1. Many anglophone Canadian writers have envied the strong sense of national and cultural identity that is shared by Quebecois storytellers. For Callaghan, as the critic Ray Ellenwood has pointed out, the whole issue is a red herring. There is no doubt that he is rooted in Toronto, but his novels are not in any way nationalist or regionalist. Though the city in The Loved and the Lost, the world of the mountain and the world of the river, are accurately described with feeling, Montreal is never named, suggesting to the dismay of some that Callaghan has been deliberately “continental” from the beginning. Political questions arise in his novels, but mostly as elements of a specific situation between two or three people, their character and not the politics being at stake. Does this mean that Callaghan is a profoundly Canadian writer, so secure in his own identity that he need make no issue of national or regional matters, or is he, this creature, a so-called insecure continentalist?
2. Callaghan’s Catholicism expresses itself in unorthodox ways. He is, perhaps, a kind of miscreant, “on the fringes of a religion and yet dependent on it.” He once told an interviewer: “At the end of your life, the whole question should be, ‘How did you manage to get along with people?’ If you say, ‘Well, I lived my life in the desert, loving God,’ to my temperament that doesn’t mean anything. Okay kid, you’ve dropped out, you’re a saint in the desert, you’re a hermit... but you know nothing about human beings. From my view, you know nothing about love. And if you know nothing about human love, to me, in my stupidity, you can’t know anything about divine love. I hate the person who loves the idea, you know. I don’t believe in that kind of love.” If The Loved and the Lost is to be read as a love story, discuss it as such in light of Callaghan’s remarks.
3. Self-discipline does not appear to be one of Callaghan’s values. He presents it as the enemy of passionate intensity and human involvement. He himself has said about McAlpine: “He made a mistake; I think he should have stayed with the girl. There should have been something in his heart that would over-ride any attitude. When you’re really good you don’t have to think. The trouble is, he thought.” In other words, a reason for doing something need not be reasonable. Discuss.
4. The critic Milton Wilson wrote: “The special talent of Morley Callaghan is to tell us everything and yet keep us in the dark about what really matters. He makes us misjudge and rejudge and misjudge his characters over and over again; we end up no longer capable of judgment, but not yet capable of faith.” Which, of course, leaves the reader uncertain about what moral stance to take toward a given character, leaves the reader in a state of ambivalence and ambiguity. Is this a strength or a weakness in Callaghan’s work?
5. Does Callaghan’s prose style, his determination that prose should “be like glass” – that the writer himself should not be there, should not in any way stand between the reader and the word – only serve to deepen that ambiguity, that ambivalence – for the reason that the author is never there to instruct or direct? The reader is on his or her own. And is this “being on your own” not, finally, the state of all his so-called “criminal-saints” – his heroes and heroines, and if this is true, is it possible that that is the bond he seeks, a bond between reader and character as criminal-saints? And does that imply that the reader who does not get this, is simply too tied to conventional narrative needs, the conventional wisdom, always remembering that today’s avant garde is tomorrow’s academic staple? Discuss.
6. Around the time of publication, 1951, several reviewers, suggested that Callaghan, in The Loved and the Lost, was attempting to solve the so-called “race problem” – and that having tried, he had failed. Discuss how this is a complete misreading of the novel.
7. Callaghan more than once declared that the great sin that preoccupied him the most was a man or woman’s failure to realize their potential. “The great trick in life,” he told Robert Weaver, “is to remain on an even keel – and somehow or other be able to draw yourself together and realize your potentialities as a man. And the great sin is to not realize your own potentialities.” McAlpine begins, as a tolerant liberal, by supposing that he can maintain the integrity of his character and develop his potential while operating among men and women who would exploit and corrupt his talent, corrupt him. He suffers, as does Peggy, from what some call innocence, but if it is innocence, it is innocence as unawareness. Would it be true to say that it is Peggy’s unawareness that beguiles McAlpine and that it is his unawareness that leads him to betray her – ( which is why who actually killed her is of no consequence to the story ) – so that the potentialities inherent in their lives are lost? Discuss.