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with the deleted material restored, did readers see the novel for what it was: a Bildungsroman that was also a key historical document.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 was born in 1913 to working-class English parents in Batley, near Leeds, in the West Riding of Yorkshire — in that era, a grim and grimy district of mining and heavy industry. His father immigrated to Canada, intending to send for his family once he found work. Hearing nothing, Garner’s mother brought her children here in 1919, only to learn that her husband had abandoned them — disappeared — leaving them to fend for themselves.