But not from me.
Morley’s dissection of my character went on for quite a long, loud time, but I can report that while love can make a man blind, sheer embarrassment (“I can’t believe this is happening!”) can render him deaf. I never did get around to tapping Morley on the shoulder, and I got out very fast at the end of the service.
As it happened, Morley and I got along very well, working together on five books in the seventies and eighties (his seventies and eighties, also), and I’m proud that I was involved in the old volcano rumbling into fiery life and producing major fiction again after almost twenty-five years. One critic, Eric McMillan, has even singled out these later books for special praise, noting approvingly that “as he grew older, Callaghan’s writing grew progressively livelier and looser.”
Early on I decided that it would be fun to get to know Morley better, so I took him to a boxing match out in the suburbs. Morley had seen the Cassius Clay–Mohammad Ali fight in Toronto with the unstoppable George Chuvalo (whom Jimmy Breslin, the New York sports writer, described as “fighting with his face”). So I took Morley by cab (as a mere editor, I could not afford a car) to George Chuvalo’s positively last appearance against a fighter named Pretty Boy Felstein.
Now I know a little bit about boxing, having fought for the Scottish Universities boxing team against the evil English team. (We won. I lost. Indeed I lost so badly that after the surgeon had finished rearranging my nose, he broke the news apologetically that there should be no more boxing. I was not inclined to argue. In recent years an inspection of my nose by an otherwise typical Toronto doctor — you know, white coat, certificates on the wall, medical instruments for examining ears and noses — led him to look up my nostrils and exclaim “My God, what a disaster!”)
But Morley knew far more. As we watched the bouts on the undercard he predicted the likely results, every time. And when the brave, bull-like George Chuvalo finally cornered the dancing “Pretty Boy” we both knew that the result was inevitable. I remember, too, that in the absence of cabs at the suburban arena we took a bus back to the subway. Far from being offended by rubbing shoulders with the fight crowd, Morley loved it, and seemed to thrive on it, a frail old man in a sea of excited young fans.
Very late in his life that frail old man was involved in a fight with an intruder he caught in his house one night. Morley’s house at 14 Dale Avenue (still in the Callaghan family) sits almost symbolically on the front lines of the prosperous Rosedale district. Just to the south, across one of the deep ravines that cut through Toronto, lies the main city, now joined by a footbridge named the Morley Callaghan Bridge. The towering high-rises represent a different (and much less prosperous) world, and it was presumably from that direction that the intruder came.
He deserves no sympathy, for he attacked Morley physically, leaving visible wounds. Yet Morley, old, bald, and frail, refused to go down, and the attacker must have felt helpless in the face of Morley’s blazing defiance as the old man stayed on his feet, trying to fight back, swinging at the thief.
The newspapers, rightly, made much of this attack on an old man in his seventies but Morley, when I called in alarm, shrugged it off. He was fine, there was no need for a fuss. You wonder how the thief described the incident to his pals; I suspect there is little honour among thieves for inconclusive fights with little old men.
Morley’s career — simply surviving and raising a family as a writer based in Toronto — is a testament to what a fighter he was in every way. One of those ways was insisting on being seen as a North American writer. One critic, Gary Boire, has ascribed to him an ambiguous position as someone who was determined to get away from the “colonial” influence of London, yet — like the country as a whole — found himself swinging to a position where American influence became the new colonialism. Callaghan, he says, “can be read as the quintessential anti-colonial colonial.” It’s an interesting theory. “The Wild Colonial Boy,” indeed.
Yet what was most striking for me is how Morley came out with all guns blazing against Toronto — and, by extension, Canada — with our first book together, A Fine and Private Place in 1975. You remember how Edmund Wilson placed Morley among the international greats and — at the very least, by implication — denounced Canadians for overlooking this great talent in their midst?
That, in a nutshell, is what A Fine and Private Place is about. I found myself in the middle of a public brawl where Morley took on the Canadian literary establishment.
The novel’s central character, Eugene Shore, is an elderly writer, well respected abroad but almost unknown in his own country and ignored in his own city. Although that city is never named, it is clearly Toronto. There are references to Jarvis Street, the Park Plaza Hotel, Britnell’s bookstore and even a publisher on Bond Street (the Macmillan office I attended was at 70 Bond Street).
More important, the districts through which the characters walk, even the cafés they visit (like the Riverboat on Yorkville), are so explicitly described that the reader could almost follow their movements on the ground, all the way to the climactic event at the meeting of Sherbourne and Elm Streets, just north of Bloor.
Many real-life people are described unkindly (including a Northrop Frye character), unless they take a positive view of the work of “Shore” and his New York critic/admirer “Starkey Kunitz.” It is astonishingly personal, and Morley allows himself to discuss his own work, and his own style, by having one of his characters, a graduate student named Al Delaney, decide to write a book about Shore.
At one point as Al and Shore sit over a late night dinner, Shore says, “‘Do you know something, Al?’ And now he had a deprecating little laugh. “Tonight, listening and talking to you I had a feeling I never expected to have in this town. I suppose I’ve been starving for years for some conversation about my own work.’”
(I am reminded of a conversation Morley and I once had, returning in my car from a successful reading Morley had given at Burlington’s famous bookstore, A Different Drummer. The late-night setting led me to raise the name of another author, asking Morley what he thought of him. Back came the reply: “Oh, he likes my work well enough.”)
The entire book, with the sour Andrew Marvell quote as its title, is a remarkable piece of revenge on an unappreciative city. Its bitterness caused a sensation when it came out. Callaghan admirer George Woodcock did not like it, calling it “the story of an unappreciated novelist that clearly has personal implications and is used to present a flattering self-analysis and a contemptuous dismissal of the characters who are blind to the worth of the novelist and clearly represent Callaghan’s critics.”
Over the years, many have raised questions about Morley’s unadorned writing style, and some, such as John Metcalf, have parodied it. But it is hard to improve on the spare, direct storytelling in the book’s key paragraph, where the plot twist has been carefully set up by conversations with a rogue cop who does not like Shore.
“Seven days later, sometime after midnight, Eugene Shore was struck by a hit-and-run driver. He died on the way to the hospital. There was the smell of liquor on him.”
A Fine and Private Place was hugely controversial in Canada, and sold perhaps 10,000 copies in hardcover. We heard later that in Russia the translation sold over half a million copies.
Those Russian readers — no doubt also admirers of Chekhov and Turgenev — were lucky in that they got a rare experience: the chance to read a strikingly accurate description of Toronto. This was one of Morley’s paradoxical strengths. He could write clear, evocative, objective descriptions of the city with which he had a love-hate relationship. He liked to walk the streets, early and late, visiting the courts, noting how the sun fell on the melting snow in the alleys, catching the yeasty evening smell from the waterfront breweries, dropping in at nightclubs or cocktail bars, and generally catching the spirit of the districts his characters inhabit.
This is a rare talent, and of
all the books I have edited that deal with the city that has been my home, Morley’s work stands out. So, too, I should mention, does that of Richard Wright. Before he went on to fame and fortune as the author of Clara Callan, I worked with him on Farthing’s Fortunes, a picaresque novel that gives a convincing picture of life in nineteenth century Toronto. Above all, in Final Things (shrewdly selected as worthy of mention for its Toronto atmosphere by Noah Richler in his thoughtful book, This Is My Country, What’s Yours?) Wright gives a depressingly accurate picture of the shabby apartments around Allan Gardens, a few significant social rungs above the desolate walk-up Queen Street apartments caught by Alistair MacLeod in No Great Mischief.
Morley’s own house on Dale Avenue is worth a special description. It is a tall, handsome, orange brick building, set behind a lawn raised above street level, and I think it is important to understand it, if you want to understand Morley. Certainly Barry Callaghan chooses to begin his 1998 memoir of his life with his father, Barrelhouse Kings, with a description of the house. And although Barry is a controversial character (don’t let that man near a microphone!) if you want to get a sense of Morley at home, and of Morley’s conversation, read Barry’s book. He has caught his father perfectly.
I say this with feeling, because all the time I was at Macmillan I lived quite near Morley’s house. I often used to walk past and see — just as Barry has described it — Morley sitting there, cocooned in light in the front window of his study, gazing blindly out into the night, thinking. And writing.
I used to like dropping in to visit Morley and his wife, Loretto, who had clearly once been a very great beauty, and was no longer able to be very active. In their big drawing room, surrounded by interesting art, Morley enjoyed receiving visitors and directing conversation in a sort of literary salon. Clenching his pipe in his worn, old man’s teeth, he really listened. I have a strong image of his blue eyes focused intently on the speaker as this long-necked little old man, with his wispy-haired head to the side (a little like a cartoon ostrich, I thought), absorbed what was being said about politics, or — often — about writers and how their standing was rising or falling. I once took Jack Hodgins, then a very young fiction writer from Vancouver Island, along to meet Morley, and the encounter between the generations was everything we had hoped.
Barry’s book talks about how, in the 1950s, Morley and he liked to watch from the front windows of the house as their Rosedale neighbours returned from their work downtown. They would count homburg hats, denoting establishment jobs that Barry and Morley liked to deride. It’s my speculation that Morley — the son of the former indentured servant — liked his position as a householder in what was perhaps Toronto’s most respectable “old money” district, but also (and above all) relished his role as an outsider and an observer.
The second book of his that I edited, Close to the Sun Again (1977), dealt with a former naval captain who after the war became a captain of industry, like the homburg-wearing men in the houses around Morley on Dale Avenue. Like so many of his books, it deals with the clash between worldly success and wider, vague, spiritual longings. Critics have noted the lasting influence on Morley of the theologian Jacques Maritain, and on his choice of extreme examples to portray these contrasting values, such as priests or prostitutes. Indeed, prostitutes feature in two of our other books together, No Man’s Meat and the Enchanted Pimp (1978) and Our Lady of the Snows (1985), where Kipling would have been surprised to find the title’s use of his admiring description of Canada. As for outsiders, in A Time for Judas (1983) he deals sympathetically with Christianity’s ultimate outsider, in an ingenious reworking of the Bible’s story of the crucifixion.
During all of the time we worked together, Morley was his own literary agent. This meant that he and I negotiated the terms of his publishing contract directly. He loved that. “Well, here we are like rug traders at the old bargaining table,” he would say, rubbing his hands with glee. It was easy to make a deal with someone who enjoyed the process so much. And after I left Macmillan, and Morley moved on to make a deal for his last novel, A Wild Old Man on the Road (1988), I remember feeling a sort of detached sympathy for the people at Stoddart, who almost certainly — as rumour had it — paid the old rug trader far too much for his last book. And I note with pleasure that the final title includes one of his favourite adjectives, “wild,” which provoked many editorial discussions between us.
I must say that despite his “prickly” reputation I found him very easy to work with on an editor-author basis. His usual accreditation to me in my signed copies of his books neatly reflects the professional roles that we both played: “To Doug Gibson, the editor.”
In my talks to young people in the publishing world I am usually asked about the outrageous confidence that I, still a young man, showed in cheerfully suggesting changes to the work of senior accomplished writers like Morley Callaghan, the toast of the literary world long before I was born. But I summarize the answer as “just doing my job.”
I often go on to give two examples of the minefield where an editor tiptoes. When I started work as a junior editor at Doubleday Canada, I happened to run into a young writer at a party who was delighted to meet me because, as it happened, he had just sent in his first novel to Doubleday.
“Look,” he told me, “ I know that the odds are against my book being accepted — but if you do turn it down, when you send it back, would you please send along some comments — you know, tell me what’s good about it, what’s not working and needs to be improved, and so on?”
I hedged, saying that we didn’t usually go into such detail when we sent a manuscript back, but I would see what I could do. Well, the manuscript was okay, but we couldn’t see anyone actually spending money to buy it, so I sent a regretful letter returning the manuscript.
Back came a letter — in these days before email — saying, thank you, but you must have forgotten our conversation where I asked you please to give some details about what’s good and what’s bad about the manuscript. Please give me a report like that, he asked, stressing that it would be very helpful to him, and so on.
So I dug up my Reader’s Report and gave it a much kinder gloss: “The dialogue is thoroughly convincing . . . a fine sense of place . . .” but suggesting that the pacing needed to be tightened at this point, while this character needs to be more clearly established at the outset. And so on.
Kindly, encouraging stuff.
Back by return of post came a letter that began, “Dear Mr. Gibson, Who the hell do you think you are?”
I learned a great lesson there. First, obviously, not to get into helpfully reviewing manuscripts that you are rejecting. Second — and this wider lesson is the truly important one — that in the realm of publishing, especially publishing fiction, you are dealing with hopes and dreams.
And then, to hammer home the lesson, I go to the other end of the spectrum, and tell of an unforgettable encounter with Morley Callaghan.
On this occasion Morley phoned me at the office in a fever of excitement. He’d just finished a novella, and he was pleased with it, and could I come by his house in Rosedale and read it? Well, I argued strongly against such a visit, using words like “unprofessional.” But this was Morley Callaghan, now a widower, and around the age of eighty, and not only a legendary figure but my friend, and very insistent. So I gave in, and went that evening to the big house that I knew well.
Morley greeted me at the door, restraining Nicky, a giant poodle with a tiny brain, I’m afraid, and brought me inside and guided me to a chair in the big drawing room. He got me set up there, very solicitously, gave me the manuscript (typed on his old machine, as I recall), then retired with Nicky across the hall to where — as the door opened briefly to reveal — a TV set was blaring out a Stanley Cup final game.
I started to read. After five minutes the TV roared again, and Nicky was bounding around the room with Morley in irritated pursuit, here to ask me
if the light was good enough. Yes, fine thanks, Morley.
Then another five minutes passed, and we had more TV, more Nicky, more pursuit around the room, and kind enquiries as to whether I wanted a glass of water. No, thank you, Morley, I’m fine.
When it happened again five minutes later, it all became clear to me. Morley needed — really needed — me to tell him that this new manuscript was good. Not, I want to stress, because my opinion was worth its weight in gold. No, he needed to hear it because, as a widower, he had spent so long on this work, his face pressed right up against it, that he really didn’t know if it was any good. So he needed an objective, professional opinion, saying, “This is fine, Morley, relax.”
And it was, and I said so.
That book, Our Lady of the Snows, featured a Toronto prostitute as the central character. Morley’s interview with Peter Gzowski, the host of CBC Radio’s Morningside, drew memorably from that topic. My friend Peter (whom I write about in a later chapter) was a superb, honest interviewer, and an author’s appearance on his program had a dramatic impact on any book’s sales. But his staff knew that like a good boy from Galt (and I am married to a girl from Galt, now Cambridge), he was somewhat prudish on the air — for example, made very uneasy by four-letter words. There was no danger of that with Morley, the experienced old CBC Radio hand, but he was a respected senior man of letters with a decisive on-air manner that made him very hard to interrupt. So my friend Hal Wake (who now runs the Vancouver Writer’s Festival and tells fine stories of those days) recalls being part of Peter’s team in the control booth listening with delight as Morley, asked about the book’s theme, began decisively: “Now Peter . . . you . . . know . . . prostitutes. You . . . know . . . prostitutes. And you know that . . .” And by now it was too late for Peter to make any protest or diversionary move, and the control booth folks were almost rolling around on the floor. And Morley, I suspect, was not unaware of the impact he was having.
Stories About Storytellers Page 12