Sense of the Local
The New Yorker is often referred to as a cosmopolitan magazine today, but in Callaghan's
era, this cosmopolitanism was more akin to the "upscale urbanity" that Yagoda describes in his history of the magazine than an openness to worldly perspectives or citizenship beyond the national that critics associate with international modernism (13). As Jessica Schiff Berman points out in Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism and the Politics of
Community, the magazine Cosmopolitan was associated with modernity, with "[t]he
implication, of course . . . that what is new is cosmopolitan" (39). In Cosmopolitan Vistas: American Regionalism and Literary Value, Tom Lutz also addresses the "the colloquial meaning of 'cosmopolitan' as up-to-date connoisseurship, of not so much knowing everything the world has to offer as knowing the best the world has to offer"
(47). He cites Nietzsche's claim that "'cosmopolitanism in foods, literatures, newspapers, forms, tastes, even landscapes'" reflects "not an ethical ideal or a philosophical idea but the description of a cultural attitude" (55). The New Yorker of the 1920s and 1930s was not interested in representing or being at home among various cultures; rather, it was founded primarily in order to sell advertising space to local merchants. As The New
Yorker's reputation for both journalism and fiction solidified it became popular nationally
and internationally, and this shift in subscribers' demographics resulted in changes to the magazine's editorial content, but until the Second World War, Harold Ross and his editors were very conscious of the necessity to appeal to their (sophisticated, East Coast American) audience. As the writer and fiction editor for the magazine William Maxwell explained, "Ross had a map in his mind of the thing The New Yorker should be covering . . . Florida, the West Indies, California and Europe were on it" since these were parts of the world which either interested New Yorkers or which they might visit on vacation, "but Illinois and Canada were not" (qtd. in Kunkel 107). These geographical restrictions applied not only to the magazine's journalism, but also to the fiction it published. For Callaghan, of whom the magazine took notice just as its unofficial editorial policies were beginning to take shape, not being a New Yorker was occasionally a literary
disadvantage.
Critics from Raymond Knister (1928) to Stephen Henighan (2002) have claimed that Canadian fiction writers, including Callaghan, "have been obliged to adjust their contributions to foreign markets" (Knister xvii). In 2007 Paul Goetsch observed:
Callaghan's success in the United States was no coincidence. Although many of his works are set in Canada, particularly in rural Ontario or, more often, in the urban centers of Toronto and Montreal, Callaghan usually does not emphasize the Canadian setting. Nor does he regularly "Canadianize" his works by addressing specifically Canadian issues in the manner of his contemporary, Hugh
MacLennan. (96)
Although there seems to be a consensus among scholars that Callaghan's decisions about where to publish have affected his work in measurable ways, less attention has been paid
to the fact that Callaghan's decisions about where to live have also affected his work. Scholars such as George Woodcock have written about the Torontonian's depictions of Toronto and Montreal, but friends, family, and Callaghan himself have focused more on how his decision not to live in New York has affected his work and his career.45
Callaghan must have been aware, at least to a certain degree, that his lack of familiarity with New York was negatively affecting his career with the magazine. White had put it plainly to him, when she wrote rejecting his story "The Homing Pigeon" on 10 October 1934: "Has anything come of your plans for moving to New York? We all wish you would seriously consider it and feel that it would greatly increase the quantity of stuff you could write for us." White was convinced that Callaghan would have not only found more financial success had he moved to New York, but also improved as a writer. She, Ross, and Sinclair Lewis were asked to write letters in support of Callaghan's application for a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her 1935 assessment of his work states that "He is an uneven writer but many of his stories have been distinguished work. In writing of New York and American life in general we have often felt that his work has suffered because of his enforced residence in Toronto" (Angell, K.S. Letter 1935). This letter demonstrates the conflicting sense of place between Callaghan and The New Yorker that is evident in the patterns of acceptance, rejection, and revision of his work. White believed that New Yorkers had specific ways of speaking and behaving, whereas Callaghan believed in readers' ability to identify with one North American urban centre just as easily as another. In some cases, Callaghan's unwillingness or inability to write about New York life
resulted in either rejections from The New Yorker –or exactly the kinds of adjustments to an American market that Raymond Knister referred to in his Introduction to Canadian
Short Stories (xvii).
45
In a letter to Peg Carroll, the wife of Callaghan's longtime friend and sports reporter Austin (Dink) Carroll, Loretto Callaghan remarks that "Morley has started a new book, and of course it is to be his biggest and best. The Canadian editors cannot persuade him to lie down and quit. I guess we should have gone to live in the States and then he would have been appreciated in his own country" (n.d.). Here she makes an argument that is similar to the one that critic Edmund Wilson made in 1960, and that John Metcalf would later make of another New Yorker writer, Alice Munro: that Canadians ignore their own writers out of a colonial mentality; in order to be appreciated by Canadian readers, a writer must either come from the U.S. or have been validated by American critics and readers first.
When the magazine first began publishing fiction and required the help of an author respected by other authors such as Fitzgerald and Hemingway in order to establish its own symbolic capital, it accepted "An Escapade" despite its Toronto setting. In other cases, though, the setting, or specific details in the story that would prevent readers from imagining the setting as New York, influenced whether or not the magazine accepted Callaghan's work. On 19 December 1928 Angell wrote to Callaghan rejecting four stories, explaining:
This matter of fiction for The New Yorker is difficult and since we do not
regularly run stories they must either be just so perfect that we cannot see our way clear not to use them or so appropriate and so much a part of New York
experience that they belong in this very specialized magazine because of the theme.
These four stories were either too "far afield" for the magazine or not "up [its] street." On 28 January 1930, White rejected "A Guilty Woman," explaining that the protagonist, Mrs. Hilts, "could not possibly be imagined as living in New York" and that "a New York audience would not take [the story] seriously." Later that year White rejected another story because its premise "just d[idn't] seem possible – to people living in New York at least –" (Letter to Morley Callaghan, 12 September 1930). In 1931 Wolcott Gibbs rejected another "because of our old complaint that the setting seems pretty remote" (Letter to Morley Callaghan, 6 March 1931). On 28 March 1932, White wrote to
Callaghan, rejecting "A Sick Call," despite the fact that she considered it "a distinguished piece of work," because "in subject matter and situation" it was "a little out of The New Yorker field." On 28 July 1933 he received a similar letter from Gibbs, rejecting once again what he considered to be a fine story because of the geographical limitations of the magazine:
I'm afraid we owe you an apology for the length of time this has been held, but it has been very difficult for us to make up our minds about it. Everyone feels that it is a very expert and moving story, but there is one objection that we have finally had to decide couldn't be overcome. It is the question of locale which I'm afraid
has operated more against your stories with us than anything else. The story as you've written it is not a New York piece. There are so many details that would be unlikely here, that it would be hard work to list them all, but such things as the turtleneck sweater which Ross and I can't remember having seen or heard of for twenty years, the description of the place she lives in which we can't identify satisfactorily at all, and to some extent the dialect seem to place it definitely outside New York, presumably in Canada. I have no idea how the piece could be fixed without spoiling it since the provincial atmosphere is implicit in almost every sentence.
We return the piece very reluctantly, as we rarely get a story as sincere and effective, but we have simply got to confine ourselves to a New York
background or at least to one that would be intelligible to New Yorkers. Im [sic] sorry.
Here we see The New Yorker clearly refuting the cosmopolitan idea that its readers would be able to relate to, or even be interested in, a story set any place other than the "native" or immediately local. In fact, the magazine was convinced that its readers would assume any story was set in New York unless they were explicitly told otherwise. Gibbs's
implication here that places other than New York must be provincial is, itself, not merely nativist or localist, but parochial. He assumes that the magazine's readers will share this parochial approach to literature, which was an assumption that Callaghan's fellow Canadian, Robert McAlmon, in his letter to Callaghan describing the "insularity" of people who live in supposedly "cosmopolitan centers," indicates might have been well- founded.46 In its early years, The New Yorker's fiction section, with its insistence upon
46
On 8 January 1926, McAlmon wrote to Callaghan about Callaghan's potential move to New York: It might be a helpful experience for you to be in N.Y. for a while, meeting people. You needn't expect much. They're just people, and they stunt, and have the insularity of people in
'cosmopolitan' centers, where few realize that things do go on outside their city. Paris and London are that way too. Cliques and circles; … No one is worldly or sophisticated, so why not use the more restive and flagrant types as material, occasionally.
stories set in New York, ran counter to Callaghan's, and international modernism's, espousal of the cosmopolitan.
A few weeks later Gibbs sent a rejection letter to Ann Watkins, Callaghan's agent in New York, making a similar observation to her about Callaghan's work: "There is the same vague suggestion, we notice, in a great deal of Mr. Callaghan's work that the setting is some other place than New York. It's hard to put your finger on precisely, but neither the place nor the people are identifiable to me, or to Mr. Ross" (16 Aug. 1933). Gibbs's comments presage scholars' later claims about Callaghan's work. Woodcock, for
example, argues that "Ultimately the test of characters lies in what they say and how they speak. Callaghan's early characters are often laconic in their peculiar Callaghanese way of speaking; but they are usually idiosyncratic enough to be acceptable" ("Lost Eurydice" 34). Woodcock criticizes Callaghan's characters' dialogue as "undifferentiated
substandard North American" (34) while Barbara Godard, in contrast, suggests that "Callaghan is deliberately non-regionalist in his dialogue, using North American speech in its most general, if extremely simple, form" (56 my emphasis). Her phrasing suggests that this is an aesthetic choice on Callaghan's part rather than a failure. His dialogue is the facet of Callaghan's work that is the most commonly criticized by scholars, editors and publishers alike. New Yorker editors did not believe that his dialogue accurately reflected New Yorkers' way of speaking, while some of the more incendiary Canadian critics such as Henighan and Metcalf have ridiculed Callaghan's "North American" writing style as "vague, generalized . . . unfocused," and imprecise (Metcalf 134).
Don't think I tell you to expect grand things of New York, or the mob here. They are, as great city people generally are, unaware that things exist outside. Any alert small town person is apt to be more "cosmopolitan" minded.
Although Callaghan does not appear to have had a strong ear for dialogue or regional differences in speech, a letter he wrote to Gibbs in response to his criticisms of a story demonstrates a fundamental conflict between Callaghan's approach to fiction and the magazine's. While The New Yorker in its early years remained devoted to the local, Callaghan was devoted to the cosmopolitan, and did not seem to believe that regional differences exist between the North American cities in which he often set his stories. After Gibbs wrote to Callaghan on July 31, 1931, rejecting another story on the basis of setting, Callaghan responded to say that he was "taking another shot" at the story, and attempted to challenge this ruling:
About the pieces being definitely set in New York: I've always felt that actual names, street, names, store names and so on, don't need to be used. A piece in its fabric is either a city piece or it isn't, and a surface reality of names won't help it, although I can see where things about one place may be put it in [sic] that definitely make the story not of another city. But in my story, "The Young Priest," which you published, which wasn't about New York any more than Boston, or Montreal, many people in New York told me that they liked the story about the New York priest. An editor wrote me that he liked the story about the young priest at St. Patricks, and it took me a moment to think of Fifth Avenue. And in my own city here the brother of a priest who used to be at the local cathedral stopped me on the street and gave me a setting out for writing about his brother and a prominent parishioner, which pleased me immensely, though I had never thought of his brother or his parishioner. (3 August 1931)
This letter reveals the strength of Callaghan's belief in cosmopolitanism. At this point in his career, rather than consciously "adjusting" his work to appeal to New Yorker editors, or any other literary market, he saw North American cities as sharing a culture and perceived ways of being and speaking in Anglophone Montreal and Boston as interchangeable. For Callaghan, cultural divisions existed between the urban and the rural, not between Canada and the United States, and this approach to place was might account for the vague descriptions of setting in some of the stories he submitted to The
New Yorker. As the 1930s progressed, however, Callaghan found himself "adjusting" his work, or allowing his editors to adjust it for him, in order to make it clear that his stories were set in New York.