Clara Callan

by Richard B. Wright

  For P again,

  With love and gratitude

  And if the worldly forget you,

  say to the silent earth: I flow.

  To the swift water say: I am.

  —Rainer Maria Rilke

  The Sonnets to Orpheus

  Contents

  HarperCollins e-book exclusive extras:

  Hero of the Humdrum

  The Giller Prize

  Governor General’s Awards

  Epigraph

  1934 Nora left for New York City today.

  1935 Thank you for the brooch.

  1936 Happy New Year!!!

  1937 A blustery day and I spent a good part of the afternoon visiting. . .

  1938 Awakened in the night by the wind and this morning I looked out. . .

  Afterword

  About the Author

  Also by Richard B. Wright

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  JOHN BEMROSE

  HERO

  OF THE

  HUMDRUM

  A PROFILE

  OF RICHARD B. WRIGHT

  Originally published in Maclean’s, December 3, 2001.

  Wiry and slight, Richard B. Wright sits half-swallowed by a large armchair in his Toronto hotel. For someone who’s just swept the Double Crown of Canadian fiction, winning both the $25,000 Giller Prize and the $15,000 Governor General’s Award for fiction for his ninth novel, Clara Callan, the sixty-four-year-old former teacher and book salesman seems remarkably phlegmatic. He admits that all the media attention has given him an interesting glimpse of fame — “For a little while, all the lenses are trained on you; when the phone rings, it’s for you.”

  But he also gives the impression that, once an upcoming Ontario-Manitoba tour is out of the way, he’ll be glad to get back to the humdrum routines of a writer’s day. “I think I’m fairly grounded in the ordinary realities of life,” he says. “That’s where I come from, and that’s where I believe we must find our happiness — in the quotidian. Not in these feast days.”

  Somehow, you can imagine his brisk, no-nonsense heroine, Clara Callan, saying just that. At a time when other Canadian writers have been turning out ambitious novels on such titanic subjects as Hiroshima or the First World War, Wright has stuck faithfully to the kind of modest focus that has sustained his thirty-year career. An unmarried schoolteacher in 1930s Ontario, Clara is the sort of woman who used to be dismissed, if not outright pitied, for a life in which it was widely assumed nothing much happened.

  Wright shows otherwise, burrowing into Clara’s hidden reserves of passion with a skill that makes her one of the most compelling heroines of recent Canadian fiction. Phyllis Bruce, Wright’s editor at HarperCollins, recalls her excitement at first reading Wright’s manuscript: “He caught the female sensibility in a way most male writers never do. I hadn’t felt that so strongly since I’d read Brian Moore’s The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne.”

  Bruce also praises Clara Callan’s “technically brilliant” use of letters and diary entries to catch the speech idioms and social atmosphere of the 1930s. It’s an era that has a strong hold on Wright’s imagination. He was born near the end of it, in 1937, in Midland, Ontario, one of five children in a working-class family. Growing up in the Forties, he felt haunted by the previous decade, not only because his parents talked about it, but because “we were still surrounded by the artifacts of the Thirties — the stoves and iceboxes and radios and big, heavy cars that were no longer manufactured during the war, when the economy switched to military production. There was still a Thirties ambience.”

  Wright says he never wanted to be a writer as a boy. A poor student, he preferred history to English classes where, as he puts it, “we tortured poems like Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’ to death.” But he began to read on his own, thrilling to such finds as Hemingway’s short stories, J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, and Harold Robbins’ potboilers, which helped ignite a lifelong fascination with New York — the city where Clara’s younger sister, Nora, becomes a radio actor and minor celebrity.

  In the mid-’50s Wright enrolled in radio and television arts at Toronto’s Ryerson Institute of Technology, and toyed with the idea of writing for the small screen. It was only after graduation — and short stints toiling for a small-town newspaper and radio station — that he joined the publishing house Macmillan of Canada in Toronto and began to imagine himself as an author. “I had the job of reading through the slush pile, and I loved it, because as bad as these manuscripts were, I just wanted to be close to writers.”

  In 1968, he was a salesman for Macmillan when he quit to write his first novel, The Weekend Man. Upon its publication in 1970, this modest but very funny tale of a salesman who hates his job made little impression in Canada, but received warm praise when it appeared in the United States the following year. It was the beginning of a career that would draw a loyal if relatively small readership. Wright has always had to work at other jobs to support his family — he and his librarian wife, Phyllis, have two grown sons. “I’ve never expected to make my living as a writer,” he says.

  Writer Robert Fulford, a member of the Giller Prize jury, thinks that Wright’s novels “have from the beginning deserved more attention in this country than they’ve had.” Many readers have been kept away, Fulford suspects, by Wright’s focus on ordinary lives. “If you were to summarize the subjects of his novels, you would never say they were dramatic or sensational. You might even think there was nothing there. But there’s a great deal there. Two months after reading Clara Callan, I still had all its characters in my head.”

  The four years it took to write Clara Callan coincided with the final stretch of Wright’s twenty-year teaching career at Ridley College in St. Catharines, Ontario, where he and Phyllis have continued to live since his retirement last spring. He usually rose at 4:45 each morning to peck away for a couple of hours on his vintage electric typewriter before heading off to the classroom. At first, he had trouble finding the novel’s voice, but throughout his struggles one idea remained constant: he wanted Clara to have an affair in the Toronto of the 1930s. “It was a very different city at that time — Protestant, uptight, and Orange, like a little Belfast,” he says. “I wanted to explore the corruption of the spirit created by that kind of puritanism.”

  He also wanted to convey Clara’s pluck in standing up to all that. There is a passage in the book Wright is particularly fond of that catches his heroine’s state of mind after she leaves an assignation with her lover. Confides Clara to her diary: “I am not eighteen years old. I am thirty-four, and have chosen to become involved with a married man. And so there will always be this hurrying from one place to another, with a run in my stocking and that look from the desk clerk as we go out the door.”

  This moment connects to another of Wright’s purposes. He wanted to show how hard life was for people in the Thirties, and not just because of the Depression. “A lot of women under forty or even fifty don’t realize what life was like in the pre-pill era,” he says. “Women were often absolutely terrified of an unwanted pregnancy. It could end your career, ruin your life.”

  Editor Bruce watched Clara Callan make this point when she asked several younger women in her publishing office to read it. “A lot of these women are post-feminist, and inclined to be critical of feminist thinking. But Clara Callan opened their eyes. One told me that she suddenly understood from the texture of Clara’s life how much women were denied by society. By telling what appears to be a period story, Richard has written a book that appeals deeply to younger women.”

  Surely one reason Clara is so alive to readers is that she was so alive to Wright. “I thought of her constantly,” he says of the years of comp
osition. “I’d be talking with someone at school, and my mind would drift to her, to whatever difficulties she was in.” Interestingly, he never imagined Clara clearly in a visual sense. “I only knew that she was tall, not unattractive, with short dark hair. What really interested me was her emotional appearance. Beneath all that rectitude was a passion for life, and an awareness of the passing of time.”

  Wright believes that time is the common subject of all his books. He frames the central question of our Western, atheist society this way: “When we lose the idea of immortality, what do we do with time — the small amount of time that is our life?” That is the conundrum faced by the hero of The Weekend Man, who resents his life being eaten up by the trivialities of his job. And that is the problem confronted by Clara Callan, who senses her sexuality and her taste for adventure withering inside her.

  Wright is frankly admiring of Clara for coming to grips with her longings in an unconventional way. “I like exploring characters like Clara who take hold of the present, who don’t live in the future, or pine unnecessarily for the past, both of which are snares and delusions. That is really what I’ve been writing about for most of my life, I think.”

  Copyright © 2001 by John Bemrose. Reprinted with permission.

  THE

  GILLER

  PRIZE

  The Giller Prize: Canada’s Premier Literary Prize

  Toronto, November 6, 2001

  At a gala dinner and award ceremony that drew over 450 members of the publishing, media, and arts communities, Richard B. Wright was named the 2001 winner of The Giller Prize, Canada’s premier literary prize for fiction.

  Richard B. Wright’s winning novel, Clara Callan, is a Phyllis Bruce Book, published by HarperFlamingoCanada. The largest annual prize for fiction in the country, The Giller Prize awards $25,000 each year to the author of the best Canadian novel or short story collection published in English.

  Of the winning book, the jury remarked, “Clara Callan illumines, by way of a diary and letters, the inner life of an Ontario village school teacher of the 1930s, when ‘spinster’ and ‘respectable’ meant constricted emotions and a glum existence.

  “In this atmosphere Clara enacts her private drama of doomed adulterous love and single motherhood with stoic heroism. Running parallel with and counterpointing Clara’s life is Nora’s — she is the sister who got away.

  “An understated, graceful writer who never makes a false step, Richard B. Wright is a master at revealing the small dramas that unfold in what might appear to others as an unremarkable life. In Clara Callan he has achieved and accomplished an utterly convincing novel.”

  GOVERNOR

  GENERAL’S

  AWARDS

  The Canada Council for the Arts Announces the Winners of the

  2001 Governor General’s Literary Awards

  Ottawa, November 14, 2001

  The Canada Council for the Arts announced today the names of the winners of the 2001 Governor General’s Literary Awards, in English and French, in the categories of fiction, poetry, drama, nonfiction, children’s literature (text and illustration) and translation.

  The awards will be presented today by Her Excellency the Right Honourable Adrienne Clarkson,

  Governor General of Canada, and Jean-Louis Roux, Chairman of the Canada Council for the Arts, at a 4 p.m. ceremony at Rideau Hall.

  Each laureate will receive a cheque for $15,000 and a specially-crafted copy of the winning book bound by master bookbinder Pierre Ouvrard. The Governor General will also present certificates to the publishers of the prize-winning books, and the Canada Council will provide each publisher with a $3,000 grant to support promotional activities.

  “The recipients of this year’s Governor General’s Literary Awards give us an artistic prism through which we see our lives and spirits refracted,” said the Governor General. “The different voices of these writers reflect the reality of human life and its varied dreams, beliefs, and desires.”

  “The winning books remind us once again of the immense power of the written word to stimulate us, make us reflect on our condition, and give us cause for celebration in even the most difficult times,” said Canada Council Chairman Jean-Louis Roux. “Our writers are the guardians of the human spirit, and their achievements should be a source of inspiration and pride for all Canadians.”

  Fiction Written in English

  Richard B. Wright, St. Catharines, Ontario, for Clara Callan (HarperFlamingo Canada: A Phyllis Bruce Book)

  English-language jury’s citation: “Clara Callan brilliantly transfers ordinary lives onto a wider canvas to portray the grandeur of an era. In a style that is understated yet compelling, Wright blends the forms of the letter and the journal to construct a powerful narrative.”

  1934

  Saturday, November 3 (8:10 p.m.)

  Nora left for New York City today. I think she is taking a terrible chance going all the way down there but, of course, she wouldn’t listen. You can’t tell Nora anything. You never could. Then came the last-minute jitters. Tears in that huge station among strangers and loudspeaker announcements.

  “I’m going to miss you, Clara.”

  “Yes. Well, and I’ll miss you too, Nora. Do be careful down there!”

  “You think I’m making a mistake, don’t you? I can see it in your face.”

  “We’ve talked about this many times, Nora. You know how I feel about all this.”

  “You must promise to write.”

  “Well, of course, I’ll write.”

  The handkerchief, smelling faintly of violets, pressed to an eye. Father used to say that Nora’s entire life was a performance. Perhaps she will make something of herself down there in the radio business, but it’s just as likely she’ll return after Christmas. And then what will she do? I’m sure they won’t take her back at the store. It’s a foolish time to be taking chances like this. A final wave and a gallant little smile. But she did look pretty and someone on the train will listen. Someone is probably listening at this very moment.

  Prayed for solitude on my train home but it was not to be. Through the window I could see the trainman helping Mrs. Webb and Marion up the steps. Then came the sidelong glances of the whole and hale as Marion came down the aisle, holding onto the backs of the seats, swinging her bad foot outward and forward and then, by endeavour and the habit of years, dropping the heavy black boot to the floor. Settled finally into the seat opposite, followed by Mother Webb and her parcels. Routine prying from Mrs. W.

  “Well now, Clara, and what brings you to the city? Aren’t the stores crowded and Christmas still weeks off? I like to get my buying out of the way. Have you started the practices for the concert? Ida Atkins and I were talking about you the other day. Wouldn’t it be nice, we said, if Clara Callan came out to our meetings. You should think about it, Clara. Get you out of the house for an evening. Marion enjoys it, don’t you dear?”

  Plenty more of this all the way to Uxbridge station when she finally dozed off, the large head drooping beneath the hat, the arms folded across the enormous chest. Marion said hello, but stayed behind her magazine (movie starlet on the cover). We quarrelled over something a week ago. I can’t exactly remember what, but Marion has since refused to speak to me at any length and that is just as well.

  On the train my gaze drifting across the bare grey fields in the rain. Thinking of Nora peering out another train window. And then I found myself looking down at Marion’s orthopedic boot, remembering how I once stared at a miniature version of it in the schoolyard. Twenty-one Septembers ago! I was ten years old and going into Junior Third. Marion had been away all summer in Toronto and returned with the cumbersome shoe. In Mrs. Webb’s imagination, Marion and I are conjoined by birth dates and therefore mystically united on this earth. We were born on the same day in the same year, only hours apart. Mrs. W. has never tired of telling how Dr. Grant hurried from our house in the early-morning hours to assist her delivery with the news that Mrs. Callan had just given birth t
o a fine daughter. And then came Marion, but her tiny foot “was not as God intended.” And on that long-ago September morning in the schoolyard, Mrs. Webb brought Marion over to me and said, “Clara will look after you, dear. She will be your best friend. Why you were born on the same day!”

  Marion looked bewildered. I remember that. And how she clung to my side! I could have screamed and, in fact, may have done. At the end of the day we fought over something and she had a crying spell under a tree on our front lawn. How she wailed and stamped that boot, which drew my eye as surely as the bulging goitre in old Miss Fowley’s throat. Father saw some of this and afterwards scolded me. I think I went to bed without supper and I probably sulked for days. What an awful child I was! Yet Marion forgave me; she always forgives me. From time to time, this afternoon, I noticed her smiling at me over her magazine. Mr. Webb was at the station with his car, but I told him I preferred to walk. It had stopped raining by then. No offence was taken.

  They are used to my ways. And so I walked home on this damp grey evening. Wet leaves underfoot and darkness seeping into the sky through the bare branches of the trees. Winter will soon be upon us. My neighbours already at their suppers behind lighted kitchen windows. Felt a little melancholy remembering other Saturday evenings when I would have our supper on the stove, waiting for the sound of Father’s car in the driveway, bringing Nora up from the station. Certainly Nora would never have walked. Waiting in the kitchen for her breathless entrance. Another tale of some adventure in acting class or the charms of a new beau. Father already frowning at this commotion as he hung up his coat in the hallway. It’s nearly seven months now, and I thought I was getting used to Father being gone, yet tonight as I walked along Church Street, I felt again the terrible finality of his absence.