The Loved and the Lost

by Morley Callaghan

  Formatting note:

  In the electronic versions of this book

  blank pages that appear in the paperback

  have been removed.

  THE LOVED AND THE LOST

  Morley Callaghan

  Introduction by

  David Staines

  Publishers of singular Fiction, Poetry, Non-fiction, Drama, Translations, and Graphic Books

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Callaghan, Morley, 1903-1990

  The loved and the lost / Morley Callaghan ; introduction by David Staines.

  (The Exile classics series ; no. 17)

  ISBN 978-1-55096-151-5

  I. Title. II. Series: Exile classics ; 17

  PS8505.A43L6 2010 C813'.52 C2010-907052-6

  eBooks

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  All rights reserved; Text © The Estate of Morley Callaghan 2010

  Introduction © David Staines 2010

  Comments by Edmund Wilson © The Estate of Edmund Wilson

  Cover Photograph by Valentin Casarsa

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  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  THE LOVED AND THE LOST

  COMMENTS BY EDMUND WILSON

  QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION AND ESSAYS

  RELATED READING

  INTRODUCTION

  In 1914, on the eve of the outbreak of the First World War, Stephen Leacock, the multi-book author and economist – once a visitor to Montreal from Toronto, now the chair of the Department of Economics and Political Science at McGill University – published his collection of comic short stories, Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich. Set in an unnamed American city, which is only a thinly veiled Montreal, the book focuses on “the very pleasantest place imaginable,” Plutoria Avenue and its Mausoleum Club.

  Just below Plutoria Avenue, however, the trees die out and the brick-and-stone of the City begins in earnest. Even from the Avenue you see the tops of the skyscraping buildings in the big commercial streets, and can hear or almost hear the roar of the elevated railway, earning dividends. And beyond that again the City sinks lower, and is choked and crowded with the tangled streets and little houses of the slums. In fact, if you were to mount to the roof of the Mausoleum Club itself on Pretoria Avenue you could almost see the slums from there. But why should you? And on the other hand, if you never went up on the roof, but only dined inside among the palm-trees, you would never know that the slums existed – which is much better.

  From this perspective, Leacock sets out to deflate and destroy – with sometimes bitter irony – the pretensions of the wealthy, their materialistic drive towards more and more money, at the same time showing that materialism denies the inhabitants of the Mausoleum Club the sense of well-being which is the essence of life in society.

  Leacock’s portrait, centered in the homes of Westmount society, dominated later fictional depictions of anglophone Montreal, though these later presentations lacked Leacock’s irony. Gwethalyn Graham’s Earth and High Heaven (1944), for example, exposed racism among the people of Westmount, winning the Governor-General’s Award for Fiction. Hugh MacLennan’s Two Solitudes (1945), another Governor-General’s Award novel, brought its characters from rural Quebec to Westmount dining rooms. Meanwhile, heralding the beginning of contemporary Quebecois fiction, Gabrielle Roy’s Bonheur d’occasion [The Tin Flute] (1945) chose the slums below Westmount to map out the lives of the underprivileged French in the Saint-Henri district, winning its own Governor-General’s Award.

  In late 1948, Morley Callaghan, another visitor to Montreal from Toronto, who had spent some summers there too, came to know a woman at Slitkin’s and Slotkin’s in Montreal. “I’d seen something about her, a guilelessness that was dangerous – she, among other things, refused to see that as she socialized openly with men, and with black men, too, she aroused rage not only in white men but in black women; anyway, she became Peggy in The Loved and the Lost.” From this point, Callaghan developed his story, which was the first to depict anglophone Montreal from Westmount downwards to the dingy apartments and Negro Clubs well below Westmount’s boundaries. Two years later, he finished his novel.

  As The Loved and the Lost opens, the focus falls on the mountain:

  Joseph Carver, the published of the Montreal Sun, lived on the mountain. Nearly all the rich families in Montreal lived on the mountain. It was always there to make them feel secure.... But the mountain is on the island in the river; so the river is always there too, and boat whistles echo all night long aainst the mountain. From the slope where Mr. Carver lived you could look down over the church steeples and monastery towers of the old French city spreading eastward from the harbor to the gleaming river. Those who wanted things to remain as they were liked the mountain. Those who wanted a change preferred the broad flowing river. But no one could forget either of them.

  Carver and “his handsome divorced daughter, Catherine,” inhabit the Westmount world, an enlightened liberal enclave of business men and their families. Into this tightly controlled realm arrives James McAlpine, a lieutentant commander in the Navy in the Second World War and now an associate professor of history at the University of Toronto; he is eager to leave the academic profession in order to write an invited and uncensored column on world affairs for Carver’s paper. Impressed by McAlpine’s quiet self-confidence, Carver vows to do all he can to aid McAlpine in obtaining his newspaper job. And his daughter becomes romantically entangled with the would-be journalist. “She talked quickly and brightly; she reached out to make his plans her plans, and she held him silent and wondering at the glow of her generosity.”

  From outside Westmount appears Peggy Sanderson, the college-educated daughter of a Methodist minister who has lost his faith. At the age of twelve she had viewed a naked black boy, young Jock Johnson, and this sight proved to be her introduction to the happy companionship of the entire Johnson family. Her subsequent affection for the black race irritates the more conventional world of Westmount, and many others too.

  How people react to Peggy reflects their attitude to the enigmatic mystery of life itself. The Carvers, for example, cannot ultimately forsake the security of their Westmount enclave. Although McAlpine is increasingly attracted to the beauty and charm of Peggy, he, like everyone else, is thrown off balance by her air about her– simple and light, that air of “dangerous guilelessness.” And so there comes a night when he abandons her to her fate. Having seen the wintry vision of “a little old church, half Gothic and half Romanesque, but light and simple in balance” on his first walk with Pegg
y, he looks in vain for the same church at the end of the novel:

  he went on with his tireless search. He wandered around the neighborhood between Phillips Square and St. Patrick’s. He wandered in ths strong morning sunlight. It was warm and brilliant. It melted the snow. But he couldn’t find the little church.

  In his realistic presentation of anglophone Montreal in its post-Second World War materialism, Callaghan fashions a haunting story. A tale of love which ends tragically, The Loved and the Lost is also a social portrait which encapsulates Westmount bigotry and the very same quality from beyond Westmount’s borders. The novelist’s duty is, as Callaghan remarked, “to catch the tempo, the stream, the way people live, think, and feel in their time.”

  The Loved and the Lost appeared in March 1951. In the March 24th issue of the Globe and Mail, William Arthur Deacon, the literary editor, concluded that this novel, Callaghan’s seventh, “must be rated Mr. Callaghan’s best novel to date.” It went on to win the Governor-General’s Award for Fiction.

  The Loved and the Lost is as timely, and as timeless, as the little church McAlpine cannot find on his own.

  David Staines

  September 2010

  ONE

  Joseph Carver, the publisher of the Montreal Sun, lived on the mountain. Nearly all the rich families in Montreal lived on the mountain. It was always there to make them feel secure. At night it rose against the sky like a dark protective barrier behind a shimmering curtain of lights surmounted by a gleaming cross. In the daytime, if you walked east or west along St. Catherine or Dorchester Street, it might be screened momentarily by tall buildings, but when you came to a side street there it was looming up like a great jagged brown hedge. Storms came up over the mountain, and the thunder clapped against it…

  But the mountain is on the island in the river; so the river is always there, too, and boat whistles echo all night long against the mountain. From the slope where Mr. Carver lived you could look down over the church steeples and monastery towers of the old French city spreading eastward from the harbour to the gleaming river. Those who wanted things to remain as they were liked the mountain. Those who wanted a change preferred the broad flowing river. But no one could forget either of them.

  Joseph Carver lived in the Château apartments near the Ritz, high above the roofs of the houses sloping down to the railroad tracks and the canal. In the grey winter days when the clouds were low on the mountain the Château with its turrets and towers and courtyards looked like a massive stone fortress. It suited Mr. Carver. He and his handsome divorced daughter, Catherine, were as comfortable in the Château as they had been in the big house in Westmount before Mrs. Carver died. All he missed was his rose garden. He still wore a rose in his lapel every day, and roses were always on the long bleached oak table in the drawing room. In the evening, sometimes, key men from the St. James Street publishing office came to the apartment for informal conferences. Mr. Carver had a weakness for conferences.

  He thought of himself as an enlightened liberal, and he was much impressed one evening late in December by an article in the latest Atlantic Monthly entitled, “The Independent Man.” The style was lively and authoritative, the reasoning sound. It reminded him that for months he had been considering having someone do a provocative column on current events. It had been difficult to find the person with the right touch, the human personal approach to everything, and this McAlpine seemed to have it. Turning to the notes on the contributors in the front of the magazine he found that McAlpine was an associate professor of history at the University of Toronto. It surprised him, and he smiled to himself. Being a member of the Board of Governors at McGill, Mr. Carver had given up expecting too much from professors. This James McAlpine seemed to be worth a night’s thought.

  The next day he wrote a letter asking him if he would come to Montreal to discuss the possibility of doing an uncensored column in The Sun on world affairs, and he enclosed a cheque covering the cost of a return ticket to Montreal.

  In the second week of January, when it was mild with no snow, James McAlpine came to the Château to have a drink with Mr. Carver. He was a tall broad-shouldered man in his early thirties. He wore a double-breasted dark blue overcoat and a black Homburg hat. He had brown eyes, black hair, and a good dignified bearing that he might have acquired in the Navy when he had been a lieutenant commander.

  Something about McAlpine compelled Mr. Carver’s immediate attention. It was not simply his manner, which was straightforward and poised, nor his quiet self-confidence; as soon as they shook hands McAlpine made him feel they had been waiting a long time to meet each other. Mr. Carver was both amused and impressed.

  That first night Catherine, arriving home from a Junior League meeting, heard the voices in the drawing room, and she stopped to listen. She liked the stranger’s low deep voice. She was a tall girl with good legs, candid blue eyes, and a handsome face with a mole on the left cheek. While she took off the beaver coat her father had given her for Christmas she continued to listen because she was twenty-seven and lonely after her divorce. A gossip columnist had written that he counted it a fine day when he happened to see Catherine walking in the sunlight on Sherbrooke Street. Yet her friends had noticed that she had the air of not quite believing in her own loveliness, of not being sure she was really wanted, and they were sometimes touched by her hesitant eagerness.

  She liked the stranger’s laugher; but because he sounded attractive she drew back with an instinctive shyness. This shyness came from a secret knowledge of herself she had gained in her brief marriage with Steve Lawson; it made her watch herself with everyone and hide the ardour in her nature from anyone who attracted her, fearing if she revealed it she would suffer again the bewildering ache of her husband’s resentful withdrawal.

  When she finally entered the drawing room, her shyness was hidden by her cultivated, cool friendliness. She had a fine walk, a slow stride as if her shoulders were suspended from a clothesline, her legs swinging effortlessly. She met McAlpine and sat down to listen.

  From that night on she was there listening. Her father would be striding up and down, his grey head like a silver bullet on his big shoulders, and he wouldn’t be talking directly about what was going on in the world, nor asking McAlpine for direct opinions that might interest the readers of The Sun.

  They would argue instead about Oxford and the Sorbonne, or whether there had been any real order in the world since the fall of the Roman Empire, then switch suddenly to the Latin poets. “What about Petrarch, McAlpine? You like Petrarch?”

  “I prefer Horace.”

  “Really? You prefer Horace?”

  “It always seemed to me there was something too deliberate about Petrarch.”

  “Well, look here, McAlpine. What about Catullus? Couldn’t we settle for Catullus?”

  “Fine. I’ll take Catullus,” McAlpine would say, and they both would smile.

  And Catherine, watching McAlpine, said, “You know, Mr. McAlpine, you don’t look much like a professor to me.”

  “No?” he asked.

  “No, but I imagine that’s why you were probably a very good one.”

  “No,” he said quietly. “I was a failure as a professor.”

  “Oh, but not with your students, surely.”

  “No,” he agreed, smiling. “That part of it was fine, but I did not get along with my superiors. They didn’t like my methods.”

  “These academic men,” Mr. Carver snorted, making an emphatic gesture with his horn-rimmed glasses. “I know them, McAlpine. I have to deal with them at my own university. It’s all to your credit if they didn’t approve of you.”

  Sitting back with his long legs folded, Mr. Carver, listening closely, noticed that when McAlpine talked to Catherine his tone would change. Whether he was talking about Winston Churchill, the United Nations, or guerrilla warfare in Greece, his tone would become easy and intimate. Catherine would break in with an eager question. For months Mr. Carver hadn’t seen such a quickening i
n Catherine, and now the pleasure in her eyes moved him.

  “Yes, he’s got a good mind,” he admitted to Catherine when McAlpine had left. “He says some good things, too. H’m-m, what was that he said about Churchill? ‘Eighteenth century syntax and nineteenth century hats.’ I liked it. Provoking and amusing.” Then he reflected a moment. “And if I should decide I want him he seems to be free to start at any time.”

  “I think you’ll want him all right,” Catherine said quietly. “No matter how long you take, you’ll end up wanting him.”

  They agreed that he had a quiet faith in himself that he must have nursed for years while he waited for the kind of job he wanted. But Catherine did not say how much she liked him, or how she had begun to put her own meaning on his words, or how she had come to believe he possessed an exciting strength of character.

  It was her town, at least the small part of it that was not French, and, wanting to be helpful, she had a drink with McAlpine in the Ritz bar; after that in the afternoons they had many drinks together in little bars and places where she hadn’t been for months. It was a fine week for walking, very mild with still no sign of snow, and no skiing in the Laurentians, and the old calèches were still lined up at the curb by the Windsor Station. They always talked about the job; but in the way they walked, her arm under his, he made her feel not only that she belonged to his happiest expectations of Montreal, but that he wanted to tell of his plans and have her approval. At first she was restrained and diffident. Then he seemed to ask for her support. He could make her feel he really wanted her opinion and her sympathy. His need of her appeared to be so genuine it gradually broke down her diffidence; it became like a caress, opening her up to him and setting her free to indulge her ardent, generous concern. Walking along in step with him, her whole being was suffused with a new light happiness. Her shyness vanished. She talked quickly and brightly; she reached out to make his plans her plans, and she held him silent and wondering at the glow of her generosity.