Dominant Impressions: Essays on the Canadian Short Story

Rediscovering the Popular Canadian Short Story

Rediscovering the PopularCanadian Short Story ALLAN WEISS ISTORIES OF THE CANADIAN SHORT STORY before 1970 generally focus on a limited and well-accepted group of writers, from Charles G. D. Roberts to Stephen Leacock to Morley Callaghan and on to the writers who emerged during the flowering of Canadian literature in the 1960s. The impression one gets is that during this period, especially during the middle decades of the twentieth century, only a fewwriters were working in the field—those writing fairly serious work.A major reason for this misapprehension is the inaccessibility of many of the works that in fact formed the bulk of Canada's short fiction for much of the century: popular short stories. The term "popular short story" refers to workspublished in generalinterest magazines and designed to appeal to as broad an audience as possible. It also encompasses certain genres like romance, detective, and science-fiction stories that have been traditionally distinguished from "mainstream" and "literary"fiction.1 While recent scholars have taken popular fiction more seriously as a cultural expression—if not on aesthetic grounds—the popular short story remains a largely unexplored field, especially in Canada.2 Yeteven the widely anthologized writers of the pre-1970 period wrote for large-circulation magazines; Callaghan, Hugh Garner, and W. O. Mitchell published in Maclean's magazine, the Canadian Liberty, and so on, and Alice Munro's earliest professional publication was in Mayfair . Many writers worked exclusively in popular fiction, but their names have been forgotten and so have the works they produced in surprisingly large numbers. Indeed, the most widely read and well-likedof these writers are unknown to most scholars today. H 88 One reason for their obscurity is that their works were designed to be disposable. The stories were formulaic, providing the kind of instant gratification that television shows do today, and they appeared in monthly or biweekly magazines that were simply discarded after reading. More importantly , such stories were seldom collected, either by the authors themselves or by anthology editors who paid scant attention to such ephemera on aesthetic or practical grounds. Certainly the stories seldom reached levels of quality that would make them memorable. Unless a story appears in book form, it is unlikely to become part of a country's fictional canon, but will moulder injustified or unjustified obscurity in a library's stacks—if the magazine in which it appeared exists at all.3 Among these lesser-known but prolific writers were R. Ross Annett (1895-?), Leslie Gordon Barnard (1890-1961) and his wife Margaret, Louis Arthur Cunningham (1900-1954), David K. Findlay (1901- ), John Patrick Gillese (1920- ), H. Gordon Green (1912-1991), Rhoda Elizabeth Playfair, and Kerry Wood (1907- ). Their stories appeared in both Canadian and foreign general-interest and women's magazines;among the Canadian periodicals were Canadian Magazine, Maclean's, the Toronto Star Weekly, the Family Herald and Weekly Star, Saturday Night, the Canadian Home Journal, and National Home Monthly. Some achieved success and even fame in the American general-interest magazines,notably R. Ross Annett, whose "Babe" stories appeared regularly in The Saturday Evening Post—a number of these stories were collected in Especially Babe in 1942 and reissued by Tree Frog Press in 1977 with an introduction by Rudy Wiebe. The popular short story in Canada reached its height during the period from about 1920 to the mid-1950s, quite naturally following the changing fortunes of the magazines themselves. What is truly remarkable about this period is the extent to which editors had a nationalist purpose or consciousness. We think of the small presses and little magazinesas the nationalist voices, and the 1960s as the period when book and magazine editors, caught up in the nationalist fervour that attended the Centennial celebrations, provided the outlets for an unprecedented burst of Canadian literary activity. Yetthe editors of some general-interest magazinesbetween the wars also sought to promote Canadian writing, or at least made a point of noting when they published a Canadian writer. It is true that periodicals like the Star Weekly and the Canadian HomeJournal published primarilyforeign writers, buying stories from syndicateswithout regard to national origin , but the editors of the Family Herald and Canadian Magazine, and to some extent Maclean's, resolved to support local talent. Indeed, for quite some time until the early 1930s, Canadian Magazine published only Canadian writers, and its editors believed that the magazine could not merely 89...