Hugh Garner's Best Stories

Hugh Garner

Description

Hugh Garner’s Best Stories received the Governor General’s Literary Award for English-language fiction in 1963. The collection consists of twenty-four stories composed between the late 1930s and the early 1960s and reflects the immense flux of the mid-century, from the Great Depression to the Spanish Civil War, World War II, the Civil Rights movement, and second-wave feminism. Garner takes on issues ranging from anglophone–francophone conflict in Canada to racism in the American South, from the disenfranchisement of First Nations people to the mistreatment of the mentally disabled. Best Stories is not only notable for the devastating precision of its prose, but also for its contribution to the Spanish Civil War literary canon. This new edition brings short fiction by Garner into conversation with the wider canon of Canadian and transnational leftist and proletarian literature.

Sujets

• Short Stories
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Presses de l'Université d'Ottawa
• Date de parution: 21 mai 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780776622620
• Langue: English

Extrait

The University of Ottawa Press gratefully acknowledges the support extended to its publishing list by Heritage Canada through the Canada Book Fund, by the Canada Council for the Arts, by the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program and by the University of Ottawa. The University of Ottawa Press also gratefully acknowledges the financial support provided by Editing Modernism in Canada.
Copy editing: Barbara Ibronyi
Proofreading: Michael Waldin
Typesetting: CS
Cover design: Lisa Marie Smith
Cover image: Los Canadienses (detail) by Bill Stapleton, 1986.
Reproduced with kind permission from the Canadian War Museum.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Garner, Hugh, 1913-1979
[Short stories. Selections]
Hugh Garner s best stories / edited and with an introduction
by Emily Robins Sharpe. -- A critical edition.
(Canadian literature collection)
Includes bibliographical references.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-0-7766-2261-3 (paperback).--ISBN 978-0-7766-2263-7 (pdf).--
ISBN 978-0-7766-2262-0 (epub)
I. Robins Sharpe, Emily, 1983-, editor II. Title. III. Title: Best
stories. IV. Series: Canadian literature collection
PS8513.A64A15 2015
C813 .54
C2015-903524-4 C2015-903525-2
University of Ottawa Press, 2015
Printed in Canada by Gauvin Press
Contents
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
INTRODUCTION
I. Garner s Life and Writing
II. The Stories in Context
III. A Cultural History of Work
IV. The Spanish Civil War and Garner s Oeuvre
V. Textual History
VI. Critical Reception
Bibliography

HUGH GARNER S BEST STORIES

EXPLANATORY NOTES
TEXTUAL NOTES
Introducing Canada and the Spanish Civil War
H ugh Garner s Best Stories joins This Time a Better Earth in a sub-series of the University of Ottawa Press s Canadian Literature Collection. The sub-series is comprised of texts in which the Spanish Civil War features prominently. These print publications emerge out of a larger scholarly and public project dedicated to the exploration of Canadian cultural involvement in the Spanish Civil War. For more information, visit: spanishcivilwar.ca
BART VAUTOUR and EMILY ROBINS SHARPE
Co-directors of Canada and the Spanish Civil War
Acknowledgements
T here are many people whose support of this project has helped to bring Hugh Garner s Best Stories back into print. The research collaborations and spirited discussions that attended this work have been among the most energizing and fulfilling experiences of my career.
First and foremost, I am grateful to Barbara Wong for her support of this project and her broader encouragement of research into Garner s life and writing.
At every phase of this process, I have had the honour to work with talented undergraduate and graduate student interns. I am grateful to Kelsie Lyons, Abigail Slinger, Adam Cotton, Emily Murphy, Daniel Marcotte, and Kevin Levangie for their diligent research, careful editing, and thoughtful comments.
I owe a great debt to the archivists and librarians who have assisted this recovery project. The staff of the Queen s University Archives, especially Heather Home; the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library; the Toronto Reference Library, especially Richard MacCallum; and Keene State College s Mason Library have contributed essential resources and facilitated my research.
This project has been supported from start to finish by Dean Irvine and our incredible colleagues in the Editing Modernism in Canada Project (EMiC)-which will continue to yield many more critical recovery projects in years to come. Jonathan P. Eburne was an early source of inspiration and encouragement, and Bart Vautour, Patricia Rae, and Michael J. New offered kind support and thoughtful feedback as this project progressed. I am especially admiring of Bart s incisive, essential work on Canadian Spanish Civil War literature and his dedication to collaborative scholarship. I am grateful to my colleague Patricia Pedroza Gonz lez for her assistance with the translation work.
I would like to acknowledge the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and Penn State University for their support of my doctoral studies, when this project was generated. EMiC funding supported much of the research for this project, as well as my own postdoctoral work.
Ricki and Steven Sharpe and Colleen and Mike New have provided me with the space to research and think about this project. The work of this edition is dedicated to my grandmothers, Helen Sharpe and Gloria Robins, and to the memory of my grandfathers, Sydney Robins and Sydney Sharpe, and to all those whose lives were shaped by the Great Depression.
Introduction
H ugh Garner s Best Stories represents a quarter century of short prose that, taken together, develops a keen, careful view of Canada s changing social conditions. Composed between the late 1930s and the early 1960s, these stories reflect the immense flux of the midcentury, including the Great Depression, the Spanish Civil War, World War II, the Civil Rights movement, and second-wave feminism. Garner takes on issues ranging from anglophone- francophone conflict in Canada to racism in the American South, from the disenfranchisement of First Nations people to the mistreatment of the mentally disabled.
Best Stories received both critical and popular acclaim when it was first published in 1963, even winning the prestigious Governor General s Literary Award for English-language fiction that year. The individual stories also had vibrant lives both before and after their inclusion in the collection, as Garner published them in magazines and journals; rewrote them into narratives for the radio, stage, and screen; and supervised their translation and republication in anthologies and textbooks around the world. The twenty-four stories included here have been reproduced hundreds of times.
However, despite the recognition earned by Garner s stories-individually and collectively- Best Stories has remained out of print for over thirty years. Along with the other texts in the Canada and the Spanish Civil War sub-series of the University of Ottawa Press s Canadian Literature Collection, Garner s collected short stories provide an important, often overlooked perspective on Canadian participation in the Spanish Civil War, and Canadian midcentury culture more generally. This critical edition of Hugh Garner s Best Stories follows the republication of Ted Allan s 1939 novel This Time a Better Earth in the sub-series and joins an emerging canon of Canadian cultural responses to the war in Spain. Like Allan, Garner travelled to Spain to support the Spanish Republican cause, and his fictionalized representations of the conflict are a key aspect of this developing canon. My intention for this critical edition, then, is to begin the work of literary recovery by reintroducing Best Stories into crucial discussions of leftist literature, Canadian Spanish Civil War participation, and transnational engagement.
In order to situate Best Stories within the emergent field of Canadian Spanish Civil War studies, this edition includes explanatory notes to provide historical and cultural context and textual notes to mark the stories evolution over the course of their multiple republications. This edition takes the 1963 edition of Best Stories as its copy text; each story s original publication date (when applicable) is listed alongside the story, with full publication information included in the bibliography. As well, this introduction offers an overview of the individual stories publication history and the collected work s reception, along with a historical and biographical overview of Garner s work. Best Stories also provides a useful counterpart to Garner s better-known midcentury novel Cabbagetown , a text with its own important representations of the Great Depression and the Spanish Civil War.
If North American midcentury culture provided a crucial backdrop for Garner s stories, his singular life also afforded key material. In his 1973 memoir, One Damn Thing after Another! , Garner repeatedly acknowledges the overlap between his lived experiences and his fictional works: Though I wasn t aware of it in my younger days, it seems that most of my jobs, travels, love affairs, wars, and living in general, were preparations for writing (xiii). The autobiographical clues that Garner provides in his memoir suggest his awareness that representing real lives-the lives of working class Canadians of different races, genders, ages, and backgrounds-was an important literary task: I can depict with reasonable accuracy the life-style and speech of prostitutes, housewives, downtown landladies, nuns, policemen, soldiers, sailors, prison inmates, Indians, schoolteachers, con artists, bartenders, librarians, pimps, drunks, and suburbanites of both sexes (xiii). Garner wrote about working class life from within. Rather than imagined, idealized, or fantastical versions of proletarian life, he actively sought realism, even going so far as to use his subsequent memoir to corroborate his fiction.
Yet, of all his writing-his memoir, novels, essays, journalism, and short stories-Garner was proudest of his short stories, in all their permutations. He believed the short story to be the most difficult literary art form (Anderson 30) and hoped that his short stories would not only live longer than my novels but also give me a little bit of immortality (Anderson 29-30). One of Garner s biographers, Douglas G. Fetherling, comments that line for line, story for story, year for year-Hugh Garner is the best storyteller we have (10). While I leav