Such Is My Beloved by Morley Callaghan

First published: 1934

Type of work: Social commentary/allegory

Time of work: The 1930’s

Locale: Toronto, Canada

Principal Characters:

• Father Stephen Dowling, the protagonist, a young Catholic priest
• Veronica (Ronnie) Olsen, and
• Catherine (Midge) Bourassa, two young prostitutes befriended by Father Dowling
• James Robison, a wealthy lawyer to whom Father Dowling goes for help for the prostitutes
• Charlie Stewart, Father Dowling’s friend, a medical student and a Marxist
• Bishop Foley, Father’s Dowling’s superior
• Lou Wilenski, Ronnie’s lover
• Henry C. Baer, the proprietor of the seedy hotel where the women entertain their customers

The Novel

The action of Such Is My Beloved is deceptively simple. Father Stephen Dowling, an eager and intense young priest, becomes inexplicably drawn to and involved with two young streetwalkers, Veronica (Ronnie) Olsen and Catherine (Midge) Bourassa, in Toronto during the Great Depression of the 1930’s. Indeed, his involvement with the women constitutes the sole action of the novel. Father Dowling meets them on the street when they approach him on a cold winter day when he has his scarf around his neck, hiding his clerical collar. Although he is reluctant to go to their rooms, he convinces himself that they need his love as much as anyone else in his parish. The rest of the novel develops as a result of this initial misunderstanding by the girls and this initial hesitancy by the priest. The structure of the work hovers uneasily between the notions of secular and sacred love as Father Dowling moves back and forth between the Cathedral and the bawdy house, never really sure himself whether his love for the two girls is fleshly or divine.

The reader is never really sure either, for the novel sets up the expectations of a plot in which a priest is seduced by his fleshly needs, but then it defeats this expectation by continually deferring the reader’s decision about the nature of Father Dowling’s love. The secular characters in the novel, Lou Wilenski (Ronnie’s lover) and Henry C. Baer, the hotelkeeper, are firmly convinced that the priest is only after sex. Charlie Stewart, Father Dowling’s Marxist friend, sees the issue only as a social, not a religious, problem, while James Robison, Father Dowling’s wealthy parishioner, is concerned only with the more limited social difficulty of a scandal within the church over the young priest’s continued visits to the women.

Neither Ronnie, the older and more cynical of the prostitutes, nor Midge, the younger and more vulnerable one, is sure of the priest’s intentions. Although they survive by appealing to the fleshly desires of men, they realize that their own desire is one of the spirit, and thus they waiver between these two needs. Although each character’s response to Father Dowling’s fascination with the two women reveals his or her own bias, the crux of the novel, the basic issue on which the plot depends, is that the priest himself doesn’t know what his fascination means.

Father Dowling is so completely focused on the women that he spends all of his money to buy them clothes, even money he usually sends to his elderly mother. He humiliates himself by going to the wealthy Robison for help; he borrows money from his friend Charlie Stewart. In short, his entire life seems to revolve around the two prostitutes. The story reaches a climax when the lawyer Robison goes to Father Dowling’s superior Bishop Foley to tell him of the threat of a scandal. The decision of the two men is for Robison to use his influence with the local police to see that the girls are ordered out of town and for the bishop to see that Father Dowling is transferred.

The result of the loss of the girls is that before Father Dowling can be sent away to another parish or to a monastery, he becomes ill and is sent instead to a mental institution, where, as he says, he is out of his mind most of the time. During his moments of clarity he decides he will write a long commentary on the Song of Songs; the novel ends with his prayer that his insanity will be accepted by God as a sacrifice so that He will spare the souls of the two prostitutes.

The Characters

The only fully developed character in the novel is Father Dowling himself, and even he is developed only to the extent that he is his obsession with the prostitutes. He is characterized as the most eager young priest at the Cathedral, one who is loved by all who meet him. The other characters in the story, however, are never quite sure whether he is a naive innocent, a hypocritical lecher, or a truly saintly figure. Many times the reader is not sure either.

Although Ronnie is older and wiser than the young and “innocent” Midge, there is little in the novel to characterize the two girls as anything more than two young women who, because of the economic conditions of the time, have been driven to prostitution. Ronnie comes from a broken home in Detroit. She enters prostitution by accepting gifts from men to help pay her rent. After losing her job, she takes to the street full-time. Midge came from Montreal with a lover, who then abandoned her. The other characters, Lou and Mr. Baer, for example, seem more representative than real, for they represent sensual and cynical antagonists to Father Dowling.

The relatively two-dimensional nature of the characters is the reader’s first clue to the basically allegorical intent of the novel. Father Dowling’s love for the young girls is so unselfish that it approaches the Christlike. Consequently, Ronnie and Midge represent Mary Magdalene or the adulterous woman from the New Testament, while Robison is like a Judas and the Bishop like Pontius Pilate. Satan is represented both by Lou and by the hotelkeeper. All this is not to suggest that Father Dowling is a Christ figure in this novel, but rather that the novel makes use of characters who replicate biblical figures in order to explore, not a social problem, but a theological problem about the nature of love.

Critical Context

Morley Callaghan received his first writing encouragement in response to his short stories, stories that both Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald encouraged Maxwell Perkins at Scribner’s to publish. Callaghan’s first novel, Strange Fugitive (1928), a violence-ridden melodrama, along with the several books that followed it up to the publication of Such Is My Beloved in 1934, placed him in the camp of naturalistic writers concerned with the gritty realities of urban life and the realistic concern of social issues. None of his work before 1934 indicated his interest in writing religious allegory. Moreover, it has been noted that Such Is My Beloved has a milder and more fluent style than the hard-boiled prose of his earlier novels. Thus, this work is somewhat an anomaly in the Callaghan canon.

Critics have suggested that the idea for the novel grew out of Callaghan’s friendship with theologian Jacques Maritain at the time the work was written. In fact, the dedication reads: “To Those Times with M. in the Winter of 1933.” It is a novel that distinguishes him from his earlier image as a new fiction star similar to Hemingway, written during the high point of his career in the mid-1930’s, somewhat after his much-praised beginning in the 1920’s and just before his gradual decline from critical interest in the 1940’s.

Although Callaghan has published numerous stories and novels since the 1930’s, his reputation has never been solid either in Canada or in the United States. His short stories are still widely anthologized, but his novels are seldom read. His countrymen and colleagues honored him in 1960 with the Lorne Pierce Medal for Literature by the Royal Society of Canada, and in 1981 the University of Ottowa published a collection of essays entitled The Callaghan Symposium. Ironically, however, Callaghan is best remembered by Americans for his association with Hemingway, with whom he was inevitably compared when he first began publishing. In a book titled That Summer in Paris: Memories of Tangled Friendships with Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Some Others (1963), Callaghan has written about his sojourn in Paris in the heady days of the late 1920’s, when he associated with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, and others of the so-called lost generation. Although Callaghan is no longer so well-known in America as he was during his much-touted debut in the 1920’s, there is little doubt that his reputation as one of Canada’s finest writers is assured.

Bibliography

Conron, Brandon. Morley Callaghan, 1966.

Hoar, Victor. Morley Callaghan, 1969.

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