Callaghan’s Toronto: The persona of a city

Callaghan's Toronto: the persona of a city GEORGE WOODCOCK One summer, travelling through France, from Chartres towards the Loire, I drove into one of those grey and rather inhospitable small French towns which exude an atmosphere of frustrated mediocrity. It was called llliers, and there I first realized to its full extent the transforming power of the literary imagination. Proust would have put it a different way and talked of the transforming power of memory. And this was Proust's town, the original of his Combray. As I stood there the iridescent outlines of the place I had constructed in the mind dissolved, as soon as it was called up, into the dull and dusty reality of that August afternoon between the ugly houses in the stench of bad French gasoline. I had not Proust's transforming memory to link lliiers, which was the detestable here and now, with Combray, which was a past crystallized (in the full Stendhalian sense) in a writer's imagination. But once away, it was llliers I almost forgot; Combray remained in the mind as I had always seen it. In a similar way, over visits at increasingly long intervals during the past twenty years, I have come to a vague knowledge and a rather active dislike of the post-1950 ci:y of Toronto. Yet there is another Toronto, which I have never seen except as a mental construct , but to which I am deeply attracted. Something like it perhaps did exist in reality, in a dead age, but as it comes to me it is entirely the product of Morley Callaghan's literary imagination and his memory in creative interplay. The great attraction of Callaghan's Toronto , of course, is that it is lodged in that almost totally vanished past; one can never pay it a visit at the risk of comparing the fictional city with its original and being disappointed . It is the Toronto of the Twenties Journal of Canadian Studies and the Thirties, of Prohibition and the Depression ; from his first novel, Strange Fugitive , to his sixth, More Joy in Heaven (if one can indeed assume that the unnamed city of that novel is in fact a version of Toronto), Callaghan builds up the picture of a small city changing and growing, darkening and losing innocence, during those decades between the wars when Canada began to emerge out of colonialism in the direction of nationhood. One senses in the novelist a parallel change to that which he sees within the city, and it may be indicative of Callaghan's attitude towards a later Toronto, that he has written no true novel of his city since 1939. He turned, for two books to Montreal, for another to Rome ,and in a volume of memoirs he wrote about the Paris of the Lost Generation . Only in recreating that Paris of his youth did he render the feeling of a city with the same lyrical intensity as in his six Toronto novels, and then it was obviously a strange city which he saw as an outsider condemned to be nothing more. But Toronto he saw from the very heart, and I doubt if any of its citizens, except perhaps Raymond Souster in verse, has presented so coherent and so illuminated a picture of a city now as submerged as any cathedrale englouti under a towered mirage of prosperity. Reading these Callaghan novels, whose publication covers a mere decade from 1928 to 1937, one enters a world whose tempo is reflected in the means of transport which its inhabitants adopt. The characters in Strange Fugitive walk great distances over the city, and when they do not walk they go by streetcar . Except on criminal business, the automobile is still far from universal, even among lawyers (who swarm in Callaghan's Toronto ), though Canadians are already addicts of the telephone; when Harry Trotter goes out to the country to see his parents' grave, he does not hire a car at the station nearest the village; he gets a horse and buggy from a livery stable. A little later, in 21 A Broken Journey, we move among people who do own cars, for this novel is...