The Complete Stories of Morley Callaghan: Volume One

THE COMPLETE STORIES

OF

MORLEY CALLAGHAN

Volume One

Introduction by

Alistair MacLeod

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.

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Copyright © The Estate of Morley Callaghan and Exile Editions, 2012

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Introduction

All the Years of Her Life

An Enemy of the People

No Man’s Meat

The Fugitive

A Predicament

A Country Passion

The Chiseler

Watching and Waiting

A Sick Call

A Cap for Steve

Now That April’s Here

Very Special Shoes

Lunch Counter

Rejected One

Old Quarrel

The Shining Red Apple

The Voyage Out

Soldier Harmon

The Young Priest

Mr. & Mrs. Fairbanks

An Escapade

Rigmarole

An Autumn Penitent

Dates of Original Publications; Questions for Discussion and Essays; Selected Related Reading; Of Interest on the Web; Editor’s Endnotes

INTRODUCTION

by Alistair MacLeod

These stories by Morley Callaghan represent the work of one of Canada’s premier writers of short fiction. They are realistic stories and they are true to a credo he established and developed for himself at a surprisingly young age — when he was in his early twenties. Readers of That Summer in Paris cannot help but be impressed by how young Callaghan was when he formed his literary opinions, how well read he was, how determined, how stubborn and how alone. In the sometimes nostalgic That Summer in Paris, the life of Morley Callaghan before he went to Paris is almost more interesting than the fabled period actually spent in that great city and the subsequent years that later developed.

The early Morley Callaghan, he tells us, was a young man who was basically an athlete. He played baseball, he played football, he boxed. He was a smart but indifferent student. But he read and he read a lot. He had friends with whom he could converse on the subjects of left hooks and fastballs but in the area of his literary interests he was basically alone. He was, perhaps, as isolated in the city of Toronto as was Sinclair Ross on the vastness of the prairies. Perhaps it was partially due to his personality or the manner in which he viewed his home city of Toronto. In Toronto, he tells us, were many poets, a group of painters called the Group of Seven, and no doubt many great readers and scholars. But in those days it was a very British city. I was intensely North American. It never occurred to me that the local poets had anything to do with me.

While he was basically happy and wonderfully at home in my native city, the intellectual and spiritual part of him, the part that had to do with my wanting to be a writer, was private and solitary. He had no one to talk to.

Even at this early age he had already established strong views regarding the literature he read and the literature he hoped to, someday, write.

He disliked much of the contemporary writing he encountered. He rejected show-off writers; writers intent on proving to their readers that they could be clever and had some education. He believed that such writers were motivated by vanity and such vanity should be beneath them if they were really concerned in revealing the object as it was. He felt that many contemporary writers used language to evade, to skip away from the object, because they could never bear to face the thing freshly for what it was in itself. He was suspicious of metaphor. He yearned to tell the truth clearly in words as transparent as glass. I remember, he tells us, one time at twilight, sitting at the typewriter in the sunroom of my parents’ home. I could smell the lilacs. A night bird cried. A woman’s voice came from a neighbor’s yard. I wanted to get it down so directly that it would not feel or look like literature. Such scenes and others like them, he felt, were beautiful in themselves and had no need to be written up. A literary guy, he felt, would spoil it and draw attention away from the object at hand to focus instead on the cleverness of the author.

This was Morley Callaghan, twenty years of age, writing by himself in the city of Toronto. Sometimes he used a typewriter and sometimes he wrote in longhand. He was lonely and opinionated and yearning, perhaps, for a kindred spirit. Then one day while writing his assigned story in the library of the Toronto Star, he looked up and there was Hemingway, watching me. I imagine he had time on his hands and was looking for someone to talk to. Though years have passed I still wonder what brought him to me.

They began to talk about literature. Hemingway was equally sincere and fierce in his opinions. At the end of the conversation he asked Callaghan how old he was. He was twenty to Hemingway’s twenty-seven. You know you are very intelligent, said Hemingway. Well thanks, said Callaghan uncomfortably, for people I knew in Toronto didn’t say such things to each other.

Hemingway asked if he wrote fiction and if he would show him a story. Hemingway offered Callaghan the proofs of the first edition of In Our Time. They read each other’s work. Callaghan felt that Hemingway’s paragraphs were so polished they were like epigrams, each paragraph so vivid, clean and intense, that the scene he was depicting seemed to dance before my eyes.

Hemingway said to Callaghan, You’re a real writer . . . All you have to do is keep on writing. A literary friendship had begun. My life was taking a new turn in those encounters, writes Callaghan, for at last I had found a dedicated artist to talk to.

If Callaghan had not encountered Hemingway, perhaps he would have continued on his dedicated path towards realistic fiction by himself. As has been mentioned, his ideas were already formed and he was prodigiously determined. But Hemingway offered a young man at, perhaps a crucial juncture in his life, great encouragement and he did so with authority. He spoke so casually but with such tremendous authority, that I suddenly couldn’t doubt him, writes Callaghan. Everything Hemingway did, he did with authority.

He was Callaghan’s first reader and first true literary friend. When he was leaving Toronto, Callaghan lamented, albeit with tongue-in-cheek, that he was losing his readership — a readership of one. No, said Hemingway. Remember this. There are always four or five people somewhere in the world who are interested in good new writing. Some magazines are starting up in Paris. Once again he spoke with convincing authority. He sounded like a bishop, writes Callaghan, and again I believed I only needed to wait. Obviously Callaghan did more than wait. He was aggressive in his own right and fiercely determined as has already been mentioned. But he had received a certain kind of validation concerning himself and the work he was producing and that which he hoped to produce in the future. He had found a fellow-traveler who was self-reliant and authoritative and somewhat contemptuous of those who chose to pay him little heed. During his time in Toronto, Hemingway’s colleagues at the Toronto Star thought little more of him than they did of Callaghan, whom they hardly knew at all. Whatever you do, don’t let anyone around here tell you anything, he said firmly to Callaghan. A new window had opened up for the Canadian writer. I knew in my heart that I had touched the world beyond my hometown, he wrote, before his own departure for Paris. He was firmly on his way.

The stories in this volume indicate how strongly he persevered. They are realistic to the core in their presentation of lives lived during their time of composition. Most of them seem to come from the 1950s, but in fact several are from the late twenties and early thirties. They are clean in Callaghan’s intended sense and metaphor or fancy writing is at a minimum. Some of them are short and others quite long but all of them depict the lives of ordinary people and the author never draws attention to himself.

Most of the stories are urban in their settings because Callaghan was himself an urban person and the city was the area of his major interests. In the stories set outside the city, rural lack of anonymity is generally a curse rather than a blessing. In No Man’s Meat, the locals despise Mr. and Mrs. Beddoes for their easy life, their cottage, their maid, and the fact that they never do anything. They make faces behind Mr. Beddoes’ back when he is on the dance floor, and Mrs. Beddoes suspects the farmers on the hill laugh easily at us. Mr. Beddoes responds: Let them laugh, they never feel, nor think; they’re part of a hard rocky soil that’s only good for timber. The Beddoes who had been trying for years to be orderly are bothered by their sloppy neighbors with their run-down buildings, their half-tilled fields, their imperfect clothing and haphazard grooming. It is a scene of mutual non-respect.

In A Country Passion, the dim-witted central character and his mentally challenged girlfriend are on a first name basis with the sheriff and the staff at the local jail. Sometimes they play checkers together while incarcerated. In the opening scene the central character is planning to take his girlfriend, who is twenty-nine years his junior, downtown to buy some underwear before she is sent to an institution in Barrie. During their relationship he has discovered that her current underwear is made of sacking. He, himself, is about to be sentenced to life imprisonment, but after being arrested he escapes and then phones the sheriff and notifies him of his whereabouts.

In An Autumn Penitent, the sporting women, who come from Toronto to entertain, are singularly unimpressed by the quality of the liquor and the quality of the men they see before them. What’s the matter, you old hick? says Miss Shipman to Joe, when he fails to respond to her efforts at arousal. In this story the dark spectre of country incest also rears its head.

In Watching and Waiting, a jealous lawyer and his much younger wife move to the country so he can be alone with her. There they lived like two scared prisoners in the house that was screened from the lane by three oak trees. He is so far from the city he can only go in three days a week and his practice fails. His jealousy deepens and in a final scene, heightened by country wind, rain, mud and darkness, he is shot in a case of mistaken identity. Obviously escape to the bucolic countryside is not, for Callaghan, the answer.

In the splendid An Enemy of the People, Miss Luella Stevens is done in by the community in which she has lived for sixty-eight years. This is a tremendously well-rounded story, fully developed and strong in its characterization. In the end the central character is rejected not by those who know her too little but by those who know her too well. Still, the anonymity of the city is not for her nor for her fellow parishioners. One feels compassion for all of them at the end.

In the city, Callaghan’s urban hand is unfailingly sure. Many of the stories deal with young people. Children in their relationships with their parents. Lovers who are young and sometimes confused. Couples who are newly married and face uncertain futures.

Frequently urban poverty is the source of many of the central issues. Not the grinding poverty of the hopeless poor but the budgetary poverty of ordinary families. The dying young woman in A Sick Call lies in a tiny bedroom that looked like a little girl’s room. In A Cap for Steve, the father, Dave, is awed by the broadloom and the fine furniture of the rich man’s house. He is embarrassed by his old windbreaker and angered to realize that the rich man doubts he can afford two dollars for his son’s cap. When he looks in Steve’s face he sees the memory of how difficult it had been to get an extra nickel, the talk he heard about the cost of food, the worry on his mother’s face as she tried to make ends meet. At the story’s resolution the son says to his father, With that man the cap was — well it was just something he could buy, eh Dad?

In Very Special Shoes, eleven-year-old Mary Johnson has saved the quarter she earns each Saturday until she has reached the magical price of the red shoes she has seen in the store window months before — $6.00. Her mother, who is more seriously ill than Mary realizes, says, Your father is going to have a lot more expenses soon. Why, he’d drop dead if he found I’d paid six dollars for a pair of red leather shoes for you. After Mary tearfully prevails, she is sent to her room, while her mother tries to reason with Mr. Johnson. From the next room she hears her father’s angered response. Are you serious? Money for luxuries at a time like this? His tone becomes explosive. Are we going crazy? You’ll take them back, do you hear? But eventually he relents. After her mother’s death, Mary is forced to send her red shoes to the shoemaker to have them dyed black so that she might appear proper at the funeral. They are the same but not the same. In her childish heart she wanted them to last a long time.

In Old Quarrel, a girl loses her best friend because she borrows a hundred dollars to give to her boyfriend who leaves town. Nearly half a century later the pain lingers illusively. In The Shining Red Apple, the apple merchant is fascinated by a boy’s longing for the forbidden fruit which, it seems, he cannot afford. In Soldier Harmon, the boxer is satisfied with his life but his girlfriend, who works at Woolworth’s, his parents and manager yearn for more money so that they can enjoy better lives. Mr. and Mrs. Fairbanks, in the story of the same name, quarrel over her unexpected pregnancy. Before the marriage he had said, With the two of us working we’ll get along in fine style. But now that would change. They would be poor, thinks Mrs. Fairbanks. Suddenly she said, I don’t want to have a baby. . . . I tell you I won’t have a baby. We’ll do something. Besides, we’re too poor, and it would just mean a lot of misery and maybe more children afterward. We can’t afford it.

Many of the young people in these stories still live with their parents. For those who are children there is always the tension and possible disappointment resulting from the clash between children’s wishes and parental authority. Sometimes the children, as young adults, are disappointments to their parents in such stories as All the Years of Her Life, The Chiseler, and Soldier Harmon. Religious bigotry makes things much worse than they might have been in A Sick Call. The dying woman’s family wouldn’t have anything to do with her after she marries the young man whom she loves. In The Rejected One, a young man brings home his girlfriend, hoping for his family’s approval, only to be met by strong rejection. At the end he is torn between the forces of his family and the girl he feels he loves. In The Voyage Out, a young man has been keeping company with his girl for a month. On a certain night he hopes she will invite him into her house so that they might become more intimate. As they tiptoe into the house they hear her father cough. We’d better not tonight, she whispered. They’re still awake. You’d better go quick. The story concludes with a moving conversation between the central character and his older brother who fears his girlfriend may be pregnant. The central character is bothered by the power of sex — by his own yearning and by the advice and results he sees around him. But he is young and hopeful. And then he was filled with awe, for it seemed like the beginning of a voyage out, with not much he had learned on this night to guide him.

Many of these stories are filled with such sexual tensions. Tensions between the unmarried and those who are married. Jealousy abounds. There is adultery, promiscuity, prostitution, and casual encounters of a casual nature. There are those who leave heterosexual unions for same-sex relationships. There are sexual yearnings which are not fulfilled. Callaghan handles such material in a low-key manner. He is revelatory without being strident. Generally he is non-judgmental and exhibits a remarkable sympathetic empathy — especially in situations that invoke the young.

Approximately one quarter of these stories have something to do with the church or members of the clergy. They are seldom overtly religious, often featuring instead events which take place within the four walls of church buildings. Sometimes they are humorous as in the case in A Predicament and, perhaps, less so, in An Enemy of the People. Some of the characters are genuinely religious and some are not. Some see church functions as social events. There are evangelicals. There are Baptists, Methodists, Catholics and Anglicans. All of them are practicing or nominal Christians. Probably the best realized of these characters is Father McDowell in A Sick Call, a man both motivated and bothered by his own small deception. His is not an easy task as he tries to accommodate religious yearning, dogma and the fierceness of love.

The small deception of Father McDowell reflects a common theme running through many of these stories. There are small white lies and there are bigger ones. There is petty thievery — All the Years of Her Life and perhaps something more serious in The Fugitive. Definitely so in An Autumn Penitent. Sometimes the deceptions are imagined as in the case of Watching and Waiting, and sometimes they are frivolous as in The Escapade —wherein a woman tells her husband she is going to one church but goes instead to another service. Throughout all of these, the people are intensely human.

And throughout these Morley Callaghan reflects the country and, more specifically, the city of his time. Toronto, as he has stated, was a British city. It will never be so again. Accordingly most of his characters have Anglo-Saxon or Irish names. There is Mr. and Mrs. Fairbanks, and Luella Stevens and Catherine Hogan. Also Mary Johnson and Anna Grant. There is Alfred Higgins and Bert Beddoes. Also Jerry O’Neil and Vincent Sullivan. There is even a Jack Spratt.

It is true that Mrs. Cosentino runs the boarding house in The Fugitive and Joe Cosentino the fruit stand in The Shining Red Apple, but they are exceptions. It is interesting that they both have the same name.

Most of the characters speak in standard English and are grammatically correct. There is a small bit of dialect in The Chiseler and occasionally some of the rougher characters use ain’t.

Callaghan has no qualms about crossing sex lines or the boundaries of age. He explores the inner lives of both men and women, the young and the old, and he does so in convincing fashion.

Contemporary readers may be struck by changes that have taken place since these stories were written. The idea that two dollars may be expensive for a cap or that six dollars is exorbitant for a pair of shoes may cause contemporary shoppers to shake their heads in wonderment. But we must remember that these stories were written over half a century ago, and if the city of Toronto is not ethnically the same, neither are its prices. The same may be true regarding certain styles and manners and modes of expression. Nearly all of the women in these stories wear hats. Most of the men smoke cigarettes, and some use cigars. Words like windbreaker, kimono and divan are no longer in common usage, and phrases such as bawling out, sore at you, poke you in the nose, are no longer as common as they once were. The reader may be struck by Callaghan’s use of his own personal adjectives. He uses sullen a great deal and the word plump occurs in almost every story.

It may be said, however, that although cities change and prices change and expressions change, the human heart in all its wonder remains very much the same. This is the magic of great literature. Who knows what shoes were selling for in the time of Sophocles or of Shakespeare? Certainly not I. But I and millions of readers can enter into the worlds created by these authors. And if we are not hip to the current expressions of their time there are footnotes to guide us. The truth however lies beyond the minutiae of footnotes. It lies in the big picture that reveals our human nature to ourselves.

The American short story writer Raymond Carver once said it is the responsibility of the writer to bring the news and that is what Morley Callaghan has done in these stories. He has brought the news of his time and of his place. He has brought it cleanly as he once hoped he would. There is little adornment or decoration in these stories. Little imagistic or symbolic adventuring with the possible exception of No Man’s Meat. Callaghan tries never to draw attention to himself and that is, perhaps, why he sticks so resolutely to the omniscient point of view as a form of narration. He was one of those writers who believed that the aim of good writing was not to trick the reader but to simply reveal the truth.

I believe that many of us, who today write in Canada, owe Morley Callaghan a debt. We owe a debt not only to the author of these stories but to that stubborn young man who, at age twenty, felt being a writer was even possible. Who read and read and formed his thoughts even if he felt he was living in a British city and had no one to talk to. We do not have to share his views nor his values. We can talk all we want and there are lots of us to talk to.

I personally feel privileged to have known Morley Callaghan. At one period we met frequently, exchanged opinions and worked together on committees of mutual interest. One afternoon in the autumn of 1971 he came to my house and we sat together at the kitchen table. I remember the way the sun shone through the window and seemed to lighten the brown surface of the tabletop. There was just the two of us and we sat there until the shadows of the evening caused the tabletop to darken and then we turned on the lights. Perhaps we drank beer, perhaps we drank wine, perhaps we drank tea. That I don’t remember. There are a lot of subjects men can talk about when they are alone but that afternoon we talked about writing. There was an age difference between us of some thirty-two years, but it did not seem to matter. We were so consumed by the subject. We were not in Paris but in Windsor, Ontario.

I, myself, have not spent a great deal of my time in Paris and given the relative years of a man’s life, neither did he. Our years were spent in Canada, a country which we left for a while and to which we later then returned. I guess it is where we wanted most to be.

Morley Callaghan took his stand early and throughout his life, although his work varied, his essential position did not change. He was determined to bring the news, and that, as Ezra Pound would have it, is news that STAYS news.

All the Years of Her Life

They were closing the drugstore, and Alfred Higgins, who had just taken off his white jacket, was putting on his coat getting ready to go home. The little gray-haired man, Sam Carr, who owned the drugstore, was bending down behind the cash register, and when Alfred Higgins passed him, he looked up and said softly, Just a moment, Alfred. One moment before you go.

The soft, confident, quiet way in which Sam Carr spoke made Alfred start to button his coat nervously. He felt sure his face was white. Sam Carr usually said, Good night, brusquely, without looking up. In the six months he had been working in the drugstore Alfred had never heard his employer speak softly like that. His heart began to beat so loud it was hard for him to get his breath. What is it, Mr. Carr? he asked.

Maybe you’d be good enough to take a few things out of your pocket and leave them here before you go, Sam Carr said.

What things? What are you talking about?

You’ve got a compact and a lipstick and at least two tubes of toothpaste in your pockets, Alfred.

What do you mean? Do you think I’m crazy? Alfred blustered. His face got red and he knew he looked fierce with indignation. But Sam Carr, standing by the door with his blue eyes shining brightly behind his glasses and his lips moving underneath his gray moustache, only nodded his head a few times, and then Alfred grew very frightened and he didn’t know what to say. Slowly he raised his hand and dipped it into his pocket, and with his eyes never meeting Sam Carr’s eyes, he took out a blue compact and two tubes of toothpaste and a lipstick, and he laid them one by one on the counter.

Petty thieving, eh, Alfred? Sam Carr said. And maybe you’d be good enough to tell me how long this has been going on.

This is the first time I ever took anything.

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