Silence Made Visible: Howard O'Hagan and Tay John

Alan Thomas is a professor of English at the University of Toronto.

Howard O’Hagan has been described as the writer whom Canadian
literature forgot—that is, ignored. The reason for this lack of
attention lies in the stuttering and uncertain course of his writing
life. Two novel-length works (Tay John and The School-Marm Tree) and two
collections of stories (Wilderness Men and The Woman Who Got on at
Jasper Station) were published in his lifetime (he died in 1982). But it
seems that O’Hagan never became a thoroughly professional writer,
producing books at a deliberate rate, experimenting with technique, and
enlarging scope.

This book shows that O’Hagan possessed a truly literary sensibility
(the memoir of a meeting with Lowry speaks volumes in this regard, and
the honorary doctorate he received from McGill in 1982 was recognition
of his talent), but it seems that he did not fully exploit this gift.
One reason may have been the limitation of his adopted self-image, that
of the romantic wilderness man, in the line of Jack London and, for that
matter, Hemingway. This self-image had literary consequences. W.J.
Keith, in a brief but stimulating essay, suggests that O’Hagan worked
skilfully and subtly to accommodate the casual narrative mode of the
wilderness man—the tall tale—to the technical demands of the short
story or novel. Evidently the source ran dry.

Editor Margery Fee performs a useful task in recovering O’Hagan’s
reputation. Particularly delightful and revealing are the passages she
presents of O’Hagan’s minutes of Arts Club meetings at the
University of California at Berkeley; these emerge as spoofs, with the
inventive play of fiction and evidence of a sophisticated and witty
intelligence that we must admire and perhaps regret did not find larger
outlet.