Such Is My Beloved (16 page)

 

AFTERWORD

BY MILTON WILSON

M
orley Callaghan's novels somehow resist being written about. As a teller of stories he often seems more concerned with suspending or even perplexing our judgment than with defining exactly how his characters come to behave as they do. Thus, writing a critical comment that claims to explain anything about
Such Is My Beloved
feels like working against the grain. To be sure, there are some big confrontation scenes where positions do get sharply defined and opposed. They happen in the Robisons' drawing room and in court. But after I reread this memorable novel, it is scenes of another sort that stick in my mind as most characteristic, where the shifting details of human behaviour somehow defy the patterns and predictions that readers keep trying to impose on them.

Consider the little scene between Father Dowling and Midge in Chapter 7. It begins as the priest, with money for the two prostitutes in his pocket, eagerly leaps up the hotel stairs two at a time and encounters Midge all prettied up and ready to leave her room for a night on the streets. It ends with
Midge and him dozing off in the room together before he suddenly wakes up, glances at her sleeping body, and leaves without disturbing her. Between his entrance and his exit they reach a kind of contact without communication. On Midge's side the scene gives us toe-tapping, shoulder-shrugging, lippursing, and other signs of impatience, not to mention outright lies (“I was thinking maybe of going over to the store”), but, long before it's over, an acceptance of his presence too, a kind of relaxed uneasiness. He arouses in her wonder and resentment at the same time. She's able to think “I won't be able to go out” in one breath and add “I don't really want to go out” in the next. She can't figure out what's really on his mind or even what he's saying. Yet she stays with him, this blue-eyed man whom she follows with her eyes at a distance, but also hopes might sit next to her on the bed.

On Father Dowling's side the scene gives us his goodwill, his overwhelming desire to provide this girl with whatever she doesn't and should have. But the goodwill includes plenty of self-deception, and the dialogue touches the funny-bone as well as the heart. A naive compliment from Midge (“You think all people are nice”) leads him to correct her via scholastic theology, and in the process “volition” ends up sounding like a dirty word as well as a theological one. He inflates her “lazy good humour” into “a desire to make the immediate eternal or rather to see the eternal in the immediate.” But the absurdity and the goodwill somehow mingle without friction, as waiting for Ronnie makes him stay longer and long with this “parishioner.” And how does one react when he at last turns over the money, in what must be the first envelope ever used for such a purpose in such a room? Midge stretches her neck, longing to see the bill under its covering, as a payoff on a dresser insists on being a formal offering on an altar.

The novel can't be just a collection of such characteristic scenes. What is its overall action? Stated in the most misleadingly clear-cut terms, this is the story of how a priest goes mad and how a couple of prostitutes go from bad to worse. The two stories are intertwined not just because they cause one another but also because they tend to be worked out in the same terms. The most literal coming together occurs when Lou the pimp plays, in a burlesque version, the role of Dowling the priest, complete with handkerchief tied around his neck as clerical collar. But we hardly need such a reminder. Lou exploits everyone, from his family to Ronnie, for cash; yet Father Dowling in his own way does no less, and, while the reader may be quite properly moved by the priest's undefinable, unfulfillable, and unquenchable love for the two persons whose well-being has become his life's purpose, it isn't hard to find bribery in the way he treats them.

Then there's that recurrent point of reference, the confessional. It provides the occasion for our most unforgettable moment with Bishop Foley, just after his disciplinary session with the “arrogant” priest. The bishop's uncertainty before making his own confession (has he sinned against Father Dowling or not?), his incomplete struggle to explain how both he and the priest have behaved (we never discover what he finally says to his confessor), are something the perpetually surmising (and never quite certain) reader can share. But I'm thinking more of how Dowling responding to confessions and the girls responding to their customers are juxtaposed. As their fellow-whore Marge says to the priest, “I'll bet you more men go to confession to me than to you.” And later, when a youth confesses to fornication with someone whom Father Dowling is convinced must be Ronnie or Midge, the priest can't help seeing a redemptive community purpose in their streetwalking
– an idea that keeps growing in his mind until they seem like scapegoats being destroyed for the sins of the world. Long before his asylum days, “the whole city…whispering its story” becomes for him “a huge confessional where he could not see the faces” and where the rebelling or condemning voices aren't really confessing at all.

But the most striking confessional scene takes place in the hotel room when Father Dowling comes to apologize for the girls' humiliation at the hands of the Robisons, a confessor seeking forgiveness. Before he reaches their room he collides with one customer coming out and when he gets inside he has to wait, listening to the sounds of sex, for a second customer to finish up next door. The latter finally emerges “beaming with an everlasting satisfaction,” “shining with new life.” Nobody else in the novel ever achieves such complete “contentment” except at times Father Dowling himself. Now he watches angrily as the “big pagan” leaves. In its way, however, this moment of fulfilment anticipates the chapter's concluding moment of peace when, after a long dialogue of mutual misunderstanding and (ultimately) mutual forgiveness, priest and girls unite in eating and drinking and conversation that goes on almost all night. It is their last meeting. I have resisted the temptation to call it their last supper or first communion despite Father Dowling's provocative words about “special graciousness” and the “mysticism” of food. The novel is perpetually tempting the reader to see parallels between everything that happens, to force life into patterns of symbolic action that keep repeating themselves, just as Ronnie calls Mrs. Robison a whore like herself. Callaghan invites awareness of such patterns, but I don't think he entirely wants them. What I imagine him saying in the background is: “This may
look
like a parable, but….”

The “buts” are endless– all those details that refuse to be swept under any patterned carpet. Consider Father Dowling's gift of clothes. Callaghan's early fiction is full of people giving and receiving gifts– I hesitate to call it his “theme of charity.” Certainly such a theme is here adulterated almost (but not quite) out of recognition. How are the gifts paid for? Father Dowling has already given the girls money extracted (by dubious pressure) from his friend Charlie Stewart, who really needs it for his prospective bride, towards whom the priest feels a mixture of sympathy and spiritual jealousy. Further money is found by not sending his usual monthly gift to the mother and brother who denied themselves to finance his education for the priesthood. When he meets Charlie's girl he persuades her to act as a kind of model for Ronnie and Midge, whom he calls his “nieces” (the euphemism has a long history). Father Dowling's gifts do ultimately give him another moment of “contentment,” but the reader of course knows that their main consequence will be to increase the girls' professional attractiveness, and before delivering the goods he spends much of his time worrying about his life and wondering what his fellow priests might think about that unopened parcel on his bed: “Ah, I must not have such thoughts,” he mutters. The charity seems very real; also surrounded by qualifications.

A very different example might be the presentation of Lou the pimp. This little guy trying to be a big-time operator, this forcible-feeble exploiter of everyone who doesn't call his bluff, has predator and loser written all over his features. One of the novel's funniest moments comes in the courtroom when Ronnie, blind with love, cries out, “He never treated anybody bad. Look at his face.” But Callaghan refuses to turn Lou into a formula by making him incapable of love. In that other gift-presentation scene, when Ronnie gives Lou a shirt and tie and
he tears up the tie and strikes the giver, the final paragraph forces us unexpectedly to confront the possibility that, for all the exploitation and violence, Lou's love for her is just as real as hers for him.

One last “but” concerns Callaghan's minimal prose. The term can apply to his syntax and metaphors, but I'm thinking of his limited vocabulary, his continual repetition of simple key words. Take, for example, “smile” and its relatives. The way everyone keeps smiling in this novel, over and over again (Father Dowling more than anyone else), invites monotony. Imagine a sliding scale, with Mr. Baer's “benevolent considerate smile…that included…all the desires of the world” or his sneering grin through “heavy wet lips” at one end, and maybe Midge's Mona Lisa smile at the other: she “smiled just a little bit as though he amused her in some way she would never reveal.” Father Dowling's own smiles run the gamut from radiant to routine and are perhaps most striking when non-existent or virtually so: “he sat there hardly smiling.” Callaghan's repetitions, like his potentially symbolic patterns, set in relief his distinctions or incompatibilities.

What about the novel's developing catastrophe? Priest and girls must be seen, in part, as victims of the Robisons, the bishop, and the police court, or of institutional self-preservation, or of the Depression. Clearly Callaghan has no desire to underestimate the dehumanizing pressures of society. Agonizing over Mr. Canzano's unanswerable questions, Father Dowling becomes, in his own way, as much of a radical as Charlie Stewart. Although inside the cathedral he may address the Virgin in a “silent prayer…more intense than any he had ever made,” outside he can look up at its cross with “a cool disgust as if the church no longer belonged to him.” But his final madness expresses no thwarted rebellion: it seems more
like the ultimate version of a detachment from the persons surrounding him, which we have seen signs of right from the start, Charlie being the initial exception. Even when with Ronnie or Midge his deep personal concern can include that “peculiar, wondering, remote expression in his eyes.”

Perhaps the psychological turning-point is that climactic moment after his confrontation with the bishop when he wonders whether his love for the two girls isn't somehow the same as God's love for the whole world, and then smiles confidently “with a swift rush of marvellous joyfulness.” What follows seems (at first, anyway) like an anticlimax. After failure with the probation officer he never tries to find the girls again, he tells his family that he won't visit them at Easter, he lets the two priests in his lodging fade into background noise, and all he can do when Charlie comes is look at him “as if he had never seen him before” and smile with a “detached, depressed, heavy stillness…dulling his eyes.” The last chapter finds him in the asylum by the lake, “ever unanswering” and never smiling. But of course there is something more than anticlimax here. Dowling has moments of clarity, like the one with which the novel ends. These allow him some renewal of compassion for the dispossessed, some hope that his madness may have a sacrificial purpose, even some inspiration to work at his commentary on that stumbling block to biblical interpreters, the love poem called “Song of Songs.”

As I finish the novel, I think of his love “flowing within him like the cold smooth waves still rolling on the shore,” but also can't forget the waves that he watches only a couple of pages earlier, “endlessly rolling and breaking with the old dull sound on the shore.” That shifting wave image is hard to get hold of quite right. It resists any final meaning. For some readers Father Dowling isn't likely to seem any easier.

 

THE AUTHOR

MORLEY CALLAGHAN
was born in Toronto, Ontario, in 1903. A graduate of the University of Toronto and Osgoode Law School, he was called to the bar in 1928, the same year that his first novel,
Strange Fugitive
, was published. Fiction commanded his attention, and he never practised law.

While in university, Callaghan took a summer position at the
Toronto Star
when Ernest Hemingway was a reporter there. In April 1929, he travelled with his wife to Paris, where their literary circle included Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Joyce.
That Summer in Paris
is his memoir of the time. The following autumn, Callaghan returned to Toronto.

Callaghan was among the first writers in Canada to earn his livelihood exclusively from writing. In a career that spanned more than six decades, he published sixteen novels and more than a hundred works of shorter fiction. Usually set in the modern city, his fiction captures the drama of ordinary lives as people struggle against a background of often hostile social forces.

Morley Callaghan died in Toronto, Ontario, in 1990.

 

BY MORLEY CALLAGHAN

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

That Summer in Paris: Memories of Tangled Friendships with Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Some Others (1963)

DRAMA

Season of the Witch (1976)

FICTION

Strange Fugitive (1928)

A Native Argosy (1929)

It's Never Over (1930)

No Man's Meat (1931)

A Broken Journey (1932)

Such Is My Beloved (1934)

They Shall Inherit the Earth (1935)

Now That April's Here and Other Stories (1936)

More Joy in Heaven (1937)

The Varsity Story (1948)

The Loved and the Lost (1951)

Morley Callaghan's Stories (1959)

The Many Colored Coat (1960)

A Passion in Rome (1961)

A Fine and Private Place (1975)

Close to the Sun Again (1977)

No Man's Meat and The Enchanted Pimp (1978)

A Time for Judas (1983)

Our Lady of the Snows (1985)

The Lost and Found Stories of Morley Callaghan (1985)

A Wild Old Man on the Road (1988)

FICTION FOR YOUNG ADULTS

Luke Baldwin's Vow (1948)

MISCELLANEOUS

Winter [photographs by John de Visser] (1974)