No Man's Meat

Hugh Oliver is Editor-in-chief of OISE Press, Ontario Institute for
Studies in Education.

Had this piece been one in a collection of short stories, I would have
had no complaint. It is nothing remarkable, but certainly worthy of
publication. My objection lies not in the story itself but in its
presentation. It is a short story (a novella, the fly-leaf claims) set
in large type on 42 small pages, bound between hard covers, priced at
approximately $1 for each 500 words, and trading, I feel, on the late
Callaghan’s reputation. In other words, a bit of a rip-off.

First published in France in 1931, the story is set in Northern
Ontario. A couple from the city, staying at their lakeside cottage, are
visited by an attractive younger women friend. In this triangle, the
woman friend and the husband spend a guilty and rather unsatisfactory
night together. The twist is that, in the morning, the wife and the
woman friend discover a lesbian attachment and abandon him—which, in
the 1930s, would have been considered risky, indeed risqué.

Callaghan’s blunt, simple, and sometimes-poetic style is a powerful
vehicle in the telling of the story; but a classic in the short story
genre, worthy of such elaborate production, No Man’s Meat is not.