Morley Callaghan

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Teaching academic English to students from around the world, I learn a great deal. One memorable anecdote came from an Afghani woman who had studied and admired Morley Callaghan at the University of Kabul. Until then I had no idea that Callaghan's work, much of it published in the 1930s, had garnered such international attention. Many younger Canadians have not heard of this writer, once an important figure on the literary scene. Callaghan was born in Toronto in 1903 and attended St. Michael's College at the U of T in the early nineteen twenties.

Between 1928 and 1937 he produced a number of novels of which the most famous were More Joy in Heaven (1937) and Such is my Beloved (1934). He was also a short story writer of some note. One of my personal favourites is "All the years of her life," a tale of an immature young man who begins to grow up when he suddenly perceives the toll his irresponsibility has taken on his mother.

In 1929, Callaghan spent the summer in Paris, where he was often in the company of James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Ford Madox Ford and Ernest Hemingway, whom he had known earlier in Toronto. In 1963, he wrote a memoir of that time called That Summer in Paris. Norman Mailer's review in the New York Times (Feb 1, 1963) calls this "a modest dull bad book." The same review describes Callaghan's boxing match with Hemingway. Timed by Fitzgerald, who also boxed, he managed to knock Hemingway down. Though Mailer had little praise for it, the book recently earned four stars in Goodreads.

Originally trained as a lawyer, Callaghan worked as a journalist and also wrote for radio. He was awarded the Governor General's Medal in 1951 for The Loved and the Lost, and the Order of Canada in 1982. He died in 1990, the same year as Hugh MacLennan.