Morley Callaghan, 1903-1990
Marin, Rick
BOOK REVIEWS F amous for knocking down Ernest Hemingway in a boxing match in Paris, Morley Callaghan was one of the hottest young literary properties of the 1920s and became one of the handful of...
...Somehow I'd managed to spend the first two decades of my life in Toronto, in a house not minutes from Callaghan's own, without having read (or at least retained) anything he had written...
...Caught between Hemingway and Fitzgerald's prickly feuding, he exacerbated it during the boxing contest that, despite his efforts to play it down, Rick Mann is the television critic for the Washington Times...
...Bookstores well-stocked with inferior Canadian imports (Margaret Atwood, Robertson Davies) have never heard of him...
...The only place to find Callaghan here is a library, or second-hand shop, which is where I recently came across a worn paperback of That Summer in Paris, his 1963 memoir of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, et al...
...His sincerity, sensible balance of reason and emotion, strong but self-effacing voice, shrewd sense of irony—all these seem identifiably Canadian traits, though Callaghan was never a cultural nationalist...
...From Ink Lake...
...But they were so far apart now that neither one trusted the first words he would have to use, or any words needed to tell what was in his heart...
...Dispassion would be the wrong word...
...Very interesting failures," one assessment patronizingly deemed his long fiction...
...For a decade (1938-48), which he called "the dark period of my life," he stopped publishing fiction altogether, and became a full-time radio commentator for the CBC...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1991 37...
...I wished I were miles away...
...What's most remarkable about Callaghan's memoir is its sobriety...
...Though still widely available in Canada, none of his two dozen titles is in print in the United States today...
...Yet, when he died in August of last year at the age of 87, his obituary did not make the front page of the Globe and Mail, Canada's newspaper of record...
...Only don't say you made a mistake," and he stomped off to the shower room to wipe the blood from his mouth...
...In his native Toronto, Callaghan would write many good novels and a few great ones...
...Hemingway, he observes, "kept death in his work as a Medieval scholar might have kept a skull on his desk...
...He regarded his relative obscurity with ironic resignation, not bitterness...
...He was silent for a few seconds...
...Candian Stories, edited by Michael Ondaatje (Viking, $24.95), a new, 714-page anthology featuring fifty Canadian writers, leaves Callaghan out altogether...
...The truth about any man is pretty hard to tell," a character says in The Many Colored Coat, "because someone else always has another angle on him...
...Then Father Dowling sat up abruptly, saw Midge's eyes closed, saw how long her lashes were, and how her lips were parted and her breast was softly swelling, and he went out without disturbing her...
...This audacious heresy was viewed as Yankee imperialism...
...The title page of one of his plays reads "Published from The House of Exile/20 Dale Avenue, Toronto"—his home address...
...Callaghan's intense curiosity about the motives of human action and his quietly sympathetic voice exert an inexorable pull...
...It's also, as the title makes clear, not in the least self-pitying...
...Outcasts, social misfits, martyrs—these are the painfully isolated protagonists of Callaghan's spare prose...
...The most junior of the group, this clear-headed, self-assured Canadian seems even then to have had the oldest soul...
...Callaghan never subscribes to political messianism, even in his novels of the 1930s...
...Everything serves the panoptic narrative, whose rise and fall he plots with expert calibration...
...You hardly notice the sly, subtle tug of his prose, his gift for snapshot description with telling cadences, as when he describes a young priest's vacillation between human and divine love: He saw that Midge was getting sleepy...
...The first was a review, extremely favorable, of That Summer in Paris, praising its author's "gift of moral objectivity" and kindred ability to rise above the expatriate fray...
...It was impossible to believe he had ever knocked down anyone, let alone Ernest Hemingway...
...His fictional lives are decorated with a minimum of period detail, and the moral dilemmas his characters face up to have as much relevance to secular as religious readers...
...There was nothing left to say...
...Callaghan, Wilson wrote, "is so much interested in moral character as exhibited in other people's behavior that, unlike his two exhibitionistic friends, he never shows himself at all...
...I saw him walk past our front door many times and once at a reading of his penultimate novel, A Time for Judas...
...In later years Hemingway would dismiss the affair as a drunken lark, though Callaghan maintains that they were all quite sober...
...BOOK REVIEWS F amous for knocking down Ernest Hemingway in a boxing match in Paris, Morley Callaghan was one of the hottest young literary properties of the 1920s and became one of the handful of writers that Canada has produced with a claim to the adjective "great...
...He is profoundly concerned with moral behavior but loath to judge...
...Hemingway was furious: "Christ...
...Modernist by way of daily newspapering, Callaghan shared Hemingway's affinity for direct speech and his distrust of literary ornament...
...They both wanted to speak, reach a peaceful settlement...
...In his fiction he learned to write them...
...I remember deciding," he says in That Summer, "that the root of the trouble with writing was that poets and story writers used language to evade, to skip away from the object, because they could never bear to face the thing freshly and see it freshly for what it was in itself...
...Scott, staring at his watch, was mute and wondering...
...Ernest yelled...
...The conventional Canadian wisdom on Callaghan was always that he was a master of the short story but wanting as a novelist...
...Their themes: faith, justice, innocence, and experience A young priest devotes himself to the material and spiritual salvation of two indigent prostitutes, sacrificing his collar and sanity to his obsession (Such Is My Beloved, 1934...
...An ex-con trying to go straight is hounded by his underworld past (More Joy in Heaven, 1937...
...Edmund Wilson tried to revive Callaghan's reputation in a series of articles MORLEY CALLAGHAN, 1903-1990 Rick Marin 36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1991 for the New Yorker in the 1960s...
...After nine months he packed it up and took it home...
...Wilson, in a letter, reported getting in trouble for making the opposite claim: that the novels were more interesting than the stories for their larger themes and the depth of their characters...
...Callaghan chose to live and work in Toronto...
...they shared for the moment that helpless angry feeling...
...His novella The Varsity Story (1948), routinely dismissed as a nostalgic valedictory to the University of Toronto, is in fact a cleverly disguised inquiry into his country's elusive national identity...
...They both lay back and began to doze...
...A modernist in style and theme, he seems never to have been a "contemporary" writer...
...One such story, published in American Caravan, got him an invitation to New York from Maxwell Perkins at Scribner's...
...he shows remarkable compassion for these vain, brilliant egotists around him...
...But he was right...
...T was loyal to my search for the sacramental in the daily lives of people," Callaghan told an interviewer in 1983...
...If you want to see me getting the shit knocked out of me, just say so...
...Hemingway thought Callaghan's stories "big-time stuff' and encouraged his awed acolyte to keep at it...
...The time Callaghan knocked Hemingway to the mat, Fitzgerald was keeping time and became so engrossed by the bout that he let the round go longer than three minutes...
...To find the extraordinary in the ordinary—this used to be the great and only aim of art...
...Even though the book is deeply autobiographical—the novelist even lives on the same street as Callaghan—its central character is not the novelist but the young scholar studying him...
...The book's two bitter enemies, divided over the death of a mutual friend and the eponymous garment, become prisoners of their "angles" on each other...
...They meet on a Montreal street: It was an awkward moment...
...Callaghan once remarked that while studying law—he was called to the bar the year before he left for Paris—he read "case books on human nature...
...He was a small, frail old man with a surprisingly forceful voice...
...In 1929 he made the pilgrimage to Paris with his wife Loretto, and soon found himself steeped in the liquid life and poisonous gossip of The Quarter's expatriate colonists: James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, Sylvia Beach, Robert McAlmon, Michael Arlen...
...Declared another admirer, Sinclair Lewis: "Here is magnificently the seeing eye...
...His sinners are usually forgiven...
...To be slighted even in death was the story of Morley Callaghan's life...
...Callaghan met Hemingway at the Toronto Star, where they worked together in the mid-1920s, one a cub reporter, the other a swaggering foreign correspondent...
...The two sparred regularly at the American Club...
...Allowing that Callaghan's prose lacked the lyricism and emotion of Fitzgerald or Hemingway, he deemed his art "more subtle" and his intelligence "more mature...
...He admired the "appleness" of Cezanne's apples...
...would become the most celebrated event in Morley Callaghan's long life...
...There was no way of communicating, nor showing any recognition of what they felt almost furtively as a desperate need...
...Once he yawned himself...
...All right, Scott," Ernest said savagely...
...Although his countrymen conferred prizes and accolades upon Callaghan throughout his career, although his stories were published in American magazines and anthologies, he always felt underestimated beyond his own borders and underappreciated within them.' His reputation fell victim to what Wilson identified as "the 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...
...His Biblical titles and mad priests invite comparisons to Graham Greene, but Greene's prescriptive moral tone is absent...
...In A Fine and Private Place (1975), an American critic bearing a strong resemblance to Wilson champions a neglected Toronto novelist who bears a strong resemblance to Callaghan...
...Called by Edmund Wilson "the most unjustly neglected writer of the English-speaking world," Callaghan published his first novel, Strange Fugitive, at twenty-five and his last, A Wild Old Man on the Road, sixty years later...
...He got up...
...His Catholicism, influenced by his friend Jacques Maritain, inclines toward charity and tolerance...
...Metaphors and descriptive indulgences are rare in Callaghan's writing...
...For brightening a banker's drab life and blamelessly ending it, a well-liked public relations man becomes a pariah,falsely accused and feverishly bent on vindication (The Many Colored Coat, 1960...
Vol. 24 • February 1991 • No. 2
