In honour of:

Morley Callaghan

Interest in Morley Callaghan has been revived as of 2003.  There is the CBC mini-series called 'Hemingway Vs. Callaghan' that was filmed in Toronto and Paris, a Life & Times CBC TV documentary, and also a four volume series: Morley Callaghan: The Complete Short Stories (Exile Editions).  His son, Barry Callaghan, is also re-releasing his novels in paperback form through Exile Editions.  Currently in publication are Strange Fugitive and It's Never Over.  The last major academic reappraisal of the Canadian writer was done in 1980 at The Callaghan Symposium at the University of Ottawa. Several critical works are also available, notably by Gary Boire, that shed new light on Callaghan's life and work.  What I do find interesting (in a negative way) is that a Callaghan Fonds does not exist currently.  Yes, there are several places where the few letters and correspondence exists, but they are in other writers fonds.  One day, the Morley Callaghan fonds should be centrally accrued by a university (any university, i.e. U. of Calgary or U. of Toronto) were they can be accessed for research purposes.

  A Google search of "Morley Callaghan" reveals that there over (1600) 33,200 73,000 hits as of October 2005 June 2006.  It was only 1600 just a few short years ago when I built this tribute page in 2002.  The increase can partially be attributed to Google's expanded search capabilities, but also an increase in the number of online search engines indexing the author's name.  And incidentally, you can place 'virtual' flowers and a note on his family's grave site online.  Indeed.

With all the preoccupation lately with J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series and several well publicized attempts by her to stop imitators from publishing their works, no one has mentioned Callaghan's original 1928 literary character in Strange Fugitive, Harry Trotter.  Well, Harry Trotter himself an orphan, admittedly did not have any magical powers in the "sorcerer" sense, but there could have been a strange mark on his face which may have been dirt or a cut after he was involved in a fight early on in the novel.  He, too, did do battle with a terrible evil, figuratively speaking: bootlegging.  Further to this idea of similarities in literature on a more serious note, Robin Mathews put forward a compelling thesis in 1981 that even in Callaghan's 1934 novel, Such is My Beloved "has a distinct relation to the story "Grace" in Dubliners by James Joyce and the interpretation of his novel, as well as the part played by the Roman Catholic Church in his fiction."  This goes to show you that literature is not created within a vacuum and all literature does have common themes and characters.  Some more closely related than others, I suspect.

I have been an avid reader and collector of Morley Callaghan's work since 1987.  While browsing for books his 1963 memoir, 'That Summer in Paris: Memories of Tangled Friendships with Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Some Others' caught my attention.  The particular book was not the first edition.  It was the cheaply produced 1973 reprint paperback edition.  I found it among the remainder pile at my college bookstore.  It was marked down from $1.00 to $0.50.  What a deal!  With a title like this, I could not help but pick it up and initially thumb through the pages to look at the black and white photos of some literary greats: Ford Madox Ford, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and James Joyce.  Ever since then I have been reading anything of Callaghan's I could find. Morley's youngest son, Barry, award winning author in his own right, publisher and poet, also has a place in my book collection.  Now included here are images of some literary works by Callaghan that appeared in leading American and Canadian periodicals such as Scribner's Magazine, Esquire, Redbook Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker,  Maclean's, etc.  Eventually, there will be images that feature books on or about Morley Callaghan.  Images presented are in thumbnail format, so click on the image for a larger picture.

Because Morley Callaghan's literary work is prodigious - beginning in the mid 1920's till his death in 1990 - I  unfortunately do not possess a complete collection of everything that he has written.  If you see that you have something that you do no see here, please send me the information so I could include it on this site.  Better yet, if you have something to sell, please make me an offer!!  And I always happily take donations.  Please feel free to contact me for your research questions, too, as I have received some from students, educators and from the Toronto Star already since creating this web site.  While you are here, also see a brief Callaghan bio that I maintain on wikipedia.org.  Additionally, here is another link to Hugo McPherson's bio of Callaghan.   Happy browsing!

-John W. MacDonald, Ottawa, Ontario
www.johnwmacdonald.com