THE COMPLETE STORIES
OF
MORLEY CALLAGHAN
Volume Two
Introduction by
André Alexis
The Complete Stories 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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Copyright © The Estate of Morley Callaghan and Exile Editions, 2012
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Introduction
Ancient Lineage
Rendezvous
The Snob
Day by Day
Amuck in the Bush
Sister Bernadette
Last Spring They Came Over
Guilty Woman
The Little Businessman
The White Pony
Settling Down
Loppy Phelan’s Double Shoot
Ellen
On the Edge of a World
A Little Beaded Bag
Hello, America!
A Cocky Young Man
Let Me Promise You
She’s Nothing to Me
The Bride
A Princely Affair
One Spring Night
Absolution
In His Own Country
Dates of Original Publications; Questions for Discussion and Essays; Selected Related Reading; Of Interest on the Web; Editor’s Endnotes
INTRODUCTION
by André Alexis
In Morley Callaghan’s remarkable memoir, That Summer in Paris, there is a striking chapter which ends with Scott Fitzgerald standing on his head.
At the beginning of Chapter 18, Callaghan writes:
“Some writers like to sit for long hours at their desks. Not me. At that time The New Yorker had written asking if I had any stories. I began to work on some . . . the Paris streets were my workshop. While loafing along the streets ideas for the stories would grow in my head. Little street scenes would seem to distract me, would indeed get my full attention: the intent expression on the faces of men hurrying to the street urinals; working men quarrelling under the eyes of a gendarme . . .”
A little later, he continues:
“. . . I knew what I was seeking in my Paris street walks, and in the typing hours — with Loretto waiting to retype a chapter. It was this: strip the language, and make the style, the method, all the psychological ramifications, the ambience of the relationships, all the one thing, so the reader couldn’t make separations. Cézanne’s apples. The appleness of apples. Yet just apples.”
In other words, Callaghan chose to be a writer of the “inherent.”
I think it’s crucial to keep this in mind while reading his short stories. Callaghan is not a realist. He is, in some ways, closer to Hawthorne than Hemingway and his approach is idealist.
Hawthorne?
Yes. There are striking similarities; the influence of Europe on their sensibilities, for instance, or the strain of the religious that runs through the work of both men. Most important, though, is the way something is hidden in the folds of their work. In Hawthorne, the hidden is guilt. In stories like “My Kinsman, Major Molyneux” or “The Minister’s Black Veil,” the sin is not named, but it is expiated.
In Callaghan’s work, it is the irrational that is hidden beneath the surface, the irrational that is inherent in the day to day. What gives Callaghan’s stories their singular drive is the sense they instill that something is about to erupt. What is beneath the surface menaces the surface itself.
His stories rarely have clockwork plots, and yet they are stories.
His stories rarely have specific locales and, when they do, the locale is less than crucial to the goings-on, and yet (for the most part) they take place in a recognizable world.
His stories do not use sparkling repartee to illuminate character, and yet character is central to his work.
No, Morley Callaghan was not the kind of writer to sit for long hours at his desk (devising elaborate play, as Joyce did, or stripping a story to its essence, as Hemingway did in, say, “A Clean Well Lighted Place”). Rather, he was the kind of writer who managed to take core samples of his world: moments pulled from larger dramas, confrontations, the soul in movement . . .
One of my deepest pleasures in reading Morley Callaghan’s work comes from the discovery of how subversive a writer Callaghan was on occasion.
There is always something “wrong,” in these stories: a detail that strikes one as odd, an awkward sentence, a peculiar turn of events. If what you are looking for is the well-made story, you will be side-swiped. Callaghan was an admirer of Joyce, Woolf, and Hemingway, and their influence is most evident in the swerves in Callaghan’s narratives, the place the stories make for the irrational.
“Ancient Lineage,” for instance, begins as if it were a story by Henry James: a young man visits the Rowers, a woman and her mother, in order to learn about their family history. It turns, mysteriously and elegantly, into a story of sensuality and desire, its final paragraph very striking indeed.
“Rendezvous” is written as if it were a realistic story, but it soon becomes clear that the drama is taking place internally, that we are dealing with a story like Poe’s “William Wilson” or Dostoevski’s “The Double.”
In “The Snob,” a husband is anxious to hide his background from his fiancée. When, while shopping with her, he happens to see his father, he goes through the most agonizing contortions to avoid an encounter. Then, angry at himself, he provokes an argument with his fiancée.
Callaghan writes:
“They had never talked in this way, and now they were both quickly eager to hurt each other.”
There are, in other stories, moments of sudden jealousy (“Day by Day”), murderous rage (“Amuck in the Bush”), uncontrollable desire (“Guilty Woman�
�) and flight: flight from the “old world” (“Last Spring They Came Over”), flight from what one has been (“Settling Down”), flight from one’s identity (“Loppy Phelan’s Double Shoot”).
I mentioned above that Callaghan is writing about the “inherent,” that he is after what lies within.
Callaghan’s subject is the human and humans are, inherently, in flight, hard to grasp, on the verge of change, subject to unexpected (and unsuspected) impulses: the irrational (anger, violence, jealousy, sexual desire, blind hatred . . .).
In being true to the moment, Callaghan is true to its end as well.
Again:
“While loafing along the streets ideas for the stories would grow in my head. Little street scenes would seem to distract me, would indeed get my full attention: the intent expression on the faces of men hurrying to the street urinals; working men quarelling under the eyes of a gendarme . . .”
His chosen subject was the fleeting.
In Callaghan’s stories there are at least two ways we lose the world:
1. We are pulled out of it by our emotions and impulses.
2. It is taken from us.
The stories I’ve so far mentioned are those in which unexpected emotions pull their protagonists out of the day-to-day.
But there are others in which the loss is closer to disillusionment, the substitution of one world for another.
In “The Little Businessman,” the young protagonist is taught the ways of the money-minded world. In “The White Pony,” the protagonist learns how ignoble adults can be. In “Hello, America,” a man refuses to allow hard times to destroy his picture of human dignity. In “A Princely Affair,” we watch the slow disintegration of a husband’s version of his wife, his slow descent into the ridiculous . . .
With all of this loss, possibility of loss, this attention to the fleeting, it might seem as if Callaghan’s mention of Cézanne’s apples is somewhat inapropriate. After all, an essence is something that lasts: “the appleness of apples” can’t be destroyed, because it is an idea. That is, there is in Cézanne’s apples a constant: appleness.
Is there a “constant” in Callaghan’s stories?
Yes, I think so. There is the human recognition of the fleeting.
One might even say that, in these stories, coming to terms with what passes is a necessity, the necessity. Some of Callaghan’s characters face their (or their world’s) impermanence with relative ease, others with great difficulty. They betray themselves. They betray others but, in the end, they come to terms:
“White-faced and still, she tried to ask herself what it was that was slowly driving them apart day by day.” (“Day by Day”)
“But she felt herself thrust so buoyantly into their life together that she sat bolt upright, breathless.” (“The Bride”)
“ And then he felt a slow unfolding coming in him again, making him quick with wonder.” (“One Spring Night”)
There is so much to talk about in these stories.
But I don’t want to set the tone for your reading, Reader.
If there is one word of advice I’d offer, though, it is this: don’t look for “gritty realism” in these stories, don’t look for the realistic.
I don’t mean to say anything derogative about realists, it’s just that the Callaghan of these stories is closer to those writers who wonder about what lies behind the fascade.
Ancient Lineage
The young man from the Historical Club with a green magazine under his arm got off the train at Clintonville. It was getting dark but the station lights were not lit. He hurried along the platform and jumped down on the sloping cinder path to the sidewalk.
Trees stood alongside the walk, branches dropping low, leaves scraping occasionally against the young man’s straw hat. He saw a cluster of lights, bluish-white in the dusk across a river, many for a small town. He crossed the lift-lock bridge and turned on to the main street. A hotel was at the corner.
At the desk a bald-headed man in a blue shirt, the sleeves rolled up, looked critically at the young man while he registered. “All right, Mr. Flaherty,” he said, inspecting the signature carefully.
“Do you know many people around here?” Mr. Flaherty asked.
“Just about everybody.”
“The Rowers?”
“The old lady?”
“Yeah, the old lady.”
“Sure, Mrs. Anna Rower. Around the corner to the left, then turn to the right on the first street, the house opposite the Presbyterian church on the hill.”
“An old family?” suggested the young man.
“An old-timer all right.” The hotel man made it clear by a twitching of his lips that he was a part of the new town, canal, water power, and factories.
Mr. Flaherty sauntered out and turned to the left. It was dark and the street had the silence of small towns in the evening. Turning a corner he heard girls giggling in a doorway. He looked at the church on the hill, the steeple dark against the sky. He had forgotten whether the man had said beside the church or across the road, but could not make up his mind to ask the fellow who was watering the wide church lawn. No lights in the shuttered windows of the rough-cast house beside the church. He came down the hill and had to yell three times at the man because the water swished strongly against the grass.
“All right, thanks. Right across the road,” Mr. Flaherty repeated.
Tall trees screened the square brick house. Looking along the hall to a lighted room, Mr. Flaherty saw an old lady standing at a sideboard. “She’s in all right,” he thought, rapping on the screen door. A large woman of about forty, dressed in a blue skirt and blue blouse, came down the stairs. She did not open the screen door.
“Could I speak to Mrs. Anna Rower?”
“I’m Miss Hilda Rower.”
“I’m from the University Historical Club.”
“What did you want to see Mother for?”
Mr. Flaherty did not like talking through the screen door. “I wanted to talk to her,” he said firmly.
“Well, maybe you’d better come in.”
He stood in the hall while the large woman lit the gas in the front room. The gas flared up, popped, showing fat hips and heavy lines on her face. Mr. Flaherty, disappointed, watched her swaying down the hall to get her mother. He carefully inspected the front room, the framed photographs of dead Conservative politicians, the group of military men hanging over the old-fashioned piano, the faded greenish wallpaper and the settee in the corner.
An old woman with a knot of white hair and good eyes came into the room, walking erectly. “This is the young man who wanted to see you, Mother,” Miss Hilda Rower said. They all sat down. Mr. Flaherty explained he wanted to get some information concerning the Rower genealogical tree for the next meeting of his society. The Rowers, he knew, were a pioneer family in the district, and descended from William the Conqueror, he had heard.
The old lady laughed thinly, swaying from side to side. “It’s true enough, but I don’t know who told you. My father was Daniel Rower, who came to Ontario from Cornwall in 1830.”
Miss Hilda Rower interrupted. “Wait, Mother, you may not want to tell about it.” Brusque and businesslike, she turned to the young man. “You want to see the family tree, I suppose.”
“Oh, yes.”
“My father was a military settler here,” the old lady said.
“I don’t know but what we might be able to give you some notes,” Miss Hilda spoke generously.
“Thanks awfully, if you will.”
“Of course you’re prepared to pay something if you’re going to print it,” she added, smugly adjusting her big body in the chair.
Mr. Flaherty got red in the face; of course he understood, but to tell the truth he had merely wanted to chat with Mrs. Rower. Now he knew definitely he did not like the heavy nose and unsentimental assertiveness of the lower lip of this big woman with the wide shoulders. He couldn’t stop looking at her thick ankles. Rocking back and forth in the chair she wa
s primly conscious of lineal superiority; a proud unmarried woman, surely she could handle a young man, half-closing her eyes, a young man from the university indeed. “I don’t want to talk to her about the university,” he thought.
Old Mrs. Rower went into the next room and returned with a framed genealogical tree of the house of Rower. She handed it graciously to Mr. Flaherty, who read, “The descent of the family of Rower, from William the Conqueror, from Malcom 1st, and from the Capets, Kings of France.” It bore the imprimatur of the College of Arms, 1838.
“It’s wonderful to think you have this,” Mr. Flaherty said, smiling at Miss Hilda, who watched him suspiciously.
“A brother of mine had it all looked up,” old Mrs. Rower said.
“You don’t want to write about that,” Miss Hilda said, crossing her ankles. The ankles looked much thicker crossed. “You just want to have a talk with Mother.”
“That’s it,” Mr. Flaherty smiled agreeably.
“We may write it up ourselves someday.” Her heavy chin dipped down and rose again.
“Sure, why not?”
“But there’s no harm in you talking to Mother if you want to, I guess.”
“You could write a good story about that tree,” Mr. Flaherty said, feeling his way.
“We may do it some day but it’ll take time,” she smiled complacently at her mother, who mildly agreed.
Mr. Flaherty talked pleasantly to this woman, who was so determined he would not learn anything about the family tree without paying for it. He tried talking about the city, then tactfully asked old Mrs. Rower what she remembered of the Clintonville of seventy years ago. The old lady talked willingly, excited a little. She went into the next room to get a book of clippings. “My father, Captain Rower, got a grant of land from the Crown and cleared it,” she said, talking over her shoulder. “A little way up the Trent River. Clintonville was a small military settlement then . . .”
“Oh, Mother, he doesn’t want to know all about that,” Miss Hilda said impatiently.
“It’s very interesting indeed.”
The old woman said nervously, “My dear, what difference does it make? You wrote it all up for the evening at the church.”
The Complete Stories of Morley Callaghan - Volume Two Page 1
