“I read it four months ago and find I still remember it and that parts of it seem very actual. It seems as though the kid were working along the real line and naturally, in Canada, with anything but encouragement … He seems to me like a kid that is worth doing something about. If you like it I’d be glad to go 50-50 with you on the cost of publishing it because I think once he gets published it will clear things up and he can go on and not worry about this stuff. I know that’s the way it made me feel.”
In those days Hemingway was hardly flush; his career was just beginning. So that 50-50 offer escalates his generosity to a new high in my estimation.
McAlmon never published the story, which Barry Callaghan thinks was “An Autumn Penitent,” first published in an anthology of fiction and poetry called 1928: The Second American Caravan: A Yearbook of American Literature.
In my dinner conversation with Morley many years later I was well aware of Hemingway’s vexation over the knockdown and his recurring rancor toward Morley, who recalled it all at length, with vivid memories of the small detail of the famous fight but, amazingly, no rancor whatever toward Hemingway. I’d bought a new copy of That Summer so he could inscribe it, and he wrote this: “To Bill after a rather wonderful evening when I felt so close to him I talked away like a fish wife – because I enjoyed myself so much.” And I remember it, too, as a great conversation that revealed Morley’s capacity for friendship, and his very early judicious valuing of the complexity of other people (including Hemingway), which I now see as an enduring virtue that has kept his work continuously surprising, his characters serially leaping off the page, flaunting their singularity and imperishability.
All that good feeling for the Ernest Hemingway Morley had known in Toronto and Paris had never been seriously damaged by the mercurial hostility of Hemingway-the-boxer’s exfoliating ego. The two men did have a shared history, both with a jaundiced view of higher education’s effect on a fiction writer, both coming to serious fiction through journalism, Hemingway actually mentoring the seven-years-younger Morley in their talks about writing when they worked together on the Toronto Star. Their fiction exhibits simplicity of language; both place a heavy emphasis on dialogue – those “conversations” Hemingway urged Morley to get right. Both writers came under the early influence of Sherwood Anderson and his pared-down style. Anderson suggested Hemingway move to Paris (not Italy, which had been his destination), and he there introduced him to the expatriate literati – Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound et al. And for Morley, reading Anderson’s work touched a chord that made him write “feverishly and with confidence … All around me seemed to be people who were stories, or as Anderson himself called them, unlighted lamps.”
In 1926 Morley wrote a brief essay on Hemingway, focusing on his first short-story collection, In Our Time: “He is a fine naturalist, who instead of piling up material and convincing by sheer weight of evidence, in the manner of Dreiser or Zola, cuts down the material to essentials and leaves it starkly authentic … Nothing stands between the reader and (the character’s) movements. So accurate is Hemingway’s reporting that this movement has an exhilarating reality in these days of the psychological novel. One moves with his people, knows what they are thinking.”
In this piece Morley was echoing what he had already done in his own short stories and would continue doing: being a master of concision, of direct statement, of the arrow of action, a writer who avoided baroque language and detailed dissection of motivations. But the two writers differed in subject matter: Hemingway was writing an extended version of himself in almost all his novels and many of his stories, whereas Morley’s focus was, from early on and forever after, outward toward others. Morley condensed psychological fiction’s analytical sprawl into brief illuminations in dialogue or thought that defined characters so swiftly and deftly that on first reading it’s possible to miss their full meaning in the compelling rush of his narrative.
When you read “Amuck in the Bush,” a story he wrote at twenty-four, the impulse is to ask, why did he write this? – a savage episode of vengeance by a brutish, stupid lout. But the lout, fired from his job after trying to seriously injure his boss, is something beyond a vengeful savage – he’s a creature driven by a self-destructive sexual compulsion that he himself doesn’t understand. He sets out to revenge his firing by kidnapping the boss’s six-year-old daughter, but is distracted repeatedly by the big hips and full red lips of his boss’s wife, and, when he does attack the wife and child, he tells the wife, “You got to let me have the kid.” Yet when he makes his crucial lunge, it’s not at the child but at her, and he wonders why. He’s out for love, savage style: he wrestles her to the ground and tells her, three times, “You got to lie there” – a rapist’s ardent foreplay. He rips her sweater off, she bites him, he feels crazy and doesn’t know why he’s attacking her, then shoots to kill her and misses, and she and the child run off. His attention to the wife doesn’t affect his predictable fate, but it does reveal an unconscious complexity well beyond the primitive.
Edmund Wilson, the great American critic who put Morley’s short stories on a level with Chekhov’s and de Maupassant’s, said, “his triumph, and his deepest irony, is his perception of the inextricable tangle of motives that makes man a creature of beauty and deformity, aspiration and destruction … [and he presents] a moral point of view without making judgments of any conventional kind … we are never certain what the characters are up to (they’re often not certain themselves).”
In the very quiet story, “A Sick Call,” an elderly and beloved Catholic priest is summoned to the bedside of a dying woman who two years ago left the church and became estranged from her family when she married a man who hated all church people. She had a happy marriage, but now, fearing eternity, she wants absolution for her sins. Her husband says no – no confession, no priest, we were always alone together and nothing will separate us now. The priest cajoles, bluffs, prays and argues but the husband won’t yield. The priest asks for a glass of water and during the one minute the husband is gone the priest hears, very speedily, the woman’s confession and absolves her. The husband comes back, sees a change in his wife, knows what happened, and tells the priest: she’s turned away from me, you weren’t quite fair. The priest admits to himself he indeed was not, but rejoices at bringing “one who had strayed” back into the fold. But he wonders, did I come between them? He admires the beauty in the husband’s staunch love for his wife, but concludes it is “just a pagan beauty, of course.” Yet this conclusion overrides his joy and makes him “inexpressibly sad” – presumably over separating a loving couple in their last moments and sending the wife off to heavenly bliss, the husband to outer darkness – the pagan’s lot. So Morley leaves the priest with a hovering counterclaim against the morality of his act, his calling and the beliefs of his faith.
Morley published the stories in this volume from the mid-1920s through the end of the 1930s, only two from subsequent decades; and so we constantly encounter a bygone world – boarding houses, gaslight, the Depression, the terror of pregnancy, women as second-class, deferential creatures; but there is nothing bygone in the themes of the stories – fear, shame, weakness, the sense of always being wrong, the inability to act, innocence, longing, bewilderment, initiation, awakening – and the attendant mysteries these conditions present to the characters whom they torture.
In “One Spring Night” a young girl is out walking with her date after a movie, they’re feeling close, they walk on, her heel is killing her, it gets to be four in the morning, her father will be angry, maybe she should stay with a girlfriend … or someplace. Her words are a subtle offer and they excite her and, seeing this, the young man feels a “slow unfolding.” But his guilt over the lateness prompts him to argue that her father trusts him, there’ll be no trouble, they’ll get a cab. They do and she turns sullen. He smoothes it out with her father but she grows furious, all you do is talk talk talk, why don’t you leave? He stands alone on the street, wondering what happened, longing for
the joy he felt with her on their walk, feeling more of that slow unfolding, which he will soon recognize as his astounding romantic stupidity.
Morley had a long life – he died at 88 in August 1990. I was at his eighty-eighth birthday party at Barry’s house and, as he was coming down the stairs from the second floor, the gathered crowd broke into song – “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” Morley paused at mid-stairs, heard them out, accepted the applause, then said in reply: “I am not now, nor have I ever been, a jolly good fellow.”
Jolly, maybe not. But he was a good fellow, original and humane, with a singular set of convictions that pervade all that he wrote. In A Literary Life, the lively and sagacious collection of his reviews, meditations and casual essays published in 2008 by Barry, Morley wrote (he was seventy) that he felt that life had outrun the convictions he had always lived by.
“Sometimes I feel my belief in man’s essential humanity isn’t right for the time,” he wrote, using the work of, and an encounter with, Jerzy Kosinski as a way into discussing the kind of modern writing Kosinski’s novel, The Painted Bird, represented: that life is a snakepit of violence and that men, at heart, are pigs and apes, when they are not clowns and frauds. Morley didn’t buy it.
“So, I go on believing,” he wrote, “that a few people, just a few people, at a given moment will stand up and demonstrate that man has buried within him a sense of inherent dignity, or some sense of conscience. Maybe I’ve wasted many years as a writer trying to hold to this conviction about man, though I always knew that even at the Crucifixion the disciples had failed.”
Morley didn’t shun violence, he often used it in his novels and stories; but he was seeing it here as a fashionable development in literature, “bestial violence for its own sake.” It was not a fashion he could adapt to, but it was something new to be understood. And then he gave us the key to the creative drive that had been forming in him since his youthful short-story days of so long ago.
“What the great storyteller does,” he wrote, “whether he be a Maupassant, Proust, Joyce or Chekhov, is give you a new effect, a new sensation in literature. Even if he is telling only about a man and a woman in a room, he is making you feel he sees something going on between them that was never quite seen in this way before. A Robbe-Grillet tries to do this with a technique. Simple technique! Fine. An experiment! But what is really new in seeing and feeling comes out of the storyteller’s own temperament, his own eyes, his own heart, his own sensibility. If he has great talent he’ll make ordinary things seem remarkable. For him, there’ll always be thousands of new stories because there are thousands of people around him, all begging to be seen as they were never seen before. The ancient hunger.”
Morley Callaghan’s hunger.
BY MORLEY CALLAGHAN
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
That Summer in Paris: Memories of Tangled Friendships with
Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Some Others (1963)
DRAMA
Season of the Witch (1976)
FICTION
Strange Fugitive (1928)
A Native Argosy (1929)
It’s Never Over (1930)
No Man’s Meat (1931)
A Broken Journey (1932)
Such Is My Beloved (1934)
They Shall Inherit the Earth (1935)
Now That April’s Here and Other Stories (1936)
More Joy in Heaven (1937)
The Varsity Story (1948)
The Loved and the Lost (1951)
Morley Callaghan’s Stories (1959)
The Many Colored Coat (1960)
A Passion in Rome (1961)
A Fine and Private Place (1975)
Close to the Sun Again (1977)
No Man’s Meat and The Enchanted Pimp (1978)
A Time for Judas (1983)
Our Lady of the Snows (1985)
The Lost and Found Stories of Morley Callaghan (1985)
A Wild Old Man on the Road (1988)
FICTION FOR YOUNG ADULTS
Luke Baldwin’s Vow (1948)
MISCELLANEOUS
Winter [photographs by John de Visser] (1974)
Ancient Lineage and Other Stories Page 23