The Complete Stories of Morley Callaghan - Volume Two

by Morley Callaghan

  “I think he will. I want him to.”

  “Are you going down street?”

  “Yes, I just discovered I was out of sugar. Isn’t that sun strong before it goes down!”

  “Take my arm, dear, so we’ll both be under my parasol, and we’ll talk as we go along.”

  Dates of Original Publication

  Ancient Lineage, The Exile, Spring 1928

  Rendezvous with Self, Esquire, March 1937

  The Snob, The New Yorker, July 1934

  Day by Day, The New Yorker, August 1932

  Amuck in the Bush, The American Caravan: A Yearbook of American Literature, 1927

  Sister Bernadette, Scribner’s Magazine, August 1932

  Last Spring They Came Over, transition, June 1927

  Guilty Woman, Common Sense, December 1932

  The Little Business Man, Saturday Evening Post, 1947

  The White Pony, The New Yorker, August 1938

  Settling Down, A Native Argosy, 1929

  Loppy Phelan’s Double Shoot, Exile: A Literary Quarterly, 1982

  Ellen, The New Yorker, March 1933

  On the Edge of a World, Esquire, January 1951

  A Little Beaded Bag, Harper’s Bazaar, September 1937

  Hello, America!, John O’London’s Weekly, July 1940

  A Cocky Young Man, A Native Argosy, 1929

  Let Me Promise You, Esquire, Autumn 1933

  She’s Nothing to Me, Story, June 1934

  The Bride, The New Yorker, September 1933

  A Princely Affair, A Native Argosy, 1929

  One Spring Night, The New Yorker, April 1934

  Absolution, The New Yorker, December 1931

  In His Own Country, Scribner’s Magazine, January, February, March, 1929 (serialized)

  Questions for Discussion and Essays

  1. In his introduction, André Alexis states that Callaghan was a writer of “the inherent.” What do you think he means by this? Explain your reaction to this idea with reference to the stories.

  2. Callaghan often addresses the idea of success – monetary, personal, social – in his stories. How does he define success and what role does the pursuit of success play in defining individual characters?

  3. Discuss the role of disappointment in Callaghan’s stories and examine how characters react to sudden surprises or unexpected outcomes of their actions. How do you, as a reader, react to such events and how does Callaghan structure the story in order to achieve this sense of surprise?

  4. Callaghan often uses the business world as a setting or theme in his stories. Discuss how the business world impacts on characters in his stories. What is Callaghan saying about the nature of fairness and poetic justice?

  5. Using Callaghan’s stories as evidence for a discussion, is happiness attainable and what are the consequences of pursuing it?

  Selected Related Reading

  Allen, Walter Ernest. The Short Story in English. Oxford University Press, 1981. (Contains a chapter on Morley Callaghan.)

  Anderson, Sherwood. Winesburg, Ohio. Introduced by Malcolm Cowley. New Edition. Milestone Editions, 1960.

  Callaghan, Barry. Barrelhouse Kings. McArthur & Company, 1998.

  Callaghan, Morley. A Literary Life. Reflection and Reminiscences 1928–1990. Exile Editions, 2008.

  Conron, Brandon. Morley Callaghan. Twayne, 1966.

  Dennis, Richard. British Journal of Canadian Studies, 1999. (Contains an essay by Richard Dennis: “Morley Callaghan and the Moral Geography of Toronto.”)

  Farrell, James T. Studs Lonigan (A Trilogy). Pete Hamill (editor). Library of America, 1998.

  Flaubert, Gustave. Madame Bovary. Margaret Cohen (editor). Norton Critical Editions, 1998.

  Hemingway, Ernest. The Complete Short Stories. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1998.

  Joyce, James. The Dubliners. Penguin, 1999.

  de Maupassant, Guy. The Complete Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant, 1955. Artine Artinian (editor). Penguin, 1995.

  May, Charles Edward. The Short Story: The Reality Of Artifice. Twayne, 1995.

  O’Connor, Frank. The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story, with an introduction by Russell Banks. Melville House, 2011.

  Snider, Norman. “Why Morley Callaghan Still Matters,” Globe and Mail, 25 October, 2008.

  Walsh, William. A Manifold Voice: Studies in Commonwealth Literature. Chatto & Windus, 1971.

  White, Randall. Too Good to Be True: Toronto in the 1920s. Dundurn, 1993.

  Wilson, Edmund. O Canada: An American’s Notes on Canadian Culture. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, l964.

  Woodcock, George. “Callaghan’s Toronto: The Persona of a City.” Journal of Canadian Studies 7-2 (1972) 21-24.

  Of Interest on the Web

  www.MorleyCallaghan.ca – The official site of the Morley Callaghan Estate

  www.cbc.ca/rewind/sirius/2012/03/01/morley-callaghan/Rewind With Michael Enright: An Hour With Morley Callaghan. Thursday, March 1, 2012, CBC Radio One. This hour-long broadcast features conversations with Morley Callaghan and a splendid commentary.

  www2.athabascau.ca/cll/writers/english/writers/mcallaghan.php – Athabasca University site

  www.editoreric.com/greatlit/authors/Callaghan.html – The Greatest Authors of All Time site

  www.cbc.ca/lifeandtimes/callaghan.htm – Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) site

  Exile Online Resource

  www.ExileEditions.com has a section for the Exile Classics Series, with further resources for all the books in the series.

  Editor’s Endnotes

  The Lost and Found Stories of Morley Callaghan contained twenty-six stories with a Foreword by Barry Callaghan and an Introduction by Morley Callaghan.

  FOREWORD

  It was just after Christmas and we were standing in the dining room. My father said that back in the 1950s he had probably left two or three stories out of his big Morley Callaghan’s Stories, which included 57 stories. “I got bored, I guess . . . I just said, ‘That’s enough,’ and let it go at that.”

  “Where do you think they are?”

  “Over there, I think. With the bills.”

  He was pointing at a small mound of brown and blue envelopes — unopened telephone and gas bills. Months go by and Morley doesn’t pay his bills. I don’t know how he gets away with it. They don’t cut off his phone or his gas. They don’t even prod him, and he just goes on stacking his little mounds, and then after six months or so, these get swept — along with letters and notes — into big manila envelopes or old used padded Jiffy bags, and it all gets put away somewhere. It is his comfortable clutter in a big house that has to be big.

  I looked for the three stories and they were there, with one — “The Fugitive” — in the onionskin manuscript my mother had typed years ago.

  “What else do you think you’ve got hidden away?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You want to look?”

  We went up to the old linen closet, closed for years, off the back stairs. The cupboards, with their little iron button-latches on the doors, were piled up with broken Christmas decorations, an old pair of boys’ hockey shoulder pads, frayed curtains, and cardboard boxes. The boxes hadn’t been touched in thirty years. The flaps and the papers on top were heavy with dark dust and, inside, the papers and magazines were jammed and rolled and bunched in no order at all.

  As I rummaged through them, with Morley standing behind me chuffing on his old pipe, muttering that he was sure there was nothing anybody would care about in the boxes, I found a letter from Sinclair Lewis, and then the proofs of a piece Edmund Wilson had written about his work — with Wilson’s corrections in the margins — and the manuscript of More Joy in Heaven.

  “Why, I thought I’d lost that years ago.”

  “And what’s this?”

  “Oh, that’s John O’London’s Weekly, an English magazine. They used to print a lot of my work.”

  “Well,” I said, lifting the brittle brown newsprint into the air, “it say
s here you wrote a story called ‘The Fiddler on Twenty-third Street.’”

  “I never wrote any such story. Not with that title.”

  “You sure did.”

  “I wonder if it’s any good?”

  After an afternoon of sifting, shuffling, and thumbing through dirt, crumbling book reviews, and old, worthless gold penny mining stocks, I’d found letters from his friends in Paris, the manuscripts of all his 1930s novels, the manuscript of an abandoned novel from the 1940s that he’d forgotten all about, photographs of himself with mother in Montreal, with Madame Thérèse Casgrain, and Slitkin and Slotkin, the famous old saloon keepers, and some 20 short stories.

  He seldom remembered the titles and couldn’t remember most of the stories. “You see,” he said, “in those days I was living only off the stories I wrote and sold. I had to get the money to keep us. I was the only guy I knew of in America somehow selling my non-commercial stories in the great commercial market and staying alive.”

  But the stories brought back forgotten memories — a memory of Max Perkins would come back to him as I held up an old orange Scribners magazine, or of George Grosz, as I brushed off a floppy Esquire dated 1937 and found that a story of his had been illustrated by Grosz. “Yes, I was supposed to go and meet Grosz one night with my old pal Norman Matson, but we got talking and never got there.”

  Soon, the old magazines — the staid Yale Review and Harper’s Bazaar with line drawings of lean elegant women on slick heavy paper, the Saturday Evening Post with a watercolor of a fanged dog frightening a boy, Cosmopolitan and a pristine page of print from The New Yorker, The North American Review and Weekend with garish pulp drawings of wide-open faces full of wonder at the possibilities of life — were all there, big magazines that were meant to be spread open just as families and life were meant to be big and open back then in hard mean secretive times. His stories had been printed everywhere all through the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s, stories that seem, deceptively, so easily told about the little moments that are so big in everyone’s life.

  “Well, there they are,” I said.

  “I suppose so,” he said.

  But week after week I kept coming back, finding another story and then another in a box in another room. And then one night, just as he’d finished tinkering with a few of the stories — and while I was upstairs trying to find a George Grosz drawing he was sure he’d put somewhere — I came across a manuscript that had never been published, “A Couple of Million Dollars.”

  “You should stop,” he said, as he sat down and read the story.

  “I should say so,” I said, wiping the dust off my hands.

  “But they’re all pretty darn good,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  The next night, as we went looking for the Grosz drawing, he reached for some small colored sheets of children’s scribbler paper that were sticking out behind two books on a bottom shelf. They were the titles to another 25 stories. “Where are they?” I cried. He didn’t know. He couldn’t remember the stories.

  “Cut it out,” I said. “This has got to stop.”

  “Perhaps it will,” he said, as he sat in the lamplight, his elbow on the desk beside a mound of old telephone and gas bills I’d never seen before.

  Barry Callaghan

  1985

  INTRODUCTION

  Walking the city streets in the afternoons, I was always working on a story. Not a real story — just the beginning of one. It was as if I was trying to remember something someone had told me so that my imagination would be set off. Though no one ever tells me a complete story, often something is said that shows me the aroused wonder in the person telling me about the incident. I would try to let this wonder grow, not forcing the story, just waiting, while I walked alone watching faces on the street. Or, maybe this would happen after meeting someone and having an idle conversation. Then, maybe two hours later, and without any concentration on my part, that unfinished incident would have progressed astonishingly, joining with another incident, becoming a form — a real story. And I remember once hurrying into a quick-lunch, getting a coffee, taking out a pad I had in my pocket and beginning to write. I had three coffees while writing steadily, and then, since it was six o’clock, I hurried home and, before dinner, finished the story. But most stories don’t come that easily. I saw stories everywhere — in churches, saloons, the prize-fight ring, the dance hall . . . in whores and saints, young lovers, boys growing up — always the boy on the thresh-old of some sobering knowledge about the world; the half-beaten man striving for a little dignity; and always the devastating influence of money and the rich and poor. I say I saw stories everywhere — and this is the mystery for the writer; most of the time I didn’t know I had seen the story when it had been right under my eye. I had to wait for months until something else happened that made me remember, and then, what had been stored up far back in my imagination was suddenly there as something I had not been able to see before.

  I can give an idea of the way a writer’s mind works. Take the story “Loppy Phelan’s Double Shoot.” It had its beginning in my only encounter with the rather fabulous “Indian” naturalist, Grey Owl. After a great success in England, where he was treated as a wonder man of the Canadian forests, he came to Toronto. His publisher, Hugh Eayrs of Macmillan, had a dinner at the York Club in his honor. About ten of the local literati, all in black tie dinner dress, broke bread with Grey Owl in the high-ceilinged, solemn York Club. Grey Owl, tall and handsome and with his long black hair in an Indian braid, was also in dinner dress. I sat directly across the table from him and as the fine dinner progressed, I watched him. He became aware that I was studying his face carefully. Once, as I turned quickly, I saw that he was eyeing me thoughtfully. When we all rose from the table, Hugh Eayrs, opulent and good-humored, asked me, “Well, what do you think?” Smiling, I said, “Well, I don’t know, but I’ll tell you one thing. He is no Indian.” “Are you sure?” he said, but he laughed good-naturedly.

  Whether or not he was an Indian was unimportant to me at the time. Then, one day some fifteen years later, I had got some news from Collingwood where I had spent my boyhood summers, and I sat remembering the boys I played with and how we all used to go to the fairgrounds to watch the town ball team play a team from one of the American ships tied up at the grain elevator. Then, suddenly, I remembered that character, Loppy Phelan, a pitcher, and how the boys claimed he could throw a double shoot, a curveball that actually zigzagged its way to the plate. Well, the boys saw what they wanted to see, and that night long after, thinking about Loppy and the kids — I suddenly remembered my dinner with Grey Owl. The recollection of Grey Owl was stored up there back in my memory as if waiting to be used when the time came for me to write about Loppy Phelan.

  And sometimes it happened that I was lucky enough to recognize at once that I had walked right in on a drama in progress, and indeed, might be helping to shape the story. In the depths of the Great Depression, I had a good close friend who, after enjoying some rich halcyon days in Montreal dealing in stocks and bonds, had lost everything. Dead broke, and of course finding himself being avoided by old fair-weather friends, he had come to Toronto. Here, after a year or two, he had begun to get his life together and was earning a frugal living. He had a big front room in an old rooming house. When I walked in on him one evening, I found he had a visitor, a thin gaunt man with a persistent nervous smile. This visitor, from Montreal, had also been in the stock and bond business before the crash. From then on, whenever I called for my friend, this fellow would be in the room, lying on the bed, smoking or reading or having a drink. When my friend and I went out, he would automatically trail along, not after me, but after our friend, as if he was scared he might get separated from him. I used to wonder if he was scared that someone pursuing him might get to him quickly if he was left alone. I wrote his story and called it “The Fugitive.”

  Through those years, I was often writing about people who, when they came into my life, had no real interest f
or me — not at the time anyway. Yet it seems that they got tucked away in my mind, waiting. At drinking parties around town, I used to encounter occasionally a plump, very soft-faced, broad-smiling, amiable fellow in the advertising business. He drank too much. He bored me. I avoided him. I only had one conversation with him. I forgot about it till the day I read in the newspaper that he had died. That conversation, that one conversation — with me — and why me? Oh, I remembered it. I wrote the story “Rendezvous.”

  I know that over the years — and even now, walking the streets, watching and listening or meeting hundreds of new people and getting mysteriously involved with them — faces, voices, and what happened, all seem to fade out; yet I know none of it does. It’s there, all there in a way I don’t understand, stored away, being nourished, until something new happens, someone new is met. Then, suddenly, the something new seems to belong to a stored-up and suddenly remembered thing and I have to write a story. Anyway, that’s the way it was with the writing of these stories.

  Morley Callaghan

  1985

  THE EXILE CLASSICS SERIES

  THAT SUMMER IN PARIS (No. 1) ~ MORLEY CALLAGHAN

  Memoir 6x9 247 pages 978-1-55096-688-6 (tpb)

  It was the fabulous summer of 1929 when the literary capital of North America had moved to the Left Bank of Paris. Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, Robert McAlmon and Morley Callaghan... amid these tangled relationships, friendships were forged, and lost... A tragic and sad and unforgettable story told in Callaghan’s lucid, compassionate prose.

  NIGHTS IN THE UNDERGROUND (No. 2) ~ MARIE-CLAIRE BLAIS

  Fiction/Novel 6x9 190 pages 978-1-55096-015-0 (tpb)

  With this novel, Marie-Claire Blais came to the forefront of feminism in Canada. This is a classic of lesbian literature that weaves a profound matrix of human isolation, with transcendence found in the healing power of love.