As an early April shower drenches Toronto’s exclusive Rosedale neighbourhood, Barry Callaghan and I sit in the library of his family’s home, discussing his place in the Canadian literary world. The walls of the library are covered with pictures of his father, Morley, at almost every stage of his long and celebrated life. One picture in the corner of the room shows Morley working away at a desk in that same corner. “I’m peripheral at the core, which is a very nice place to be,” says Callaghan, who speaks quite deliberately, which has the effect of making his deep voice seem even deeper. “Who in their right mind wants to be an insider?”

It’s perhaps not entirely accurate for Callaghan to claim outsider status, considering his literary pedigree, his many books of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction, his stint as books editor of the long-defunct Toronto Telegram, and his former position as professor of English at Toronto’s York University, from which he has retired. 

Nevertheless, Callaghan speaks his mind like an outsider, on everything from politics to literature to the state of modern criticism. Over the course of our conversation, he refers to the current prime minister as “that fucking secret little bastard Harper”; he says of Hugh MacLennan, whose work he believes has not stood the test of time, that “the day he died was the day he disappeared”; and when asked about the state of book reviewing, he bemoans the lack of present-day equivalents to Edmund Wilson or I.F. Stone. “Look at the state of the book pages,” he says. “The fundamental thing that’s missing in this culture is criticism of high seriousness.” 

The day after our conversation, Callaghan’s new novel, Beside Still Waters, was on the receiving end of a very positive review in the shrinking books pages of The Globe and Mail. The new novel is, in fact, a reworking of his 1989  The Way the Angel Spreads Her Wings. Callaghan didn’t return to the material because he disliked the original; he did it because he saw it as a challenge. “I’ve done a lot of translating, and it was kind of like translating,” he says. “There’s an almost mystical pursuit of the best word.” In the end, Callaghan says, he had to rewrite virtually every sentence. “I’ve never been afraid to stroke out my own best lines.”

Callaghan published Angel with Key Porter Books, but he is publishing Beside Still Waters with his longtime editor and publisher Kim McArthur, of McArthur & Company. According to McArthur, Callaghan has been consumed with rewriting Angel for the past couple of years, even abandoning a new work-in-progress in order to focus on it. “He kept phoning me last year, saying, ‘This is taking over my life,’” McArthur says. But the result, she adds, is an entirely new work.

Callaghan’s unique rewrite certainly isn’t something that McArthur & Company is promoting. Most of the publicity material for the book makes no mention of the connection between Beside Still Waters and Angel. As Callaghan sees it, the evolution is a non-issue, and he points to the fact that he has frequently revised his first book, The Hogg Poems and Drawings, for new editions. And both Callaghan and McArthur cite as a precedent James Joyce’s Stephen Hero, a novel that was never published and ultimately rewritten as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. “I want the thing to be what I want it to be,” says Callaghan. 

As our conversation ends, Callaghan points out a few photos in the library. Referring back to his earlier comment about the decline of big ideas and big thinkers in the public sphere – “Things have not gotten larger, things have gotten smaller” – he notes a black-and-white shot featuring six well-dressed figures, circa the 1960s, walking across a nicely manicured field somewhere in Toronto’s east end. Pictured, from left to right, are his father, composer and conductor Sir Ernest MacMillan, actress Kate Reid, A.Y. Jackson, Glenn Gould, and Marshall McLuhan. Morley, as his son refers to him, is a couple strides away from the other five, who are shoulder-to-shoulder. “Peripheral at the core,” says Callaghan.