Flying a Red Kite
Page 1
Michael Gnarowski — Series Editor
Dundurn presents the Voyageur Classics series, building on the tradition of exploration and rediscovery and bringing forward time-tested writing about the Canadian experience in all its varieties.
This series of original or translated works in the fields of literature, history, politics, and biography has been gathered to enrich and illuminate our understanding of a multi-faceted Canada. Through straightforward, knowledgeable, and reader-friendly introductions, the Voyageur Classics series provides context and accessibility while breathing new life into these timeless Canadian masterpieces.
The Voyageur Classics series was designed with the widest possible readership in mind and sees a place for itself with the interested reader as well as in the classroom. Physically attractive and reset in a contemporary format, these books aim at an enlivened and updated sense of Canada’s written heritage.
OTHER VOYAGEUR CLASSICS TITLES
The Blue Castle by Lucy Maud Montgomery, introduced by Dr. Collett Tracey 978-1-55002-666-5
Canadian Exploration Literature: An Anthology, edited and introduced by Germaine Warkentin 978-1-55002-661-0
Combat Journal for Place d’Armes: A Personal Narrative by Scott Symons, introduced by Christopher Elson 978-1-55488-457-5
The Donnellys by James Reaney, introduced by Alan Filewod 978-1-55002-832-4
Empire and Communications by Harold A. Innis, introduced by Alexander John Watson 978-1-55002-662-7
The Firebrand: William Lyon Mackenzie and the Rebellion in Upper Canada by William Kilbourn, introduced by Ronald Stagg 978-1-55002-800-3
In This Poem I Am: Selected Poetry of Robin Skelton, edited and introduced by Harold Rhenisch 978-1-55002-769-3
The Letters and Journals of Simon Fraser 1806–1808, edited and introduced by W. Kaye Lamb, foreword by Michael Gnarowski 978-1-55002-713-6
Maria Chapdelaine: A Tale of French Canada by Louis Hémon, translated by W.H. Blake, introduction and notes by Michael Gnarowski 978-1-55002-712-9
The Men of the Last Frontier by Grey Owl, introduced by James Polk 978-1-55488-804-7
Mrs. Simcoe’s Diary by Elizabeth Posthuma Simcoe, edited and introduced by Mary Quayle Innis, foreword by Michael Gnarowski 978-1-55002-768-6
Pilgrims of the Wild, edited and introduced by Michael Gnarowski 978-1-55488-734-7
The Refugee: Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada by Benjamin Drew, introduced by George Elliott Clarke 978-1-55002-801-0
The Scalpel, the Sword: The Story of Doctor Norman Bethune by Ted Allan and Sydney Ostrovsky, introduced by Julie Allan, Dr. Norman Allan, and Susan Ostrovsky 978-1-55488-402-5
Selected Writings by A.J.M. Smith, edited and introduced by Michael Gnarowski 978-1-55002-665-8
Self Condemned by Wyndham Lewis, introduced by Allan Pero 978-1-55488-735-4
The Silence on the Shore by Hugh Garner, introduced by George Fetherling 978-1-55488-782-8
Storm Below by Hugh Garner, introduced by Paul Stuewe 978-1-55488-456-8
A Tangled Web by Lucy Maud Montgomery, introduced by Benjamin Lefebvre 978-1-55488-403-2
The Yellow Briar: A Story of the Irish on the Canadian Countryside by Patrick Slater, introduced by Michael Gnarowski 978-1-55002-848-5
The Town Below by Roger Lemelin, introduced by Michael Gnarowski 978-1-55488-803-0
Pauline Johnson: Selected Poetry and Prose by Pauline Johnson, selected and introduced by Michael Gnarowski 978-1-45970-428-2
The Kindred of the Wild: A Book of Animal Life by Charles G.D. Roberts, introduced by James Polk 978-1-45970-147-2
All Else Is Folly: A Tale of War and Passion by Peregrine Acland, introduced by Brian Busby and James Calhoun, and with a preface by Ford Madox Ford 978-1-45970-423-7
In Flanders Fields and Other Poems by John McCrae, introduced by Michael Gnarowski 978-1-45972-864-6
Ringing the Changes: An Autobiography by Mazo de la Roche, introduced by Heather Kirk 978-1-45973-037-3
The Regiment by Farley Mowat, introduced by Lee Windsor 978-1-45973-389-3
God’s Sparrows by Phlip Child, introduced by James R. Calhoun 978-1-45973-643-6
Contents
Hugh Hood: An Introductory Note by Michael Gnarowski
Sober Colouring: The Ontology of Super-Realism by Hugh Hood
Fallings from Us, Vanishings
O Happy Melodist!
Silver Bugles, Cymbals, Golden Silks
Recollections of the Works Department
Three Halves of a House
After the Sirens
He Just Adores Her!
Nobody’s Going Anywhere!
Flying a Red Kite
Where the Myth Touches Us
The End of It
Hugh Hood: An Introductory Note
Michael Gnarowski
Flying a Red Kite, Hugh Hood’s first book, was published by Ryerson Press in 1962.
Ryerson, which had been established as the publishing arm of the Methodist Church in Canada, had a curious existence. Under the guidance and management of a sensitive editor in Lorne Pierce, it had one foot in the area of Church publications while the other did “missionary” work in the fields of Canadian literature. Established in 1829, Ryerson Press was a significant literary publisher in its own right, having brought out the work of major Canadian writers, from Charles G.D. Roberts in the nineteenth century to Earle Birney, Louis Dudek, and Dorothy Livesay in the twentieth.
Hugh Hood as he appeared on the back panel of the dust jacket of the first edition of Flying a Red Kite (1962).
For Hugh Hood, publication by Ryerson meant that he had stepped out of the world of occasional appearance with short stories in literary periodicals such as the Tamarack Review into the challenging environment inhabited by well-established and admired practitioners of the art of storytelling such as Mavis Gallant and Alice Munro — the latter, as is well-known, destined to win the Nobel Prize for Literature — and the older Morley Callaghan. Callaghan, it may be noted was an early presence if not a readily provable early influence in Hood’s life, since Hood had been a friend of Callaghan’s son Michael from their university days, and had spent much time in the Callaghan household.
Hood, who was born in 1928, came from a middle-class Toronto family with strong Roman Catholic convictions, something that lingered as a sort of moral compass in his fiction. In a tell-tale conclusion to an interview with Victoria Hale recorded in 1974 and published in Le Chien d’Or/The Golden Dog, he concluded his remarks with “… I’m in favour of tradition, and the seat of Christianity and Judaeo-Christian mythology.” He attended Catholic schools and went on to study at St. Michael’s College in the University of Toronto, from which he graduated with a Ph.D. in literature.
In 1957, he married Noreen Mallory, a professional graphic artist and set designer, with whom he would have a family of four children. The newly married Hood accepted a teaching position at St. Joseph College in Hartford, Connecticut, where he stayed for four years, and where he began to write with serious purpose. When a story was accepted and published by Esquire magazine in 1960, Hood was also tentatively offered a position with the magazine in New York but, tempting as that was, the Hood family preferred to take up an offer of an academic appointment in the English Department of the University of Montreal* where they arrived in 1961.
The Hood family lived first near the University of Montreal at 2541 Maplewod Avenue, now renamed Boulevard Édouard Montpetit, moving later to the comfortable, middle-class neighbourhood of Notre-Dâme-de-Grâce. On Maplewood Avenue, one could cross the street and climb the lightly forested (now crowded
with buildings) slope of the mountain behind the main building of the university and through a stand of young saplings find one’s way to open spaces where one could fly a red kite.**
In many ways this must have been a curious situation. The University of Montreal was, largely, a francophone institution, and its English department, small and anomalous, with mainly graduate students, was chaired by an unusual individual with a wide range of non-literary interests. Thomas Greenwood (he also has a literary identity as Alain Verval, who published poetry in French), a man of undetermined European background, had studied at the universities of Liège, Paris, and London, was interested in philosophy and mathematics, and had corresponded with some of the twentieth-century’s leading thinkers (reportedly the likes of Bertrand Russell, the British philosopher, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the French paleontologist), and was invited frequently to lecture on the geopolitics of the Cold War at American institutions from the State Department in Washington to the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. His English department was eclectic and free-ranging in its approach to the study of literature (Greenwood himself was keen on the Mabinogion and the bardic trouvères), and Hood found both Montreal and the English department a comfortable fit. He was given interesting core courses to teach and had enough time to devote himself to his own development as a writer of serious fiction.
Unattributed design for the front cover of the first paperback edition of Flying a Red Kite (1967).
Unattributed front cover design for the dust jacket of the first edition of Flying a Red Kite: Stories by Hugh Hood (1962).
As he recollected a quarter of a century later in a chatty and detailed autobiographical essay which prefaced the 1987 reissue of Flying a Red Kite, misleadingly subtitled “Collected Stories: I,” Hood went about the business of turning himself into a professional writer by a very disciplined and deliberate process. Starting out early in 1957, shortly before he got married, Hood took aim at the short story markets available in the pages of major American magazines such as Esquire and the New Yorker. He wrote with great diligence, some might say furiously, so that in the span of five years, between 1957 and 1962, he had written something like thirty-eight stories from which he would cull the dozen or so that would go into his first book, Flying a Red Kite.
As he worked on his stories, Hood was developing certain fundamental principles that would become defining elements in his writing. As he recalls it, “Throughout those six years I was trying to learn to write fiction, by the method of trial and error …” although, and almost in the same breath, he harkens back to his university days and the influence of Marshall McLuhan, who had pointed Hood towards James Joyce and the stories in Dubliners as key examples of the modern method of blending symbolism with a calm-eyed naturalism. As important an example as that work might have been for Hood, he also says (as a Canadian) that he knew the work of Morley Callaghan, Stephen Leacock, and Ernest Thompson Seton, whom he saw as “not a bad sample.”
Among other things, the 1960s, when Hugh Hood was embarking on what would be a remarkably prolific career, were also the harbinger of significant new developments in Canadian writing. With the appearance of Margaret Atwood, there was a coming into their own of a cohort of women writers who quickly displaced the major male figures of Canadian fiction. Mavis Gallant had led the way for some time, but she was now joined by the previously mentioned Alice Munro and the impressive Margaret Laurence. In addition, the names of Adele Wiseman, Ethel Wilson, and Marian Engel would lend their weight to what can be seen as a substantial claim on the reader’s imagination. Hugh Hood was entering a new world in which the women writers’ revolution had firmly established the female point of view in Canadian fiction. Post-modernism was just over the horizon.
Having established himself and his family in Montreal, Hood embarked on an ambitious programme in which long fiction, which is to say the writing of novels, would claim most of his time and efforts. Living in Montreal, he was at a certain disadvantage. A seismic shift had taken place in writing in English in Canada in that English-language publishing was now firmly centred on Toronto, and the literary scene, meaning visibility, connections, and all that matters in literary life, was now removed from the setting in Montreal.
Hood appears to have been undeterred by these developments. A glance at a bibliography of his work shows a steady output of published work in the years following the appearance of Flying a Red Kite. He connected successfully with several major publishers – E.P. Dutton and Harcourt Brace in New York and Longman in Toronto – gradually edging towards a long-term relationship with a smaller but more literary Oberon Press of Ottawa, which, in 1975, would take on his ambitious life’s work: a multi-volume sequence of novels which he called The New Age/ Le nouveau siècle.
What is particularly interesting about Hood is his intense delving into his art. The essay that opens this collection is an example of Hood examining the nature of his own writing. Testing, as it were, his own devotion to his art. He was interested in what can be described as the great flow of literature, in which he saw himself as a willing and happy participant. One notes his not infrequent reference to towering figures such as Tolstoy and Proust, who were clearly totemic presences in his imagination, but then there is also mention of Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene, James Thurber (hugely important), and (of all people) Walter de le Mare as models of practical approaches in addressing the problems inherent in a writer’s efforts.
Upon its release, Flying a Red Kite was well-received by critics and reviewers. There was general recognition that an important new voice had emerged in Canadian fiction, a voice that had its own timbre, and one which would have to coexist with the new sounds of an imminent post-modernism, a development in literature that would leave Hood happily distant. Canadian Literature, the pre-eminent journal devoted to Canadian writing, published a short but positive review piece in its Spring 1963 issue in which the reviewer noted that Hood’s stories were about “life, death and eternity,”and that the collection as a whole was a “subtle and generous book.” In the popular press, Arnold Edinborough, then an influential newspaper columnist, devoted a two-column spread to Flying a Red Kite, in which he said of the stories, “All have a professional polish and every page is a joy to read.”
Hood’s determined and self-imposed apprenticeship to his art would now begin to reap its rewards. Greatly encouraged by the reception of his book, Hood would continue to write and publish his stories in literary magazines such as the Tamarack Review and scholarly journals like Queen’s Quarterly and publications intended for a general readership such as the Montrealer. Hood had entered on the most important and productive stage of his life. Creatively, he was endowed with prodigious energy which resulted, ultimately, with an œuvre of some thirty-plus books, which included an impressive range of collections of short stories, the twelve-volume novel sequence The New Age/Le nouveau siècle, as well as essays and other writing of a more general interest, such as sketches about Montreal and a popular book about Jean Beliveau, the great centre of the Montreal Canadiens hockey team. He also found time to do public readings from his work as a member of the Montreal Story Tellers.
Hood died in Montreal in 2000.
Related Reading
A very useful annotated bibliography of published material by and about Hugh Hood was assembled by J.R. (Tim) Struthers and published in Volume Five of The Annotated Bibliography of Canada’s Major Authors by ECW Press in 1984 under the general editorship of Robert Lecker and Jack David.
In the course of his lifetime Hood managed to write on a variety of topics, some of which could be described as fugitive pieces. He remained current on the literary scene, appearing in long and short-lived little mags, magazines and periodicals such as Yes, Prism, Parallel, Canadian Forum, Intercourse, Quarry, and others.
Various critical responses and assessments of Hood’s work have been gathered in a single volume entitled Befor
e the Flood: Hugh Hood’s Word in Progress, edited by J.R. (Tim) Struthers and published in 1979 by ECW Press. For a study of Hood’s major opus, The New Age/Le nouveau siècle, the reader is referred to W.J. Keith’s Canadian Odyssey: A Reading of Hugh Hood’s The New Age/Le nouveau siècle published by McGill-Queen’s University Press in 2002.
* * *
* In Hood’s own words “… I got a letter from the secretary of the Faculté des Lettres of the Université de Montréal, asking if I would be interested in accepting a position there.…” The letter would have been instigated by Thomas Greenwood, Hood’s chairman-to-be, and would have been signed by Jean Houpert, an irascible Frenchman who was secretary, but, in effect, dean of the Faculty of Letters. The University of Montreal had been in a state of some intellectual “turbulence” in those two post–Second World War decades, partly because of strong currents of French-Canadian nationalism, and partly because it harboured individuals, both political refugees from France and Quebeckers, who were known for having sympathised with fascist thinking. (See Esther Delisle, Myths, Memory & Lies: Quebec’s Intelligentsia and the Fascist Temptation 1939–1960, Montreal, 1998.)
* * *
**The University of Montreal is built on the northern slope of Mount Royal. For a sense of locale, see Hugh Hood’s Around the Mountain: Scenes from Montreal Life (Toronto: Peter Martin Associates, 1967).
Sober Colouring: The Ontology of Super-Realism*
Super-realism, yes, because that is how I think of my fiction, quite deliberately and very likely unconsciously too. When I started to write novels and stories about the year 1956, I had no clear idea of what I was doing. I had had a literary education and knew something about critical theory and method as applied to the work of other writers, the classics especially, and some moderns. I got a Ph.D. in English in late 1955. After that I did more or less what I wanted. I began to write independently, feeling liberated from the need to defer to what other people might think. I was glad to get out of the graduate school.