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INTRODUCTION

BY PAUL STUEWE

By the fall of 1948, Hugh Garner was beginning to have serious doubts about the possibility of ever becoming a professional writer. After almost three years of work on a novel about growing up in the Cabbagetown neighbourhood of Toronto, he had produced an eight-hundred-page handwritten, and then typed, manuscript that had been turned down by all the major Canadian publishers. Desperate to elicit some spark of interest from the source of his latest rejection slip, William Collins Sons, he told them he had also written a novel about his experiences in the Royal Canadian Navy during the Second World War. When an editor indicated that the firm would like to see it, Garner found himself faced with yet another challenge in a career that had featured more hard knocks than free rides.

He had begun the novel that would become Storm Below in 1944 while stationed in Quebec City, one of the many short-term postings he was assigned during his military career. But he had managed to produce just a few pages of what he tentatively entitled “Convoy,” and although he would return to it periodically during the next four years, the book was less than three-quarters of its eventual length when he mentioned its existence to a Collins editor. Working non-stop over the following weekend, he finished the novel and, steeling himself for yet another rejection, dropped the hastily completed manuscript off at Collins’s office on Avenue Road in Toronto.

The result astonished him. Two days later he was informed that the book had been accepted for publication, and when he was shortly thereafter offered a contract and taken to lunch at an elegant restaurant, he could reasonably consider that he had arrived as a professional writer. Given this sudden change in his fortunes, he was more than willing to fall in with Collins’s suggestion for a new title for his work. He had submitted the manuscript as “Landlubber Lying Down Below,” the concluding line of a song he still remembered from his grade-school days, but not surprisingly Collins opted for Storm Below as a more dramatic and less lugubrious-sounding improvement.

Having become accustomed to the leisurely way Canadian publishers seemed to do business — one firm had held on to his “Cabbagetown” manuscript for eight months before deciding that it wasn’t quite their cup of tea — Garner was amazed by the speed with which Collins got it into print. Published in March 1949 to generally favourable reviews — noteworthy among them Roy Kervin’s Montreal Gazette notice, which asked “Who is this man Garner, who writes with such strong, sure skill?” — and respectable if not quite bestseller-list sales, Storm Below would in 1965 be described as “the most impressive Canadian novel of World War Two” in the prestigious Literary History of Canada. In subsequent years Garner would often receive letters from former servicemen complimenting him on the accuracy of his portrayal of the Riverford and its crew, and he typically wrote long and considerate replies to these reminders of one of his formative experiences.

Storm Below marked the arrival of a new and rather different voice on the Canadian literary scene. This brash young man from Cabbagetown, who would often correct well-meaning interviewers as to his “slum” rather than working-class origins, who had spent the Depression years hoboing around North America and fighting on the losing Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, and whose military service had been anything but a record of stellar accomplishment, had somehow produced a novel that earned him enthusiastic praise from reviewers, veterans, and the general reading public alike. Just how this came about is one of the most unusual success stories in Canadian literary history.

Hugh Garner was born on February 22, 1913, in Batley, an industrial town in England’s West Yorkshire region whose inhabitants worked in the local woollen mills and coal mines. His father, Matthew Garner, immigrated to Canada by himself in 1919, promising to send for his wife and two children as soon as he was settled in Toronto. When Annie Garner heard nothing from him for several months, she decided to bring herself and the children over, anyway, only to find her husband living with another woman and uninterested in reassuming his marital responsibilities. Although friendless and unable to rely on her shiftless husband — he immediately skipped town when a court finally did convict him of non-support — Annie Garner ignored her family’s advice to return to England and made a life for herself and her sons in Toronto. Working at menial jobs, often two at a time, she managed to ensure that her family usually had most of life’s necessities in a period when the little social assistance available was typically private, occasional, and often granted on terms that humiliated its recipients.

Six-month-old Hugh Garner in 1913.

In his autobiography One Damn Thing After Another (1974), Garner bitterly remembers such demeaning gifts as the sweaters provided by the Toronto Star’s Santa Claus Fund, “of a color I can only describe as puce,” and feeling as though they had been “knitted out of steel wool,” which when worn to school identified the wearer as a charity recipient. Acutely aware of issues of social class, and torn between resentment of his disadvantaged background and a fascination with those whom life had dealt an easier hand, Garner would go on to invest his fictional characters with what he saw as the characteristic markers of the castes into which society was divided. Storm Below’s representation of two of its Canadian naval officers exemplifies Garner’s complicated attitude toward people in positions of authority: Lieutenant-Commander Joseph Frigsby, the ship’s captain, rules his miniature world with a tough but fair hand, while Sub-Lieutenant Peter Smith-Raleigh is a snobbish, egotistical, and anti-Semitic jerk who owes his rank to his socially superior background.

Garner dropped out of high school as soon as legally possible on his sixteenth birthday in 1929, and when the stock market crashed in October of that year it became that much harder for a young man with no particular skills to find employment. He laboured at various odd and infrequent jobs in Toronto for the next few years, but by the summer of 1931 he was fed up with searching for the occasional factory and warehouse work that was poorly paid and barely provided enough to live on. In July he hopped a freight headed west and soon found himself harvesting wheat in southern Saskatchewan, earning what seemed like the princely sum of a dollar a day and board. But when the harvest season ended, he and many another summer agricultural workers found it necessary to hit the road again in search of a job. For the next five years Garner would travel all over North America, from Toronto to Vancouver and from New York to Los Angeles, gradually forming the intention of writing about what he had seen as a way of letting people know what was really going on in Depression-era society.

He made a promising beginning in 1936 when his essay on “Toronto’s Cabbagetown” was published in The Canadian Forum.

In blunt, graphic language Garner sketched what it was like to be on what was euphemistically called “relief,” as in this description of being allotted a new pair of shoes:

The room smells like an army quartermaster’s stores, and the recipients line up in front of the wicket. There are benches around the wall where shoes may be tried on. These are unnecessary as none of the shoes ever fit. The attendant ties up the order in brown wrapping paper and the recipient hurries from the office and down the street, looking straight ahead until he is clear of the neighbourhood.

Again, it is the resentment of being forced to rely on society’s handouts that animates Garner’s writing, and led him to take an increasingly active part in left-wing politics as the Depression showed no signs of abating.

When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, Garner saw this as an opportunity to actively battle for the kind of political and social justice that was so lacking in his own country. He spent most of 1937 fighting for a Republican cause that, like George Orwell in Homage to Catalonia, he came to see as undermined by the Moscow-controlled Spanish communists, who weakened the Republican coalition by squabbling with its anarchist and Trotskyite factions. Disillusioned by the failure of left-wing groups to unite against their fascist enemy, he returned to Canada and the part-time, poorly paid jobs that were all he could find. When the Second World War began in September 1939, he enlisted first in the Royal Canadian Artillery, where for a variety of reasons, including the suspicion that he was a communist sympathizer, he felt himself discriminated against. Requesting and receiving his discharge, he joined the Royal Canadian Navy in June 1940, and spent the next five years in the world chronicled by Storm Below.

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

Although Storm Below is set during six days in 1943 and is intensely focused on the relationships among the crew of a small Canadian ship escorting a convoy across the Atlantic Ocean, its characters and their actions reflect several different aspects of Hugh Garner’s life experience. Many of the humorous incidents that lighten the novel’s overall mood of imminent danger are taken directly from his autobiographical writings: First Class Stoker O’Brien’s naked serenade to his shipmates while aloft on a mast (115–16), First Class Signalman “Cowboy” Henderson’s “uncontrollable urge to ride a milkman’s horse through the Halifax dockyard” (86), as well as his reminiscences of hoboing during the Depression (122–23), would all be presented as actual happenings in One Damn Thing After Another. More generally, Storm Below’s frank descriptions of the fears and anxieties that trouble many of its characters have many analogues in Garner’s remembrances of his Spanish Civil War and Second World War experiences. A characteristic example is his account in a 1960 Star Weekly article of one of the first times he came under fire in Spain when any thoughts of incipient heroism were swept aside by a deeper urge:

I dreamed up visions of girls I had known at home, and wished I had impregnated one of them before I left. I felt the urge to leave something behind, so that all of me would not come to an end in that wheatsheaf- strewn field under the boiling sun that afternoon. I felt that I had not rounded out my life, and I wanted so much to do so.

As a consequence, Storm Below’s realistic treatment of life on a Canadian corvette is not simply a matter of describing the physical environment comprised by the Riverford and its crew, but also delves deeply into the psychological pressures that affect the men onboard. Nor is this limited to combat experiences, of which there are surprisingly few in the book; Garner served on the corvette Battleford during three days of continuous submarine attacks on Convoy ONS-154 in December 1942 when fourteen of its forty-six ships were sunk, and he could easily have used this as the basis for a more action-packed narrative. Instead, as he noted in One Damn Thing After Another,

The book, though based on an amalgam of many convoy escort groups I served in, with the ever-present stress of sudden death as part of everyone’s life, was a sociological study of a small warship’s crew rather than a study of the Battle of the Atlantic and its relationship to the crew of a small Canadian corvette.

Thus in choosing to focus on the interpersonal and group relationships that form and are transformed in the close quarters of a small warship, Garner produced an ambitious and largely successful portrait of men during wartime.

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

There are two linguistic aspects of Storm Below that deserve some comment. As a lifelong celebrant of the delights of slang, Garner peppers his text with words that are specific to the informal speech of seamen. Most are either immediately explained or can be figured out from the context in which they occur, but a few require assistance from reference works such as Wilfrid Granville’s Sea Slang of the Twentieth Century and Eric Partridge’s A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English. For example, slackers (98) derives from the sequence Halifax–Halifacks–Slacks– Slackers, which explains how it can be the location of a torpedo school. A bag shanty, first introduced as something that smells bad (38), later becomes a place where one is able to have sex (67), which gets us closer to its more common meaning of a brothel. The Jimmy (144), or first lieutenant, those social climbers who are scissor-bills (159) — naggers and gossipers — and a scratch house (150), lodgings where the resident vermin give one the itch to vacate, are other examples of Garner’s penchant for the colourful and effective use of slang.

The novel also presents an amusing example of one of the ways Garner went about naming his characters. He would often select a relatively common name from the Toronto telephone directory and then change one or two of its letters, afterward ensuring that there was no one listed under this spelling. In the case of one of the main characters in Storm Below, Lieutenant-Commander Joseph Frigsby, Garner took the name “Grigsby” and replaced its initial g with an f; however, an editor more familiar with the idiom of working-class Canadians would have recognized that frig was a common euphemism for fuck, the latter, of course, being completely unacceptable in print in 1948. Given Hugh Garner’s anti-establishment attitudes, one can well imagine that he enjoyed this opportunity to imply what he really thought of authority.

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HMCS — “His Majesty’s Canadian Ship” in nomenclature that reflects the country’s status as a loyal member of the British Commonwealth — Riverford is, as Garner tells us, a “composite” of the several corvettes he served on during the Second World War. Although readers will gather that a corvette is a naval vessel somewhat smaller and less well armed than a destroyer, it might help to more fully describe a craft whose development reflects the specific conditions of anti-submarine warfare during the Second World War.

When the war began in September 1939, Great Britain and its allies found themselves woefully deficient in the kinds of escort vessels required to shepherd convoys of desperately needed war matériel safely across the Atlantic Ocean. Although the March 1941 Lend-Lease exchange of military bases for ships with the United States added fifty aging destroyers to the forces available, there was still an immediate need for craft capable of tracking and sinking the German submarines that were so efficiently torpedoing Allied shipping. More destroyers would have been the ideal solution, but they took so long to build that as a matter of necessity the more quickly buildable corvette became the escort vessel of choice.

In December 1942, the HMCS Battleford was part of an escort protecting a convoy of Allied ships. Garner was there when the convoy was badly mauled, losing fourteen vessels.

The corvette’s particular advantage was that it had a narrower turning radius than U-boats, which meant it could maintain contact with them and continue its attacks for a longer period of time. On the other hand, if a submarine tired of being depth-charged and decided to fight it out on the surface, the corvette’s minimal gunnery complement gave the U-boats the advantage, which meant that some corvettes resorted to the ancient naval tactic of ramming as an effective if often suicidal way of sinking their opponent. Such desperate measures reflected the Royal Canadian Navy’s expansion during the first two years of the war from eighteen hundred to thirty-six thousand men, many with only minimal training, which as a consequence led to initially poor performances in such complex tasks as submarine hunting.

As Storm Below vividly depicts, life on a corvette was a cramped and all too intimate existence that might be radically upset by any change in routine. Thus the captain’s decision to keep a deceased sailor’s body onboard rather than bury it at sea, perhaps defensible on a larger ship where it could be kept out of sight and out of mind, proves to be a serious mistake: when the body comes loose from its moorings during the Riverford’s violent combat manoeuvres, and literally shows the face of death to the crew, the result is a pervasive “mass psychological tension” (156) that almost provokes a mutiny. The “storm below” the surface created by the ship’s antisubmarine depth charges has been relocated within the Riverford itself, and it is Garner’s deft depiction of this transformation that makes the novel such a powerful portrait of what happens to men under the conditions of combat.

Hugh Garner would go on to become one of the most prominent Canadian writers of his time. Hugh Garner’s Best Stories, which included such much-anthologized favourites as “The Yellow Sweater,” “The Conversion of Willie Heaps,” and “One, Two, Three Little Indians,” won the Governor General’s Award for Fiction in 1963, and when Cabbagetown was finally published unabridged in 1968, it was recognized as a major work of social realism. Although the ravages of alcoholism and poor health would significantly diminish the quality of his subsequent literary output, and thus lead to a substantial downgrading of his work by literary critics and historians after his death in 1979, for much of his career he was a powerful and evocative writer who spoke directly to many of his fellow Canadians. In my biography The Storms Below: The Turbulent Life and Times of Hugh Garner, I concluded that his best writing “will be read and appreciated as long as there is an audience for honest and impassioned literature,” and rereading and reflecting upon Storm Below allows me to reaffirm that judgment.

By the time this photograph was taken in 1968, Garner had won the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and was at the height of his powers as a writer.

Selected Reading

Fetherling, Doug. Hugh Garner. Toronto: Forum House, 1972. Garner, Hugh. One Damn Thing After Another. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1973.

Moss, John. “A Conversation with Hugh Garner.” Journal of Canadian Fiction, I, No. 2 (Spring 1972), 50–55.

Stuewe, Paul. Hugh Garner and His Works. Toronto: ECW Press, 1984.

____. The Storms Below:The Turbulent Life and Times of Hugh Garner. Toronto: James Lorimer, 1988.