Cabbagetown: A Novel [Paperback]

Had Hugh MacLennan been an anarcho-syndicalist and a D.H. Lawrence devotee, he might have written books like Cabbagetown, a voluminous tale of depression-era Canada that's arguably Hugh Garner's finest novel. First published in a bowdlerized edition in 1950, Cabbagetown is one of the few Canadian novels published before 1960 that is genuinely frank about sex and politics, and as a result, it's one of the few literary artifacts of its time to dismantle the myth of Toronto the Good.

Set in Toronto's east-end Cabbagetown neighbourhood ("the largest Anglo-Saxon slum in North America," not the comfortable middle-class enclave it has since become), Garner's novel begins on the eve of the Great Depression, with his teenage characters leaving school, finding paltry jobs, and attending half-innocent kissing parties at their more privileged friends' homes. The effects of the stock market collapse slowly begin to crush Cabbagetown's paltry economy, and Garner's characters--the earnestly struggling Ken Tilling and the sometime love of his life Myrla Patson most prominent among them--do what they can to survive. Some turn to crime, prostitution, or wage slavery and others ride the rails, while one cynical social climber becomes a crypto-fascist and government clerk.

Cabbagetown is chiefly notable as an alternative social history of Toronto. There's nothing puritanical about Garner's novel; in this Old Ontario, people cruise for sex in city parks, drink themselves to death, and lie, cheat, cuss, and steal for all they're worth. It's also an Ontario rife with political struggle: in one of the novel's most disturbing scenes, a gang of fascist youths attacks a party of picnicking Jews at Cherry Beach; later, Ken Tilling finds his way into the Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. As literary art, Cabbagetown is decidedly second-tier. Readers who have yet to read Norman Levine's (By a Frozen River or Canada Made Me) shouldn't turn to Garner just yet. Nonetheless, its brutal honesty makes it a consistently rewarding novel, and far more than a mere historical curiosity. --Jack Illingworth

"...as important and revealing as The Grapes of Wrath." -- Globe and Mail

Toronto's Cabbagetown in the Depression...North America's largest Anglo-Saxon slum. Ken Tilling leaves school to face the bleak prospects of the dirty thirties-where do you go, what do you do, how do you make a life for yourself when all the world offers in unemployment, poverty and uncertainty?

"As a social document, Cabbagetown is as important and revealing as either The Tin Flute or The Grapes of Wrath. Stern realism has also projected upon the pages of a whole gallery of types, lifelike and convincing. He is well fitted to hold the mirror up to human nature." Globe and Mail.

Cabbagetown was first published in an abbreviated paperback edition in 1950 and was published in its entirety in 1968. This, the first quality paperback edition, contains the full unexpurgated text of Cabbagetown.

The Depression was no longer euphemistically called the slump, the panic, the recession or such things. Hoover's "chicken in every pot" had been flushed down the same drain as "just around the corner there's a rainbow in the sky." The poor of Cheapside, Harlem, Berlin's Wedding, St. Henri, the east side of Vancouver, the north side of Winnipeg, and Cabbagetown, took their unemployment stoically, as they had always taken disaster. Some chose apathy, some revolt, some fatalism, and some "took care of number one." -- From Book Two, Chapter 12

The year is 1929. Follow Ken Tilling as he passes from a 16-year-old adolescent to a young man of 24 during a time of struggle, hunger and deep sadness. If you rooted for the young man fighting his way out of a Montreal ghetto in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz or cheered when the boy finally leaves his poverty-stricken home in Ireland in Angela's Ashes, you will applaud Ken's search for truth and maturity.

Hugh Garner is one of Canada's best known writers. Born in Yorkshire, England he grew up in the Cabbagetown section of Toronto. He left technicall school on his sixteenth birthday and the next day began work at the Toronto Star.
During the Depression he rode freight trains across Canada and the U.S.A., working at every conceivable kind of job. With the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, he joined the Abraham Lincoln Battalion of the International Brigades. Back in Canada after the war, he worked at odd jobs until World War II when he joined the Navy and served on Atlantic convoy duty until 1945.
He is the author of nine novels, five collections of short stories, a book of humourous essays, and his autobiography One Damn Thing After Another.