I've read a little bit of Callaghan's work before: a few stories, a couple novels, and I was really looking forward to That Summer in Paris, not least because it's another account of that glittering golden age of American expats living and drinking and writing together the City of Light in the 1920s: the maturation of modernism. I love these books; I love the stories about the stories.
That Summer in Paris was written more than forty years after its events unfold. Callaghan explains in the introduction that he hadn't thought about Hemingway at all for years, but upon hearing of his death, he began to be obsessed with thinking about him and that one summer spent in his circle in Paris, in 1929. And so he decided to write a book about it. Quite interesting, I think, when you realize that he wrote this book shortly after Hemingway wrote his own Paris memoir, A Moveable Feast, though That Summer saw publication first. The two books could not be more different.
The first chapter of That Summer is an exhilarating gallop towards greatness that I think perfectly captures the way young thinkers view the world, that perfect surety, the arrogant certainty that the greats have been doing it wrong, and that we, the rising new stars, have the right of it. It's done in swift little sentences that leave the reader breathless, feeling the anticipation (when will it happen? when will the big break come?) as keenly as Callaghan might have felt it himself more than seventy years ago.
But the more I read of That Summer, the more unpleasant Callaghan himself became. It's a strange thing, I think, for a writer to be a character in his own work. Stein handles it brilliantly by simply making her autobiography come from someone else: anything she says isn't her, it's Alice. But here, we get Callaghan on Callaghan, and it feels oily to me. He is so careful in his presentation of himself, so very careful to appear humble, aware now, forty years after the fact, of the foibles of his own youth, able to laugh at himself. But I can't help being aware that he is the one pointing out his own humility, over and over again, and he does so with smug pride.
He is distasteful in many ways. Callaghan makes it a point to illustrate the misogyny of Perkins the publisher who thinks that all girls should grow up in convents and from whom Callaghan gets "the impression that women who plunged into a man's world were a nuisance" (52), which Callaghan denounces as one of Perkins's "fatalistic convictions" (52).
But throughout the book, it becomes more and more clear that Callaghan himself holds this view. During his first whirlwind, starstruck trip to New York City, he is lucky enough to be seated next to Katherine Anne Porter, one of the greatest of the great writers, and all he wonders about her is "why she went home alone" (41). His brief mention of Bryher Ellerman, an important writer in her own time, immediately puts her in her place: she is "the writer, who was the daughter of Sir John Ellerman, the shipping magnate, one of the rich men of England." And her true purpose follows almost immediately: "It had been a very nice thing for [McAlmon] to marry a rich girl and get a handsome divorce settlement" (65). Women are resources for men to use, in this autobiographical world, and they damn well better know their place. During a chapter about the Fitzgeralds, Callaghan reflects on how wonderful it is that his own convent-raised wife has no designs on the limelight herself, "hoping she would never feel driven to jockey with [him] publically for attention" (139). Women should be seen and not heard, right, Morley? He dismisses Gertrude Stein, whom he never met, as having "nothing whatever to say. [...] As for her deluded coterie, well, [he] had no interest in finding one of them who would lead [him] shyly to her den" (157). He breathlessly mentions spotting Picasso, the most famous of this coterie, walking through Paris a few pages later, but I guess Picasso is allowed to be deluded.
By
contrast, you know, Hemingway's female characters are invariably strong,
complex, passionate, ferocious: his men may be big game hunters, but
the women he paints are always lions, and in a Hemingway story, the
lions win as often as not. I get why people compare these two men: they
worked on the Star at the same time; they knew many of the same
people; they were direct contemporaries; they both boxed. But I
struggle, reading this book, to see any similarities in writing style.
Over and over, Callaghan expresses his disgust with form: "the words
should be as transparent as glass, and every time a writer used a
brilliant phrase to prove himself witty or clever he merely took the
mind of the reader away from the object and directed it at himself; he
became simply a performer" (12). And Hemingway is a pure master of
form, writing sentences so beautiful they cause the reader to linger, to
lounge around in his words. I remember a scene from The Nick Adams Stories
about an obscene, obscenely fat prostitute and Nick's inexplicable,
undeniable lust for her, and it remains one of the most beautiful and
powerful things I've ever read. Hemingway uses brilliant phrases to
further illuminate his object; Callaghan can't even imagine this as a
possibility. The blurb on the back of this book calls his writing
"lucid" as though being easy is a good thing. I am of the school which
believes it is not: the easier a work is to read, the easier it is for
readers to skim whole pages and chapters without having processed a
word.
Callaghan speaks as if he and Fitzgerald and Hemingway were the very best of friends, when in fact he only met both of these men a handful of times over a few months. He claims to know Hem's innermost thoughts and desires, while at the same time exclaiming that Hem couldn't possibly have known his. My feeling is that he constantly broadcast his own small, petty, ugly motives onto Hemingway. The book has several instances where Callaghan starts out by telling us Hemingway was a great guy, proceeds to tell a story about him which attempts to paint him a very poor light, and concludes by saying that Hemingway was awful. But more often than not, the whole story makes Hemingway all the more attractive, and in a way Callaghan seems completely blind to. The best example of this is a story about a sparring match that took place between Hemingway and Callaghan early on. Callaghan bloodies Hemingway's lip and continues to poke at it, making it bleed quite badly. I don't know much about boxing but this strikes me as a bizarre thing to do in a friendly spar. Hemingway's response is to spit a mouthful of blood all over Callaghan's face, saying "'That's what bullfighters do when they're wounded. It's a way of showing contempt'" (105). I love this moment. I imagine the spars between these two and always, in my mind's eye, I see Hemingway, tall and muscular, holding back, keeping it friendly, with short, fat Callaghan giving it all he has and thinking they were equals. I imagine Hemingway finally growing tired and contemptuous, and this act, spitting blood: my god, such a brutal, sexual act. Callaghan, naturally, is shocked and appalled, as of course anyone in his place would be, though he does nothing about it. He uses this episode to try to illustrate the darkness in Hemingway, the "strange nocturnal depths of his mind" (105), and he and his wife discuss how dreadful it all is. Fine. But a few chapters later, Callaghan recounts with some pride how upon receiving a minor insult from a crass reporter in Toronto, he becomes "blind with rage" (150) and jumps over a couch to knock the man down and throttle him. Strange nocturnal depths, all right.
Overall, Callaghan and his wife both come across as snide, ignorant, and almost unbelievably delusional. Callaghan seems almost incapable of taking people at their word; he regularly assumes they do not mean what they say and instead builds up his own huge fantasies about them, projecting motives and ascribing emotions that, by his own account, people do not actually exhibit. He admits to this at times, such as when he first comes to Paris and has built an elaborate fantasy world in which he and Hemingway and Fitzgerald (whom he's never even met) are all the best of friends and sit in cafes together discussing writing, and is hurt and angry when this daydream never materializes. He can't fathom why Hemingway doesn't want Fitzgerald to know where he lives, because in his mind they are and must be close, and although Hemingway explains that it's because Scott's out-of-control lifestyle affects his work, Callaghan instead stacks tenuous assumption upon tenuous assumption to come up with Hemingway's "true" motives: petty jealousy and disloyalty. It is obvious to me that whatever the Callaghans judge others to be is a measure only of what they themselves are.
I don't remember these sorts of flaws being present in the other things I've read by Callaghan. Misogyny in the priest and hookers book? Surely I would remember that. One thing this book makes me want to do very badly is to read more Callaghan, to see if his fiction is better, as I remember it being, than this memoir. Callaghan points out that he was being published in the early days of all the little magazines coming out of Paris. He eagerly writes about the thrilling revelation that
it "had been Scott Fitzgerald who had talked to [a publisher] most
enthusiastically" (47), leading to an offer from Scribner's to publish
not one, but two of Callaghan's books. I wanted to read "Amuck in the Bush" and "The Predicament" and "They Come over in the Spring" and the other stories Callaghan mentions in That Summer, to read the stories that made Pound and Fitzgerald and Hemingway believers in the first place. Because clearly, once, he
was great. So I went looking for his stories. I have The New Yorker Stories,
but of course those are all from later in Callaghan's career, when he
was back in Toronto. I searched around online stores and in libraries,
both public and university, and was shocked to realize that the early stories are just not readily available to the public anymore. Is he is only being
published in Canada now? No
Canadians I've asked have ever even heard of him, let alone read him. Has
Callaghan fallen this far out of favour?
Disappointed, I went back to my own shelf to look for A Moveable Feast, looking forward to snuggling up with Hemingway before bed, and there: Morley Callaghan's Stories, first edition, published in 1959 by Macmillan. This is one of those times when I agree with Tom that a personal library should never have any sort of order, because in searching for what you think you want, you tend to find what you actually need. It was tucked in next to Borges, naturally. Inside, a wealth of early Callaghan stories: all those mentioned above and many more, fifty-seven in all.
I read all the stories mentioned in That Summer, and was startled by how strong they are, how true. Most of these early stories are extremely good, I think. They, like the best of Hemingway, don't make assumptions about what the characters in them think or how they reason. The stories just show, with deft precision, how they act, and we are left to think about the why of it for ourselves. Reading these stories, I certainly see why the comparison to Hemingway has been made: both writers are concerned with the lives of what are, perhaps, unsavoury characters, and in writing the truth so purely, these stories are made beautiful.
Well. Perhaps not so much with one of his first stories, "A Girl with
Ambition". It's written largely from the girl's point
of view, and her thoughts about Harry (who is quite obviously based on
Callaghan himself). He writes that no other man stands as high in her
mind as Harry does, though what she actually does suggests otherwise. The story shows Harry very clearly, shows the girl's
actions quite truthfully, but it feels dead wrong when it comes to her thoughts. Of course Callaghan would thinks this low-class girl would hold him, a moderately wealthy law student, in the very highest esteem, because he holds himself in the highest esteem. This early tendency towards narcissism and self-aggrandizment becomes so overblown and absurd in That Summer that I can only find it despicable. I wonder if this was Callaghan's downfall, finally:
his inability to understand that not all people have the same thoughts
that he has, that what would motivate him, if he were in their shoes, is
not what actually does motivate them. If a writer's job is to expose
truth, then writing, as Hemingway does, about characters who share his own experiences and have his own understanding of the world, and
showing only their motives, and the true actions of everyone else, does
this. Callaghan fails at this because he doesn't understand the true motives of others; he ascribes them his own, regardless of who they are. When he avoids forcing his own thoughts into the minds of his characters, writing only what they do and not what they think, his writing is very good. When he doesn't, he writes something like That Summer. Gone is the clean clear prose, the observer's approach, the purity and the fairness. Instead it's all about Callaghan, or rather, all about how Callaghan tries to construct himself to appear. It's a tell-all, with Callaghan working hard to disguise the fact that he himself is the tattler.
Many of the people in the book appear in other works, such as A Moveable Feast and That Summer in Paris,
so it is interesting to gain a broader understanding of who these minor
characters are and how they fit into the literary and publishing
world. But over and over, it seemed that these people were trotted out
to testify to one of two things: the greatness of Callaghan the writer,
or the badness of Hemingway the man. The interesting bits of trivia and history are spoiled by the ugliness of Callaghan's view, the jealous, snide, backwater sniping, the malicious gossip. It's like he wants to rip apart everyone who was in Paris, maybe because no one in Paris seems to have remembered him. This book reads like a gossip magazine written by a person who is very bitter about not having been invited to the party.
