Morley Callaghan at the Wikipedia
Morley Callaghan, by Roser Gelabert
BIOGRAPHY
Morley Callaghan was born in 1903, in Toronto, into an
Irish Roman Catholic family. He graduated from the University of Toronto in
1925. During his college years, Callaghan held a summer job as a reporter with
the Toronto Daily Star, where he met Ernest Hemingway. The two exchanged stories,
and Hemingway encouraged Callaghan in his writing. In 1925 Callaghan enrolled
in a law school at Osgoode Hall, in Toronto, and was admitted to the Ontario
Bar in 1928, but he did not practice law.
Callaghan’s career as a writer began in 1921, when he
sold a descriptive piece to the Toronto Star Weekly. In 1926 published his
first story in the Paris magazine, This Quarter and started on his first
novel Strange Fugitive, and his stories began to appear regularly in
American and European magazines. Callaghan married Loreta Dee in 1929 and went
to Paris for eight months. There he was part of the great gathering of writers
in Montparnasse that included Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald or James
Joyce. He recalled this time in a memoir, That Summer in Paris, 1963; in
the book he discusses the famous boxing match between himself and Hemingway, and,
being Callaghan a better boxer, he knocked Hemingway to the floor.
The 1930s were an active and prolific period for
Callaghan. His work was strongly affected by the experiences of the Depression.
He published four novels, and he produced a second collection of stories, Now
that April’s Here and Other Stories. And wrote two plays in 1939.
During World War II, Callaghan was attached to the
Royal Canadian Navy and served on assignment for the National Film Board of Canada.
He also become a well-known radio figure.
Callaghan’s novels and short stories are marked by
Roman Catholicism, often focusing on individuals whose essential characteristic
is a strong but often weakened sense of self.
Callaghan was awarded the Royal Society of Canada's
Lorne Pierce Medal in 1960. In 1982, he was made a Companion of the Order of
Canada.
A long time Toronto resident, Callaghan remained
independent until the end of his life. He broke a hip in 1989 at the age of 86,
but still persisted in walking to his neighbourhood grocery store to do his
shopping. He died of natural causes in Toronto on August 25, 1990.
THE STORY
The protagonist in this story is an adolescent boy
named Michael. He is younger than some of his friends he is much bigger physically.
His life is divided between the pleasures of childhood, the problems at home
and the pangs of love. Michael's behaviour is affected for these tensions. It
is due to these tensions that at first jumps down on the sawdust and the same
tension disallows him to jump down the second time, while all other boys are
able to do, so he becomes a subject of jeer. Only to stablish his superiority,
he goes out to fight with a coloured boy, but then he makes friends with him
and finds several qualities in the opponent. He loves his father and also his
stepmother, he has a soft corner for his stepmother, but is unable to establish
a good relationship with her because she reprimands him, though for his own
good. What disturbs him more is that his father and stepmother quarrel all the time,
and that makes Michael feel unhappy and sorrowful. He is also ashamed that
their hot arguments can be heard by the passers-by and those living in the
neighbourhood.
Added to this tension is the fact that he is unable to
stablish communication with the girl he loves. He can’t find the right words to
talk to her. One of the major reasons for him to decide to escape is when he realizes
that she is in a relation with another boy.
He feels trapped in a society where everyone knows
everyone and a family where his father had constant arguments with his
stepmother. He wants to be with unknown
people, but then he is going to his uncle in the city. Thus, we see that he is
suffering from contradictory feelings all the time, unable to decide clearly
what he wants.
It is
then not a surprise that Michael feels the need to escape, to run away from
everybody and visit “places with beautiful names, places like Tia Juana,
Woodbine, Saratoga and Blue Bonnets.”
Michael, however, is not an irresponsible guy, he has
plans to settle with his uncle in the city he plans to write his agony to his
father from the city. The story ends with a wide-open future to the young boy.
CONCLUSION
Adolescence is the most difficult stage of life. Teenagers are difficult to manage. They can be very sensitive, perhaps too sensitive on some occasions. They are often contradictory. It is hard to understand what they are going through; and due to this, they are likely to do strange things, which are done by Michael in this story.
QUESTIONS
Talk about the main characters:
>Mike / Michael
>Father
>Mother / Stepmother
>Helen Murray
>Art
Teenagers:
>What characteristics define a teenager?
>What is the meaning of “adolescence”?
>Teenagers now, are they the same they were in “our
time”? Why?
>Doing something risky, or difficult, seems to be the typical
challenge for teenagers, like a rite of passage. Do you remember some anecdote
/ story related to it?
>Do you remember any other short stories or novels where
the teenagers are the stars, e.g., The Lord of the Flies?
>Do you think Mike’s feelings for his parents reflect
the typical teenager feelings for theirs?
Fighting: is it a way to make friends? (Remember The
Quiet Man and Women in Love)
Why was Mike worried when his father didn’t go out of
the shed?
Why do you think at a moment the narrator says “Heavy
clouds were sweeping up from the horizon” (384, 4)? And what about “The moonlight
shining on the hay” (390, 2)?
At the end, Mikes to look for the places he mentions
because of the beauty of the names: do you know something about the chapter in
Proust “Names of countries”?
VOCABULARY
lumberyard, sawdust, whitecaps,
stump, yellow, coaxing, fob, lick, humoring, cinder path, flour-and-feed, loafers,
crony, glumy, roughcast, shack, coon, snowball's chance, pop, clucking, stoop, woodpecker,
pocket, shipyard, dogged, clover