THE CELTIC SCRIBE Callaghan Outlived
his Generation of Writers
By RAY CAVANAGH
Morley Callaghan was born in 1903 in Toronto, entering a Catholic family of Irish descent. He attended the University of Toronto and went on to take his law degree.
However, he would never see one day in court, as he abandoned the legal arena for a journalism job at the Toronto Daily Star, where he teamed up with fellow reporter Ernest Hemingway.
Callaghan followed in Hemingway's fiction-writing footsteps, placed stories in The New Yorker, and soon became regarded as a leading practitioner of the craft.
He then headed to France, joining Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and others comprising that fashionable troupe of ex-pat scribes who brought the "roaring twenties" to such storied venues as Montparnasse.
Many memories were made, though perhaps none exceeded the events which ensued when Hemingway challenged Callaghan to a boxing match, refereed by a semi-inebriated F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Though no one could surpass Hemingway in toughness, Callaghan was a technically superior boxer, and he unleashed a torrent of five-punch combos on the American icon.
Owing to Fitzgerald's "lack of attention on the stopwatch," the round went a bit longer than regulation. As a wobbling Hemingway struggled to protect his chin, Callaghan penetrated the Hemingway liver with "sickening left hooks."
Ultimately, the bout became a slaughter equivalent to many of Hemingway's beloved bullfights. Already known for harboring grudges, Hemingway maintained that Fitzgerald's refereeing ineptitude was due not to drunkenness, but a desire to see a more successful writer "humiliated."
Back from Paris, Callaghan resumed his fiction endeavours well into the Great Depression era.
Though the 1940s were a dry season of sorts for Callaghan's literary output, he was still a busy man - raising a family, contributing articles, and carving his niche as a media personality. He also penned, Luke Baldwin's Vow, a popular novella about a boy and his favourite dog.
Callaghan's full-length novels often deal with religious themes. His Time for Judas involves a modern man's discovery of ancient tablets telling of Jesus' final days.
The discoverer learns that Judas was actually the "most trusted disciple," instructed by Jesus to commit the betrayal; it is revealed that Judas hung himself because "he had not kept the secret."
With novel More Joy in Heaven, Callaghan drew on the real-life crime spree of infamous robber Norman "Red" Ryan a.k.a. "Canada's Jesse James," a lifelong crook who specialized in armed heists and safecracking. In 1924, he was sentenced to a life-term in Ontario's Kingston Penitentiary.
Ryan, however, was such a "model prisoner" that he received the support of high-octane politicians (even the prime minister) and won parole in 1935. Now liberated, Ryan became the host of a popular radio show which railed against the criminal life.
Off the air and out of view, Ryan reunited with some old pals and commenced a rabid crime spree. Soon enough, one of these heists went sour, as a father and son were killed outside a car garage.
Ryan's next broadcast was an outpouring of condemnation for whoever had committed that unsolved atrocity outside the car garage. He then went to Toronto Police Headquarters, approached the chief detective, and offered to go undercover so he could effect justice.
By the time the warped truth was revealed, Ryan had been gunned down by policemen outside a liquor store; it seems another of his heists went sour. Not surprisingly, the Toronto Archdiocese denied Ryan a Catholic burial.
Callaghan's fictionalized version of Ryan, Kip Caley, is a somewhat more sympathetic character than his real-life counterpart. As More Joy in Heaven progresses, the recently-paroled Caley seems intent on walking the straight and narrow, but cannot escape being used by public figures looking to serve their own special interests.
Caley ultimately gets caught in a "complicated mess" and dies violently.
The last of Callaghan's books appeared when he was 85-years old. The writer outlived his generation; old buddies Fitzgerald and Hemingway had been gone for decades.
Following a brief illness, Callaghan expired in 1990. Some dozen years later, Canadian television aired the miniseries, Hemingway vs. Callaghan.
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