2 (softcover v. 2).--ISBN 978-1-55096-344-1 (EPUB).--
ISBN 978-1-55096-345-8 (Kindle).--ISBN 978-1-55096-343-4 (PDF).--
ISBN 978-1-55096-306-9 (softcover v. 3).--ISBN 978-1-55096-347-2 (EPUB).--
ISBN 978-1-55096-348-9 (Kindle).--ISBN 978-1-55096-346-5 (PDF).--
ISBN 978-1-55096-307-6 (softcover v. 4).--ISBN 978-1-55096-350-2 (EPUB).--
ISBN 978-1-55096-351-9 (Kindle).--ISBN 978-1-55096-349-6 (PDF).--
I. Title. II. Series: Exile classics ; no. 22-25
PS8505.A43A15 2012 C813'.54 C2012-906213-8
Copyright © The Estate of Morley Callaghan and Exile Editions, 2012
All characters and events are fictional.
eBook publication copyright © Exile Editions Limited, 2012. All rights reserved.
Text pages and cover designed by Michael Callaghan.
Cover Photograph by permission of the Estate of Morley Callaghan
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Introduction
The Red Hat
Timothy Harshaw’s Flute
A Regret for Youth
A Very Merry Christmas
All Right, Flatfoot
The New Kid
The Duel
The Thing That Happened to Uncle Adolphe
The Sentimentalists
Emily
Big Jules
The Fiddler on Twenty-third Street
Mother’s Day at the Ballpark
Just Like Her Mother
A Boy Grows Older
The Man with the Coat
Dates of Original Publications; Questions for Discussion and Essays; Selected Related Reading; Of Interest on the Web; Editor’s Endnotes
Introduction
by Margaret Atwood
Morley Callaghan, long considered the most important Canadian story writer of his generation — which he was — has also long been a literary misfit; people never knew quite what to make of him. Doubtless this was how he liked it: he took pleasure in baffling expectation. He’s important, he’s very important, they say; but why? Even the American critic Edmund Wilson, lavish in his praise of Callaghan in his 1964 book O Canada, spends a lot of time scratching his head. Callaghan’s effects, he says, are so subtle, so modulated, yet so simple, that it’s hard to describe them. And so it has often gone.
For those Canadian writers who began in the early 60s, cutting their teeth on beatniks and post-war French existentialists and the Theatre of the Absurd, Callaghan was neither fish nor fowl. He wrote of a time before our time, but not so long before that we had no memories of it. In some ways the world he depicted overlapped with our own age — we knew about the squalor of rooming houses, and grubby Depression-scarred lives lived on the financial margins, and the fear of unwanted pregnancy — but in those instances it represented parts of our lives we wanted to change, or hoped we had escaped. Such things held no glamour for us.
The esthetics of Callaghan’s minimalist style, devoid of fancy words and metaphors — a style he hoped to render “transparent as glass”[1] — had excellent antecedents in the English tradition, from Addison’s efforts to divest the eighteenth-century English stage of bombast and superfluous rhetoric, to Wordsworth’s attempt, in Lyrical Ballads, to get back to the poetic basics, to Orwell’s prose like a windowpane, intended to give us an unimpeded view of real life, like so many raw steaks in a butcher’s display case. All such purifiers see their efforts as a sort of excavation: a fraudulent accumulation of grotty old barnacles called “the literary” or “the academic” must be scraped away in order to get to the deep-down freshness and newness of the actual — to truth, to honesty, or, in Callaghan’s words, to “the object as it really was.”[2]
However, if you’re a writer, all this must be done through language, which is — how can the purifier get around it? — man-made, and therefore artificial. But if you must have speech, then make it plain speech; if words, then short words. Awkwardness is to be preferred to an overly carved and varnished elegance; and if elegance, then the elegance of a Shaker chair. These tendencies too can turn mannerist. Taken too far, you’d end up with a literature of monosyllables that would read like a Dick and Jane primer, but Callaghan avoided thi
s trap.
Style in every art swings like a pendulum from the plain to the ornamented and back again, with “nature” and “artifice” being the polarizing catch-phrases; but we whipper-snappers in the early 60s hadn’t thought much about that. To us, the hard-boiled school — decades old by the time we came across it — seemed an almost comic affectation, like talking out of the side of the mouth in gangster films. The young are cruel, and they are most cruel to the quasi-parental generation preceding them, as Callaghan himself was cruel to the aesthetes of the turn of the century — “show-off writers,”[3] he termed them, fixated on demonstrating their own cleverness. It’s a necessary cruelty, I suppose, or we would all be replicants.
Callaghan’s legend — as opposed to the milieu depicted in his work — did have glamour for us, however. He’d been our age in the 1920s, and had written through the Great Depression and the War — eras that were now so far away that they were already furnishing the costumes for fancy-dress parties. In Paris, still thought of as the proper destination for an artist of any kind, he’d consorted with Hemingway and Fitzgerald — writers we’d studied in school, and who for that reason alone had an aura of semi-divinity, while at the same time being ridiculously hoary. Unlike those two, however, he’d become neither a drunk nor a suicide, and was said to be living in Toronto — Toronto! — an unromantic, second-rate city in which no real writer — surely — would live by choice. Why wasn’t he stowed away in Paris or New York, where we wouldn’t have to bother about him? Why did he stick around, like a burr?
What was it about Callaghan that made us uncomfortable? For one thing, he was doing something thought to be impossible: he was making a living in Canada, as a writer, albeit through sales in the United States and in England. That was a challenge, since it was a truism among us that you’d have to leave the country to get anywhere. We were — of course — provincials, who believed that the Great Good Place was somewhere else; and he was a non-provincial who understood the provincial — having once partaken of it — and who had chosen this very provinciality as his material. (He was a student of — among others — Flaubert and de Maupassant, who had done the same.) We youngsters weren’t the only folk made nervous by this. As Edmund Wilson said in 1960,
The reviewer … is now wondering whether the primary reason for the current underestimation of Morley Callaghan may not be 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.[4]
Northrop Frye was another to put his finger on the Canadian uneasiness with Callaghan. After having stated that by 1929 Callaghan had established himself as perhaps the best short-story writer in Canada, he later said,
Morley Callaghan’s books, I think I am right in saying, were sometimes banned by the public library in Toronto — I forget what the rationalization was, but the real reason could only have been that if a Canadian were to do anything so ethically dubious as write, he should at least write like a proper colonial and not like someone who had lived in the Paris of Joyce and Gertrude Stein.[5]
Not surprisingly, Callaghan — who was nothing if not a scrapper — kicked against the pricks. He took the piss out of what he saw as the back-scratching mediocre sham literati in Canada, calling them — among other things — “local medicine men feasting and having a big cultural pow-wow,”[6] and homegrown critics took the piss out of him for it, and he took the piss out of them back. One of these fracases took place live on television, after Callaghan had been praised by Edmund Wilson, and then predictably denounced for it by a two-bit academic, live on a talk show. Callaghan, no stranger to rancorous debate, did not take this sitting down. It was an object lesson in self-respect to the young, and one we needed; for at that time, in Canada, to be a writer was to be thought next door to a junk-bond salesman: shifty, not above pinching the silver, to be sneered at and viewed with suspicion.
Self-respect. Respect. Respectability. These are key concepts in Callaghan’s work: in fact, “respect” is the last word in the last story in this collection. Almost every Callaghan character desires to have and to earn “respect,” the admiration of others. “Self-respect” — that quality of inner integrity, the ability to hold up your head when you look in the mirror — is also highly valued. “Respectability” is ambiguous. You need it to get and hold a job, which connects you with money — the ability to earn a living, to show a girl a good time, and to buy coveted objects — often articles of clothing, for people were judged very much by their wardrobes in those days. Money is never out of the picture, because, for Callaghan’s characters, it doesn’t grow on trees. But “respectability” is also a negative. It’s the lack of joie de vivre, the absence of passion and energy; it’s conformity; it’s hypocrisy; it’s mediocrity; it’s a dingy grey stifling fog. It’s also next door to self-righteousness, and self-righteousness was not a quality Callaghan admired, although it occupied him greatly as a subject.
Callaghan has frequently been compared with Fitzgerald and Hemingway, yet the concerns of the three are very different. In a Western shootout saga, Fitzgerald would have been interested in the cattle barons hiring the gunmen, Hemingway in the gunmen themselves; but Callaghan, though he might have paid some attention to both of the other groups, would have focused on the jittery townsfolk who were crouching behind the dry-goods counter. Fitzgerald was drawn to rich people, Hemingway to adventurous people, but Callaghan to people — men, usually — who might long to be rich and adventurous but who cannot actualize their longings, either because life has not provided them with the scope or because their own makeup defeats them. Their sense of their own worth is tenuous, as is their sense of their own bravery: both can stand or fall on an accident, an incident, a misunderstanding, an added pressure brought to bear. We identify with such characters because we’ve known people like them, but also because, given a change in circumstances, we could so easily find ourselves in their shoes.
As a story writer, Callaghan has been likened with many: Chekhov and Turgenev, Sherwood Anderson, Katherine Mansfield, de Maupassant, the Joyce of Dubliners, even O. Henry. His specialties were the small and thwarted life and the brief but exactly sketched state of emotion. Typically, his characters live in rooming houses or cramped apartments; they’re unemployed, or in danger of losing their jobs or modest businesses. They borrow money they can’t repay, or they get drunk and blow it, or they skirt the edge of minor criminality. If they are women, their husbands may have run off, or — and Callaghan’s sense of gender interaction is exact for his times — they may be resented and even physically abused for having jobs when their men do not. If they are children or young people, adults let them down. If they are dogs, they are unfortunate.
Most of them indulge in irrational hopes and yearn for better things, but it’s not likely they’ll get them. They see themselves reflected in the eyes of others and the reflection does not please them, unless they are puffed up by a soon-to-be-deflated vainglory. Desiring to be looked up to, they more often feel belittled or small: size does matter. Occasionally someone will score points — the boy in “The New Kid” gains status through combat, the umpire in “Mother’s Day at the Ballpark” is cheered by the crowd — confusingly for him — because he’s punched a mother-insulting heckler. Amid the malice and the disappointment and the rage and the bitterness in these lives there are moments of generosity and joy, however unfounded; but such states of grace, we know, are temporary.
In literature, irony is a mode in which the reader guesses more accurately about the character’s fate than he does himself, and in this sense Callaghan is a profoundly ironic writer. Life is not only a struggle, it’s a puzzle. Another puzzle is why Callaghan, in That Summer in Paris, would claim to applaud the art he admires— his example is Matisse — as “a gay celebration of things as they were.”[7] “Why couldn’t all people have the eyes and heart that would give them this happy acceptance
of reality?” he continues. Happiness and gaiety and acceptance of things as they are may have belonged to the author of Callaghan’s stories, but they are not frequently found among his characters. Perhaps the stories are, in part, an attempt by Callaghan to answer his own question — to provide a “because” to go with the “why ” — with the lamentable scarcity of the right kinds of hearts and eyes.
The next four words in the curious passage quoted above are “The word made flesh.” The context might lead us to believe that this is an endorsement of a philosophy of immanence, of the divine isness of things — “The appleness of apples. Yet just apples,” as Callaghan had just said of Cézanne. Yet they are also a signpost pointing towards Callaghan the Christian writer.[8]
This side of Callaghan is not obtrusive or doctrinaire, and yet it’s there — the ground beneath the house, not always seen, but necessary. It’s more obvious in the novels, and avoidable in “The Man with the Coat,” the last short fiction Callaghan ever wrote — a transitional form, termed a novel in the 1955 issue of Maclean’s magazine in which it appeared, but really a novella. Callaghan expanded it and changed the plot, and this version later appeared as The Many Coloured Coat.
“The Man with the Coat” is an adroitly constructed piece in which several characters take turns sneering at and belittling one another. Scorn is handed from character to character, like the hot object in a game of Pass the Package, until the sequence of blame leads to a tragic consequence. The motion is not circular, but spiral: its end is not its beginning. It’s possible that this story was written as an attempt to work out a problem: how to write a tragedy in the age of the common man. Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, for instance, is pathetic rather than tragic in its effect, because the salesman can’t fall from a high place, having never achieved one. The true tragic hero must plummet like a falling star, and his descent must be due in part to a weakness or flaw in his own character. Or so went the theory. Callaghan was widely read, and perfectly aware of the requirements. As he was a Christian writer, the flaw needed to be a flaw in Christian terms: more a sin than a flaw.
The Complete Stories of Morley Callaghan Page 1
