The Loved and the Lost by Morley Callaghan

First published: 1951

Type of work: Social commentary/allegory

Time of work: The late 1940’s

Locale: Montreal, Canada

Principal Characters:

• Jim McAlpine, the protagonist, a professor of history who aspires to success as a journalist
• Joseph Carver, his prospective employer, the publisher of a newspaper
• Peggy Sanderson, a young woman loved by McAlpine and preoccupied with her love of blacks
• Chuck Foley, McAlpine’s friend and an advertising executive
• Catherine Carver, Carver’s daughter, a young divorcee in love with McAlpine
• Walter Malone, a cynical journalist
• Wolgast, a bartender
• Elton Wagstaffe, a black bandleader
• Ronnie Wilson, a black trumpet player
• Milton Rogers, a newspaper photographer
• Claude Gagnon, a newspaper cartoonist
• Henry Jackson, an artist friend of Peggy Sanderson

The Novel

Like several earlier novels by Morley Callaghan, particularly the important 1930’s works Such Is My Beloved (1934), They Shall Inherit the Earth (1935), and More Joy in Heaven (1937), The Loved and the Lost is both a realistic depiction of modern man’s quest for the self in the physical world and a symbolic study of the metaphysical conflict between the spiritual and the sensual.

At the center of this conflict in The Loved and the Lost is the protagonist, Jim McAlpine, a former professor of history, disillusioned with his profession and seeking more practical success in journalism. His first break in this direction, and the event that sets the action of the novel in motion, comes when Joseph Carver, the wealthy publisher of the Montreal Sun, sees an article by McAlpine in The Atlantic Monthly entitled “The Independent Man,” a title whose irony the rest of the novel will make clear. The central object around which McAlpine’s search for independence and his spiritual and sensual conflict revolve is Peggy Sanderson, an ostensibly innocent and unassuming young woman whom he meets when he moves to Montreal to try for a job as a columnist on Carver’s newspaper. Completing the important plot triangle in the novel is Catherine Carver, the rich publisher’s divorced daughter. Whereas Catherine draws McAlpine toward the social success he thinks he wants, Peggy impresses him with her lack of concern for worldly success.

The structure of the novel derives from McAlpine’s attempt to come to terms with his desire for Peggy—a desire which obsesses him in spite of her own obsession with blacks, especially with black men. Whereas the men at the newspaper—Milton Rogers, Claude Gagnon, and Walter Malone—interpret Peggy’s love for black men in the most stereotyped and sexual way, McAlpine himself is not sure. Whether Peggy is an innocent whose love reflects essential Christian charity or is merely a sensualist is the question that plagues McAlpine and the reader as well. While McAlpine pursues Peggy, even as she pursues black culture by her regular attendance at black nightclubs and her friendship with various black men, Carver holds him in limbo by not immediately fulfilling his promise to hire McAlpine as a columnist on the Sun.

Although McAlpine vacillates between the values represented by Carver and his daughter and the independence represented by Peggy, he does finally commit himself enough to know that it is Peggy he wants—that is, if she is willing to leave her black friends and come away with him. The conflict comes to a climax in the last few chapters of the novel when, after a brawl in a nightclub started by Walter Malone’s crude attempt to pick up Peggy, Peggy finally seems to admit the truth of what McAlpine has been telling her: that her obsession with blacks is dangerous and that she should come with him. Exactly at the point when Peggy is ready to yield to McAlpine sexually and emotionally, however, he decides that such is not the appropriate moment, that he would be exploiting her; thus, he leaves her to go back to his own hotel. The next morning, he returns to find that she has been raped and murdered. The novel ends with a dazed and lost McAlpine wandering about in search of a symbolic image of Peggy’s spirituality, knowing that he will keep her with him forever.

The Characters

The protagonist, Jim McAlpine, is a former World War II naval officer who holds a position at the opening of the novel as an associate professor of history at the University of Toronto. He is a man with social and professional ambitions which his academic life cannot fulfill. He is a man whose professed liberal values are challenged by Peggy Sanderson’s love for black men. He is a man searching for independence but afraid to let go of his needed social props to find that independence. In contrast to Peggy’s personal and social “untidiness,” McAlpine is a man who thinks that there is a place for everything and that everything has its own place. At the same time, however, he is not sure that he wishes to align himself with Catherine Carver, who, if anything, is even more concerned with straightening things and putting everything in its place than he is. Because he seems to exploit Peggy and Catherine in his search for his own value system, he is not a very appealing hero, even though the reader feels sympathy for him in his lost state at the novel’s conclusion.

Peggy Sanderson, for all of her declared independence and freedom from narrow social prejudices, also is a character with whom the reader finds it difficult to sympathize. In many ways, she seems the superficial liberated female of the 1950’s, a nonintellectual version of the “beatnik chick” who frequents jazz hangouts and demonstrates her liberated attitudes by sleeping with black musicians. Not to sympathize with Peggy, however, is to run the risk of being placed in the same camp as the cynical journalists who are obviously racist in their condemnation of her. Thus, both for characters in the novel and for the reader, Peggy poses a dilemma. One is never certain of the motives behind her so-called obsession with black men because Callaghan does not allow the reader a glimpse into her mind. In some ways, she is almost Christlike in her love, whereas in others she is a superficial and misguided hypocrite.

The remaining characters in the novel, in spite of their number, are primarily functional. They serve either as embodiments of the social values which McAlpine seems to treasure or as a kind of chorus, which echoes conflicting opinions about Peggy Sanderson’s behavior. The newspapermen who frequent Wolfgast’s Chalet bar and the musicians who work at the black bistro, the Cafe St. Antoine, represent two sets of value systems between which McAlpine is torn; indeed, the action of the novel often alternates between these two socially symbolic locations.

Critical Context

In spite of critical uncertainty about the generic nature of the novel, The Loved and the Lost won a Canadian award for fiction when it was first published, and it is frequently required reading in Canada in university courses on Canadian literature. In 1955, it was adapted as a Broadway musical, although it never reached the stage. It stands out in the Callaghan canon as somewhat of an anomaly, most similar to that earlier Callaghan anomaly of the 1930’s, Such Is My Beloved, for it seems very much a book about the complex problem of selfless versus selfish love.

Most critics agree that Morley Callaghan’s earlier novels constitute his best work, and thus, The Loved and the Lost, his one novel published in the 1950’s, has not received the same kind of praise and critical attention as his works in the 1930’s. At that time, when Callaghan made his debut as a writer, in the United States he was compared to Ernest Hemingway and touted as a master of the short story equal to Anton Chekhov and Leo Tolstoy. Although he never fulfilled this early promise and is not as well-known in America as he was in the 1930’s, he remains one of Canada’s most significant twentieth century writers.

Bibliography

Conron, Brandon. Morley Callaghan, 1966.

Hoar, Victor. Morley Callaghan, 1969.

Staines, David, ed. The Callaghan Symposium, 1981.