The New Yorker Stories

by Callaghan, Morley; Callaghan, Barry;

  THE NEW YORKER STORIES

  Morley Callaghan

  Preface by

  BARRY CALLAGHAN

  Publishers of singular fiction, poetry, non-fiction, drama and graphic books

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Callaghan, Morley, 1903-1990

  The New Yorker stories / Morley Callaghan ; preface by Barry Callaghan.

  (Exile classics ; no. 11)

  ISBN 978-1-55096-110-2

  I. Title. II. Series.

  PS8505.A43N49 2008 C813'.52 C2008-901958-X

  eBooks

  ISBN 978-1-55096-277-2 (pdf)

  ISBN 978-1-55096-275-8 (epub)

  ISBN 978-1-55096-276-5 (mobi)

  Copyright © 2008 The Estate of Morley Callaghan

  Cover Artwork by Mad Dog Design Connection Inc.

  The publisher would like to acknowledge the financial assistance of The Canada Council for the Arts, and the Ontario Arts Council–which is an agency of the Government of Ontario.

  Published by Exile Editions Ltd ~ www.ExileEditions.com

  144483 Southgate Road 14 – GD, Holstein, Ontario, N0G 2A0

  PDF, ePUB and MOBI versions by Melissa Campos Mendivil

  Publication Copyright © Exile Editions, 2008. All rights reserved

  Exile Editions eBooks are for personal use of the original buyer only. You may not modify, transmit, publish, participate in the transfer or sale of, reproduce, create derivative works from, distribute, perform, display, or in any way exploit, any of the content of this eBook, in whole or in part, without the expressed written consent of the publisher; to do so is an infringement of the copyright and other intellectual property laws. Any inquiries regarding publication rights, translation rights, or film rights – or if you consider this version to be a pirated copy – please contact us via e-mail at: info@exileeditions.com

  Editor’s Note

  When Morley Callaghan’s Stories appeared in 1959 the author did not indicate the date of magazine publication for any of the fifty stories. Nor did they appear in anything close to a chronological order. Other than to say that these twenty-one stories were published in The New Yorker between 1928 and 1938, this volume follows the author’s intentions.

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  All the Years of Her Life

  Day by Day

  The Snob

  Silk Stockings

  The White Pony

  An Escapade

  Ellen

  Their Mother’s Purse

  The Shining Red Apple

  One Spring Night

  Timothy Harshaw’s Flute

  Younger Brother

  The Faithful Wife

  The Red Hat

  The Duel

  Absolution

  The Voyage Out

  The Bride

  The Chiseler

  Lunch Counter

  The Rejected One

  “Toronto’s Callaghan” from Saturday Night

  Questions for Discussion and Essays

  Related Reading

  Of Interest on the Web

  PREFACE

  It was 1928. Morley Callaghan had published a story in Ezra Pound’s’ little magazine, The Exile, and he had appeared in transition with James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. He’d had a story in the Paris magazine, This Quarter, and so had Hemingway, and Hemingway had written to the editor, saying, “Of the two I would much rather have written the story by Morley Callaghan . . . Oh Christ, I want to write so well . . . Callaghan’s story is as good as Dubliners.”

  Morley’s first novel, a gangster story called Strange Fugitive, appeared in New York and The Times said, “So fresh and vivid is Mr. Callaghan’s style, so sharp and convincing his characterization . . . that one has the urge to place the laurel crown on his brow without more ado.”

  It was hard for Morley, a good-looking but paunchy guy of twenty-five from Toronto, to keep his bearings. “I hardly ever ate them,” he said, “but walking up Fifth Avenue past Scribner’s bookstore and seeing the window filled with Strange Fugitive, I thought the world was my oyster.”

  Then he wrote to his editor:

  Dear Perkins,

  Here is something I thought you might tell me about. Do you think The New Yorker would be a good magazine for my stories? They have never printed fiction before, but are going to start with the story of mine called “The Escapade.”

  Morley Callaghan

  Perkins wrote back:

  Dear Callaghan,

  As for The New Yorker I think it has a very excellent type of circulation from your standpoint and ours . . .

  Maxwell E. Perkins

  Morley was entirely at ease in New York: “Ideas were alive on the street,” he said. “You could hear their footsteps.”

  William Carlos Williams had him to his house for supper and told him that he had found the effect of Strange Fugitive so stark that it had kept him awake all night.

  Morley went to Paris, settled in near the city prison, had supper with Joyce, drove to Chartres with Hemingway and watched F. Scott Fitzgerald stand on his head.

  Then the markets crashed.

  Morley wrote a long and singular story about lesbian lovers, No Man’s Meat, and published It’s Never Over, a “prison” novel that Fitzgerald said was “his deathhouse masterpiece.”

  But the oyster bars were closed and the soup kitchens were open.

  People were singing “Ten Cents a Dance” and “Brother Can You Spare a Dime.”

  Morley decided to backpedal home to Toronto where, audaciously, he told his friends that he was going to keep his family alive by writing “quality” stories for the New York commercial magazines: Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar, The Atlantic Monthly, Redbook, and The New Yorker.

  “You think you’re a gambler,” he told me years later. “I was a real gambler. I gambled all our lives on my talent.”

  As he sat down to write his stories he decided that “the root of the trouble with writing was that poets and storywriters 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 . . . To tell the truth cleanly.”

  He thought truths were unobtrusive.

  He was unobtrusive.

  He looked like a man who thought so well of himself that he could afford to be a bit casual.

  He was his style; colloquial, clean.

  He’d finish two-finger-typing a story, talking it out loud to himself as he hunched over his small portable Remington, and then he would walk downtown to Bowles Lunch to meet his best friend, the sports writer Dink Carroll, and if Dink said he liked the story after Morley read it to him, then Morley would post it in a legal size envelope to New York.

  “I was going good,” he said. “It was the rest of the world that had gone to hell in a hack.”

  He was going so good he also wrote four novels: A Broken Journey, Such Is My Beloved, More Joy in Heaven, and They Shall Inherit the Earth.

  He was going so good he never looked back.

  “I will never be convicted of the sin of Orpheus,” he said.

  Then the world crashed into war.

  After the war, he wrote more stories, but then he stopped. “Everything in the world is form. I got bored, tired of the form.” His diffidence was disconcerting. When he put together his collected stories, he got to forty-five and then to fifty and then he just stopped because fifty seemed like a good number. Besides, he said, he was tired of mucking around in old magazines.

  But in the last years of his life, after I found twenty-six stories that he’d forgotten about, stories stuffed away with old gas and telephone bills, he sat down
and carefully edited his novel, A Passion in Rome, and tightened the slack lines in some of his stories, dropping a few swells, a gee or two, and a Jimminy Christmas.

  One grim winter night when Wyndham Lewis was stuck in Toronto he read these stories and wrote: “These are tales full of human sympathy – a blending of all the events of life into a pattern of tolerance and of mercy . . . beautifully replete with a message of human tolerance and love. Every one, or almost all, of these discreet miniature dramas ends softly and gently. At the end of some anguish there is peace; at the end of some bitter dispute there is reconciliation. All of these creatures are dimly aware that the parts they play – for all the sound and fury into which they may be led by the malice of nature, by the demands of instinct for animal survival, or by our terrible heritage of original sin – the roles they are called upon to take are played according to some great law, within the bounds of a rational order. The plot, however tragic, is not some diabolic and meaningless phantasy . . . There is good and evil not merely good luck and bad luck. And if the stories end in a witty sally or in a comic deflation, the wit and the comic deflation are full of a robust benevolence.”

  A robust benevolence.

  I like that. It’s clean. Fresh.

  Barry Callaghan

  2008

  Drawing of Morley by Arthur Lismer, 1931

  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 grey-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 grey 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.”

  “So now you think you’ll tell me a lie, eh? I don’t know what goes on in my own store? You’ve been doing this pretty steady,” Sam Carr said as he went over and stood behind the cash register.

  Ever since Alfred had left school he had been getting into trouble wherever he worked. He lived at home with his mother and his father, who was a printer. His two older brothers were married and his sister had got married last year, and it would have been all right for his parents if Alfred had only been able to keep a job.

  While Sam Carr smiled and stroked the side of his face very delicately with the tips of his fingers, Alfred began to feel a fright growing in him that had been in him every time he had got into such trouble.

  “I liked you,” Sam Carr was saying. “I liked you and would have trusted you.” While Alfred watched, his pale eyes alert, Sam Carr drummed with his fingers on the counter. “I don’t like to call a cop in point-blank,” he was saying, very worried. “You’re a fool, and maybe I should call your father and tell him you’re a fool. Maybe I should let them know I’m going to have you locked up.”

  “My father’s not at home. He’s a printer. He works nights,” Alfred said.

  “Who’s at home?”

  “My mother, I guess.”

  “Then we’ll see what she says.” Sam Carr went to the phone and dialed the number.

  Alfred was not ashamed, but there was that deep fright growing in him, and he blurted out arrogantly, like a strong, full-grown man, “Just a minute. You don’t need to draw anybody else in. You don’t need to tell her.” Yet the old, childish hope was in him, too, the longing that someone at home would come and help him.

  “Yeah, that’s right, he’s in trouble,” Mr. Carr was saying. “Yeah, your boy works for me. You’d better come down in a hurry.” And when he was finished Mr. Carr went over to the door and looked out at the street and watched the people passing in the late summer night. “I’ll keep my eye out for a cop,” was all he said.

  Alfred knew how his mother would come rushing in with her eyes blazing, or maybe she would be crying, and she would push him away when he tried to talk to her, and make him feel her dreadful contempt; yet he longed that she might come before Mr. Carr saw the cop on the beat passing the door.

  While they waited – and it seemed a long time – they did not speak, and when at last they heard someone tapping on the closed door, Mr. Carr, turning the latch, said crisply, “Come in, Mrs. Higgins.” He looked hard-faced and stern.

  Mrs. Higgins must have been going to bed when he telephoned, for her hair was tucked in loosely under her hat, and her hand at her throat held her light coat tight across her chest so her dress would not show. She came in, large and plump, with a little smile on her friendly face. Most of the store lights had been turned out and at first she did not see Alfred, who was standing in the shadow at the end of the counter. Yet as soon as she saw him she did not look as Alfred thought she would look: she smiled, her grey eyes never wavered, and with a calmness and dignity that made them forget that her clothes seemed to have been thrown on her, she put out her hand to Mr. Carr and said politely, “I’m Mrs. Higgins. I’m Alfred’s mother.”

  Mr. Carr was a bit embarrassed by her lack of fear and her simplicity, and he hardly knew what to say to her, so she asked, “Is Alfred in trouble?”

  “He is. He’s been taking things from the store. I caught him red-handed. Little things like compacts and toothpaste and lipsticks. Stuff he can sell easily,” the proprietor said.

  As she listened Mrs. Higgins looked at Alfred and nodded her head sadly, and when Sam Carr had finished she said gravely, “Is it so, Alfred?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why have you been doing it?”

  “I’ve been spending money, I guess.”

  “On what?’”

  “Going around with the guys, I guess,” Alfred said.

  Mrs. Higgins put out her hand and touched Sam Carr’s arm with an understanding gentleness, and speaking as though afraid of disturbing him, she said, “If you would only listen to me before doing anything.” Her simple earnestness made her shy; her humility made her falter and look away, but in a moment she was smiling gravely again, and she said with a patient dignity, “What did you intend to do, Mr. Carr?”

  “I was going to get a cop. That’s what I ought to do.”

  “Yes, I suppose so. It’s not for me to say, because he’s my son. Yet I sometimes think a little good advice is the best thing for a boy when he’s at a certain period in his life,” she said.

  Alfred couldn’t understand his mother’s quiet composure, for if they had been at home and someone had suggested that he was going to be arrested, he knew she would be in a rage and would cry out against him. Yet now she was standing there with that gentle, pleading smile on her face, saying, “I wonder if you
don’t think it would be better just to let him come home with me. He looks a big fellow, doesn’t he? It takes some of them a long time to get any sense,” and they both stared at Alfred, who shifted away, a cosmetic showcase light shining for a moment on his thin face and the tiny pimples over his cheekbone.

  But even while turning away uneasily Alfred realized that Mr. Carr had become aware that his mother was really a fine woman; he knew that Sam Carr was puzzled by his mother, as if he had expected her to come in and plead with him tearfully, and instead he was being made to feel a bit ashamed by her vast tolerance. While there was only the sound of the mother’s soft, assured voice in the store, Mr. Carr began to nod his head encouragingly at her. Without being alarmed, while being just large and still and simple and hopeful, she was becoming dominant there in the dimly lit store. “Of course, I don’t want to be harsh,” Mr. Carr was saying, “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll just fire him and let it go at that. How’s that?” and he got up and shook hands with Mrs. Higgins, bowing low to her in deep respect.

  There was such warmth and gratitude in the way she said, “I’ll never forget your kindness,” that Mr. Carr began to feel warm and genial himself.

  “Sorry we had to meet this way,” he said. “But I’m glad I got in touch with you. Just wanted to do the right thing, that’s all,” he said.

  “It’s better to meet like this than never, isn’t it?” she said. Suddenly they clasped hands as if they liked each other, as if they had known each other a long time. “Good night, sir,” she said.

  “Good night, Mrs. Higgins. I’m truly sorry,” he said.

  The mother and son walked along the street together, and the mother was taking a long, firm stride as she looked ahead with her stern face full of worry. Alfred was afraid to speak to her. He was afraid of the silence that was between them, so he only looked ahead too, for the excitement and relief was still strong in him; but in a little while, going along like that in silence made him terribly aware of the strength and the sternness in her; he began to wonder what she was thinking of as she stared ahead so grimly; she seemed to have forgotten that he walked beside her; so when they were passing under the Sixth Avenue elevated and the rumble of the train seemed to break the silence, he said in his old, blustering way, “Thank God it turned out like that. I certainly won’t get in a jam like that again.”