Stories About Storytellers Read online

  Later, he and I worked together again on Next Year Country, about his beloved Prairies, and Ordinary Russians, about the country that had just been opened up by glasnost. We stayed in touch by phone or by Russian tractor factory notes. That was how I learned with pleasure of his marriage to Lori, an old sweetheart from his Winnipeg days; of his George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award for an Outstanding Literary Career in B.C., the award arranged by the heroically ubiquitous Alan Twigg in 1997; of the Order of Canada honour in 1996; and of his honorary doctorate that same year from the University of Manitoba. I suspect he didn’t wear a turtleneck for these presentations, but I may be wrong. I’m confident, though, that if he spoke he would be modest, underplaying his role as a historian, and possibly even using the phrase “What the hell.”

  In 1998, when I began one of our occasional phone calls with the words, “Hi, Barry, it’s Doug Gibson,” I got a very strange response.

  “Doug [pause] Gibson [pause]. I know that name.”

  “What do you mean, Barry?”

  “Oh, I’ve had a stroke, and I don’t remember every name.”

  It was true. The stroke had afflicted him with a failing memory and robbed him of his sight.

  The next time I was out west, I went to Nanaimo and stayed with Barry and Lori in the house on Morningside where they now lived. His sight allowed him to stride forward, grinning confidently, and shake my hand with vigour — but finer work like reading was beyond him, although he tried.

  We had a good visit, talking about old times, although he described himself as a “dead man walking.” But now, for him, “what the hell” was a stoical way of facing up to what life had brought him. In leaving, I tried to tell him what an important role he had played in reclaiming Canadian history from the bloodless academics. They might scoff at the “unproven” rumour in Ten Lost Years of a brutal railroad cop found crucified against a boxcar. Wiser heads realize that the point of the story is that these club-swinging cops were so hated by the homeless men trying to ride the rails that to them the story was absolutely believable.

  Christopher Moore, the Governor General’s Award–winning historian I’ve quoted earlier, understood that. Late in Barry’s life he made a pilgrimage to pay his respects to the old pioneer of oral history in Canada. On Barry’s death in 2003 he told the Toronto Star, “Ten Lost Years and Six War Years are among the most powerful books anyone has written about Canadian history.”

  Not bad for an old newspaper guy. What the hell.

  In his 1965 book, O Canada, the august American critic Edmund Wilson described Morley Callaghan as “perhaps the most unjustly neglected novelist in the English-speaking world.” Comparisons were made to Chekhov and Turgenev. In 1963 the New York Times had hailed Callaghan, saying, with unconscious sexism: “If there is a better short story writer in the world, we don’t know where he is.”

  All the time Morley Callaghan, of course, was in Toronto, the city of his birth. Toronto was the base from which he made occasional forays but to which he always returned, setting his own life and most of his stories in the city streets he knew in his bones.

  The Callaghans were an old Irish family, but they had fallen into poverty by the time Morley’s father, Thomas, left Wales for London, and as a young teenager sailed to Canada as an indentured servant. It seems incredible now, but this form of genteel slavery was fairly common in Victorian times among penniless young immigrants, allowing them to work their way back to freedom. In Toronto, Thomas did that, gained an education and came close to going to university. It was not the perfect rags to riches immigrant success story but he rose to a white-collar job as a railway dispatcher, marrying a respectable woman named Mary Dewan, playing a role in the union movement, and continuing to study the ways of the world through the newspapers, which he described as “the poor man’s university.” He provided a happy home for his family.

  Although the Callaghans were Roman Catholic, young Morley was sent to non-denominational public schools in Toronto, then went to the University of Toronto, where he was an active sportsman, learning to box well (as Ernest Hemingway would learn to his cost in Paris), and playing such serious baseball that icing his arm was regarded as important.

  And he wrote. His entry in Canadian Who’s Who noted proudly, “Has been writing seriously since 1923.” The writing included fiction that was soon to make him a prodigy when he published his first book, Strange Fugitive, at the age of twenty-five. But it also included valuable part-time work for the Toronto Star newspaper, where he became friendly with another young reporter, an American with experience in Kansas City named Ernest Hemingway, who encouraged his writing ambitions.

  Morley fulfilled his father’s dreams by graduating from Osgoode Hall Law School in the heart of downtown Toronto, beside courts teeming with criminals of all sorts — and some of those criminals, such as prostitutes, thieves, and bootleggers, would become familiar to his readers over the years — but he chose never to practise law, becoming a professional writer instead.

  In those days for a serious Canadian writer the literary world lay elsewhere. Soon, with the help of Hemingway, who was generous with his contacts, Morley was successfully mailing off stories to Paris (to This Quarter in 1926 and transition in 1927), and Ezra Pound bought two stories for an edition of Exile. New York was an even bigger draw, and Hemingway saw to it that on his visits Morley met the right people, including prominent writers like Sherwood Anderson and William Carlos Williams, and the legendary book editor at Scribners, Maxwell Perkins, who signed him up for the short story collection A Native Argosy, which came out in 1929, when Morley was only twenty-six.

  Nineteen twenty-nine was a watershed year for the world, and for Morley Callaghan everything changed on a personal level as well. He married Loretto Dee (a notable beauty whose family had close, romantic connections with real live gangsters like “Legs” Lenihan, later gunned down in his flower shop in Detroit — we can only imagine the floral tributes at the funeral), and they followed their friend Hemingway to Paris.

  Much later, in 1963, Morley wrote about his time there, in a memoir entitled That Summer in Paris: Memories of Tangled Friendships with Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Some Others. The others in that “very small, back-biting, gossiping neighbourhood” included Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, the painter Miro, and Zelda Fitzgerald, who was not sure if Ernest was turning her Scott into an alcoholic, or vice versa. It was the time of — pick your slogan — the Jazz Age or the Lost Generation, and it was an exciting time to be with that crowd in Paris, since 1929 was when A Farewell to Arms was published, joining The Sun Also Rises and Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise and The Great Gatsby as the exciting new books of the decade.

  When Morley’s memoir came out many years later, however, Norman Mailer (reviewing it for the New York Review of Books) damned it with faint praise, calling it “a modest dull book that contains a superb short story about Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Callaghan.” That “short story,” of course, describes the boxing match when Hemingway, who fancied himself as a boxer, and even earned money in hard times in Paris as a hired sparring partner, invited Morley to join him in the ring. This was a mistake. Not only because Hemingway had just eaten Lobster Thermidor and consumed “bottles of white burgundy,” but also because Morley was a good, well-trained boxer. Hemingway already knew this. In an earlier sparring match Morley had bloodied him, and in Morley’s astonished words, “Suddenly he spat at me; he spat a mouthful of blood; he spat in my face.” Hemingway laughed it off as a macho practice among bullfighters, but Morley was not amused.

  In the fateful fight, where Fitzgerald agreed to be the timekeeper, Morley was even less amused when his pal Ernest, who at six feet towered over him and outweighed him by forty pounds or so, began to press the attack in this friendly bout. In Morley’s words, “Ernest had become rougher, his punching a little wilder than usual.”

  So Morley knocked him down.
r />   Hemingway, furious, climbed to his feet accusing Fitzgerald of deliberately letting the round run long because he wanted “to see me getting the shit kicked out of me.” It changed their relationship forever, since his prowess in the ring really mattered to Hemingway. He once, famously, said, “My writing is nothing. My boxing is everything.”

  And Morley spent the rest of his life trying to be more than “the guy who knocked down Hemingway in Paris.”

  Safely returned to Toronto, Morley began to write at a great pace. He produced two novels (It’s Never Over, published in 1930, and A Broken Journey, which appeared in 1932); Gary Boire has identified them as particular examples of “the obvious influence of American naturalist writers such as Anderson and Theodore Dreiser.”

  Then Morley really hit his stride, releasing three 1930s novels with biblically inspired titles. George Woodcock summarized his achievement in these Depression years as follows: “A sudden sureness of touch appeared in Callaghan’s fourth novel, Such Is My Beloved (1934) and continued through They Shall Inherit The Earth (1935) and More Joy In Heaven (1937) which have an economy of form and a lucidity of expression and feeling that make these the best of all Callaghan’s works and perhaps the best Canadian novels written in the 1930s.”

  And then the novels stopped.

  To what extent this was caused by Morley’s inspiration drying up, and to what extent it reflected a writer’s realistic assessment of the fiction market set against the need to provide for a young family, now consisting of two sons, Michael and Barry, is impossible to say. But after 1937 Morley busied himself writing magazine articles (and his book for young people, Luke Baldwin’s Vow, was based on a reworking of a Saturday Evening Post story), plays, a film script, a semi-fictional history (The Varsity Story), and doing a lot of broadcasting work for CBC Radio, which put bread on the table. The exception was The Loved and the Lost, a novel that appeared in 1951, set in Montreal and dealing with a white woman who dated a black man in the jazz scene in that city. It was, for its day, a daring novel, and won the Governor General’s Award; it continues to be read in courses today.

  In his marvellous book about Canadian Publishing, The Perilous Trade (2003), Roy MacSkimming tells the story of the launch of that book “set in the underworld, which Callaghan had come to know by mixing with boxers and gangsters in a bar and grill on Dorchester” (now René Lévesque Boulevard, where I was later to die a thousand deaths with Pierre Trudeau). John Gray of Macmillan, along with his colleague Frank Upjohn, “decided to launch The Loved and the Lost at Montreal’s tony Ritz-Carlton hotel, inviting guests such as Frank Scott from McGill and the city’s mayor, Camillien Houde.” Now Mayor Houde had done time in prison during the war, and in Roy MacSkimming’s elegant phrase was “famed for his underworld contacts.” As the party moved on to the dodgy Dorchester Street establishment and the booze flowed, everyone was having such a fine time that the mayor decided that the great writer should sign his “golden book” of distinguished visitors at city hall. “Gray and Upjohn piled into Houde’s limousine with Callaghan and his wife, Loretto, some newspaper cronies, and the oversized mayor, and were chauffered to City Hall at two in the morning. Having forgotten his keys, Houde ordered his driver to break in through a window, and the signing was enacted in the mayor’s chambers, sanctified by the ceremonial passing of a silver flask.” It was an interesting Montreal version of the ancient tradition whereby honorees received the keys to a city, what you might call a real breakthrough.

  But apart from this unlikely burst of excitement, the flurry of attention caused by a fine collection of stories in 1959, and above all by Edmund Wilson’s 1965 announcement of his neglected greatness, Morley Callaghan spent almost a quarter of a century working away quietly. He was universally regarded as a survivor from his great days in the thirties, a man with not much writing future, a burnt-out volcano.

  Here I was lucky enough to enter the scene. When I was hired in March 1974 to become the editorial director of Macmillan of Canada, I was inheriting a fine list of distinguished authors built up by the legendary publisher John Gray. The authors included not only the magisterial historian, Donald Creighton (a lean, sepulchral figure who inspired shock and awe when he stalked the corridors, concocting lines as famous as the opening to his epic John A. MacDonald biography: “In those days they came usually by boat”). There were other fine Canadian historians, including two of the best, with the worst possible professional surnames, Careless and Wrong.

  The fiction list was equally distinguished, consisting of names like Hugh MacLennan, W.O. Mitchell, Robertson Davies, and Morley Callaghan — “If,” they explained to me, “he ever gets around to writing another book. He hasn’t done anything since 1963.”

  I must admit that I found that there were mixed feelings about Morley at Macmillan when I arrived. He was respected as a grand old man, now over seventy, with a distinguished past (Hemingway! Fitzgerald! Joyce!) His involvement with major writing events like the Kingston Conference of 1955, where a future for Canadian writers and publishers was discussed, stood his reputation in good stead. So did his published recognition that in the book world Canada (besieged by cheap overruns from British and American publishers with huge economies of scale in their favour) was “a country that is no publisher’s paradise.” But true to his parents’ union sympathies he had played an active role with the Writer’s Union, a stance not guaranteed to make him popular with the local Capitalist Oppressor, his Canadian publisher.

  I heard tales, too, of how jealously Morley (and it was easy to get on first-name terms with him) had protected his turf as Canada’s Great Novelist. Apparently when Macmillan held the launch party (almost literally in this case) for Robertson Davies’ astonishing novel Fifth Business, all of literary Toronto was aboard the floating waterfront restaurant near the site of the fictional Boy Staunton’s death in the harbour. At the height of the party Morley appeared, and, flanked by what one witness described as “his two big sons,” he made a dramatic progress around the room before making an equally dramatic exit. A point had been made.

  John Gray was among the Macmillan people who did not appreciate Morley’s approach. In MacSkimming’s words, “Gray sometimes confided to colleagues that, much as he admired Callaghan, he felt more comfortable with other Macmillan authors who were less prickly and combative, and, frankly, more British . . .”

  The “British” comment is interesting, because Gray himself came from a very traditional Upper Canadian family that had sent him to a private school, which may have been where he learned to keep his handkerchief up his sleeve, like a British officer. He had even got the job in publishing (for which he proved to be ideally suited) in the first place because of “the way he played bridge.” None of this, I suspect, endeared him and his style to the indentured servant’s son, who was so “prickly and combative.” In fact, if the typical Australian represents someone with no time for airs and graces but with an instinctive support for the underdog, even against the forces of law and order, I must say that Morley was the most “Australian” Canadian I have ever known. It’s clear that he would have been on the side of outlaw Ned Kelly or of Jack Duggan, “The Wild Colonial Boy” of the song, both of whom defied the British-based authorities.

  Later, John Gray brought me and Morley together in an unexpected way. After his retirement, John Gray remained on Macmillan’s board, and after board meetings he would often visit my office for a chat about books and authors. He was a great storyteller, a quality that none other than W.O. Mitchell once told me, flatteringly, that all good publishers possessed. I remember with special delight Gray’s tale of Prime Minister Mackenzie King once visiting the Macmillan Bond Street office and insisting that the group should move two doors up the street to visit the former home of his ancestor, William Lyon Mackenzie. The bachelor prime minister was the only member of the party unaware that the historic Mackenzie house had fallen on hard times and was now a house of ill repute.
When the portly PM stood reverently outside the ancestral abode, head bowed, one of the ladies inside took his stance for shy, bourgeois hesitation. Throwing up the window, she loudly proceeded to invite him inside with very explicit promises. According to Gray, the sidewalk party left in a hurry.

  Later I had the pleasure of working with John Gray on the first (and, sadly, only) volume of his memoirs, 1978’s Fun Tomorrow. (One reviewer noted that he was a man so modest that while describing his service in the Second World War, he never actually got around to mentioning the Military Cross he had won.) As he wrote the book Gray was dying of cancer. In the end, thank to heroic efforts from the printer, Hunter Rose (headed by Frank Upjohn’s son, Guy) I was able to rush to his hospital bedside the first, specially bound copy of his memoirs on a Saturday. He died on the following Monday.

  The funeral was what brought me and Morley into uncomfortable contact. It was a predictably large event at a major Toronto church, and I was sitting in a pew alongside the half-dozen main representatives of Macmillan. Shortly before the service began, Morley appeared and edged his way along the pew ahead of us to sit directly in front of me.

  Before I had a chance to tap him on the shoulder and say hello he launched into a loud monologue with his neighbour in the very audible tones of a somewhat deaf old man. (And he had a crooning, lilting way of talking, lingering on the letter l.)

  “Well,” he told his neighbour. “This is a sad day.” Then without warning he asked, “Well now, what do you make of this young fellow Gibson who has taken over the editorial side at Macmillan? I’ve worked with him, and I find . . .”

  My seatmates were all in an agony of delight. Agony because this was wonderful stuff, and I was twisting around in the pew, practically shrouding my ears and chanting “Can’t hear you, can’t hear you.” Agony, too, because they were publicly mourning the loss of their beloved president, and could not be seen to smile, let alone guffaw. The entire pew was rocking with suppressed laughter.