The Silence on the Shore. Hugh Garner

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      Garner served on a number of corvettes in the Royal Canadian Navy during the Second World War. Here he is on HMCS Arvida in 1941.

      What has all this got to do with The Silence on the Shore? A great deal, in my view. In 1918−19, immediately after the end of the First World War, the U.S. and Canadian governments commenced hostilities against the progressive movements in their respective countries. But people’s unpopular beliefs survived and, with the beginning of the Depression a decade later, grew far stronger until the Hitler-Stalin Pact ripped out their hearts. There were many individuals who, like Garner, joined the Second World War not to defend the British Empire but to continue the battle against fascism. But even these people were never again what they had been prior to Stalin’s deal with the devil. Many old leftists of course became anti-communists and did much to permit another kind of terror during the McCarthy era and the Cold War. Garner never did. He obviously shared the feelings of violation, betrayal, and emptiness, but he had a great advantage over most of the others in the same situation: he had art to fill the space left by the death of his ideology. The art was accordingly apolitical, except in the sense that he still believed in community — the kind of community that lies at the centre of urban life.

      Born ten years later than Morley Callaghan (and eighteen years before Mordecai Richler), Garner became the second in the thin line of English Canada’s great urban novelists. He wrote in pursuit of the city, though of course not always deliberately or even consciously so. And not the city of Toronto specifically but rather the idea of a city, created by and for the constantly changing cast of individuals who by going about their lives there, anonymously, show that democracy of a kind can actually function and a culture of sorts survive. To say that the city is so often the principal character in Garner’s fiction is a cliché, but a useful one.

      The Silence on the Shore was his peak achievement as a writer. He never again produced fiction so sustained and complex. It was also a book with a troubled publication history. The first edition was printed in the United Kingdom, and a labour dispute delayed its appearance in Canadian bookshops, whereupon Garner severed relations with the publisher, McClelland & Stewart. In his own telling at least, this incident hardly sounds like one of the major professional upheavals so common throughout his writing life, and there appear to have been legitimate complaints on the other side as well. One suspects that by the time Garner completed a novel of such length (the first version was twice as the long as the published revision) he had reached the stage of alcoholism that left him unable to undertake another. With the exception of a novella called “The Violation of the Virgins,” the shorter fiction he wrote in the nearly two decades that remained to him was far inferior to much of what had preceded it. In the same period his novels consisted of crime fiction and police procedurals, each less competent than the last, tainted by a documentary fervour to provide layer after layer of hard observed “fact” — the sort of information one can “prove” by looking it up. He had abandoned that wise dictum of beginning writers: reveal, don’t explain. The Silence on the Shore is quite different.

      The distinctive front jacket of the McClelland & Stewart edition of The Silence on the Shore was designed by Frank Newfeld.

      Readers of Garner’s short stories and his autobiography will find hints of many experiences and encounters that were given their ultimate expression in this novel: people slaving away in the dull journalistic underworld of trade magazines, the sadly eccentric landladies, the sexual deviants, the English remittance men, the semi-rural working-class Québécois, the veterans who have difficulty readjusting to civilian life, the immigrants whose deracination has made them come down in the world rather than rise.

      There is a tendency among many novelists to produce books of ever greater narrative and structural complexity, as Garner was doing here. His cast is a large one and their interactions complicated; the characters, especially the female ones, exist as individual personalities, not as examples. The setting is 1959 in what was once a prosperous middle-class home, now being operated as a rooming house, in the Annex, a downtown Toronto neighbourhood so called because the land was annexed by the city between 1883 and 1887. In the novel it is a district in transition, though the people involved don’t know which way it will ultimately lean: toward decay or redevelopment? Readers today have the answer. The Annex is a pricey and vibrant area associated with the arts and professions. Let me say that when I first knew it, in 1966, gentrification was just beginning, and there were still rooming houses much like the one in Garner’s novel, which perfectly captures — intuitively and imaginatively, without documentary taint — the way people moved about in the space that surrounded them and the texture of life there at the time. The type of monophonic and authorial fiction Garner wrote is no longer fashionable, but it can be read for its place in history and its grouchy love of humanity. In these connections no one could be faulted for calling The Silence on the Shore the finest work of his singular career.

      The front cover of the 1968 Ryerson Press paperback edition of The Silence on the Shore (here dropping “The” in the title) features a stylized typical Annex Victorian house.

      All that remains to be given here are some bibliographical footnotes. After his falling out with McClelland & Stewart in 1962, Garner was published primarily by The Ryerson Press, the publishing arm of the (obviously latitudinarian) United Church of Canada. In addition to new works as they were completed, Ryerson produced a paperback edition of The Silence on the Shore in 1968. Two years later, however, in what became a loud national scandal, the church sold its press to the American publishing giant McGraw-Hill, which renamed it McGraw-Hill Ryerson. Garner later published with that imprint as well but found a home more frequently in another “branch plant” of U.S. firm Simon & Schuster, which republished The Silence on the Shore in 1971. This publisher reasoned that “Gordon Lightfoot,” one of the novel’s main characters, would invite confusion with the Canadian musician of the same name who was then at the zenith of his fame. Accordingly, the fictional Lightfoot was given the forename “George.” The Ryerson paperback for some reason dropped the initial article from the book’s title, making it Silence on the Shore rather than The Silence on the Shore. These ill-advised tamperings have been ignored in the present edition, which adheres to the 1962 text.

      Selected Reading

      Batten, Jack. The Annex: The Story of a Toronto Neighbourhood. Erin, ON: Boston Mills Press, 2004.

      Garner, Hugh. Storm Below. Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2010.

      ____. One Damn Thing After Another. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1973.

      Hoar, Victor. The Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion: Canadian Participation in the Spanish Civil War. Toronto: Copp Clark Publishing, 1969.

      Stuewe, Paul. The Storms Below: The Turbulent Life and Times of Hugh Garner. Toronto: James Lorimer & Co., 1988.

      Zuehkle, Mark. The Gallant Cause: Canadians in the Spanish Civil War, 1936−1939. Vancouver: Whitecap Books, 1996.

      To Alice

      When it comes down to the final analysis

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