Callaghan’s Vision: Wholeness and the Individual

Callaghan's Vision: Wholeness and the Individual PATRICIA MORLEY It is fitting that Callaghan should be honoured in the fiftieth year of his publishing career. God knows our authors need staying power. Canadians have never been in a rush to honour their own (witness the literary careers of Sinclair Ross, Ernest Buckler and Adele Wiseman, among others). But stick around for forty or fifty years, keep publishing fine fiction, and recognition will come. This article enlarges on the general thesis put forward in my short book on Morley Callaghan 's fiction. Over fifty years of publishing, Callaghan's themes, his character types, and most of all - his distinctive vision exhibit continuity and similarities, along with a marked shift in emphasis. His three novels of the 1970s express a philosophy of vitalism, where passionate emotion, human warmth and personal involvement have the author's obvious approval. His more famous works of the 1930s focus on the redemptive possibilities of self-sacrificing and compassionate love, while the works of some fifteen post-war years bridge the thirties and seventies by emphasizing prudence and the necessity of self-knowledge. I Throughout, Callaghan continues to stress the significance of the individual human being. And from his earliest published work, the novelist 's understanding of human nature is remarkably shrewd. Strange Fugitive is a powerful portrait of man without God, or the ruinous escalation of pride, egotism and greed. It's Never Over reveals the intimate relationship between the individual and society, and the pressures exerted by the latter on its members. Callaghan's attitude is not simply satiric, although he satirizes gossip and the lust for respectability most amusingly. He goes beyond mockery to show that those who 8 ignore or underestimate social pressures are harmful to themselves and others. Peggy Sanderson's dangerous naivety is prefigured in earlier characters such as John Hughes. Callaghan's view of the rottenness of human beings and their inevitable interdependence is symbolized in the thirties in one of the central metaphors of Such ls My Beloved. His startling analogue for fallen humanity is venereal disease. Human follies or sins (pride, fear, lust, vanity, greed) are imaged as a social disease: shared, contagious, the common lot. The wealthy Mrs. Robison is simply a different kind of whore. The Church's diseased state, from the Bishop down to local parishioners, is equally venal, so that Father Dowling is driven to conclude ''that the Church, the visible church and the mystical body, was rotten at the core and always socially delinquent." 2 At confession, where a young man seeks absolution for having visited one of the prostitutes whom the priest cares about so deeply, Father Dowling realizes the closeness of everyone in his parish, and ''the teeming richness of living things" (SB, 76-7). It could be argued that Callaghan's vision has changed very little, when we compare such statements with critical scenes in A Fine and Private Place. The dual sense that human beings are both incredibly depraved and incredibly precious is prominent in Callaghan's work from the thirties to the seventies. Lisa Tolen notes ''the rotten human stuff'' in Eugene Shore of which Al seems oblivious. She later makes the terrifying discovery of this "darkness" in herself: " 'It's in everybody,' she whispered. 'It must be.' "3 Whereas "the greatness of the person" (a phrase from The Varsity Story) remains central, the emphasis in Callaghan's later work shifts from compassionate love and vicarious redemption to self-reliance and individual responsibility. This is not surprising, given the change in national econqmic conditions (from the Depression to the boom times of the sixties and early seventies) and Callaghan's personal philosophy of economic invulnerability.4 He considers independence at the economic level a sine qua non of personal freedom . Revue d'etudes canadiennes Vol. 15, No. l (Printemps 1980 Spring) In Such Is My Beloved, Father Dowling sacrifices his health and sanity willingly in order that the prostitutes may be restored to self-respect, goodness and joy. Forty years later, his fictional policeman compares his marital situation with the relation between the priest and the prostitutes. Jason Dunsford concludes, agonizingly, that sacrifice and compassion are not enough...