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Michael Gnarowski — Series Editor
The Dundurn Group presents the Voyageur Classics series, building on the tradition of exploration and rediscovery and bringing forward time-tested writing about the Canadian experience in all its varieties.
This series of original or translated works in the fields of literature, history, politics, and biography has been gathered to enrich and illuminate our understanding of a multi-faceted Canada. Through straightforward, knowledgeable, and reader-friendly introductions the Voyageur Classics series provides context and accessibility while breathing new life into these timeless Canadian masterpieces.
The Voyageur Classics series was designed with the widest possible readership in mind and sees a place for itself with the interested reader as well as in the classroom. Physically attractive and reset in a contemporary format, these books aim at an enlivened and updated sense of Canada’s written heritage.
OTHER VOYAGEUR CLASSICS TITLES
The Blue Castle by Lucy Maud Montgomery, introduced by Dr. Collett Tracey 978-1-55002-666-5
Canadian Exploration Literature: An Anthology, edited and introduced by Germaine Warkentin 978-1-55002-661-0
Combat Journal for Place d’Armes: A Personal Narrative by Scott Symons, introduced by Christopher Elson 978-1-55488-457-5
The Donnellys by James Reaney, introduced by Alan Filewod 978-1-55002-832-4
Empire and Communications by Harold A. Innis, introduced by Alexander John Watson 978-1-55002-662-7
The Firebrand: William Lyon Mackenzie and the Rebellion in Upper Canada by William Kilbourn, introduced by Ronald Stagg 978-1-55002-800-3
In This Poem I Am: Selected Poetry of Robin Skelton, edited and introduced by Harold Rhenisch 978-1-55002-769-3
The Letters and Journals of Simon Fraser 1806–1808, edited and introduced by W. Kaye Lamb, foreword by Michael Gnarowski 978-1-55002-713-6
Maria Chapdelaine: A Tale of French Canada by Louis Hémon, translated by W.H. Blake, introduction and notes by Michael Gnarowski 978-1-55002-712-9
The Men of the Last Frontier by Grey Owl, introduced by James Polk 978-1-55488-804-7
Mrs. Simcoe’s Diary by Elizabeth Posthuma Simcoe, edited and introduced by Mary Quayle Innis, foreword by Michael Gnarowski 978-1-55002-768-6
Pilgrims of the Wild by Grey Owl, edited and introduced by Michael Gnarowski 978-1-55488-734-7
The Refugee: Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada by Benjamin Drew, introduced by George Elliott Clarke 978-1-55002-801-0
The Scalpel, the Sword: The Story of Doctor Norman Bethune by Ted Allan and Sydney Ostrovsky, introduced by Julie Allan, Dr. Norman Allan, and Susan Ostrovsky 978-1-55488-402-5
Selected Writings by A.J.M. Smith, edited and introduced by Michael Gnarowski 978-1-55002-665-8
Self Condemned by Wyndham Lewis, introduced by Allan Pero 978-1-55488-735-4
Storm Below by Hugh Garner, introduced by Paul Stuewe 978-1-55488-456-8
A Tangled Web by Lucy Maud Montgomery, introduced by Benjamin Lefebvre 978-1-55488-403-2
The Yellow Briar: A Story of the Irish on the Canadian Countryside by Patrick Slater, introduced by Michael Gnarowski 978-1-55002-848-5
FORTHCOMING
Robert W. Service: Selected Poetry and Prose, edited, selected, and introduced by Michael Gnarowski 978-1-55488-938-9
The Town Below by Roger Lemelin, introduced by Michael Gnarowski 978-1-55488-803-0
THE SILENCE ON THE SHORE
HUGH GARNER
INTRODUCTION BY GEORGE FETHERLING
INTRODUCTION
BY GEORGE FETHERLING
For about twenty-five years beginning in 1949, Hugh Garner was an unmistakable and virtually unique presence as a writer of Canadian fiction. He was particularly admired for his short stories, many of which became standard anthology pieces, well-known to students and general readers alike. One of his collections, Hugh Garner’s Best Stories (1963), won the Governor General’s Award for fiction. That was the only important literary honour he ever received, for his writing, and indeed his entire life, were one continuous critique of mainstream Canadian society. The upholders of middle-class values acknowledged him when they had to, but they did not reward him. They stuck to their principles and he stuck to his. The standoff ended only with his death in 1979 at the age of sixty-six. In the past generation, however, there have been signs that Garner’s legacy is being reassessed and moreover that this re-examination extends to his novels.
The first one he published, but not the first one he wrote, was Storm Below (1949), drawn from his service aboard a Royal Canadian Navy corvette during the Second World War. It found a ready audience and led to the first publication of Cabbagetown, a work he had been wrestling with intermittently for years. The title refers to a section of downtown Toronto that is still known by that name but was then a slum area where Garner and his fictional character, Ken Tilling, grew up (before the narrative propels Tilling into the Great Depression, as he ricochets across the country in search of work). When finally published in 1950, it was only as a cheap and heavily expurgated (albeit bestselling) mass-market paperback that mocked and distorted the original intent. Not until 1968, when there appeared a new edition with the deleted material restored, did readers see the novel for what it was: a Bildungsroman that was also a key historical document. It had not been written as a pulp novel, as the original paperback suggested. It was written, rather, within the conventions of social realism fashionable during the period in which the novel was set. By 1968 that type of fiction was nearing the end of its useful life as a living genre, yet was coming to be appreciated in terms of literary history. Specifically, such an approach to narrative was considered an important episode in the story of American fiction, but had far fewer adherents in Canada. Many vaguely progressive Canadian writers, such as the poet Dorothy Livesay, had written of the Depression’s effects on ordinary Canadians but had done so from a superior position, looking down. Garner was at or near the bottom, writing of the life he himself was experiencing and saw around him at ground level.
In the decades between Storm Below and the unexpurgated Cabbagetown, Garner confined himself to short-form fiction as he attempted to support his family through freelance journalism, a struggle punctuated again and again by collisions, feuds, and dismissals, because of the suspicion with which he viewed middle-class editors and other authority figures and they him; and also, perhaps most of all, because of his ever-worsening alcoholism — a problem so acute that Maclean’s once described him as Canada’s best-known drunk since Sir John A. Macdonald. Yet before the 1950s were out, he was hard at work on his most ambitious and important novel, The Silence on the Shore.
Garner
