SOURCE: Pell, Barbara. “Morley Callaghan.” In Faith and Fiction: A Theological Critique of the Narrative Strategies of Hugh MacLennan and Morley Callaghan, pp. 65-73. Waterloo, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1998.

[In the following essay, Pell delineates the defining characteristics of Callaghan's fiction.]

Although he did not share MacLennan's nationalistic vocation to define this country in fiction, Morley Callaghan was arguably the other most important founding father of the modern Canadian novel. One of Canada's most prolific writers for over sixty years, he produced in that time sixteen novels, five books of short stories and novellas, a book of memoirs, a couple of plays, and innumerable articles. He was also a major religious novelist, for the distinctive and personal view of life which characterized all of his writings was based on a religious view of humanity in God's world. In a time of rapidly changing social mores and perspectives, he portrayed the tension between the sacred and the secular in our modern world with fidelity both to the social context and to his religious vision. Callaghan always displayed an intuitive understanding of the complexities of the individual's existential struggle against “sin, the world, and the devil” and toward “grace” and personal salvation. In his attempt to commune intimately with what he called the “despairing questions” and the “secret loneliness” of modern life, “the dead of night in a man's heart,” he used the vision and form of his art, for “in the glory of form is a sense of eternity” (“excerpt” 20-21). Callaghan presented humanity's spiritual struggles in secular analogies and the eternal solution, not in abstract dogma, but in drama with all the ambiguities and paradoxical mysteries of human life.

Callaghan's religious vision arose naturally out of his Roman Catholic background, but it was more instinctive than intellectual and more empirical than dogmatic. It was the vision of a world redeemed; at a historical point in time the sacred became incarnate in the secular and this Incarnation redeemed the temporal and gave it ultimate worth. It was this “view of life” that distinguished Callaghan as a “religious novelist.” However, he denied that he wrote “thesis books,” or that he deliberately sat down “to write religious books.” And, while not quite “hopelessly corrupt theologically,” he was not a consciously orthodox Roman Catholic (Weaver 23-25). In fact, like Graham Greene and François Mauriac, he was a “Catholic who was a novelist, not a Catholic novelist” (Stratford 289). For he reserved the right of unorthodoxy for all “real writers”:

A real writer, that very rare thing—a man who looks at the world out of his own eyes and judges it according to the best part of himself, whatever truth he has in him; his loyalty is all to this humanity in himself. This loyalty can't be a deliberate thing, a self-conscious thing. It is simply his way of seeing things … ; all great writers by their very nature must be heretical.

(“Solzhenitsyn” 72)

Callaghan did not, however, share Greene and Mauriac's particular heresies, what he called their Jansenist and Albigensian tendencies (Weaver 25-26). In That Summer in Paris he recalls how, as a young writer searching for a Christian aesthetic, he strongly rejected the dualistic viewpoint which he saw “running through modern letters and thought that man was alien in this universe” (TSP [That Summer in Paris] 148):

My own problem was to relate a Christian enlightenment to some timeless process of becoming. A disgust with the flesh born of an alleged awareness of an approaching doomsday bored me, as did the flash of light that gave a man the arrogant assurance that he was the elect of God.

(TSP 94-95)

Callaghan's own temperament, in contrast to this dualistic view, predisposed him to a “Mediterranean Catholic view of life” (Weaver 25). His natural inclinations were to live out his faith in the world:

[I]t seemed to me it would be most agreeable to God if we tried to realize all our possibilities here on earth, and hope we would always be so interested, so willing to lose ourselves in the fullness of living, and so hopeful that we would never ask why we were on this earth.

(TSP 111)

This religious attitude manifested itself in an artistic concern for and celebration of the temporal world in opposition to the fashionable modern authors who rejected “this world and the stuff of daily life” (TSP 229-30):

Wandering around Paris I would find myself thinking of the way Matisse looked at the world around him and find myself growing enchanted. A pumpkin, a fence, a girl, a pineapple on a tablecloth—the thing seen freshly in a pattern that was a gay celebration of things as they were. Why couldn't all people have the eyes and the heart that would give them this happy acceptance of reality? The word made flesh. The terrible vanity of the artist who wanted the word without the flesh.

(TSP 148)

Callaghan's rejection of this terrible gnostic vanity was based on the doctrine of the Incarnation, “the word made flesh,” and it was this faith that gave rise to the distinctive marriage—and tension—of religious themes and realistic techniques in his fiction.

In That Summer in Paris Callaghan speaks of the “new dignity and spiritual adventure” that Christian artists were finding in the neo-Thomist philosophies of Jacques Maritain (TSP 94). We know that Callaghan was already interested in Maritain's Art and Scholasticism in 1929 (TSP 103), and in the winter of 1933 they became friends when the Catholic philosopher was teaching at the Institute for Medieval Studies at St. Michael's College (Callaghan's alma mater). This friendship lasted for many years, but 1933 marked an important turning point in Callaghan's writing.

It is impossible to attribute the religious themes in Callaghan's novels directly to Maritain's theology. Callaghan was proud of his long friendship with “the great Jacques Maritain,” of Maritain's praise for Such Is My Beloved, and of his appreciation of The Loved and the Lost as “a great religious book.” But Callaghan denied a direct adoption of Maritain's doctrines: “He and I had in common a belief in the essential dignity of the individual. That was the basis of our communion, and he knew it. Doctrinal matters were way outside” (Fetherling 14, 16). The novelist, while interested in metaphysics (TSP 103), seems to have assimilated ideas from his discussions with Maritain (J. O'Connor 147), rather than consciously to have turned philosophy into fiction.

In this practice, of course, he was in accord with Maritain's own precepts. Christian art is “the art of humanity redeemed” (Maritain, Art 68), but:

[A]ny philosophical thesis imposed on a work of art tends to corrupt its transcendence. The presence of a particular idea in a work must be entirely natural, not consciously forced. For example, it would be impossible to create an expressly Christian work of art. For Maritain, Christian art can only result when a profoundly and sincerely Christian person creates a beautiful work in which he expresses himself. It is the work of an artist possessed by divine love.

(Dunaway 106)

Nevertheless, in this theory of art, as in many other vital areas, there are striking parallels between Maritain's thought and Callaghan's themes, and the philosophy can often illuminate the fiction. Integral Humanism is Maritain's most important analysis of the application of religious principles to the secular realm, and it establishes the framework for Thomist responses to all particular temporal issues including those in The Rights of Man and Natural Law. Integral Humanism is the text of six lectures delivered in Santander in August 1934—the same year as Such Is My Beloved was published and dedicated to the philosopher: “to those times with M. in the winter of 1933.”

In Integral Humanism Maritain rejects inhuman totalitarian systems for a Christian humanism that “tends essentially to render man more truly human. … [I]t at once demands that man develop the virtualities contained within him, his creative forces and the life of reason, and work to make the forces of the physical world instruments of his freedom” (2). He characterizes pure anthropocentric humanism as a “metaphysic of freedom without grace” and Calvinist-Jansenist Christianity as a “theology of grace without freedom” (20). His solution is “that the creature be truly respected in its connection with God and because receiving everything from Him; humanism, but theocentric humanism, rooted where man has his roots, integral humanism, humanism of the Incarnation” (72).

Following this, man must achieve an “evangelical consciousness-of-self” (Integral 76): the knowledge of human sin and divine mercy, of human freedom and spiritual grace. This new man will establish the new Christendom, “a veritable socio-temporal realization of the Gospel,” since “… it is in vain that one affirms the dignity and vocation of the human person if one does not work to transform conditions which oppress him, and to bring it about that he can eat his bread with dignity” (Integral 94). And the new Christendom demands “a new style of sanctity, which one can characterize above all as the sanctity and sanctification of secular life” (Integral 123). Although the temporal order is “a divided and ambiguous domain,” the Gospel tells us that “the world is saved in hope, and the blood of Christ, the vivifying principle of the redemption, acts already within it,” and there is no more segregation of the sacred and the secular. The Christian, therefore, must work for “a realization of the Gospel exigencies and of Christian practical wisdom in the socio-temporal order—a realization which is itself thwarted, in fact, and more or less marked and deformed by sin” (Integral 126). This new Christendom, which is communal, personalist, and peregrinal (Integral 133-36), will be a society “brought about on earth by the passing of something divine, namely, love, into human means and into human work itself” (Integral 203). This means that in art and in life “the temporal wants to be vivified by the spiritual”:

In reality, the justice of the gospel and the life of Christ within us want the whole of us, they want to take possession of everything, to impregnate all that which we are and all that which we do, in the secular as well as in the sacred. Action is an epiphany of being.

(Integral 293)

From the beginning Callaghan's works were marked by this same strong humanistic compassion for the individual in his socio-historic condition and a moral concern for his freedom and dignity. However, in his first three novels he seems to have searched vainly for a theology that would vivify the secular with a glimpse of the sacred. In a conflict of current naturalistic theories with his own religious perspectives, his heroes struggle in vain to escape their environments, their pasts, and their own sins to find meaning, hope, freedom, and love—the intimations of grace in nature.

Influenced by the theories of Maritain—popular among liberal Catholic intellectuals at that time—Callaghan in the mid-1930s found a focus for his art in the doctrines of Christian humanism. The three novels from the middle of this decade are his most overtly religious, and many critics would say his best. They present a world struggling with sin but eternally redeemed, in which the dignity of humanity is rooted in the Incarnation. Human beings have free will to sin but also the responsibility to seek God's grace and forgiveness. And secular saints attempt to realize divine love in human relationships, thus bringing the Gospel into the socio-temporal realm. However, Callaghan was neither a philosopher nor a dogmatic theologian. He was a realistic novelist with an empirical awareness of the tension between the sacred and the secular in life and the very ambiguous ways in which grace operates in nature. Therefore, even in these three biblical parables there are few clear-cut victories for the Gospel or happy solutions for the characters.

In Callaghan's later novels his view of the existential struggle between nature and grace becomes increasingly complex, and there is a greater concentration on the secular realm as the only possible forum for any realization of the sacred. He expressed his personal feelings in an interview in 1971:

Another interesting question is, how is anybody redeemed? … At the end of your life, the whole question should be, How did you manage to get along with people? If you say, Well, I lived my life in the desert, loving God, to my temperament that doesn't mean anything. Okay, kid, you dropped out, you're a saint in the desert, a hermit. Great, you like that kind of thing, but you know nothing about human beings. From my view you know nothing about love. And if you know nothing about human love, … you can't know anything about divine love. I hate the person who loves the idea.

(D. Cameron, “Callaghan” 23)

This sentiment may be an inevitable development of Christian humanism when the emphasis shifts to human involvement away from a clear balance with Christian theology. This faith has resulted in Callaghan's fictional commitment to the realities of life and to the compassion for humanity that illuminate his books. But it has also been responsible for his central conceptual weakness. Desmond Pacey pointed this out many years ago and later novels have only confirmed it:

Callaghan, though himself a Catholic, is a proponent of a liberal and humanitarian Christianity. The defect of that type of Christianity, and of much of Callaghan's work, is that it often loses sight of the reality of evil. One feels the lack, in Callaghan's novels and stories, of any definite standards by which his characters are to be judged. He succeeds admirably in revealing the shoddiness of most of the prevailing standards, but when it is a matter of suggesting alternatives he can offer only vague words like simplicity, tenderness and compassion. The result is that all of Callaghan's work has a certain moral flabbiness. … Of the novel, however, we demand a firm philosophy, a clearly articulated sense of values, and instead of that Callaghan invites us merely to a feast of pity.

(Pacey, Creative 211)

Having considered the development of Callaghan's theological themes, we can now see the effect that they have had on his fictional techniques. In That Summer in Paris Callaghan outlines his artistic creed of realism, according to the fashion of the twenties and the influences of Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway:

It was this: strip the language, and make the style, the method, all the psychological ramifications, the ambience of the relationships, all the one thing, so the reader couldn't make separations. Cezanne's apples. The appleness of apples. Yet just apples.

(TSP 148)

However, Callaghan also viewed this aesthetic as a moral, religious commitment, not to orthodoxy (“fat comfortable inert people who agreed to pretend, agreed to accept the general fraud, the escape into metaphor”) but to honesty (“Tell the truth cleanly”) (TSP 20). The real artist must portray the “concrete reality” of life in words “as transparent as glass” (TSP 21) in a rejection of modern dualistic heresies (“the terrible vanity of the artist who wanted the word without the flesh” [TSP 148]). Never a post-modern, Callaghan throughout his career believed in the mimetic function of art and the transparency of language.

Moreover, despite his denunciation of metaphor, Callaghan's logocentric fictional form (“the word made flesh” [TSP 148]) implies a metaphysics of presence behind his simple realistic surfaces. “I was loyal to my search for the sacramental in the lives of people,” he said in 1983, “to find the extraordinary in the ordinary that used to be considered the great and only aim of art” (“Interview” 17). In realizing this aim, however, he was never entirely successful. Whether the critics call them “parables” (Woodcock, “Eurydice”) or “two worlds” (McPherson), his novels attempt to create a temporal universe with the transparent fidelity of realistic techniques and the inner illumination of religious themes. He is combining Chekhovian objectivity with Christian humanism when he says: “The great fiction-writer, then, must not only have a view of man as he is, but of man as he ought to be” (“Novelist” 32). Callaghan may have underestimated, however, the difficulties of integrating faith and fiction. F. W. Watt calls realism and religion “two opposite extremes” that must be married with great tact, and points out Callaghan's frequent lapses:

Callaghan is the kind of novelist who tries to reach his goal by simultaneously working from two opposite extremes. Being a realist, he enjoys making acute observations and providing accurate notations of physical appearances, turns of conversation and thought, and behaviour. Being a religious writer, he is inspired by glimpses of patterns or significant forms which promise to make all nature meaningful. Ideally these two processes meet: accurate notation coincides with meaning, and there is an explosion of light, a point of illumination. Where they do not meet, we get the wayward piling up of naturalistic detail empty of significance, or—and this is more often Callaghan's weakness—distortions or false notes in the realistic texture, stilted, factitious, unconvincing effects of dialogue or gesture.

(Watt, “Letters 1961” 455)

As a Catholic writer with a sacramental view of nature redeemed and imbued with grace, Callaghan would not have agreed that reality and religion are antithetical. Nevertheless, Watt has articulated the problem for the religious writer of illuminating the holy in the daily. Callaghan's solution was different from MacLennan's and produced markedly different strengths and weaknesses in his fiction.

While, as I have suggested, MacLennan seems to have begun his novels with a thesis, Callaghan began his with a (male) character. He then allowed the character to determine the action; this is the decision for a “character-centred” novel that (as we saw in the Introduction) many of the best religious writers have taken in order to avoid the apparent manipulation of the plot by a religious thesis (MacLennan's chief weakness). Therefore, Callaghan believed his novels “end in terms of the people themselves rather than in terms of the pattern for that kind of material” (D. Cameron, “Callaghan” 25).

Callaghan also, like Greene and Mauriac, had a customary attitude of deep compassion for his characters and, as he said, an almost “anarchistic” sense of the “unyielding” integrity and autonomy of the individual (D. Cameron, “Callaghan” 29-30). No doubt these values were a product of his Christian “personalism” as was his attitude of “Christ-like identification” (Stratford 220) with sinful humanity and his characterization which increasingly stressed human free will and potential, and the individual's eternal worth and vocation in the light of the Incarnation (Maritain, Integral 133-36). For Callaghan, as for Greene, “Le pécheur est au coeur même de chrétienté. … Nul n'est aussi compétent que le pécheur en matière de chrétienté. Nul, si ce n'est le saint” (Heart, epigraph). In Callaghan's books the sinner and the saint are frequently confused. Yet, as we have seen, he did not share Greene's Jansenist preoccupation with the sins of the flesh (TSP 94-95). Much more than MacLennan, Callaghan portrays the seedy case-histories of life for which there are few conventionally happy endings. But his view, while realistic, is neither pathetic nor pessimistic; the muted spiritual optimism in his novels rests on his Christian humanism and his “Mediterranean Catholic” view of the grace operating, however ambiguously, in nature.

Callaghan's narrative point of view is limited or selective omniscience (now known as “free indirect discourse” [New 164]), a voice particularly consistent with his compassionate identification with his characters. He most often focuses on one narrative centre, usually the protagonist, confining himself to the language rhythms and intellectual awareness of the character, moving between internal and external vantage points as necessary. In this way he attempts to delve into the souls of his characters and dramatize their spiritual struggles with compassionate empathy, without surrendering his own vision of the unity and purpose of life.

This brings us again, however, though by a different route, to Callaghan's chief weakness. And, as we saw in the Introduction, it is an occupational hazard for religious writers, such as Greene and Mauriac, who employ techniques similar to Callaghan's. His compassionate attitude, his undiscriminating generosity of characterization, his deep involvement in the limit-situations of his characters, and the structural freedom he allows them without the tyranny of plot or theme—all these result in the lack of a definite vision or judgement conveyed to his readers, and therefore the impression of “moral flabbiness” (Pacey, Creative 211). This is the opposite of the principle defect in MacLennan's works. However, unlike MacLennan, Callaghan was not an academic intellectual, a philosopher or essayist. He was a popular columnist and radio-television personality. After dramatizing the existential questions of life so faithfully, he either did not wish, or did not know how, to resolve them. In positive terms, he refused to impose absolute metaphysical solutions on the ambiguities of life. In negative terms, the ambiguities become simply confusions.

As D. J. Dooley points out, there is a modern critical debate about the necessity for moral clarity in the novel. He cites the quarrel between Wayne Booth “who maintains that the novelist must provide a judgement upon his materials and accuses many moderns of ethical unreliability for not doing so” and Alan Friedman, for whom “leaving things in a state of irresolvable suspension may be the most honest thing for a novelist to do.” I would agree with Dooley that both positions have validity in the broad range of modern literature: “It may be proper for a novelist to conclude upon a note of moral ambiguity, but on the other hand … sometimes his doing so may be an evasion of his responsibility” (Dooley, Moral x-xi). In his interpretation of Callaghan, Gary Boire would apparently take Friedman's position. He praises Callaghan's fiction as a “heuristic device” used “to illustrate a moral puzzle which is left deliberately for the reader to solve” (Boire 99).

However, while never as didactic as MacLennan, and increasingly ambiguous in his moral framework and unorthodox in his theological content, Callaghan throughout his career constructed novels that appeal to logocentric concepts of “truth,” “reality,” and “the law of love.” In fact, the author usually invokes both rhetorical and narrative closure at the end of his novels. These obviously moralistic and religious novels arouse readerly expectations of moral and religious clarity which Callaghan fails to satisfy. I argue that the essential pattern in the development of Callaghan's novels is the dilemma of dramatizing Christian humanism—the divine in the human, the sacred in the secular. His most successful novels are powerful syntheses of faith and fiction, but ultimately the increasing difficulties of uniting the Word and the flesh create moral puzzles that are less heuristic than simply puzzling.

At the time they appeared in Canada, Callaghan's first three novels were distinctive and courageous experiments in urban realism. He seems to have been influenced by the contemporary literary theories of naturalism which offered a sympathetic explanation for the sufferings of humanity with which he compassionately identified. At the same time he does not deny the religious perspective that people have free will and responsibility for both their sin and their salvation. This dual vision leads to an unresolved tension in these novels between nature and grace, reflected in contradictions of both themes and techniques.

List of Abbreviations

Books by Hugh MacLennan

BR Barometer Rising

CC Cross-Country

EM Each Man's Son

OS The Other Side of Hugh MacLennan

P The Precipice

RS Return of the Sphinx

SR Scotchman's Return and Other Essays

TT Thirty and Three

TS Two Solitudes

VT Voices in Time

WE The Watch That Ends the Night

Books by Morley Callaghan

BJ A Broken Journey

CS Close to the Sun Again

FP A Fine and Private Place

NO It's Never Over

LL The Loved and the Lost

MCC The Many Colored Coat

MJ More Joy in Heaven

OL Our Lady of the Snows

PR A Passion in Rome

SF Strange Fugitive

SB Such Is My Beloved

TSP That Summer in Paris

TSE They Shall Inherit the Earth

TJ A Time for Judas

WO A Wild Old Man on the Road