In 1914, on the eve of the outbreak of the First World War, Stephen Leacock, the multi-book author and economist – once a visitor to Montreal from Toronto, now the chair of the Department of Economics and Political Science at McGill University – published his collection of comic short stories, Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich. Set in an unnamed American city, which is only a thinly veiled Montreal, the book focuses on “the very pleasantest place imaginable,” Plutoria Avenue and its Mausoleum Club.
Just below Plutoria Avenue, however, the trees die out and the brick-and-stone of the City begins in earnest. Even from the Avenue you see the tops of the skyscraping buildings in the big commercial streets, and can hear or almost hear the roar of the elevated railway, earning dividends. And beyond that again the City sinks lower, and is choked and crowded with the tangled streets and little houses of the slums. In fact, if you were to mount to the roof of the Mausoleum Club itself on Pretoria Avenue you could almost see the slums from there. But why should you? And on the other hand, if you never went up on the roof, but only dined inside among the palm-trees, you would never know that the slums existed – which is much better.
From this perspective, Leacock sets out to deflate and destroy – with sometimes bitter irony – the pretensions of the wealthy, their materialistic drive towards more and more money, at the same time showing that materialism denies the inhabitants of the Mausoleum Club the sense of well-being which is the essence of life in society.
Leacock’s portrait, centered in the homes of Westmount society, dominated later fictional depictions of anglophone Montreal, though these later presentations lacked Leacock’s irony. Gwethalyn Graham’s Earth and High Heaven (1944), for example, exposed racism among the people of Westmount, winning the Governor-General’s Award for Fiction. Hugh MacLennan’s Two Solitudes (1945), another Governor-General’s Award novel, brought its characters from rural Quebec to Westmount dining rooms. Meanwhile, heralding the beginning of contemporary Quebecois fiction, Gabrielle Roy’s Bonheur d’occasion [The Tin Flute] (1945) chose the slums below Westmount to map out the lives of the underprivileged French in the Saint-Henri district, winning its own Governor-General’s Award.
In late 1948, Morley Callaghan, another visitor to Montreal from Toronto, who had spent some summers there too, came to know a woman at Slitkin’s and Slotkin’s in Montreal. “I’d seen something about her, a guilelessness that was dangerous – she, among other things, refused to see that as she socialized openly with men, and with black men, too, she aroused rage not only in white men but in black women; anyway, she became Peggy in The Loved and the Lost.” From this point, Callaghan developed his story, which was the first to depict anglophone Montreal from Westmount downwards to the dingy apartments and Negro Clubs well below Westmount’s boundaries. Two years later, he finished his novel.
As The Loved and the Lost opens, the focus falls on the mountain:
Joseph Carver, the published of the Montreal Sun, lived on the mountain. Nearly all the rich families in Montreal lived on the mountain. It was always there to make them feel secure.... But the mountain is on the island in the river; so the river is always there too, and boat whistles echo all night long aainst the mountain. From the slope where Mr. Carver lived you could look down over the church steeples and monastery towers of the old French city spreading eastward from the harbor to the gleaming river. Those who wanted things to remain as they were liked the mountain. Those who wanted a change preferred the broad flowing river. But no one could forget either of them.
Carver and “his handsome divorced daughter, Catherine,” inhabit the Westmount world, an enlightened liberal enclave of business men and their families. Into this tightly controlled realm arrives James McAlpine, a lieutentant commander in the Navy in the Second World War and now an associate professor of history at the University of Toronto; he is eager to leave the academic profession in order to write an invited and uncensored column on world affairs for Carver’s paper. Impressed by McAlpine’s quiet self-confidence, Carver vows to do all he can to aid McAlpine in obtaining his newspaper job. And his daughter becomes romantically entangled with the would-be journalist. “She talked quickly and brightly; she reached out to make his plans her plans, and she held him silent and wondering at the glow of her generosity.”
From outside Westmount appears Peggy Sanderson, the college-educated daughter of a Methodist minister who has lost his faith. At the age of twelve she had viewed a naked black boy, young Jock Johnson, and this sight proved to be her introduction to the happy companionship of the entire Johnson family. Her subsequent affection for the black race irritates the more conventional world of Westmount, and many others too.
How people react to Peggy reflects their attitude to the enigmatic mystery of life itself. The Carvers, for example, cannot ultimately forsake the security of their Westmount enclave. Although McAlpine is increasingly attracted to the beauty and charm of Peggy, he, like everyone else, is thrown off balance by her air about her– simple and light, that air of “dangerous guilelessness.” And so there comes a night when he abandons her to her fate. Having seen the wintry vision of “a little old church, half Gothic and half Romanesque, but light and simple in balance” on his first walk with Peggy, he looks in vain for the same church at the end of the novel:
he went on with his tireless search. He wandered around the neighborhood between Phillips Square and St. Patrick’s. He wandered in ths strong morning sunlight. It was warm and brilliant. It melted the snow. But he couldn’t find the little church.
In his realistic presentation of anglophone Montreal in its post-Second World War materialism, Callaghan fashions a haunting story. A tale of love which ends tragically, The Loved and the Lost is also a social portrait which encapsulates Westmount bigotry and the very same quality from beyond Westmount’s borders. The novelist’s duty is, as Callaghan remarked, “to catch the tempo, the stream, the way people live, think, and feel in their time.”
The Loved and the Lost appeared in March 1951. In the March 24th issue of the Globe and Mail, William Arthur Deacon, the literary editor, concluded that this novel, Callaghan’s seventh, “must be rated Mr. Callaghan’s best novel to date.” It went on to win the Governor-General’s Award for Fiction.
The Loved and the Lost is as timely, and as timeless, as the little church McAlpine cannot find on his own.
David Staines
September 2010