Читать книгу The Silence on the Shore - Hugh Garner - Страница 5

INTRODUCTION

BY GEORGE FETHERLING

For about twenty-five years beginning in 1949, Hugh Garner was an unmistakable and virtually unique presence as a writer of Canadian fiction. He was particularly admired for his short stories, many of which became standard anthology pieces, well-known to students and general readers alike. One of his collections, Hugh Garner’s Best Stories (1963), won the Governor General’s Award for fiction. That was the only important literary honour he ever received, for his writing, and indeed his entire life, were one continuous critique of mainstream Canadian society. The upholders of middle-class values acknowledged him when they had to, but they did not reward him. They stuck to their principles and he stuck to his. The standoff ended only with his death in 1979 at the age of sixty-six. In the past generation, however, there have been signs that Garner’s legacy is being reassessed and moreover that this re-examination extends to his novels.

The first one he published, but not the first one he wrote, was Storm Below (1949), drawn from his service aboard a Royal Canadian Navy corvette during the Second World War. It found a ready audience and led to the first publication of Cabbagetown, a work he had been wrestling with intermittently for years. The title refers to a section of downtown Toronto that is still known by that name but was then a slum area where Garner and his fictional character, Ken Tilling, grew up (before the narrative propels Tilling into the Great Depression, as he ricochets across the country in search of work). When finally published in 1950, it was only as a cheap and heavily expurgated (albeit bestselling) mass-market paperback that mocked and distorted the original intent. Not until 1968, when there appeared a new edition with the deleted material restored, did readers see the novel for what it was: a Bildungsroman that was also a key historical document. It had not been written as a pulp novel, as the original paperback suggested. It was written, rather, within the conventions of social realism fashionable during the period in which the novel was set. By 1968 that type of fiction was nearing the end of its useful life as a living genre, yet was coming to be appreciated in terms of literary history. Specifically, such an approach to narrative was considered an important episode in the story of American fiction, but had far fewer adherents in Canada. Many vaguely progressive Canadian writers, such as the poet Dorothy Livesay, had written of the Depression’s effects on ordinary Canadians but had done so from a superior position, looking down. Garner was at or near the bottom, writing of the life he himself was experiencing and saw around him at ground level.

In the decades between Storm Below and the unexpurgated Cabbagetown, Garner confined himself to short-form fiction as he attempted to support his family through freelance journalism, a struggle punctuated again and again by collisions, feuds, and dismissals, because of the suspicion with which he viewed middle-class editors and other authority figures and they him; and also, perhaps most of all, because of his ever-worsening alcoholism — a problem so acute that Maclean’s once described him as Canada’s best-known drunk since Sir John A. Macdonald. Yet before the 1950s were out, he was hard at work on his most ambitious and important novel, The Silence on the Shore.

Garner was born in 1913 to working-class English parents in Batley, near Leeds, in the West Riding of Yorkshire — in that era, a grim and grimy district of mining and heavy industry. His father immigrated to Canada, intending to send for his family once he found work. Hearing nothing, Garner’s mother brought her children here in 1919, only to learn that her husband had abandoned them — disappeared — leaving them to fend for themselves.

The back jacket of the McClelland & Stewart hardcover first edition of The Silence on the Shore features a pugnacious-looking Hugh Garner.

Hugh Garner grew up in the streets and alleys of Toronto’s East End, in an area close to the shore of Lake Ontario and long known as an enclave for Anglo-Saxon, Scots, and Irish immigrants. He quit public school at sixteen and began his lifelong pattern of unsuccessful employment, though one of his jobs held out promise. In 1929 he was taken on as a copyboy at the Toronto Daily Star and when seen to have reportorial skills was singled out for advancement by the editor and proprietor. But he lost the opportunity, as he would lose so many others through the years, either quitting or being let go — the distinction hardly mattered. He was not, so to speak, a farmer tending his plot in order to support himself. Rather, he was a raider descending on some menial and often meaningless job to grab enough money to carry him to the next target. Once jobs became terrifyingly scarce as the Depression worsened, this pattern of behaviour could no longer be sustained, at least not if he remained in Toronto.

In 1933 he slipped across the border into the United States and for several years travelled from place to place as a hobo, “riding the rods,” and undertaking an astonishing range of casual labour across the United States and from Mexico to Canada. He picked fruit, harvested tobacco, stoked wheat, worked construction, bussed tables, and sold soap door to door — the list seems almost endless. Garner was often arrested for vagrancy and other misdemeanours, and served short sentences in municipal and county jails in cities large and small. At one point he was living in New York City on sixty-five cents a day.

Garner was also educating himself and becoming radicalized. Using The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism by George Bernard Shaw (1928), he began to see how the dilemma within which he existed might be understood in terms of socio-economic theory. In the public libraries of New York, Los Angeles, and elsewhere, he read Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels as well as popular literature. He also, as seems significant as we look back on him now, read What Is Property? (1840) by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the first person to call himself an anarchist in the philosophical sense. Like Garner, Proudhon was a poor working-class lad. He never forgot the humiliation of having to wear sabots when his school fellows wore proper shoes, just as Garner never overcame the memory of wearing clothing distributed to Toronto’s poor children by the Daily Star each Christmas. Proudhon’s book contains the catchphrase “Property is theft.” This was an indictment not of private ownership but rather of exorbitant rents and similar inequities. Radicalism permitted Garner to become a writer. His first publication was an essay about the Cabbagetown slums. It appeared in the mildly progressive journal Canadian Forum in 1936, the year that saw the beginning of the Spanish Civil War (which some anarchists prefer to call the Spanish Revolution).

In February that year the Popular Front, a wide-ranging and unwieldy coalition of left-wing parties and organizations, came to power in Spain’s national election. Inevitably, violence erupted between the Popular Front and the right-wing Falange and its own array of affiliated groups. In Spanish Morocco the military mutinied, and a career officer, Francisco Franco, assumed command there. With the help of Adolf Hitler of Germany and Benito Mussolini of Italy, Franco moved his army home to Spain to destroy the democratically elected government. To counteract the Nazis’ and Italian fascists’ support of the Spanish fascists, who were termed the Nationalists, Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union pledged aid to the anti-fascists, known interchangeably as Republicans and Loyalists. By August, volunteers from major democratic countries were signing up to fight on the Loyalist side. The conflict was one in which Garner, as he would write in his autobiography One Damn Thing After Another, became involved “both ideologically and personally. Through a combination of my life up to then — through class, intellect and political ideology — I was an anti-fascist, and still am. When I discovered that foreigners, the forerunners of what were to become the International Brigades, were fighting with the Spanish Loyalists in University City and Casa de Campo on the outskirts of Madrid I knew I had to join them.”

The International Brigades included, among others, Americans, Britons, Canadians, French, Belgians, Dutch, Czechs, Russians, people from the Scandinavian countries, and a full range of Latin Americans. There were even some anti-fascist Germans and Italians. The volunteers came from all walks of life (letting Garner claim that “the Loyalist forces probably contained more distinguished novelists and poets in relation to their size than any fighting force since Caesar’s”). Garner was not a communist but rather a communist sympathizer with anarcho-syndicalist tendencies, whereas many of the others, though by no means all, were committed communists, responding to the call by the Comintern in Moscow that the Loyalists must be supported.

Just as the Nationalists were commencing their major offensive against Madrid, the League of Nations, representing the capitalist countries, enacted a ban (it proved unenforceable) on participation by foreign volunteers. That was in February 1937, the month that Garner crossed the Pyrenees from Portugal into Spain, wearing a suit and tie, with a homburg on his head and spatterdashes on his feet. Each of the International Brigades was made up of from four to six battalions, which were usually dominated by one ideological position (Stalinist, Trotskyite, or anarchist) or a particular nationality. Like a number of the other Canadians who joined the struggle early on, Garner had enlisted in an American unit, the Abraham Lincoln Battalion. A short time later, Canadian volunteers formed their own Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion, named for the two men who had led the Upper and Lower Canada Rebellions a century earlier. Through legislation, arrests, spying, intimidation, and even by refusing to issue passports, the Canadian government tried to prevent Canadians from joining the Spanish cause.

In 1937, Garner served in the Abraham Lincoln Battalion during the Spanish Civil War, fighting on the Republican side against Generalissimo Francisco Franco.

The Nationalists were supplied by Nazi Germany and others, while the Loyalists had much less sophisticated arms from various sources, including the Soviet Union. Even though Garner later wrote a long memoir of his Spanish days for the Star Weekly, a leading national magazine of the day, he was maddeningly vague as to which particular fights he took part in, though it is clear that he saw action in the Jarama Valley and at the Battle of Brunete and other places. He was in a machine-gun company and was equipped with a hand-me-down Russian-made Maxim gun mounted on spoked wheels. The fact that he once witnessed a sabre charge by Loyalist cavalry underscores how unfairly matched the two sides were.

As he admitted freely in his published reminiscences, he was of course frightened. Yet he was also frustrated, he said, when confined to the periphery of the action. So, on his own initiative, he left his unit and went to Madrid, intending to visit brigade headquarters and seek assignment to another unit closer to the centre of the fighting. He was picked up by the police. Believing he was being framed by the Stalinist leadership, he left Madrid and joined an anarchist outfit (“they’d take anybody”) but later decided to return to his own battalion. He was then accused of desertion. There was even brief talk of his being executed by firing squad. In the end, the charges were reduced to being absent without leave. He served a short time in detention and returned to the fighting but was sent back to Canada.

Garner arrived home with no sympathy for the Moscow-trained officer class whose infighting with Trotskyite and anarchist comrades undermined the common cause and contributed to the Nationalist victory in the war. He was hardly alone. Whatever good faith persisted between and among the communist camps was expunged in August 1939 when Stalin and Hitler signed a mutual non-aggression pact (which Hitler broke in June 1941 by invading the Soviet Union). In September 1939, when Germany invaded Poland and Britain entered the Second World War, Garner enlisted in the Royal Canadian Artillery but was suspected of being a communist sympathizer, as were all those who had gone to Spain as volunteers and fought against fascism before it was fashionable to do so. He asked for and received a discharge from the army and promptly joined the Royal Canadian Navy. His service there was not without incident (he served time in a navy glasshouse). It also, of course, led to Storm Below.

Garner served on a number of corvettes in the Royal Canadian Navy during the Second World War. Here he is on HMCS Arvida in 1941.

What has all this got to do with The Silence on the Shore? A great deal, in my view. In 1918−19, immediately after the end of the First World War, the U.S. and Canadian governments commenced hostilities against the progressive movements in their respective countries. But people’s unpopular beliefs survived and, with the beginning of the Depression a decade later, grew far stronger until the Hitler-Stalin Pact ripped out their hearts. There were many individuals who, like Garner, joined the Second World War not to defend the British Empire but to continue the battle against fascism. But even these people were never again what they had been prior to Stalin’s deal with the devil. Many old leftists of course became anti-communists and did much to permit another kind of terror during the McCarthy era and the Cold War. Garner never did. He obviously shared the feelings of violation, betrayal, and emptiness, but he had a great advantage over most of the others in the same situation: he had art to fill the space left by the death of his ideology. The art was accordingly apolitical, except in the sense that he still believed in community — the kind of community that lies at the centre of urban life.

Born ten years later than Morley Callaghan (and eighteen years before Mordecai Richler), Garner became the second in the thin line of English Canada’s great urban novelists. He wrote in pursuit of the city, though of course not always deliberately or even consciously so. And not the city of Toronto specifically but rather the idea of a city, created by and for the constantly changing cast of individuals who by going about their lives there, anonymously, show that democracy of a kind can actually function and a culture of sorts survive. To say that the city is so often the principal character in Garner’s fiction is a cliché, but a useful one.

The Silence on the Shore was his peak achievement as a writer. He never again produced fiction so sustained and complex. It was also a book with a troubled publication history. The first edition was printed in the United Kingdom, and a labour dispute delayed its appearance in Canadian bookshops, whereupon Garner severed relations with the publisher, McClelland & Stewart. In his own telling at least, this incident hardly sounds like one of the major professional upheavals so common throughout his writing life, and there appear to have been legitimate complaints on the other side as well. One suspects that by the time Garner completed a novel of such length (the first version was twice as the long as the published revision) he had reached the stage of alcoholism that left him unable to undertake another. With the exception of a novella called “The Violation of the Virgins,” the shorter fiction he wrote in the nearly two decades that remained to him was far inferior to much of what had preceded it. In the same period his novels consisted of crime fiction and police procedurals, each less competent than the last, tainted by a documentary fervour to provide layer after layer of hard observed “fact” — the sort of information one can “prove” by looking it up. He had abandoned that wise dictum of beginning writers: reveal, don’t explain. The Silence on the Shore is quite different.

The distinctive front jacket of the McClelland & Stewart edition of The Silence on the Shore was designed by Frank Newfeld.

Readers of Garner’s short stories and his autobiography will find hints of many experiences and encounters that were given their ultimate expression in this novel: people slaving away in the dull journalistic underworld of trade magazines, the sadly eccentric landladies, the sexual deviants, the English remittance men, the semi-rural working-class Québécois, the veterans who have difficulty readjusting to civilian life, the immigrants whose deracination has made them come down in the world rather than rise.

There is a tendency among many novelists to produce books of ever greater narrative and structural complexity, as Garner was doing here. His cast is a large one and their interactions complicated; the characters, especially the female ones, exist as individual personalities, not as examples. The setting is 1959 in what was once a prosperous middle-class home, now being operated as a rooming house, in the Annex, a downtown Toronto neighbourhood so called because the land was annexed by the city between 1883 and 1887. In the novel it is a district in transition, though the people involved don’t know which way it will ultimately lean: toward decay or redevelopment? Readers today have the answer. The Annex is a pricey and vibrant area associated with the arts and professions. Let me say that when I first knew it, in 1966, gentrification was just beginning, and there were still rooming houses much like the one in Garner’s novel, which perfectly captures — intuitively and imaginatively, without documentary taint — the way people moved about in the space that surrounded them and the texture of life there at the time. The type of monophonic and authorial fiction Garner wrote is no longer fashionable, but it can be read for its place in history and its grouchy love of humanity. In these connections no one could be faulted for calling The Silence on the Shore the finest work of his singular career.

The front cover of the 1968 Ryerson Press paperback edition of The Silence on the Shore (here dropping “The” in the title) features a stylized typical Annex Victorian house.

All that remains to be given here are some bibliographical footnotes. After his falling out with McClelland & Stewart in 1962, Garner was published primarily by The Ryerson Press, the publishing arm of the (obviously latitudinarian) United Church of Canada. In addition to new works as they were completed, Ryerson produced a paperback edition of The Silence on the Shore in 1968. Two years later, however, in what became a loud national scandal, the church sold its press to the American publishing giant McGraw-Hill, which renamed it McGraw-Hill Ryerson. Garner later published with that imprint as well but found a home more frequently in another “branch plant” of U.S. firm Simon & Schuster, which republished The Silence on the Shore in 1971. This publisher reasoned that “Gordon Lightfoot,” one of the novel’s main characters, would invite confusion with the Canadian musician of the same name who was then at the zenith of his fame. Accordingly, the fictional Lightfoot was given the forename “George.” The Ryerson paperback for some reason dropped the initial article from the book’s title, making it Silence on the Shore rather than The Silence on the Shore. These ill-advised tamperings have been ignored in the present edition, which adheres to the 1962 text.

Selected Reading

Batten, Jack. The Annex: The Story of a Toronto Neighbourhood. Erin, ON: Boston Mills Press, 2004.

Garner, Hugh. Storm Below. Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2010.

____. One Damn Thing After Another. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1973.

Hoar, Victor. The Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion: Canadian Participation in the Spanish Civil War. Toronto: Copp Clark Publishing, 1969.

Stuewe, Paul. The Storms Below: The Turbulent Life and Times of Hugh Garner. Toronto: James Lorimer & Co., 1988.

Zuehkle, Mark. The Gallant Cause: Canadians in the Spanish Civil War, 1936−1939. Vancouver: Whitecap Books, 1996.