Hugh Garner was a maverick in his life and in his fiction. His vision, in his novels and in the short stories which are his most memorable work, was formed by his multifarious experiences during the Depression, the Spanish civil war, North Atlantic convoy duty, and by his sympathy for what he called the bottom half of humanity.
Garner's name will always be associated with Toronto's Cabbagetown, where he attended school before quitting at the age of sixteen. He was born to Matthew and Annie Fozard Garner in Batley, Yorkshire, England, and came to Toronto with his parents when he was six. Shortly thereafter, Matthew Garner deserted the family, and there can be little doubt that Hugh Garner's sympathy for the working-class poor had its origin in the effect of this desertion on his mother. It also accounts for the fierce independence that was characteristic of the man. Garner rode the rails in Canada and the United States during the Depression until 1937, when he enlisted in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and joined the Loyalist cause in Spain. After he was discharged from the Royal Canadian Navy in 1945, he turned to writing as a career. He had married Marie Alice Gallant in 1941, and to finance a writing career frequently interrupted by bouts of drunkenness, he turned to journalism and to hack writing, publishing 439 articles and essays in his lifetime, in addition to his output of 17 books, including shortstory collections, a volume of one-act plays, and novels.
Storm Below (1949), Garner's first book, is based on his World War II experiences on North Atlantic escort duty. The plot involves an Ordinary Seaman on his first tour of duty, who dies of a fractured skull sustained in a fall aboard the corvette H. M. S. Riverford. The novel's real interest lies in Garner's handling of the crew's superstitious reactions to the presence of a dead body aboard ship and in his exploration of their private thoughts and lives. Garner's sociological interest in his characters has led some critics to associate his work with the tradition of the naturalistic novel.
The sociological approach of his first novel is handled more surely in Cabbagetown (1950), which takes its title from a Depression-era slum situated in east-central Toronto and tells the stories of several families trying to cope with the effects of the Depression. The novel's ostensible focus is on the career of Ken Tilling, a semi-autobiographical figure, from his graduation from technical school in 1929 until his enlistment in the international brigades in 1937. Garner's noteworthy achievement is his depiction of the characters associated with Ken, delineated with an eye for the minutiae of the social and economic conditions in which they live and of the urban geography by which most of them feel imprisoned. Although Cabbagetown quickly became a bestseller, Garner was not satisfied with it. It had been truncated before being published, its language pared of much of its "impropriety"--hence when the book was republished in 1968 Garner first refashioned it, the better to reflect the language of the people he wished to represent. Cabbagetown was followed by Waste No Tears (1950), written under the pseudonym Jarvis Warwick in just ten days, and Present Reckoning (1951), an equally hastily written story about the postwar readjustments of an artillery sergeant. Beyond occasional flashes of wit, neither novel has much to recommend it; if anything, their appearance suggests that, as was often the case, the Garners were in financial difficulties.
The year 1952 saw publication of The Yellow Sweater, and Other Stories, his first story collection. "The Conversion of Willie Heaps," about a young boy's nearly fatal encounter with a deranged fundamentalist, shared the Northern Review prize in 1951 and was included in Best American Short Stories for 1952. Three other stories also made the anthology's honor roll that year. Apart from Storm Below, Garner's only explorations of nonurban subjects and themes, many of them inspired by his travels during the Depression, are found in his short stories. His shrewdly sensitive observations into character have no better expression than in these stories.
In the following decade Garner wrote only the occasional story. Most of his energy in these years was devoted to magazine journalism, principally with Saturday Night and with Liberty, which he edited for a year. In 1959 a Senior Arts Fellowship from the Canada Council enabled him to divert some of his energies from journalism, and he composed the first draft of The Silence on the Shore (1962), his most complex work. The didacticism and sentimentality evident in his earlier works are less obtrusive in this novel, the story of the interrelationships and private lives of the tenants of a dilapidated boardinghouse. As in Cabbagetown Garner's strength reveals itself in his penetration into the private hells of his protagonists. Although some of his characters are grotesques, Garner's general avoidance of symbolism prevents them from becoming universal types; rather, they are simply representatives of an urban substratum where life is always an uphill grind.
Major recognition came to Garner in 1964, when he received the Governor General's Award for Fiction for Hugh Garner's Best Stories (1963), a collection of twenty-four stories, including twelve from his first collection. In the years following this success Garner's creative energy seemed to wane. Author! Author! (1964), a collection of humorous essays, was not well received; nor was Men and Women (1966), a collection of short stories, or Three Women (1973), a trilogy of one-act plays. His detective novels, The Sin Sniper (1970), A Nice Place to Visit (1970), and Death in Don Mills (1975), lack depth but sold well. With the exception of his autobiography, One Damn Thing After Another (1973), the only significant new work of this late period is The Intruders (1976).
In The Intruders Garner returns to Cabbagetown to examine the impact that forty years of change have had on the neighborhood. The focus is on the disillusioned suburbanites who have infiltrated Cabbagetown in search of community involvement. What these middle-class professional families discover, however, is that class consciousness is difficult to overcome. In the end they relinquish the neighborhood to those who have always been there, the punks and the drunks and the working poor. Garner's lifelong concern for the people of this neighborhood was suitably commemorated in 1982 with the dedication of a housing development, the Hugh Garner Co-operative.
Although Garner avoided pretension as assiduously as he shunned literary coteries or fashions, he loved telling stories, and he had tremendous respect for his craft. He championed the cause of the down-and-out and was, above all, a gifted short-story writer. His stories continue to be anthologized in Canada and abroad.
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