Storm Below. Hugh Garner
by Paul Stuewe
Preface by Hugh Garner
Series Editor’s Note by Michael Gnarowski
BY PAUL STUEWE
By the fall of 1948, Hugh Garner was beginning to have serious doubts about the possibility of ever becoming a professional writer. After almost three years of work on a novel about growing up in the Cabbagetown neighbourhood of Toronto, he had produced an eight-hundred-page handwritten, and then typed, manuscript that had been turned down by all the major Canadian publishers. Desperate to elicit some spark of interest from the source of his latest rejection slip, William Collins Sons, he told them he had also written a novel about his experiences in the Royal Canadian Navy during the Second World War. When an editor indicated that the firm would like to see it, Garner found himself faced with yet another challenge in a career that had featured more hard knocks than free rides.
He had begun the novel that would become Storm Below in 1944 while stationed in Quebec City, one of the many short-term postings he was assigned during his military career. But he had managed to produce just a few pages of what he tentatively entitled “Convoy,” and although he would return to it periodically during the next four years, the book was less than three-quarters of its eventual length when he mentioned its existence to a Collins editor. Working non-stop over the following weekend, he finished the novel and, steeling himself for yet another rejection, dropped the hastily completed manuscript off at Collins’s office on Avenue Road in Toronto.
The result astonished him. Two days later he was informed that the book had been accepted for publication, and when he was shortly thereafter offered a contract and taken to lunch at an elegant restaurant, he could reasonably consider that he had arrived as a professional writer. Given this sudden change in his fortunes, he was more than willing to fall in with Collins’s suggestion for a new title for his work. He had submitted the manuscript as “Landlubber Lying Down Below,” the concluding line of a song he still remembered from his grade-school days, but not surprisingly Collins opted for Storm Below as a more dramatic and less lugubrious-sounding improvement.
Having become accustomed to the leisurely way Canadian publishers seemed to do business — one firm had held on to his “Cabbagetown” manuscript for eight months before deciding that it wasn’t quite their cup of tea — Garner was amazed by the speed with which Collins got it into print. Published in March 1949 to generally favourable reviews — noteworthy among them Roy Kervin’s Montreal Gazette notice, which asked “Who is this man Garner, who writes with such strong, sure skill?” — and respectable if not quite bestseller-list sales, Storm Below would in 1965 be described as “the most impressive Canadian novel of World War Two” in the prestigious Literary History of Canada. In subsequent years Garner would often receive letters from former servicemen complimenting him on the accuracy of his portrayal of the Riverford and its crew, and he typically wrote long and considerate replies to these reminders of one of his formative experiences.
Storm Below marked the arrival of a new and rather different voice on the Canadian literary scene. This brash young man from Cabbagetown, who would often correct well-meaning interviewers as to his “slum” rather than working-class origins, who had spent the Depression years hoboing around North America and fighting on the losing Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, and whose military service had been anything but a record of stellar accomplishment, had somehow produced a novel that earned him enthusiastic praise from reviewers, veterans, and the general reading public alike. Just how this came about is one of the most unusual success stories in Canadian literary history.
Hugh Garner was born on February 22, 1913, in Batley, an industrial town in England’s West Yorkshire region whose inhabitants worked in the local woollen mills and coal mines. His father, Matthew Garner, immigrated to Canada by himself in 1919, promising to send for his wife and two children as soon as he was settled in Toronto. When Annie Garner heard nothing from him for several months, she decided to bring herself and the children over, anyway, only to find her husband living with another woman and uninterested in reassuming his marital responsibilities. Although friendless and unable to rely on her shiftless husband — he immediately skipped town when a court finally did convict him of non-support — Annie Garner ignored her family’s advice to return to England and made a life for herself and her sons in Toronto. Working at menial jobs, often two at a time, she managed to ensure that her family usually had most of life’s necessities in a period when the little social assistance available was typically private, occasional, and often granted on terms that humiliated its recipients.
Six-month-old Hugh Garner in 1913.
In his autobiography One Damn Thing After Another (1974), Garner bitterly remembers such demeaning gifts as the sweaters provided by the Toronto Star’s Santa Claus Fund, “of a color I can only describe as puce,” and feeling as though they had been “knitted out of steel wool,” which when worn to school identified the wearer as a charity recipient. Acutely aware of issues of social class, and torn between resentment of his disadvantaged background and a fascination with those whom life had dealt an easier hand, Garner would go on to invest his fictional characters with what he saw as the characteristic markers of the castes into which society was divided. Storm Below’s representation of two of its Canadian naval officers exemplifies Garner’s complicated attitude toward people in positions of authority: Lieutenant-Commander Joseph Frigsby, the ship’s captain, rules his miniature world with a tough but fair hand, while Sub-Lieutenant Peter Smith-Raleigh is a snobbish, egotistical, and anti-Semitic jerk who owes his rank to his socially superior background.
Garner dropped out of high school as soon as legally possible on his sixteenth birthday in 1929, and when the stock market crashed in October of that year it became that much harder for a young man with no particular skills to find employment. He laboured at various odd and infrequent jobs in Toronto for the next few years, but by the summer of 1931 he was fed up with searching for the occasional factory and warehouse work that was poorly paid and barely provided enough to live on. In July he hopped a freight headed west and soon found himself harvesting wheat in southern Saskatchewan, earning what seemed like the princely sum of a dollar a day and board. But when the harvest season ended, he and many another summer agricultural workers found it necessary to hit the road again in search of a job. For the next five years Garner would travel all over North America, from Toronto to Vancouver and from New York to Los Angeles, gradually forming the intention of writing about what he had seen as a way of letting people know what was really going on in Depression-era society.
He made a promising beginning in 1936 when his essay on “Toronto’s Cabbagetown” was published in The Canadian Forum.
In blunt, graphic language Garner sketched what it was like to be on what was euphemistically called “relief,” as in this description of being allotted a new pair of shoes:
The room smells like an army quartermaster’s stores, and the recipients line up in front of the wicket. There are benches around the wall where shoes may be tried on. These are unnecessary as none of the shoes ever fit. The attendant ties up the order in brown wrapping paper and the recipient hurries from the office and down the street, looking straight ahead until he is clear of the neighbourhood.
Again, it is the resentment of being forced to rely on society’s handouts that animates Garner’s writing, and led him to take an increasingly active part in left-wing politics as the Depression showed no signs of abating.
When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, Garner saw this as an opportunity to actively battle for the kind of political and social justice that was so lacking in his own country. He spent