is direct and to the point, the structure of ‘‘All the Years of Her Life’’ follows a formula that characterizes many of the stories in the collectionNow That April’s Here, as Victor Hoar has pointed out in his book Morley Callaghan. Hoar identifies this structure as ‘‘prelude, confrontation, revelation.’’ The prelude contains the exposition and also starts off the action, which quickly builds to a quarrel or disagreement or some kind of misunderstanding (confrontation). Then follows a resolution in which the protagonist reaches a usually positive new understanding of some important aspect of life (revelation).

What sticks in the reader’s mind is usually the revelation. Often, as in ‘‘All the Years of Her Life,’’ this comes right at the end of the story. In Callaghan’s ‘‘Possession,’’ for example, the only bright spot in the life of Dan, an unemployed young man, is his growing friendship with a young woman named Helen. He is devastated when Helen tells him she must leave town to care for her sick mother. After he sees her off on the subway, Dan feels alone, with nothing in the world to call his own, and he reproaches himself for allowing Helen to leave. But then comes the mysterious moment with which the story ends. As he walks along the street, Dan feels the life of the city surging within him, with all its noise and traffic, and he suddenly realizes that his happiness did not depend on Helen at all: ‘‘He felt he held it all in him, he felt all the joy of full possession, and he could never be alone again.’’

Another example of a moment of revelation occurs in Callaghan’s story ‘‘Younger Brother.’’ It is particularly interesting because to create the moment, Callaghan repeats a plot device that is central to ‘‘All the Years of Her Life.’’ It occurs when the protagonist observes another character, or in the case of ‘‘Younger Brother,’’ two characters, without the character or characters being aware of it. What the protagonist sees shocks him. In ‘‘Younger Brother,’’ young Jimmie comes home and finds his elder sister Millie sitting on the sofa with her boyfriend, an unpleasant man whom Jimmie dislikes. As Jimmie watches and listens unobserved, the couple appears to quarrel and the boyfriend slaps Millie lightly across the face. Jimmie expects his feisty sister to strike him back, but instead she begins to cry. Seeing this, Jimmie’s world begins to crumble: ‘‘Everything important and permanent in Jimmie’s life now seemed beyond him.’’

Although the plot device and the moment of revelation are similar, the content and effects of Jimmie’s moment are quite different than those of Alfred in ‘‘All the Years of Her Life.’’ Whereas Alfred grows in knowledge, Jimmie lapses into confusion (although by the end of the story Jimmie has managed to adjust to new realities).

This analysis shows that what counts in Callaghan’s stories is a change in perspective on the part of the protagonist. Before the critical moment, the protagonist sees his life in a certain way, with certain structures and meanings. But after the moment of change comes, everything becomes different. The whole meaning of life undergoes a seismic shift. In no story is this shift more apparent than ‘‘All the Years of Her Life.’’

Perhaps one way of looking at Alfred’s moment of transformation is to analyze it in terms of healthy or unhealthy personality types. At the beginning of the story, Alfred does not look like promising material. He gives every impression of being thoroughly selfish and unaware of the effect of his actions on others. He has little awareness of the strain his mother is under, or what her life is really like, until that extraordinary moment when he observes her trembling hand as she raises the tea cup to her lips. In that moment he makes a huge transition to healthy adulthood (‘‘his youth seemed to be over’’) because he has learned to empathize with another human being. Empathy is the beginning of compassion, for it is hardly possible for a fully developed individual to see into the suffering of another, as Alfred does here, and not feel compassion. The opposite of the empathetic individual is what psychologists call a narcissistic personality. The narcissist is easily recognizable as the person who always steers a conversation back to himself. In the eyes of the narcissist, everything revolves around him, and he is largely unaware of the needs and perspectives of other people. This is also true of the sociopath, who is incapable of empathy and merely uses others to gratify his own needs.

Between these two extremes—the healthy and unhealthy personality type—there is a gap the size of the Grand Canyon, and Alfred shows in his breakthrough moment that he can make the leap. He is helped by the situation upon which he stumbles, because it gives him the chance to observe a familiar person when that person is unaware of his presence. In social situations, humans often disguise themselves, whether consciously or unconsciously. The face they present to others may not reflect the thoughts and feelings they are really experiencing. In many situations this may be entirely necessary, and in the story Mrs. Higgins shows in the drugstore that she is a master of such disguises, or masks, when the need arises. Equally, however, the masks people wear may stifle real communication. And naturally when people think they are alone they tend to drop the masks they habitually wear in other situations. Therefore Alfred’s mother, thinking she no longer has to keep up appearances, unwittingly helps to facilitate the crucial moment when Alfred sees her in a new light. Alfred, of course, must still have the perceptiveness and maturity to notice the difference and allow the implications of it to sink deeply into his mind.

The irony of human life is that two people can often spend many years in close proximity to each other and never have an ‘‘Alfred moment’’—that is, never have much insight into the essence and reality of the other person’s life. This often leads to a lack of communication, and eventually a wall is built up between them that is impossible to penetrate. There can be great distance in proximity, as appears to have been the case for Alfred and his mother. It is particularly significant that the incident in the story involves a parent and child. Since adolescents are so fully occupied trying to find their own place in the world, they may find it hard to see their oh-sofamiliar parents as individuals in their own right, with feelings and needs of their own. Often those whom a person most needs to see in a fresh light are the ones closest to them.

This is why the last line of the story, ‘‘It seemed to him that this was the first time he had ever looked upon his mother’’ is so moving. The challenge of life is always to see anew, not to let the film of habit or custom dull or distort perception. The image of the trembling hand holding the teacup, and the effect this has on Alfred, is surely a secular version of an epiphany—the illuminated, transforming moment in which a spiritual reality shines through a mundane object. In Stephen Hero, James Joyce defined such a moment (quoted in Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism):

By an epiphany [Stephen] meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments.

Although Callaghan was a realist through and through, a secular not a spiritual mind, he obeyed Joyce’s injunction. The nonliterary literary man preserved that delicate moment of epiphany in an exquisite work of art, the short story, ‘‘All the Years of Her Life.’’

Source: Bryan Aubrey, Critical Essay on ‘‘All the Years of Her Life,’’ in Short Stories for Students, Gale, 2004.

It would be hard to find a writer who contrasts more vigorously with Katherine Mansfield than the Canadian Morley Callaghan, whom I wish to consider now. For one thing he works at a much greater psychic distance from, and with a considerably lower degree of sympathy for, the English literary tradition, in which Katherine Mansfield felt so intimately at home. For another, there is in his work, as in that of other Canadians writing in English, a further strain, an implicit sense of oppression by the powerful tradition of the United States. Moreover, Morley Callaghan is a writer whose intentions are simpler than those of Katherine Mansfield, and whose achievement is more restricted—a difference manifested in the contrast of their prose styles: where hers is poetic and suggestive, his is crabbed; where hers is light and gliding, his is stiff. And how extraordinarily discrepant are the materials they treat and the worlds they construct. The world evoked in Morley Callaghan’s work is a bleak, industrial one, and its gritty presence rubs off even on the countryside. It is a shut-in, remorseless place in which the individual person even when he lives in a family is painfully isolated. Morley Callaghan’s characters in the short stories, with which I shall begin, are mostly drawn from the middle and lower reaches of society: the bereaved poor, the workman, the forsaken wife, the widow, the hard-up young man, the nervous curate and the elderly parish priest, the part-time pugilist, the small girl with a dying mother, the amateur criminal, the drug-store keeper, the apprentice reporter, the cocky young man, the pianist in the tavern. His style is plain to the point of drabness and often painfully clumsy, and yet, in spite of the raw, northern world, the graceless manner and the dreary ordinariness of the characters, the reader is increasingly conscious of an awkward, stubborn and unfashionable conscience, and of a bluntly honest endeavour to dig out and to hold on to some evasive human truth.

‘To dig out’: as I use the phrase to convey something of Morley Callaghan’s hard, blow-byblow prose, it comes to me that the words say more about him than I had thought. They carry with them a sense of investigation and reporting, and Callaghan’s stories strike one precisely as reports— as reporters’ reports, in fact. They give the feeling of pre-1914–18 provincial newspaper chronicles, and sometimes of provincial newspaper prose, too. (In fact, Morley Callaghan began his career as a reporter on the Toronto Star when Ernest Hemingway was working on the same newspaper.) The storyteller’s function as Morley Callaghan practises it is in keeping with this bias in his work. It is to impose an arrest upon time, and to outline for a moment an interruption in the flow of life, which, it is clear, continues as before once the observer’s eye is withdrawn. His is a restrictive, framing technique. He is concerned with events, which are shown as instances and images of experience, while the people involved are planed down to an extreme simplicity. A Morley Callaghan story presents a special combination of realistically rendered happening and of people denuded of complication, who are seen as strangers are seen in the street in a single concentrated glance, as types and illustrations. Realism, and a somehow surprising strain of formality, blend in a drily personal way. Indeed, as the reader begins to find his way about the stories, he becomes gradually aware—the effect is slow and cumulative— of an authentic individuality strong enough to show through the plain prose and the straightforward narrative technique.

The reader’s sense of that presence is arrived at by continuous application. The unremarkable medium, which has none of the literary sophistication of Hemingway, one of Callaghan’s early heroes, takes time to make its mark. And yet it is exactly suited in its unpretentiously humdrum way to the intention on which all this work is sprung, the effort at scrupulous fidelity to the facts of the case. And the ‘case’ in these stories is the mysteriousness of the ordinary, the inexplicable sequences of feeling, the bewildering discrepancies of human fact, and the logic, ‘as severe as it is fleeting’ as Coleridge has it, which the imagination can elicit from these frictions and inconsequences.

Short stories by Morley Callaghan appeared in 1929 (A Native Argosy), 1931 (No Man’s Meat), and 1936 (Now That April’s Here,) and in the twovolume collection (Morley Callaghan Stories, 1959). Most of them are strikingly uniform in quality and even a random choice provides the characteristic Callaghan combination, an undistracted concentration on essentials, a rather grouchy but unquestionable honesty, a grave sobriety of mood and treatment and a naturally discriminating moral imagination. Let me look for a moment at the first story, ‘‘All the Years of her Life,’’ in the 1959 collection. The dim and oddly innocent Alfred Higgins is caught by his employer pilfering from the drugstore in which he works silly little objects which he sells for spending money. From this thin, commonplace situation there springs a movement towards complexity, not through analysis but by the natural growth of the action. Alfred’s crime, at first denied, and then admitted, becomes an event, a phenomenon, which is gravely scrutinised by Mr Carr, the employer, Alfred himself, who from now on is the registering instrument rather than an active protagonist, and Mrs Higgins, Alfred’s mother. She is large and plump with a little smile on a friendly face and seems an intensely positive person beneath her deference. The employer is dislodged from his position of moral superiority, which he had indeed begun to enjoy. Alfred realised that ‘Sam Carr was puzzled by his mother, as if he had expected her to come in and plead with him tearfully, and instead he was being made to feel a bit ashamed by her vast tolerance. While there was only the sound of the mother’s soft, assured voice in the store, Mr Carr began to nod his head encouragingly at her. Without being alarmed, while being just large and still and simple and hopeful, she was becoming dominant there in the dimly lit store.’ The mother’s contained strength deflects the angry proprietor. His expression of regret at what happened is almost an apology to her. When Alfred and his mother return to their home he begins to see that the force she showed in the shop was not what it seemed to be. It was not some intrinsic strength of character but a force which issued out of a passion for protection, and once home, with the crisis over, it collapses. As she drinks her tea her hand is trembling and she looks very old. ‘He watched his mother, and he never spoke, but at that moment his youth seemed to be over; he knew all the years of her life by the way her hand trembled as she raised the cup to her lips. It seemed to him that this was the first time he had ever looked upon his mother.’

A moment of consciousness—of true recognition, not the usual routine registration—is necessary to clinch the existence of an event, like Alfred’s petty crime, or a state of feeling like the mother’s weary anxiety, and as it were, to sanction the disturbance it will produce.

Source: William Walsh, ‘‘Morley Callaghan,’’ in A Manifold Voice: Studies in Commonwealth Literature, Chatto and Windus, 1970, pp. 185–88.

Callaghan’s second collection presents thirty-five selected stories written between 1929 and 1935. All of these had already been published in North American magazines except the title piece. It appeared in This Quarter (October–December, 1929) as the result of a bet which Edward Titus made with Callaghan and Robert McAlmon in Paris encouraging both to write a story expressing each’s contrasting views about two young men familiar in the Montparnasse of 1929. McAlmon never did write his story.

‘‘Now That April’s Here’’ comes fourth in the arrangement of the book. Its two chief characters, Charles Milford with his ‘‘large round head that ought to have belonged to a Presbyterian minister,’’ and his younger companion Johnny Hill with his ‘‘rather chinless faun’s head’’ arrive in Paris in the late autumn. They have left their native Middle West city convinced that the American continent has ‘‘nothing to offer them.’’ They spend their afternoons wandering around the streets, admiring in art gallery windows such objets d’art as ‘‘the prints of the delicate clever unsubstantial line work of Foujita.’’ In the evenings they sit together at the cafés, snickering at the conversation of other customers. Aspiring writers, they look forward to the stimulating spring days of April.

The story traces in dramatic interludes this autumn introduction, a winter in Nice and their eager return to Paris at the beginning of April. Ironically that month frustrates their expectations. For it brings cold and disagreeable weather, a temporary separation of the two friends as Johnny visits in England, and an irrevocable rift in their intimate relationships when Constance Foy, ‘‘a simple-minded fat-faced girl with a boy’s body and short hair dyed red’’ becomes part of this unconventional love triangle. During the bright clear days while ‘‘Paris was gay and lively’’ as though in mockery of their romantic hopes, the boys are ‘‘sad and hurt and sorry.’’ On the evening of the rainy day when Johnny leaves to return home to the United States with Constance, Charles sits forlornly at a café with his overcoat wrapped around him and wearing his large black American hat for the first time in Paris.

Throughout his depiction of these youths Callaghan carefully builds up details which authenticate the atmosphere of intimacy that surrounds his main figures as they move about the left bank circle: ‘‘People sitting at the café in the evening when the lights were on, saw them crossing the road together under the street lamp, their bodies leaning forward at the same angle and walking on tiptoe.’’ Charles’ nervous habit of ‘‘scratching his cheek with the nail of his right forefinger till the flesh was torn and raw,’’ his way of raising his eyebrows, Johnny’s manner of snickering with his finger over his mouth, and even their bedroom conversations all develop a concrete picture of their strange world. Callaghan’s handling of this detail is full of clever suggestion and insinuation. Even the title has an appropriately ironic twist in terms of Browning’s original application in ‘‘Home Thoughts from Abroad,’’ as Johnny’s April visit to England brings not spring joy but the autumnal decay of disintegrating family relationships, and the two boys never do ‘‘recapture / The first fine careless rapture.’’ Yet the story has an overall mocking brittleness of tone, which is not evident in the deft treatment of a somewhat similar theme in No Man’s Meat, and which is different from Callaghan’s customary compassionate or even detached interpretation of human aberrations.

Seven of the stories in Now That April’s Here are included in J. Edward O’Brien’s The Best Short Stories annual editions of 1930 through 1936. Set against selections of other writers, these tales provide a criterion of Callaghan’s comparative skill in the genre as well as an indication of changes in his own technique. They also treat a variety of themes which are representative of his 1936 collection: young lovers’ quarrels and problems; relations between parents and children; religious and miscellaneous subjects.

‘‘The Faithful Wife,’’ which appeared in the December 28, 1929 issue, was the first thirty-nine of Callaghan’s stories to be published in The New Yorker. It is included not only in the 1930 edition of The Best Short Stories but also in O’Brien’s 50 Best American Short Stories 1915–1939 (1939), as well as in Martha Foley’s Fifty Best American Short Stories 1915–1965 (1965). This piece catches a mood of poignant frustration. A young woman Lola, whose husband is a war invalid, invites a youthful lunch counter attendant George to her apartment on the last night before he leaves to enter college. The early winter setting is suggestively portrayed: the shoddy restaurant near the railway station, warming-up base for ‘‘brightly dressed and highly powdered’’ girls who are sharply contrasted with ‘‘gentle, and aloofly pleasant’’ Lola, and the older counter men with their knowing ways who urge on the naïve George, are realistically depicted. George’s unexpected invitation to Lola’s apartment and his nervous expectation are skilfully exploited as he finds Lola dressed in a tight fitting sweater and ‘‘almost savagely’’ responsive to his initial overtures. Yet for her these embraces are terminal. She has correctly assessed George’s temperament—that he will ‘‘not spoil it for her.’’ The story is typical of Callaghan in its moving insight into spiritual kinship, its sharpness of detail, and the final shift of frustration from the faithful wife Lola to the reluctantly noble young man.

‘‘The Young Priest,’’ originally published in The New Yorker of September 27, 1930 and included in the 1931 edition of The Best Short Stories, was later modified and expanded into a chapter in A Broken Journey. As noted already, this episode is a sensitive treatment of a young and inexperienced priest’s introduction to the ugly actualities of life.

‘‘The Red Hat,’’ first published in the October 31, 1931 issue of The New Yorker and included in the 1932 edition of The Best Short Stories, expresses a frustrated yearning typical of the Depression era and appropriate to the autumn background against which it is set. A young wife Frances yields to the impulse to spend a great part of her weekly salary on a little red hat. Since her actor husband Eric, out of work for four months, ‘‘had been so moody and discontented recently she now thought with pleasure of pleasing him by wearing something that would give her a new elegance, of making him feel cheerful and proud of her and glad, after all, that they were married.’’ Her eager modelling of the hat, however, precipitates a violent quarrel with Eric over the sensitive subject of money. Anxious to conciliate him, she sells the hat to the landlady for a third of its original price.

The structure moves neatly in a circle with Frances’ emotions being described in both the opening and the conclusion in similar language. Just as she had let her fancies wander in front of the silverfaced and red-lipped mannequin in the shop window, so she lets her hopes rise that she can buy the hat back from Mrs. Foley and feels ‘‘an eagerness and a faint elation; it was a plain little red hat, the kind of hat she had wanted for months, elegant and expensive, a plain felt hat, but so very distinctive.’’ Frances’ desire, hesitation and finely shaded rationalization are concretely conveyed. The scene in the shop, where the ‘‘deep-bosomed saleswoman, splendidly corseted, and wearing black silk’’ ingratiatingly smiles approval, and Frances’ vision of her own face in the mirror resembling the mannequin’s face, is neatly balanced by the home scene with Eric slumped disconsolately in his chair and savagely deflating Frances’ dream of his admiring approbation.

‘‘A Sick Call,’’ which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly of September, 1932 and was included in the 1933 edition of The Best Short Stories, probes a Roman Catholic priest’s dilemma of conscience. Called to the bedside of a sick and frightened woman who has left the Church, old Father Macdowell meets the sullen opposition of her husband, John Williams. Behind the screen of his deafness, shortness of breath and tired legs, the priest succeeds in entering the bedroom which symbolically reminds him of a little girl’s room with its light wall-paper with tiny birds in flight. John’s protest against the priest’s attempt to disrupt their spiritual kinship is futile in the face of Father Macdowell’s patient persistence and even guile. Requesting a glass of water, he quickly hears Mrs. Williams’ confession and gives absolution during the brief period in which her husband is out of the room getting the drink.

Throughout the story Father Macdowell is the focal figure. The significant details of his physical appearance and tolerant disposition are briefly sketched in the opening paragraph: his ‘‘wheezy breath,’’ large build, ‘‘white-headed except for a shiny baby-pink bald spot on the top of his head,’’ his florid face with its ‘‘fine red interlacing vein lines’’ and his tenderness with those who come to confess. All of these details are relevant to the bedroom scene and play a part in his battle of wits with John. Appropriately the conclusion returns to the priest as he goes home from the brief call pondering uneasily ‘‘whether he had played fair with the young man,’’ whether he has come between the two, alternating ironically between ‘‘rejoicing amiably to think he had so successfully ministered to one who had strayed from the faith,’’ and admiring sadly the staunch—if ‘‘pagan’’— beauty of John’s love for his wife.

‘‘Mr. and Mrs. Fairbanks,’’ first published in Harper’s Bazaar (September, 1933) and included in the 1934 edition of The Best Short Stories, is a miniature drama of misunderstanding between two young married people. Walking arm in arm together in the park, they share their mixed emotions over the discovery that Helen Fairbanks is expecting a baby. Bill’s pride and pleasure in his wife’s condition gradually overcome her uncertainty and fear until they are both glowing with contentment. At this crucial moment they pass a bench where a tired, shabby old man is sitting looking like a beggar. In an impulsive gesture of generosity Helen offers him a quarter which he declines with simple dignity. This silent rebuke arouses in her a mood of humiliation and injured pride that Bill’s logically comforting remarks only accentuate. The happy contentment of a few moments before evaporates, the afternoon sunlight becomes ‘‘hot and withering, drying up the little bit of freshness there was in the park,’’ and fear of future poverty and old age pervades her thoughts. As the couple turn homeward, keeping ‘‘a step away from each other, so their elbows would not touch,’’ they hurry past the bench where the old man is seated. Glancing back Helen sees him ‘‘looking after them, and suddenly he smiled at her, smiling gently as if he had noticed in the first place that they had been happy and now were like two lovers who had quarrelled.’’ This understanding rapport restores the mutual glow shared by husband and wife.

In his portrayal of the Fairbanks Callaghan catches and registers how fragile human relationships may be. Although the background of the Depression sharpens their fears and anxieties in contemplation of the responsibilities of parenthood, the emotions represented have a universal application. Even man’s response to the weather is conditioned by his feeling of the moment.

‘‘Father and Son,’’ published in Harper’s Bazaar, June, 1934 and included in the 1935 edition of The Best Short Stories, explores the feelings of a father who after a four year interval visits a young son and his mother. Greg Henderson, moderately successful New York lawyer, is drawn by an inexplicable compulsion to the old stone farmhouse in Pennsylvania where his former wife Mona lives with her husband Frank Molsen. From the moment of his arrival Greg feels uneasily aware of how unimportant he has become in the life of Mona and his own son Mike, who is ignorant of his real parent’s identity. Despite the natural antagonism between himself and Frank, Greg is able to establish a companionable relationship with Mike. Although he contemplates taking his son away with him, Greg realizes how wrong such an action would be, and takes a kind of resigned pride in the fact that Mike is a ‘‘fine boy.’’

This is a story of strong contrasts both in natural setting and in human characteristics. The dark hill and the shadow cast by the huge old barn stand out sharply in the moonlight and the flood of light from the window; the silence of the mist-laden valley is a sudden change for Greg who is accustomed to city noises. Tall and dark in expensive clothes, Greg is in physical contrast with Frank, short and fair in his leather jacket. Temperamentally, the distinction between the two is even more marked. Urban Greg seems lonely, wretched and out of place in the simple farm home of Mona, with her peaceful assurance, and of Frank, with his social revolutionary enthusiasm. The latter looks on this ‘‘no-account lawyer, a little bourgeois,’’ as though ‘‘he were an old enfeebled man who had been a slave all his life.’’ This sense of himself creeps into Greg’s own mind as he listens to the symbolical sound of ‘‘the trickling of water in the nearly driedup creek.’’ Yet his pleasant day with his son and Mike’s warm and spontaneous farewell bring a surge of joy to Greg which fills his emptiness and somehow unites him spiritually with Mona and Frank.

‘‘The Blue Kimono,’’ first published in the May, 1935 issue of Harper’s Bazaar and included in the 1936 edition of The Best Short Stories, conveys with restraint the powerful feelings of a young couple when their son falls ill. Waking at dawn, George finds his wife Marthe nursing their feverish boy Walter, whom she suspects of having infantile paralysis. This new calamity triggers an outburst of bitterness from George over the bad luck which had dogged them ever since coming to the city. The corrosive effect of six months’ unemployment on their bright dreams and aspirations, their fine resolutions and plans, seems to him to be symbolized by his wife’s tattered blue kimono:

The kimono had been of a Japanese pattern adorned with clusters of brilliant flowers sewn in silk. George had given it to her at the time of their marriage; now he stared at it, torn as it was at the arms, with pieces of old padding hanging out at the hem, with the lightcoloured lining showing through in many places, and he remembered how, when the kimono was new, Marthe used to make the dark hair across her forehead into bangs, fold her arms across her breasts, with her wrists and hands concealed in the sleeve folds, and go around the room in the bright kimono, taking short, prancing steps, pretending she was a Japanese girl.

As the boy’s temperature drops under the effect of an aspirin, however, both father and mother gain new hope. Mutual concern for their child deepens their own love for each other. The quiet implications of this changed mood are subtly indicated as Marthe, taking off the kimono, is suddenly sure that she can ‘‘draw the torn parts together and make it look bright and new.’’

In ‘‘Day by Day’’ the discouraging effect of unemployment is particularly evident. This compact story, originally published in The New Yorker of August 20, 1932, treats the theme of suspicion and jealousy nourished by economic distress. Pretty young Madge Winslow, after an innocent afternoon of window-shopping, relaxes peacefully in the park and dreams of recapturing with her husband John the eager spontaneity of their days of romance. Uncomplaining of the failure of their plans ‘‘or that her husband went from one job to another and the work was always less suited to him,’’ she timidly asks ‘‘God to make her husband content, without any suspicion of her.’’ Arriving home late, by her very animation and inner warmth she excites a jealous outburst from John. When he walks out of the house angry and embarrassed by his violence and lack of faith, Madge sits down to await his return:

Tears were in her eyes as she looked around the mean little kitchen. She had such a strange feeling of guilt. White-faced and still, she tried to ask herself what it was that was slowly driving them apart day by day.

Accentuated by the conditions of the Depression era, the dilemma, frustration, paradox and disillusionment involved in the adjustment of a married couple are all subtly suggested or concretely portrayed; the very beauty which attracts a young man can also make him a suspicious husband; the cruel misunderstandings of married life are in stark contrast with the carefree gaiety and trust of courtship; youthful hopes often dissolve in the harsh actualities of experience; and hope itself may sometimes seem an affront to the miserable. More pervasively than many of the pieces in Callaghan’s collection, ‘‘Day by Day’’ reflects the mood of pessimism of the thirties which intensified the age-old problems of young lovers.

When he was requested in 1942 to select his own favorite story for Whit Burnett’s collection of ‘‘over 150 self-chosen and complete masterpieces’’ from ‘‘America’s 93 living authors’’ published in This Is My Best (1943), Callaghan submitted ‘‘Two Fishermen.’’ This story treats a typically Callaghan theme of human justice through an interesting series of ironic contrasts. Young Michael Foster, only reporter for the small town Examiner, discovers the identity of the man K. Smith who has arrived to hang Michael’s old acquaintance Thomas Delaney, convicted of killing his wife’s molester. In an evening of fishing together Michael and Smitty come to understand each other. The next morning after the hanging in the jail Smitty magnanimously gives to Michael two fish caught that morning. Shortly afterwards outside the jail yard these same fish are seized by one of the angry crowd and thrown at the hangman.

The peaceful setting of Collingwood on Georgian Bay, with ‘‘the blue hills beyond the town . . . shining brilliantly on square patches of farm land,’’ seems incongruous with the hangman’s grim purpose. In his explanation of why he chose this story for inclusion in This Is My Best Callaghan comments on the warm human relationship which developed between the young reporter and the executioner, as well as

the hangman’s rather wistful attachment to his despised job and his realization that it gave him an opportunity to get around the country and enjoy himself as a human being and a fisherman. And then after I had written it I saw that it had a certain social implication that I liked. The hangman, a necessary figure in society, a man definitely serving the public and the ends of justice, was entitled to a little human dignity. In fact he saw himself as a dignified human being. But of course as an instrument of justice he became a despised person, and even his young friend, who understood his wistful humanity, betrayed that humanity when the chips were down. If I had started out to write the story with that in mind it might have become very involved but I wrote it very easily and naturally and without any trouble at all.

The contrast between Smitty in his human aspect and Mr. K. Smith as a public official is striking. As a fisherman dressed in casual clothes he is a small shy man ‘‘with little gray baby curls on the back of his neck,’’ proud father of five children and an amusing raconteur. As an executioner ‘‘dressed in a long black cut-away coat with gray striped trousers, a gates-ajar collar and a narrow red tie’’ he walks with military precision and carries himself ‘‘with a strange cocky dignity.’’ These two aspects of his personality are neatly brought together in the image of the two fish which he gives to Michael. They exemplify for both Michael and Smitty the fact that man is not only an individual but is also a creature of society. The fish, symbolical evidence of friendship, also become in the closing episode instruments of human betrayal and shameful rejection.

The stories of Now That April’s Here have a remarkably uniform quality. The themes of the remaining twenty-five will be briefly noted. Several treat a variety of dreams, misunderstandings or entanglements of lovers: ‘‘The Rejected One,’’ a family’s disapproval of a young man’s gaudy belle as a suitable marriage partner; ‘‘Guilty Woman,’’ a young woman’s stolen moment of love with her older sister’s sweetheart; ‘‘Let Me Promise You,’’ the attempt to recapture a former beau by an expensive birthday present; ‘‘Ellen,’’ an unmarried pregnant woman’s hope that her lover will return; ‘‘Timothy Harshaw’s Flute,’’ a young couple’s impractical dream of moving to Paris; ‘‘The Snob,’’ a lovers’ quarrel resulting from a young man’s sense of shame in snubbing his poor father; ‘‘The Two Brothers,’’ the complex influence of a prodigal upon his older brother’s love affair; ‘‘The Bride,’’ the need for mutual attention in marriage; ‘‘One Spring Night,’’ the natural warmth and the frustration of adolescent love; ‘‘It Must Be Different,’’ the stifling effect of parental suspicion on young love; ‘‘Younger Brother,’’ a boy’s ignorant confusion about his sister’s attitude to men; ‘‘Three Lovers,’’ an older man’s loss of his loved one to a younger rival through lack of trust; ‘‘The Duel,’’ a former beau’s failure to win back his girl; ‘‘Silk Stockings,’’ a frustrated attempt to win a girl’s approval by a birthday present; ‘‘Rigmarole,’’ the need to preserve in married love the sentimentalities of courtship; and ‘‘Possession,’’ the recognition that a woman’s genuine concern for her lover is superior to mere physical surrender.

Other stories in the collection reflect Callaghan’s understanding of family life and the relationship between parents and children. The initial story, ‘‘All the Years of Her Life,’’ which was included in Short Stories from The New Yorker (1940), presents a double exposure of a mother whose son is detected in petty larceny. Her public display of courageous dignity and calm strength as she dissuades his employer from prosecuting are balanced in her own home by a private expression of frightened despair and trembling weakness. The effect of family dissension on both parents and children is portrayed in ‘‘The Runaway,’’ in which the quarrels of his father and stepmother so magnify a boy’s own little failures that he runs away. ‘‘A Separation’’ reveals the unhappy result of a broken home and the tensions which arise between a deserted husband and his son.

The remaining pieces concern diverse aspects of human aspiration, disappointment and adjustment. In ‘‘Shining Red Apple’’ a fruit dealer gives vent to his resentment over not having a son by tormenting a hungry boy. ‘‘Lunch Counter’’ dramatizes the suspicions of a frustrated sensualist and his prudish wife who spoil an innocent friendship between a cook and a teen-age girl. In ‘‘Rocking Chair’’ the symbol of a young widower’s love for his deceased wife is misinterpreted by an aggressive female friend as a token of favor toward her. ‘‘An Old Quarrel’’ contrasts the significance of petty animosities of bygone days with the richness of memories of happy times together. A priest’s visit in ‘‘Absolution’’ arouses in an alcoholic woman ‘‘a faintly remembered dignity’’ of past respectability. In ‘‘Sister Bernadette’’ an illegitimate baby becomes the symbol of the sacrificed motherhood of a hospital nun.

Now That April’s Here indicates both continuity and change in Callaghan’s fictional technique. As in his earlier A Native Argosy, the stories, although distinctive and individual in flavor, do follow a recognizable formula. They are all selfcontained anecdotes. Their opening is usually a declarative statement that sets the stage for a drama that most frequently is psychological and involves little action. A problem is posed, and, by description, dialogue and internal monologue, the story moves with easy economy through a climax to an ending which may not resolve the dilemma but invariably leaves it haunting the reader’s mind. Sometimes the conclusion returns full cycle to the same emotional attitudes introduced initially, and these are then perceived in the light of a changed situation. Few violent passions are depicted, and little humor is displayed except in the quiet irony which pervades the style. A sure sense of significant detail and mood, and an unobtrusive use of symbolism contribute suggestive overtones of universality.

There are, however, obvious changes in the stories of this second collection. The chronological duration is briefer. The settings are authentically American, since many of the stories were actually written in New York about that city, and its streets are often mentioned by name. The tales reflect the conditions of the Depression era. The depiction of family life involving children is more frequent. The syntax is tighter and the overall structure more artful than in A Native Argosy. The characters, although still unpretentious and ordinary people, are generally more intelligent and more sophisticated than the bewildered persons of earlier stories with whom the average reader has difficulty identifying himself. Callaghan interprets this cross-section of humanity with sympathy yet detachment. His tales have a restraint, an unstressed reticence and a deceptive gentleness that subtly convey to the reader the quiet implications of the awkward emotional predicaments and fluctuations between happiness and despair which occur in intimate relationships. In his adroit handling of those commonplace actions that involve failure to adjust to circumstances or personalities, Callaghan in these later stories leaves the reader with a profound awareness of a universal truth: respect for individual dignity, patience and understanding love provide the best solution to the problems of life.

Source: Brandon Conron, ‘‘The End of an Era,’’ in Morley Callaghan, Twayne Publishers, 1966, pp. 97–108.