THE SHORT STORIES OF HUGH GARNER: GROUND-LEVEL REALISM WITHIN THE CANADIAN SHORT STORY TRADITION uOttawa UikARitS .• Michael P. J. Kennedy A Thesis Submitted to The School of Graduate Studies In Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements For The Degree Of Doctor of Philosophy in Canadian Literature University of Ottawa Ottawa, Ontario, Canada hael P.J. Kennedy, Ottawa, Canada, 1989. UMI Number: DC53943 INFORMATION TO USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleed-through, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. UMI® UMI Microform DC53943 Copyright 2011 by ProQuest LLC All rights reserved. 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Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 "The moment you put pen to paper or your fingers on a typewriter you are on your own —the mistakes, successes, hardships, elation, despair, are all yours alone..." -Hugh Garner, 1965 ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iv ABBREVIATIONS v INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER I The Writer In The Context Of His Age 7 CHAPTER H The Development Of The Writer-Craftsman 28 CHAPTER IE Garner's Social Vision: Through A Jaundiced Eye 62 CHAPTER IV Gamer's People: Psychological Realism At Ground Level 93 CHAPTER V The Short Story Style Of Hugh Garner 129 CONCLUSION 153 BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Works: The Short Stories (Initial Publication History) 157 Separate Volumes (Stories, Novels, Essays) 167 Other Writings (Articles And Essays, Interviews, Letters, Poem) 169 Secondary Sources (Annotated) Gamer And His Work (Articles, Interviews, Letters, Reviews) 171 Other Relevant Publications (The Short Story And Journalism) 186 iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The author thanks Professor John Moss of the Department of English, University of Ottawa, for serving as thesis advisor. Gratitude is expressed for his critical ideas and assistance with completion of this work. Special acknowledgement is herein given to Professor W. Glenn Clever who assisted the author with the initial development of the thesis and whose respected scholarship and academic guidance stimulated the author to become further involved with Canadian literature at the graduate level. The author is grateful to Marcel Aasen of the Kelsey Institute Learning Resources Centre for her co-operation in acquiring secondary source material for examination. Mr. George Henderson, Assistant Archivist, and his staff at Queen's University Archives, custodians of the Hugh Gamer Papers, are also thanked for their assistance. Finally, the author thanks his wife Marjorie who has exhibited steadfast backing for this project from the outset. Without her continuous encouragement and support, this thesis would not have been completed. IV ABBREVIATIONS (Accompanying Page References In the Text) HGBS Hugh Garner's Best Stories. Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1968. LofL Legs of the Lame. Ottawa: Borealis Press, 1976. M&W Men and Women. Richmond Hill: Simon and Schuster of Canada, 1973. OPT One Damn Thing After Another. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1973. VofV Violation of the Virgins. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1971. YS The Yellow Sweater and Other Stories. Toronto: William Collins, 1952. NOTE: All other references are cited as textual notes which refer to publication data contained in the annotated Bibliography. v INTRODUCTION Hugh Gamer is one of the most important but least acknowledged short story writers in Canadian literature written in English. His importance lies in no small part in his creation of dozens of highly successful short stories which were initially published over a period of thirty years from 1949 until his death in 1979. In addition to the continuous popularity of his stories, Hugh Gamer as short story writer is important for the type of stories he wrote and their place within Canadian short story history. His stories are part of the realistic tradition in Canadian fiction. Collectively, they serve as a literary bridge between the works of those who came before, like Frederick Philip Grove, Raymond Knister, and Morley Callaghan, and those who have followed, including Alice Munro, Guy Vanderhaeghe, and W. P. Kinsella. Garner's approach to the short story is that of a literary tradesman who combines his wealth of personal experience and his intuitive ability to re-create in fiction much of the world as he perceives it. His talent for clear description and realistic depiction of character is enhanced through his extensive reading, as well as through his personal experiences as a non-fiction journalist and novelist. His world view is tempered by his identification, from childhood, with the working class. His social vision, therefore, is that of a proletarian writer whose stories often probe with accuracy the psychological impact of society on the individual. As a major contributor to the Canadian short story tradition, Hugh Gamer has for too long been neglected by serious critics. To date, no major study of his short stories has appeared. Indeed, principal historical studies in Canadian literature all too often ignore the significance of his short fiction. In the first edition of Carl Klinck's Literary History of Canada, which appeared in 1966, Garner receives only five brief citations, with emphasis on only two of his novels, Cabbagetown and Storm Below. His short stories merit only one paragraph, a paragraph which also discusses the stories of Morley Callaghan, Ethel Wilson, and Thomas Raddall (491, 707, 710, 720, 721). In the second edition of Literary History of Canada (volume III), William H. New, in the section dealing with fiction, provides more discussion of Gamer's short stories. Yet 1 2 this discussion too is not reserved for the Gamer stories alone, it shares a paragraph which discusses Cabbagetown and three other Gamer novels (244-245). New provides some insight into Gamer's stories, but only on a very superficial basis, since the passage discusses all of his Active creations. In David Staines's The Canadian Imagination: Dimensions of Literary Culture, critic George Woodcock writes extensively about realism in Canadian fiction. The former editor of Canadian Literature includes in his discussion naturalism as well as Marxist social realism. Within his chapter, he recognizes the work of Grove, Callaghan, Hugh MacLennan, and Mordecai Richler as being within the realistic category. Yet Gamer is relegated to a brief mention by Woodcock, who dismisses the Toronto author as one who "retains some standing even to-day in the Canadian literary world and is respected for his short stories and novels of Toronto working-class life, such as Cabbagetown" (72). Thereafter, the work of Gamer is completely ignored by Woodcock in his presentation. W. J. Keith's Canadian Literature in English appeared in 1985, and provides only one paragraph dealing with Hugh Gamer and his work. Cabbagetown is lauded and his short stories are compared to those of Morley Callaghan. Keith notes that Gamer "is a simple unostentatious writer who covers a wider range than Callaghan" (153). This all too cursory treatment, of an author whose creative work spans thirty years and whose stories have been anthologized around the world and translated into five languages, is by no means unusual among Canadian literary critics. In 1987, W. H. New published a work devoted entirely to the short story in Canada and New Zealand, Dreams of Speech and Violence: The Art of the Short Storv in Canada and New Zealand. In this volume, New grants Gamer only two passing references. The most extensive one merely recognizes Gamer for "his string of books" on such subjects as urban poverty , working class labour, and street behaviour" (89). Two theses have been written about Gamer's work. One written by Robert J. Reimer for an M. A. at University of Waterloo in 1971. Entitled "Hugh Gamer and Toronto's 3 Cabbagetown" the Reimer thesis contains a great deal of useful biographical material about Garner. It has since been superceded as a source of Garner material by Gamer's own autobiography, One Damm Thing After Another, which was published in 1973. The second thesis is Constance Arthur's "A Comparative Study of the Short Stories of Morley Callaghan and Hugh Gamer," which appeared four years before Reimer's as partial fulfilment for the Ph.D. at University of New Brunswick. Limiting herself to the Gamer stories from less than two decades of his writing career, Arthur has taken a comparative approach, examining how effectively each author uses setting, characterization, style and structure, themes and philosophies. In fewer than 120 pages, Arthur endeavours to discuss not only Gamer's stories, but the not inconsiderable number of stories published by Callaghan as well. The result is an unsatisfactory glimpse of Hugh Gamer's accomplishments as a short story craftsman. Consequently, neither one of these theses provides readers with a thorough discussion of the Garner short story canon within a Canadian tradition. In 1972, journalist Doug Fetherling published a monograph on Hugh Gamer as part of the Forum House "Canadian Writers and Their Works" series. This is an all too brief, fairly superficial look at Gamer's work. In addition to being incomplete because of its publication seven years before Garner's death, it is also inadequate due to its lack of in-depth analysis of the short stories. Hugh Gamer contains several useful critical comments about the fiction, but its principal value lies in providing plot summaries and biographical information on Gamer. For thirteen years it remained the only published critical work which allotted Hugh Gamer and his short stories more than a few paragraphs of critical text The most scholarly approach to Hugh Gamer and his work is by Paul Stuewe.