Canadian Odyssey: A Reading of Hugh Hood's The New Age/Le nouveau siècle 9780773570085

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Canadian Odyssey

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Canadian Odyssey A Reading of Hugh Hood’s The New Age / Le nouveau siècle w. j. ke i t h

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston · London · Ithaca

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© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2002 isbn 0-7735-2344-8 (cloth) isbn 0-7735-2389-8 (paper) Legal deposit first quarter 2002 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (bpidp) for its publishing activities. We also acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program.

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data Keith, W.J. (William John) Canadian odyssey : a reading of Hugh Hood’s The new age/Le nouveau siècle Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-7735-2344-8 (bound). isbn 0-7735-2389-8 (pbk). 1. Hood, Hugh, 1928–2000—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Hood, Hugh, 1928–2000. New age. I. Title. ps8515.o49z73 2002 c813’.54 c2001-903159-9 pr9199.3.h59z73 2002

Typeset in 10/13 Palatino by True to Type

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For Noreen Mallory, who made The New Age possible

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Contents

Preface

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Introductory: Reading Hugh Hood 3 part one: “the mythos of canadian life” The Making of The New Age 17 Roman-Fleuve 26 Hood and His Precursors 33 part two: towards the new age The Swing in the Garden 51 A New Athens 64 Reservoir Ravine 74 Black and White Keys 89 The Scenic Art 102 The Motor Boys in Ottawa 113 Tony’s Book 123 Property and Value 136 Be Sure to Close Your Eyes 146

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Dead Men’s Watches 156 Great Realizations 167 Near Water 178 Conclusion: Rereading Hugh Hood 193 Notes 197 Bibliography 203 Index 209

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This book is designed to serve as an accessible introduction for any serious reading of Hugh Hood’s novel-series The New Age / Le nouveau siècle. It is intended alike for general readers, students, and scholars interested in Canadian literature in English. The opening chapters provide preliminary information – biographical, formal, and literaryhistorical – while the rest offer a novel-by-novel discussion of each book in the series. Individuals will understandably wish to consult separate chapters – when tackling a new book in the series, for instance – and I hope that each is as self-contained and coherent as possible. It is, however, part of my concern and responsibility that interconnections should be pointed out and the shape of the whole appreciated; I therefore believe that, like The New Age and other specimens of romanfleuve, this book has more to offer if it is read from start to finish. The chapter on A New Athens first appeared in rather different form as “‘Layer on Layer’: A Reading of Hugh Hood’s A New Athens” in John Moss’s collection The Canadian Novel: Present Tense (Toronto: nc Press, 1985) and was subsequently reprinted in my own An Independent Stance (Erin, on: Porcupine’s Quill, 1991). Parts of the chapters on “Roman-Fleuve” and “Hood and His Precursors” were delivered as a lecture, “In the Company of Proust and Powell: Hugh Hood and the Roman-Fleuve,” at the Visionary Tradition conference at the University of Guelph, organized by J.R. (Tim) Struthers, in November 1999. A few sentences elsewhere are taken from brief reviews of

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Hood’s work published over the years, but the major part of this material appears here for the first time. I have many debts to acknowledge. Hugh Hood himself was always interested and supportive, and answered occasional queries, but he kept scrupulously distant from the project as a whole. I also wish to thank T.F. Rigelhof for making some extremely helpful and stimulating suggestions after reading a slightly earlier version of the text. In addition, I have learned a lot from graduate students with whom I have discussed Hood’s work over the years, especially Sabine Heuser, Dave Little, and Stephen G. Vanderstoep. My wife, Hiroko, has helped with proofreading, and Ruth Grogan provided sage advice and assistance on matters relating to computers. As usual, however, any mistakes are my own responsibility. Last but by no means least, I am deeply grateful to the House of Anansi Press, as current publisher of the series, for granting permission to quote from The New Age, to the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme of the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada for approving a grant-in-aid of publication, and to Philip J. Cercone and his staff at McGill-Queen’s University Press (especially Elizabeth Hulse as copy editor) for their cheerful and continual support, encouragement, and technical help.

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... everything that has gone into me is going to come out in this book, transformed. Hood in Robert Fulford “An Interview with Hugh Hood”

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Introductory: “Reading Hugh Hood I want to know how the whole thing hangs together. Reservoir Ravine 205

This book is written out of a conviction that Hugh Hood’s The New Age / Le nouveau siècle (generally abbreviated, in the interests of concision, to The New Age) represents a major achievement in Canadian literature, and even a substantial contribution to the art of fiction in the English-speaking world. A twelve-volume novel-series written over a period of a quarter of a century represents by any standards a feat of creative achievement, but The New Age is much more than that. It is certainly the most ambitious literary undertaking to date in English-speaking Canada, though comparable works have been produced elsewhere – one thinks of John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga and, more to the point here, Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time. (In the world of French literature, Hood’s relation to Marcel Proust raises even larger questions and will be discussed in due course.) Both these fictional sequences chronicle a segment of English life over an extended period of time. Galsworthy, who heads a list of “class-conscious, bad English novelists” in The Swing in the Garden (17) and whom Isabelle is presented reading both there and in Reservoir Ravine (146), portrays the rise and decline of the Victorian commercial upper middle class: the Forsytes are a specific family, but they also represent a powerful network of families who set their stamp on a historical period. We watch their impact on such larger issues as art and culture, social and domestic behaviour, and – to borrow a phrase from C.P. Snow,

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another writer of an extended series – the corridors of power. (Snow’s famous title is appropriately cited in The Motor Boys in Ottawa [218].) Powell’s emphasis, on the other hand, is more detached and aesthetic: he employs as narrator a writer with aristocratic affiliations through marriage who paints a dryly ironic portrait of social, literary, and artistic life in England between 1920 and 1970. The New Age is both similar and different. Hood’s Goderich family embraces teaching, politics, art, scholarship, literature, science, and, through Matt’s marriage into “Codrington Hardware and Builders’ Supplies. Since 1867” (New Athens 151, etc.), trade and commerce. Moreover, that strategically introduced date inevitably recalls Confederation: Hood was clearly attempting to portray a more general sense of Canadian growth and aspiration during the twentieth century. I write “attempting” because the possibility of complete success in such a vast undertaking, especially at this point in Western intellectual development, is problematic at best, and Hood’s sequence offers a decidedly impressionistic and (for all its range and breadth) selective view of modern life in Canada. What he has in fact achieved may well be more limited than his initial vision, conceived in the heady years of the 1960s; as the century progressed, Canada developed into a more complex entity, a more diverse and multicultural country, which evaded any attempt at comprehensive coverage, even in twelve volumes. Still, the series remains impressively ambitious: in it Hood painted a portrait of one unusually informed and articulate, but otherwise reasonably representative, middle-class Canadian and, through his family and acquaintances as well as himself, was able to communicate a sense of what it felt like to grow up in twentieth-century Canada. By creating the complex figure of Matt Goderich – and presenting his life, beliefs, endeavours, and disappointments – Hood succeeded in conveying a sense of the Canadian experience and an awareness of what Matt, in a projected book title, called The Canadian Style (Reservoir 217). The twentieth century, as we know, had once been dreamt of as Canada’s; while it turned out to be something less grandiose so far as Canadians were concerned, it may also be seen as decidedly more galvanic and artistically challenging. The New Age is a Canadian odyssey because it begins at a specifically Canadian place in the garden of a Canadian city, explores “[e]ver-widening spaces” (Swing 10) – even including, in Great

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Realizations, interplanetary space – and ultimately returns, in Near Water, to a complementary lakeside place as Matt completes his life’s voyage, moving from his Canadian to his eternal home. It is an intellectual odyssey undertaken by Hood, by Matt Goderich, and by the acute and persevering reader. But why should such a literary undertaking – if executed in a clear style, as it undoubtedly is – require an extended commentary? The answer to this question helps to reveal precisely what distinguishes Hood’s fictional series from its predecessors (though Galsworthy and especially Powell have assuredly attracted numbers of extended commentaries themselves). The New Age is not a difficult work to read; it provides none of the immediate barriers to understanding and appreciation that one finds in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake or even Ulysses – or, for that matter, Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha series. But it is complex, and its complexity derives to a considerable degree from the fact that each of the twelve novels in the series allies itself to a different form of fiction writing. To borrow the title phrase of one of his short stories, which obviously has autobiographical relevance, Hood makes “every piece different” (August Nights 36). In the case of earlier novel sequences, by Anthony Trollope or Lawrence Durrell or C.P. Snow as well as Proust and Powell, readers soon learn what is expected of them, find their intellectual and artistic bearings, and subsequently continue on the same path. With Hood, however, though the main characters remain the same throughout the series, the novelistic forms in which they are presented shift drastically; an individual work may reveal qualities that link it with autobiographical memoir or historical chronicle or romance or religious allegory or even situational comedy, spy thrillers, and science fiction. Reading Hood is invariably an exploratory adventure, a rewarding, mindexpanding, but on occasion disorienting experience. Each book seems straightforward in itself, but appearances can be deceptive, and the subtlety in any individual instance is often revealed only when it is recognized as taking its place within the larger framework of the series as a whole. In addition, there is an important corollary to be recognized here. Not only the complete series but each individual novel within it responds to – and even demands – a challenging variety of literarycritical approaches. Hood himself was fond of hinting at Dantesque layers of interpretation discernible within his work, and this exalted comparison has irritated and even, it seems, alienated a number of

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commentators. Certainly, The New Age is not and could not, in the nature of things, be a latter-day Divine Comedy, but it is still true that the work does operate simultaneously on various levels of significance. Hood’s suggestion deserves to be taken seriously, with the proviso that no claims to Dantesque status are implied. Most readers are able to keep in focus the literal story of Matt Goderich and his family and, at a straightforward allegorical level, his historical representativeness as “Mr. English Canadian” (Tony’s Book 147) in the twentieth century. Both these levels are compatible with standard conventions of literary realism. The Forsyte Saga, as I have indicated, is readily interpreted in much the same way. Furthermore, a moral level can also be isolated readily enough. We are impelled by Galsworthy to consider and evaluate the commercial and sexual morality of his Forsytes, whether we regard them primarily as a family or as a class. Similarly, large moral issues are continually raised in The New Age, most obviously in the plotting of George Robinson and Henry Golmsdorfer to make vast profits out of the Canada-U.S. Auto Pact, or the tortuous sexual interrelationships that engulf Matt, Edie, and Tony in the second half of the sequence. So far, so good. But the fourth level, which Dante called anagogical, is another matter. Briefly, it may be described as a spiritual reading that implies something approaching a divine viewpoint which absorbs all other levels, converting them into a vast unifying totality. In his 1994 “Author’s Introduction” to The Collected Stories IV (Around the Mountain), Hood illustrates these four levels with reference to “the creative words ‘Let there be light,’” and he observes: “The anagogical source, the highest reach of signification, describes the carrying of the immortal soul to glory, by and in Christ” (19). In the final novel, Near Water, this vision finds its most eloquent and compelling expression. Admittedly, such an interpetative dimension is much more difficult to comprehend, especially for readers lacking any religious affiliations that would enable them to envisage a higher, even divine, perspective. Hood’s own religious (specifically Catholic) position is a complicating factor here and, because it is so central to his work, necessitates what might otherwise be considered an excessively detailed discussion.1 Apart from the internal evidence to be culled from The New Age itself, the best sources of information about Hood’s religious position are to be found in the first and last essays in his non-fiction collection

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Trusting the Tale. The former, “Before the Flood,” explains how he came at an early age under what he calls “the sway of parable” from a child’s Bible History and “the sway of elementary theological reasoning” from the catechism (14). The Old Testament, albeit at second hand, provided “[s]tories that you took away from the book and turned over in your head with no power whatsoever to banish them from the imagination” (11), while the New Testament was absorbed in the course of a few years through regular attendance at Mass. From this solid, but by no means oppressive, saturation in Christian story and practice, Hood derived a sense of design, value, precision, and purpose that, to its imaginative enrichment, flowed over into his secular experience. “Afterword: What Is Going On,” the concluding essay, lays stress on the title of one of his collections of short stories, None Genuine without This Signature, which celebrates “the primal guarantee of the actual, the authentic certificate of its existence which God provides” (Trusting 131). Most of the article is devoted to a Catholic deconstruction of Jacques Derrida and his fellow deconstructionists, in the course of which Hood asserts (with a sly verbal echo of Walter Pater) that “[t]he arts of narration all aspire to the condition of Sacred Scripture” (136), a statement that may be regarded as central to his writings. In even a short “seven hundred and fifty word piece,” he notes with a combination of pride and amusement, he “has to drag in the entire apparatus of the Christian narration from Christmas to Easter,” for the sublimely simple reason that it is “the way [his] mind works” (137). “All art is religious if it’s any good at all.” So argues Alex MacDonald, the artist-protagonist in Hood’s first published novel, White Figure, White Ground (209), and it is clearly a remark that carries the approval – even, one might say, the “signature” – of the author. Such a remark can, however, be all too easily misinterpreted. Hood does not mean that all art must have a religious subject or embody some kind of religious meaning or message; rather, he means that all true art affirms the sacramental principle of life. May-Beth Codrington, Matt’s mother-in-law and the visionary painter whose work dominates the later pages of the second novel in the series, A New Athens, at first seems narrower in her religious commitment than Hood himself. The “true subject for the painter,” she claims, “is the soul’s voyage in the companionship of Jesus and the angels” (171). By Hood’s standards – he is, after all, the author

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of a detailed commentary on Seymour Segal’s paintings entitled Scoring: The Art of Hockey – that sounds excessively sectarian and therefore limited. Yet when Matt examines one of her paintings after May-Beth’s death, he finds in it a “vision of the heavenly and eternal rising from the things of this world” (211); and this is a central principle in all of Hood’s work. For Hood, as man and as artist, Jesus Christ is supreme, not because he offered axioms in support of the good life, but because he “unites what is the most universal and the most particular” (Struthers “Interview” 23). His religious faith and vision are the aspects of Hood’s work that most clearly distinguish him from his two most important mentors in fiction, Proust and Powell, both of whom offer a resolutely secular presentation of human experience. But Hood’s is a religious viewpoint that is integral and thoroughgoing without being in any way oppressive and self-conscious. While, on the one hand, he could declare, “I am a practising Catholic and I speak under correction and in submission to theological definition” (Hood and Mills 136), he could also insist, “[m]y views now [1972], ethically, morally and politically, are certainly not those of doctrinaire Catholicism” (Hale “Interview” 35), and he could make Matt Goderich argue: “The Protestant insistence on freedom of conscience and witness is the best thing that ever happened to Roman Catholicism” (New Athens 123). This religious seriousness is, indeed, so fully transmitted to Matt that, even in the extremity of his desertion in Tony’s Book, he expresses himself in terms of Christian allegory: “Thinking about the three filaments in the light led naturally to thoughts of the Trinity” (231). In an early interview Hood reveals himself as uncertain at that time about the compatibility of his religious position and his artistic aspiration. “The problem is that I believe in the heavenly city, the immortal soul and the whole Christian bag of tricks, but I don’t know how to make a literary image out of it yet” (Cloutier “Interview” 49). This comment is curious because his mature writing is steeped in Christian imagery and allusions that seem to operate as an integral part of his style. Even in so apparently secular a passage as the opening of The Scenic Art, where Skip Manley’s team is raising the tent for the first Stratford Festival, religious imagery is pervasive. The whole enterprise is described as “tabernacular, reminiscent of both Arks,” and such words as “Holy of Holies,” “sacred,” and “canonical” recur (1). Hood is nowhere more characteristic than in his express-

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ing the sacred in terms of the secular or vice versa – he is invariably revealing “this image of the holy in the daily” (Swing 100). Thus the Trinitarian preoccupation just mentioned is reflected at the end of The Swing in the Garden, where the interconnected islands that enclose Toronto Harbour are seen in terms of “three in one” (171), and the same emblem is celebrated in Be Sure to Close Your Eyes in the lowly form of the brand name of a triple-purpose household lubricant (179). Above all, certain basic images enjoy a structural centrality because of their religious importance. “Marriages,” he told J.R. (Tim) Struthers, “are at the centre of literature because they’re sacramental, they’re enriching, they’re the beginnings of new life” (“Interview” 62). One might also, in arguing for a larger structure in The New Age as a whole, suggest that its encyclopedic form, its uniting of various kinds of narrative within the compass of the total sequence, itself has a precedent, a sacred example, in the Bible. Hood, almost inevitably, made the point himself when talking to Linda Sandler: “Northrop Frye talks of a kind of fiction which begins with a genesis and ends with an apocalypse, and it’s like the Christian scripture. That’s what I’m doing” (Sandler 5).2 Hood’s Catholicism has sometimes been seen as a liability for a novelist intent upon presenting the development of Canadian life in an increasingly secular age. Thus Sam Solecki, in his review of Reservoir Ravine, wondered whether “in this period of Canadian history readers will simply not respond to a writer with an explicitly Catholic world view” (“Songs” 30). More recently, Hood himself admitted “that my Catholicism may seem old and incidental in the main line of development of Canadian social ethics and religious practise across Canada in the twentieth century” (“Hugh Hood” 81). In the same article, however, while reasserting that he writes “from an explicitly Christian stance,” he also insists, “I did not want [The New Age] to be specifically identifiable as Catholic” (90). That suggestion may sound a trifle ingenuous, yet though the work is obviously Catholic in spirit, Hood seems fully justified in implying that it is not Catholic in terms of an insinuating dogma.3 Moreover, some commentators have gone too far, it seems to me, in assuming that Hood’s Christianity implies an excessively optimistic view of life in our troubled, if not apocalyptic, age. These include Margery Fee, who claimed in 1984: “Neither damnation nor doubt troubles either Hood or Matt Goderich ... Such complacent security

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makes no concessions to non-Christian readers, or even to struggling Christian ones” (122). It is difficult to see how such a position could be sustained after the publication of Black and White Keys (or, for that matter, an early pre-New Age novel such as You Cant Get There from Here, a sombre story of violence and betrayal set in a fictive African country), while such scenes as the close of The Swing in the Garden and the account of the Wall Street Crash in Reservoir Ravine hardly suggest “complacent security.” Hood insisted in 1993 that such remarks represent a misunderstanding of his position: “I don’t see how any reflective human being can avoid Cardinal Newman’s conclusion about our moral and ethical predicament, that we are all deeply sunk in the consequences of a terrible aboriginal calamity. I mean that we are fallen beings with darkened reasons and a strong natural inclination to do ill” (“Hugh Hood” 93). These words were written in the early 1990s, but they suggest no fundamental change from his earlier position. He was always preoccupied with the loss of Eden, as The Swing in the Garden makes clear. It can be too easily forgotten that a belief in the possibility of redemption presupposes a belief in original sin. “I think of art without Hope as inoperative art,” he argues. “It won’t work” (Struthers “Interview” 36). But “Hope” and complacency are not synonymous. Obviously, many of the readers whom Hood is addressing will not be Catholics or even Christians. At the same time, firmly secular commentators tend to underestimate both the number of contemporary churchgoers (let alone non-churchgoing believers) and the capacity of readers to tolerate, and respond positively towards, a belief system that they do not share. Furthermore, the structural stimulus derived from a firmly held belief – the assumption that there is a pattern to the whole scheme of things – is not easily dismissed. Admirers of the Anglo-Welsh poet-painter David Jones will recall the way in which his Catholicism, far more rigorous and traditional in its theological emphasis than Hood’s, enabled him in In Parenthesis to find an artistic structure that could contain the apparent chaos of the First World War trenches. The same might be said of the visionary painter Stanley Spencer, whose paintings of war and resurrection are discussed in A New Athens (211–12) and visited in Black and White Keys (56–7). One does not have to share Hood’s (or Matt Goderich’s) religious beliefs to bring an intellectual and artistic assent to the interpretation of the Canadian twentieth century that one finds in The New Age.

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The overall formal structure of The New Age, then, is at least partly governed by Hood’s religious faith, which recognizes an ultimate purpose within the universe and reflects it in the subtly interrelated structure that unifies his own work. But he goes further, inviting his readers to appreciate the series as a formal structure itself created out of a series of formal structures. His novels may seem to operate, in the main, within realistic conventions, yet his art seldom conceals itself. Tony’s Book, for example, with its four equal parts each narrated by a different speaker who takes up the narrative where the immediate predecessor has left off, specifically draws attention to its own artifice, as do the startling shifts in narrative mode and subject that we find in Reservoir Ravine and Black and White Keys. Above all, in the culminating chapters of Near Water, realism in the traditional sense is left far behind. Hood’s fascination with ever-varying numerological structures, as soon as we become aware of it, has a similar effect.4 In addition, astute readers with a special interest in novelistic form will notice how, especially in the later novels, he organized his material so that all chapters in a work are approximately the same length. Moreover, from The Scenic Art onwards, newly narrated events and sequences are artfully interwoven with scenes that have already been chronicled, complicating our response to what has gone before. At this point we may even become preoccupied more with the demonstration of formal intricacy than with the personal application of the new information that has been revealed. A deliberate metafictional dimension is also developed; we are constantly reminded of the relationship between Hood’s novel-series and the writings of those who have influenced him. Allusions to Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu are conspicuous throughout, and references to details in Powell’s series (never fully identified but evident to Powell admirers) recur less prominently but with relative frequency, while Wordsworthian and to a lesser extent Joycean associations are common. Gradually, something close to an intellectual dialogue between Hood and his precursors begins to emerge. If we choose to follow up these invitations to literary exploration, we shall find our response to the series extending far beyond the boundaries of realism or mimesis. Ultimately, the attraction of the series transcends our interest in the fortunes of Matt Goderich and the other members of his family, developing into an absorption with Hood’s control and his manipulation of the numerous threads that he has woven into his design.

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If The New Age records Hood’s unique experience of Canadian life in the twentieth century, a thoughtful reading of the sequence constitutes a distinct yet complementary experience on the part of each individual reader. Because of the extent of his interests and preoccupations, however, each reader can benefit from the findings of others. What I hope to offer in the course of this book is my individual reading, itself tentative but one that has had the benefit of an increasing familiarity with the series over most of the years in which it was being produced. My interest was aroused soon after the early volumes were published. From Reservoir Ravine onwards, I have read each volume as soon as it appeared and have enjoyed the invigorating, if somewhat awesome, experience of continually rereading earlier books in the series in order to discover how subsequent volumes have altered my understanding and appreciation of the previous ones. In the course of this process, I have developed a profound respect for Hood’s unique artistry. Not the least impressive aspect of his art was his own attitude towards the developing aspects of his fiction. Obviously, such an undertaking cannot be initiated without some definite ideas about the direction that the series is to take; on the other hand, options need to be left open. Readers returning to an earlier book and discovering what they had not been in a position to recognize before are simultaneously, if unconsciously, responding to the writer’s art that skilfully interweaves inventions and insights to make the procedure possible. It might even be claimed that, in a palpable sense, they are participating in Hood’s own process of creative discovery. What follows, then, is a reading – an informed and helpful reading, I hope – of the series novel by novel, though I begin with three preliminary chapters that succinctly gather together biographical, formal, and literary-historical information which can enrich and fortify an individual response to a complex and multi-faceted work. Otherwise, the approach is decidedly empiric; I try to bring to the text as few theoretical preconceptions as possible, searching for clues, trying to establish clearly what is there, hoping to read in the spirit in which the author wrote (though without necessarily subduing my own responses to his), picking up the appropriate nuances, responding in appropriate fashion to the tone that he has established. At the same time, I write as one who is familiar with the series as a whole and so can point out details which, when I was a beginning reader myself, passed me by. I am only too well aware that there will be

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details that still pass me by: The New Age is one of those unfathomable works that are illuminated by whatever experience or special expertise the individual brings to them. But I am reasonably confident that my reading can assist others in acclimatizing themselves to a new and infinitely rewarding literary experience, and can help them to go on to discover their own new ages for themselves.

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pa rt o n e The Mythos of Canadian Life

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Delayed Impact

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The Holocaust and Canadian Jews in the 1930s and 1940s

The Making of The New Age I believe what I’m doing is of the greatest value and importance for this country. “Notes for a talk”

On 23 February 1969 Hugh Hood typed out a memorandum concerning a future fictional project which, as he noted in block capitals, “may turn out to be the grand overriding work of my life.” The main statement reads as follows: “Possible enormous twelve-volume roman-fleuve. A combination twelve-volume novel-book of annalsmemoir. My reason for conceiving it is that I’m so much at the center of life in Canada now, seem to know everybody or know somebody who knows everybody, without being at the center of power myself. This would be the first time such a book (Saint-Simon, Proust, Powell) has ever been done in Canada” (“Elephant” 101). This is the first formal written record of the beginnings of The New Age / Le nouveau siècle, which began with the publication of The Swing in the Garden in 1975 and was brought to completion with the appearance of the final volume, entitled Near Water, in 2000. In a later autobiographical essay, Hood explained the genealogical reasons for this claimed centrality: “I am one-quarter Scot, one-quarter French, half west-of-England. In the year of my birth, 1928, you couldn’t get more Canadian than that” (“Hugh Hood” 77). On his father’s side he traced his roots back to West Country Anglicans and Highland Catholics, on his mother’s to French-speaking Torontonians originating in Quebec, France, and once again the west of England. Hood taught English for over thirty years at the Université de Montréal, and although he was Toronto-born and wrote exclusively

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in English, his command of both French and English enabled him to bridge the proverbial two solitudes. At the same time, he was well aware that the Canadian “ethnic mix ... has altered radically” since that time, and that he can no longer be designated, in Clark Blaise’s phrase, “the Canadian” (quoted in “Hugh Hood” 77). But his origins placed him in an unrivalled position to chronicle the crucial evolution of Canadian society during the twentieth century. The central figure in the series, Matt Goderich, is born in Toronto in 1930, two years later than Hood himself, but like him in sharing mixed English- and French-speaking Canadian parentage; he grows up to become an art historian and what he calls “the first prophet of the Canadian style” (New Athens 120). But the action of the series as a whole does not proceed in accordance with strict linear or temporal development. Thus the third novel, Reservoir Ravine, doubles back in time to present the story of Matt’s parents, while the ninth, Be Sure to Close Your Eyes, ranges even further back to take in the early life of his artist mother-in-law. By the same token, the last two novels, Great Realizations and Near Water, even extend speculatively into the near future. While most of the narrative is told from Matt’s viewpoint and in the first-person mode, other perspectives are also introduced. For instance, the fourth novel, Black and White Keys, alternates its five chapters between a third-person narrative chronicling the European wartime experience of Andrew Goderich, Matt’s father, and a firstperson account of Matt’s simultaneous teenage years in Toronto; the seventh novel, Tony’s Book, as already indicated, is told in four chapters, each narrated by a different character. In other books, a third-person narrative voice is sometimes dominant, though various hints suggest that Matt is an assumed authorial presence behind the writing. Moreover, even in the sections where Matt seems at first sight to be recounting his experience in the traditional first-person manner, we find, on reflection, that Hood frequently makes him shift back and forth between different stages in his intellectual and emotional growth. The temporal comprehensiveness of the series is not in question; the extent of Hood’s coverage of the whole Canadian experience is another matter. When interviewed by Pierre Cloutier in 1973, before the first volume had been published, Hood commented on this aspect of his work as follows: “I’ve been thinking about my big novel ... and wondering whether I could pin it on Toronto, Montréal and the Maritimes, which I know fairly well, or whether I would

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have to go out west or up to the mouth of the Mackenzie. I’ve been deliberately making trips out west, but I don’t know that I would tour western Canada to get it up. This is what they always say. Canadian literature is doomed to be a five region literature and nobody can take the whole thing in. Well, somebody can and I’m going to” (51–2). Two years later he made a comment in a subsequent interview that would seem to imply a more circumscribed ambition: “I see Ontario and want to show how Ontario goes out to Europe and to China” (Fulford 69). Certainly, the series has made no systematic attempt to touch base with all the geographical extensions of the country. One section of Reservoir Ravine recounts an episode during the Winnipeg General Strike in 1919, much of the action of Be Sure to Close Your Eyes takes place in Saskatchewan, a brief consideration of Whitehorse and the Yukon is offered in Dead Men’s Watches, and occasional references are made to Nova Scotia, the home of Matt’s (and Hood’s) paternal grandfather; but no significant recognition is offered either of British Columbia and Alberta in the west or of Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, and Newfoundland. For the most part, “Canada” means English-speaking Canada as represented by Toronto and Ontario and French-speaking Canada as represented by Montreal and Quebec. In addition, the social perspective is firmly centred on various gradations of the educated middle class. As Sam Solecki remarked in 1979 while reviewing Reservoir Ravine: “His first three novels are not really about Canada (in the sense that a Dos Passos novel is about the entire U.S.A.) but about a very small part of Toronto and Ontario society” (“Songs” 29). On the other hand, it is worth noting that both Proust and Powell, Hood’s mentors in the writing of extended fictions, paint decidedly circumscribed social and geographical portraits of France and England respectively. Powell, indeed, is on record as stating that “all ... writers, even the greatest, work within a comparatively limited range” (“Taken” 52), and a comment by André Maurois on Balzac is worth quoting at this point: “Even Balzac falls short of describing the whole of society as it existed in his day. An occasional workman crops up in his pages, an odd peasant or so, but the rôles that they play are subordinate” (303). All these novelists are less interested in national comprehensiveness than in imaginative recreation of the psychological atmospheres in their particular times and places. In this respect, another of Hood’s comments in the Cloutier interview may be seen as articulating the ultimate effect of the

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novel-series: “My book will try to define the mythos of Canadian life” (52). In 1986 Hood delivered a paper at a symposium in London, Ontario, devoted to the New Age series on the occasion of its reaching the halfway point with the publication of The Motor Boys in Ottawa. The title he chose was “The Elephant in the Next Room,” and in the paper he tries to describe “how it feels to live with a literary conception of great magnitude lodged in my mind thirty years, perhaps forty years” (97). The fanciful, Ionesco-like metaphor employed is that of an elephant oppressively present in a dark study adjacent to the room that Hood inhabits at any given moment. This presence was, of course, conspicuous in the quartercentury from 1975 onwards during which the successive volumes of The New Age appeared, but Hood insists that, in fact, “hints and flashes and intuitions” of the elephantine project had been evident for many years before the specific ideas for the sequence began to form in his mind: “I think that The New Age / Le nouveau siècle began to rise in my person, my nature, from the earliest moments I addressed the typewriter keys, that suggestions of the work will be detected in most of the stories written around 1960 which appeared in my first book, the story collection Flying a Red Kite of 1962” (98). Moreover, in the interview with Struthers conducted in 1978, Hood referred to “The New Age and the works of mine which go with it and around it” (86). It is clear that, in undertaking a detailed consideration of the development of his novel-series, we must begin with its relation to his earlier work. Precisely how conscious these “hints and flashes and intuitions” were at the time is impossible to document. What is true is that, if we look back to the earlier fiction from the perspective of the completed New Age series, we can see how elements of these writings – a character, a setting, a stylistic experiment – have later been taken up into the major work as if attracted by the strength of a powerful magnet. Maura Boston, for example, who is later to become the poet-director of the Codrington Colony for the Encouragement of Visionary Art in A New Athens, first appears in the short story “Three Halves of a House” in Flying a Red Kite. Angela (Marie-Ange), the daughter of George Robinson, who appears in the middle novels of the series, has already made her bow in “Bicultural Angela” in Around the Mountain (1967) and also, along with her husband-to-be, Duncan

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McCallum, in the novel A Game of Touch (1970). The town of Stoverville, destined to become an important setting in the novelseries, developed over the years, like one of Thomas Hardy’s Wessex locales, as it gradually evolved a characteristic topography in several short stories (“Three Halves of a House” and “Bicultural Angela” again and also “Friends and Relations,” later collected into The Isolation Booth) and, once again, in A Game of Touch. More generally, two stories in Flying a Red Kite – “Silver Bugles, Cymbals, Golden Silks” and “Recollections of the Works Department” – though in no way anticipating the content of The New Age, appear in retrospect as experimental attempts at the kind of documentary memoir that comes to full flower in The Swing in the Garden. Hood himself noted how in the sixties he “experimented continually with the forms of autobiography and memoir” (Trusting 137), and he described these writings as “semi-fictional memoir narratives” (“Elephant” 98). A similar short story–cum–article, “The Ingenue I Should Have Kissed, but Didn’t,” first published in 1962 and collected much later in The Isolation Booth, represents, we now see, the first fruits of the experiences later to be transmuted into parts of The Scenic Art. Hood’s interest in what he called “documentary fantasy,” an important element in The New Age, developed gradually but surely out of his early work. Sometimes these interconnections are decidedly subtle, as if Hood were puckishly inserting cryptic references specifically designed for an inner circle of dedicated readers. Thus Bronson, the genial cottagecountry neighbour who makes a fleeting appearance in The Motor Boys in Ottawa when he alerts Matt to the news broadcast announcing the sudden death of his father (283), will not be recognized by many readers, though in fact he has been a central figure in short stories in Dark Glasses, August Nights (a collection that appeared just one year before the novel), and You’ll Catch Your Death (which was published six years later). He is also a frequently mentioned offstage presence in the final novel, Near Water. Similarly, references to the fictive Canadian artist Alex MacDonald and to Abe Shumsky’s Galerie Anéantie in Montreal, where Edie eventually exhibits in Tony’s Book (188, 196), presuppose acquaintance with Hood’s first novel, White Figure, White Ground, and, so far as the gallery is concerned, with the short story “Starting Again on Sherbrooke Street” in Around the Mountain. Perhaps the most playful of these references occurs in The Motor Boys in Ottawa when Charlie Pope alludes to the Ugeti and the

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Pineals, warring African tribes “in the unfortunate state of Leofrica” (232); the reference makes no sense unless readers are aware of Hood’s “African” novel, You Cant Get There from Here (this title phrase, by the way, is smuggled into the text of several novels, including The Scenic Art [127]). One senses a Joycean allusiveness here, an amused clue-dropping puzzle-game played with his readers; veiled references to Proust and, especially, to Powell are scattered through the texts in a comparable way, as we shall see. Hood knew perfectly well, however, that comparatively few of his readers were likely to pick up these interconnections without help. This kind of effect can prove either intriguing or irritating, but it demonstrates unequivocally that The New Age, formally autonomous as it may be, belongs within the context of Hood’s whole oeuvre, and cannot be totally divorced from the rest of his writing. A series of events combined in the second half of the 1960s to impel Hood towards the idea of an ambitious work. He refers to “first aimless pencil scratchings in late 1966” (“Hugh Hood” 89), but doubtless more important was the national awakening symbolized the following year by the centenary of Confederation and the phenomenon of the Montreal Expo. Hood and his family were by this time settled in Montreal, and he was invited by the editors of Tamarack Review to be “our man at Expo” (Governor’s Bridge 7), an assignment that resulted in two articles (reprinted in The Governor’s Bridge Is Closed) and one piece, “Paradise Retained?” in The Fruit Man, the Meat Man & the Manager, that significantly transformed itself into fiction. “I remember feeling,” he wrote, “that The New Age / Le nouveau siècle would develop naturally from the optimistic climate of feeling across Canada in 1967” (“Hugh Hood” 89). Coincidentally, the acceptance by different publishers of the manuscripts of Around the Mountain and The Camera Always Lies within a week of each other in September 1966 had proved to be a considerable fillip to Hood’s confidence (already by no means negligible) in his creative powers. To quote his own account, “I began to understand that what I was doing somehow existed as representative of the whole of Canadian life. I began to have a sense of mission. I began to see my work in Wordsworth’s superb phrase as ‘a leading from above, a something given’” (“Elephant” 100). Moreover, at this time he was already reading the middle volumes of Powell’s not-yet-completed Dance to the Music of Time series. What Powell was in the process of doing for a segment of

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British society in the middle of the twentieth century, Hood clearly felt that he could provide for eastern Canadians (perhaps the whole of Canada) over an even longer time span. At this comparatively early period, then, the gradual outlines of a “really big” work began to form. During Centennial Year, Hood reports, “I saw at last where my proper direction lay” (“Elephant” 101). After months of brooding, spurred on by the realization, derived from Powell’s example, that such a project was likely to take twenty-five years to complete, he eventually jotted down the memorandum quoted at the beginning of this chapter. Some preparatory notes roughing out the basic subject matter of the first volume, later to be called The Swing in the Garden, date from about this time. According to Hood’s own testimony, the first dramatic step forward came some two years later with the choice of a Quebec-made garden swing as an emblem for the spatial and spiritual concomitants of the story. At this time, he was using the title Fin de siècle and described the work as “a long chronological novel about the meaning of Canadian society” (quoted in Struthers “Bibliography” 278). That was in 1971, a year before the name and character of Matt Goderich ultimately came into focus. Even more than Powell’s narrator, Nicholas Jenkins, Matt is carefully constructed as an ideal observer-figure fated to come into contact, in Hood’s case, with a wide range of representative twentieth-century Canadian experience. According to the fictive expatriate brother in Tony’s Book, Matt “stands for all those elements in Canadian life and the Canadian character upon which the buggers pride themselves so much” (97), and in the same novel he is nicknamed “Mr. English Canadian” (147). Such figures always run the risk of being interpreted as the clones of their creators, and here identification is encouraged by the fact that Matt and Hood share the same birthday. However, Matt is two years younger (doubtless to make him a child of the Wall Street Crash), and in other respects Hood attempted to differentiate him as fully as possible from his creator. Nevertheless, even the contrasts seem in a curious way to enforce a likeness. Thus, whereas Hood went to De La Salle College (a private Catholic high school) and St Michael’s College in the University of Toronto, Matt attends North Toronto Collegiate and Victoria College. Hood, to be sure, encountered his future wife in Morley Callaghan’s house (Struthers “Interview” 26), not on a train, ghost or otherwise, and he married in 1957 rather than 1953; yet both real and fictional wives are artists, both come from

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Brockville/Stoverville, and both have had artistic experience at the Stratford Festival. Hood wisely made Matt an art historian rather than a novelist; nonetheless, sufficient similarities remain to encourage commentators to draw autobiographical connections. Sam Solecki, albeit playfully, has even professed to convert Matthew into “Matt-Hugh” (“Gospel” 38). Hood, however, consistently denied any close identification, insisting that Matt is “much less frivolous, much more earnest” (Hood and Mills 145). Matt Goderich is a complex creation, amusing and ponderous by turns; sometimes radically challenging, sometimes sturdily traditional; at one time bland, at another obstinately opinionated. As we might expect in a twelve-volume sequence, we see him develop dramatically from a small boy to an old man who has experienced both ecstasy and anguish in the course of a life extending into his eighties. I shall be tracing some of these character shifts in the second part of this book. Here it will suffice to indicate the importance and significance of Hood’s choice of name. In “The Elephant in the Next Room” he explained how he came to choose both Christian name and surname. He was seeking “an immediately recognizable familiar name, not trendy and not old-fashioned” (104). His wife recommended the name of one of the apostles, and after considering these, Hood eventually settled on the apostle traditionally identified as one of the evangelists. The latter distinction was important to him, and the additional fact that as a name Matthew is “[s]ober but not out-ofdate” (104) proved irresistible. Although Hood regarded the biblical Matthew as “a mean son-of-a-bitch,” he also noted shrewdly that “there is more in his story than there is in him” (Trusting 136). Above all, as he makes May-Beth Codrington observe in A New Athens, Matthew was the evangelist who “illuminat[ed] the old tradition by the wonder of the new” (104). The surname combines a number of meaningful elements. First, as May-Beth explains to Matt in the same conversation, “‘Goderich’ means ‘God’s kingdom,’ from the old English ‘Godes rice’” (105). In addition, the Ontario town of Goderich (where, as recounted in Be Sure to Close Your Eyes, May-Beth lived briefly as a child) is laid out in the form of a wheel, so the name embodies associations with mandalas and prophetic wheels like those in Ezekiel’s dream-vision. The word economically links Canadian space with a divine eternity. Once Hood had found an initial emblem and an appropriate name for his protagonist, and had mapped out the course of the opening

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novels, he was all set to embark upon his epic artistic journey. He was an unusually methodical writer and carefully preserved records of his literary development. In October of 1972 he set down his draft scenario and began to write the opening pages, he remembered with habitual meticulousness, on “Sunday afternoon, October 15, 1972, at 1:00 p.m.” (“Hugh Hood” 89).5 The main draft of The Swing in the Garden was composed between that date and May 1973. We now know that Hood was here in the process of establishing his basic working timetable, which he would maintain through the rest of the century. Moreover, the general pattern for the whole series was becoming clear, including even the titles of later volumes. The overall plan, giving the titles of all but the final volume and even the years in which they would be published, was fixed in time for an encyclopedia entry to appear in John Robert Colombo’s Colombo’s Canadian References in 1976. With only very minor adjustments, this plan was doggedly maintained. Not only did the novels appear on schedule, but Hood succeeded in adapting his original conception to the social, political, and aesthetic changes that had taken place since he first planned the series.

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Roman-Fleuve Often pieces of art serve as ligatures to tie discrete experiences together through time and space. The Swing in the Garden 100

In his first written statement about the work of art that was to develop into The New Age, Hood employed, as we have seen, the phrase “roman-fleuve” (“Elephant” 101). Clearly, he had been thinking about the aesthetic implications of an extended fictional series and was aware of a critical category that recognized ambitious structures of the kind he envisaged. As a term, however, “roman-fleuve” is extremely slippery and difficult to pin down with any precision. It is perhaps significant that no adequate synonym exists in English. Critics in that language, indeed, have been remarkably reluctant to attempt any definition, conscious perhaps of the potential absurdity of trying to fix the meaning of a phrase that in its very name evokes the quality of a powerfully flowing river. However impressive “roman-fleuve” may sound as a technical term, in practice it implies little more than a novel-sequence that allows for amplitude, depth, and what Anthony Powell in an interview once described succinctly as “room” (Davis 533). In his 1969 memorandum, indeed, Hood is most likely to have used the term to characterize any extended series involving recurrent characters, settings, and attitudes, though probably with the added requirement of a unified individual perspective, as provided by Proust and Powell – and later by himself. Nonetheless, it will be helpful at this point to survey the range of multi-volume novels in an endeavour to see more precisely where

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Hood and The New Age fit. “Amplitude,” “depth,” “room”: there is clearly a greatly expanded space involved here which makes possible the presentation of a wide and historically valuable social panorama, as well as a comparable variety of kinds of fiction, and which may, as in the case of Proust, present a meticulous and minute psychological probing of the intimate details of a life. Most examples, indeed, cannot be confined to a single subject or theme. Thus Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu is at one and the same time a philosophical meditation, a shrewd dissection of French aristocratic life over a critical forty years or so, and the record of a bewildering variety of sexual tastes and liaisons. In other words, there are no firm “rules” for the content and form of such sequences, any more than there are rules for the organization and structure of a single novel. The range is extreme. Balzac’s Comédie humaine series, for example, offered a comprehensive view of French life in a vast series of narratives (over a hundred planned, ninety completed) that would encompass different classes and geographical settings. Balzac, whose name occurs early in The Swing in the Garden (17), designed each to be a coherent world in itself, yet quite often interconnections were established by introducing characters from one fiction into another. The principle is not that of a continuous sequence; rather, the work suggests a collection of scientific specimens that becomes more and more comprehensive as additional examples are amassed. Ultimately, the series extends to offer an encyclopedic view – or fictional anatomy – of a nation. Thomas Hardy’s Wessex novels (mentioned early in A New Athens [10]) do much the same on a more modest scale. Taking as his province “Wessex,” an extensive area of southwest England, and writing fiction that conforms to a common geographical setting, Hardy was able to produce novels of various kinds (from the bittersweet idyll of Under the Greenwood Tree to the tragic dourness of Jude the Obscure) which, while complete in themselves, provide a cumulative portrait of a specific region over a century of radical change and painful challenge. Here, however, unity is provided by a shared environment, rather than (with a few minor exceptions) by shared characters. A more common characteristic of the novel-sequence – and one that brings us closer to the roman-fleuve – is the tracing of a family through an extended period of time. Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series fits here, while the best-known example in English is Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga. With such works the concept of a sequence becomes

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decidedly more pronounced. Not only do the extended fortunes of a family, so long as it is sufficiently important or representative, take on a larger significance, but the complex interconnection of recurring characters within the narrative means that readers need to read the books in a recognized order to gain a full historical, let alone aesthetic, understanding of the material. (It should be noted, however, that, while order of composition is often identical with the chronological order of events, these do not have to coincide, and when they do not, the order of composition normally takes precedence.) The Jalna or “Whiteoaks” series of Mazo de la Roche (another author mentioned early in The Swing in the Garden [17]) superficially belongs within this category. It is severely limited, however, by the fact that Jalna is an imaginative never-never land with, at best, limited historical relevance. Readers may follow the fortunes of the characters from book to book, and gradually build up an awareness of familial relationships, but the Whiteoaks family seems for the most part hermetically sealed from any authentic historical reality. As is shown by allusions within the novels, as well as by remarks made in interviews and his other writings, Hood was familiar with various earlier examples of the roman-fleuve before he began his own sequence. It is also clear that he had thought deeply about the dimensions of his series and had even worked out a surprisingly firm skeleton of the contents of individual volumes. But many practical problems could be recognized and solved only as they manifested themselves in the actual process of writing. This explains what might otherwise seem the curious absence, in earlier pronouncements about his own work, of any discussion of the techniques of the novelsequence or of the unique qualities that Hood wished to explore. However, we find him realizing the complexities of the process in the course of an interview with Robert Fulford published in 1975, and especially in his “epistolary conversation” with John Mills after the latter’s reserved review of The Swing in the Garden, an exchange eventually published in the Fiddlehead in 1978. Thus in the Fulford interview we notice the number of phrases that both interviewer and interviewee produce in an attempt to pin down the precise nature of what Hood is attempting. Fulford begins by employing “documentary novel.” This phrase is too journalistic (and, I suspect, too sociological) for Hood, who at first substitutes “historical novel”: “I think a more acceptable term for my work would be ‘the historical novel of

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social mythology and group awareness’” (Fulford 66). Later in the interview he decides that “‘documentary fantasy’ would be about right” (77). It is noteworthy that both Hood’s proffered definitions (“mythology,” “fantasy”) place emphasis on imaginative structure as well as fidelity to historical accuracy. In the exchange with John Mills, Hood was especially concerned with criticism of an individual novel (The Swing in the Garden) that depends upon criteria more appropriate to a single narrative than to the opening book in an extended sequence. In it, however, he expressed his doubts about whether the form he was evolving could be described in any terms usually applied to traditional fiction. Here are some of his observations: “I may not be writing ‘novels’ in the customary sense, since Flaubert and James ... I am writing some books with particular modes and values of their own ... Maybe [my books] are not novels at all. I would be content to call them simply ‘big narrative pieces’ ... I am writing things that look like novels but are only tenuously related to the form” (Hood and Mills 140). Interestingly enough, we can observe Hood, in the process of arguing with Mills, articulating his own original contribution to the art of the roman-fleuve. This occurs a little later when he remarks that he sees himself among “Joyce, Proust, Dickens, Tolstoy, Burton, Rabelais, Dante, Chaucer” as writers of “long narrative sequences which allowed of much variation of form within the overall plan” (141). Not the least noteworthy point here – and we may also remember the mention of the Duc de Saint-Simon in the 1969 memorandum – is the fact that Hood’s list includes two poets and a non-fiction prose writer, along with practitioners of fiction. It may seem paradoxical to propose, as I have just done, that Hood displayed his originality by aligning himself with a motley list of earlier writers. I suggest, however, that the statement just quoted reveals two characteristics of special interest. First, it associates him, via Robert Burton, with the vast encyclopedic form of the anatomy, a form that enables him to extend significantly the traditional boundaries of Canadian fiction. As Sam Solecki noted in a review of Black and White Keys, the form of the roman-fleuve “has allowed Hood to introduce and linger lovingly over digressions with an astonishing quantity of social and cultural detail from the daily life of Canada’s recent past” (“Gospel” 38). Just as significant, however, is the second characteristic, the remark about “variation of form within the overall

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plan.” Hood attempts in The New Age to combine a series of novels linked through the life of a single protagonist and that of his immediate family with a presentation that involves continually changing fictional forms. One of the main difficulties that reviewers and critics have encountered in approaching the series has been the formal challenge represented by the need to respond each time to a new kind of novel while acknowledging a continuity of subject and coverage. It is, of course, a challenge to writer and reader alike. At this point I find it helpful to turn to one of the few attempts to define “roman-fleuve.” This will at one and the same time illustrate the impossibility of fixing the form and also throw light on difficulties that Hood had to face in producing his novel-series. The definition in question is that of Nicholas Hewitt in the recently published Encyclopedia of the Novel. Despite the fact that his article is subtitled “Series and Novel Cycles,” Hewitt takes pains to link the term to a historical development in French fiction between the wars, and he is also intent on stressing the traditionalism of the form, in contrast to the more experimental, avant-garde writing of the period. As a result, his definition is somewhat restrictive, and it excludes many authors and works that other writers, Hood included, would accept within the category of roman-fleuve. Hewitt’s definition reads as follows: “A roman-fleuve is an extended series of novels ... each of which may be free-standing and read separately, but which form part of a coherent and continuous narrative” (1110). The idea raised is an interesting one, but as a viable definition it immediately encounters difficulties, since such narratives as those of Balzac, Zola, and Faulkner, though “coherent,” are hardly “continuous,” while Proust’s individual novels do not qualify as “free-standing.” To exclude all these, as Hewitt does, tends to rob the term of anything but a narrow historical interest. Besides, to describe examples of the roman-fleuve as freestanding is to come dangerously close to a confusingly mixed metaphor. Hewitt does admit Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time into his exclusive sub-genre, and one can reasonably assume that he would therefore accept The New Age as well. But here again problems arise. Is it true that the individual novels of Powell and Hood are at once “free-standing” and “part of a coherent and continuous narrative”? In my own view, both series occupy an interesting middle ground. Yes, it would admittedly be possible to read these novels out of their published order without total disorientation and puzzlement, but it

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would, to say the least, be undesirable. The opening image of A Dance to the Music of Time – the figures of the workmen huddled around their brazier in the snow and suggesting to the narrator Nicolas Poussin’s painting of the same title, with its personification of the changing seasons – is as integral to the whole series as Proust’s early scenes involving the mother’s bedtime stories and the taste of the petites madeleines dipped in tea. To begin reading with, say, A Buyer’s Market or The Acceptance World instead of A Question of Upbringing would seriously damage the artistic continuity which Powell has so expertly set in place. Similarly, Hood’s image of “the swing in the garden” and his introduction of Adam Sinclair on the opening page of the first novel are crucial not merely to the first of the New Age novels but to the series as a whole. (Hood’s sense of symmetry, incidentally, is beautifully illustrated in the way another swing in another garden appears at the close of the final novel, Near Water, as the series, odyssey-like, comes full circle and, imaginatively speaking, returns home.) To appreciate these and other aesthetic and structural effects, it is essential, pace Hewitt, to read these books in the order approved by their authors. The difficulties encountered by readers in the process of coming to terms with Hood’s series seem to me divisible into two main strands. The first concerns the formal integrity of individual novels. A writer of novel-sequences is inevitably involved with two structures: that of the separate volume and that of the series as a whole. After the first two or three books have appeared, interconnections between novels begin to take place, and it becomes increasingly difficult, unless an inordinate amount of recapitulation is included, to create a coherent and readily appreciable unity for the new volume. Thus Auberon Waugh, reviewing Powell’s Books Do Furnish a Room, the tenth in his series, claimed that the novel was “almost completely incomprehensible to anyone like the reviewer, who has a memory like a sieve and is reluctant to refresh his memory to the extent of re-reading nine, ten, or eleven volumes on each occasion” (258). Neither Powell nor Hood writes, of course, for readers with memories like sieves, and it could reasonably be argued that such a disability would prevent the reviewer from understanding even a single novel of any length and complexity. (Imagine him struggling with Joyce’s Ulysses, for example!) Still, the problem of the unity of a novel that exists as part of a series is very real. So far as Hood is concerned, the matter was raised by at least three reviewers as early

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as the appearance of Reservoir Ravine (see Struthers “Bibliography” 315, 318, 319). As might be expected, such criticisms were reiterated as the series continued. This particular problem arises because individual novels are seen to depend upon an awareness of previously published work and therefore cannot be regarded as self-contained. The second difficulty is related, so far as the principle of self-sufficiency is concerned, but for the opposite reason that full understanding cannot reveal itself until late in the series. Certain passages in earlier novels will seem at best dubiously relevant to the main theme because their structural significance belongs to the whole rather than to the individual part. A casual reference to Edie Codrington in The Swing in the Garden (177) means nothing until she becomes Matt’s wife in A New Athens. In Reservoir Ravine “Georg Mandel” is described as a great German author (160), but curious and diligent readers will look in vain for his name in encyclopedias and publishers’ lists. He is in fact a fictional creation, and the name lights up only when he is recognized as a central figure in the immediately succeeding novel, Black and White Keys. Numerous other instances could be cited, and some of these will be mentioned in the discussions of individual novels to follow. In some cases, several volumes elapse before an allusion is fully explained. Small wonder, then, that some readers initially find themselves puzzled and even frustrated. These difficulties are inherent in the very nature of novelsequences, though one can encounter a similar challenge in a highly complex single work such as Ulysses or War and Peace. And the complementary rewards are the same in both cases: one of the pleasures ultimately derived from such texts consists in the satisfaction of recognizing and savouring new meanings, insights, and aesthetic effects in the act of rereading. To our surprise and delight, passages that originally seemed either unremarkable, inconsequential, or even baffling are illuminated by our knowledge of how they fit into the total structure. In the hands of a skilled practitioner – and Hood, I am convinced, fully earned that designation – the roman-fleuve is a form that generously repays constant rereadings and can be considered inexhaustible.

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Hood and His Precursors There are the books you would like to have been influenced by ... which make their appearance pretty late in the story, and then there are those others, the real influences, books you read so early in life that you can’t even guess at a date. Trusting the Tale 9

No literary work develops in a vacuum. To speak of influences is not to accept some simplistic theory of imitation but, rather, to acknowledge that even the most original of writers build upon what has already been achieved by their predecessors. An earlier author’s accomplishment enables a later artist to venture further, though not necessarily in precisely the same direction. The masterpieces inherited from the past may sometimes seem a burden, but without them a new writer would lack hints, pointers, examples for emulation and extension. In Hood’s case, the names of numerous earlier writers can be cited as potential models. At the same time, he was instinctively aware of the fact that Canadian history, geography, and both political and social development necessitated a unique approach. For example, class distinctions, so well scrutinized by Old World authors (for obvious reasons) can manifest themselves in radically different ways, and the methods of, say, a Zola or a Galsworthy cannot be simply transplanted to a new continent. What Hood learnt from such earlier writers was, I believe, a way of handling thematic and formal relationships within a complex and extended work. And these are lessons that can be learnt from poets and non-fiction prose-writers as well as from novelists. Thus, while Tolstoy had much to teach him about the individual life and its relation to impersonal historical forces, Dante was clearly of considerable importance in exploring the

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possibilities of unifying a collection of individual narratives and experiences within a religious (specifically, Catholic) structure; even the Duc de Saint-Simon, an unexpected influence continually alluded to by Proust and specifically mentioned by Hood (“Elephant” 101), can give hints about the relation between memoir and social significance, the way a personal perspective can mediate the events of a society or an age. It is clear, however, that three writers had more than a routine influence upon Hood’s writing. These are Wordsworth, Proust, and Powell, and their presence is duly acknowledged in the numerous references to them (both overt and covert) that recur within the text of The New Age. Each deserves more lengthy consideration. In an early interview, Hood described Wordsworth as his “greatest literary influence” (Hale 36), and the impact of the poet’s imaginative vision can be traced throughout his work. In the somewhat later – and indispensable – interview conducted by J.R. (Tim) Struthers in 1978, Hood elaborated upon this literary debt. He remarked there that he was “very much concerned with the structure of the imagination” (21) and “the truth-telling aspect of the poetic imagination” (22). This interest led Hood to devote his doctoral dissertation to tracing connections between “the mediaeval view of modes of knowing,” derived from Dante’s poetics and the metaphysical thought of Aquinas, and Romantic views of poetic psychology, especially those embraced by Wordsworth and Coleridge (22). The poetry of Wordsworth provided, then, an all-important intellectual link between Hood’s religious beliefs and his literary preoccupations. But the attraction was emotional as well as academic. It is therefore not surprising to learn that in 1971, when Hood and his wife paid a visit to England, one of their first undertakings was a literary pilgrimage to Wordsworth’s Grasmere (28). This impulse is reflected in a scene in the opening chapter of A New Athens when Matt and Edie go on an excursion to Tintern Abbey because of its appearance in the title of one of Wordsworth’s best-known and best-loved poems. Not long after he completed his doctoral dissertation, Hood began to write the short stories that were ultimately collected into Flying a Red Kite (1962). Struthers shrewdly observed that this book is full of “Wordsworthian diction and concepts,” citing such words as “recollection,” “tranquillity,” “vanishing,” and “immortality.” In addition, he remarked to Hood that “you often pick up and play with a

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Wordsworthian image or phrase” (28). The New Age series carries the process still further. Indeed, it is worthwhile noting that references to Wordsworth or quotations from his poems occur – if not as a signature, at least as a sign – in almost every book in the sequence.6 These allusions may well be conspicuous and specific – when, for example, lines from Wordsworth’s sonnet “On the Extinction of the Venetian Republic” are quoted in Property and Value (226). Often enough, however, they exist as faint hints just below the surface of the narrative. Thus at the end of The Swing in the Garden, Matt and his friends on Toronto Island go for rides “in an old rowboat borrowed without permission from the Aquatic Club premises” (207), and in A New Athens the glimpse of the ghost ship is obtained after a wintry skating party. Both scenes allude covertly to well-known passages from Wordsworth’s Prelude (1850 text, 1:ll.357–400, 425–63). More basically, Hood acknowledged that he “imitated explicitly” the pattern of The Excursion in the opening chapter of A New Athens, “which is a big excursion, a walk in the country, a modern representative of a great genre” (Struthers “Interview” 62). Anthony John Harding has examined Hood’s Wordsworthianism in a pioneering and still decidedly useful article that appeared in Canadian Literature in 1982. At the time he wrote, however, only the first three of the New Age novels had been published, and the extent of Wordsworth’s presence behind the total scheme was inevitably less clear than it is now. For instance, Harding wrote that “Matt’s infant dreams are blended, not with the voice of Derwent, but with the traffic of the cpr line that borders his parents’ back yard” (89). What we now know, but Harding could not, is that a later character, Linnet Olcott, conceived in Wordsworth’s cottage at Racedown and deriving her first name from one of his poems, has a similar river experience that is recounted in the opening pages of Tony’s Book – an excellent example of Hood’s capacity for artistic elaboration within the extended scope of his series. Harding is concerned, for the most part, with Hood’s interest in “Romantic notions of the eternal moment, the moment out of time” (85). This is, of course, of the highest importance. Indeed, a number of Hood’s novels, especially the first three, are structured around Wordsworth’s principle of “spots of time” (Prelude, 1850 text, 12:l.208). However, as the series proceeds, it becomes increasingly evident that for Hood the complexities of Time were filtered through the fiction of Proust, and I shall reserve most of my discussion of this matter for my consideration of Hood’s debt to

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the French novelist. Here I shall lay emphasis on the formal and psychological influence of the Romantic poet. In his Preface to The Excursion, the second part of an ambitious three-part poem to be called The Recluse that was never completed, Wordsworth commented on the relation between The Excursion and a not-yet-finished first book: “the two works have the same kind of relation to each other, if [the author] may so express himself, as the ante-chapel has to the body of a gothic church. Continuing the allusion, he may be permitted to add, that his minor Pieces, which have long been before the Public, when they shall be properly arranged, will be found by the attentive reader to have such connection with the main Work as may give them claim to be likened to the little cells, oratories, and sepulchral recesses, ordinarily included in these edifices” (Prose 3: 5–6). Here, I suggest, is an important clue to the structural problems of an extended work. The relation to Hood’s oeuvre is not, of course, exact, but it is nonetheless intriguing, and I have already had occasion to quote his reference to “The New Age and the works of mine which go with it and around it” (Struthers “Interview” 86). The idea of Wordsworth’s “minor Pieces” functioning as appendages that establish connections with the central structure relates usefully to Hood’s insistence on the ways in which his other writings – his earlier novels or short stories such as “Three Halves of a House” and “Bicultural Angela” – coalesce around the main series. More important, Wordsworth’s analogy of the “gothic church” can also be applied to Hood’s work, though here the emphasis is on style rather than structure. Hood was able to provide his own variation on Gothic form by combining novels belonging to various fictional sub-genres and written in various styles into a whole that embodied an impressive and even elevating unity. It is interesting to note that early in 1971 he spoke in an interview of his biggest challenge: to write a novel which should be recognized as “one of the major achievements of mankind, like a great cathedral” (quoted in Struthers “Bibliography” 278 [my emphasis]).7 The Preface that includes Wordsworth’s analogy to the Gothic church ends with a transcription of the poem generally known as “Prospectus to The Recluse.” This contains what Hood, in the Struthers interview, described as “those magnificent lines of dedication ... where he talks about the spousal union of the mind and the world” (62). Wordsworth writes in praise of “the discerning intellect

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of Man / When wedded to the goodly universe / In love and holy passion” (ll.52–4), and he continues: How exquisitely the individual Mind (And the progressive powers perhaps no less Of the whole species) to the external world Is fitted: – and how exquisitely too – Theme this but little heard of among men – The external world is fitted to the Mind. (ll.63–8)

Despite Wordsworth’s religious development from a revolutionary pantheism to a conservative Anglican orthodoxy, his insight as expressed here into the melding of the internal with the external, of the material universe with the human mind that inhabits and comprehends it, is not far removed from Hood’s Catholic expansiveness. Hood elaborated on this parallel in his essay “The Ontology of SuperRealism,” the title of which, on its first appearance in Canadian Literature, was prefaced with the appropriately Wordsworthian phrase from the “Immortality Ode,” “Sober Colouring”: the spirit is totally in the flesh. ... Knowing is not a matter of sitting in an armchair while engaged in some abstruse conceptual calculus. ... Knowing includes making love, and making pieces of art ... and in fact knowing is what Wordsworth called it, a “spousal union” of the knower and the known, a marriage full of flesh. I want to propose the Wordsworthian account of the marriage of the mind and the thing as a model of artistic activity. (Governor’s Bridge 132)

Wordsworth the poet of memory but even more the poet of ecstatic union provides a firm foundation for Hood’s vision of wholeness. Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, best described perhaps as a gigantic novel rather than a novel-sequence, appeared between 1913 and 1927 (severely interrupted, of course, by the First World War), in seven sections comprising fifteen volumes; the last three sections (five volumes) appeared posthumously. It was rendered into English in a once highly praised translation, mainly by C.K. Scott Moncrieff, under the resonant but inaccurate title Remembrance of Things Past (1922–31). In 1981 Terence Kilmartin radically revised this translation, attempting greater fidelity to the original and

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incorporating subsequent important textual discoveries; this version, in turn, was further revised by D.J. Enright and now appears under the more suitable title In Search of Lost Time (1992). Hood, fully bilingual in terms of reading, read it in French in the Pléiade edition. I shall be referring here to the 1992 translation. A la recherche du temps perdu contains a detailed personal account of the life, thoughts, and experiences of a character similar in age and circumstances to its author, though Hood takes significant pains to insist (through Matt) that this character was “a very different being from Proust himself” (Black and White Keys 202). For most of the narrative he is unnamed, but his first name is revealed in a single passage in the late novel entitled The Captive (La prisonnière) as Marcel (5: 171–2). An introverted child born into the comfortable French middle class, Marcel describes his relations with his parents, his early upbringing in city and quiet country-town, and his gradual realization of the impact that the past can have upon the present. As he grows up, he becomes increasingly preoccupied with the recollective faculty as well as with his ambitions to become a writer. In an early section set in the past, the love affair of Charles Swann, a Jewish friend of his parents, provides the main focus and is narrated in the third person (compare the story of Andrew and Isabelle in Reservoir Ravine). Marcel then embarks upon a perilous voyage of social and sexual advancement, and much of the action (if this is the right word) is taken up with a minute analysis of the manners and mores of the aristocratic Faubourg Saint-Germain in Paris. This is a social class in the last stages of decline at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, immersed in artistic and social snobbery, torn apart by the Dreyfus case with all its attendant anti-Semitism, and devastated both literally and economically by the First World War. In addition, Proust explores his own ambivalent and ambiguously presented sexuality by portraying varieties of sexual experience in Marcel’s agonizing relationship with his mistress, Albertine, his suspicion of her lesbian tendencies, and his observation of the homosexual world of the Baron de Charlus. The final section depicts the rapidly aging survivors of the Faubourg Saint-Germain during the immediate post–First World War years, along with Marcel’s realization that the combination of voluntary and involuntary memory (willed recollection and remembrances of the past that come unsought) will enable him to recapture the lost age and, by setting it down in writing, to achieve his life’s work.

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In 1975, on the eve of the publication of The Swing in the Garden, Robert Fulford’s interview with Hood in the Tamarack Review contained an introductory paragraph, presumably by the editor or by Fulford himself but based on information from Hood, that each novel in the series would be “part of a Proustian whole that will capture the thoughts and textures and feelings of a century of Canadian life” (Fulford 65). In a possibly unguarded remark in the same interview, Hood acknowledged that, of all the examples of ambitious fiction, “Proust’s is the one I’m imitating most explicitly,” and he identified the areas of influence as “narrative technique, the appeal to the philosophy of time, certain subtleties in the handling of the narrator” (66). “Imitating” may be too crude a term, but the remark makes clear that the example of A la recherche du temps perdu was prominent in Hood’s consciousness at an early stage in the development of his own novel series. Nonetheless, the extent of Hood’s familiarity with the details of Proust’s text at this time is open to question. According to Linda Sandler, who once again presumably derived the information from Hood himself, he “was reading A la recherche du temps perdu in 1968 when he conceived the idea of writing the spiritual history of his own age” and was currently (1975) “reading Proust for the fourth time” as he was working on Reservoir Ravine (6, 7). Some at least superficial awareness of Proust is evident as early as the pre–New Age novel The Camera Always Lies (1967), where the romance hero is Jean-Pierre Fauré of Films Vinteuil. Not only is “Vinteuil” an allusion to the composer of Swann’s “little phrase” in Swann’s Way (Du côté de chez Swann), but the sonata for piano and violin from which it comes is supposed to have been based on one by Gabriel Fauré (see 1: 250 and Painter 1: 164). Yet in 1978 Hood listed A la recherche among the books which he “would like to have been influenced by” but which came “pretty late in the story” (Trusting 9). He presumably meant only that Proust’s novel was not among the earliest literary experiences that formed the cast of his mind in childhood. Whatever the historical situation may have been, however, it remains clear that the significance and importance of Proust’s work became more and more evident as his own series progressed. Allusions to the French novelist may not be as numerically frequent in The New Age as those to Wordsworth, but they are generally more prominent. In The Swing in the Garden the two main excursions of the Goderich family out of residential Toronto “into the country”

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and “down to the docks” (175–6) are likened to the Guermantes and Méséglise (or Swann’s) ways in the opening book of Proust’s novel. In The Motor Boys in Ottawa, a three-page discussion of Proust (211–13) refers not so much to A la recherche, though this is mentioned, as to the Figaro article “Filial Sentiments of a Matricide” – an indication, perhaps, that Hood had been propelled to study Proust’s whole oeuvre in detail. But it is in the eighth novel, Property and Value, that Proust’s work becomes central. Here Linnet Olcott plays Albertine – or, to be more accurate, the wraith or spirit of Albertine – in a film shot in Venice and based upon a sequence in The Fugitive (Albertine disparu, or La fugitive). The interpretation of Proust thus becomes a prime topic in the narrative. Subtle intertextual allusions are also involved; for instance, the accidental death of Linnet towards the end of the shooting of the film is a structural parallel in Hood’s sequence to Albertine’s sudden death in Proust’s. Hood’s debt to Proustian concerns is obvious enough. His discussion of class and rank (initiated in the opening chapter of The Swing in the Garden and receiving a detailed analysis early in Near Water) and the continuing debate between the imperatives of time and value that constantly recurs within The New Age are indicative of this debt. Similarly, in the course of Hood’s series we move up from the servants’ end of Rosedale to the decaying social enclave of the Stoverville waterfront and further – Hood’s extension demanded by modern Canadian historical circumstances – to the unabashedly high-tech commercial world of Robinson Court. Hood, then, as a North American and even more crucially as a Canadian, presented a very different social world from Proust’s, yet there is a comparable concern with the historical significance of a social panorama. So far as sexuality is concerned, the resemblance is closer to that of a reversed mirror image. Hood was as unequivocally heterosexual in his emphasis as Proust was ambiguously homosexual. The example of A la recherche (and Powell’s sequence) may well have alerted him to the need for a presentation of a broad sexual range, but one feels a tension – even unease – here that is the opposite of Proust’s yet related to the older novelist’s artistic dilemma. Hood’s description of Adam Sinclair’s advances in the first chapter of The Scenic Art, for all its attempt at farce, is as willed and uncertain as Proust’s delineation of the relationship between Marcel and Albertine. Later, while discussing Proust with Adam in Property and Value, Matt – convincingly, in my view – remarks that he has never been

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able to accept the late revelation in Proust’s novel that Robert de Saint-Loup (one of Marcel’s friends) was, as Adam characteristically puts it, “a member of my club” (100). The presentation of Albertine, for all its acute flashes of psychological insight, is similarly uncertain. Hood’s account of Matt’s response to Adam in The Scenic Art falls back on the conventions of theatrical farce to avoid too serious an analysis of the situation. Matt’s change of heart in the second part of Dead Men’s Watches, where Adam dies painfully and lingeringly from aids in Matt’s apartment, is compelling, though here again – in my view, at least – it is not without a suggestion of willed empathy against an instinctive grain. One of Proust’s most important legacies to Hood was his artistic principle of digression, though “digression” is technically the wrong word in both instances, since these passages reproduce the substance of their narrators’ meditations on experience and are thus central to the artistic purpose. Both Proust and Hood were preoccupied with the way in which the mind works, so that if an experience sparked off a vivid memory, as in the case of Marcel’s petite madeleine or the place where Matt saw the last journey of the Stoverville railway in A New Athens, the following of the mind into a recreation of the past became obligatory. It is typical of Proust’s subtlety that he makes Marcel discover a model for the process within the latter’s own (fabricated) literary experience. As a youth, Marcel encounters the writings of a novelist named Bergotte and is attracted to them for precisely this quality: “For in his later books, if he had hit upon some great truth, or upon the name of an historic cathedral, he would break off his narrative, and in an invocation, an apostrophe, a long prayer, would give free rein to those exhalations which, in the earlier volumes, had been immanent in his prose ... These passages in which he delighted were our favourites also. For my own part I knew all of them by heart. I was disappointed when he resumed the thread of his narrative” (1: 112) A difference, however, is that, whereas Bergotte employed this device as a conscious trick of style, Marcel (as well as Proust behind him) sees it as a means of communicating the workings of involuntary memory. For Hood (as, I think, for Powell) it was primarily a principle of structure. It became a semi-realistic way of demonstrating how our minds work – when, for example, Andrew Goderich loses himself in abstruse philosophical speculations in the middle of the wedding ceremony in Reservoir Ravine – or an economical and

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convenient way of allowing Matt to express his thoughts and responses to all the myriad aspects of the material world that he observes around him. Oddly enough, Proust is not mentioned by name in A New Athens, though this is in many respects Hood’s most Proustian novel. Here the early climactic moment when Matt’s present in 1966 becomes fused with an earlier experience in 1952 (“This place intersected with that time” [18]), while presented as a supremely Wordsworthian “spot of time,” was clearly Hood’s equivalent to the famous Proustian scene involving the petite madeleine (1: 51). Dedicated readers of Proust who remember references to “the whistling of trains” and “the clanging of the bell” in the early pages of the first book (1: 1, 38) will realize that Hood’s clues at this stage in his fiction were decidedly subtle and indirect. In addition, the discussion of May-Beth’s painting entitled The Stoverville Annual Regatta (107–9) obviously owes much to Marcel’s consideration of Elstir’s picture of the harbour at Carquethuit (2: 480).8 In A la recherche, Marcel begins by writing about a moment of acute childhood anguish when his mother refuses his plea that she come up from her social commitments as hostess to kiss him good night. This leads to a particularly traumatic scene in which she eventually spends the whole night with him in order to calm his fears. (A subtle variant of this scene was created by Hood in Reservoir Ravine [188–9; cf. Proust 1: 12].) It in turn triggers reflections on the nature of memory that culminate in the petite madeleine scene. Here Marcel experiences the power not of conscious recollection, but of involuntary memory made possible by happy synchronicities of sense-experience that enable him to recapture the past in all its vivid particularity. By the end of the novel, in its self-reflexive conclusion, Marcel the artist discovers that the revelations of involuntary memory can become the primary theme of his writing. This is perhaps the best-known characteristic of Proust’s writings – Marcel’s realization, in Matt Goderich’s words from The Motor Boys in Ottawa, that the past can be “ideally enshrined and fully recoverable in art” (212). Hood’s aim was remarkably similar, and it is not surprising that by 1981 Proust had become for Hood, quite simply, “the greatest novelist of this century” (“Notes for a talk”). Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time (like The New Age, a novel-series in twelve volumes) paints a portrait of English upper-

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class life, along with its artistic and bohemian connections, in the first three-quarters of the twentieth century. It resembles A la recherche du temps perdu in that this society is observed from the viewpoint of a middle-class writer. But there the resemblances cease. Powell’s Nicholas Jenkins marries into this higher social world, but observes it with a dry, witty, amused detachment. There are, to be sure, volumes devoted to Jenkins’s childhood and his experiences in the Second World War, but the intimate events of his adult life, notably his marriage and the growth of his family, are conveyed briefly and indirectly. He is primarily a spectator watching Time’s dance, with all its complex conventions and repetitions, from a position apart. He is concerned with its dazzling surface, rather than with its inner tensions. Powell, though always shrewd and sometimes touching upon profundities of insight, is primarily a comic artist in the nondivine sense. The pattern of his life as a writer, however, closely resembles Hood’s. He began writing a number of novels, praised for their polish and skill, that explored the world of London art and society between the wars. The first of these, by the way, was entitled The Afternoon Men, a phrase that Hood smuggles dexterously into the text of Near Water (247). These early novels are promising, unusually assured, but not especially remarkable. Only with the gift of hindsight can we see them as in a sense anticipating the much more complex series of novels that were to appear after the Second World War. Like Proust’s work (which Powell knew well and of which he wrote with knowledge and admiration), his writings focus on a powerful class in decline, with the Second World War having the same devastating effect upon it as the first had on the Faubourg SaintGermain. The difference is that Proust reflects that society along with the private, personal, and essentially inner world of Marcel. Powell’s Nicholas Jenkins, on the other hand, moulds the world he sees into a rich and satisfying artistic design that continually draws attention to its own artifice. Like Hood, Powell set himself an ambitious and minutely planned regimen – and stuck to it. The twelve volumes in A Dance to the Music of Time appeared regularly at two- or three-year intervals. With the publication of the final volume, Hearing Secret Harmonies, in 1975, Powell brought his series full circle when Jenkins comes at the end of the book upon the workmen around their brazier, the image that, in a Proust-like moment, had set off the process of recollection which

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led to the whole sequence. All three writers were preoccupied with representing the complex effects of time on human relationships and aspirations, and all three found themselves demonstrating Time’s power in the very process of writing, since later scenes in their fictions – the post–First World War world in Proust, the age of flower children and protest in Powell, and the world of aids in Hood – could not have been foreseen when they initiated their series. Hood is on record as regarding A Dance to the Music of Time as “the most important work of fiction in English that has been accomplished since the death of Joyce” (Struthers “Interview” 69). In the same place he acknowledged that he “imitated” Powell’s series but was not trying “to produce anything like it.” Certainly, he was fond of introducing covert references to Powell’s work into his own narrative. The most intriguing of these occurs towards the end of Reservoir Ravine when Miss Chenoweth reports to Matt that “Lady Isobel Jenkins and her husband ... Nicholas Jenkins, the novelist,” were sitting behind her on a bus tour in northern Italy (216).9 Other Powell references in the New Age series include seemingly casual allusions in Black and White Keys (51–3) and Be Sure to Close Your Eyes (175) to Dogdene, the stately home of the Sleafords in At Lady Molly’s, with its famous (but fictional) Veronese – a double reference, since Hood took over the name Sleaford itself for May-Beth’s family. Another fictional painting, introduced by Powell into Temporary Kings, is mentioned in A New Athens (97), while Dr Trelawney’s ritual utterances from The Kindly Ones (64) are quoted and discussed in Near Water (149). It is worth remarking, however, that despite the comparative frequency of such allusions, Hood never explicitly identified Powell or his writings within the series. The emphasis on art (both literary and painterly) in these references is by no means coincidental. From both Proust and Powell, Hood could have derived hints about the introduction of works of art, both real and invented, into The New Age. In A la recherche Proust clearly takes pains to include a considerable range of artistic achievement in his design. The writer Bergotte, the actress Berma, the composer Vinteuil, and the painter Elstir all make their appearance early. In Powell’s Dance we encounter an almost bewildering range of artists and performers: Edgar Deacon, with his classical studies of naked young men, Barnby, with his female nudes, the old-fashioned novelist Sir John Clarke and the “modern” X. Trapnell, Morland the professional composer and General Conyers the amateur cellist, and

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many others. Moreover, in both novelists we are confronted with an impressively large range of references to actual works of art, works produced by the fictional characters, and sometimes (to complicate matters further) fabricated works foisted upon real artists. In Proust, characters are continually being likened to figures in famous paintings, and the trick is picked up by Powell (and Hood), while “created” works include Vinteuil’s violin sonata, whose “little phrase” haunts Swann, and Elstir’s portrait of Odette as Miss Sacripant (alluded to, incidentally, by Hood in The Motor Boys in Ottawa [261] and Property and Value [191]). In Powell we find the fabricated paintings already mentioned and considerable discussions of works of art produced by the invented writers, painters, and musicians. Hood learnt from all these examples. At the visionary centre of his series, we might say, are the fictional May-Beth Codrington’s fabricated paintings. One also thinks of Maura Boston’s poetry, discussed and partly quoted in A New Athens; Tony Goderich’s writings and Edie’s mural in The Scenic Art; Linnet Olcott’s superimposed drawings and the Proust filming in Property and Value; the “last Titian,” brought to the National Gallery of Canada in Great Realizations; the dramatic art of Adam Sinclair and others; and Petter Arnesson’s jazz in Be Sure to Close Your Eyes; not to mention factual references to the memorial chapel at Burghclere and the murals in the Stiftskirche on the island of Reichenau in Black and White Keys. Prominent also are Matt’s “digressions” on artistic subjects ranging from Lawren Harris and the Master of Alkmaar in The Swing in the Garden, through Stanley Spencer and James Ensor in A New Athens, to Bing Crosby in Black and White Keys, the evolution of jazz in Be Sure to Close Your Eyes, and, of course, the various disquisitions on Proust already discussed. The links between Powell’s Dance and Hood’s New Age are remarkably close. Powell completed his series in 1975, the very year that Hood’s opening volume appeared. Both men wrote their series at the same stage in their lives – Powell between 1951 and 1975, Hood between 1975 and 2000. They were within months of the same age when they embarked on their respective novel-cycles, and both, as I have shown, had established modest but solid reputations in fiction and non-fiction before beginning their ambitious main works. Indeed, it was as a result of carefully reading Powell’s work while A Dance was still in progress that Hood came to realize the urgency of beginning to write his series when he did. Both men were indebted to Proust and made frequent direct and indirect allusions to

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A la recherche throughout their work. It was from Powell (with help, no doubt, from Virgil, Milton, and Tennyson) that Hood derived his idea for a cycle of twelve books. But Powell’s main influence on Hood was twofold: it resides, first, as Hood himself suggested, in “the way he can see a society as an infinite series of social relations” (Struthers “Interview” 69) and also in his use of a relatively passive spectator-protagonist who becomes, as it were, the creative and moral centre of the work. Powell’s literary attitudes, interests, and ambitions are often similar to Hood’s, though at times they diverge drastically. In describing the origins of A Dance, Powell wrote: “After the war ... I decided that the thing to do was to produce a really large work about all the things I was interested in – the whole of one’s life, in fact” (“Taken” 53). With minimal adaptation, the statement fits Hood’s New Age readily enough, though one significant qualification needs to be registered immediately: the two novelists were interested in very different things. As I have shown, Powell chronicled the interweaving fortunes of a small collection of English “society” people and artistic hangers-on through the first three-quarters of the last century. He was fascinated by their passions and actions and especially their sexual compulsions, which he presents with a brittle, ironic detachment. There is no particular interest in religious issues in Powell, however, and I suspect he would have found Matt Goderich – and probably Hood himself – excessively earnest and even stodgy. A second, if related, difference emerges as Powell continues by emphasizing inevitable practical limitations: “You ... must limit yourself in what you deal with. You cannot write about everybody” (“Taken” 53). This comment is obviously true, and Hood would agree, yet one cannot help feeling that Hood wanted to include not only everybody but everything – at least, everything pertaining to modern Canada. Certainly, he would not confine his canvas to merely personal interests; as we have seen, he considered himself as embarked upon a national mission. There is a public dimension in his writing that is totally absent in Powell. Oddly enough, Hood has been criticized for offering too narrow a view of Canadian experience in his work. This is, I am convinced, an unfair charge – what Canadian writer has included more? – but it arises, understandably, in response to some of his more grandiose statements of intention.

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The decision to write a work containing “all the things I was interested in” inevitably leads to a consideration of the relation between author and protagonist. Powell described his own position succinctly and accurately in Miscellaneous Verdicts: “The narrative of this novel [i.e., the Dance sequence] is told by a man who has lived the same sort of life as myself, without our having necessarily shared every experience; a method intended to give consistency to the point of view – all novels must have a point of view – by looking at things from an angle always familiar to the writer” (9). Again, this observation sounds wholly applicable to Hood, and much critical commentary about both writers has been devoted to an exploration of this “overlap,” to employ James Tucker’s term in his discussion of Powell (145). Hood and Powell clearly shared a concentration on details of class, social activities, and general views about life and art. Yet they differed drastically in the way they presented their narrators. Powell was, at various times, criticized for the way in which he recorded only the basic facts and events of Jenkins’s marriage, leaving the intimate details blank. He was himself, however, unrepentant. As he stated in an interview: “If Jenkins told you a lot about himself he’d lose credibility as a reporter. In fact, he would end up as an appalling egotist” (Davis 535–6). Hood was prepared to risk this outcome. Matt reflects the world about him, and his function as an observer/reporter is important. But his private life is presented as well, and Hood made a number of noteworthy alterations to the circumstances of his own life in order to build Matt Goderich into a more representative – one is tempted to say, a more emblematic – figure. Thus Matt’s father does not, like Hood’s, work in a bank but begins as a university teacher of philosophy; Matt himself is an art historian, rather than a novelist and teacher; and in the second half of the series, Matt’s marriage, unlike Hood’s, breaks up in conformity to the crisis in marriage and sexual relations characteristic of the 1960s and 1970s. While Hood, like Powell, packed his series with “all the things [he] was interested in,” these included both national and personal issues and what he saw as an inevitable relation between them. Although Powell admitted that he hoped, “among other things, [to] show the changes in English society ... from 1914 to the present,” he saw this focus as “only secondary to the investigation of human character” (Davis 533). For Hood, it was primary, and while it rendered him more vulnerable to criticism, it also makes his series in certain respects even more ambitious than Powell’s.

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I have attempted in this chapter to show where Hood followed and where he diverged from the example of some of his more important predecessors. Every work of art combines the conventional and the original; it positions itself within a context of what has already been achieved in its genre and form, but also ventures into new territory. Hood’s sequence is no exception. Now that we have explored the traditional bases upon which he builds, we can embark on a literarycritical odyssey towards “the new age” by means of a book-by-book examination of the series, concentrating on the breadth of his insight and the variety of his art.

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pa rt t w o Towards the New Age

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The Holocaust and Canadian Jews in the 1930s and 1940s

The Swing in the Garden ... the impulse to articulate a connected account of the past. The Swing in the Garden 72

As readers, we approach any book we open with certain generic expectations. The Swing in the Garden is described and classified as a novel, so we naturally anticipate a work of fiction. After the first few pages, however, we may well begin to wonder whether we have been deceived by an error in cataloguing. The book does not feel like a novel; we register a distinct impression of recollection rather than invention. Further thought – and further reading – will soon bring the realization that a deliberate blending of generic effects is involved. “On the face of it,” Keith Garebian has written, “The Swing in the Garden ... appears to mix documentary fact with fiction without telling a story in the conventional sense” (Hugh Hood 97). Indeed, it is because the incidents that make up the narrator’s life seem to lack narrative suspense that we assume them to be autobiographical. The effect is not, of course, unprecedented: we encounter it, to some extent, in any fictional narrative that lays stress on the conventions of realism, and Canadian readers are likely to be reminded immediately of Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women. But the relation of personal recollection to creative fiction is a subject so crucial to the whole of the New Age series that it needs special attention here. Interconnections between memoir and fiction had exercised both Proust and Powell, and a comment by John Bayley concerning Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time seems especially apposite here: “Nothing shows the complete originality of Powell’s technique more

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than the way his fiction imitates, and almost in a double sense, like a trompe l’oeil painting. The reader, that is to say, quickly grasps that the work is invented, like all novels, and the pictorial element helps him to understand the nature of the invention that is going on. Yet there is deception in this because the work in its own inimitable way is a memoir, a memoir masquerading as a novel” (11). One might well argue with this comment as an accurate representation of Powell’s sequence, but its application to Hood is of considerable interest. The more we learn about Hood’s own autobiographical experience as a child, the more we realize how much he recreated from personal memory while at the same time interspersing scenes that had no existence outside his keen imagination. And at this point it may be helpful to cite a remark from one of Proust’s letters, written during an early stage in the composition of A la recherche du temps perdu – a remark that approaches the topic from the other end, as it were – “I’ve written a long book which I call a novel because it hasn’t the casual element of memoirs” (quoted in Painter 2: 285). If we keep these observations in mind, a careful reading of the opening paragraphs of The Swing should convince us that, though the writing here is compatible with memoir, it is no more casual and no less artful than the work of Proust and Powell. The deceptively simple first sentence is a case in point: “In those days we used to have a red-and-white garden swing set up in the backyard beside the garage.” The book begins, then, with an allusion to a child’s plaything which, though not technically Matt’s earliest memory, serves a similar function to that of the moocow coming down the road in the opening sentence of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The swing is an ordinary, everyday object, and as readers, we might pass quickly over the detail, were it not for the fact that it echoes the title of the novel as a whole. We are therefore alerted to the possibility that the swing in the garden is more than a mere realistic detail. It is immediately invested with the imaginative potential of a symbol or emblem. A few sentences later, we are offered a tentative account of the swing’s origin: “It was a design which, I suppose, originated in Québec or along the Ontario-Québec border, possibly because of the abundance of cheap lumber in hinterlands still imperfectly cleared” (5). This is something that the young child could not possibly know, but the older narrator here places the swing within a clear geographical and historical context. Furthermore, however humble and utilitarian an object the swing may have been, it is recognized as having

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a “design” – one of the key words not only in the novel but also in the series to which it belongs. There is, however, a further dimension to be explored. “In those days” – in illo tempore – has important anthropological and spiritual or religious associations. Again, reference to a “garden” may seem innocent enough, but like “innocent” itself, it is a word which, for anyone inheriting a cultural background influenced by the JudeoChristian tradition, will readily suggest Eden. Hood, of course, was especially sensitive to this kind of association. He explained to Pierre Cloutier: “The swing is the pendulum of time, of course, and the cyclical movement of the fall from the original One into individuation and the return from the fall to the original unity” (Cloutier 52). And to John Mills he wrote: “There really was a swing, in that garden [i.e., Eden] away from personal innocence towards the fall” (Hood and Mills 137). Hood’s novel imitates the same symbolic pattern, and other details underline the connection with the sacred story. In the first paragraph, the children “would pretend a thunderstorm was at hand” (i.e., the garden was threatened), and there is a reference (repeated a little later) to “cross-pieces” which, it could be argued, contains a faint hint of Golgotha and the crucifixion. The first identified playmate of the narrator and his sister is Adam Sinclair, and both his names are meaningful – “fraught with suggestion,” to use Matt’s phrase in The Scenic Art (74). Moreover, we subsequently realize that the novel, which begins in a garden (albeit merely a suburban garden in Toronto), ends with the word “fall.” North American seasonal connotation and idiom in no way preclude a larger mythic reference; rather, this is a convenient example of Hood’s practice, already noted, of working simultaneously on more than one level of significance. There is, however, an additional seemingly casual comment in the early paragraphs which deserves thoughtful consideration. The narrator tells how he and his sister “made up stories,” yet almost immediately he refers to his own “infant addiction to realities and facts” (5). Both qualities are to be illustrated in the pages to follow; indeed, the blending of fiction – “stories” that have to be “made up” – with “realities and facts” becomes, I would argue, a distinguishing feature of the series. Before we embark on more complicated matters, it will be as well to consider another effect so obvious that it is tempting to assume it

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without comment. Hood begins by placing his fictional commentator (who, it is worth noting, is destined to become a special kind of historian) within a lovingly detailed “real” topography. Within the next page or two we encounter references to “north Rosedale,” “the Bridle Path,” “St. Andrew’s Gardens,” “Rosedale Heights Drive,” “Sighthill,” “Ridge Drive,” “Moore Park,” “Christie Street,” “Bathurst,” “Avenue Road,” “Yonge Street,” “MacLennan Hill,” “the Don Valley” (6). The effect itself is, of course, commonplace; we recall Virginia Woolf’s invented Mrs. Dalloway walking through the actual streets of central London, Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus in a meticulously remembered Dublin, and, nearer to home, characters in various Margaret Atwood novels who pace an accurately portrayed and sharply etched Toronto. Examples could be found in most novels written within the conventions of realism, yet Hood’s conspicuous litany of names suggests a special emphasis on the historical and the authentic. Within the New Age series as a whole, Hood followed his own personal variation on traditional practice. Jane Austen, referred to in the text (25), invented her characters, along with the local manor houses and villages in which they live, yet sent them off to authentic urban centres such as London, Bath, or Lyme Regis. Hardy’s Wessex (discussed at the opening of A New Athens) was fictional so far as the names of local human settlements were concerned (Casterbridge, Budmouth, Mellstock, Weatherbury), but once again, outlying centres (London, Bristol) were authentic, as were most natural features (the Vale of Blackmore, the River Frome) and prehistoric antiquities (Stonehenge, the Cross-in-Hand). In his series Hood transformed Brockville into Stoverville for his own imaginative purposes (though reproducing many features of Brockville topography with impressive accuracy); elsewhere, however, he remained almost invariably faithful to the nomenclature and geography of southeast Ontario. Following a tradition normally associated with the historical novel, Hood also intermixed historical and invented people. Once again, illustrious precedents are easily listed. Sir Walter Scott’s eponymous hero in Waverley meets Bonnie Prince Charlie; Tolstoy’s Prince Andrei encounters Commander Kutuzov in War and Peace. Here in The Swing in the Garden, Matt refers to his father’s involvement in the founding of the League for Social Reconstruction and associates him with “his friends, Mr. [Frank] Underhill at the university and Mr. [F.R.] Scott

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and Mr. [John King] Gordon [the son of the popular novelist “Ralph Connor”] down in Montréal” (22). I have inserted the identifying first names or initials to point up Hood’s startling effect here in bringing his ostensibly fictional characters into intimate contact with figures we recognize in the worlds of politics, writing, and social commentary. At a stroke, he has connected his imagined family with personalities and events in the world that extends outside the book. This effect continues when the young Matt is visited in bed by another of his father’s friends, who turns out to be Jacques Maritain, the distinguished Catholic theologian who taught regularly at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto (42). We never again encounter Maritain in person, but his brief presence strengthens the reality of Matt’s Catholic allegiances. A page later, “a Mr. Woodsworth” – the founder of the ccf party – is another visitor at the Goderich home. These references are not to be explained away as mere name-dropping; they are essentially emblematic and subtly connect Matt’s story with the worlds of international scholarship and public events. As for later novels, the statesman Earl Balfour and the scholar-philosopher G.S. Brett make their appearance in Reservoir Ravine; the American intelligence official Allen Dulles is a momentary presence in Black and White Keys; Lester Pearson and Pierre Elliott Trudeau, as well as the theatrical director Tyrone Guthrie, are minor figures in The Scenic Art; while several prominent and readily identifiable members of the New Democratic Party gather together in a scene in The Motor Boys in Ottawa. Moreover, Hood was fond of following Proust in including lists in which fictional and historical figures rub shoulders. The result is a remarkable integration of his invented world into the verifiable processes of history. Hood described the main theme of The Swing in the Garden as “the narrator’s becom[ing] aware of himself as a person” (“Elephant” 105). Since Matt Goderich’s perspective is to be dominant within the whole series, the circumstances of his early years are of particular importance, and the relation between author and protagonist naturally becomes a vital factor. Matt’s story on the literal level of memoir is specific and personal, but it must also have general and representative application. In order to achieve a much needed immediacy, Hood based many of the incidents upon equivalent events in his own life, but he also created episodes that would qualify Matt for his role as cultural commentator, looker-on, “the recollective one”

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(Swing 109). In the course of the book, Hood inconspicuously impresses upon us the abiding characteristics of Matt Goderich, who is not only protagonist but recording eye. Through Matt he was able to create the portrait of an age from a unique and quintessentially Canadian angle, establishing from the outset what is referred to in the novel, only half jokingly, as “The Matt Goderich style” (133). As Matt remarks himself, “I absorbed all these things without really thinking about them, assimilating them into the permanent set of my imagination and thereby enriching my whole life” (178–9). As readers, we gradually become accustomed to his characteristic thought and attitudes. Matt’s literary and artistic bents are immediately stressed: “I was a mighty verbal type from babyhood” (15). He is shown to be sensitive at an early age to “design” in all its forms, beginning with cars; he cares passionately “about shapes and sounds and colours and lettering and the sound of motors, not as motors but as rhythms” (27). Later, his knowledge of “physical shape and form, whether this car was well-modelled where that one was ugly,” leads smoothly towards his “beginning to have a sense of beauty in women and girls” (60). Similarly, his involvement with religious beliefs and practices is aesthetic as well as spiritual: the word and the Word are intertwined from his earliest experience. He is pleased formally by the opening words of the Catechism (60), and attracted to the word “Tenebrae,” which became “another of the deeply resonant poetic words that cluttered my verbal imagination as a boy” (116). Ultimately, of course, this interest in design and form and language will coalesce into an intense (albeit liberal) Catholicism that recognizes a divine design in the universe and in the larger significances of human life. Ostensibly, The Swing in the Garden presents Matt’s early years as he recalls them. If the swing itself constitutes one of the earliest memorable images in his life, a slightly later scene in the garden, where he is comforted by the older and apparently freer Mostyn McNally, represents an early glimpse of the equivocal world beyond Eden. Yet here too Hood worked adroitly on a number of different levels at the same time. He acknowledged that he introduced the railway track not merely because it was a genuine topographical detail from his own childhood but because it allowed him to hint at Harold Innis’s thesis concerning the importance of communications, in general, and railways, in particular, to the historical development of Canada as a

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unified nation-state. Furthermore, Mostyn significantly precedes Matt in the human process of “moving outward into bigger and bigger rooms and perimeters” (10). From Matt’s viewpoint, on a restraining lead and so confined to the garden, Mostyn is enviably free, but the freedom of “[e]ver widening spaces” is seen to be dangerous – he could get “hurt” by the trains (10). Mostyn also introduces Matt to the world of poverty and class deprivation (“The first time I was ever allowed in their house I was stunned by the sudden sharp stink of poverty and dirt” [13]). Finally, in a formal effect typical of Hood, Mostyn plays a sobering part in the overall design of the book: introduced early, he appears again on the last page when he suffers a painful death in action in the opening period of the Second World War. The first chapter takes care not merely to record Matt’s developing character and interests but also to place the Goderich family socially as well as geographically. The Goderiches are, as they must be if Matt is to become a viable spokesman for eastern Canada in the twentieth century, unquestionably middle-class. Matt is born, like Hood himself, on Summerhill Avenue in the north Rosedale district of Toronto, but Hood, through Matt, is quick to insist that this is not Rosedale proper, that Ontarian emblem of wealth and privilege: “When I told people later on that I’d grown up in Rosedale, they were always impressed and ready to concede me a class distinction that I’d never thought of asserting. If I identified the location as ‘north Rosedale’ the mistaken identification didn’t occur, because north Rosedale was in some degree the dormitory of the servants of the south” (23). Matt’s father is at first a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto, thus introducing an intellectual atmosphere, but he ultimately resigns and (somewhat improbably, we may feel) spends some time running a restaurant in cottage country and managing a hotel on Toronto Island. The young Matthew Goderich can therefore experience the fringes of aristocracy (or at least plutocracy) but can also move within the orbit of working-class life and attitudes. His early life includes a number of typical childhood joys and misadventures: his minor mishap with the curtain rod and his maternal grandmother’s frightening explanation, “Dieu t’as puni” (9); the pedal-car given him on his fourth birthday (18–20); the near-drowning when showing off his new high-cut boots (38–40). But we soon realize that the book is consciously and artfully constructed: it is not

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a mere anthology of chance-recalled memories. The first chapter ends with Matt’s introduction to a new social world at elementary school (47). We watch him moving tentatively but inexorably into relations with others beyond his immediate family. His dutiful but somewhat reluctant protection of Adam Sinclair when he is ragged at the cinema (57–9), his brotherly help given to the young Tony (65–7), his calf love for Bea Skaithe (77), the excitements and regrets of moving house (89–91) are all representative events characterizing the second chapter. Violence at both a personal and a historical level dominates the third chapter: Matt’s chivalric fight in the schoolyard after his kissing of Alanna Begin (114–15); the anticipation of the Second World War, indicated by the last word, “Spitfire” (130); and so on. As Robert Lecker has noted, in one of the most helpful essays on Hood that has yet been written, a basic image in The Swing in the Garden is that of a “journey into widening spaces” (192). In telling the story of his own life, Matt is to illuminate some of the most significant developments in the recent history of his country. Hood insisted to Robert Fulford that “there’s a continual parallel all the way through this particular book between my little infant ... and the society of which he is a microcosm” (Fulford 67). As J.R. (Tim) Struthers wrote in a perceptive early review, “[t]he dawning consciousness of Matthew Goderich in this novel reflects the consciousness of Canadian society in the process of gaining awareness of its position in the world” (Untitled review 518). Within the text itself, the mature Matt, looking back, refers to the “directly experienced structure of an individually lived life” (67) and later observes: “History was beginning to pull into shape around and behind me” (133). His later development as not only a historian but an art historian – one who studies the inheritance from the past with special reference to its artistic creations – is clearly adumbrated here. Similarly, within a few pages of the end of the novel, as he watches his father’s face on the first day of the Second World War, Matt suddenly realizes “how a single man’s life may stand for the lives of many” (205). The remark applies profoundly to Matt himself. His character will be filled out in later novels. His tendency to pontificate, his philosophical earnestness, his opinionated responses to things in general may all be seen in embryo here and more obviously in those parts of the commentary that come from the middleaged retrospective narrator. As early as 1975, in what may have been a self-consciously defensive posture to forestall criticism, Hood

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remarked to Linda Sandler that his protagonist “is sometimes a real horse’s ass ... much stuffier than I am” (Sandler 6). Most importantly, however, he made two crucial points unequivocally clear to potential readers of the whole series: first, that whatever is interesting to Matt is of relevance to “the New Age”; second, that Matt’s preoccupation with form and structure and design will have a profound influence upon the story that he is telling, that the story he chronicles will have been imaginatively moulded and accentuated with an eye to artistic effect. I must therefore end, as I began, with a further consideration of the artifice that underlies this seemingly casual memoir. Despite the illusion of realism created by this imitation memoir, Hood regularly inserted statements in his text that specifically drew attention to other genres and forms. Often these involve literary allusions that give a hint to the way in which The Swing in the Garden can be read. Early in the opening chapter, for instance, a story about Matt from “the Goderich annals” (it is also worth pausing over the suggestiveness of “annals”) is described as “[f]irst episode in the epic cycle” (10), and references to epic recur noticeably and appropriately in this opening book of an extended series (see also 36, 71 [“Catalogue of the ships and heroes”], 72, 78, 140). Other formal devices are also hinted at, as previous commentators have noted. For Lecker (189), “moral vision” – Hood’s own phrase (175) – becomes a structural framework, while for Garebian the novel “has the archetypal form of the quest” (Hugh Hood 98). Structural concerns are also highlighted by the numerous references to other writers and to other carefully selected books. Once again, this is not a matter of name-dropping but a deliberate principle of formal design. The first reference of this kind is to a children’s book, the aptly titled Journeys through Bookland (5); another is to Collins’ Aircraft Annual (7), which belongs to the Innis-influenced communications theme already mentioned. Soon we encounter a description of Matt’s mother’s reading tastes – references to popular novelists such as Galsworthy – and passing mention of, among others, Balzac and Mazo de la Roche (17). It can hardly be fortuitous that, within the text of the opening novel of The New Age, Hood alludes to early writers, of various degrees of literary seriousness, who have produced ambitious and extended novel-series. We come to realize that no reference in Hood’s work is ever casual, and that even

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passing allusions to writers and books can yield important clues for the appreciation of his own work. A noteworthy example occurs in the fourth chapter, where Hood apparently digresses into a lengthy discussion of Stephen Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town. But like all such seeming narrative interruptions in Hood, this “digression” is fully germane to his larger meaning. The allusion is touched off by a reference to an unexpected branch line of the cnr north of Toronto, which reminds the adult Matt of “the line to Mariposa” (138). Then he (or his creator) goes on to characterize Leacock’s book as “one of the two or three books at the nerve-centre of Canadian life” (139), a book that is “about as Canadian as you can get” (140). The shade of Harold Innis lurks once again in the background here, and it is also no accident that, as Matt notes, Leacock made “the central Canadian political question [free trade versus protectionism] surface in the book’s next-to-last chapter” (139). (Hood would himself explore the question in his own way later in the series in The Motor Boys in Ottawa.) Sunshine Sketches is described as “a pastoral idyll treated satirically” (140), and the relevance to the threatened child’s-pastoral world of The Swing in the Garden is clear. Throughout this apparent digression Hood’s conscious structural artistry is not in doubt. The discussion of Leacock also includes a passing reference to Proust. Orillia, Matt notes, is “usually accepted as the original of Leacock’s little town, standing in the same relation as Cabourg to Balbec” (138). Later the two excursion destinations of the Goderich family, either “into the country” around Toronto or “down by the docks” (176), are compared to the two ways in Swann’s Way (Du côté de chez Swann), and reveal “how the narrator discovered much later in life that the two ways finally united themselves into a single meaning” (175). Proust is obviously of considerable importance to this novel about childhood and memory, but structurally the Wordsworthian connections are even greater. The novel is composed, like The Prelude, around “spots of time” (Prelude, 1850 text, 12:l.208), and Hood follows the poet in narrating the immediacy of childhood experience while commenting upon it from an adult perspective. Above all, Wordsworth’s connecting, discursive passages are unabashedly didactic in character – he proudly described himself as “a teacher or nothing” – and we may well find links here with the so-called digressions in Hood’s text.

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For some readers, his practice of apparently interrupting his narrative to reproduce Matt’s opinions on and interpretations of any subject that comes within his orbit is a manifest artistic blemish, but it was clearly deliberate, an effect as integral to Hood as to Wordsworth (and, for that matter, to Proust), and it will be as well to consider the matter here. First, we should remember that, in terms of literary history, a non-didactic aesthetic is a very recent phenomenon. Ever since Horace, the dictum that it is the artist’s responsibility both to teach and to delight had been accepted as axiomatic up to the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Certainly, Tolstoy (mentioned by Hood early in The Swing in the Garden [21]) never troubled himself with the idea that his work might be considered unnecessarily didactic, and the same is true of a number of writers closer to our own day, including D.H. Lawrence, George Orwell, and Thomas Mann. James Joyce, also mentioned here (21, 174), may be called as a key witness on this point. Anti-didactic critics are fond of citing the well-known passage about the detached artist withdrawn from his creation and paring his fingernails, but they often forget that it occurs within a notoriously argumentative and didactic section of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. We might at least consider the possibility that Hood’s Matt Goderich is as opinionated as Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, for comparable artistic reasons. Comparisons between The Swing and Joyce’s Portrait are inevitable, though Hood’s is the more conventionally accessible book. Both are in five chapters, but that in itself is a superficial and possibly coincidental similarity. Just after his book’s publication, however, Hood explained to John Mills: “One principle of structure in The Swing in the Garden is that the five chapters, of about equal length, cover shorter and shorter periods of time” (Hood and Mills 137). The more conscious Matt becomes of his immediate surroundings, the longer the narrative, an effect that may well be consciously derived from Joyce’s book. We thus come, inevitably, to the way in which The Swing anticipates the development of the series by exploring the phenomenon of time. I have already quoted Lecker’s description of the novel as a “journey into widening spaces,” but journeys habitually move through time as well as through space. In the course of the book, the young Matt becomes increasingly aware of time passing. A childhood remembrance of Miss Clarkson, shop assistant in the local drugstore for decades, “aging imperceptibly” (67), develops, in one of those

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passages where the young Matt gives place to the older narrator, into a meditation on permanence and change. Later a family joke involving the confusion of Shirley Temple, the child actress so poignantly representative of the ephemeral, and Sharon Temple, the Ontario house of worship built as an emblem of the eternal, introduces a comparable discussion of “Calendar time. Chronological time. Psychological and emotional and instinctual time, physiological growth time” (131). The novel that begins with the phrase “In those days ...” and creates a convincing portrait of a crucial period in the history of an individual (Matt), a place (Toronto), and a nation (Canada) is also a novel concerned with a religious, more-than-temporal process. The preservation of childhood memory is subsumed into a Proustian meditation reflecting the perspective of an adult narrator. This in turn leads to a consideration of the relation of time to value, a theme that recurs throughout the series. Matt, we realize, is destined to grow into an art historian whose life, as Lecker reminds us, “is devoted to interpreting the aesthetic impulse as it has existed through time” (196). The Swing in the Garden, then, presents a portrait of the art historian as a young child. What seems at first sight a casual anthology of boyhood memories is eventually recognized as a carefully planned, artfully constructed narrative that, while satisfyingly complete in its own right, opens up a wide variety of topics and approaches for possible development. Because Matt is no more than a child, the economic details of the Depression appear only fitfully, but enough is hinted at, and the subject will be amplified later. His immediate family – his parents and siblings – are firmly characterized and, like Matt himself, invite elaboration in later books. Of the supernumeraries, some disappear for ever, others – including Harold Forbes (“Hal from the ’peg” in Reservoir Ravine) and Marianne Keogh – make subsequent appearances, and at least one, Adam Sinclair, is destined to become a central figure. The subtle range of mood, varying from moments of carefree, youthful curiosity to shadowy intimations of adult seriousness, prepares the way for the shifting tones of subsequent novels in the series. Hood succeeds in introducing, at least in embryo, most of the issues that will be explored in the rest of The New Age. Moreover, an all-important emphasis is placed not so much on the external world of facts and challenge as on how the world is gradually recognized and comprehended by a sensitive observer. Matt is

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both a specific individual and a generalized model capable of mediating between author and audience. As sympathetic readers, we are invited to move on to the next novel with a feeling of keen anticipation.

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A New Athens This place intersected with that time. A New Athens 18

“Although The Swing in the Garden is full of documentary importance, it does not satisfy on the documentary level alone” (Lecker 189). The foregoing discussion has fully confirmed Robert Lecker’s assertion, which will also be found applicable, albeit in very different ways, to the rest of the series. Thus when we turn from the close of the first novel to the opening chapter of A New Athens, we find ourselves not only in a different decade but in a decidedly different kind of novel which requires to be read in a radically different way. The documentary features are still conspicuous, but the structure of memoir has given way to the now less familiar aesthetics of vision and revelation. Yet Lecker’s remark provides a vital clue to the transition in his felicitous use of the word “level.” In A New Athens the imagery of layers and levels is pervasive. Although the narrative viewpoint in The Swing in the Garden constantly shifted between that of the child experiencing events and the adult remembering and interpreting them, the narrative proceeded in traditional linear fashion. Here past and present fuse and interweave, since the action exists within the experiencing and recollective mind of the protagonist; moreover, he is vouchsafed from time to time—through religious awareness, psychological process, and the insights of art – visionary glimpses that allow him to perceive the unity of life from within what Yeats, in “Sailing to Byzantium,” called “the artifice of eternity.”

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When we approach A New Athens, it is important to follow Hood’s lead and respond receptively to these interconnecting physical, literary, temporal, and psychological “levels.” What I attempt in the following pages is a sequential interpretative commentary that may seem elementary, but it will lead, I hope, to a better understanding of the novel’s tonal and formal unity and of its crucial position within the series as a whole. At the risk of appearing to proceed by means of somewhat simple-minded plot narration, I shall try to indicate how Hood controls and vindicates the seemingly startling shifts in Matt Goderich’s mind and memory. A New Athens begins in June of 1966 with Matt setting out on a walking tour in the country north of Stoverville (i.e., Brockville), and the first major image we encounter is the familiar one, especially to southern Ontario residents, of straightened and modernized roads replacing earlier surfaces: “Everywhere the provincial highway engineers have been at work, straightening a curve here, introducing a fatal approach from a sideroad there, on the whole improving and embellishing the old road with an excellent surface and safe sightlines. Sometimes you can see an earlier roadbed cutting a sharp curve around a knoll a hundred feet off, while new paving lies above it on the wider, more direct course” (5–6). The image recurs later in the chapter when, on following Mrs McCready to the site of the disused Forthton station, Matt notices “traces of paving under the gravel” (46). This is the effect that gives rise to his paradoxical yet resonant phrase “instant archaeology” (6). But the main event in Matt’s walk begins with his discovery of “broken old creases in the shoulder of the highway and certain strange upheavals in the tarred surface” (6). The buried past here insists on obtruding into the present. The road in question is Highway 29, once known as the Victoria Macadamized Road in commemoration of the new queen and also of J.L. McAdam, the inventor of an enduring method of road-construction who died while the road was being planned. Hood, as we might expect, makes artistic and symbolic capital out of this road-making son of Adam, and the idea of one name being replaced by another yet still existing – if only in the minds of historians – suggests levels of another sort: both circumstances point up the wider implications of what are at first literal images. After discovering “[a]t least four different layers of resurfacing” (7) on the highway, Matt then notices a “strange earthwork” (8)

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leading off into the adjoining fields. The experience reminds him of days spent tracing thousand-year-old footpaths in England, and we follow the movements of his mind as he thinks back via the Wessex novels of Thomas Hardy to ancient legend and folklore: “we haven’t the culture-memory of the people who live in Angla-land, layer on layer on layer on less discernible layer on faint mark on mere suspected prehistoric spume of cross-hatched human purposes, or have we, or have we? Who tarred over those scratches on the roadway? How much past is past?” (11). The unifying imagery of layer and surface is now fully established, applied not only to the humanly adapted and controlled landscape in which Matt finds himself but to the configurations of his own consciousness. What he soon comes to refer to as “the barrow” (12) is eventually recognized as the disused roadbed of the Stoverville, Westport, and Lake Superior Railroad. By Old World standards this represents “instant archaeology,” since the remains date back no further than three generations and were not abandoned until some fourteen years before the date of Matt’s walking tour. Moreover, Matt had himself observed the last ceremonial run of the railway in question; enrolled in the University of Toronto’s Art and Archaeology course, generally shortened (shades of Noah) to “Art ’n Ark” (38), he was “up the highway looking for the ruins of an old farmhouse [shades of Wordsworth’s Margaret?], said to have been built before the beginning of the nineteenth century” (36). What he stumbled upon at that time was not a ruin from the past but a historic moment in the present; and at the same time he gained a first glimpse of his future wife. These two events, the walking tours of 1952 and 1966, combine to create a Wordsworthian “spot of time”; in Matt’s words, “this place intersected with that time” (18). This invoking of Wordsworth’s name is by no means arbitrary on my part. A specific reference to the poet has occurred on the previous page as if to prepare us for the dramatic moment of recollection and recreation. Wordsworth was always a powerful force for Hood, as I have already shown; indeed, Hood followed the conspicuous practice of George Eliot in constantly alluding to Wordsworth as a way of indicating the particular intellectual and imaginative tradition to which his fiction belongs. A more deliberate invoking of Wordsworth appears later in the chapter at the site of Forthton station. In another flashback, Matt remembers going with his wife to visit Tintern Abbey, mainly on

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account of Wordsworth’s famous poem that includes the ruin in its title if not in its text. The Goderiches make their way up a track to obtain a distant view of the abbey ruins in the belief that they are following the actual footsteps of the poet. They discover, however, when they examine the path more closely, that “[t]he damn thing was an abandoned rail-line” (49). In this English instance, which contrasts with the Canadian experience while at the same time complementing it, the disused railway is later in time than either the abbey ruins or the Wordsworth who wrote the poem. And, predictably, Matt goes on to consider the older Wordsworth’s complaints about the intrusion of railways into the Lake District and to discount the poet’s fears: “Pace Wordsworth, the railways were never invasive, alien; they were new in their beginnings. We turned them into antiquities as fast as we reasonably could” (51). But the Wordsworthian flashback is introduced by a passage that is not only central to the whole subject of our perceptions of the Canadian past but extends our understanding of Hood’s artistic procedure. Matt is disturbed that he had never recognized the Forthton station for what it was: “What bothered me about this terrible recognition was the way in which the evidence of past things lies before us, trailing clouds of meaning ... and we miss it” (46). “Trailing clouds of meaning” – the allusion, of course, is to the “trailing clouds of glory” line from the “Immortality Ode” (l. 64). The Wordsworthian statement lies, as it were, below the surface of Hood’s multi-layered text in much the same way that the swlsrr roadbed lies beneath the tarred surface of Highway 29. We begin to see how this imagery of layers and surfaces provides a key to the whole form and structure of the book. We might say that the Tintern “digression” (for want of a better word) is indicative of the layers of Matt’s mood; and, by extension, the way in which the fiction is made up of an elaborate series of interrelated actions and reflections is indicative of the layers of Hood’s art. It is at this point that Matt meditates upon “the almost infinite possibilities of recession” (43) and considers the “strange double-treble optics of the superimposition of the present on many, many pasts” (45). This effect has already been demonstrated in my discussion of the “spot in time” during which Matt in 1966 is carried back to the past of 1952, when he had witnessed the last run of the railway that opened in 1888. Yet when the 1952 event was itself the present, Matt was searching for the ruins of a pre-nineteenth-century farmhouse.

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The remark about infinite possibilities of recession is made (within what is itself a flashback) when Matt is interviewing the current owner of a historic house and discovers that the owner’s greatgrandfather, who built the house, was born in 1798, the same year that Wordsworth and Coleridge published Lyrical Ballads. And here I may perhaps be forgiven for extrapolating somewhat from Hood’s text and noting that “Tintern Abbey” (which first appeared in Lyrical Ballads) itself depends upon a temporal recession between the present of 1798 and Wordsworth’s previous visit to the banks of the Wye five years earlier. Within the same section of A New Athens Matt recalls being told a local story by an old inhabitant “about the day it rained on the church picnic and the congregation just about had to swim home – which happened 75 years before I heard about it, the tale resurfacing in my informant’s imagination as though it had happened the week before” (39–40; my emphasis). Matt’s own imagination links the anecdote with traditional flood-narratives (“Art ’n Ark” in another manifestation). Much earlier he had remarked that the folk mind can link legendary tales with orally transmitted memories of historical events “on the same level of reality” (11; my emphasis). I suggest that Hood subtly introduced these metaphorical phrases to show how our habitual processes of language themselves contribute to the subject he is exploring. Metaphor bears witness to layers of language that suggest resemblances to those other layers of earth and mind studied respectively by archaeologists and psychologists. I cannot, of course, continue to discuss the later chapters of A New Athens with the same degree of detail that I have used in examining the novel’s opening section, but this imagery of layers and surfaces looks forward conveniently to the second chapter, where the ghost ship replaces the ghost train as a powerful symbol of the interrelations of past and present. We learn later that the ship in question was built “in 1824–25, and scuttled as redundant thirteen or fourteen years later” (195); the inconspicuous link with the fourteen-year span between Matt’s walking tours in the first chapter is probably deliberate. Matt and Edie catch a glimpse of the ship under the ice in the dying moments of 1952 after a skating scene that recalls a wellknown Wordsworthian account in the first book of The Prelude and is heralded by another quotation from Wordsworth four pages earlier (104). The ship is lying beneath the surface of the St Lawrence River

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and is only visible at certain privileged moments when suitable light effects converge. For Matt and Edie, the miracle happens; it is the occasion on which they become engaged, thus connecting by way of their personal romance with the episode of the ghost train, when Matt saw Edie “[f]or the first time” (63). “The phantom. Really there” (114) – these are the words in which Matt describes what might be called the natural supernaturalism of the ghost ship. A little earlier, an important conversation that looks forward to some of the major preoccupations of the latter half of the book alludes to the building of the St Lawrence Seaway, which is described as “a pressing example of the interpenetration of reality by vision” (102). The phrase could be applied with equal appropriateness both to the ghost-ship incident and to May-Beth Codrington’s paintings, which combine the visionary and the local in a way that has since become popular (and distorted) under the term “magic realism.” For Matt, her paintings are examples of the way that “[v]ision obliterates fact” (108); although realistic perspective is ignored, an effect of “coherent unity” is nonetheless achieved. The connection is made quite specifically when one painting, The Stoverville Annual Regatta, is described as communicating “a living atmosphere, and at the same time a distinctly submarine, aqueous impression, as if the viewer were seeing the town through light reflected off water, maybe even from under water” (109). In other words, Stoverville is seen as if from the viewpoint of the phantom but real ghost ship. Images of layer and surface are less prominent in the third chapter. Nevertheless, various issues that have coalesced around this imagery, matters concerning art and history, continue to develop. Centred upon Matt and Edie’s wedding, the chapter shows Matt coming to know Edie’s relations, and a reference to “primordial Codringtons” (154) suggests the layered generations evident in familial as well as local, social, and national histories. This chapter also contains an account of Matt’s frustrating relation with “the South Nation Village project” (161). As chief historical consultant, he protests the inclusion of a “kind of Upper Canadian hotel, in fact almost a motel” (164) designed to accommodate tourists and their cars. He finds that he cannot prevent the absurd anachronism since the franchise chain “insists on an on-site site” and the chain in question is “Americanowned” (165). So modern political realities can distort and vulgarize a historical vision. But at least Matt learns something from the

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experience: “We can’t actually live in our own past. All we can do is remember it, love it, and try to understand it” (166). Significantly, Matt is roused from his irritation by May-Beth Codrington’s bringing another picture for his critical response. In the ensuing artistic discussion she complains that most modern Canadian art is “cut off from the world of vision” (171). In her paintings, real people – real, that is, within the world of the fiction, like the mayor of Stoverville and the local mp – are represented in fanciful guise, and one feels that such blending of the visionary and the real is close to the essence of Hood’s own art. The point is, I believe, underlined in the fourth and final chapter when her paintings are gathered and arranged after her death to comprise the “permanent display at the Codrington Colony for the Encouragement of Visionary Art” (216). “Twelve in all,” Matt remarks, and we remember the number of projected novels in The New Age.10 In the final chapter the emphasis falls first upon the archaeological recovery of the ghost ship and its restoration as an emblem of the past, and then on the timeless relevance of May-Beth’s art, where action “occurs in space, and outside it, simultaneously,” and where she succeeds in communicating a “vision of the heavenly and the eternal rising from the things of this world” (211). In this technical discussion of art, levels and surfaces are replaced by interconnecting planes, but the basic principles of argument remain the same. On the structural significance of this section, I am in general agreement with John Mills, in “Hugh Hood and the Anagogical Method,” where he argues that the four chapters are “suggestive, though not strongly, of the four elements – earth, water, fire (of the Pentecostal sort), and air (into which the figures in May-Beth’s last paintings triumphantly recede)” (104) – and with Lawrence Mathews, in “The Secular and the Sacral,” where he elaborates on Hood’s remarks in the Struthers interview about literature as “a secular analogy of scripture” (Struthers “Interview” 32). Mills asserts that May-Beth’s paintings “seem to act as the visual equivalent of Hood’s own technique and viewpoint” (110), while Mathews maintains that, “in Matt’s analysis of Mrs. Codrington’s painting, Hood is also explaining how he wants his own art to be read” (227). I would add only two footnotes. First, as an amplification of Mathews’s point, we may detect another Wordsworthian analogue, since the discussion between the narrator and the Wanderer in book 1 of The Excursion on the subject of Margaret and her cottage may be seen

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as Wordsworth’s explanation of how his poetry ought to be read.11 Second, Hood has signalled the connection between May-Beth’s art and his own in a detail that Mills and Mathews do not mention. He makes her insert a little touch of Matt Goderich into her masterpiece: “The seventh figure is that of a man with face obscured, not old, about my height and weight” (216). One is free to speculate on the relation between this figure and the version of Hugh Hood that is transformed into Matt Goderich for the purposes of the fiction. I am further convinced that Hood intended us to make connections between May-Beth’s art and his own by the fact that the just-quoted remark about his work presenting a “vision of the heavenly and eternal rising from the things of this world” paraphrases his reasons for admiring Wordsworth. He praised “We Are Seven,” for example, because “[t]here, in that poem, is an ordinary and quotidian experience related by poetic meditation to a great religious truth” (Struthers “Interview 79). A thorough reading of A New Athens shows how “sacred art” (whether Wordsworth’s, May-Beth Codrington’s, or Hugh Hood’s) reveals the visionary below the surface of the real, and sometimes vice versa. It is a quality that unites the prehistoric painters at Lascaux (34, 60) with the best of the present day, and it also links ancient and modern societies. Even the novel’s title, in terms of literary layers provided by a line from Alexander Pope quoted in the early Canadian novel by Frances Brooke, The History of Emily Montague, connects classical Greece with nineteenth-century Ontario while exemplifying the continuity of human aspiration (23). Matt is at pains to explain that the (historical) alteration of the community’s name from Farmersville to Athens is neither presumptuous nor ridiculous: “What they had done wasn’t to insinuate that their village was as great, as central to culture as the city of Athena, but only that their schools were in the tradition of the Academy, that human culture is continuous, that a Canadian school two generations removed from the wilderness is the same kind of school as the Academy, that human nature persists, remains self-identical through many generations of superficial changes” (59). It is a sentiment that the novel eloquently supports. In conclusion, I should acknowledge that this reading of the novel has been, to some extent, selective. Like any interpretation, mine has emphasized one aspect and has doubtless underestimated others. Thus my approach has laid stress on literature rather than the fine

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arts, despite the fact that the novel is concerned with painting and that references to visionary-cum-realistic painters, from Dürer to Stanley Spencer, are significantly more frequent here than elsewhere. Besides, Wordsworth is by no means the only writer to be an inspiration for Hood. Proust, as we have seen, is a strong if unmentioned presence; his influence, we might say, is frequently to be detected “below the surface.” Dante, mentioned twice in the text (168, 170), seems prominent, named or unnamed, in much of Hood’s mature work, while Joyce pares his fingernails inscrutably in the shadows (also unnamed, but obliquely present in “funferal” [20], “epiphany” [81], and “Willingdone museyroom” [166]),12 and even Stephen Leacock, complete with his own ghost train, takes a bow as an influential Canadian with an apt reference to “the train to Mariposa” (25). But I would argue that Wordsworth is absolutely central: the Wordsworth for whom common things are “[a]pparelled in celestial light,” for whom the poorest leech-gatherer can be seen as “a man from some far region sent” by “peculiar grace,” for whom the meanest flower that blows – and Matt picks a large posy of them in the first chapter – “can give / Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.” Moreover, following through the developing imagery of the “Immortality Ode,” A New Athens, though a sun- and light-filled book, is also a deeply probing one which, as in the serene scene that presents the death of May-Beth, keeps “watch o’er man’s mortality.”13 Yet for Hood, Wordsworth provides not only an attitude and an imagery but also a form, and I agree with Dennis Duffy when he finds The Prelude a more promising clue to Hood’s choice of form than The Excursion (140). But I would not, as Duffy does, speak of “looseness of form” (“Space/Time” 142). What this Wordsworthian form allows, rather, is a freedom of intellectual movement between times and places that results in a remarkable variety of tone and is unified by the continual development of an individual mind. No less Wordsworthian, as Anthony John Harding was the first to insist, is the strong sense of local place. In Hood’s case, however, this manifested itself in an exhilarating emphasis on a specifically Canadian experience which is firmly presented without any sense of shrill nationalism. The layers that are uncovered are those of Ontario history. Matt’s thesis, we remember, was called “Stone Dwellings of Loyalist Country”; with his wife he is preparing “an illustrated guide to eastern Ontario architecture” (36); and later in life they see them-

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selves as “recapitulating ... the constitutive, essential story of life in the colony which became Ontario” (185) when they turn away from the riverfront to build a summer cottage near Athens. The action thus takes on much larger dimensions. Matt lays claim to the title of “first prophet of the Canadian style,” remarking, “There must be something in my guts that is finally Canadian” (120). We might say, indeed, that in the last analysis, both above and below the surface, A New Athens is as quintessentially Canadian as Wordsworth’s poetry is quintessentially English.

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Reservoir Ravine ... a reservoir is a form of memory. So is a ravine. Reservoir Ravine 221

At a first reading, Reservoir Ravine is likely to be regarded as a blend of the dominating modes of The Swing in the Garden and A New Athens – documentary historical detail leading to visionary moments of emotional power. It consists, seemingly, of a series of tableaux illustrating various cultural and behavioural aspects of the 1920s. Further consideration, however, will reveal a surprising number of effects that distinguish this novel from its predecessors. Most obviously, an apparently omniscient third-person narrative method is employed (though this is boldly challenged towards the end of the novel), and the chronological scheme of the whole series is radically interrupted since, after novels set in the period between the mid-1930s and the mid-1960s, we are plunged back to the decade before Matt’s birth. Reservoir Ravine is, indeed, a much more complex novel than any initial impression is likely to suggest, and this becomes increasingly clear if one reads it within the context of the completed series. I propose here to begin with a straightforward narrative reading that will gradually reveal the complicating factors which make it a crucial volume in the development of The New Age as a whole. Hood’s meticulous yet unostentatious artistry, his cunning blend of realism and what might be called representative allegory, is nowhere better illustrated than in the opening chapter. It begins with a description of a young woman, identified only as “Ishy,” taking “a

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longish walk which she enjoyed for the exercise and for the sense of liberty it conferred” (5). On one level, this is a conventional opening for a traditional narrative, and the second sentence duly conveys the requisite basic information: the setting as Toronto, the time as 1921, and Ishy’s age as seventeen. But that opening sentence is not as straightforward as it may appear. Readers of the previous volume of The New Age will recall that A New Athens begins with another character embarking on another “longish walk,” and we subsequently realize that the two are mother and son. Furthermore, the hint of Ishy’s concern for a “sense of liberty” anticipates not only the more general aspects of the new decade but a decisive factor in her own later character, as well as a pattern subsequently repeated and magnified in the attitudes and actions of Matt’s wife, Edie. The point is developed in the rest of the chapter. Ishy is returning home on her final day as a high-school student, and her symbolic act of rebellion takes the form of discarding her school-uniform black stockings within minutes of leaving her school for the last time. On one level, this is to be read as a deeply human, personal act of independence: we warm to her aspirations towards a wider, freer life and are intrigued by the potentially fruitful contrast between the “docile, sweet, conscientious” disposition she has displayed as “a prize pupil” (5) and her deep-seated determination to defy convention. At the same time, her gesture sums up a feeling of challenge and discontent that was characteristic of the age. In other words, the terms of her individual story are extended to allow her to appear as a representative figure. Such complexity is evident throughout the chapter. When we are told that “fires were banked in this cuddly girl” (7), one of the dominant elemental images of the novel (to which I shall return) is introduced for the first time, and it alerts us also to the quality of physical passion which is presented as existent although officially suppressed at this period. Ishy’s challenge to conventional norms is exemplified later in her choice of college at the University of Toronto (non-denominational University College against the expected Catholic St Michael’s – which was Hood’s own college) and in her Blake-like objection to the constraints of corsets. At the same time, it is hinted that the latter may represent “a perhaps delusive notion of ease” (9–10). The pattern is extended when – again independently – she goes out to find summer employment and is hired at the Domestic and Foreign Bank by a Miss Saint-Hilaire. Once again, realistic and emblematic meanings coexist.

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“Saint-Hilaire,” like “Goderich,” is acceptable enough on a realistic level, but the name contains a subtle suggestiveness. Etymologically, “Hilaire” is derived from a Latin word meaning “cheerful” or “glad,” and Matt calls her “a sister superior or abbess who ran her own highly individual nunnery ... the patron of laughter” (202). Earlier in the book, Hood plays on the name’s links with exhilaration (17), and for Keith Garebian it “suggests a cheerful protectress” (Hugh Hood 119). In the first chapter she duly supports Ishy (who has now grown into Isabelle) in repelling the harassing attentions of Colonel Jarvis and Chastel Baby. In addition, the name has Proustian associations: Saint Hilaire is the patron saint of the church at Combray, the name of one of its streets, and the subject of a historical-cum-etymological lecture by the curé (Proust 1: 73, 124). These details are not essential for an appreciation of Reservoir Ravine, but they highlight Hood’s capacity to insert complex meanings and associations into what seems at first sight a realistic presentation of life in Toronto in the early 1920s. He also experiments boldly in Reservoir Ravine with the blending of fact and fiction, a melding of invented situation and historical events which he has introduced modestly in earlier books but nowhere as elaborately as here. In the first chapter we encounter what we expect from realistic fiction (and what we have witnessed earlier, especially in The Swing in the Garden): the presentation of fictional characters – Isabelle, her girl friends, Miss Saint-Hilaire – against an authentic background – downtown Toronto, St. Joseph’s College, the university. When Isabelle gets her summer job at the Domestic and Foreign Bank, we appear to be moving into history – some of the downtown firms and restaurants mentioned (Osler, Hoskin and Harcourt; Michie’s; and McConkey’s) actually existed. But the bank in question is fictional (though the Home Bank did fail at about this time), while Jarvis and Baby, though appropriating the names of authentic wellknown Toronto business families of the period, are figments of Hood’s imagination. In the second chapter, in which attention turns to the young Andrew Goderich, Andrew himself is naturally fictional, but his employer, Professor G.S. Brett, was a well-known philosopher-scholar of the period, whose Toronto career is somewhat impressionistically reproduced in Hood’s text. Hood takes the fact/fiction intermingling a stage further when he has Brett recite to Andrew a version of the story of Reznikoff, a historical figure haunting (some say, literally) the cloisters of University College. However, the pamphlet by

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Mackenzie King from which the version is supposedly quoted (27–8) is Hood’s fictive contribution to the career of Canada’s eleventh prime minister. The next two chapters venture even further into the realm of historical fantasy. The main features of Earl Balfour’s political career are reproduced with reasonable accuracy, but he did not visit Canada in 1923 and never spoke at Hart House. The whole scene in the (authentic) Debates Room, where Isabelle disguises herself as a young man to gatecrash what was then an all-male preserve, is a spectacular tour de force. Her gesture, with its hint of feminist protest, at once extends Isabelle’s defiance of accepted conventions and becomes an emblem of challenge and change. On the political and intellectual level, the scene provides a memorable context for Charlie Pope’s statement that “the Holy Land is in Manitoba and in Québec” (55), a remark that is central to Hood’s artistic purpose as it develops in later volumes. (Charlie Pope is a fictional creation not identified by name until Black and White Keys, though part of his invented career combines with part of Andrew Goderich’s to suggest that of Lester Pearson.) Similarly, the magnificent scene of the burning of the discredited banknotes in the fourth chapter, despite its almost surrealistic vividness, belongs to the world of symbolic archetype rather than that of documentary allegory. The Hood who artistically blurred the disputed area between fact and fiction in earlier narratives such as “Recollections of the Works Department” (in Flying a Red Kite) here honed his skills to produce a splendid illusion that, while improving on the factual accuracy of the police court or the camera, offers a series of profound imaginative scenes that create what, in Be Sure to Close Your Eyes, he calls “the trappings of historical mythology” (17). When “Miss Archambault” invites “Mr. Goderich” (it is significantly at this point that they learn to call each other by their first names) to the burning of the now worthless banknotes, Andrew, in the rather pompous language that he bequeaths to his son, sees the event “as a symbolic gesture, and as a community’s illustration for itself of the sources of its mythology and folklore” (74). In other words, this is a secular ritual and one that can be seen to partake of both apocalyptic and demonic overtones. Hood conveys the complexity of the scene’s implications through a repeated pattern of imagery. The furnace chambers in which the obsolete notes are destroyed are called “hellish flues” used for “holocausts” (71), yet the

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participants are described in conspicuously Christian vocabulary. Everything, we are told, “was proceeding according to the liturgy” (72), the presiding lawyers are likened to “saints overlooking the heavenly city from afar off” (72), while Miss Saint-Hilaire’s duties include “providing refreshment for the choir of saints and the elect who were to be present” (72) and serving in the “capacity of recording angel” (73). Yet an aggressively secular scene qualifies the religious associations. Isabelle is invited to “roll in those bins of dollars” (75) and does so in an unforgettable pictorial sequence that creates, albeit at an ironic distance, the aura of Hollywood-like material excess. This ritual destruction of the banknotes (though worthless) offers a fleeting glimpse of a possible world in which the morality of high finance and industrial capitalism is transcended. Yet viewed as a whole, the scene provides much more than a historical and sociopolitical emblem. The “mad revel” (76) takes on a new character when the dyes that distinguished the various denominations of banknotes create “a dancing kaleidoscopic whirl of distinct colours, always changing” (76), which becomes for Isabelle and Andrew, who are now watching hand in hand, a “magical spectrum” (77). For Andrew, it leads to a moment of revelation: “Thoughts of monetary value which had perplexed him all this week had given way to reflections on superior values, and on the nature of human love. He saw in the instant that he loved Isabelle” (77). The personal and the socially representative, the material and the magical, are fused. Structurally, the scene invites comparison with that in Hal Forbes’s ice palace in the seventh chapter. (I shall return to the intervening chapters in due course.) Again we are confronted with an incident that combines the imaginative-magical with the historical-practical, and again the scene plays a significant part in the romance between Andrew and Isabelle. The two visit the ice warehouse as a curiosity, a phenomenon necessary before the age of electrical refrigeration, and the move into a higher realm is indicated by recurring references to Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” (“this magical sunny cave of ice” [126], “Sunny caves of ice ... Beware! Beware!” [127]). Coleridge’s poem depends upon the preternatural balancing of elemental opposites, fire and ice, and Hood achieves a comparable effect by juxtaposing the burning of the banknotes with the visit to the ice palace, where the icy temperature contrasts with the warmth of their love. The elemental preoccupation, already noted in A New Athens, is developed

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and extended here. Moreover, this scene takes on a special significance for readers acquainted with the previous novel, since Andrew and Isabelle become formally engaged here in circumstances that recall in the reading experience (but anticipate in the New Age chronology) the engagement scene between Matt and Edie as they share the “miraculous” vision of the submerged ghost ship. Between the imagistic scenes of fire and ice, we find the charming idyll about the blue dress and the dance at the Aquatic Club (which becomes more aquatic than intended) and the flashback to the Winnipeg General Strike. Not much need be said about the former. It represents an appropriate engagement scene and, in the story of Madame Liliane, draws on historical material from the family history of Noreen Mallory, Hood’s wife.14 Moreover, in a later chapter and a different context, as we shall see, the blue dress is recognized as having profound Proustian associations (see 189). The flashback in chapter 6 to Hal from the ’peg’s Winnipeg of 1919 is more complicated. First, it represents an extension – some might say, a rather self-conscious extension – of the geographical and historical range of the series. In addition, it injects a sense of social tension and class dissonance into a novel that might otherwise seem to offer an excessively sweet and sentimental memoir of the past. All this is true, but its effect is, I think, more complex than that. First, its focusing image of the shattered and smouldering Winnipeg streetcar adds to the series of tableau-like evocative images that distinguish the novel, one that complicates the previous fiery image of the destroyed banknotes by being uncontrolled and physically threatening. It is also worth noting that Hal from the ’peg’s idiom is carefully distinguished from Matt’s and so provides a refreshing stylistic variety as well as a view of the period that escapes that of the otherwise predominant middle class. The three chapters that present Andrew and Isabelle’s wedding, the settling into their new home, and the birth of their first child, Amanda Louise, are relatively straightforward and do not immediately invite special comment. But at this point, as Garebian forcefully argues, “the sacrament of matrimony begins to take hold” (Hugh Hood 122). At the same time, the temporal setting of the novel, by going back to a period prior to that of the previous books, allows all sorts of connections and comparisons to be initiated. Andrew and Isabelle now become parents, yet we have already seen them as

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parents in The Swing in the Garden, and we watch here their respective relations to their in-laws with Matt’s and Edie’s relations to theirs already in our minds from A New Athens. Such backward and forward comparisons proliferate as the series proceeds, and each book becomes richer as it is seen within a context of more and more comparable situations. One example becomes evident very early. Andrew’s attention wanders during the wedding service as he listens nervously to the French of Father Lamarche (who, incidentally, besides being a minor figure in The Swing in the Garden, has already made his appearance outside the New Age series in “Brother André, Père Lamarche, and My Grandmother Eugénie Blagdon,” a short story from The Fruit Man, the Meat Man & the Manager). A dêjà vu effect is achieved here, since we have already witnessed a similar occurrence during Matt’s wedding (New Athens 136–7), where Matt’s focus is on the church paintings rather than on the ceremony itself. This latter scene irritated at least one reviewer, R.P. Bilan, who was outraged that “we find out what he thinks about painted glass, but not how he feels about his wife” (327); yet as we proceed further in the series, we come to realize that it is highly characteristic of Matt (whose marriage will later collapse partly as a result of his absorption with other matters) and that, in so proceeding, he reveals himself as very much his father’s son. Andrew is concerned, among other things, with Samuel Aaronsohn’s refusal to attend the wedding service (though he is present, and dances, at the reception that follows). The extended discussion about Christian and Jewish attitudes, which Andrew re-enacts in memory, may initially seem remote to the subject in hand; indeed, the whole character of Aaronsohn in this novel seems curiously detached from the main events. It is only when we encounter Black and White Keys that the full significance of his appearance here (not to mention that of Earl Balfour and his Zionist interests in the earlier chapter) becomes clear. I labour the point because it is important at this stage in the series to realize that the form of the individual volume and the larger structure of the twelve-volume work cannot cohere seamlessly. Similar problems occur in Powell. Readers of separate novels must accept the fact that, in order to enjoy the richness of the whole ambitious scheme, occasional relevancies within single books will have to be taken provisionally on trust. A few dangling threads will not be tied until later in the series. A good example (already cited) is the apparently gratuitous reference to the “great” philosophical writer

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Georg Mandel at the close of the ninth chapter (160). Only after the publication of Black and White Keys does an explanation of the reference become possible. If we read through these chapters after an experience of the whole series, however, numerous casual references light up and take on resonance. The newly married couple take a steamship from Toronto to Prescott, where they transfer to another ship for Montreal (a historical possibility that Hood records with characteristic documentary care), and dock briefly at Stoverville. We are already in a position to recognize the importance of this episode within the total scheme and can savour the irony of Andrew’s remark on watching the local urchins diving dangerously for coins: “I won’t have any of our children running loose around Stoverville” (144). Yet, though George Robinson has already appeared briefly in A New Athens, we cannot yet appreciate that the advertising sign “medicaments robinsons remedies” (143) has anything more than “local colour” significance. Only with the transformation of the business into the RobPharm of The Motor Boys in Ottawa is the sign’s place in the total design clarified. The intimate honeymoon scenes demonstrate that Christianity and sexuality need not be mutually exclusive, and they invite comparison with scenes in later books ranging from the farcical goings-on in The Scenic Art to the high romance of Matt and Linnet in Property and Value and the anguished honeymoon of May-Beth and Earl Codrington in Be Sure to Close Your Eyes. The ninth chapter, by contrast, may well seem excessively didactic to some, but the main subjects of discussion – the position of women, the allegedly religious idea of the Canadian state, and the rise of Nazism – are crucial to the period and exert a considerable impact on the development of the whole series. Such topics are central to Hood’s determination to provide a comprehensive account of Canadian historical experience. The arrival in Toronto of Andrew’s parents adds to the theme of familial interrelation, and the birth preparations not only illustrate changes in popular fashion in such matters and show how Isabelle is still the unconventional Ishy of the opening chapter, but they also demonstrate how rigid conformity may be challenged. The narrative action has more than a representative function, however: Andrew’s younger brother Philip is a minor character here, yet his lifelong passion for Isabelle, which we see in its initial stage, sets a pattern that is to be developed in several subsequent novels and ultimately resolved in Dead Men’s Watches.

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The carefully orchestrated tableau at the end of the tenth chapter, with the adults gathered around the recently born Amanda Louise on Christmas morning, might well be regarded as an appropriate conclusion to a novel of courtship, marriage, and birth. But Hood is never predictable, and Reservoir Ravine does not end at this point. Instead, the succeeding chapter opens with a technical bombshell: “For a long time in the early nineteen-thirties when I was a very small child ...” (177). The shift to the first-person mode, briefly anticipated by Hal from the ’peg, appears now as a radical shock to our readerly expectations, especially since it turns out to be a return to the voice of Matt and the established perspective of the first two novels. But it is a return with a difference, achieved imagistically by means of an apparently casual allusion at the close of the tenth chapter to the dizzying repeated patterns on the “gaily-designed packages” (175) produced at Christmas by Toronto shops and department stores. These turn out to be designs (that keyword in The New Age) which caught the eye of the infant Matt growing up in the next decade, though it is a detail that is now added to the record of The Swing in the Garden (a process we shall see subtly developed and extended in subsequent books). This shift is not, however, merely a matter of mode; just as Hal from the ’peg’s chapter moves back from the period of the 1920s, so this chapter moves forward. Ultimately, we discover, the Matt who takes over the narrative responsibility here is writing from a mature viewpoint in the late 1970s, over fifty years after the events that have just been recorded. This chapter, easily the longest in the book, breaks down into three basic related parts: recapturing the child’s memories of exploring the linen closet; a meditation on conception, birth, family, and ancestors; and a poignant account of Matt’s return to Reservoir Ravine after many years’ absence. Whereas we have earlier been presented with a direct portrait of Toronto in the 1920s, we are now shown how an impression of the period can be built up – archaeologically, as it were – from a scrutiny of the material and artistic objects it leaves behind. The young Matt’s discovery of old movie magazines and abortive film scripts not only comments on a significant aspect of the late 1920s but relates in an important way to the artistic and psychological traits of the Goderich family. If his fascination with this material indicates “[a]nother scholar in the family” (179), the as-yet-unborn Tony is to fulfill his mother’s frustrated ambition by becoming a film writer. Moreover, the evidence of the film scripts substantiates a

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yearning to reach out beyond the limits of home and family – what Matt, thinking of his mother, calls “the tedium of the daily round” (180) – which is to be developed in a more radical way by his future wife, Edie. Above all, perhaps, Matt’s early fascination with the art deco of the gift boxes instills in him the “classical principles of design” (184) and so provides an example of the kind of profound early experiences that determine a future career. Here too, not surprisingly, Hood returns to the Proustian mode, duly signalled by a specific reference to the French writer (186). The attempt to recapture the lost time of Matt’s absorbed hours in the linen closet is in itself sufficient to justify this link, but Hood goes further. Matt’s recollection of the emotional night-scene in which he sees his mother in her now-famous blue party dress is obviously modelled on an equivalent scene early in Swann’s Way (Du côté de chez Swann). More importantly, the borrowing also recalls the larger structural principles, central to Reservoir Ravine, that are assisted by Proust’s example. Thus it is doubtful if, at this stage in The New Age, Hood would have made the bold leap backwards in time to a period before the birth of his narrator and protagonist had not Proust done likewise in Swann’s Way. The parallels are both interesting and instructive. Proust’s opening volume begins with an introductory section that culminates in the celebrated petite madeleine scene echoed in A New Athens; it then proceeds to the Combray sequence centred on the two “ways,” for which Hood found Toronto equivalents towards the end of The Swing in the Garden. At this point, Proust also moves back into the past, a past beyond the lifespan of the narrator, Marcel, who admits that he is drawing upon “the memories of another person [Swann] from whom I had acquired them at second hand” (1: 223). The surprising change of tone at the beginning of chapter 11 is caused not simply by the resumption of Matt’s first-person narrative but by a second temporal dislocation, this time from Christmas 1927 to October 1979, the fiftieth anniversary of the Wall Street Crash. Interestingly enough, this drastic time-shift also seems indebted to Proust’s example. The “Swann in Love” section just mentioned had similarly employed apparently omniscient narration before returning, in “Place-Names . The Name,” to Marcel’s viewpoint at an indeterminate later date. And then, suddenly, the time shifts again to “this year as I crossed [the Bois de Boulogne] on my way to Trianon” (1: 506). And the year is 1913. For a few pages, what had previously

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been vivid, immediate, becomes remote, distanced. Once again, Hood carries the effect a stage further. We move startlingly from a half-remembered, half-imagined scene in which Matt is a toddler in diapers to the physical and intellectual wanderings of an elderly, lonely man (“Here I am in the middle way,” he says, echoing T.S. Eliot’s “East Coker,” itself alluding to the opening of Dante’s Inferno [209]) who is attempting to return to the past and being inevitably disappointed. Hood’s technical audacity reaches a peak here. More is involved than a mere switch in narrative mode, however disorienting that may be. In the course of his meditation, Matt makes it clear that he is in fact the author of the whole book recounting the period before his own conception and (in chapter 12) during his prenatal development: “The chapters of this book that I sit here writing are the events leading up to my pebble-fall into the Pacific, the matrix of my nature” (193). The example of Proust is here seen merging with that of Joyce, whose name is also scrupulously acknowledged (204). We are offered, in a scene analogous with, though tonally different from, the “Oxen of the Sun” section of Ulysses, a meditation on the development of the fetus at a time when Matt is himself a seed in the womb. In a curious way (suggestive of Blake) his conception and birth – his fall, in Blakean terms, into the material world – are not only contemporaneous with the Wall Street Crash but mysteriously fused with it. “I believe that I lived through the Crash and heard it echoing in rolling tumult even though I was safely tucked away in that warm dark from whence we come. I heard the sound of the crash. I remember it well. It was still reverberating when I awoke” (197). The individual discussion of human and divine conception, the continuity of the family and the importance of “family folklore” (190), the everrecurrent brooding on time and meaning and value, all need to be seen within the idiosyncratic but sublimely original context of Matt’s narrative situation – though this, of course, is not made unambiguously clear until later in the series. The process of archaeological reconstruction initiated in the linen closet ultimately accounts for the appropriate, if idiosyncratic, form of the whole book. Proust’s voluntary and involuntary memory combine with Joyce’s system of verbal correspondences to create the imaginative vision that is the novel we know as Reservoir Ravine. The culminating “spot of time” in the novel occurs when Matt, lonely, troubled, and wandering in the David A. Balfour Park (the

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coincidence of the surname with that of the champion of Zion is a happy accident that Hood leaves unstressed), climbs to the brow of a hill from which he expects to see the reservoir familiar in his childhood. What he encounters is the relentlessness of historical change: When I came over the top I got a bad shock and I stood there, almost reeling, for a long time. They’ve closed over the water. Somebody has covered in the reservoir. It’s gone, gone, the open water. I’d been expecting, looking forward to, the reflection of the deep grey of the air in the calm water ... But there was nothing visible. Simply a wide range of browned grass, nothing to what I’d hoped for, uninteresting, with clumps of yelling children roving across it ... I can’t measure the effect this discovery had on me. I still haven’t taken it in. (211)

But the past is not all expunged. Immediately after this troubling experience, Matt meets Miss Chenoweth, whose conversation with his mother when he was little more than a year old he has just recounted. There is some embarrassment in the meeting – how do you respond to a casual acquaintance who has watched you while your diapers were being changed? – and the tone shifts accordingly. Few hints of Proust here. But Hood puckishly indicates the change by an indirect, bookish reference (apt enough, given the fact that Miss Chenoweth is a distinguished librarian). Though Joyce is mentioned by name, the significant reference in these pages is to Nicholas and Lady Isobel Jenkins, whom Miss Chenoweth is supposed to have encountered on a tour in Italy. Only readers of Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time will recognize the names of the narrator and his titled wife. Hood’s writerly joke is to make his own invented character meet the fictional creations of a fellow novelist, but the allusion subtly and precisely indicates the change in tone and sphere of influence. The coincidence of Matt’s meeting Miss Chenoweth is itself Powellian, as is the half-serious, half-comic nature of the encounter. Proust, Joyce, Powell, plus the ever-present allusions to and quotations from Wordsworth – for his sophisticated readers, Hood is listing the literary company he wants to keep and the kind of reading to which his work aspires. The scene at the reservoir is the most poignant of the many visionary or symbolic moments within the novel. It neatly links the

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historical periods (Earl Balfour, the ramifications of the 1929 Crash), the interconnections of personal lives (the earlier linkage of Matt and the librarian with the reservoir park), and the larger philosophical implications of time, change, and value. The fact that the water remains, albeit invisible, just beneath the surface, pointed by allusions to St Peter on the Sea of Galilee (213) and St Raphael at the troubling of the waters (222) – Isabelle, we gather, is now an inmate of the St Raphael nursing home – establishes lines of fragile but significant continuity that will be exploited and completed in the content and title of the last volume in the series. In the final chapter, after experiencing the fiftieth anniversary of the Crash, we return to the week immediately following the Crash itself; in addition, we apparently return to impersonal third-person narration, though on the last page Matt announces himself (“I gave another hearty kick at this point”) as reconstructing narrator once again. The setting is the Goderiches’ apartment, and the final part is taken up with Miss Saint-Hilaire’s account of her experiences at the bank during the previous disastrous week. Documentary realism seems once more to be firmly in the saddle, yet at the same time Hood dexterously establishes links with many of the earlier scenes. Credit is given to Colonel Jarvis, the “old roué” of the first chapter (22; cf. 226), as the one person to anticipate the financial breakdown, while the realization that money is “the most ingenious of all fictions” (227) sets off memories of the burning of the banknotes in chapter 4. Letters from Sam Aaronsohn chronicle the threatening political events in Germany that are coincident with the Wall Street debacle. Yet life goes on, Isabelle is pregnant again (so parallelling events in chapter 10), and the family must find a larger home. Andrew walks “through the ravine” (235) to examine a house for rent, and so duplicates Matt’s ramble half a century later, presented in the previous chapter, while the reappearance of Philip just before the birth of the baby recalls the earlier birth of Amanda Louise. Above all, perhaps, and recalling a dominant effect in The Swing in the Garden, the concept of the Fall becomes a conspicuous organizing image within the book. To Aaronsohn, the First World War was “a recapitulation of the original fall of man” (233), and Reservoir Ravine takes us from the end of that fall to the financial fall just over a decade later, which Garebian aptly calls “the very image of a calamitous fall from grace” (Hugh Hood 120). And Matt, about to be born at this perilous time,

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has, we remember, already characterized his birth as a “pebble-fall” (193). As we shall see when we turn our attention to Black and White Keys, the original reviewers of Reservoir Ravine tended to overemphasize the more optimistic aspects of the book and then to criticize Hood for not facing up to the problem of evil. My emphasis here on the Fall as a central image may therefore seem strange, and it certainly offers a qualification (though not a rejection) of Garebian’s stress on the centrality of marriage. The difference in focus can be explained, I think, by the fact that I am commenting on the book with an awareness of the contents of the later novels. When I read the novel in 1979, my immediate response, though warmly approving, was not far removed from that of many reviewers, and when Garebian’s book-length study appeared in 1983 (Reservoir Ravine was the last of Hood’s novels to be discussed there), I felt no urge to question his analysis, which remains enlightening. But the novel seemed less original then than it does now. The focus was definitely on Isabelle and Andrew, and the step backward in time suggested a mildly nostalgic historical idyll. The deeper matters – the Jewish question, the woman question, even the financial catastrophe – could be regarded as part of the historical background to the age, material ideally suited for any number of Hood’s well-known “digressions.” Only with an understanding of the position of the novel within the larger pattern of the whole series does the complexity of the book become fully evident. A knowledge of subsequent Jewish history should have been sufficient to cast a shadow of (at the very least) uncertainty over the figure of Aaronsohn; moreover, when we are aware of his personal fate in the next book, our response to his presence here takes on a decidedly darker tone. Hood hints at a similar temporal effect when, in chapter 11, he flashes forward to show how the beautiful Ishy becomes a blind invalid in a nursing home. As for Matt himself, we deduce some sad change in his personal life but are given no precise details. Even this chapter, poignant as it is in itself, takes on a profounder aspect when the intervening events become known. If we return to the novel after reading the whole series, not only do the supposed digressions turn out to make an important contribution to the effect of the whole, but certain details take on a greater force. The final chapter, while it registers a number of falls, may also be seen in apocalyptic terms. A full reading of Reservoir Ravine will

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attempt to keep all these elements in balance. Garebian is right in drawing attention to Hood’s preoccupation with marriage “both as sacramental ritual and domestic situation,” and with life as “a complex recapitulation of the Creation, Fall, and Redemption” (Hugh Hood 116). But it is important to insist that, while one strand of the book ends with the phenomenon of birth (Amanda Louise’s in the premature finale at the close of chapter 10, Matt’s imminent arrival on the last page), another strand concludes with the image of apocalypse. “Surely the end is at hand,” writes Colonel Jarvis to Miss SaintHilaire as he forecasts financial ruin (228). “It was the end of the world,” comments Andrew on the Crash. “We’ve come to the end of something” (224). The character of the world that took its place is explored in the next novel.

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Black and White Keys The world seemed full of analogues to the Christological drama. Black and White Keys 129

Commentators aware of Hood’s almost ostentatious assertions of his positive Christian beliefs have not infrequently expressed doubts about his capacity to portray with any adequacy the harshness and evil so clearly manifest in the world. One of the more cogent of these critics is Sam Solecki, who while reviewing Reservoir Ravine under the title “Songs of Innocence,” suggested that a liability of Hood’s affirmative vision was his “unwillingness to deal with evil” (30). Black and White Keys, though planned long before the review appeared, reads almost as a deliberate answer to this charge, and it is not surprising that Solecki’s review of this book, “The Gospel of St. Andrew,” was decidedly more favourable. At the same time, given his main concerns within the series, Hood’s choice of subject for an exploration of evil in the twentieth century is somewhat unexpected. It would not have been difficult, for instance, to manipulate the plot so that a member of the Goderich family could have been present at one of the major Canadian confrontations with the evils and horrors of war – at Vimy in the First World War or at Dieppe in the second. Instead, Hood chose a daring though, at the level of verisimilitude, an unlikely plot device to bring his novel into contact with the unquestionably climactic example of evil in the modern world: the Holocaust. In choosing the Holocaust as his focus, he was not only emphasizing a major world event but treating a subject compatible with his

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religious vision and with his ambitious artistic aims. The Nazi Reich was, after all, embarked on a demonic crusade, and all western human beings were inevitably involved in the outcome. Hood was under no illusions: his narrative includes hard facts about Canadian attitudes to Jewish immigration during this period and about callous British policies in Palestine immediately after the war. The ultimate subject of the novel is no less than “The Age of Genocide,” to which is linked, with the creation of the atomic bomb, “the possibility of the suicide of the race” (288).15 At the same time, the extremity of the situation leads to heartening co-operation of different peoples against a common threat. Black and White Keys qualifies as a war book, but it is a war book with a difference, in part because Hood’s is not a meaningless conflict; unlike Matthew Arnold’s ignorant armies clashing by night in “Dover Beach” or W.B. Yeats’s weasels fighting in a hole in “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,” his is an essentially holy war. In approaching this novel, then, we should not expect to find analogous effects to those that we encounter in Timothy Findley’s The Wars or Colin McDougall’s Execution. Characteristically, his emphasis falls not on front-line action but on the war as it affects civilians. There are scenes of violence here but no battle scenes. Hood works by indirection and adheres to an alternative vision. Where the central image in The Wars – the homosexual gang-rape by unidentified assailants – is an image of chaos, the equivalent in this book – Andrew restoring life to the frozen body of Georg Mandel – is one of redemption. The title, Black and White Keys, is obviously crucial here. The literal reference, to the contrasting keys on a piano, is elaborated in the fourth chapter when the teenage Matt Goderich is taking music lessons. As might be expected, Hood reproduces in detail “the ancient maxims of the piano teacher” for the correct placement of the hands (223). More figuratively, the phrase points to a structural principle of contrast that runs throughout the book – most noticeably, of course, in the tonal contrast between the chapters devoted to Andrew’s efforts to keep open escape routes for Jews fleeing from Nazi Germany and those displaying the innocent contemporary world of Matt’s Toronto, with its Bing Crosby films, latest song hits, and the weekly wrestling tournaments at Maple Leaf Stadium that become a grotesque parody of the inhuman conflict in Europe. But the theme manifests itself in other ways as well. As readers, we receive a hint of it on the first page, where the “unfamiliar harmonies

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of black, silver, and white” in the view seen from the Plexiglas bubble of the Hudson aircraft that is taking him across the Atlantic remind Andrew of “a Nazi uniform glimpsed in the pre-war movie Confessions of a Nazi Spy” (1). In this instance, beauty and evil, though morally separated, have been aesthetically blended. References to mingling and cohering are, however, rare, and they generally occur in a sinister context – when, for instance, Asa Freedman, putting together the scattered information about deeply disturbing events in the camps of eastern Europe, exclaims: “Can’t you see how the two elements hang together?” (14). But in general Hood’s novel is based on a principle diametrically opposed to E.M. Forster’s famous “only connect.” Some of these contrasts are poignant, as when Andrew remarks of Sam Aaronsohn, who answers to the code name Blackbeard, “Blackbeard! Your beard is white” (71); or elegiac when, during the desperate flight with Mandel, he notes “the contrast between the splendour of the country and the horror of the nation’s political situation” (171). A figurative equivalent is to be found in the opposed imagery of fire and ice that Hood carries over from Reservoir Ravine; here it takes the horrendous form of the fire from the Holocaust ovens and the freezing experiments from which Andrew tries to revive Mandel. At a more general level, it manifests itself in what Hood, commenting on the book elsewhere, described as the “insistent split between romantic fantasy and the dreadful realities of war” (“Hugh Hood” 82). Within the text itself, Matt sees the piano keyboard with its black and white keys “as an area of life, a metaphor of musical possibility which would in time become so familiar to me that I could live in it”; but for him, as for most of the characters in the book, “[t]he black and white keys stayed separate” (224). The contrasting piano keys become, then, emblems of other dichotomies: not only peace and war but innocence and experience, good and evil, truth and falsehood, the private and the public, the Old World and the New. In addition, Solecki noted perceptively in his review that the interweaving chapters, those focused on Andrew and Matt, represent two normally opposed forms of fictional narrative: the one virtually plotless, the other tightly structured; the one realist, the other not. In the Toronto of the teenage Matt, the war is a remote fantasy world that can easily be confused with the phony wrestling matches at Maple Leaf Stadium; but “real life” is still presented in the documentary mode already developed in The Swing in

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the Garden. For Andrew in the depths of Hitler’s Germany, it is a lifeor-death struggle, distressingly real yet existing in a narrative unreality that runs the gamut between James Bond thriller and symbolic meditation. The range is extreme, the mix perilous, and readers need to proceed with imaginative sympathy and intellectual caution. The reference in that last sentence to the atmosphere of a “James Bond thriller” should make us pause: how is it possible to blend that kind of escapist vulgarity with the unimaginable but unquestionably real horror of the Holocaust? Unfortunately, the original publishers helped to exaggerate the dubious linkage when they printed a blurb on the first-edition cover that read in part: “Set in Europe and Canada, the book is rich in historical detail; but it is also a tense, actionpacked spy thriller which follows Andrew Goderich’s death-defying rescue mission – turn by threatening turn.” This melodramatic rhetoric is unworthy of its subject, but it probably influenced I.M. Owen when, surveying the first half of the New Age series four years later, he categorically wrote of Black and White Keys, “it is in fact a spy story” (48). Reviewing the novel for the Fiddlehead, the present writer forcefully expressed unease about the classification. The blurb’s description seemed to me “almost obscenely irrelevant to Hood’s intention and achievement” (93). That may have made the point a little too strongly, but I still consider my indignant protest preferable to Owen’s blanket acceptance. It is perhaps significant that Owen went on to complain that the book was not “very good or convincing” as a thriller, without ever pausing to consider that Hood might have had different – and higher – ambitions. Still, it cannot be denied that parts of the book create a suspense compatible with thriller literature: it would be a very inadequate reader indeed who was not on tenterhooks about the outcome of Goderich’s mission. Moreover, Hood makes the connection himself later in the series when Charlie Pope remarks to Andrew, “You talk as if we were characters in a spy novel,” and Andrew replies, “We’ve both been characters in a spy novel, to our cost” (Motor Boys 35). Andrew, however, is speaking figuratively. For readers, the mistake is to assume the book’s effectiveness to be wholly dependent upon the excitement of its plot. It is important to insist that Hood was being artistically courageous – and totally serious – in juxtaposing the presentation of the Nazi threat in wartime propaganda movies (the discussion of Raymond Massey’s film career in the early 1940s at

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the opening of the second chapter) with the terrible realities of the events in central Europe. Between the celluloid conventions and the actuality falls a decidedly dark shadow. Similarly, if we are occasionally reminded of James Bond movies and their like in the central chapter where Andrew and Aaronsohn attempt to smuggle Georg Mandel to safety, the presence of more timely cinematic allusions within the text should alert us to Hood’s aim. This is not, of course, to reduce the Holocaust to the level of kitsch (as Matt remarks in The Scenic Art, “[t]here can’t be any such thing as holocaust-chic” [33]), but to reveal the difference between the irresponsibly phony and the genuinely serious – in the terms of the title, between the black and the white keys. Hood takes considerable risks here, and it might be argued that his success is not unequivocally complete, but his artistic integrity is never in any doubt. Hood takes other, related risks. One might even question the propriety – or even the possibility – of writing fiction about the Holocaust at all. Adorno’s well-known phrase “no poetry after Auschwitz” (which he hardly meant to be taken literally) can be debated, but “no fiction about Dachau” might well be considered a slogan more difficult to challenge. I should state at once that I believe Hood to have evaded the main pitfalls that surround this sensitive area, but it would be a mistake to avoid discussion of moments where his work trembles on the brink of serious challenge. At this point his documentary realism can prove a liability when references in his text can be authoritatively disproved by an appeal to historical fact. For example, he makes specific reference to the issue of Time for 8 June 1942, which is supposed to have carried a portrait of Georg Mandel on its cover (185), whereas in the world in which Time actually operates the cover for that week was devoted to Lord Louis Mountbatten. Similarly, Andrew Goderich, a fictional Canadian, is supposed to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950, but we know as we read that a few minutes’ research will disprove the statement (historically, the winner was Ralph Bunche). Keith Garebian has described Hood’s invention here as “needlessly un-historical,” but he defends it – reasonably, I think – as “ennobling metahistory” (“Hugh Hood” 139), an act of fictive reparation. It is one of the many examples in the series where Hood invokes the creative writer’s privilege to present history, not as it was, but as it might have been. By analogy with the New Jerusalem, an idealized projection of the existing one, he offers the possibility of

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an imagined world, a new age, in which Canada might indeed become the “Holy Land” that Charlie Pope envisions (6–7). Yet it remains a dangerous tactic; to invoke the freedom of the creative imagination is ultimately not quite sufficient. No one can legitimately object to a novelist creating a fantasy world – a world containing, say, an Ariel or a Hobbit or talking animals – where such imaginative flights are appropriate to the artistic purpose. But if one is committed to historical accuracy, any defiance of scientific laws or the provable historical record within the real world can endanger its force or “relevance.” This, I suggest, is a rare instance of Hood’s documentary realism failing to coalesce fully with his religious vision. For once, the two literary modes, like the black and white keys, remain separate. The relation between fact and fiction, richly intriguing in other literary modes, can raise sensitive issues for readers of this novel, but it also constitutes much of the book’s strength. Indeed, it could be argued that Black and White Keys, by venturing into the dangerous no man’s land between the imaginative and the authentic, forces its readers to think seriously about the awesome issues that transcend the supposed boundaries of fiction. Scholarly research can be particularly helpful here, and the whole topic of the novel’s relation to the historical facts has been exhaustively investigated by Dave Little in “On the Trail of Hugh Hood: History and the Holocaust in Black and White Keys.” Little isolates a number of different elements in what he describes as Hood’s “semidocumentary technique of storytelling” (142). First, some of the ostensibly fictional characters are based on historical personages – most notably Asa Freedman, Hood’s spokesman for Canadian Jews, whose biography conflates aspects of the lives of A.J. Freiman and Samuel Bronfman. Second, an unusually large number of historical figures appear under their own names alongside the fictional characters; these include comparatively well known names such as Admiral Canaris and the American agent Allen Dulles but also Doctors Blaha, Rascher, and Reckse (or Reckzeh), Hans Bernd Gisevius, Frau Solf, and Count von Bernstorff. Above all, Hood has clearly taken considerable pains to ensure the accuracy of his historical statements. Little is able to cite numerous authorities to uphold the general soundness of Hood’s background research. His conclusion – I quote a comment on a specific instance, but it can be accepted as generally applicable – is that Hood’s “overall description is historically accurate; some of his details are not”

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(151). Where he unearths discrepancies from the authentic historical record, Little finds almost invariably that “Hood has justifiably put aside the demands of history in order to provide us with more compelling fiction” (153). While he does not tackle the larger issue of whether fiction, however “compelling,” can be justified when a topic seems to demand unimpeachable factual authenticity, Little’s vindication of Hood’s creative procedures is both impressive and convincing. Black and White Keys is divided, like The Swing in the Garden, into five chapters, but an interweaving effect is introduced whereby the white keys, chapters in first-person narrative devoted to Matt and Toronto, are interspersed between the three black, in impersonal third-person narration, recording Andrew’s mission in wartorn Europe. Matt’s sections are relatively straightforward and do not require much discussion here. They function primarily as tonal foils to the main action. By hinting at “adult mysteries and confusions which were still out of the reach of my understanding” (192), Matt acknowledges that he was not in a position to comprehend the full seriousness of what was going on in the rest of the world. These chapters, then, as an extension of the documentary aspects of The Swing in the Garden, represent how the world appeared to him at that time. Hood, of course, was able to draw on his own memories here. “My war,” he wrote elsewhere, “was fought on the screens of the dozens of neighbourhood theatres in Toronto” (“Hugh Hood” 82). Yet he was able to turn what might otherwise be a liability to advantage, since Matt’s separation by age mirrors the separation by geography of the population of Toronto – and, for that matter, of Canada. “Oh, God, how ignorant we all were,” Matt exclaims at one point (83), and “all” demands emphasis. Hood realized that, with the exception of those on active service, most Canadians were dependent for their visual and imaginative awareness of the war on the cinema, which meant propaganda movies as well as newsreels. The war was filtered and interpreted through art, albeit pop art, and a considerable part of Matt’s contribution is devoted to this process. The focus on war movies involving Raymond Massey, Errol Flynn, and Ronald Reagan is by no means unrelated to the references to high art – to the Stanley Spencer chapel in Hampshire, the carving at Memmingen, and the murals at Reichenau to be discussed shortly. But the insidious effect of the former involves a distanced, escapist distortion: “The war

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seemed a vivid remote fantasy, very far off, unrelated to the actualities of suffering” (79). As I have indicated, since Hood himself employed modern artistic conventions for his own didactic purpose, he took some risks here, and the abrupt changes of tone from chapter to chapter are not always easy for readers to negotiate. Commentators responded in a variety of ways. I.M. Owen, for instance, praised the Matt chapters as “good Hood” and even found them superior in their personally experienced immediacy and “informed enthusiasm” to the chapters set in Germany (48). Others judged them lightweight and too prolix. The musical analogy in the title may encourage us to regard the structure in symphonic terms, with slow movements, by their very contrast, accentuating the vivace of Sturm und Drang. What has for the most part escaped notice is the superb epiphany at the end of the fourth chapter. Matt is listening to Perry Como on the record-player and loafing through the latest copy of Life when he comes upon the first released photos of the death camps. Here the black and white keys merge for once in a horrendous juxtaposition. It is a climactic development not only in the novel but in the whole New Age series. Lawrence Mathews is one of the few commentators who have recognized the importance of this scene: “The world of Matt’s adolescence, in which evil can be represented by the Masked Marvel and warded off by Bing Crosby ... vanishes instantly” (“Hood and Evil” 182).16 The structure of the chapters devoted to Andrew Goderich is decidedly more complex. The urgency of the escape plot leads us to expect the suspense and fast-paced action characteristic of adventure narrative, and this is part – but only a part – of the total effect. That other factors are also involved becomes clear when, as soon as Andrew arrives in England for training and briefing prior to his mission in Germany, the forward movement of the narrative is interrupted by an apparently extraneous visit to the Stanley Spencer chapel at Burghclere (officially known as the Sandham Memorial Chapel). Ultimately, we realize that, if the documentary procedures of The Swing in the Garden dominate the Toronto chapters, the emphasis on the human need for art (especially religious and visionary art) so central to A New Athens is extended in the European chapters. In each of the chapters in which Andrew plays a central role, there is a moment of stasis and quietness in which spiritual values are proclaimed within a world of suffering. It is as

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if physical action stops while intellectual and emotional understanding are nurtured. The first of these scenes takes place in the private chapel that the English painter Stanley Spencer had decorated some ten to fifteen years earlier as a memorial to the victims of the First World War. Spencer is an authentic visionary painter within the tradition to which the fictional May-Beth Codrington belongs. He is mentioned on several occasions in the final chapter of A New Athens, where we are told that a “vision of the heavenly and eternal rising from the things of this world” (211) is shared by both artists, that Spencer’s Resurrection in the Tate Gallery explores the “fundamental possibilities of pictorial space” (212) which May-Beth also explores in her central picture, and that the conversion of her studio and apartment into “a permanent gallery of visionary art” (219) is influenced architecturally by the design of the Burghclere chapel. The focus of attention here is also the altarpiece at Burghclere, in which “the represented dead of the other war, the old war” (57), are shown rising to carry their crosses at the time of the Last Judgment. This painting is, however, supplemented by wall paintings portraying soldiers resignedly contending with “the hazards of war” (57). Andrew and his host respond “in silence” to this “urgent design” (57), and nothing further is said about it, but the visit provides spiritual support for the subsequent efforts at rescue. The second scene occurs while Andrew, along with Aaronsohn and the pathetically frail Mandel, is hiding overnight in the church of Memmingen. He admires “the most treasured works of art in the old city, the beautiful carven choir stalls” (168), but especially “the enormous, powerful carven image” of Hans Holzschuher, “the sixteenthcentury churchwarden” (167). Looking up at the image each time he wakens from troubled sleep, Andrew is emboldened and spiritually sustained by the carving’s “nobility, concentration, clarity of purpose” (168). He comes to realize that both the churchwarden and “the anonymous artist who had enshrined him here for the centuries had shared an endurance rarely found, and much needed by all those hunted by murdering injustice” (168). Even the barely conscious Mandel is seen to contemplate it “with calm and easeful peace” (169). In the midst of danger and violence, the preservation of this solid and serene figure becomes a potent symbol of survival. But the most detailed and memorable of these scenes involving responses to artworks occurs in the final chapter, where, after the

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deaths of Aaronsohn and Mandel, Andrew attempts to re-establish links with possibly surviving members of the infiltrated escape route. He is landed by fishermen under cover of night on the island of Reichenau on the Untersee and makes contact with the priest who has assisted escaping fugitives in the past. He is shown over the Stiftskirche St Georg with its tenth-century murals. These “millennial paintings,” as the priest calls them, exert a powerful effect upon Andrew: “He felt as if he had been abruptly taken out of time” (263). They consist of “a series of broad rectangular paintings of the redemptive and saving acts of the life of Christ” (264). Originally, the effect was “completed by the grand representation of Christ coming in majesty,” but the “culminating painting had not stood the test of time,” having been “partially erased, then painted over” (264). Here we are clearly encouraged to recall May-Beth’s The Population of Stoverville, Ontario, Entering Into the New Jerusalem, where the painter “defies the viewer to locate God. But God is there” (New Athens 215). The emphasis on both redemption and incompletion points strongly to an allegorical level in this section of the novel. This allegory is duly developed. Andrew has to hide in the church crypt “in darkness” (271) for a symbolic equivalent of the period from Good Friday to Easter Sunday, while the priest departs on a reconnaissance in search of information. This sequence could reasonably be described as Andrew’s descent into Hell, though Hood writes deftly to prevent the allegorical dimension from seeming too insistent. At one point, when Andrew’s watch stops, he again has the sense of being taken out of time, and it may be worth noting at this juncture how the art in these three scenes extends further and further back in history – from the twentieth century to the sixteenth and then to the tenth – towards the time of Christ. For Andrew, this period in the church is both a spiritual challenge and a spiritual retreat. It is a dark vigil, but from it he emerges with the first tentative plans towards what will become his Nobel Prize–winning exposure of genocide. In many outward respects, this venture is a failure – the priest returns to report the hopelessness of any attempt to revive the escape route – but his three-day withdrawal has strengthened Andrew’s personal resolve and eventually bears worthy fruit. When the fishermen take him on board once again to escort him to the safety of the Swiss shore, the literalization of the “fishers of men” image (Matthew 4:19, quoted here 244, 256) adds to the Christological flavour of the book. And the context of religious art, especially that

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of the “miraculous church” at Reichenau (277), is essential to the structural firmness on which the novel depends. Memorable as these artistic moments of stasis and meditation may be, however, they prove ultimately less vivid and original than the extraordinary scene in the third chapter where Andrew strips naked and revives the frozen body of Mandel through the warmth of his own body. In its subtle resonance, this episode constitutes the emotional, psychological, and visionary climax of the book. It is positioned at the exact centre of the novel, a position almost invariably important in Hood’s fictional design, and certainly represents its moral centre. Moreover, the imagery he employs reflects a broad cultural and intellectual range. As the two men are covered with hay in the barn, Andrew is likened to an “Egyptian king ... buried with ceremony” (153), and understandably, “[t]houghts of entombment crossed his mind” (154). He becomes worried about spontaneous combustion and the transformation of the barn into “a funeral pyre” (155). At the same time, the scene has various sacred and secular analogues. Sam Aaronsohn informs Andrew that they used “naked women in the research at Dachau” (150), and this comment recalls the story of David and Abishag the Shunamite in 1 Kings 1. Hood’s scene may possibly be influenced by Tolstoy’s short story “Master and Man,” in which the master Vasili Andreivich warms the serf Nikita, and by a scene in Morley Callaghan’s Close to the Sun Again, published in 1977, in which, during an incident in a wartime convoy, Horler the bosun warms the frozen body of Jethroe Chone. But Hood exalts this narrative incident to a new height of meaning. The scene is inherently religious but by no means excessively hopeful. Indeed, if we look at it in relation to traditional patterns of death and resurrection, we notice that Hood reverses the order of events: Mandel is “resurrected” first, but dies later. More to the point, however, the way that Andrew the Gentile revives Mandel the Jew is offered as a symbolic reversal of Nazi anti-Semitic policies. There is an emblematic interchange between the two “unaccommodated” men. Andrew is presented as “receiving the gift of the presence of the other” (156); at the same time, he “could feel his own life leaving his body and passing into the sufferer” (157). Additional allusions to the Christ story abound. That the scene takes place in a “barn” itself recalls the Nativity, and there are undertones of both irony and

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sublimity in Aaronsohn’s remark: “We are bringing our friend, our master, back to life” (162). In the novel as a whole, Christological elements are present, but it is important to emphasize once again the distinction between black and white keys and the contrast between Torontonian and European experience. In The Swing in the Garden, as Matt remarks, “we kids knew a lot about religion and church affairs” (98). In comparison with the numerous allusions in the opening novel to Christian practice (Amanda Louise’s liking for confession, Matt’s service as altar boy, the account of the China mission, etc.), religious reference in the Toronto scenes of Black and White Keys is both sparse and superficial, limited to such casual matters as “Judeo-Christian notions” relating to “business practice” (92), the bland Christianity behind Bing Crosby’s performance as a young pastor in Going My Way (210), and the bare fact of Perry Como’s Catholicism (221). Matt’s religious and spiritual concerns have apparently fallen into abeyance. But in the European chapters, as Garebian rightly insists, “Andrew cannot get the Christian liturgy out of his head” (“Hugh Hood” 138), and he is surrounded, in the artworks already discussed, by visible witness to the Christian vision. Yet the emphasis here is specifically on works. Andrew (who enters on his mission on Good Friday and participates in the extraction of Mandel from Dachau on Low Sunday) lives his Christianity – most notably and memorably, of course, in the physical revival of Mandel with its symbolic obliteration of Christian/ Jewish antagonisms.17 Nonetheless, as Lawrence Mathews has cogently remarked, this “is not the place for the glib invocation of some triumphantly ‘Christian perspective,’ nor for ecumenical smarminess” (“Hood and Evil” 183). Mandel is revived, but only temporarily; the rescue is achieved, though at appalling human cost. But the image of Mandel resuscitated by warmth from a fellow human creature, partly by virtue of its analogue with “the Christological drama” (129) but partly because of its existential human power, earns a balancing place beside the deathcamp photos. It can never, of course, erase the horror of the latter, but it is a white key legitimately juxtaposed with a black one. It is an example of genuine personal heroism, far removed from the grotesque posturing of Hollywood war movies, that a state of war produces alongside the more easily conjured atrocities. And it is partly as a result of being a participant in this eerily sublime scene that, a few years later and in the closing pages of the novel, at a moment

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when another human mission had succumbed to the deathly imperatives of power politics, Andrew finds the inner strength, within sight of a once-holy land that is “still a turbulent area” (291), to begin his bold and clear-headed condemnation of genocide. A Canadian looking over the mountain beyond Haifa has not forgotten Charlie Pope’s insistence that “the Holy Land is in Manitoba and Québec” (Reservoir Ravine 55, quoted here 6–7). Black and White Keys contains, as its title suggests, the opposed poles of negation and affirmation. Evil is acknowledged, recognized as omnipresent both as a possibility and as a threat; the affirmation consists in the firmness with which, by the determined and the heroic, it can be challenged.

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The Scenic Art ... a special kind of intellectual farce. The Scenic Art 123

Black and White Keys had been structured around the contrast between the banality and triviality of Matt’s Toronto and the seriousness of the earth-shaking events taking place in wartorn Europe. The story of hiss teenage years was sandwiched, as it were, between the accounts of Andrew’s secret and vital activities. But what then? In terms of the New Age series, how does one follow the account of Mandel’s extraction from Dachau and the efforts for peace and decency in the explosive areas of Germany and what was then Palestine? The risk of anticlimax is considerable. Hood clearly foresaw the difficulty, and he attempted to counter it through an effect of defiant, even blatant, contrast. If Black and White Keys is the novel within the series that probes most deeply into the nature of twentieth-century conflict and evil, The Scenic Art is tuned to the key of comedy and at times even embraces situational farce. An emphasis on the nature of comedy is established in the opening section about the Stratford tent which served as a theatre in the early years of the Shakespeare Festival: “[Tyrone] Guthrie thought the music of the tent Wagnerian, which reveals much about his conceptions of the histrionic and theatrical. To many of us who were observers of the scene, Mozartian associations seemed immensely more appropriate, the voice of the tent more assimilated to dramma giocoso and the atmosphere of Salzburg and Vienna than to the more heroic ... operatic conceptions of Bayreuth” (2). This kind of

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sentiment – with the balance weighted towards comedy – continues throughout the novel. In the second chapter, in a long discussion between Tony Goderich and Adam Sinclair in London, Tony defines art as “Frivolous play. Performance” in a definition that, as Adam observes, “makes nonsense of tragedy” (94). Similarly, towards the end of the novel, Edie unveils her giant mural, which is revealed not as an ambitiously portentous serious statement but as “an inordinately funny, really comic, play on Canadian politics and art” (228). There was also, we are told, a “strongly pop-art feeling” about it (229). Just as May-Beth Codrington’s twelve visionary paintings in A New Athens suggest the scope and seriousness of The New Age as a whole, so these comments in The Scenic Art offer a clue to the tonal quality of the individual novel that contains them. In some ways, indeed, Hood is here writing a comedy and an anticomedy at the same time. Or, to make the point another way, The Scenic Art is a comedy in reverse. “The end of comedy is marriage,” Matt remarks in A New Athens (139), but this novel begins with a honeymoon (Matt and Edie’s) and ends, against comedic convention, with the breakup of a marriage (Adam and Sadie’s). Moreover – though this is something that was doubtless missed by many readers of the book in 1984 (I confess I missed it myself) – there are a number of hints throughout the narrative that foreshadow the later collapse of the relationship between Matt and Edie. The comic approach may well have developed out of the method employed in Black and White Keys. As we have seen, the climax of the flight across country with Mandel is presented in a narrative sufficiently close to historical facts to be acceptably exciting in its own right, yet at the same time suggesting parody – albeit profoundly serious parody – of James Bond and other thriller material. This is hinted at within the text in the account of Warner Brothers war movies, as described by Matt, and preceding the account of his father’s exploit. Something similar happens here. For example, Tony Goderich has ideas for plays with “trendy homosexual overtones” (89), a remark which in this case reflects back on the sitcom routine involving Adam and Matt at the end of the first chapter. The point is worth stressing since it develops into a complicated effect which has implications for the whole series. Thus the lengthy discussion of Tony’s play Claude and Gertie has no particular significance for beginning readers except insofar as it comments on radical changes in British artistic tastes and moral attitudes at a particular moment

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in time (“There’s a total reversal of social values coming in this country” [122]). But when we return to The Scenic Art with an awareness of the later fortunes of the main characters, certain lines light up. Claude and Gertie (the title, of course, involving a slick allusion to the king and queen in Hamlet via a disguised contemporary reference to Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead) is described as “a play about a man who wants to winkle his older brother’s wife away from him” (127), and we realize – in Tony’s Book – that it represents a sublimated version of thoughts and desires that have been haunting Tony’s inner mind since the occasion of Matt and Edie’s wedding. Another prominent technical effect here, one that only becomes possible at about this stage in an extended fictional series, is a complex strategy by which the narrative interweaves, so far as temporal chronology is concerned, with earlier patterns we have already met. This, too, is touched upon in the discussion of Claude and Gertie, since Tony’s play, which in this respect resembles Stoppard’s, is described as “a play in the holes of another, lines between the lines, scenes that ought to be in the other play but weren’t” (125). We are especially aware of this effect at the opening of the third chapter, which reproduces, with interpolations, the last twenty lines or so of the conclusion to A New Athens. (By the same token, incidentally, most of the last page of The Scenic Art is reproduced word for word – and extended – in the middle of The Motor Boys in Ottawa [153].) Here the effect bears some resemblance to that of an old-style movie trailer: the passage at the end of A New Athens serves notice on a new aspect of the subject to be explored at a later time. But the principle of synchronicity is also involved. Early in The Scenic Art we encounter the phrase “during the first weekend of our honeymoon” (5) and are thus reminded of equivalent passages in A New Athens, but are also introduced to complicating elements – notably Adam’s homosexual pass at Matt – of which we had heard nothing in the earlier novel. Similarly, the half-humorous, half-grisly scene in which Matt sobers up a severely hungover Adam in time for him to complete a successful interview with the Stratford Festival committee (72–8) takes place no more than a week after the magical New Year’s Eve of 1952–53, at which Matt and Edie become engaged. Once again, the incident passes unrecorded in A New Athens, where it could have seriously compromised the elevated tone. But Hood knows that the

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mixed form of “tragi-comedy” is an accepted style within the “scenic art” of the theatre, and he delights here in contrasting “the appearance ... of the sunken vessel beneath the champagne-bottle ice” (already presented in the second chapter of A New Athens) with the new detail of “the deathlike green cast of the moribund actor’s skin” (78). This tonal variety is reflected within the text by the violent switches between dramatic realism, emotional extremity, and broad farce that characterize the novel as a whole. The Scenic Art, then, is a comedy about comedy, and the dramatic experiences recurring throughout the narrative ultimately constitute a survey of modern Western drama. Shakespeare, of course, dominates the scenes at the Stratford Festival, and references to or quotation from over twenty Shakespearean plays occur within the text. While a student at the University of Toronto, Matt acts in, among other plays, Chekhov’s The Seagull. In London, Tony encounters the world of the new British dramatists of mid-century, and the text is peppered with names like John Osborne, Arnold Wesker, Harold Pinter, and N.F. Simpson. In the third part, the dramatic offerings of Stage Stoverville include plays by Tennessee Williams, W.B. Yeats, and J.M. Synge, and for the climactic Dominion Drama Festival, Hood deliberately constructs a program that reflects a whole spectrum of theatrical trends, approaches, and interpretations. Playwrights range from Shakespeare and Molière to Shaw, Pinter, and Albee, with “Canadian content” represented by a dramatization of W.O. Mitchell’s Who Has Seen the Wind.18 Dramatic fashion is illustrated by a grotesquely inappropriate “gay” production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf , a vulgar transposition of The Taming of the Shrew to the times and costuming of the Wild West (a “Bright Idea” from the director of “Stampede Theatre,” Calgary [225]), and an inordinately long, deadly conventional, uncut production of Shaw’s Man and Superman. In addition, the history of the rise of a serious theatrical tradition in Canada is chronicled by scenes involving Robert Gill and Hart House Theatre, Tyrone Guthrie at the Stratford Festival, and the continuing competitions in the Dominion Drama Festival that were so important until professional theatre in most of the larger Canadian cities took its place. It is worth noting also that comedy is dominant within the repertory of plays and playwrights specified here. Moreover, comedy not only provides much of the subject matter for the novel but notably

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dominates its structure. Divided into three chapters, it imitates the three-act structure of traditional modern comedy (an up-to-date application of numerology), and each chapter duly closes on a hallowed comic finale. In the farcical climax of chapter 1, Edie flushes Adam Sinclair out of Matt’s bed as if he were “a Demon King in a pantomime” (82); at the end of chapter 2, the married couple is left together according to the conventional formula, but Adam and Sadie are not conventional lovers, the scene becoming a parody of the norm; and if we omit the coda appended, like that of A New Athens, to point towards further developments in the series, the metaphorical curtain falls in the final chapter on Adam’s disastrous adjudication speech, an elaborate travesty of the classic recognition scene. If we look at the structure of the novel from another perspective, we note that the action begins in Canada, moves to England, and then returns to Canada. In the first part, almost everything concerning the Stratford Festival is imported from abroad: the playwright, the director, the principal actors, the set designer, the assistant production designer – even Skip Manley, the expert in charge of the big tent (itself made in Chicago). In the second part, however, a reverse process is beginning to take place. Tony Goderich, a Canadian in London, makes a reputation for himself as both novelist and playwright; Adam and Sadie become stars of stage and television; “Milldrummond,” the Canadian team specializing in costume designs and theatrical furnishings, establishes itself firmly as a presence to be reckoned with; even the Chichester Festival Theatre is seen (with historical justification, it should be added) as following the “thrust stage” trend set by Stratford, Ontario. By the third chapter, the Canadian Adam Sinclair is himself “the star from Stratford” (161) and, as I have already indicated, we witness the general development of the theatrical arts in Canada from amateur enthusiasm to something approaching professional standards. It would be easy to interpret this pattern in trendy “post-colonial” terms – the empire acts back, as it were – but this would be a mistake. Hood was not working within any rigidly ideological framework. The flowering of Canadian artistic talent is certainly an important theme (it is, in some respects, the dominating subject of the whole New Age series), but he was well aware of the fact that the arts depend upon the unpredictable appearance of “talent,” defined by Matt in theological terms as “[t]he artist’s mode of Divine Grace”

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(49), and cannot be politically legislated. Once again, however, comic tone takes precedence over thematic solemnity, even Matt’s. The words that he applies approvingly to an unpretentious American comedy performed by the Stoverville Players’ Guild – “The social comment is never overt” (216) – provide an accurate summing-up of the effect of the whole novel. At the same time, here as elsewhere in the series, Hood stressed the representative quality of his narrative. Thus Adam and Sadie are presented as possibly acting out “the fated deathly love story of the epoch now rising with them” (164), an idea developed two novels later in the subsequent breakup of Matt and Edie’s marriage at a time of dramatically rising divorce figures and a general sense of marital uncertainty. A little later, Prime Minister Lester Pearson and actor Adam Sinclair are seen as representing “a bringing-together of opposites in some way intensely characteristic of Canadian life,” and both are recommended as providing “lessons in rôle-playing” (173) – the dramatic image startlingly invoked at this point. Later still, we are told that “the birth throes of Stage Stoverville were an emblem of the changes in the metabolism of Canadian economic life” (205), and we are invited to see the account as illustrative of more general problems in an age of rising inflation rates. All this is neatly summed up in the figure of Dougie Crum, representing “the coiling intercircles of Ontarian business and financial life” but also chairman of Stage Stoverville and once (the dramatic image returning once more) associated with Edie in a boating incident forming “an indelible part of Stoverville social comedy” (207). Technically, the first and third sections of The Scenic Art – that is to say, the Canadian sections – are presented from Matt’s viewpoint and in his words, while an omniscient narrator is invoked for the central section. At first sight, this approach seems to reflect, by means of a mirror image, the arrangement in Black and White Keys, where the third-person narrative of the European-dominated chapters devoted to Andrew are interspersed with Matt’s first-person accounts of life as a teenager in wartime Toronto. But the situation in The Scenic Art is not quite as clear-cut as that. There is no indication of an individual speaker in the opening pages of the novel. Apart from a nonspecific reference to “many of us who were observers of the scene” (2) and a casual but unindividualized “I can see him now” (4), the narrative proceeds in a relaxed but dignified prose style for more than four pages until a paragraph begins: “On Anne Street, not more

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than three hundred yards from the site of the tent, I could look down from the front bedroom window during the first weekend of our honeymoon and watch Skip [Manley] and his crew” (5). Only then will readers of A New Athens realize that the narrator is still Matt Goderich, who goes on to present his personal perspective, which remains conspicuous throughout the rest of the chapter. The reverse situation occurs in the second chapter. As readers, we make the transition to omniscient narration readily enough as the scene switches to Tony Goderich and Adam Sinclair walking in the streets of London. Their subsequent meeting with the rest of the Canadian theatrical contingent, the production of Claude and Gertie at Coventry and at the Criterion Theatre in Piccadilly Circus, and the success of Bed Sitters on British tv all follow, and it is with something of a shock that, four pages from the end of a lengthy chapter, we encounter a reference to Adam as established “in the minds of people like Valerie Essex as ‘the star from Stratford,’ which is how she described him to me, as we stood and chatted in front of Stage Stoverville” (161). Matt, it would seem, has been the tacit narrator all the time. The effect is analogous to the sudden appearance of his personal voice in the eleventh chapter of Reservoir Ravine. From a strictly logical viewpoint, there are difficulties involved here. Clearly, Matt was not in a position to witness any of the events in the second chapter, and it ends with an intimate scene in which Adam and Sadie are alone for the first time after their marriage, a scene for which a voyeuristic narrator – outside the conventions of drama – is obviously unsuitable. Related difficulties may be found in various passages in the third chapter: in the long conversation between Valerie Essex and George Robinson (186–91), for instance, at which Matt was not present (as he is at pains to point out, it occurred while he was experiencing his Proustian moment in the fields by Highway 29, recorded at the opening of A New Athens). Hood is aware of this difficulty and even draws attention to it: “Conversations like this, fraught with consequences for many who don’t take part in them, persons in some cases many miles distant when they take place, seem to have a mysteriously effective method of diffusing themselves, perhaps through the thin upper atmosphere, in such a way as to make those for whom they mean big trouble shiver with apprehension, though they have seen and heard nothing of them through the corporeal senses” (191).

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It is possible to retort, “This gentleman protests too much,” as Tony remarks on another occasion in Tony’s Book (73). What Hood ultimately achieves, however, is a prose style in which his own characteristic qualities and those of his creation, Matt Goderich, are interwoven so tightly that they become indistinguishable. This allows a flexibility, a blending of the detached and the intimate, a constant intermingling of the impersonal and the personal, that can accommodate the variety of focus desirable in an extended work. Even Proust, we may remember, has Marcel recount the long narrative about Swann in love that took place before his own birth. It is a flexibility employed to good effect, as we shall see, in later books in the series, including Be Sure to Close Your Eyes. “Intermingling” may, indeed, be considered the main structural foundation of the whole New Age series, but it is particularly strong in this novel and its immediate successor, The Motor Boys in Ottawa. It is a principle that operates on a number of levels, and nowhere is it so pervasive as here, most notably in the relation of documentary accuracy and imaginative fantasy. As we have seen, “documentary fantasy” was the term chosen by Hood himself to describe the series, and the yoking of opposed expectation within the phrase itself elegantly illustrates the process involved. In the first chapter, for instance, we are offered accounts of the opening of the Stratford Festival in 1953 and of Robert Gill’s years as director of Hart House Theatre which, though fictionalized in certain details, are basically trustworthy in terms of general historical atmosphere. Fictional characters such as Adam Sinclair, Sadie MacNamara, and Edie Codrington/ Goderich are smuggled into the Stratford story, but their names mingle with those of people actually associated with the beginnings of the festival – Tyrone Guthrie, Alec Guinness, Skip Manley, and others. In general, the narrative in these pages may be accepted as imaginatively heightened but still reliable social history, in the same way that The Swing in the Garden provides an authentic, albeit fictional glimpse of an aspect of Toronto during the 1930s. The presentation of Hart House Theatre is, critically speaking, a little more complex. Whereas in the case of Stratford, Hood could draw upon the recollections of his wife, Noreen Mallory (who worked in much the same capacity at Stratford as Edie in the novel), here he is reproducing events in which he was himself a participant during his university years. This association leads to some more elaborate reordering and transposing of the historical record, possible in

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part because the theatrical history involved is not so well known an element of Canadian cultural development as the rise of Stratford. Some of the details are surprisingly accurate: the extract from the University of Toronto Varsity review of Othello – “As Lodovico, Matthew Goderich let the play down with a dull thud” (47) – is a paraphrase of an actual review with Matt’s name substituted for that of Hugh Hood! But others are adapted. For example, the Shakespearean plays produced at this time are a matter of history, but Gill presented them in a different order: it seems, indeed, that Hood exaggerated his own dramatic failings since, unlike Matt, he played increasingly important (though never leading) roles in the course of his undergraduate career.19 Even more liberties are taken with the exact historical record in the account of the student actors’ participation in the Dominion Drama Festival. The play involved was not Chekhov’s The Seagull (though Gill had produced that play, without Hood, during the 1948–49 Hart House season) but Lillian Hellman’s Another Part of the Forest. In The Scenic Art, the director and actors are referred to only by their first names (62–3), but they can be readily matched with their real-life counterparts: Henry Kaplan, Kate Reid, Eric House, Ted Follows, Bill Hutt (“Don” and “David” were not apparently, involved, but obviously refer to Donald Davis, later to become a stalwart of the Crest Theatre, and David Gardner, who had played Othello in the Hart House performances). But the fortunes of the production – winning the local competition, losing out in the finals – are accurate, and the respective adjudicators are readily identifiable as Robert Speaight and Philip Hope-Wallace. In the second chapter, set in England, the situation may initially appear similar, but it is in fact very different. Here Hood inserts an influential fictional group into the dramatic events of the time. Although individual Canadians had some success in the London theatre during this period, the main narrative centred upon Tony Goderich is, of course, invented. Into the historical tension between regional theatre and London’s West End, Hood introduces his fictional Canadians (with Claude and Gertie a playful substitution for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead) and a whole series of characters who may in some cases have their real-life equivalents (such as Bryan Bailey, artistic director of the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry) but are primarily participants in a fictive story which, despite its occasional and often cogent interconnections with history, exists in

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its own right and for its own sake. Hood here stretches the convention of realism to its limit, creating a narrative that operates simultaneously on two levels of imaginative reality. The Scenic Art committed Hood to a courageous, though perilous, change of tone, and many of its more interesting aesthetic effects do not become apparent until readers have ventured further into the series. When it first appeared in 1984, response was for the most part cooler than to the earlier New Age novels, and it seems probable that it discouraged a number of potential readers from continuing. For myself, I consider it more interesting to write about within the context of the completed series than I found it at a first reading. In fact, in my preface to A Sense of Style I wrote that it “fails to attain the standard of the other novels in the first half of his New Age series” (10). I now have a better understanding of its position within the whole and am decidedly less sure of that judgment. Indeed, I have to confess that I discover more to enjoy at every rereading. It is possible, however, that Hood became here the victim of his own remarkable versatility. The tone of The Scenic Art is not what we expect after the first four novels, and we may tend to judge it by inappropriate criteria. I now believe that it needs to be judged as a performance, as a dramatic tour de force remarkable for its exuberant, if somewhat slick, wit and its skilful shifts of pace and rhythm. It does succeed, if read in the right spirit, in conveying a sense of brittle theatrical unreality; moreover, Hood catches the cadences and idiom of British dramatic circles in the 1950s (of which I had some modest experience) with impressive accuracy.20 At the same time, the Adam-Matt confrontation at the end of the first chapter still seems coyly self-conscious and forced, and the “camp” dialogue artificially contrived, while Adam’s climactic speech at the close of the book, amusing as it may be in itself, fizzles because the nature of the climax seems uncertain. An actor reveals his sexual orientation and the failure of his marriage in public – but who really cares?21 The book ends on a note of embarrassment, but the embarrassment involves not merely the tone of the participants’ reactions but the reader’s response to the writer’s grip over his material. Mark Levene made a related comment in a review when he remarked that, “in part because of its withdrawal from the characters’ bonds with one another, the book never quite becomes a novel, never gives a clear purpose to its accumulation of detail” (333).

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There is, then, much to enjoy and admire in the book, as I hope that this discussion has demonstrated, but I cannot help feeling that it ends with a sense of letdown. In some respects, of course, this was deliberate: there is a decided morning-after-the-night-before mood detectable in the final two pages. Unfortunately, it is only too easy to read the passage, as I originally read it, as an unwitting anticlimax. In such a case, the supreme effect occurs when the reader experiences letdown but simultaneously realizes with admiration that the author has produced precisely the reaction that was intended. I still think that the desired effect eludes Hood here. Still, it is a blemish that matters less now that The Scenic Art is seen as the fifth in a series of twelve. When it was the most recent contribution to the New Age series, however, it appeared to lack direction; the persevering reader turned to the next book with interest and hope, but also with apprehension. As might have been expected, however, The Motor Boys in Ottawa offered yet another radical change in focus.

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The Motor Boys in Ottawa Everything seems to intertwine with everything else. The Motor Boys in Ottawa 36

The Scenic Art ends with the celebration of a hundred years of Canadian political union in 1967 but also, insofar as Adam Sinclair and Sadie MacNamara are concerned, with marital breakup. The concluding scene is decidedly equivocal in tone, as Stoverville’s climactic drama festival ends in emotional disarray. “Why didn’t you warn us?” Valerie Essex asks Matt, and all he can answer is, “I didn’t know ... How would I know?” (253). The public and the private, the political and the personal, have come together – but with disturbing and unsettling results. This intermingling is continued and extended in The Motor Boys in Ottawa, which moves back from Centennial Year to the beginning of the decade to offer Hood’s comprehensive presentation of the 1960s in the most overtly political novel in the whole series. The main political events, national and international, are all included. We hear of the negotiations leading up to the proclamation of the Canada–U.S. Auto Pact, the assassination of President Kennedy, the beginnings of the Quiet Revolution in Quebec, the rise of Trudeau, the opening moves in the recognition of the People’s Republic of China and on the last page or two, the October kidnappings of 1970 and the ensuing national crisis. Moreover, Hood presents the strategy of political organization at all levels: George Robinson’s crafty moves to ensure re-election (chapters 7 and 9), Andrew Goderich’s low-keyed electioneering (chapter 12), the attempts of leading

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members of the ndp to create an effective opposition (chapter 18), the inner workings of leadership conventions (chapter 30). In addition, we are given chilling glimpses of the intricate connection between industrial and political policy, the power of big corporations, aggressive methods of advertising and persuasion, and the growing fact of technology. Despite all this, however, The Motor Boys in Ottawa is not confined to the political in the narrow sense. It presents, indeed, what might be called a social-cum-psychological portrait of the period. Central to the novel is the way in which apparently distant political events have profound effects upon individual lives. Public and private are inextricably interconnected. Above all, Canada, like the rest of the world, changed radically during the decade. After a first part that proceeds expeditiously from 1960 to 1964 (chapters 1–7), the book settles down to offer, to all intents and purposes, a year-by-year chronicle of the beginnings of what Matt calls “the decade of twaddle and bullshit” (194). “Somewhere in the nineteen-sixties,” he remarks later, “the world of values that I’d inhabited up to that time had been sapped at its roots, withered, dried, been torn up” (218). Moreover, the period is “filled with intimations of coming change” (193). Such comments blend seamlessly with Hood’s own statement in a lecture: “The Motor Boys in Ottawa treats the years from 1966 to 1970 as the pivot, the turning point, in Canadian life” (“Elephant” 100), a turning point that will have momentous effects on the personal lives of Canadians in general and the Goderich family in particular. It is also, of course, a pivotal volume in the New Age series, since its conclusion marks the halfway point in the whole project, and as a result of the 1960s, the prevailing tone of the second half will be radically different from that of the first. The specifically political aspects of the period are understandably prominent within the novel, but they are invariably related to events in individual lives. It is while Matt and his family are looking for a house in Montreal that they hear of the first bomb incidents in the city and of the Kennedy assassination. The fictional George Robinson is made to play a crucial role in the historical Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s triumph in the Liberal convention of 1968, and Hood is as interested in his character’s personal motivation as in the national-political implications of his action. Andrew Goderich’s death in China at the end of the novel and at the exact halfway point in the series – itself an indirect result

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of Robinson’s political machinations – terminates his peaceful international mission, but it also sets up a series of major shifts in relationships within the Goderich family, as novels in the second half of the series make clear. Finally, the October Crisis opens a new chapter in Canada’s national history, but at the same time ushers in a darker social climate that will have severe repercussions on individual lives. This is a matter that cannot, I think, be overemphasized. The interweaving of personal and political was not perhaps as evident when the novel first appeared as it is now, when we can view it within the full context of the completed series. Indeed, at least one reviewer failed to notice the connections. For I.M. Owen, writing in the Idler, the novel seemed no more than a “thin and unlikely story ... padded out with bits that belong to other books” (49). Because it moves to and fro between the industrial-financial-governmental world of George Robinson, the liaison between Tony and Linnet Olcott, Matt and Edie’s marriage, and the quest for political responsibility at both national and international levels on the part of Andrew Goderich, such a view is superficially understandable. It will be worthwhile, however, to look more closely at a representative section of the text to get a clear impression of what Hood is really doing. Chapters 18 through 20 provide a convenient segment. It begins with Andrew pointing out a painters’ hut historically associated with the Group of Seven to a collection of the “best minds” of the New Democratic Party (109), who are only moderately impressed.22 For them, art and politics are separate issues. For Andrew, however, the nation’s cultural health and its political health are crucially intertwined. He has brought these individuals together to discuss the implications of the newly proclaimed Auto Pact, yet once again his motives are more than “merely” political: he realizes that the party will “have to abandon the principle of international socialism and act as Canadian nationalists in this affair” (112). In other words, as the author of books with such titles as Sin Quantified and Property and Value, he knows that the practice of politics cannot be separated from the making of moral judgments. One of the party members is unconvinced by this argument, suggesting that Andrew is taking the matter “a little too seriously.” At the same moment, Ishy accidentally drops a tea service in the dining room and admits to “having a little trouble with [her] eyes” (112). This may at first seem a coincidental juxtaposition

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of the domestic with matters of social policy; in fact, when read imaginatively, the scene conveys a latent but more radical insinuation: that some high-ranking members of our political parties can be “blind” to the realities of the world in which they find themselves. We move immediately from Toronto to Matt and Edie’s lakeside cottage, where Valerie and George Essex have come to discuss details of the Dominion Drama Festival to be held in Stoverville the following year, the outcome of which readers of The Scenic Art already know well. Hood – or, rather, Matt, since this is a first-person chapter – begins with a seemingly casual punning reference to the Essex surname and a once-popular brand of car. The tone is light and full of socio-historical allusions characteristic of Hood’s supposedly digressive manner, but a reference to “the enormous place held in our social mythologies by automobiles” (114) reminds us that the Auto Pact contains implications that filter down from the political realm to affect the conduct of everyday life. The conversation then turns to George Robinson and his “hatred” of the Goderiches. After discussion of his attitude towards Edie and her mural and towards Matt for his refusal to allow Robinson to use May-Beth’s “libellous” portrait of his election opponent in a recent political campaign, it becomes clear that Robinson is incapable of separating the political and the personal. Since both topics, automobiles and art, have been presented as of concern to Matt’s father, we realize that, in the last words of the chapter, Valerie unites all these themes when she remarks to Matt that Robinson “hates your dad too. Really hates him” (118). The scene breaks off abruptly at this point, but in the next chapter we find George Robinson, parliamentary secretary to the prime minister, consulting on Parliament Hill with Andrew Goderich’s old friend Charlie Pope, now permanent undersecretary for external affairs. The subject is the eventual official recognition of the People’s Republic of China, but through oblique references and indirect aspersions, it is clear that Robinson is plotting to get Andrew sent to China to prevent him from asking awkward questions in the House of Commons about the human effects of the Auto Pact. It will now be realized that these three apparently fragmented scenes are anything but unconnected. The last-mentioned scene of spy-style politicking (including the use of bugging devices) has widespread ramifications: ultimately, it will lead not only to Andrew Goderich’s death abroad but, on a family level, to the return of Tony to Canada and subsequent catastrophic developments in Matt and Edie’s relationship.

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The more we “stand back” from The Motor Boys in Ottawa, the more we recognize that, far from being disjointed, it coheres as a tightly bound fictional structure. Formally, the novel consists of seven parts, each containing seven comparatively short chapters. The process of interweaving that I have illustrated enables Hood to develop most of the thematic strands initiated in earlier volumes of the series, and many of these will, in turn, continue into the second half of The New Age. Furthermore, in chapter 34 the birth of Emily Underwood, Matt’s niece, prepares the way for the story of a new generation that will become important in subsequent volumes, especially in Great Realizations. Hood’s structural interests are never more skilfully displayed than here. In the twenty-fifth chapter (itself the central pivot of this fortynine-chapter work) Matt meditates on the effects of his own actions upon others and the impact of external events on his own life, noting how “later events reveal their linkage with earlier, and the earlier grow in meaning and value, change their shape, become tragic or comic or neither in reinterpretation, in light of later happenings” (151–2). The pivotal significance of The Motor Boys in Ottawa is thus clearly indicated. There are two principal ways in which Hood elaborates upon the possibilities of this structure. First, he refines still further the subtle interrelation of first- and third-person narrative evolved in the earlier volumes. The book opens with a chapter of detached, impersonal narrative. This gets slightly more colloquial – closer, we might say, to the characteristic accents of Matt Goderich – at the beginning of the second chapter, but the third-person narrative continues. Indeed, so far as the first part is concerned, only the fifth chapter (involving Matt and Edie) is narrated by Matt himself. But the proportion of his narration increases steadily, almost relentlessly, throughout the book until, in the seventh and final part, all seven chapters are narrated from Matt’s viewpoint. Thus the novel that at first sight appears to be the most detached, impersonal, and historical becomes increasingly personal as it proceeds. The second effect might be called structural synchronicity. It is an organizing principle central to The Motor Boys in Ottawa, but it has been developed earlier and is, indeed, well exemplified by a significant moment in The Scenic Art. There, with the Stoverville Dominion Drama Festival in the planning stage, allusion is made to George

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Robinson’s realization that he might be able to have the prime minister as a “week-long resident of Robinson Court, with Adam Sinclair and Sadie MacNamara installed in an adjacent suite.” Matt comments: “This happened on the day following my conversation with Valerie and her husband ... at the exact same time, as nearly as I can reckon it, as I was standing in the middle of the fields eight miles out of town, knee deep in wild flowers, envisaging the ten brilliant princesses on their last railway ride” (186). Here, in anticipation of the technique employed in the present novel, an intensely personal scene involving Matt coincides temporally with a scene of ambitious political strategy. Not only that but Matt’s moment among the flowers takes us back as far as A New Athens. We begin to realize that, within the full range of the novel-sequence, a whole series of interrelations between the novels becomes possible. Every new book can now reveal further configurations. In this way, scattered scenes that will eventually be integrated into the whole are initially juxtaposed through a seemingly fortuitous synchronicity – a synchronicity, however, that Hood artfully and skilfully controls. It is an effect that he may have picked up from one of his favourite authors, Evelyn Waugh, who employs it on several occasions in his Sword of Honour trilogy. Nowhere is it used more deliberately than in The Motor Boys. The third chapter shows Linnet Olcott, “one bright afternoon in 1963” (16), discussing the background music for a television show and duly introducing an early Beatles recording as “the sound of the nineteen-sixties” (20). The fourth chapter begins: “At precisely the same moment – just at ten o’clock in the morning on a rainy day in Stoverville – George Robinson sat in his sparsely peopled committee rooms and questioned himself and everybody else about his election defeat of the previous day” (21). Old-style and new-style attitudes are here eloquently set against each other. (It is typical of Hood, by the way, that he makes an appropriate adjustment for the transatlantic time change.) Later in the novel a letter from Tony (significantly addressed “Dear Edie and Matt” [60]) arrives on the same day that May-Beth Codrington’s estate is finally settled and Edie is invested with “all rights” (65) – a juxtaposition that is to reveal itself as meaningful in Tony’s Book. Later still, a mutually agreed-upon temporary separation of Matt and Edie is synchronically juxtaposed with Tony and Linnet’s holiday together in the Scottish Highlands (104), and later again (144) actions of Edie and Linnet are similarly linked. This is not mere synchroni-

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city. Hood is subtly preparing us (though I doubt if many readers in 1986 took up the hints) for the startling realignments of relationship that are to take place in Tony’s Book and Property and Value. Now that he has advanced to this halfway point in his series, he can be rigidly chronological within the novel itself while allowing his dedicated readers to experience the very different pleasure of a fluctuating temporal perspective. An excellent example occurs in the sixteenth chapter where Edie, turned down by two galleries and chafing against the inevitable comparisons between her painting and her mother’s, remarks, “I need some big major work to establish myself, something that’s a real novelty” (100). The date is June 1966, and those familiar with earlier novels in the series will readily set the incident within a linear chronological scheme. They know, in fact, that she is about to get her opportunity, since the scene ends with her going off with the children to their summer cottage to work on her own, leaving Matt in Stoverville. But in The Scenic Art we have already seen Matt and Valerie Essex at this time evolving the plan for a mural on the wall of the Stage Stoverville building (174–8). Matt and Edie are reunited on this occasion in a scene already portrayed in A New Athens, while Matt mentions the mural to Edie a little later in The Scenic Art (193), and the whole series of events culminates with the unveiling ceremony towards the end of the same novel (228). But at this point we need to return to the sixteenth chapter of The Motor Boys, which looks forward as well as backward. Immediately after stating that she needs “some big major work” to establish herself, Edie continues, “I have to get away from here, Matt, I really do” (100). This outburst reflects the desperation that will eventually find its bridge-burning climax in Tony’s Book.23 The reader’s ability to move around in time – to “look before and after,” in Shelley’s phrase – results in a richly complex aesthetic experience. Despite Hood’s frequently expressed dislike for the employment of irony in its strictest sense – in Matt’s words here, “Gollies, how I hate irony!” (150) – he was not averse to using effects that, in looser and more popular parlance, are designated “ironic”: statements that take on a different tone and evoke a different response when scrutinized from a temporal remove. Examples here include a remark about the unconventional Trudeau made by a political pundit on election night in November 1965: “Of course you can’t win elections acting like that” (80). Readers know, with the gift of hindsight, that by the next

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election Trudeau will be prime minister and the word “Trudeaumania” will have been born. Later in the novel, Matt is destined to make a false prophecy of classic proportions when he comments of their life in Montreal: “I was growing to enjoy living in la métropole myself, now that the silliest of the political aberrations seemed to be a year or two behind us; the seventies would surely see a more pacific Québec fully restored to the bosom of the Canadian community” (246). Fifty pages later the novel will end with the sentence “Later the same week the prime minister invoked the provisions of the War Measures Act against the kidnappers of Pierre Laporte and Jasper [sic] Cross” (295). This kind of “ironic” effect, dependent upon the quiddities of temporal change, will become increasingly notable in subsequent novels. A related effect was involved when this novel about the Canada–United States Auto Pact of 1965 appeared during the political debates leading up to the free-trade election of 1988. Before we concluded our discussion of The Motor Boys in Ottawa, it will be appropriate to add a coda concerning another example of interweaving conspicuous in this novel: that of the authentic local history of Brockville (including the personal family history of Hood’s in-laws, the Mallorys) with his overall fictional design. This interweaving occurs throughout the series, but the impact of Brockville/Stoverville and some of the more prominent families is especially evident here, mainly because of the social importance and political influence of George Robinson, Robinson Court, and RobPharm. Hood adapts a good deal of Brockville geography and topography as well as history for his fictional (Stoverville) purpose, sometimes quite drastically. Thus he makes Robinson remark to Golmsdorfer at the opening of the book: “Just cast your eyes along there to the west, where the shoreline curves in, past the MacLean place ... And then there’s the Codringtons’ garden and a few more houses along King William Street, and after that it all belongs to us, down to the water and right into the middle of town” (4). The Robinsons are clearly modelled on the Fulfords of Fulford Place, a turn-of-the-century mansion on the eastern edge of the city that is still a Brockville showpiece, but the Mallorys, who appear in The New Age only partly disguised as the Codringtons, lived at the western end of the city in a house otherwise accurately described in the series. Just as Hood telescopes two important Brockville streets, King and William, to

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create Stoverville’s King William Street, so he runs together details of the eastern and western parts of the Brockville waterfront in the larger interests of his fiction. The resemblances between the fictional Robinson Court and the actual Fulford Place are particularly close. Both houses were set in extensive grounds, “shrubberies and hedges in close to ten acres, an enormous garden and park for an Ontario house in the middle of a city or town”;24 shared details include “a porte-cochère” (254), terrace doors (6), a “commodious games room” (7), and a music room built for Fulford’s American wife, who was a pianist, but transformed by the fictional Robinson into a computing centre (49)! Moreover, the parallels between the life of George Fulford (1852–1905) and George Robinson, including their common first name, are striking. Fulford, like Robinson, was a druggist; he made his fortune after acquiring a patent for “Pink Pills for Pale People” and initiating a large-scale American-style publicity campaign. Hood devotes the whole of the fifteenth chapter of The Motor Boys to a fictional equivalent of this episode. Fulford’s political career was confined to acting for twelve years as city councillor, though he also ran (unsuccessfully) for mayor. But his son, also George, was a member of Parliament for some years, originally as a Liberal. George Fulford senior was made a senator shortly before his death. He was fond of lavish entertainment, and several Canadian prime ministers dined in the house. Readers of The New Age will remember Robinson entertaining Lester Pearson in Centennial Year during The Scenic Art. The relation between the Mallorys and the Codringtons is one that extends through the whole novel-series. Jeanne Mallory, the mother of Hood’s wife, shares a number of biographical connections with May-Beth Codrington, though radical differences exist as well. MayBeth’s attendance at Branksome Hall in Toronto and her training at the Toronto General Hospital as a nurse (Be Sure to Close Your Eyes 27, 147ff.) are both modelled on Jeanne Mallory’s experience, though the nursing episode presumably took place under less distressing circumstances in real life. Both met their future husbands while at the hospital, but Jeanne married a dentist rather than the proprietor of a successful hardware business. (Hood drops one of his private allusions into the text at this point: at May-Beth and Earl Codrington’s first meeting, reference is made to a Dr Mallory as the leading Stoverville dentist [Be Sure 170–2].) Similarly, both later took art lessons, May-Beth from a Mr Di Angelo (New Athens 65), Jeanne

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Mallory under his historical equivalent, an Italian instructor named Aromi who taught in Brockville in the 1940s. But Jeanne Mallory produced pleasant, traditional landscapes very different from the startlingly original visionary art associated with May-Beth. One of Jeanne Mallory’s paintings was entitled Boathouse of Flora Wolsey, Hartley Street;25 Hood seems to have taken over the given name for Flora MacLean (New Athens 64). Finally, while he has incorporated aspects of national, local, and personal pasts into his fictional series, there is a curious sense in which his writings may be said to have influenced the future. Nowadays, the village of Athens, just over twenty kilometres west of Brockville, is famous for the murals that adorn the exterior walls of many of its buildings (in the final novel, Near Water, it is described as “the town with the murals” [41]). When, however, Hood began the narrative sequence culminating in Edie Goderich’s giant wall painting in Stoverville, these murals had not been produced. His wife, Noreen Mallory, and their son John are now both painters of murals; each, indeed, has contributed a wall painting to the Athens series. Yet, though the early life of Noreen Mallory often runs parallel to Edie’s, she had not painted a mural when Hood wrote The Scenic Art, though she had often considered the possibility. John Hood, incidentally, not only has a painting in Brockville as well as the one in Athens, but has another, on the Sun building in Toronto, which incorporates a portrait of his novelist-father while still a teenager. The interweavings of fact and fiction, of art and life, are indeed complex, and The Motor Boys in Ottawa effectively displays the process in action.

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With Tony’s Book, Hood initiated the second half of his New Age series, and it can in some respects be regarded as a second start. The opening books have established a flexible but firm narrative line (though this is to be blatantly severed here), and the main thematic concerns have been introduced. New patterns and approaches now become both possible and desirable. Once readers are familiar with the basic narrative elements and with the characters of the main participants, other preoccupations latent in the material can be explored. As a consequence, we begin to notice various possible subdivisions within the subsequent books that gradually take on a new importance. Thus Hood himself referred to a “marriage-group” within the series (see “Bringing it all back”), on the analogy of Chaucer’s thematic segment within The Canterbury Tales, and it is true that the opening books in the second half present delineations of close sexual relationships that can be regarded as a loosely integrated discussion of the complexities of the married state. A more-or-less systematic consideration of various aspects of modern art – film, television, jazz, and various styles in painting – can also be discerned in the central books of the series, while a preoccupation with death (including sudden death) becomes noticeable in later volumes. But Tony’s Book is most remarkable for its technical experimentation. The title might in itself suggest that Tony Goderich becomes the narrator as well as the central and dominating character in the fiction,

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but this is not in fact the case. Here Hood makes his most ambitious experiments with shifting narrative viewpoint. Earlier books, notably Black and White Keys and The Scenic Art, had interwoven first- and third-person narratives, but he now offers a series of four interrelating personal accounts, each containing five chapter-segments and almost identical in length. In addition, and characteristically, these form an elaborate pattern: two women, two men, the genders alternating from section to section. As might be expected, this approach leads to further presentations of alternative versions of scenes with which we are already familiar from Matt’s viewpoint. But in this novel his voice is the last to be heard, and when we come in the end to hear him, it is a very different Matt, transformed through shock, trauma, and crisis. Tony’s Book, then, is a structural tour de force. Linnet Olcott, giving her version of her affair with Tony, initiates the storyline here, and it is then taken over, in a literary equivalent of a relay race, by Tony himself, his account leading us into the central action in the book: his visit to Canada for his father’s funeral and the eventual return to England with Edie and her children. Edie’s account then recapitulates the story of their developing relationship, the two sections parallelling each other in time but with the events now presented from the woman’s viewpoint. Finally, Matt picks up the narrative at this climax and carries it forward to the moment when Ishy has to be transferred to a nursing home and he therefore finds himself deprived of mother as well as wife. All sections, we should notice, end on the breakup of a close relationship. The pattern is precise though not over-insistent. It becomes more evident, however, when Linnet and Matt, the first and the last speakers, form their own relationship in the next novel, Property and Value. The novel is also a tour de force stylistically. At a first reading, it might be assumed that Hood’s habitual plain style is simply carried over from earlier books, in which case the subtle differences between the four narrators will probably make little impression. As one familiarizes oneself with the text, however, the distinctions become more conspicuous. The account given by one speaker flows smoothly and naturally into the next, yet they are notably different. We notice the chaste decorousness of Linnet’s voice, sensitive to linguistic variety (“alive to nuances,” as she herself remarks [26]), often reflecting in its imagery the theatrical world which is the centre of her existence, but never succumbing to the ephemeral verbal fashion of the day. Tony,

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on the other hand, comes across as more a man of the moment, more carefree and to some extent more sophisticated, but embodying the cleverness of the intellect rather than the integrity of the word. And Edie – surprisingly, until we recall the darker implications of her conversation in earlier books – is sharp, iconoclastic, even ribald. Finally, when Matt takes over the narration once more, we recognize a tone and vocabulary belonging to the centre, capable of moving outwards in the direction suggested by the other speakers but ultimately as representative in his speech as he is in his instincts, emotions, sentiments, and attitudes. This opening novel of the second half of the New Age series begins, like The Swing in the Garden, with childhood memories – indeed, it even opens with a scene in a garden – but the speaker, Linnet Olcott, is unexpected. She has made a brief appearance in The Scenic Art as an actress in a television series with which Tony Goderich has connections, and the rise and fall of her relationship with Tony has already been chronicled, from Tony’s viewpoint, in The Motor Boys in Ottawa. But the account of their parting towards the end of that novel hardly leads us to suppose that she will subsequently become more prominent. Her reappearance is, however, salutary. One reason, of course (others will become evident in Property and Value), is that her fresh perspective initiates a fruitful series of comparisons and contrasts with Matt’s story and situation. Since her origins are conspicuously English, the “Canadianness” of Matt’s roots becomes all the more evident as a result of the juxtaposition. At the same time, both move from backgrounds sensitive to religious values into a decidedly secular modern world, and this development was clearly a representative experience for many in the twentieth century. Linnet’s section is dominated by Wordsworthian allusions and recollections, a cultural influence also important, as we have seen, both for Matt and for his creator. She was “most probably conceived in the Wordsworths’ cottage” at Racedown in Dorset (12), and her father named her after Wordsworth’s “green linnet.” Mention is also made of “Margaret and the ruined cottage,” the narrative of a deserted woman that became the first book of The Excursion and was possibly begun at Racedown. But the most potent Wordsworthian echoes exist below the surface. As a tiny baby, Linnet is left in her pram in a garden past which the River Parrett flows, and she “would listen more and more closely to the sound of moving water” (4). Not only are

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these pages packed with words that possess Wordsworthian reverberations – “harmonies,” “earliest moments,” “shallows,” “halfconscious,” “danced” – but the whole situation recalls, without actually quoting, some well-known lines from the first book of The Prelude: Was it for this That one, the fairest of all rivers, loved To blend his murmurs with my Nurse’s song, And, from his alder shades and rocky falls, And from his fords and shallows, sent a voice That flowed along my dreams? (1850 text, 1:ll.269–74)

This account is as representative of an English rural upbringing as Matt’s growing up in Toronto is characteristic of a Canadian experience. At the same time, Linnet’s “recollections of early childhood” are no unalloyed idyll. These are, after all, the early months of the Second World War; what she sees as intriguing lights and “great moths” (6) are in fact “the bomber squadrons of the Luftwaffe” making their “repeated devastating attacks on the docks and rail installations of Cardiff” (5). One night, “marvellously bright colours” originate from a shot-down bomber, and bodies and bits of “melting metal” (6) descend around her before she is rushed into the house. And a few years later, her eldest brother is killed during the Normandy landings. Hood manages the transition from male to female cadences and viewpoint with consummate and unostentatious ease, deftly emphasizing the way in which Linnet’s rhythms gradually but smoothly evolve from speech appropriate for “a young English country miss, a daughter of the rectory” (59) to sophisticated theatre talk of the 1950s. Her section is structurally and strategically crucial. First, it subtly refines the sense of period that we have already encountered in the central chapter of The Scenic Art. Then, in terms of the immediate situation presented in the rest of the book, it is important that Tony be seen through eyes that provide an alternative view and one which, from the Goderich standpoint, is more detached than that of his elder brother. At the same time (though we are not yet aware of it), the account of Linnet’s love at first sight for Tony (36–7) anticipates the immediate mutual attraction between Linnet and Matt in Property and

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Value. Linnet’s deceptive vision of the macaws that she and Tony are never able to locate in the London Zoo is not merely an imagistic equivalent to her own pattern of development and yearning from the modest native species suggested by her name to the exotic birds offered as both beautiful and elusive, but also an emblem for the relationship never quite attained with Tony, though achieved for a fulfilling, albeit tragically brief, period with Matt in the succeeding novel. When the narrative viewpoint turns to Tony, we realize that a different imaginative principle is being invoked. He has been an important but somewhat elusive figure in the early books: we learn something about his childhood in The Swing in the Garden and (minimally) in Black and White Keys; moreover, we catch the briefest of glimpses of him as a young man in A New Athens. He is, of course, totally absent from Reservoir Ravine, but his career as a writer is etched in memorably in The Scenic Art, and the impression is kept alive in the brief sections devoted to him in The Motor Boys. Linnet provides an effective buildup for him in the first part here, but when we hear him offering his own version of events, we realize how a story can vary radically when a fresh viewpoint is presented. Just how our perspective can change becomes evident when, early in his section, Tony announces quite casually that he wishes to “retract” the letter he wrote to Matt at the time of the split with Linnet. He describes it as “ungenerous” and, more subtly yet more disturbingly, as containing “the facts of the breakup as I understood them at the time” (73; my emphasis). He cannot, of course, take the letter back: knowing Matt’s procedures, he suspects that “it’s squirreled away in some file somewhere to be opened after we’ve all been dead fifty years, when nobody will know or care what anybody’s feelings were” (73). As readers, of course, we know better: we have already read the letter in the forty-third chapter of The Motor Boys. We are aware, then, that it is Hood, just as much as Tony, who cannot “retract” it. But what is startling is the implication not merely that the “facts” will vary according to the viewpoint of whoever relates them but that even an individual viewpoint will shift and change in the course of time. The novel is legitimately entitled Tony’s Book because it is in this section that Tony – and Hood – drops the bombshell that is to have shattering repercussions on the lives of the main characters in the

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series and force us as readers to reconsider, and even to re-evaluate, all that we have so far deduced not only about the subject of the New Age series but also about the nature of Hood’s art. This is the revelation that Tony was attracted to Edie from the very moment when he first met her on the eve of her marriage to Matt. And by the end of the novel the Matt-Edie marriage has broken up. I have called this revelation a “bombshell,” but in fact it is insinuated gradually into our consciousness. At the end of the sixth chapter, the first in Tony’s account, he takes us back to the occasion of Andrew Goderich’s funeral, which had been presented at the close of The Motor Boys: “Matt asked me to escort Mom, along with Uncle Philip, at the cemetery. Old Uncle Philip, still casting sheep’s eyes at the widow. I saw Edie at the graveside and the trouble started all over again” (81). What “trouble”? Tony is, of course, a novelist, and the remark is left, in the sanctioned tradition of suspense fiction, hanging teasingly at the end of the chapter. At the beginning of the next chapter, he moves off on an apparent (but only an apparent) tangent: “I think now that I’ve been conscious of a resemblance to my uncle and a profound rivalry with him since I was about two years old” (82). At this point, a number of seemingly separate elements within the novel-series begin to fall startlingly into place. Ever since the close of Reservoir Ravine, we have known of Uncle Philip’s dog-like devotion to and unrequited passion for his sister-in-law, Ishy, and this attachment is further illustrated in Black and White Keys. We have also learned, in the same novel, that something unspecified but traumatic has occurred in Matt’s domestic life. If we have read The Scenic Art with attention and taken note of certain as-yet-unassimilated details, we shall be aware of Tony’s obsessive preoccupation with the birth of Matt and Edie’s first child and may have wondered about a curious exchange between Tony and Adam Sinclair in a London pub: “Listen, Adam, I’m not paying any attention to anything you say about Matt. Or Edie either.” “Oho. Oho. So that’s the way the wind blows, is it?” “Never you bloody mind which way the wind blows.” (92)

At this stage in the reading we are, perhaps for the first time, in a position to realize the significance of the theme of Tony’s play Claude and Gertie: an updating, rewriting, “deconstruction” (call it what you will) of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Moreover, at least on a rereading,

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Tony’s comments on his play are suddenly thrown into high relief and become ominous. Initially, the discussion subtly recalls Stephen Dedalus’s discourse on Shakespeare in Joyce’s Ulysses, which Edmund Wilson once described as “a lecture which has little to do with Shakespeare, but a good deal to do with Stephen himself” (198). The same is true here. Tony claims, with ingenuous accuracy, that Claude and Gertie is “a play about a man who wants to winkle his older brother’s wife away from him, by fair means or foul. That’s a motive that’s always dramatic, and always farcical, ridiculous. The man who cuckolds his brother will always be a ready butt, especially if the brother is much older” (Scenic Art 127). The Scenic Art, as we have seen, is set in the key of comedy. But just as Claude and Gertie turns Shakespearean tragedy into something bordering on the farcical, this subject, which we now recognize as an imaginative sublimation of a personal and socially inflammable compulsion, is to be played out – and here the subtleties proliferate – in the “real world” of Hood’s fiction. In other words, art and life are shown as painfully interrelating, albeit within an artistic creation. Here in Tony’s Book, out of the normal temporal sequence – and Willy Rhys-Noggs will argue in the next novel that “any rearrangement of ordinary time sequence provides matter for the finest art” (Property and Value 19) – we learn of Tony’s intense and immediate attraction to Edie upon their first meeting in 1953. We even learn that Andrew Goderich was aware of the situation and deliberately arranged for his younger son to go to England, out of harm’s (and temptation’s) way. “‘It’s not really a tenable position,’ he said to me, handing me a large cheque” (99). Moreover, through an oblique reference to Uncle Philip and a crucial allusion to Hamlet, Andrew is now acknowledged to have given Tony “the idea for Claude and Gertie” (100). A whole series of incidents and situations that hitherto had seemed unconnected are now recognized as interlocking parts in an implacable process. There is a significant development in Hood’s art that becomes manifest here and needs to be recognized. The interpolation of earlier scenes into the fabric of the whole story is now familiar, though it is here raised to a higher level of complexity. In The Scenic Art, where the principle of inserting new scenes into the sequence of past events first becomes prominent, the artistic motive, as we saw, is tonal separation. The comic-grotesque scenes involving Adam’s “pass” at Matt and the desperate process of getting Adam into respectable

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shape for his Stratford Festival interview have no place in the particular aspect of Matt’s experience chronicled in A New Athens. Similarly, the early pages of The Motor Boys in Ottawa, predating the events of Centennial Year already documented, focus on public and political issues (George Robinson’s fluctuating fortunes as a Liberal mp, the Auto Pact) which fill in the comprehensive story without in any significant sense altering the way in which we read the earlier novels. This is new material that can be readily assimilated into an overview of the New Age series as imaginative social history. But in Tony’s Book – and this is a significant extension of the technique – the interpolations are at one and the same time challenging and revisionary. The new knowledge that we acquire concerning Tony impels us to reconsider elements in the story that we thought we already understood. In Black and White Keys, for instance, Matt relates a scene in which his mother hears of the death of Georg Mandel and is in agonized ignorance about the fate of her husband. Matt, attempting to comfort her, persuades her to sit on his knee, and this is how Tony finds them on his return from school. What we now receive is an awareness of the traumatic effect that this incident had upon Tony: “That encounter struck me in the face like a crunching whack across the jaw from a baseball bat. I’ve never been able to get it out of my mind” (84). The seeds of fraternal rivalry that culminate in Tony’s Book grow inexorably out of this incident; we cannot reread the scene in Black and White Keys without becoming painfully aware of its consequences. This represents, in miniature, a striking example of the ever-increasing subtlety of the New Age series. When we move on to Edie’s section, this revisionist effect is even stronger. It is with something of a shock that we realize the extent to which we have viewed the Matt-Edie marriage through Matt’s eyes only. With one equivocal exception, we have heard nothing to suggest that the marriage is in danger, that it is anything but strongly stable. The exception is the flash-forward towards the end of Reservoir Ravine in which we learn that by the late 1970s Matt is on his own; but the reason for his situation is not made clear. Speaking for myself, I should report that when I read Reservoir Ravine on its first publication, I assumed that Edie had died. The breakup of the marriage never suggested itself to me – partly, I suppose, because of the strong sense of familial solidarity established in The Swing in the Garden and the Catholic emphasis on the sanctity and permanence of

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the marriage tie which manifests itself in the earlier books. This may have been an ingenuous conclusion – Hood provided what can now be seen as a strong clue at the close of chapter 11 – but at that time it was not, I think, an unreasonable one. If we return, however, to these same earlier books, to The Motor Boys in Ottawa and even as far back as A New Athens, and reconsider Edie’s contributions to conversations, we are likely to notice a number of cumulatively disturbing details: a surprising penchant for ribaldry (e.g., “a coarse jest about Richard iii’s balls” in The Scenic Art [21]), a continued undercurrent of acerbity in her responses, and a nervous tension in her character as a whole. All these were readily visible within the text but (if my reading was at all representative) had not registered in any serious sense at that time. “There was sharp feeling in Edie’s rejoinders,” Matt had observed towards the end of The Scenic Art (232), and this quality becomes even more evident as we read further. At one point in The Motor Boys, as we have seen in the last chapter, she even warns Matt directly: “I have to get away from here, Matt, I really do” (100). Once again, I would argue that this is a remarkable tribute to the firmness and delicacy of Hood’s art. There is no deception or sleight of hand here. He does not withhold information, since Matt is unaware of Tony’s feelings for Edie, let alone of Edie’s for Tony. Any sense of her increasing dissatisfaction never crosses his mind, and, in any case, this does not reach crisis proportions until after the death of Andrew, Ishy’s deteriorating health, and the re-entry of Tony upon the scene. If we have failed to notice detectable signs of unrest and frustration in Edie’s actions and statements, it is because Hood has invited us to share Matt’s “innocence” and accept his judgments. Not the least poignant of the effects in Tony’s Book, in contrast with our experience of previous books, is the way in which we consistently learn of events ahead of Matt, and then watch the adequacy (or otherwise) of his response to them. In Edie’s section the case against Matt, which commentators have often argued without recognizing it as part of Hood’s design, is presented with force and cogency. She goes back over the whole relationship and makes an effort to be fair. She acknowledges that she had herself been the dominating partner in initiating their meeting and subsequent engagement: “I wanted him and I meant to have him” (147). She is prepared to share in any blame – becoming a Catholic may, she decides, have been “the big mistake of my life”

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(150) – and praises Matt as “the most purely likeable man I’ve ever known” (148). But she also alludes to unspecified “hidden defects,” his tendency to bore (148), and their disagreements about what she revealingly calls “all the religious stuff” (150). She then raises other issues that we have not encountered before: Matt’s psychological change when he took over the management of the Codrington estate and became aware of the wealth deriving from Edie and her family; her own somewhat far-fetched suspicion concerning May-Beth’s “sexual interest” in Matt (176); and above all, the change that took place in Matt after the death of his father (“Matt was simply a different man ... He just came apart” [202]). Edie’s account does not replace our earlier understanding of their relationship – it would be a serious mistake to assume that her version is more trustworthy than his – but it certainly complicates a judgment of the situation. Other factors are also involved, especially Edie’s artistic struggle to emerge from the shadow of her mother’s achievement. Matt’s ultimate preference for May-Beth’s visionary art over her daughter’s contemporary taste and talent is an index to his hankering after the values of the past rather than the preoccupations of the present. As time goes on, Edie becomes more and more aware of their growing incompatibility. Connected with all this is the collapse during the sixties (“Dear God, the sixties!” [186]) of traditional acceptance of “the sanctity of marriage” (191) and, of course, the ever-present image of separation prominent in the Quebec political scene, with its “huge waves of unrest” (189). Most important of all, however, from Edie’s point of view, is a growing personal urgency. From both their versions it is evident that she was as forceful as Tony in advocating their flight together. He reports her as saying: “You’ll take me with you ... you’ve got to take me with you” (124). One might have expected Hood to lay stress on the moral aspects of the situation, and these are touched on, appropriately, in Matt’s section; on the whole, however, the emphasis falls not on abstract, theoretical, or even theological issues but on the intensely human feelings involved. This applies equally to Edie’s impulse to leave with Tony and to Matt’s anguish on learning of their flight. In Matt’s concluding section Hood must substantiate, and explain from the inside, the change in Matt that Edie has recognized; furthermore, he must provide a bridge between the youthful, confident, even (some would argue) self-satisfied Matt of most of the early

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books and the later Matt whom we have glimpsed, briefly and troublingly, close to the end of Reservoir Ravine. The sorrows of the middle-aged Matt Goderich are therefore especially important because they prepare the way for his remaking in the second half of the series. While attempting to justify her desertion, Edie remarks: “He spreads his talk over a vast black depth of ignorance ... Most of the time – I’m convinced of this now – Matt doesn’t know what he’s talking about” (196). This is, of course, a gross exaggeration, yet the fact that Matt is fallible, all too fallible, needs to be acknowledged – most immediately by Matt himself. There have been earlier intimations of his poor judgment, the clearest occurring in The Motor Boys when the family moves to Montreal. Not only does Matt misread the Quebec separation issue, but he refuses to buy a house late in 1966, despite Edie’s insistence that it is “a bargain at that price,” arguing that “when Expo is over ... prices will fall to a reasonable level” (129). He is dead wrong, and ten months later they pay “a substantially higher price than we’d expected” (169). “We’d” is a characteristic and telling inaccuracy, since Edie had made her more realistic views clear. Matt, to be sure, is prepared to admit his error: “I’d outsmarted myself. That wasn’t the first time I’d done it, and I don’t suppose it will be the last” (169). Unfortunately, however, he fails to learn from the experience, and his words, when encountered by readers who are aware of the outcome of his story, take on a poignant irony. Matt’s initial response to his new situation is a pained numbness. He is at first unable either to comprehend the crisis that has overtaken him or to adapt to its reality. This is clearly the same Matt – we recognize his characteristic mode of thought all the more sharply after being exposed to the distinctive responses of Linnet, Tony, and Edie – but a Matt who, we ultimately realize, is about to pass through an unimaginably painful transformation. Significantly, allusions to Shakespearean tragedy and the mystical tradition of the Dark Night of the Soul take the place of Wordsworthian joy. Appropriate, too, are specific references to Poe’s Usher and the collapsing house in Dickens’s Little Dorrit, since on an imaginative plane the house of Goderich has fallen. “Fall” is a constantly recurring image in Hood – one recalls the last word of The Swing in the Garden, and readers familiar with the whole series will think of Linnet’s fatal accident in Property and Value. The Eden associations are muted here, but on a more mundane level Matt must now face the problems of closing up the home in Montreal before moving “into exile” (253).

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“When she went, everything changed,” he insists (249). Gradually, however, we watch him picking up the pieces of his shattered life. Most importantly, he goes through a painful process of self-realization: “God, when I think how smug and innocent I was about what was happening to Edie and me, I cringe” (219); “I was sunk deep in my old confusion between thinking and feeling” (222). The Matt who can admit this is the Matt who, in Dead Men’s Watches, will acknowledge the inadequacy of his earlier judgmental assessments of Uncle Philip and Adam Sinclair. (The latter, of course, is subtly anticipated here in the final, initially disturbing, Powellian coda to the section when Matt finds himself comforted by Adam in a “gay bar” [273].) Eventually, in a process whose later stages will be chronicled in subsequent novels, he is able to throw off his “anguished sense of injury” (231) and bring whatever order he can to his new postdiluvian life. In Wordsworthian phrase, we might even suggest that a deep distress has humanized his soul. Of course, all Hood’s novels are literary in the sense that they are strewn with quotations and contain frequent discussion of literary and artistic matters. In Tony’s Book, given the fact that one narrator is an actress, one a writer, one a painter, and one an art historian, this element of the novel is even more conspicuous than usual. Here, however, Hood has taken his literary preoccupations one stage further. The Scenic Art contained discussion of Tony’s play Claude and Gertie and his novel Balancing Act. But now that these texts are reintroduced, their psychological and economic implications are stressed. The motive force for the play is located within the mythic patterns of Tony’s own desires, while in the case of Balancing Act the altering of the setting for the film version to Canada raises complex issues related to the capacity of authors to distance themselves from their roots and the effect of financial backing upon artistic choices (see 101, 104–5). The subject of art, then, becomes central, and all this helps to explain why Tony’s Book may be described as Hood’s most obviously metafictional novel. The text continually draws attention to the fact of its artifice. This characteristic is implicit in the way the narrative is self-consciously divided between the main participants, but it also manifests itself in numerous details and references. Andrea remarks that her one line in the film of Balancing Act was a show-business injoke because it echoed “Noel Coward’s first line of dialogue on the

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English stage” (264). Hood includes a number of comparable references within his own text. Thus Linnet lists “Blagdons” among her West Country connections (11), and these are Hood’s ancestors as well (see “Hugh Hood” 75). Similarly, Edie offers a list of student contemporaries at the Ontario College of Art, beginning with Michael Snow and Harold Town. The list is factually accurate, part of the novel’s documentary realism, but in the last-named, Noreen Mallory (181), we recognize an allusion to Hood’s painter-wife. There are a number of such moments in the novel. A playful instance occurs when Tony invites readers to see the play and movie versions of Down Off a Dirty Duck “and compare!” (77) – a send-up of documentary realism since neither exists outside the covers of The New Age. But Hood strikes a more serious note when Tony observes: “I never managed to write about anything that was detached from myself. I don’t know whether it is possible to do it, but the great writers certainly create the illusion that that’s what they’re up to” (75). In dividing his narration between four very different speakers, Hood is demonstrating his ability to do precisely that.

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Property and Value Certainly the time was ripe for some new turn in his life. Property and Value 48

Hugh Hood acknowledged Property and Value to be “as much a romance as I could have made it;”26 but the decided contemporaneity of this particular romance is made evident when the narrator asks playfully and rhetorically: “Where else should loving encounters take place in late twentieth-century romance, if not in McDonald’s?” (70). Certainly, the romance mode is conspicuous here. The main setting is Venice, for many (including Proust’s narrator) a “romantic dream” (115), and we soon become aware of converging courses that are going to bring hero (Matt Goderich) and heroine (Linnet Olcott) together in a scene that occurs, artfully and appropriately, at the exact halfway point in the narrative. The book exists at a far remove from drab modern realism, as the rich descriptions of locales and clothing testify. Moreover, romance elements recur throughout. On first encountering Anthony Goderich (Matt’s elder son), Linnet feels that she will be “magically transformed into a princess of eighteen, as though in some fairy-tale encounter” (69). She looks back on her life with Tony as “seven years of enchantment” (71), and Matt similarly declares that he has been in search of her “for seven enchanted years” (130). Even the introduction of Linnet’s superimposed drawings (63–7), as Hood has acknowledged, is a technique for the furthering of the romantic mood: it helps to justify the love-at-first-sight motif.27

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At the same time, there are elements in the book that run counter to the romantic emphasis. The name “Venice” may immediately suggest “romance,” but the city has two very different sides to its character, as most writers, including Lord Byron and Thomas Mann, have acknowledged. In Five New Facts about Giorgione, Hood’s novella (1987) sharing many associations with Property and Value, the protagonist concedes that “the old Venice of the lagoons had its own special odour of decay compounded of tidal silt, garbage, sewage, and the occasional corpse” (21), images that are to recur, along with the epithets “uncomfortable, smelly,” towards the dark climax of the longer book (Property 201). Furthermore, the references in my previous paragraph allude to Linnet’s intimate friendships with two brothers and a son, and a disturbing ambiguity concerning sexual relationships is pervasive. The literary analogues, ranging from a calculated reference to Thomas Hardy’s The Well-Beloved (18) – where the protagonist pursues his ideal of beauty through three generations of a Wessex family – to the all-encompassing atmosphere of Proust, are within the context unsettling. Early in the book, Lauchie MacOgie and Willy Rhys-Noggs, faced with Linnet’s association with Anthony, are puzzled by the relationship, “not daring to put the question. Playmate, lover, protégé, instrument for intrigue?” (20). We are soon reminded of Uncle Philip and “his sister-in-law whom he had yearned after all his life” (32), and even if he quickly dismisses them, Matt finds himself thinking about “Oedipal yearnings ... [c]hild molestation, incestuous coupling” (47). As a counter to the supposed innocence of traditional romance modes, Freud’s “family romance” seems disconcertingly close. Moreover, “instrument for intrigue” reminds us that a dominant strand of imagery in Property and Value involves spying and conspiracy. MacOgie and Rhys-Noggs guard their film plans and contracts against “covert surveillance” (3); we are told that “much intelligence work is done in Venice during the Biennale” (77); Matt feels that he is being “translated without warning into the scenario for a spy film” (84); and the narrator comments of Venice that “[n]o city of the West had so much allowed secret undertakings” (120). In the hallowed traditions of espionage, Pluyshin, the grotesque administrator (whose name is “pronounced ... in English as ‘pollution’” [77]), apparently reports back on Linnet’s activities to MacOgie and Rhys-Noggs (210–12) and on Matt’s to the director of the National Gallery (160,

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229–31); she may even be responsible for the claimed sabotage in the preparations for the Canadian art exhibition at the Biennale (194, 197–8). Hints of “intrigues and power struggles” (227) abound. Such conspiratorial plottings are, of course, staples of a certain kind of romance, and Pluyshin, double (or multiple) agent extraordinaire, combines many narrative and thematic elements in the role of spy, witch, and representative of a repellant sexual ambiguity. Above all, Hood does not allow his novel to remain in the never-never land of an erotic escape world. The romantic ecstasy of Linnet and Matt is pitiably short. That this is no ordinary romance is evident at the close of the book when, within a few minutes, Matt learns of the loss not only of his mother and his lover but also of a potential child of whose existence he had hitherto no notion. But the main complicating factor that makes Property and Value more than a “mere” romance is the parallel narrative focused upon the filming of Marcel in Venice, a segment from Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. Linnet Olcott is playing Albertine in the section of Proust’s vast novel where, after her death, Marcel mistakenly believes her to be alive and is haunted by her image as he walks the streets of his romantic Venice. The possibilities for intricate complications are infinite. We are pointedly told that Linnet’s “notion of Venice had never been the romantic dream of Proust’s narrator” (115), while the joyous, if brief, love affair between Matt and Linnet is in marked contrast to the anguished relationship between Marcel and Albertine. At the same time, Linnet’s awareness that she is in fact playing the ghost of Albertine – a wraith whose only existence is in the mind of the leading character – casts a disturbing (and, in the end, a proleptic) shadow over her relation with Matt. At one of the rehearsals, he suddenly becomes aware of her, within the cinematic illusion, as “the ghost of a dead love that must remain dead,” and he realizes that “[w]hat we love will die” (187–8). Linnet’s sombre end is thus prefigured in the role she plays. In A la recherche Albertine had died after a fall, and Linnet finds her own death in Venice when she slips, in a dourly bizarre accident, into a polluted canal. Marcel’s visit to Venice takes up a concentrated but relatively brief segment of A la recherche called The Fugitive (La fugitive, originally published under the title Albertine disparue). It provides a welcome change of locale from Paris and is indeed the only occasion in Proust’s novel where Marcel ventures outside his own country.

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Similarly, along with the scenes elsewhere that are set in England, the Venice scenes in Property and Value (roughly two-thirds of the whole book) extend the experience of The New Age beyond the boundaries of Canada. Here it is interesting to note that Marcel draws comparisons between Venice and Combray, just as Matt likens the city to Toronto. Otherwise, contrasts are more in evidence. Albertine dies before Marcel’s visit – indeed, the trip is undertaken to distract him from the shock of her death. Marcel is lethargic and introspective at this time, while Matt is feverishly busy. Above all, Marcel is accompanied by his mother, while Matt guiltily leaves his mother, whose health is failing, in Toronto. Nonetheless, both books respond to the ever-varying but constantly fascinating spell of Venice, and both are saturated with Venetian atmosphere. While a central presence behind the whole conception of The New Age, Proust’s novel is especially important here. This is not merely because a considerable segment of the plot focuses on the filming of part of the book but because most of the characters in Property and Value are intimately acquainted with A la recherche – thus ideal readers of Hood’s novel need also to be dedicated Proustians. When in the first chapter MacOgie and Rhys-Noggs discuss plans for the film with Linnet, they discover to their surprise that she is well informed about Proust and his methods as a writer of fiction. Matt, as is evident in earlier books, possesses a detailed knowledge of the French novelist’s text, and so does Adam Sinclair, even if his interests are more with the homosexual parts of the book centring upon the Baron de Charlus than with its presentation of Parisian social life or its profound meditation on art, time, and memory. Furthermore, the elaborate descriptions of places and dresses, already referred to, are clearly a stylistic complement to the Proustian subject matter and atmosphere, as is shown by the lengthy quotation from The Captive (La prisonnière) which fits smoothly into Hood’s own prose at this point (117–18).28 Moreover, various passages within the text, though they need not be recognized as such, appear to be allusions to passages in Proust. Thus when Linnet, during her affair with Tony, “moaned out the prayer that all true lovers firmly repeat: ‘Do anything you like with me’” (70), she is invoking an archetypal pattern of amatory behaviour but may also be echoing a phrase that Marcel puts into the mouth of Albertine: “Do what you like with me” (5: 80). Even when Linnet in her drawings superimposes the images of Charlie Chaplin, Laurence

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Olivier, and Arturo Toscanini (or later, Matt, Tony, and Anthony), she is acting on a hint that Hood seems to have derived from Marcel’s juxtaposition of a photograph of Mme de Guermantes with the features of Robert de Saint-Loup (3: 84). Traces of Anthony Powell, though less conspicuous than those of Proust, are also discernible. It is possible that the setting of the opening chapter, a Chinese restaurant in Soho, may constitute a bow in the direction of the locale which gives its title to the fifth novel in Powell’s series, Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant. There can be no doubt, though, that Property and Value is considerably indebted to the eleventh novel of A Dance to the Music of Time. Much of Temporary Kings (a phrase incorporated, by the way, into the text of both A New Athens [97] and Black and White Keys [186]) takes place in Venice during an earlier Biennale, a short-lived love affair (very different, however, from Hood’s) originates there, and it is even connected with a proposed film. But still more noteworthy is the Powellian atmosphere of much of the plot. Matt’s affair with Linnet after his brother has abandoned her and gone off with Matt’s wife, spiced by the deep, if Platonic, relationship between Linnet and Matt’s son Anthony, smacks of the plot manipulations in Powell which result in a dizzying round of sexual musical chairs. And the painful ending previously mentioned, where Matt is faced with a battery of simultaneous deaths, bears all the hallmarks of Powell-like artful contrivance. The ninth chapter, ending with the shockingly unexpected death of Linnet, is at one and the same time the most original, the most creatively challenging, and the most controversial section of Hood’s novel. While powerfully written and unforgettable in many of its effects, it is a chapter that, understandably, can make some readers and commentators uneasy. One of the reviewers disturbed by it was Peter Buitenhuis, who wrote, under the heading “A Manipulated Universe,” as follows: “Certainly, appalling accidents happen in real life and suddenly change the nature of the life of one who survives a death. But in fiction the patterning of events is not happily susceptible to random accidents ... The moral law doesn’t seem to have much validity in this manipulated universe of Hugh Hood, and, for my money, this otherwise fine novel suffers accordingly” (81). I sympathize with Buitenhuis’s puzzlement, though I find his objection at least as problematic as the chapter he criticizes. Hood must have been surprised, after years of reviewers objecting to his traditional moral

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preoccupations and excessively optimistic stance, to find himself taken to task for manipulating his fictive universe so that he can sidestep “moral law”! Further consideration of the conflicting principles underlying this exchange should, however, shed more light on Hood’s intention and achievement. First, I have described the chapter as “shockingly unexpected,” yet as Buitenhuis implies, this is a response based upon the conventions of fiction rather than the realities of life. At the same time, Hood has taken considerable pains in this particular instance to prepare us for the shock. Thus a heavy aura of foreboding broods over the whole chapter (the word “foreboding” occurs, designedly, in its first sentence). The narrator is quick to register “a growing sense of something amiss” (202), and there are references to “Universal Judgment,” “absolute evil” (204), and “last things” (205). During her altercation with MacOgie and Rhys-Noggs, Linnet alludes to what might happen to the film if she were “to fall ill or meet with an accident” (213), and she later imagines Venetian plots to “lodge you in some stinking oubliette at the bottom of five damp flights of stone steps” (214). It is also worth noting the recurring references to her acute fatigue not only in this chapter but in earlier parts of the book. Indeed, if we reread earlier passages after experiencing this chapter, we realize that Hood has been laying the foundations for this climactic effect over many pages. Earlier references to the steep stairs in Linnet’s hotel, where “a careless misstep might lead to injury or worse” (106) and where the upper floors “might be slippery when wet” (109), now seem more than casual description, and as early as the first chapter, hints have been dropped about “Death by water” (5), soon followed by an oblique reference to Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (8). Moreover, as far back as Linnet’s section in Tony’s Book, in a passage strategically positioned in her last paragraph, she has listed among the “worst disasters” in her life “how to retrace one’s steps to a hotel in an unfamiliar city” (67). Buitenhuis’s insistence that “in fiction the patterning of events is not happily susceptible to random accidents” applies well enough to what F.R. Leavis called the “great tradition” of serious fiction in English, though if this were accepted as a general principle, the death of Albertine in Proust would be as objectionable as that of Linnet here. One thinks also of other sudden deaths in traditional fiction where readers share the shock of the bereaved, including the death of George Osborne in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair or that of

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Gerald in E.M. Forster’s The Longest Journey. Hood’s “patterning” cannot be fully understood, however, except in relation to the equivalent scene in Proust. Albertine’s “fatal accident” is mentioned here in the first chapter (15), and we are continually reminded of the fact that in the film Linnet is impersonating a ghostly presence within Marcel’s mind rather than a living character. The point is deliberately repeated early in this ninth chapter: “She is Albertine. She is gone” (201). The Fugitive, the volume that contains the Venice segment, begins where the previous volume had ended, with Albertine’s flight from Marcel’s apartment. This is closely followed by the news of her death, though Proust first establishes a disturbing correlation between Marcel’s imaginative fantasies and the event that, unknown alike to Marcel and the reader, has already taken place. Just before receiving the news, he ponders: “At all events, how I should have lied now had I written to her, as I had said to her in Paris, that I hoped that no accident might befall her! Ah! If some accident had happened to her, my life, instead of being poisoned for ever by this incessant jealousy, would at once regain, if not happiness, at least a state of calm through the suppression of suffering” (5: 543). Marcel quickly challenges this conclusion, and then imagines himself arguing with Swann over the question of the death of love and proving that just such a wish “was not only criminal but absurd” (5: 544). The news of the fatal accident reaches him immediately. The rest of the volume focuses on Marcel’s coming to terms with these circumstances. He is taken by his mother to Venice in the interests of mental recuperation, though ironically he then believes, through another accidental happening, that Albertine is still alive. Sadly, this belief soon becomes, in a ghastly irony, as disturbing as the realization of her death. Although Property and Value depends for much of its effect and reference upon A la recherche, the details are at once comparable yet notably different. The love between Linnet and Matt is far more physically intimate than that between Marcel and Albertine, and in various senses of the word, it may be considered more mature; for both partners, it happens after the unforeseen breakup of a lengthy previous love relationship. In artistic terms, though, the affair is a more conventional affair one Proust’s since it conforms, as we have seen, to the sanctioned literary patterns of romance and makes little attempt to penetrate the psychological complexities and ambiguities of sexual attraction. Tonally, moreover, it is at an opposite extreme from

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Proust. The darkness of Hood’s story is to be found in external circumstances, not in the minds of either of the protagonists. Somewhat unusually, Hood emphasizes Gothic stylistic elements here (as distinct from the intellectual discussion of Ruskin and Gothic aesthetics offered by Proust in A la recherche) to convey the doom impinging upon the lovers. The stress laid upon darkness and an all-pervasive threat is strong, and it is evoked in a decidedly un-Proustian manner by the unsettling images of the hungry cat and the sinister prison guard. But Hood is, nevertheless, closely indebted to Proust, not least in the final chapter where Matt learns of Linnet’s death. Here, after the event rather than before, Matt broods over the issues that Proust raises (as well as those to which Buitenhuis objects). He finds himself experiencing here a refutation of Marcel’s meditations on “how evanescent love and the anguish over the death of the beloved must be” (188). Matt’s thoughts end with explicitly Christian reference though without Christian consolation – “Which of you can drink of the cup that I drink?” (247, quoting Mark 10:38) – but not before the whole question of accident is raised and debated: People said these days that there weren’t any true accidents. ... He remembered reading Freud on the subject, and Freud had been explicit about accidents, slips of the tongue, accidental breakage. Far from being the effects of pure hazard, these mishaps (and even mishap was a misnomer, a falsification) betrayed buried intentions whose roots lay immeasurably deep in the personality ... It must have been a misstep. But we know there is no such thing as a misstep! No, no, we don’t know that. That’s half-baked neo-Freudian propaganda ... Fatality. Necessity ... Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured and little to be enjoyed ... Accident. An event with no cause, like the big bang. Metaphysics of liberty ... (246–8)

I have selected drastically – the whole passage needs to be read in its entirety – but have quoted enough, I think, to show that Hood is deliberately raising, albeit in modern Freud-influenced terms, issues similar to those that exercised Proust. Pace Buitenhuis, Hood is not shrugging off “moral law” here. Ironically, however, the “accident” of Linnet’s death cruelly solves the moral questions implicit at this stage of the narrative. She is

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pregnant, but her deepest instincts preclude an abortion, while Matt’s religious principles will not allow a divorce from Edie. Hood “manipulates” the plot here, not to avoid moral problems, but to draw attention to their intricacy, the impossibility of finding an adequate solution within experiential human action. He invokes “accident” to cut through the Gordian knot that (and this is the point) cannot be untied in any neatly appropriate way. Just before she dies, Linnet is unable to see “any way out of their difficulty” (215). The accident – and there is no question that, so far as she is concerned, it is an accident – immediately and conveniently intervenes. Matt, not having yet absorbed the shock of Linnet’s death and about to receive the news of the death of his mother, is confronted with the bitterly inappropriate words of Pluyshin: “To quote your so-distinguished prime minister, sir, the universe is unfolding as it should” (249). This is one of the darkest and most emotionally complex scenes in the whole series. Hood told Joel Yanofsky at the mid-point in the series that the second half would become “pretty goddarned dark” (Yanofsky 13), and Linnet’s “random” death here is the first in a series of sudden, unexpected fatalities. These include Petter Arnesson’s in the immediately succeeding novel, Be Sure to Close Your Eyes, Uncle Philip’s and Adam Sinclair’s in Dead Men’s Watches, and Tony’s in Great Realizations. Indeed, all these books can be seen as ringing tonal changes on the vast, multi-faceted subject of love and death. Uncle Philip’s death from a coronary attack is poignantly sudden, only eight months after the beginning of a long-deferred marriage, but the shock can be accommodated: he had, after all, attained the biblical span, and he and Jeanne Three Streams Magill had won through to a fulfilling relationship that sustains his wife in her loss. Adam’s death from aids in the second, conspicuously anti-romantic half of Dead Men’s Watches raises the relation between love and death on very different terms, and it becomes representative of larger sociological issues. The aging Tony, on the other hand, appears sadly to have outgrown love by the time of his death on the operating table in Great Realizations, which serves as a contrast to the love portrayed in other parts of the novel and of the series, and underlines life’s uncertainties, even within the advanced state of modern technology and expertise. Petter’s death in Be Sure to Close Your Eyes, however, even more than Linnet’s, is shockingly premature, since his personal life is as yet

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undeveloped and he has hardly begun to display his artistic promise. But it takes place only two-thirds of the way through the narrative, and the whole of the final section is devoted to the gradual process by which May-Beth’s life, after her prostrating loss, is ultimately reshaped. Not so in Property and Value, where Matt suffers the loss of both lover and mother in the course of a few minutes at the close of the book. The effects in the two novels are at one and the same time deliberately opposed and artfully juxtaposed. Here, however, we can recognize the advantages that Hood derived from the multiple-novel form. In itself, Property and Value ends on a very dark note indeed. Matt has already suffered the breakup of his twenty-year marriage, and now what seems for a moment the promise of a new beginning is devastatingly quenched. Moreover, if we turn immediately (as we now can, though Hood’s first readers could not) from the last page of Property and Value to the opening page of Be Sure to Close Your Eyes, the subject is dropped and we find ourselves transported back over seventy years. At first, this seems an evasion, yet as we read, we find ourselves responding to May-Beth’s loss in the light of Matt’s and vice versa. As May-Beth recovers from the death of Petter, so Matt will survive the deaths of Linnet and Ishy. In this case, however, the process takes longer, and it is assisted, by means of a bold and unexpected development, through his experience of the two further deaths in Dead Men’s Watches. As a consequence, the Matt presented in the two final novels, Great Realizations and Near Water, is a Matt who, from the low point here, has attained a mature and exemplary serenity.

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Be Sure to Close Your Eyes is a novel about the nature, origins, and vicissitudes of vision and the visionary experience, especially in relation to the arts. Hood, of course, had already examined this phenomenon in some detail in A New Athens, centring upon the work of MayBeth Codrington, but here, in a novel that takes us further back in time than any other book in the series, he considers the circumstances that led to May-Beth’s blossoming as an artist of a particular kind. Indeed, this book is Hood’s contribution to the genre of the Künstlerroman, a novel about the growth and development of an artist’s ability and temperament. It is, however, a decidedly darker book than A New Athens, though its solemn and even tragic moments are tempered with scenes of exuberance and humane idealism that artfully complicate the effect. Jazz is the musical form that dominates this novel. When Petter Arnesson is introduced to the first tentative rhythms of early jazz, he encounters “bits of music [that] seemed sad when you hummed them in slow tempo, then unexpectedly cheerful when you quickened the pace and perhaps whistled them. He had never seen any music that had that strange double nature” (36). It is appropriate that the book itself partakes of an equivalent doubleness. The predominant tone shifts back and forth between the comic and the tragic, between achievement and failure. Unlike A New Athens, which conveys a sense of almost Edenic innocence, Be Sure to Close Your Eyes portrays

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a world fraught with danger, accident, and anguish. May-Beth’s vision, we soon learn, is of a hard-won realm of mature optimism discovered on the further side of a painfully traversed experience. Hood was convinced that this condition, with its aura of serenity and assurance, could be attained only after an apprenticeship of uncertainty and suffering. In mystical terms which he does not insist upon but which are, I suggest, implicit within his whole conception, May-Beth has to undergo her own version of the Dark Night of the Soul before she can achieve the poise and calm of her later life and can communicate her hard-won spiritual understanding on canvas. This tension between suffering and calm, between the tribulations and satisfactions of life, is parallelled in the ambivalent tone of the initial epigraph from a traditional song that gives the novel its title: “If you ever get hit / By a barrel of shit / Be sure to close your eyes.” The violent colloquialness of the phrasing may at first seem startling, though the stressing of basic and disturbing realities within traditional popular song is not inappropriate in a novel that spans (even if it does not directly confront) the period of the First World War and its immediate aftermath. Within such a world, the dangers to life are continual and omnipresent. On the very first page the five-year-old May-Beth is almost killed by a falling brick; a little later an unnamed black musician dies after he falls from a train while riding the rods; later still, May-Beth and her fiancé, Petter, almost succumb to an unseasonable blizzard on the prairie; and in a sudden and shocking catastrophe, Petter is struck down in a freak accident at the cattle barn. Even the continually reiterated references to safety precautions and the careful measures employed to prevent accidents (see 10, 23, 30, 105) hang like an ominous pall over the narrative (cf. the “feeling of apprehension” experienced by the unimaginative Charlie Rutter in the opening scene [11]). More ominously, when Petter and his father ascend their roof to display the flags celebrating Dominion Day, an “attentive crowd of small boys” assembles, “possibly in the unspoken hope that one of the Arnessons might stumble and fall” (133). In the midst of life, clearly we are in death. Closing one’s eyes may not, of course, help, yet the temporary acceptance of darkness can, it seems, occasionally allow the eventual recovery of vision in time to come. May-Beth’s life conforms to a pattern of vision lost and vision ultimately regained. But the epigraph functions as more than a succinct indicator of theme: the words are the fortuitously preserved fragments of an “old

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song,” just like the stanzas sung by Charlie Rutter, the bricklayer (3–6). These, Hood acknowledged, he had to reconstruct from stray lines imperfectly remembered from childhood.29 This is more than just a trivial detail. While A New Athens focused on the art of painting, an art that can be bequeathed from the past to the present and into the future, this novel concentrates on music as a performing, spontaneous art that is also, by the nature of things, ephemeral. The music of the black man who died by the railway tracks is, like his name, lost for ever. Petter’s death is particularly sad – “so darn sad,” in May-Beth’s words (212) – not only because a young life has been snuffed out prematurely but because he produced nothing that can be preserved as proof of his musical accomplishment. Hood is here, as in Property and Value, exploring the personal and philosophical issues pertaining to permanence and transience. Yet, as we might expect from a writer with Hood’s religious background and convictions, all is not “accident” and all is not lost. Coincidentally – or even, perhaps, providentially – the black musician lives long enough to pass on his notebook, containing hints of new techniques and possibilities in jazz, to a young aspirant who is uniquely endowed to decipher and learn from them. If only in fragmented form, the vision is handed on. And in turn, Petter’s musical originality, while unrealized in his own life, is ultimately translated and transmuted by May-Beth, who is presented within The New Age as a visionary genius, through the medium of painting. To secular readers, the invocation of “providence” may seem dubious; within the confines of the narrative, however, Hood deftly invokes the possibility through the catalytic effect of “The Saints,” one of Petter’s favourite performance pieces repeated, under strikingly different circumstances, at a Harlem jazz concert towards the end of the novel. This concert, attended by May-Beth while on her honeymoon with Earl Codrington, effects the release of all the pent-up emotions that she has carried within her since Petter’s death. Hood thereby creates a chain of interconnections within his fiction which hint at a morethan-accidental principle at the heart of things. God works in wondrous ways ... Such divine explanations are unfashionable at the present time, but the endowing of individuals like Petter and May-Beth with exceptional artistic abilities remains a tantalizing mystery. “Where does

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such a gift come from?” The narrator raises this question within the novel (76), and in so doing, is struggling, as Petter struggles, “with some of the most troubling problems in the theory of the arts” (87). Part of the answer, of course, involves inheritances from ancestors, and Hood is careful to indicate the artistic debts that both Petter and May-Beth owe to their parents, notably to their fathers. Arne Arnesson, Petter’s father, is a blacksmith with an “inquiring artistic nature” (56), master of the “immensely subtle and delicate craft” of horseshoeing; he finds creative expression in producing “finely wrought shapes” for his “work in wrought iron, fencing, gates, decorative lamp standards, verandah ornaments” (29–30), all of which are subsumed, both here and throughout the series, under the all-important category of “design.” “He’s certainly a kind of artist,” as Professor Sleaford later remarks (99). Sleaford himself, May-Beth’s father, is inventive rather than artistic, though his cattle-tending schemes are profoundly involved with drainage, duly described as “one of the fundamental human arts” (101); more to the point, he bequeaths to his daughter an intense visionary faculty with a capacity for “large imaginings” (15). Above all, his ambitious schemes (for all their imperfections, which will be discussed later) aim at permanence: “The professor was building, not for a year or a decade, but for an age” (102). Readers of A New Athens will remember May-Beth’s last painting in the attic room – the same attic reached on the last page of Be Sure to Close Your Eyes – “It hangs on the west wall of the attic, and will hang there until the house and all its inhabitants are dust” (209). Similarly, the five-year-old MayBeth here in the first chapter looks at her first deliberate drawing (significantly, of an angel) and “thought that her picture would last a long time” (8) – which it does. The artistic interchange between Petter and May-Beth, though bearing centrally on the issue of transience versus permanence, is decidedly more complex, and Hood takes considerable pains to document it. May-Beth accompanies Petter when he travels with his band to their amateur musical engagements. She “would pass the evening making drawings of the scene that tried to suggest the feeling and the nature of the music. She never linked drawing to words, to literature, but always to the mysterious expressiveness of music” (73). Her instincts, we are told a few lines later, “were musical and even contrapuntal.” The same point is reiterated when they go off on

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their almost fatal expedition which culminates in the blizzard. She has her paints, Petter his cornet, and they try to share and absorb the secrets of their respective arts. Both are acutely aware of an ultimate mystery. In the last analysis, artistry is a gratuitous gift, stimulated in their case by the comparable mystery of genuine human love, but originating in an inexplicable beyond: “When she listened to Petter play, May-Beth was aware that some marvellous communication was being addressed to her, not simply by the young cornetist – her beloved – himself, but by some superior intelligence and voice that seemed to inhabit the music” (76). And again: “Every now and then she painted something almost musical. Her drawings and watercolours had something unearthly about them ... Music, which says nothing and needs no words to accompany it, sometimes seems to express some state of mind or feeling or experience that cannot be derived from the material world ... The greatest art emerges from the holy, the sacred” (87). Throughout the novel, visionary and particularly artistic awareness is seen as “God-given.” Hood even digresses into prairie history to point out that the surname of Edgar Dewdney (founder of Regina, Saskatchewan) probably derives from the French dieu-donné (16). At first, this may seem an extraneous and unnecessary detail, but it points to the phrase that becomes a leitmotif within the novel. As the Reverend Dwight Huskisson insists in his address on Pentecost, all human achievements are “the gifts of the Spirit” (44), and later in the same scene Petter’s performance on the cornet is said to include “God-given beauty of tone” (50). Both the word and the concept occur frequently in the course of the book (e.g., 28, 74, 149). “The tones of the great musician,” May-Beth decides, “are the instrument of the heavens” (76). The biblical allusions and references in the novel naturally bolster the idea of the mysterious, divine origins of art, but they also illustrate the conflicting tensions that underlie the narrative. In terms of mythic patterning, Be Sure to Close Your Eyes moves between Old Testament Babel and New Testament Pentecost. Typologically, of course, the two are closely connected. The story of Babel represents a hubristic attempt foiled by a jealous God through imposition of the confusion of languages. Pentecost, on the other hand, enacts the opposite process: the Holy Spirit descending to earth so that all human beings may hear the good news in their own tongues.

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Within the narrative this biblical imagery is transformed and in part disguised. Professor Sleaford, while “steeped in Old Testament history and prophecy” (12), is no Nimrod, and the uncompleted towers that litter his properties are noble experiments designed to improve the lot of domestic animals in obedience to the divine injunction “Feed my lambs, feed my sheep” (13, quoting John 21:15, 16). But his theoretically admirable designs based upon “a perfect circle” (40), incompatible with earthly imperfections, are frustrated by human error and dangerous processes present within the natural world. And towards the end of the novel (199), true to Hood’s characteristic sense of imaginative structure, we catch a glimpse of an unfinished New York skyscraper aspiring towards a Yankee perfection within a few weeks of the Wall Street Crash. A central scene presents a revivalist service in a Pentecostal temple, a scene that recalls – if only by virtue of its atmospheric contrast – the hell sermon in that earlier Künstlerroman, Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Here, however, the preacher, the Reverend Dwight Huskisson, brings hope and revelation to his congregation by reproducing the scene of the original Pentecost, the disciples meeting in despair and then suddenly revived by the glory of God’s grace. The scene is central to the novel in a number of ways. It is, first, the occasion where the musical genius of Petter is made manifest. His rendition is an inspired musical equivalent to the faithful speaking in tongues and leads May-Beth’s parents, with punning appropriateness, to ask: “What in heaven’s name was that?” (51). Moreover, the pattern Huskisson describes is reproduced psychologically in the subsequent experience of May-Beth – shattered by the sudden and seemingly pointless death of her lover, enduring a period of shock and depression, and at last emerging into the possibly humdrum but stable and decent experience of an earthly marriage after her brief glimpse of heavenly possibility. As I have already indicated, this process of realization and acceptance is made possible – again thanks to Hood’s creative and imaginative design – through a Proustian moment when Petter’s rendition of “The Saints” is replicated on the trumpet by Louis Armstrong in a spontaneous recital. A clue to the imaginative filaments involved here is provided within the Pentecostal revival scene. The speaking with tongues that occurs at the climax of the service contains “something else unidentifiable” (47), and the whole congregation is moved “by a primordial supernatural reality” (48). This is conveyed in musical terms by

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Petter’s cornet solo, which makes them “aware that they had witnessed an absolutely new proclamation” (51). This mysterious visionary quality is developed in other ways at other points in the novel. Thus the beginnings of radio are described in terms of “sweet invisible presences” (52), “heavenly signals, sounds and visions of mysterious origin” (55). Significantly, both Petter and May-Beth are dedicated to arts that can escape the curse of Babel by communicating without human language. If all arts, in Walter Pater’s phrase, aspire to the condition of music, it is because music and harmony are traditionally associated with the divine. There can be no doubts about the importance of design in a novel where the concept of design is itself central. Like Hood’s other novels in the New Age series, though unlike Professor Sleaford’s towers and feeders, Be Sure to Close Your Eyes is expertly and effectively constructed. There are eighteen chapters of approximately twelve pages each, divided into two parts: “Out West,” comprising chapters 1 to 12, and “Back East,” consisting of chapters 13 to 18. The numerology contains complications, but is lightly and wittily reflected in the number of Holsteins in the Sleaford herd. The professor originally planned a small herd of “not more than a dozen” (99), the number of chapters in the first part; but he later decides on a larger number, and the cattle eventually arrive in Hanbury in three railroad trucks containing six animals each (113). Traces of an equivalent threefold pattern are evident within the structure of the work. Thus the sixth chapter ends with the establishment of love between May-Beth and Petter, but Hood concludes it with a sentence, albeit referring to the young Al Rinker and Bing Crosby, that contains an ominous echo of the end of Milton’s Paradise Lost: “The world lay open before them” (74; cf. Paradise Lost 12: 653). The mortality integral to the fallen world is invoked at the end of the twelfth chapter with the brutally direct “Then he died” (143). The close of the last chapter substitutes the provisional for the final, and looks hopefully but tentatively towards the future: “We’d have to see about that” (218). Formally, however, the two-part division predominates, the second section repeating the pattern of the first, but more economically and in a different tonal mode. Hood once noted that an initial tragic structure is then replayed as comedy.30 Youthful romance is replaced by a mellow development of mutual respect and need. Earl Codrington is a good amateur musician, but he shows no signs of Petter’s

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originality and genius. May-Beth must be sure to close her eyes to a repetition of the earlier romantic experience, but if she can, she will come to derive satisfaction and happiness from Earl’s somewhat pedestrian but nonetheless sterling qualities. Yet the pattern of courtship interrupted and courtship completed is only the most prominent of a number of common elements that link the two narrative parts. Most obvious (because pointed up in the text) are the two very different journeys in Ford cars (chaps. 7 and 16; see 184). Structurally, too, May-Beth’s return to King City is clinched by her discovery of her first drawing of the angel preserved among the ruins, and similarly, in the scene in New York, the repetition of “The Saints” releases her memories and emotions. Less conspicuous but deliberately contributing to a sense of elegant shaping are the references to Pentecost (43 and 194) and Dominion Day (132 and 194) and the way in which the anonymous black musician early in the novel is balanced by the brief but significant appearance of Fats Waller and Louis Armstrong at the close. Even casual parallel phrases about the exclusion of Mexico from North American generalizations (132, 195) occur in each part and augment the impression of controlled and purposeful repetition. For obvious chronological reasons, this is the only novel in the New Age series in which the name Matt Goderich is not even mentioned, though it would be a mistake to assume that he is absent from the thoughts of any readers familiar with the earlier volumes. Superficially, Hood appears to be employing conventional omniscient thirdperson narration, a procedure he had followed in the immediately preceding novel, Property and Value. The earlier novel set primarily in a period before Matt’s birth, Reservoir Ravine, is for the most part narrated in the same way, though there, as we have seen, Hood startles us by suddenly introducing a first-person pronoun and then disconcertingly plunging us into a flash-forward from Matt’s personal perspective. Here the technique is less violent but arguably more subtle. Although Matt is not present, the tone of the novel is compatible with his style and views – indeed, the narrative voice might be said to comprise an imaginative fusion of Hood and Matt. Hood himself commented usefully on the effect a year before the novel was published: “Matt isn’t in it, but he is the consciousness that is aware of its consequences.” Characteristically, he cited a precedent in “Swann in Love” (“Un amour de Swann”), a third-person interpolation in Proust’s A la recherche, and also insisted that Be Sure to Close

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Your Eyes “illuminates and justifies all that [chronologically] follows it” (“Bringing it all back”). But we can venture, I think, even further than this. It is possible to detect a new openness in Hood’s narrative stance, though one derived from the evolving relationship with the reader established in earlier novels. At first reading, some of the Hoodian digressions in this novel seem unusually blatant – when, for example, the narrator laments, justifiably yet intrusively, that “the theoretical critics of the present time deny their cousins the artists their true function” (87). This comment occurs, however, at the beginning of the impressive sequence in which Hood conjures up the snow blizzard in prose that, on the one hand, convincingly evokes climatic conditions in Saskatchewan while, on the other, including literary echoes from Virgil, Shakespeare, Coleridge, and Joyce. Hood lays claim to a remarkable stylistic range here. He can playfully include “in-joke” allusions with references to “Struthers of Guelph” (14: the literary critic to whom Property and Value is dedicated) and “Dr Mallory” of Stoverville (170: Hood’s father-in-law, some of whose characteristics are taken up into the character of Earl Codrington). Conspicuous also is the increased capacity of the narrator not merely to indicate but to discuss openly the issues raised in the novel. At their most successful, these are cunningly interwoven into the texture of the narrative. At one point, for example, May-Beth’s thoughts about her father lead seamlessly into a general discussion of “intimate family concerns” as the central subject of works of art, where the tones of Matt Goderich and Hood as author are already inextricably blended (177). In this novel, Hood also extended his geographical and ethnic coverage of the Canadian mosaic. Not only did he introduce the black musician (whose influence extends out of all proportion to his brief role in the action), but he also acknowledged the immigrant experience in the Scandinavian Arnesson family. Effortlessly he caught the feel of the Saskatchewan landscape, with its majestic cloud effects as well as the violent and potentially dangerous changes of weather. Hood here made use of geometric imagery appropriate to the prairies in a tradition harking back to W.O. Mitchell and Wallace Stegner.31 This is not merely a matter of grids and section lines; round barns were once a feature of the Saskatchewan prairies, and coincidentally or not, at least one – the Howie Round Barn at Willmar – became the scene of a tragic fatality.32 It is typical of Hood that he should introduce a detail (while again adapting the facts, since round barns go

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back well into the nineteenth century) which contributes at one and the same time to his documentary realism and to his employment of circles as emblems of a sought-for, but not always achieved, perfection. His own art reflects the qualities of those sister arts whose intricate development is the central subject of the novel; through his narrative control and stylistic elegance, he too manages to “capture a sight of the heavenly” (55).

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Dead Men’s Watches I was the appointed mediator of two totally disparate kinds of life. Dead Men’s Watches 89

We have seen that Hood’s novels have always been remarkable for their structural arrangement, for the way they are divided into meaningful parts, but nowhere is this more evident than in Dead Men’s Watches. If we were ever tempted to wonder whether Hood had exhausted the possibilities of this aspect of his art, we should have been mistaken. This novel is surprisingly divided into two exactly equal parts, and at first sight at least, these parts constitute two separate, tonally contrasting, autonomous, novella-length stories. Indeed, we could be forgiven for doubting if, in the strictest sense, the book qualified as a novel at all. Initially, the two stories appear to have little in common. The first focuses on Philip Bentinck Russell Goderich, or Uncle Philip, who has been a continual but shadowy figure throughout the series. Here, in a slow-paced, quietly elegiac narrative, his private life, hitherto hidden from his immediate family as much as from readers of The New Age, is ultimately revealed. After a prolonged absence on Uncle Philip’s part, Matt is informed that he has suddenly married at the age of seventy, but it is only after his death eight months later that Matt makes the trip to Moosonee and meets Jeanne Three Streams Magill, his widow, the woman whom Philip had known for forty years. The second story concerns Adam Sinclair, who has been prominent in the series from the beginning. The now-famous actor arrives at the Goderich home suffering from an unidentified illness

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which ends his career and which is eventually diagnosed as aids. It is a sombre narrative that traces, in harrowing detail, the relentless development of the disease and the increasing strain it exerts upon those who look after Sinclair in the last stages of his life. This two-part, apparently bifurcated arrangement is, of course, unexpected in a book that forms part of a novel-series. When we consider the matter further, however, we gradually realize that there are indeed many factors – technical, thematic, stylistic – that bind the two stories together and relate them firmly to the rest of The New Age. Some of these are obvious enough: Matt Goderich, for example, is the narrator of both stories, and in both (as the title implies) the death of the central figure is a focal point in the plot. The connection established through the two watches is little more than a structural flourish; however, that between the two “dead men” is integral. Moreover, if we are reading carefully, we notice that comparisons and contrasts between the two central figures are inconspicuously but palpably introduced into each of the stories. At first, the points of contrast are more obvious than those of similarity. One protagonist is a relative, a member of the family, while the other is merely a lifetime friend; one is heterosexual, the other homosexual; one retiring and unobtrusive, the other flamboyant and self-revealing. Philip’s story is private, while Adam’s is relentlessly, even embarrassingly, public. In the first part Matt is detached from the main story, which he hears after the event; in the second he is intimately involved, his life becoming for a while as “public” as Adam’s. To be sure, the stories are similar in emphasizing the deaths of the protagonists, but Uncle Philip’s death is quick and “exemplary” (111), while Adam’s is slow and excruciating. In addition, although Uncle Philip is the focus of interest in the first part, he is oddly absent from the narrative – his nephew never meets him in the course of the story, and for both Matt and his readers, the new insights gained about Uncle Philip are retrospective. By contrast, of course, Adam magisterially imposes himself on the Goderich household on Crescent Road (significantly, he moves into Philip’s old room [148]) and immediately becomes a domineering and, as Matt remarks in the first story, “ineffable presence” (17). It is also noteworthy that Uncle Philip’s death causes Matt to embark on a complicated journey, while in the second story it is Adam who makes the journey and virtually confines Matt, Andrea, and their helpers to the Goderich apartment. Moreover, Matt journeys to “the Near North” (126), whereas Adam

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arrives from the tropical lushness of California, yet these apparently contrasting locations are described within the narrative as “blended scenes ... supplementary and almost parallel” (122). But the connections are much more subtle – and much more interesting – than the contrasts. As Matt notes in his comments on the “blended scenes” of California and the Canadian North just quoted, they represented “the complex signs of two lives that had existed quite apart from [his] knowledge of them” (122). Early in the first story he remarks: “[Adam] and Uncle Philip were the irregular wandering moons or meteorites in the constellation. Between them they offered a catalogue of the varieties of erotic need. Mother troubles, father troubles, childlessness, fraternal envy, entrapment in fantasy.” And he goes on to make what at first reading seems a very odd comment indeed: “If I hadn’t known that they were separate persons I’d have insisted that they were the same man ... the man who gets locked into a prison of the emotions very early in life” (17). We need to ponder, and assimilate, these challenging but perceptive remarks if we are to appreciate the delicate structural balance that characterizes Dead Men’s Watches. At first, Matt reacts to both men in what might be described as conventional terms: “for long years I had judged Philip and Adam to be obeying forbidden impulses, violating taboos” (123–4). Indeed, one of the most important features of Dead Men’s Watches is the way in which the two protagonists of these stories have a profound effect on the character development of Matt Goderich. He eventually comes to admit: “I had been wrong all my life about Uncle Philip and about Adam too” (126). This is, in part, a novel about reconsidering deep-seated assumptions about people; there is a sense in which both stories trace what Matt describes as a “great change in [his] attitudes and feelings” (166). Coming to a new understanding, entering “a new circle of perception” (105), is an experience repeated throughout the book. The Philip presented here is notably different from the impression of him that we have gained from earlier books, and something similar can be said of Adam Sinclair. The reason, of course, is that we have seen both Philip and Adam from Matt’s limited perspective and so have taken over his interpretation of their characters. Our views can only change when his change. Moreover, Matt is perceptive enough to realize that what Philip and Adam had in common “was guessable though so far unknown to me, their obscure existence ‘in the holes’ of the texture of my own history” (123). This is, of course,

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the principle on which Tony’s play, Claude and Gertie, had been based, and we have already seen how Hood employs the same process in the central volumes of The New Age, where he introduces new episodes taking place chronologically between scenes presented in earlier volumes. The radical revision of Matt’s evaluation of both Philip and Adam is a bold and original extension of this same effect, and I shall return to it later in my discussion. Dead Men’s Watches is a novel about love, both eros and caritas. Indeed, were not Hood a confirmed Aristotelian rather than a Platonist, we might be tempted to describe it as his Symposium. Certainly, all varieties of love are represented within the two stories. Temporally, the book carries on immediately from the close of Property and Value, in the last pages of which Matt learns of the almost simultaneous deaths of his lover, Linnet, and his mother, Ishy. When at the opening of the present book he receives letters of condolence from his brother Tony (who, we must remember, has run off with Matt’s wife, Edie, and has previously had an affair with Linnet), from Edie herself, and from Adam (whose attraction to Matt has already been recorded in The Scenic Art), we realize how the context has been thoroughly prepared for a probing examination of the ever-varying phenomenon of love to be conducted here. The opening story presents love in its more traditional manifestation. In the background are Matt’s daughter, Andrea, and her boyfriend, Josh Greenwald, and their presence represents a specific instance of a standard pattern in both life and literature. As Matt remarks, “There were signs of an intimate shared affection, perhaps the first signs of love. I thought, oh-oh, now it begins” (50). The story of Philip and Jeanne Three Streams Magill itself – their first meeting in 1939, her love for him and his original reticence, their meeting again in 1966 and gradually forming a relationship, a “liberating love” (83), that culminates belatedly in a brief yet fulfilling marriage – offers a somewhat unusual form of the traditional love story, but is recognizable as belonging to a sanctioned genre. This hitherto unknown relationship radically complicates and alters our impression of Uncle Philip’s life, which had previously been dominated by suspicions of a quasi-incestuous yearning for Ishy, his brother’s wife. We come away from the first story with a chastened sense of love’s sad complexities (the lengthy constancy of Jeanne’s love set against the brevity of the achieved mar-

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riage), but also convinced of the normative quality of their relationship. With the story of Adam, however, Hood moves into uncertain, disputed terrain – what Matt describes, even while questioning its implications, as “the wrong kind of love” (223). Readers of The Scenic Art will remember that, as early as the 1950s, Adam had declared his “love” for Matt (see 23). Now, thirty years later, it is possible for them to understand more fully what that love entails. The second story in Dead Men’s Watches may narrate Adam’s illness and death, but its most pressing preoccupation is the effects of these events on Matt himself. He is forced, in the course of the narrative, to consider the fluctuating character of his response to Adam “since page one” (133), by which he means, literally, the opening page of The Swing in the Garden. This includes not merely Matt’s early collaboration in Adam’s “victimhood” but his passive acceptance of the attitude of Adam’s teenage peers (“fucking fruit!” [124, recalling Swing 193]) and the personal (and, under the circumstances, perfectly understandable) response when Adam tries to seduce him on his honeymoon. “Until now,” Matt realizes, “I had usually taken a comic and satiric view of my old friend” (124). The earlier scenes with Adam are, in consequence, revisited and their interpretation revised. If in the highly theatrical pages of The Scenic Art, Adam has been portrayed, as Matt admits here, as “a zany figure of commedia dell’arte comic satire” (128), he is now presented more humanly and so more sympathetically. Even the more recent event in the gay bar at the close of Tony’s Book is reconsidered; whereas Adam’s friends there had originally seemed “like comic or grotesque figures,” they are now regarded, in the wake of the aids crisis, as “ordinary people pursuing the ordinary human needs” (167). The experience of tending Adam through the relentless and humiliating process of succumbing to aids radically affects Matt’s attitude. “He’d offered me love,” he recalls, and he only realizes thirty years later that Adam “had spoken the plain truth;” – which leads in turn to Matt’s discovery of another truth: “You can’t turn away love; you need any love that’s going” (223). Matt’s understanding of the full meaning of love (including both its connection with and its distinction from sexual desire) is substantially enlarged and clarified in the course of the narrative. At the beginning of the book, trying to describe his feelings in having to come to terms with the deaths of Linnet and his mother, he asks, “How can you tell that what you’re

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feeling is love if you can’t call it love?” (6). By the end of the book he has learnt to recognize it under a broad range of guises. He even comes to realize that the oppressive public interest in the private lives of media personalities like Adam involves “a warped affection” (155) that may be construed as a form of love. And it is to the reporters and photographers who work to satisfy this public nosiness that he addresses the speech which articulates his new awareness: “You want to know if I’m Adam’s lover, isn’t that so? ... I don’t need to ask what you mean by lover; we all know what you mean by that. I’ve known Adam Sinclair since I was three and he was four years old. We weren’t lovers then and we aren’t now. But if you’re asking me if I love him, if he’s my oldest and dearest friend, then yes, I love him” (217). The whole of the second story elucidates, elaborates, and exemplifies this distinction. One of the problems that must have exercised Hood considerably during the writing of Dead Men’s Watches derives from the fact that in each story he discusses a topic – the presentation of “Indians” in the first, public attitudes towards both homosexuality and aids in the second – that is currently associated with “political correctness.” The pressures towards a feckless conformity must have been strong. How, it might be asked, could he deal with these subjects without risking unwelcome controversy, on the one hand, or seeming ostentatiously trendy, on the other? Here Hood’s technical expertise came to his assistance. In both stories he blunted possible criticism by making Matt Goderich sensitively – even comically – self-conscious about his capacity to negotiate such troubled waters. Thus when he hears Jeanne’s full name for the first time during a conversation with his bank manager, he blurts out, “An Indian” (43), and then immediately feels embarrassed by problems of terminology, embarrassment not shared by the bank manager – or, more to the point, by Jeanne Three Streams Magill herself (see 70). Then, the issue having been raised, it can be quietly dropped. Jeanne’s racial origin is not a factor in the love between herself and Uncle Philip, and she emerges as an impressive and admirable character in the narrative, not because of her ancestry, but because of her unique personal qualities. The controversial elements in the second story, however, are more complex, and not so readily resolved. One challenge is overcome in much the same way as in the first story. The passage in which Matt

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admits to being a duffer when confronted by technology – in this case, nothing more mysterious than a microwave oven (118–19) – highlights his subsequent mastery of the intricate techniques and skills necessary in the nursing of Adam. The effect is a bold one, since humorous treatment might well be considered out of place in this dark story, but it occurs early and offers an emotional release that helps readers to endure the painful extremity of the climax. Yet the effect works in another way as well. Matt acknowledges that, in earlier presentations of Adam’s homosexuality, he had over stressed the comic and absurd aspects while neglecting the human complexity and the suffering. The change of tone from comedy to harrowing seriousness within the story appropriately parallels the change of approach to the topic discernible in the course of the series. Nonetheless, a related problem, perhaps defying solution, is inevitably created by the subject-matter of the second story. In the interests of comprehensiveness, Hood clearly felt obliged to consider homosexual as well as heterosexual lifestyles in The New Age, and the former receives its emphasis here. But he himself was manifestly heterosexual, and the difficulty of rendering the action sympathetically – let alone with full conviction – is therefore acute. The problem is compounded by a wavering in Hood’s own thinking. He admitted that his attitudes to homosexuality had developed in the years during which he had been working on the series.33 It seems clear that he came to consider his authorial treatment of the subject in The Scenic Art as inadequate, just as Matt Goderich, within the fiction, finds his own earlier attitudes. As a consequence, Matt’s change of heart – understandable as it may be, admirable as it may be – represents an authorial change that could easily endanger the maintenance of a desirable authorial detachment. I do not wish to be misunderstood here. There have been very few novelists in the history of literature (Thomas Mann is one, the shockingly neglected John Cowper Powys another) who have portrayed heterosexual and homosexual feelings with equal sympathy, fairness, and conviction. Hood’s success in this area is therefore remarkable. Indeed, I would go so far as to argue that his presentation of the subject in Dead Men’s Watches is more convincing than most of the heterosexual scenes in Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. But total conviction is not, I think, achieved. While discussing The Scenic Art, I described the tone of the homosexual scenes as “self-conscious.” The farcical element seemed an artistic strategy invoked to avoid a

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forthright presentation. Here in Dead Men’s Watches I detect a similar self-consciousness, though Hood has now produced a decidedly subtler effect by presenting a Matt who is as self-conscious as his creator. It manifests itself now, however, as a deliberate excess of sympathy rather than a dismissive evasion. I cannot help detecting a willed quality in the argument that, for all its force, does not quite ring true. As a consequence, we are uneasily aware of a propagandistic element even as we applaud Hood’s boldness in tackling a delicate subject and coming so close to complete success. Despite this slight flaw, however, the quality of the achieved result – in part, his sheer artistic courage in facing up to so perilous an undertaking – ought, surely, to place him in the forefront of serious Canadian novelists. The treatment of the aids crisis is another matter. This is a subject that had not yet attracted much attention from writers of fiction, and Hood was able to explore new territory. He wisely drew upon his documentary as well as his imaginative skills. As a result, the controversial public response is swallowed up in a wealth of original descriptive detail. The didactic element is still present but less selfdefensive. This is a good example of Hood’s ability to integrate a recent contemporary development into his already planned fictional structure. As I have already noted, he could not have anticipated the aids phenomenon when originally planning the series. Indeed, “Bringing it all back,” his mimeographed sheet distributed at the talk given at St. Michael’s College in 1992, suggests that Adam’s fate was in the balance until a comparatively late stage. As he stated there: “I have to consider [the ‘Adam Sinclair’ material] in beginning my new work in 1993. How far do I have to go with Adam Sinclair?”34 We now know that he went very far indeed. One suspects that Hood’s grasp of this aspect of the narrative was surer for the very reason that, unlike the issue of homosexuality, the presentation of aids lacked complicating treatment in previous novels in the series; he could present the subject without being inhibited by earlier responses fixed in the text, whether his own or Matt Goderich’s. I have endeavoured to illustrate some of the numerous ways in which the two stories that make up Dead Men’s Watches, though strikingly different in both subject matter and tone, prove on closer scrutiny to be skilfully and artfully interrelated. But how, apart from filling in the private life of Uncle Philip and concluding the all-too-public life of Adam Sinclair, does the book interrelate with the rest of

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The New Age? Three of the more conspicuous aspects of the series, as discussions of earlier novels have shown, are the documentary, the religious, and the geographical. By way of conclusion, it may be helpful to indicate how this novel adds to Hood’s larger concerns in these areas. As we have seen, the second story continues his age-by-age chronicle of twentieth-century Canadian experience by focusing on what Matt calls “a terrible decade ... the 1980s, the aids decade” (227). This emphasis is achieved not merely by offering Adam’s experience as “a textbook case of the etiology of the sickness and its beginnings” (225) but by showing how it establishes links with other notable characteristics of the period, many of them advances in technology, some to be welcomed, others dubious. Among the more prominent are the development of medical strategies, on the one hand, and “the awful consequences of celebrity” (202), on the other. The former is to be explored again in the section devoted to Tony in the immediately succeeding novel, Great Realizations, though in both cases scientific methods are portrayed as at the mercy of other factors, whether the continually changing threats of fatal diseases or the unavoidable consequences of human fallibility. The latter have already been treated with reference to Adam in earlier books, especially The Scenic Art; on the other hand, the possibility of human co-operation and responsibility will be centrally involved in the coverage of the space mission in Great Realizations. More generally, Hood rings a change on his customary procedure by having Matt Goderich, habitually a “storehouse of information,” as he half-ironically describes himself (51), presented as the receiver rather than just the purveyor of instruction.35 As before, Matt’s religious consciousness pervades the book, which begins “in the week after Easter” in 1980 (3) and concludes immediately after Christmas in 1989 (227). His sacramental response to experience is conveyed by constant references to religious matters, ranging from allusions to Holy Communion and the Eucharist (5), the two churches (one in Toronto, the other in Moose Factory) dedicated to Our Lady of Perpetual Help (71–2), and the possibility of Jeanne’s being “an agent of divine knowledge” (85), to references to parables (26, 148, 149, 150), Matt’s association of Adam as “victim” with Christ as victim (132–3), and the introduction into the account of Adam’s medical history of such phrases as “a weird litany of affliction” (168) and “the whole sacred litany of drugs”

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(218). Once again, however, there is a significant difference that distinguishes Dead Men’s Watches from most of the earlier works: to express it in traditional terms, whereas Matt’s habitual emphasis in religious discussion tends to focus on faith, in the second story here, as in Black and White Keys, the emphasis falls unequivocally on works. Nowhere does he express his Christianity more eloquently and less ostentatiously than in his nursing of Adam through his last illness. But perhaps the most notable contribution made by this novel to the intellectual and aesthetic extension of The New Age may be found in the area of natural geography. This is achieved in the first story not only by the presentation of Moosonee but by the brief section devoted to Andrea and Josh Greenwald’s visit to Whitehorse. Both communities are depicted with remarkable accuracy of topographical and other details – even the telephone number of the Westmark Hotel in Whitehorse is accurate (51)! These are Hood’s first literary depictions of the Canadian North (or, at least, the Near North), and Moosonee in particular is portrayed in terms of both real and symbolic geography. The landscape from the town itself to the lower reaches of James Bay is presented with a realistic immediacy, but the emphasis falls ultimately on less-material elements. This is a psychological as well as a literary journey. If the community seems at times like “an extension of Ontario cottage country,” it is also “a gateway to infinity” (79). As the boat swings around from its furthest point north, the movement of “the entire enormous vault” (102) creates in Matt a dizzying effect that is more than merely physical. Here he finds a geographical equivalent to what he earlier calls “the vertigo of history” (88). He is “completely disoriented” (102), carried into “a new circle of perception” (105). It is a scene modest in terms of plot but vast in its psychological effect. The Matt who takes the Ontario Northland Railway back to Cochrane is not the Matt who travelled in the reverse direction two days earlier. His enlarged perspective plays no small part in preparing him for his role of tending Adam in the second part of the book. Moreover, the last two novels, Great Realizations and Near Water, derive a special poignancy from the maturity and humanity that Matt Goderich attains in his visit to Jeanne Three Streams Magill and northern Ontario. We move from the “immense space” (50) of the Canadian northland to outer space in Great Realizations. The space mission in the eleventh novel explores the ultimate “frontier” of

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human aspiration, while Near Water, set in “cottage country,” partakes of the whole Christian allegorical cosmos of infinity. Expanding horizons and the fact of death, linked together here in Dead Men’s Watches by the description of Ishy “gone away into eternal presence” (83–4), are both central to these concluding books of The New Age, and in Near Water (as we shall see) they become one.

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Great Realizations ... two great events ... had become inextricably connected. Great Realizations 231

Not “Great Expectations” but “Great Realizations.” Published at the close of the twentieth century, the penultimate book in the New Age series is set not, like Dickens’s novel, in the previous century but in the following century, which is now our own – the century that, as Hood announced long ago (see Fulford 68), is the new age alluded to in the overall title. Like its immediate predecessor, Dead Men’s Watches, this novel tells two stories that interconnect at various levels. One, on an international (indeed, interplanetary) level, is an account of the first manned space flight to Mars, presented as taking place in the months from April 2004 to July 2005; the other, sharing the same time span but focusing on the national (Canadian) level, concerns the acquisition of a major work of art – “the last Titian” (74) – for the National Gallery of Canada. These two are linked in terms of plot by the fact that John Sleaford Goderich, the younger son of Matt and now a scientist at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at Cambridge, becomes, through his researches into the properties of gravity, a participant in the first landing on the red planet, while as an art historian, chief organizer of the Codrington Colony for the Encouragement of Visionary Art in Stoverville, and coordinator of the Canadian exhibit at the 1980 Venice Biennale, Matt plays a crucial role in the negotiations for (and financing of) the Titian. The two stories in Dead Men’s Watches are presented sequentially, the phone call at the end of Uncle Philip’s story initiating that of

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Adam Sinclair, but the plot interconnections here proceed simultaneously. Each of the six chapters – which, as J.R. (Tim) Struthers notes, “recall the six days of Creation” (“It’s Almost Time” 12) – contains a two-part structure, beginning with the voice of “Mission Control” covering the latest developments in the space journey for international television and then veering to the life and viewpoint of Matt Goderich and his involvement in the Titian project. Thematically, the emphasis of the novel alternates between the world of “high-tech” science and that of traditional art, though these are united by the common need for human co-operation. Generically, the space flight introduces science fiction into the series, while the convolutions of the art plot allow for hints of the novel of intrigue. Both these are subsumed, however, by a common involvement in the conventions of romance. A strong element of “romance” in the popular sense of the term runs throughout the book, extending from John Goderich’s message of love for Emily at the beginning (12, 16) to the developing emotional attachment between astronauts Céline Hervieu and Hubert de Barny towards the end. In more scholarly terms, since his son is born while he is in outer space, John’s return can be linked to “the romantic tale of the hero who meets his son for the first time long after the child’s birth” (121). More generally, the book exploits the widely held sense of the romance of space travel (in many respects, science fiction now fills the literary slot formerly held by romance), while the successful completion of both quests – the journey to Mars and the national triumph in acquiring “the last masterwork to be allowed out of Europe” (192) – concludes the book on a note of wish-fulfillment readily compatible with the romance mode. Moreover, despite the justifiable emphasis on “realizations” in the title, the novel follows the sanctioned conventions of romance not only in its concern for interconnections between the space plot and the art plot but in Hood’s skilful bringing together of seemingly disparate strands from earlier parts of the New Age series. A foray into the genre of space fiction may seem an unexpected development for Hood, but, as usual, the theme has been quietly anticipated earlier in the series. As far back as the first chapter of The Swing in the Garden, the young Matt feels the constraints of being confined on a lead in the garden in Toronto, and he dreams of “moving outward into bigger and bigger rooms and perimeters” (10). In the

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same paragraph there are references to “[e]ver widening spaces” and even to “patterns of the conquest of space.” Such details did not seem significant on first publication, but they light up impressively in the context of the complete series. In his concern for comprehensiveness, however, Hood could hardly have left science or the literary genre of science fiction out of his presentation of Canadian life and experience during the twentieth century and the early years of the “new age.” At the same time, he was a non-scientist himself and wrote for a clientele unlikely to possess advanced scientific expertise or to make any claims as connoisseurs of “sci-fi.” By presenting the “great scientific venture” of space flight (3) in the form of a television broadcast beamed at non-specialist viewers, however, he was able to achieve the illusion of technological authority and avoid the perilous complexities of science-fiction convention. A scientific ethos is suggested, simply and economically, by means of a number of impressive-sounding but, for the most part, non-technical phrases: “fuelling conduits and supply ramps” (3), “a functioning artificial gravity service” (4), “the Hohmann ellipse path” (8), “the surface life-support module, or lsm” (90), “the bls, or Backup Landing Shuttle” (166), and so on. Only occasionally does Hood make a bow towards the more sensational elements in popular science fiction, as in a cryptic (and undeveloped) reference to “radio signals of unknown origin, emitted in deep space from a transmitter of nonterrestrial source” (45). Emphasis is placed instead on the smoothrunning efficiency of the whole enterprise. In some respects, this section of the novel is a tribute (nowadays more often assumed than articulated) to the functional reliability of modern scientific technology – or, in Matt’s words, “the beauty and glamour of technology that really works” (18). Much the same can be said for the art-history background in the sections devoted to “the last Titian.” There are allusions (almost always factual) to such details as “the Assumption from the Frari” (69) and “the Pièta in the Accademia” (79), a rediscovered Caravaggio (81), and a Dürer already in Ottawa (97), as well as elaborate references (sometimes authentic, occasionally imagined) to the art and architecture of Ravenna and its environs. But more attention is paid to the political and financial manoeuvrings behind the transfer of the painting and to the physical process of extracting it from the (fictive) Castello Bianchini and installing it in the (factual) National Gallery. Not unexpectedly, Hood employs his own artistry to convey an

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impression of the complex realities of the world of art. More important than any erudite detail is the significance of the story of the last (fictive) Titian as “the definitive act of cultural maturation, for Canadians” (49). I stress artifice, the deliberate intermingling of fact and fiction, because it is related, albeit indirectly, to what for most readers will be the most surprising, conspicuous, and disturbing characteristic of Great Realizations. This is not so much its association with the genre of science fiction, still vaguely questionable in traditional literary circles, but its dubious (because potentially disprovable) setting in the all-too-near future. Hitherto, The New Age, although presented as “documentary fantasy,” has seldom been associated with anything approaching fantasy in the normal sense of the word. Indeed, if one thinks back to the impressive realism of The Swing in the Garden, one may well wonder what has happened to the consistency and integrity of the series. Hood’s authorial note here, “The events depicted in this narrative will take place in the near future,” is a bold, poised, yet possibly dangerous piece of coat-trailing, all the more blatant because the date in question is so close. Most novels of this kind, George Orwell’s 1984 being the exception that virtually proves the rule, look towards a relatively distant future, but Great Realizations is set in a period only seven years ahead of the time of its first publication. Why, one may ask, would Hood indulge in a future fantasy that will be tested – and doubtless found inaccurate (perhaps drastically so) – within a few years of the novel’s appearance? Two possible explanations suggest themselves. One stems from the fact that Hood, steeped as he was in the forms of Sacred Scripture, here offered (despite his un-Jeremiah-like optimism) his own personal contribution to prophetic literature. In the first chapter, Matt muses on the consequences if his younger self had possessed “the gift of prophecy” (26), and earlier, as the space-vehicle departed on its mission, he had fantasized about tv coverage of the Last Judgment (14) and wondered “what book of revelation might lie on the other side of the widening space” (17). It would be unwise to regard these crucially placed references as accidental; we might, indeed, see the novel as Hood’s own Book of Revelation. Such a mode would be appropriate to a subject matter that also depends, as the text insists, on imagination and vision. As Mission Control remarks, “the human imagination invariably outruns our technical capacities” (130), and in the art plot Edie, who must agree to the financial arrangements

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involving “Codrington Hardware and Builders’ Supplies. Since 1867,” is praised for her “large and ready vision of the project” (116). Moreover, as a thoughtful Christian, Hood was well aware that future predictions are rarely fulfilled – after all, both Jesus and St Paul firmly believed that the Apocalypse or Last Judgment was imminent – but can readily be re-projected into the more distant future. Only the most literal-minded readers would expect events to unroll precisely as they are forecast here. But what will be the reaction of readers in, say, 2020 if the intervening years show developments notably different in detail from those that Hood has imagined or envisioned? Obviously, the book will have changed in impact because of the effect of subsequent events, but (though I am acutely conscious that my own comments here are subject to the same testing as Hood’s) it will not have been rendered obsolete. Orwell’s 1984 has been affected but not disproven by the passing of the year in question without Britain becoming a totalitarian state; it has even survived the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. The crucial point is that other forms of dictatorship still survive and may be expected to remain as threats in the foreseeable future. In the case of Great Realizations, whether Mars is visited by a manned spacecraft in 2004–5 or not, space exploration will doubtless continue, even if the precise details are unforecastable. Similarly, while no one believes that a virtually unknown Titian will become available, still less that it will be acquired by the National Gallery of Canada, we can be sure that in other ways the gallery will continue to improve its holdings. The second explanation might, however, be considered more compelling. By venturing into the unstable realm of space fantasy, Hood found a way of reminding us yet again, and this time quite explicitly, that the world he portrays in his fiction is not identical to that in which we live out our lives. Throughout the series he took pains to offer a narrative representative of social and historical developments in Canada during the twentieth century, while at the same time creating an artistic structure that possessed its own unique form and integrity. He constantly reminds us that, however significant it may be as a comment on “real life,” his series is a fictive creation. Thus we know that the Codrington Colony for the Encouragement of Visionary Art exists in Stoverville but not in Brockville, that Andrew Goderich never won the Nobel Peace Prize or initiated political connections between Canada and the People’s

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Republic of China, that George Robinson played no part in the emergence of Pierre Elliott Trudeau as leader of the Liberal Party, and that Matt Goderich did not organize the Canadian exhibit at the 1980 Venice Biennale. These events exist in a dimension, an imaginative compartment, parallel to authentic history but essentially independent of it. Of all Hood’s writings in this series, Great Realizations goes furthest, by its challengeable future setting, in insisting upon the artifice that is in fact its most important feature. Thus when the future prophecies do not materialize in the form imagined, they will nonetheless remain as visions of what might have been and what could be, intriguing images of possibility, great expectations still waiting to be realized. Even more important than the future setting, I would argue, is the stress laid on the human element within this story of a scientific triumph. From the outset, the space project is recognized as “an unprecedented example of international human cooperation” (3; my emphasis). The point is underlined by John Goderich’s “last word” in the previously taped interview broadcast as the spacecraft leaves the earth’s atmosphere: he sends his “love to Emily” (12), and Matt, hearing the broadcast on the Leslie Street Spit in Toronto, meditates on “human attachment stretching and stretching across the widened gulf” (17). This human connection is developed still further when Emily’s pregnancy, mentioned as a rumoured possibility in the first chapter (31), is confirmed in the second (47), and by the beginning of the third has become “an example of the intense human drama unfolding around the epic voyage of the spacecraft,” just as the space mission itself is characterized as a “great human story” (85). Hood reinforces the human analogy through both imagery and structure. The manned spacecraft is seen as approaching its “consort,” the cargo vessel, “like a mating male” (87; cf. 88, 89), and this sexual imagery is continued later, as we shall see. Moreover, the plot allows John Goderich to land on the surface of Mars at about the same time that his child is born on earth, thus demonstrating “the close solidarity of humankind: the father walking on the distant planet as the child begins the long voyage of a human lifetime” (92). Here technological science and human values go hand in hand. The viewers of the space broadcasts bombard the station with deeply felt, if unscientific, notions suggesting “how closely the narrative of the

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birth of the Goderiches’ child seems to retell the strange tale of life on Earth and its possible relation with life elsewhere in our solar system” (86). Even Mission Control itself is prepared to acknowledge “a close link between the nine months of Emily Underwood Goderich’s pregnancy and the time that will have elapsed when Visitor I completes its investigations of the Martian surface and turns for home” (86). This imagery is parallelled in the “last Titian” sections when the time required between the agreement to sell and the installation of the painting in Ottawa is described as “the nine months of human gestation” (114). Human co-operation, however, has negative as well as positive implications, since it is inevitably accompanied with the possibility of human error. Lest it be thought that the obstacles and dangers of space flights are negotiated too easily, Hood inserts into the fourth chapter yet another of his shocking sudden deaths when Tony becomes a victim of unexpected medical accident. Once again, the account is linked with that of the space mission, most notably when he is given the same emg (electromyogram) test that Commandant de Barny has just administered to Captain Hervieu on the surface of Mars (see 127, 149). But the technological expertise that works on the space flight fails in this case in the operating theatre, and the human Tony is transformed into an inhuman statistic, an example of the “under-five-percent failure” (160). And so another strand in the Goderich story is brought to its conclusion. Since the space voyage looks to the future of scientific expansion, and the Titian, with its Homeric subject matter, to the traditions of the artistic past, the links between the two may at first sight seem somewhat remote. Yet Hood insists upon them. Thus Matt calls them “great parallel undertakings” (192), and reports that, during his early negotiations with the National Gallery, “there was an unspoken agreement from almost everybody ... that the link between the actions of the Canadian space voyagers and the acquisition of the last Titian wasn’t simply factitious” (104). The most obvious link is naturally the Goderich family itself, with Matt accompanying the painting to Ottawa and his son participating in the space mission. The image of travel provides an essential connecting device. Thus the painting itself undertakes a remarkable journey, and the National Gallery officials who assist with “vigour and enthusiasm” in making the arrangements are described as “voyagers in new spaces” (176). Moreover, the relationship is subtly reflected in the subject of the

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picture itself. Its full title is King Priam Before the Tent of Achilles, Begging the Body of Hector from the Hero, for Burial (109, 235), an episode receiving its supreme literary treatment at the close of Homer’s Iliad in a scene described by Hood elsewhere as one of those “great passages in literature” that “make us think” (Unsupported Assertions 96). Hector is, of course, Priam’s son, so a father-son relationship is developed here, one that obviously lends suspense to the account of the space flight, since the relationship in the painting is grimly tragic in tone. Throughout the novel, Matt is painfully aware of the dangers that beset the astronauts. As the spacecraft leaves on its mission, he fears that its participants have been “condemned to an isolated and dreadful extinction” (17), though happily this does not occur. Indeed, Homer provides the clinching connection between the two strands in the novel, since the triumphant return of the astronauts constitutes a twenty-first-century odyssey, a “new age” version of the traditional epic pattern. And there are other links. For example, just as he placed the figure of Matt Goderich within May-Beth’s painting in A New Athens, Hood here shows how “the shadowy figure of Ares/Mars ... lurked in anger in the recesses” of Titian’s painting (122). Moreover, he emphasizes the relation at the close of a novel that might otherwise seem excessively optimistic. The space flight’s intention may be, in J.R. (Tim) Struthers’s shrewdly ambivalent phrase, “to conquer Mars in the name of peace” (“It’s Almost Time” 14), yet Hood knows that Ares is not to be vanquished easily. The unveiling of the Titian is a triumph like the safe return of the space mission, and the painting supports the emphasis on co-operation by expressing “the nihilism of every kind of human contest”; but it qualifies any sense of euphoria by “revealing momentarily the figure of Ares, god of warfare, struggle, confusion and hatred” (239), like the breaking out of the Blatant Beast at the end of a medieval romance. That Ares is “the resident god of the Red Planet,” which even derives its name from the Greek war god’s Roman equivalent, gradually dawns upon the spectators at the unveiling as one of the “implications of the turning picture.” The painting is set on a turntable that “goes around every ninety minutes day or night and the light firms or dims accordingly” (239), thus imitating the motions of a planet, whether earth or Mars. Indeed, the last word of the novel is “Turns,” suggesting that the relation between painting and planet is real, although the relation between the need for

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human co-operation and the urge towards human contest remains equivocal. I have been illustrating the extent to which the two plot lines in this novel, though at first sight so different in tone and emphasis, are subtly linked through the medium of Hood’s art. It is now time, by way of conclusion, to examine a related effect: how one of the “pleasures of the text” in the final volumes of The New Age is the satisfaction of seeing how apparently independent strands in the earlier narratives begin to be gathered together. This is especially true of Great Realizations. One such link even explains how John Goderich came to be a participant in the space mission. Matt’s narrative here begins with the phrase “Those beautiful aerial cars” (8). He is remembering the words, recorded in The Motor Boys in Ottawa (168), uttered by the four-year-old John at the Montreal Expo of 1967 when he requested a ride on the Minirail. Matt speculates that this may have been the moment that determined John’s “aching need” (18) to be “the first Goderich in space” (9). So one “spot of time” begets another. This is a typical example of the way that an inconspicuous phrase in an early novel can light up when placed within the larger context of the whole series. As the narrative proceeds, readers are continually reminded of incidents from previous books. Some of these are general and obvious. Thus the death of Tony recalls the unexpectedly sudden deaths of Linnet in Property and Value and Petter Arnesson in Be Sure to Close Your Eyes, while Matt’s meeting and partial reconciliation with Edie bring back to mind the principal events in Tony’s Book. Similarly, the appearance of Pluyshin and the Italian background of the Titian both recall the theme and setting of Property and Value. More specifically, the preoccupation with “media attention” (9), though generally positive here, raises echoes of the journalistic bombardment in Dead Men’s Watches (indeed, in the voice of one of the tv commentators, Matt recognizes “somebody who had been busy in harassment during the weeks that Adam had lain dying in my house so many years before” [14]). The brief glimpses we receive of Matt’s other son, Anthony Earl, suggest a life-pattern not unlike Matt’s Uncle Philip, thus sparking off recollections of various earlier narratives, most notably the first story in Dead Men’s Watches. In addition, the coming of the Titian to Ottawa has connections with Canadian participation in the Second World War, which in turn, along with a reference to

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“the Age of Genocide” (25) and to Sin Quantified (110–11), harks back to Andrew Goderich’s exploits in Black and White Keys. We even hear, tantalizingly and poignantly without details, of the death of Bea Skaithe, the rich Rosedale girl whom Matt had admired from afar in The Swing in the Garden, “in obscurity and need” (67). One might have expected such tying up of strands to be reserved for the last novel in the series, but Near Water, as we shall soon see, is focused on the final, inevitably lonely journey of the individual human soul. Here in Great Realizations, therefore, the subsequent fortunes of other characters are systematically indicated. In addition to those already mentioned, we learn of the eventual marriage of Andrea and Josh Greenwald, as well as that of John Goderich and Emily Underwood, which fulfills yet another of John’s childlike visions hinted at as far back as Tony’s Book (202). The “realizations” chronicled in this novel are as much those of family and associates as of national endeavours in science and the arts. But this process is most memorably illustrated in the opening chapter, which presents a culminating instance of the mingling of present experience with past memory that is so central to the whole series. In order to watch the spacecraft as it moves out of the earth’s atmosphere, Matt walks out to the tip of the Leslie Street Spit, an artificial landfill promontory extending into Lake Ontario that was begun in the 1960s. Like the spacecraft itself, though in a much more modest way, the spit is a man-made achievement, a product of human ingenuity. To observe a triumph of science, Matt watches from a triumph of civil engineering. After the spacecraft has disappeared on its dangerous mission, he finds himself looking over to the Toronto Islands towards “the crumbling concrete pierhead that had been [his] private land of meditation in August and September of 1939” (23). In another scene of meditation he is here recalling an incident recounted in the closing pages of The Swing in the Garden. At first, this may seem yet another of Hood’s Proust-like scenes of meditation, but it is narrated with a difference. In the 1930s the Leslie Street Spit did not exist and had not even been “so much as thought of” (13). In the earlier novel the nine-year-old Matt had been presented as peering southwards over the Eastern Gap out into space and the unimaginable future. Now the septuagenarian Matt, after peering into a deeper space, looks back to his past self and a remotely past age, and as readers we experience one of the most moving of

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the “spots of time” that recur throughout The New Age: “And I understood, as he or I or both looked forward and back, that it was the distant future he was searching for, in the light mist that in memory always seemed to swim around Eastern Gap shipping arrivals. To my child self everything that had brought me here today was inexistent futurity, an early dream. He already existed while I was lost in sixty years to come. I felt my aging self dissolving around me. I was a being in my 1939 dreams” (24–5). Now “an old man at the end of the land” (26), Matt looks back over his life and begins to cast up accounts, not realizing that, like his son, he is on the brink of a new and fulfilling stage in his life’s work. This is a supreme – and eternal – moment. At the same time, this scene, which looks back to the first novel in the series, creates subtle connections with the last. It is no coincidence that, at the tip of the Leslie Street Spit, Matt is “near water” – indeed, almost surrounded by water. This “old man at the end of the land” will soon be an old man at the end of his life, looking out, not on Lake Ontario, but on a smaller Ontario lake that has been a significant location during his adult years. The literary mode, as invariably with Hood, changes drastically, but the basic constituents of earth, water, and air remain – to be completed in the final novel by seraphic fire.

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Near Water Here is notice from the very end of life. Near Water 121

Near Water, the twelfth and final volume of The New Age / Le nouveau siècle, though it frequently refers back to people from the earlier books, resembles none of its predecessors. Indeed, Hood here develops an appropriate and distinctive, though initially bewildering, form for the culmination of his series; one might even suggest that an essential prerequisite for coming to terms with the book is to banish from one’s mind all previously held assumptions about traditional novels. Not the least unusual feature of the book – and one of which we become aware gradually in the course of reading – is the way in which it is confined throughout to Matt and his consciousness. This is far more than a mere matter of first-person narration. No other human beings are directly involved; there is no human conversation, no human interchange. Matt is either alone or surrounded by spiritual entities. Ultimately, Near Water can be appreciated as an extremely moving and rewarding book, but acclimatization to its particular mode is not easy. At first encounter, a novel dominated by angelic powers may well seem a bizarre development out of keeping with the concerns and methods of the earlier novels in the series. Such a reaction would be understandable, yet at the same time inaccurate. Once again, when we reread the previous books of The New Age after experiencing Near Water, we realize that this preoccupation has been firmly, if unostentatiously, prepared for. Casual references, such as the phrase “infinite

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numbers of angels” in Reservoir Ravine (193) or the description of Squadron Leader Ferrier, who pilots Andrew Goderich across the Atlantic in Black and White Keys, as “a good angel, a guardian” (52), suddenly take on new interest. We now recognize a special significance not only in the incident early in Be Sure to Close Your Eyes where the young May-Beth makes her first drawing – of an angel (8) And in Dead Men’s Watches, after considering the way in which the religious believer becomes accustomed to the notion of “the all-seeing wisdom of the Creator,” Matt observes that “the watchings of lesser invisible beings, angels, the saints in glory, seem equally normal” (85), and he remarks a little later that each of us “may very well enjoy the attentions of a guardian angel” (105). Moreover, in Great Realizations, while acknowledging death as “the final fundamental human act,” he goes on to speak of “the permanent human need to treat imaginatively with the likelihood of existence in an afterlife” (35). This is precisely what Hood attempts here. There are nine chapters in Near Water, and their titles take the form of a listing of the hierarchy of angelic beings as it has come down to us from scattered biblical references, the church fathers, and early Christian tradition. In Hood’s ordering, proceeding from lowest to highest on the heavenly scale, they are Angels, Archangels, Powers, Virtues, Principalities, Dominations, Thrones, Cherubim, and Seraphim. This is a clear indication that the novel is to move in the direction of full-scale allegory. Since this may seem a daunting prospect, I propose to offer here a commentary that will pick up helpful clues as soon as they are encountered, map out the route, and generally assist the reader’s progress through this challenging but – on reflection if not necessarily at first reading – highly satisfying conclusion to the series. For reasons that will become clear shortly, the nine angelic levels, as well as Matt’s nine-part journey which forms the basis of the narrative, both divide neatly into “a triad of triads” (54). In the ensuing discussion I shall follow the same general divisions. Despite the immediate hint of allegory, the opening chapter begins conventionally enough. We encounter the familiar Matt Goderich speech intonations, his idiom and mindset, and he specifically identifies himself on the second page. The immediate situation is less clear, especially since the chapter is almost totally lacking in action, consisting as it does of meditational discourse; we gradually come to

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realize that Matt, now in his eighties, is driving in leisurely fashion to his lakeside cottage in southern Ontario in anticipation of a reunion with Edie that will perhaps become permanent. As he drives, we follow his thoughts over a host of topics that pass through his mind, including memories from the past, uncertainties about the future, and ideas arising in the present from what he sees around him. All this conforms to the tradition of free association that has become a recognized feature of contemporary fiction and has been employed often enough, though not so exclusively, in earlier volumes of the series. Nonetheless, the intellectual challenges begin early. In the first paragraph we find him meditating on a curious word, “periplum,” not to be found in most dictionaries, and defined by him as “a literary work having the overt and public form of, say, an account of an epic journey, as well as a private, concealed form and purpose” (3). This is a concept by no means unfamiliar to readers of Hood; I discussed earlier in this book his interest in “levels of meaning” (a phrase that follows here immediately), “multiple communications embedded in the various strata of a single work of art” (3–4). Clearly, we are being alerted to a “concealed form and purpose” in the novel we are just beginning to read. Matt goes on to discuss Homer’s Odyssey as a classic periplum, ostensibly “a more or less realistic narrative” of a “return home” (4), but covertly, “[l]ike so many stories with an epic intention ... a traveller’s handbook, a guide to navigation” (4).36 Other cited examples of the genre include The Pilgrim’s Progress and the Acts of the Apostles. Moreover, the statement that “a marine periplum deals with small seas and lakes” (5), linked with the suggestiveness of the title Near Water, prepares us, even if the suggestion is not confirmed until the next chapter, for Matt’s return to his lakeside cottage. In addition, his thoughts about St Paul’s sea journeys “give rise to meditations about his survival techniques” (6), and a later reference to various tales of the sea as “salvation stories all” (8) offers a subtle hint to the direction that Matt’s own story may be taking. Such hints come to a climax in the following passage: “Novel turning into allegory from Homer to Dante, the greatest of endings, the essential arrival, safe at home” (9). Before we proceed further, it will be useful to pause over “periplum” as the literary account of an epic voyage and Homer’s Odyssey as a specific instance of such a narrative. The associations

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with water make the setting of this last novel centred upon the Goderiches’ lakeside cottage especially apt, but there is no attempt to apply the term rigidly and provide a full circuit of Charleston Lake. Moreover, I have included “Odyssey” in the title of this book, employing the more generalized meaning of a journey homewards, because it catches, I believe, a sense of the amplitude of Matt’s – and Hood’s – quest. Matt embarked on an intellectual journey in search of “The Canadian Style” as it manifests itself in art and design, and he plays a notable part (within the fiction) of fostering the nation’s cultural development. At the same time, this final novel is the story of his return home in a spiritual sense to the abiding Presence that he knows as God. Hood assumed the burden of providing, in the dominant literary form of the twentieth century, an epic work that encompasses all that he had encountered and absorbed in a life of sustained creative curiosity. To commit oneself to twelve intricately linked novels over a quarter of a century is an act of awesome ambition and stamina; in Near Water he brought his project, in the imagery of “periplum,” safe to harbour.37 Significantly, at the precise moment when specific reference is made to allegory, Homer, and the return home, we are also confronted with the concept underlying the chapter titles, for Matt continues, “Nine choirs of angels, yes, yes. It is better to reach home than to continue the search.” At first, the phrase about “choirs of angels” seems incongruous, lacking in context, yet it is a thread that will not be left dangling for long. Within a few pages, thoughts about St Paul’s journeys as recorded in Acts lead to a recollection of his speech on the Areopagus in Athens, and so to the single reference in the Bible to Dionysius, the Pauline convert said in later tradition to have become “the first bishop of the diocese of Athens” (13), a piece of information that is insistently repeated (13 again, 14, 18). The rest of the chapter consists of thoughts arising out of the subsequent attribution to this same Dionysius of influential mystical texts dealing with angels, the nature of God, the concept of hierarchy, and the associated patterns of ascent and descent, including images of “stairs” and “ladder” (15, 20). Then, without warning, comes the short concluding paragraph: “I’m drawing close to Athens now. And from there it’s no distance to the lake” (27). Readers of earlier books in The New Age will immediately recognize “Athens” as the small town in southern Ontario – “the town with the murals,” as it is called a little later (41) – which gave its name to the second novel in the series. But the juxtaposition

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of the two Athenses within this chapter suggests the presence of at least two of the “levels of meaning” mentioned on the first page. If the “overt and public” level of meaning is to present Matt’s return to the lake, we begin to perceive that the initially hidden meaning may well imply a “return home” in a deeper, mystical sense involving Dionysius and the nine angelic orders. Hood, through Matt, gives some basic information about the work and influence of Dionysius in this first chapter, but since his writings in general and The Celestial Hierarchy in particular, for all their theological importance in earlier centuries, are now virtually unknown to many readers, it may be helpful to offer an introductory account of them at this point. Dionysius, as we have seen, was the name of the single identified male member of the Areopagite council in Athens who was converted when St Paul preached there (see Acts 17:34). According to the custom of earlier centuries, his name was later appropriated to serve as a pseudonym for some extremely influential theological writings that played an essential role in introducing strands of Neoplatonic thought into early Christian thinking. The “strange and nameless writer,” as Evelyn Underhill called him, “who chose to ascribe his work to Dionysius the Areopagite, the friend of St. Paul and to address his letters upon mysticism to Paul’s fellow-worker, Timothy” (456), wrote a number of generally short treatises, including The Celestial Hierarchy, The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, The Divine Names, and The Mystical Theology. These appeared sometime between 475 and 525, most probably in the early years of the sixth century. It is The Celestial Hierarchy that primarily concerns us here. In this short book, Dionysius (often referred to by scholars as Pseudo-Dionysius) develops clues from references in the Bible and early Christian commentators to work out the orders, or choirs, of angelic beings that mediate between our world and the ultimate Divine Presence. These orders include many that are still familiar (Angels, Archangels, Cherubim, Seraphim), while the rest are encountered from time to time in theologically oriented literary writings such as Dante’s Paradiso and Milton’s Paradise Lost. It is no longer generally known that the systematization of this hierarchy was the work of Dionysius, and that in so doing, he provided a precise map for the medieval Christian universe. In Near Water, Matt describes him, in terms that may at first seem inflated, as “[o]ne of the most important mystical theologians” (39) and praises the “ranks and grades” of

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The Celestial Hierarchy as an influence “on you and me from the moment of our conception ... forming our interior speech, direct[ing] our actions at every point” (54). But Evelyn Underhill bears out these tributes to his influence. “From the ninth century to the seventeenth,” she writes, “these writings nourished the most spiritual intuitions of men, and possessed an authority which it is now hard to realize” (456). For Dionysius, the nine orders of angelic beings are divided into a triad of triads. In his discussion he begins with the Seraphim, the level closest to God, and proceeds in threes down the scale to those closest to the human world, the Angels. (The word “angels,” by the way, has always been potentially ambiguous, since it refers to the lowest level, but also serves as a generalized word to describe all such spiritual beings.) Hood lists them in the reverse order because that is the way Matt encounters them, and for convenience, I shall follow that order here.38 The first triad, then, in ascending order, consists of the Angels, the Archangels, and the Powers, which, in Matt’s words, “are the angelic powers [= choirs] nearest to us” (96). The choirs of the “Middle Kingdom” (110) – the Virtues, Principalities, and Dominations – prepare the ascending soul for its separation from what we call reality and its introduction to a higher level of awareness and existence. The last three choirs – the Thrones, Cherubim, and Seraphim – “form a closed ring around the fiery fountain” (222), in the centre of which is the Reality we call God. Although it would be easier for human comprehension if the divisions between the orders were clear-cut, such is not in fact the case. Because each angelic power on the hierarchical ladder mediates between the immediately lower and higher states, blurring of distinctions invariably occurs. In Matt’s words, “[e]ach grouping of three blends and merges into the next,” so that “the operations of the most high angelic spirits show through and participate in the motions of the lower choirs” (54). For an initial reading of Near Water, then, it is less important to identify the special characteristics of the individual levels than to appreciate the pattern of ascent which is involved and to recognize the way in which the novel, like Dionysius’s hierarchy, divides into three sets of three. Because Hood’s fundamental procedure has now been glossed, the second and third chapters require less commentary than the first. In the second chapter we find Matt brooding over religious and secular triads, the significance of names (compare Dionysius and The Divine

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Names), and the fact that the Catholic church in Athens is dedicated, astonishingly, to St Denis the Areopagite. There is a reference to “mystical theology” (51) – another Dionysian title – and even the discussion of Bronson, his neighbour-cottager, in the second chapter leads to remarks about “some sort of guardian angel” and “the powers of the heavenly host” (54). The things of this world and the possibilities of the timeless other world are beginning to blend. Even more significant, however, may be the scattered but persistent references to moments of darkness. Towards the close of the first chapter, Matt admitted to “memory lapses” (23) and remarked: “Sometimes I can feel my attention sliding out of control” (26). Now we hear of “little ripples in my consciousness that I wouldn’t call blackouts. More like minor power outages that keep on coming along” (41). These “blank moments,” which he experiences “every now and then” (42), lead to “a feeling of vague discomfort somewhere around the base of the skull at the back of my neck” (43). Although Matt may not fully recognize them as such, they are clearly danger signals, not-so-casual details within the text that seasoned novel readers will regard as ominous. The very absence of significant action – he is merely driving towards the lake, stopping for breakfast, driving on past the appropriately dedicated church – provokes intimations that something untoward may be about to take place. The third chapter, though beginning with references to the “invisible world” and “our guardian allies” (59), is more self-consciously literary in emphasis. We are introduced to Zasper, Matt’s guardian angel, but are not allowed to forget that his name, at least, is an imaginative fantasy, a somewhat whimsical hypothesis: Matt invents Zasper to explain what others might describe as his good fortune or even his luck. This reference leads in turn to Matt’s anecdote about a rescued swimmer – “That time you went too far out in the lake ...” (64) – a “you” who is later admitted to be “I” and later still acknowledged as a first-person fiction. This is Hood’s bow in the direction of postmodernist metafiction, though ultimately recognized as a tricky means to a serious end. What we experience here is first a blurring of “you” and “I,” then a blurring between fact and fiction, and ultimately a blurring between the real and the non-real which raises profound questions about what constitutes “the real” – questions that lead to the heart of Dionysius’s Christian Neoplatonism and also provide a clue to the narrative strategies that are to be employed at later stages in Near Water itself.

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The end of both the third chapter and the first triad reproduces the first climactic moment in the novel. Having at last arrived at his cottage, Matt has negotiated the steep path from the cottage to the margin of the lake and has just lain down on the recliner on the deck: It’s very quiet and still, and warm. Hardly any breeze and what happened? something just happened! what? (83)

These lines mark the outset of a fatal stroke – fatal, that is to say, from the viewpoint of our world. That Matt’s stroke should occur at this precise point in the book is, of course, structurally appropriate, alike from the perspective of Dionysius the theologian and from that of Hugh Hood the novelist. As we learn in the next chapter (whether from Matt or some unidentified and disembodied narrator is not altogether clear, and I shall return to the point a little later), Angels, Archangels, and Powers, who have presided inconspicuously over the first three chapters, though “unimaginably our superiors in all things, abilities, functions, potencies,” work in a region that maintains strong connections with our world. The Powers, however, are “spread along the border of the next trio of choirs, the middle ground in the angelic hierarchy” (96). It should now be evident why the angelic orders blend and in some respects overlap. Matt’s stroke initiates the movement by which he is passed on to the next stage in the hierarchical ascent, one that is no longer immediately associated with earth but has not yet attained closeness to the Divine. Matt Goderich, then, as the result of a major stroke while he is lying on a recliner some distance below his summer cottage, is paralyzed and unable to move. His wife may or may not be driving out to see him later in the day; otherwise, no one knows where he is. It soon becomes clear that, so far as the literal narrative is concerned, his survival depends upon his ability (which, under the circumstances, seems highly unlikely if not impossible) to work his way out of the recliner, crawl back up the path from dockside to the base of the cottage, and then climb the steps to the cottage entrance, where, if he is lucky, he may be able to make his presence and condition known.

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But it becomes equally clear that at this point the allegorical meaning takes precedence over the literal. Matt’s situation is therefore to be viewed from a larger perspective, not as a mere earthly progress but as an ascent from the limitations of this world to a higher level of being – or, in a phrase that occurs later in the novel, as a “passage from temporality to eternity” (168). Moreover, this radical shift in the mode of narration needs to be accompanied by an equivalent shift in the way that readers respond to the text. While the early chapters recorded Matt’s varied interests and impressions, his attention after the stroke is focused exclusively on the basic issue of survival (“I have to learn movement all over again” [101]). Indeed, in the central three chapters the narrative “action” is confined to Matt’s painfully propelling himself out of the recliner on to the concrete deck and so to the place where he can begin his symbolic ascent in the final triad. In consequence, for the rest of the novel we must adjust our reading pace and must begin to adapt, like Matt, to the new situation. There is inevitably a certain stasis, a lack of the kind of narrative progression we have come to expect in novels, which extends through the rest of the book. For most sympathetic readers, however, this will be offset by an appreciation of the poignancy of Matt’s circumstance, and of the resoluteness of the aging Hugh Hood’s presentation of it in such harrowing yet impressively imaginative detail. Hood was not a writer to employ conspicuously avant-garde technical devices on a regular basis to achieve special effects, but he does so here. (One earlier example is the inarticulate “hip” idiom reproduced in his short story “Whos paying for this call” in The Fruit Man, the Meat Man & the Manager.) The opening pages of the fourth chapter communicate Matt’s frenzied attempts to come to terms with his experience, to find words – at first, only isolated words – to describe what has happened to him. We are faced with unpunctuated words and short phrases in block capitals scattered over the pages, with initially unsuccessful attempts to open his eyes (“open! shut! open! shut!” [89]), and with his efforts to hold on at all costs to his personal identity (“i am i again” [90]). Then, after a brief period in which the words fall back into the more conventional lower case, another narrative shift takes place. Just as the typography becomes more traditional, a third-person observer takes over the narrative. “He prepares to take inventory of his body, what he can feel, what he can move and what is powerless, and he begins with sight” (95). For the next few pages, it is uncertain

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whether this voice represents an aspect of Matt that has become separated from his physical self, a traditional “omniscient narrator,” or a spiritual power (possibly his guardian angel). Given the occasional interpolation of Matt’s “I” (further down 95, for example), the mixed “is he / am I” construction (96), and the reference to “we human beings” (97), the first of these possibilities may be considered the most likely, though all may ultimately take part. But more important than the establishing of narrative certainty is the sense, growing stronger as these middle chapters proceed, that Matt’s personality is slowly but surely sloughing off its customary connections with the norms of this world. What we witness in the rest of the chapter is Matt’s gradual regaining of control over his own thoughts. He eventually clarifies his position and is able to admit – and articulate – the fact that he has had a major stroke. The essentially inner nature of the narrative is reinforced, however, when he remarks, “I make perfect sense inside my head” (101), but “I can’t form the right sounds” (102). Readers are thus in a curiously privileged position, rather like that of the angelic beings whose presence Matt is coming increasingly to recognize. Henceforward he is preoccupied with such small but significant advances as opening his eyes and moving the little finger on his left hand. The chapter ends with what is, under the circumstances, a triumph: the assertion that “I am still me” (111). Once Matt’s new situation is understood and we grow accustomed to the clipped, staccato rhythms of his inner speech, the process of reading becomes easier. As a result, the next two chapters can be passed over quite briefly here. In the fifth, Matt manages not only to gain some control over his muscles but to work out strategies for limited action; by the end he has been able to manoeuvre himself off the recliner on to the hard concrete of the deck. This chapter, it will be noted, occupies the central point within the novel as a whole; the next initiates a new direction and so occupies “a crucial place in the ascent” (110). From here onwards, the focus of Matt’s life and of Hood’s narrative begins to tilt away from the earth and towards the Divine. The sixth chapter, with its delicate description of vegetation and sunlight, contains more retrospective passages for the very reason that Matt has become aware that he is leaving behind what he has hitherto known as “reality.” Indeed, we are told that it is the main function of the Dominations, who rule over the sixth level, “to

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persuade us to quit reality in favour of something more” (148). This chapter thus becomes a “farewell to reality” (148). Emphasis is still placed on the fact that Matt must persevere in the intense physical effort that belongs more obviously to the literal level, but in terms of the allegorical aspects of the ascent, he is more and more dependent on external guidance: “I don’t know whether I can manage this ascent without special grace” (154). As the last links with earth fade, night falls, and we may well be reminded of the traditional Dark Night of the Soul. At the beginning of this chapter, Matt is, in some respects, at his lowest ebb; indeed, he falls into a coma and his life seems in the balance: Time has passed, is passing, will continue to pass, and the body on the dock lies still, face down in the water, waiting ... This is the first time since April 30, 1930 [Matt’s birthdate], that the world has experienced a state of being without a Matthew Goderich conscious and active within its boundaries. (164)

It is possible to read the last quoted sentence as an indication that Matt has now died. In any case, we realize that death, as we envisage it, is near. Hood does not require us to accept unquestioningly an ascent through the Dionysian hierarchies as the only possible account of Matt’s journey. Two references in the novel (45, 159) to his “waiting for Edie” remind us of the work of Samuel Beckett, and it is possible to see Matt’s attempted journey in these chapters as a brave, but absurd because doomed, progress towards an inevitably dissolution. Ideally, perhaps, we are invited to regard these chapters as subtly poised between two alternative readings: a presentation of Matt’s physical and conscious collapse or a triumphant entrance into the eternal Presence. Our impressions are directed through his experience, and we are aware of Hood’s personal convictions, but as readers we remain free to choose the level upon which to base our intellectual judgment. Whatever course we choose, however, in Hood’s imaginative terms the story is not yet over. Matt is assuredly “very near to the edge” (168), but an edge beyond which there is light. Now, thanks to the Dominations, he experiences the impulse towards what has already been described as “a new state of being” (162). The coma in fact represents a significant spiritual boundary. Once he emerges from the highest level of the second triad to the lowest level of the

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third, he will have passed into a field of influence that has lost all earthly connections and where “an approach to a nameless Absence/Presence seems possible” (152). Ahead of him is “the great change” (162). The seventh chapter opens, appropriately, with the word “Detachment,” since Matt’s entry into the highest of the triads implies “separation from a previous state of being” (171). A new pattern is now initiated. Hitherto, his journey has, in physical terms, been one of descent, culminating in the induced fall from the recliner. He reached his lowest point in the sixth chapter, which ended with the question “Will he climb?” (168); the answer is affirmative, and he now becomes “[t]he climber” (176). In this chapter he manages to crawl from the lakeside deck to the foot of the cottage stairs, getting cut by thorns and juniper bushes in the process. Yet the literal and allegorical readings, though seemingly opposed, blend readily enough. As readers, we respond much like the climbing Matt himself. The physical effort and suffering at this stage are registered, yet the emphasis falls positively on the spiritual progression. We rejoice as Matt demonstrates his capacity to sever his connections with earth. The intermingling of the literal and the allegorical is nowhere more evident than in the eighth chapter. Here the steps up to the door of the cottage – nine in all, so we have a ninefold ascent within a ninefold ascent – merge into a concentrated version of the journey through the angelic hierarchy. Within the process of reading, they are accepted simultaneously as “this creosoted staircase” (214), which belongs to the “real” world, and “the nine-stepped staircase that is the road back to the Father” (202). The former remains a factor in the narrative, but the spiritual journey now becomes primary: “The staircase can no longer injure me, because I’m climbing the ninefold structure that has passed through and over everything that is in the old world” (208). At one and the same time, we are in southern Ontario and in the allegorical universe of Dionysius and Dante. By the end of the eighth chapter, Matt has succeeded in climbing the steps and raising himself upright; he can now claim to be “on the level” (223). The final chapter presents his arrival at his ultimate destination – either death or the approach to the Divine, depending on whether one favours the literal or the allegorical level of interpretation; in Dantesque terms, however, we are now in the realm of the

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anagogical, the God-like perspective that absorbs, unites, and transcends the other levels of meaning. All that Matt can do is to wait and meditate. The resulting meditation, which becomes a culminating specimen of the digressive method prominent in the whole series, focuses on three primary images. These are music, the periplum, and (once again) a swing, all of which are structurally as well as thematically important. The chapter opens with a quotation from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, a play whose tone is profoundly apposite to Hood’s purpose: “Sometimes methought a thousand twangling instruments did chime about my ears” (227; cf. The Tempest 3.2.146–7). A musical allusion is doubly appropriate here. If Walter Pater was right in asserting that all art aspires to the condition of music, it is a suitable culmination to the concern for art that has been a major preoccupation of the series. But the lines are appropriate for another reason. Later in the chapter, Matt hears a “reverberant voice” (244), which he first interprets as “an invitation, a calling to attention” (245), and then identifies as “the voice of the Seraphim” (245), who preside over the ninth level. This is Hood’s equivalent to the concept of the music of the spheres traditionally associated with any spiritual ascent. While the chapter opens to music, Near Water itself began with a discussion of “periplum.” Although the novel is not involved in a full circumnavigation, the lake, along with its shoreline, is a perpetual presence. Throughout the narrative we encounter references to journeys on the lake, whether fictive (the made-up story of the rescued boy in the third chapter) or actual boat journeys observed or recollected (as here). Moreover, Matt’s own journey has now reached its climax on a level from which he can look out on large stretches of the lake. At the end of the first paragraph, he imagines himself on the Asian side of the Bosporus looking across at the “wide and happy prospect” that is Europe (227). Descriptions and discussions of the lake recur throughout the chapter, and at its close he imagines that the islands of the lake “draw together, closing the circuit and forming the new ring” (251). This “ring” is at one and the same time the image of the periplum, Matt’s earthly journey, and the New Age series, all of them achieving completion.39 The New Age began, we remember, with the image of “the swing in the garden” in the Goderich home in Toronto. It is appropriate, therefore, that a related image should appear here, and it takes the form of “the rusty creaky old porch swing” (231). Hood’s favourite

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narrative strategy here enjoys its final flowering within the series as the sight of the swing sparks off Matt’s retrospective and unifying imagination. In a classic example of free association, the swing recalls an incident when Anthony Earl, his eldest child, has a near accident while swinging on it at about the same age as Matt was at the beginning of the series. The resulting noise disturbs Matt and Edie out of “a bout of mild lovemaking” (234), which in turn leads to a consideration of the varieties of love (“from Eros to Agape through the troubadours to modernity” [234]) as inspired by St Paul in his Epistles to the Corinthians. The reference to St Paul duly “brings us around the circle back to the thought of St. Dionysius and his insistence on the hierarchical principle” (234). And so to the “love of the Seraphim” (235), the guardians of the ninth level, and the ultimate Love which is synonymous with the Divine. Moreover, the phrase “brings us around the circle” itself echoes the “periplum” image in the sense of a circumnavigation of a sea or lake. But even this allusion is not all. The discussion of love recalls Matt’s relationship with Adam Sinclair, his “best friend, from the opening page of my story to the last” (237). And the opening page in question is that of the first novel in the series, where Adam is associated with the first garden swing. The final paragraphs are subtle poised between the literal and the allegorical. From the viewpoint of this world, Matt, at the point of death, listens yearningly for the sound of Edie’s car, even though the time for rescue and recovery has long passed. Whether Edie arrives or not is, in a sense, immaterial. Matt comes close to believing that she does, but if she does, she is too late (“Sorry. I couldn’t wait. Had to be on my way” [251]). In human terms, his death, like all deaths, is agonizing. But Hood is careful to associate Matt’s death, not with the shocking and sudden deaths that have appeared distressingly in the later books of the series, but with the most calm and satisfying of deaths, May-Beth’s in the final chapter of A New Athens. Hood makes the connection deftly in the penultimate paragraph, which reproduces the last sound that Matt hears – or thinks he hears – on earth: “Faint crunch of gravel” (251). This is a subtle but clear echo of the passage where May-Beth is found by Matt and Edie, apparently asleep in her chair: “She didn’t move, didn’t hear us. One on either side of the deep armchair, we moved around her, then stood side by side with our backs to the window, looking into her still face. I put my hand to her cheek; it was warm and soft and she was dead. She

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must have died moments before. She may have heard our car rolling softly up the gravel drive” (New Athens 201).40 This scene (which should, of course, be read and savoured in its entirety) is one of the artistic triumphs of The New Age. But the ending of Near Water, in its own way, is comparably affecting. Matt’s last words, as he moves into the next order of reality, acknowledge the trinity of angelic spirits that are to accompany him into eternity and the Divine Presence: “The three mighty forms towering stilt-like coming for me. Coming across the water for me now” (251). The circle is complete, the periplum achieved, the series finished. Anagogically speaking, Matt, his Canadian odyssey at an end, returns to his original and ultimate home.

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Conclusion: Rereading Hugh Hood I really want to endow the country with a great unimpeachable work of art. Hood in Struthers “An Interview with Hugh Hood” 85

“It is premature to start critical study until all the evidence is in, i.e., until all the words have been read. After the experience has been completed, we can move from experience to knowledge. A great mass of additional meaning that we missed in the sequential reading then becomes relevant, because all the images are metaphorically linked with all the other images, not merely with those that follow each other in the narrative.” So writes Northrop Frye in The Great Code (63). He is, of course, discussing approaches to the Bible, but what he writes is applicable to all ambitious literary endeavours – and we shall do well at this point to recall Hood’s own remark, already quoted, about attempting “a kind of fiction which begins with a genesis and ends with an apocalypse ... like the Christian scripture” (see Sandler 5). In this book I have argued that The New Age / Le nouveau siècle, now completed, is worth the concentrated and detailed attention that Frye recommends for major texts. So far, of course, Hood’s work has not been granted this kind of attention. A few literary commentators have followed it with admiration and enthusiasm, and he commands a small but loyal band of regular and devoted readers. For the most part, however, it is clear that, with the exception of his admittance as an officer of the Order of Canada in 1988, Hood has not yet won the recognition he deserves. He was the recipient of various literary medals, grants, and prizes, but (unaccountably, given the quality of

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his work) the Governor General’s Award, which attracts the lion’s share of public attention, eluded his grasp. As a result, while his name is familiar to serious readers of Canadian literature, it is hardly a household word, and he is comparatively little known outside the boundaries of Canada. This neglect is unfortunate yet hardly, perhaps, surprising. One has sensed, in the past, pessimistic suspicions that the project would not be completed or could not succeed. Along with such prognostications has gone a consequent reluctance to persevere with a series that demands application, sustained attention, and the outlay of a considerable amount of time and intellectual effort. A number of potential readers, it seems, made a beginning, but then gave up their attempt to keep abreast of the series; some became discouraged by the two-to-three-year interval between volumes, while others were doubtless puzzled by the shifts of narrative genre and tone that I have taken pains to trace and explain. But The New Age is no longer a possibly over-ambitious dream; it is now an achieved reality, and I have no doubt that if we approach it on its own terms, without reliance on untested assumptions or preconceived theory, it succeeds admirably and can legitimately be accounted a masterpiece. In Great Realizations, when “the last Titian” is finally installed in the National Gallery in Ottawa, Matt explains how the work was to be “free-standing” on a moving turntable. (Interestingly enough, “freestanding” was the word that Nicholas Hewitt used to indicate one of the necessary qualities of a “roman-fleuve” [see 3o above].) He continues: “The huge, superb painted image moved almost imperceptibly, at the same time obliging the viewer to move very slowly with it so as to maintain a certain consistency of viewpoint, or to stand still and allow the composition of the work to adjust itself as the painted surface shifts slowly in her or his eyes ... The slow speed of rotation allows multiple viewpoints to the student, scholar or critic; indeed it almost obliges one to keep on adjusting one’s stance” (227). I am reassured to discover that J.R. (Tim) Struthers has anticipated me in interpreting this passage as Hood’s veiled direction for an appropriate response to his own work. First, he demonstrates that this scene, at the close of the penultimate volume, subtly “parallels the discovery” of May-Beth Codrington’s visionary paintings in the second volume, A New Athens. He then notes how the images reflected in the “almost imperceptibly rotating” Titian “seem to parallel the way this novel, like others in the series, will continue to rotate subtly, fostering new

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interpretations as we revisit it or as new readers experience it” (“It’s Almost Time” 14). The analogy is not perhaps exact, but it is imaginatively provocative. If we turn back after a reading of Great Realizations and Near Water to The Swing in the Garden and A New Athens, we shall not be the same readers who experienced them before, nor will they be precisely the same novels. We cannot read of Adam Sinclair as victim of the swing game without being reminded of his subsequent history; we cannot watch the young Matt Goderich looking into the future from Toronto Island without recalling the older Matt summoning up the same scene from the tip of the Leslie Street Spit in Great Realizations. Similarly, May-Beth’s painting of The Population of Stoverville, Ontario, Entering into the New Jerusalem is not quite the same picture when we return to it after our awareness of “the last Titian” or after we see Matt making his own entry into another world at the close of the final novel. The rereading of any major work of fiction involves a continual and radical reappraisal, and nowhere is this process more apparent than with The New Age. Hardly a page passes without new interconnections being discovered, new associations becoming evident. Once we return to the beginning after an experience of the end, the kaleidoscopic patterns change continually and offer a deepening pleasure that is richly satisfying. Artistically minded Canadians have been searching desperately over the last half-century or so for a major fictional expression of Canadian life and experience. Too many of them, ironically, have failed to recognize an emerging masterpiece as it has been gradually taking shape since 1975. At last, however, such a work has, I submit, been achieved. If we are prepared to “keep on adjusting [our] stance,” the reward will be entry to a work that provides virtually inexhaustible sustenance for the intellect and the emotions, a work that enlarges our perceptions of the world we inhabit and looks towards a challenging but bracing future – that “New Age” which the series both heralds and celebrates.

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Notes

1 Perhaps I should make clear at this point that I am not a Catholic myself and have no formal connections with any church, though I was brought up as an Anglican. 2 Despite the acknowledgment of Frye, this observation derives, as T.F. Rigelhof has reminded me, from the particular form of traditional Catholicism promoted by Jacques Maritain and the Basilian Fathers at St Michael’s College in the University of Toronto, where Hood studied as an undergraduate. He discusses this tradition in “The Intuition of Being: Morley, Marshall and Me,” the concluding essay in Unsupported Assertions. 3 Few, if any, Canadian commentators possess the necessary background in theology and philosophy, on the one hand, and sufficient sensitivity to the English language, on the other, to discuss Hood’s religiously informed vision adequately. As yet, the best hints (though no more than hints) are to be found in Rigelhof’s illuminating and deeply personal essay “Tales Catching Tales,” where he alludes to “the darkness of [Hood’s] aesthetic credo” (124). 4 This is an arcane subject that can easily detract attention from more immediate qualities in Hood’s text, but it should be noted that the number of chapters in each novel is fraught with emblematic, often biblical and Christological, implications. Some of these are obvious, such as the nine angelic hierarchies dominating the nine chapters of Near Water, the four elements that dictate the structure of A New Athens, or the way The Scenic Art appropriately imitates the three-act norm of modern comedy. Other numerical patterns are more abstruse, but the

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5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

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fivefold division of The Swing in the Garden suggests the Pentateuch, and the six chapters of Great Realizations recall the six days of Creation, while the seven-times-seven scheme in The Motor Boys in Ottawa doubtless alludes to a significant astrological climacteric. In Great Realizations, Matt insists that the dedication ceremonies at the National Gallery of Canada be held on 15 October in the year 2005. When asked to explain his choice, he reports, “I had ... private reasons for choosing that date, that I considered my own business” (181). The reasons were actually Hood’s rather than Matthew’s and constitute another of his private allusions concealed within the text. I can find no allusion in Dead Men’s Watches, but in all the other novels in the series Wordsworth is either named or quoted, or at least alluded to, at various points in the text. Proust, it is worth noting, also uses the cathedral image to characterize his work (as did Balzac before him), and J. Theodore Johnson Jr has even written a stimulating article entitled “Marcel Proust and Architecture: Some Thoughts on the Cathedral Novel,” in Barbara J. Bucknall, ed., Critical Essays on Marcel Proust (Boston: Hall, 1987), 133–61. Hood acknowledged this debt in a talk given at St Michael’s College in the University of Toronto (29 October 1992). The connection had already been pointed out by Diana Brydon (4), who also links Matt’s first meeting with Edie on the ghost train to Marcel’s first sight of Albertine and her friends in Within a Budding Grove (A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs). Hood once intended to introduce one of Powell’s characters into The New Age (see Sandler 6 and “Notes for a talk”), but this was the closest he got. Here, perhaps, I should register my disagreement with Diana Brydon, who argues that the idea of the Codrington Colony is ridiculous because May-Beth’s “individual vision” becomes “the center of an institution” (10). May-Beth is a fiercely independent painter, to be sure, but the content of her art is the relation between the worldly and the eternal. Besides, the colony is subsidized to a considerable extent by the commercial profits of another institution which provided her with the necessary leisure and artistic materials to create her paintings in the first place. Moreover, Brydon’s unease is shared later in the series by Edie, who finds the colony oppressive. Thus, far from being a criticism recognized from without, this is a factor contained and available within Hood’s total scheme. I have argued this point, so far as Wordsworth is concerned, in The Poetry of Nature: Rural Perspectives on Poetry from Wordsworth to the Present (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), 32–5. “Epiphany” is the term appropriated by Joyce and used in a secular

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14 15

16 17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24 25 26 27

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sense to indicate the revelations of banality created in Dubliners; for “Willingdone museyroom” and “funferal,” see Finnegans Wake (8, 120). The quotations in these two sentences are derived from the “Immortality Ode” (ll.4, 198, 202–3) and “Resolution and Independence” (ll.50, 111). I am indebted for this information to a personal interview with Hood (22 September 1994). It is worth noting here that the first use of the word “genocide,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was in R. Lemkin’s Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944). It became well known during the Nuremberg trials in the following year. This scene had its origins in autobiographical experience (see Hood “Hugh Hood” 82). For further discussion of the “Christological” aspects of the novel, see Keith Garebian’s study of Hood in the Canadian Writers and Their Works series (136–9). Hood departs from historical authenticity here, since the 1967 Dominion Drama Festival, in honour of the Centennial, was confined to Canadian plays. It was held in St John’s, Newfoundland. Information in this and the succeeding paragraph derives from somewhat spotty Hart House scrapbooks held in the University of Toronto Archives. There is one exception: the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art is known as rada, not “the rada,” the form used by Hood’s characters here (102, 103, 108). Significantly, Hood realized his mistake, and in Tony’s Book the definite article is dropped (28, 35, 37). For the record, it should be noted that, at a talk given in St Michael’s College at the University of Toronto (29 October 1992), Hood claimed this revelatory scene to be “Christological” and based in some respects on Molly Bloom’s soliloquy in Joyce’s Ulysses. These are mentioned only by their first names, but are easily identifiable: David and Stephen Lewis, Ed Broadbent, Stanley Knowles, and Tommy Douglas. For those rereading the novel and already familiar with Tony’s Book, the connection is made all the more evident by Matt’s unconsciously proleptic question that follows immediately: “You’re taking the kids?” This was historically the size of the Fulford estate, though it is now reduced to three. This painting was displayed at an exhibition in the Brockville Museum during the summer of 1997. Hood made this comment in a talk given at St Michael’s College in the University of Toronto (29 October 1992). Another oral comment, made by Hood at a reading at University

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29

30 31 32 33

34

35

36

37

38

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College in the University of Toronto just after Property and Value was published in the fall of 1990. For the equivalent of this passage, see In Search (5: 449–50), though the translation is different from any published English translation, and may well be Hood’s own. Hood mentioned this fact in private conversation and publicly in the lecture at St Michael’s College in the University of Toronto (29 October 1992). Hood to the author in private conversation (4 June 1991). See the opening of Mitchell’s Who Has Seen the Wind (1947) and the general discussion in Stegner’s Wolf Willow (1963). I am indebted to Dr Dave Little for information and details at this point. Hood spoke about this matter during a talk given at St Michael’s College in the University of Toronto (29 October 1992), when he was about to embark upon the writing of Dead Men’s Watches. Hood had, however, made the decision at least eighteen months earlier, since he had told me in a private conversation on 4 June 1991 that Adam would die of aids in Matt’s arms. This is another of the unifying factors linking the two parts of the novel. In the first story, for example, Matt’s ignorance of the North (offered as representative of southern Canadian attitudes) is exposed by Josh and Andrea on their visit to the Yukon and by Jeanne Three Streams Magill, who recognizes his false preconceptions about Moosonee. It may be helpful to quote the Oxford English Dictionary at this point. “Periplum” is first recorded in Pound’s Cantos (1941): “Periplum, not as land looks on a map But as sea bord seen by men sailing” (Canto 59). “Periplus,” however, is defined first as “a voyage (or journey) round a coastline, etc.; a circuit,” and also as a “narrative of such a voyage.” The dates of first usages are given as 1776 and 1803 respectively. For Hood on the Odyssey as periplus as early as 1978, see Struthers “Interview” (57). Hood’s death, only a month before the publication of the final volume, constituted an especially poignant quirk of fate, but he lived long enough to read and approve proofs. For an account of the circumstances under which the text of Near Water was produced, see my “Seeing Hugh Hood’s Last Novel through the Press.” Although Dionysius is usually regarded as authoritative on this subject, the ordering of the angelic hierarchies differs somewhat from author to author. Pope Gregory i produced a slightly different list in his Homilies on the Gospel, while Dante in the Paradiso (canto 28) and the Convivio proposes other orderings. Hood’s list agrees with Dionysius so far as Angels, Archangels, Dominations (=Dominions), Thrones, Cherubim, and Seraphim are concerned, but he varies the order of the other choirs

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for his own purposes. In a letter to the present writer (29 January 1999) he described himself as employing for the middle choirs “a system of my own that is in order with the story I have to tell.” 39 The title of this last novel also reminds us of the central presence of water throughout the series, including Matt’s near drowning and the exploit on Toronto Island in The Swing in the Garden, the skating and the ghost ship in A New Athens, the water under the park in Reservoir Ravine, and so on. Similar water scenes and water references could be cited for every book in the series. Indeed, the New Age’s claims to the title of “roman-fleuve” are justified in imagistic as well as generic terms. 40 I am indebted to my wife for drawing my attention to the significance of this detail.

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Bibliography

The following bibliography contains all the works cited in this book and, in addition, lists other critical writings that either discuss The New Age or contain important general discussions of Hood’s fiction. The most detailed bibliography, by J.R. (Tim) Struthers, was virtually complete at the time of publication, but unfortunately, it dates back to the early 1980s; the less ambitious bibliography at the close of Keith Garebian’s essay in the Canadian Writers and Their Works series is useful but also inevitably outdated. Both are, of course, listed below. Bayley, John. “The Ikon and the Music.” The Album of Anthony Powell’s “Dance to the Music of Time.” Ed. Violet Powell. London: Thames and Hudson, 1987. 9–22. Bilan, R.P. “Fiction 2” (“Letters in Canada 1977”). University of Toronto Quarterly 47 (summer 1978): 326–38. Bliss, Michael. “Hugh Hood, Canada and History: A Historian’s Viewpoint.” Literary Review of Canada 8.2 (March 2000): 3–5. Brydon, Diana. “Tradition and Postcolonialism: Hugh Hood and Martin Boyd.” Mosaic 15.3 (September 1982): 1–15. Buitenhuis, Peter. “A Manipulated Universe.” (Review of Property and Value). Matrix 35 (fall 1991): 80–1. Cloutier, Pierre. “An Interview with Hugh Hood.” Journal of Canadian Fiction 2.1 (winter 1973): 49–52. Colombo, John Robert. “Hood, Hugh.” Colombo’s Canadian References. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1976. 244.

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Cooke, John. The Influence of Painting on Five Canadian Writers: Alice Munro, Hugh Hood, Timothy Findley, Margaret Atwood, and Michael Ondaatje. Lewiston, ny: Edwin Mellen Press, 1996. Copoloff-Mechanic, Susan. Pilgrim’s Progress: A Study of the Short Stories of Hugh Hood. Toronto: ecw Press, 1988. Davis, Douglas M. “An Interview with Anthony Powell.” College English 24 (April 1963): 533–6. Dionysius. See Pseudo-Dionysius. Duffy, Dennis. “Grace: The Novels of Hugh Hood.” Canadian Literature 47 (winter 1971): 10–25. – “‘More Dear, Both for Themselves and for Thy Sake’: Hugh Hood’s The New Age.” The Montreal Story Tellers: Memoirs, Photographs, Critical Essays. Ed. J.R. (Tim) Struthers. Montréal: Véhicule, 1985. 169–75. – “Space/Time and the Matter of Form.” Essays on Canadian Writing 13/14 (winter/spring 1978–79): 131–44. Fee, Margery. “On Hood.” (Review of Garebian’s Hugh Hood). Canadian Literature 103 (winter 1984): 121–3. Frye, Northrop. The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982. Fulford, Robert. “An Interview with Hugh Hood.” Tamarack Review 66 (June 1975): 65–77. Garebian, Keith. Hugh Hood. Boston: Twayne, 1983. – “Hugh Hood (1928– ).” Canadian Writers and Their Works, Fiction Series. Volume Seven. Ed. Robert Lecker, Jack David, and Ellen Quigley. Toronto: ecw Press, 1985. 91–151. Hale, Victoria G. “An Interview with Hugh Hood.” World Literature Written in English 11 (April 1972): 35–41. Harding, Anthony John. “Field of Vision: Hugh Hood and the Tradition of Wordsworth.” Canadian Literature 94 (autumn 1982): 85–94. Hewitt, Nicholas. “Roman-Fleuve: Series and Novel Cycles.” Encyclopedia of the Novel. Ed. Paul Schellinger. 2 vols with continuous pagination. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1998. 1110–13. Hood, Hugh. Around the Mountain: Scenes from Montreal Life. Toronto: Peter Martin, 1967. Short stories. – “Author’s Introduction.” The Collected Stories IV (Around the Mountain). Erin, on: Porcupine’s Quill, 1994. 9–29. – Be Sure to Close Your Eyes. (The New Age / Le nouveau siècle 9). Toronto: Anansi, 1993. – Black and White Keys. (The New Age / Le nouveau siècle 4). Downsview, on: ecw Press, 1982. – “Bringing it all back: problems of the serial novelist.” Mimeographed single sheet distributed at a talk given at St Michael’s College in the University of Toronto, 29 October 1992.

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– The Camera Always Lies. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1967. Novel. – Dark Glasses. Ottawa: Oberon Press, 1976. Short stories. – Dead Men’s Watches. (The New Age / Le nouveau siècle 10). Toronto: Anansi, 1995. – “The Elephant in the Next Room: Anatomy of a Long Work.” Canadian Literature 116 (spring 1988): 97–108. – Five New Facts about Giorgione. Windsor, on: Black Moss Press, 1987. Novella. – The Fruit Man, the Meat Man & the Manager. Ottawa: Oberon Press, 1971. Short stories. – A Game of Touch. Don Mills, on: Longman, 1970. Novel. – The Governor’s Bridge Is Closed. Ottawa: Oberon Press, 1973. Essays. – Great Realizations. (The New Age / Le nouveau siècle 11). Toronto: Anansi, 1997. – “Hugh Hood (1928– ).” Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series. Vol. 17. Detroit: Gale Research, 1993. 75–94. – “Hugh Hood Replies [to Patrick Mahoney’s article listed below].” Canadian Literature 96 (Spring 1983): 46–8. – The Isolation Booth. (The Collected Stories III). Erin, on: Porcupine’s Quill, 1991. – The Motor Boys in Ottawa. (The New Age / Le nouveau siècle 6). Toronto: Stoddart, 1986. – Near Water. (The New Age / Le nouveau siècle 12). Toronto: Anansi, 2000. – A New Athens. (The New Age / Le nouveau siècle 2). Ottawa: Oberon Press, 1977. – “Notes for a talk at the Heliconian Club.” Mimeographed single sheet distributed at the talk in Toronto, 24 April 1981. – Property and Value. (The New Age / Le nouveau siècle 8). Toronto: Anansi, 1990. – Reservoir Ravine. (The New Age / Le nouveau siècle 3). Ottawa: Oberon Press, 1979. – The Scenic Art. (The New Age / Le nouveau siècle 5). Toronto: Stoddart, 1984. – Scoring: The Art of Hockey. Images by Seymour Segal. Ottawa: Oberon Press, 1979. Non-fiction. – A Short Walk in the Rain. (The Collected Stories II). Erin, on: Porcupine’s Quill, 1989. – Strength down Centre: The Jean Béliveau Story. Scarborough, on: PrenticeHall, 1970. Non-fiction. – The Swing in the Garden. (The New Age / Le nouveau siècle 1). Ottawa: Oberon Press, 1975. – Tony’s Book. (The New Age / Le nouveau siècle 7). Toronto: Stoddart, 1988. – Trusting the Tale. Downsview, on: ecw Press, 1983. Essays. – Unsupported Assertions. Toronto: Anansi, 1991. Essays.

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White Figure, White Ground. New York: Dutton, 1964. Novel. You Cant Get There from Here. Ottawa: Oberon Press, 1972. Novel. You’ll Catch Your Death. Erin, on: Porcupine’s Quill, 1992. Short Stories. and John Mills. “Hugh Hood and John Mills in Epistolary Conversation.” Fiddlehead 116 (winter 1978): 133–46. Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. [1939]. Corr. ed. New York: Viking Press, 1958. Keith, W.J. “A Canadian Masterpiece: Hugh Hood’s The New Age.” Antigonish Review 126 (summer 2001): 21–30. – “The Case for Hugh Hood.” Canadian Forum 60 (October 1980): 27–9. Reprinted in An Independent Stance: Essays on English-Canadian Criticism and Fiction. Erin, on: Porcupine’s Quill, 1991. 234–40. – “Hugh Hood.” A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada. Toronto: ecw Press, 1989. 134–54. – “Seeing Hugh Hood’s Last Novel through the Press.” Canadian Notes & Queries 59 (spring/summer 2001): 15–17. – Untitled review of Black and White Keys. Fiddlehead 135 (January 1983): 93–95. Lecker, Robert. “A Spirit of Communion: The Swing in the Garden.” Essays on Canadian Writing 13/14 (winter/spring 1978–79): 187–210. Levene, Mark. “Fiction 2” (“Letters in Canada 1984”). University of Toronto Quarterly 54 (August 1985): 322–38. Little, Dave. “On the Trail of Hugh Hood: History and the Holocaust in Black and White Keys.” Essays on Canadian Writing 44 (spring 1991): 142–61. Mahoney, Patrick J. “Hugh Hood’s Edenic Garden: Psychoanalysis among the Flowerbeds.” Canadian Literature 96 (spring 1983): 37–45. Mathews, Lawrence. “Hood and Evil.” The Montreal Story Tellers: Memoirs, Photographs, Critical Essays. Ed. J.R. (Tim) Struthers. Montréal: Véhicule, 1985. 176–87. – “The Secular and the Sacral: Notes on A New Athens and Three Stories by Hugh Hood.” Essays on Canadian Writing 13/14 (winter/spring 1978–79): 211–29. Maurois, André. The Quest for Proust. Trans. Gerard Hopkins. London: Constable, 1984. Mills, John. “Hugh Hood and the Anagogical Method.” Essays on Canadian Writing 13/14 (winter/spring 1978–79): 94–112. – See also Hood, Hugh, and John Mills. Morley, Patricia. The Comedians: Hugh Hood and Rudy Wiebe. Toronto: Clarke Irwin, 1977. Owen, I.M. “Part Six of Twelve.” Idler 11 (January–February 1987): 47–9. Painter, George D. Marcel Proust: A Biography. Rev. and enl. ed. 2 vols in 1. London: Chatto & Windus, 1989. Pell, Barbara Helen. “Faith and Fiction: The Novels of Callaghan and Hood.” Journal of Canadian Studies 18.2 (summer 1983): 5–17.

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Powell, Anthony. A Dance to the Music of Time. [1951–75} 4 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. This edition reproduces the separate pagination of the original editions of the twelve novels. – Miscellaneous Verdicts: Writings on Writers 1946–1989. London: Heinemann, 1990. – “Taken from Life.” Twentieth Century 170 (July 1961): 50–53. Proust, Marcel. In Search of Lost Time [A la recherche du temps perdu]. Trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin; rev. D.J. Enright. 6 vols. London: Chatto & Windus, 1992. Pseudo-Dionysius. Complete Works. Ed. Paul Rorem. Trans. Colm Liubhéid. Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1987. Rigelhof, T.F. “Tales Catching Tales.” This Is Our Writing. Erin, on: Porcupine’s Quill, 2000. 111–33. Sandler, Linda. “Between Proust and Yonge.” Books in Canada 4 (December 1975): 5–7. Solecki, Sam. “The Gospel of St. Andrew.” (Review of Black and White Keys). Canadian Forum 62 (December 1982–January 1983): 38. – “Songs of Innocence.” (Review of Reservoir Ravine). Canadian Forum 59 (October 1979): 29–30. Struthers, J.R. (Tim). “Hugh Hood: An Annotated Bibliography.” The Annotated Bibliography of Canada’s Major Authors. Vol. 5. Ed. Robert Lecker and Jack David. Downsview, on: ecw Press, 1984. 231–353. – “An Interview with Hugh Hood.” Essays on Canadian Writing 13/14 (winter/spring, 1978–79): 21–93. – “It’s Almost Time.” (Review of Great Realizations). Books in Canada 27 (September 1998): 12–15. – Untitled review of The Swing in the Garden. Queen’s Quarterly 83 (fall 1976): 518–19. Tucker, James. The Novels of Anthony Powell. London: Macmillan, 1976. Underhill, Evelyn. Mysticism. [1911]. Rev. ed. London: Macmillan, 1930. Waugh, Auberon. “Auberon Waugh on The Music of Time.” Spectator 226 (20 February 1971): 258–9. Wilson, Edmund. Axel’s Castle. New York: Scribner’s, 1931. Wordsworth, William. The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth. Ed. Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire. 5 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940–49. – The Prose Works of William Wordsworth. Ed. W.J.B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974. Yanofsky, Joel. “Chosen Son.” (Review of The Motor Boys in Ottawa). Books in Canada 15 (October 1986): 12–14.

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Acts of the Apostles, 180, 181, 182 aids, 41, 44, 144, 157, 160, 161, 163, 164 Aquinas, Saint Thomas, 34 Athens (Ont.), 71, 73, 122, 181. See also Hood, Hugh, New Athens Atwood, Margaret, 54 Austen, Jane, 54 Balfour, Earl, 55, 77, 80, 86 Balzac, Honoré de, 19, 27, 30, 59, 198n7 Bayley, John, 51–2 Beckett, Samuel, 188 Bilan, R.P., 80 Blaise, Clark, 18 Brett, G.S., 55, 76 Broadbent, Ed, 199n22 Brockville (Ont.), 24, 54, 65, 120–2, 171 Bronfman, Samuel, 94 Brooke, Frances, 71 Brydon, Diana, 198n8 & 10 Buitenhuis, Peter, 140–1, 143 Bunyan, John. See Pilgrim’s Progress

Burton, Robert, 29 Calgary, 105 Callaghan, Morley, 23, 99 Canada–U.S. Auto Pact, 6, 113, 115, 116, 120, 130 ccf party, 55 Centennial Year, 23, 113, 121, 130 Charleston Lake (Ont.), 181 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 29, 123 Chekhov, Anton, 105, 110 Cloutier, Pierre, 18, 19, 53 Cochrane (Ont.), 165 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 34, 68, 78, 154 Como, Perry, 96, 100 Confederation, 4, 22 Connor, Ralph, 55 Crosby, Bing, 45, 90, 96, 100, 152 Dachau, 93, 99, 100, 102 Dante, 5, 6, 29, 33, 34, 72, 84, 180, 182, 189–90, 200n38 Dark Night of the Soul, 133, 147, 188 Davis, Donald, 110

de la Roche, Mazo, 28, 59 Depression, the, 62 Dickens, Charles, 29, 133, 167 Dionysius, 181, 182. See also Pseudo-Dionysius Dominion Drama Festival, 105, 110, 116, 117, 199n18 Douglas, T.C. (Tommy), 199n22 Duffy, Dennis, 72 Dulles, Allen, 55, 94 Dürer, Albrecht, 72, 169 Durrell, Lawrence, 5 Eliot, T.S., 84 Ensor, James, 45 Farmersville. See Athens (Ont.) Faulkner, William, 5, 30 Fee, Margery, 9–10 Findley, Timothy, 90 First World War, 10, 37, 38, 43, 44, 86, 89, 97, 147 Flaubert, Gustave, 29 Follows, Ted, 110 Forthton (Ont.), 65, 66, 67 free trade, 60, 120

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Freiman, A.J., 94 Freud, Sigmund, 137, 143 Frye, Northrop, 9, 193 Fulford, Robert, 28, 39, 58 Galsworthy, John, 3, 5, 6, 27, 33, 59 Gardner, David, 110 Garebian, Keith, 51, 59, 76, 79, 86, 87, 88, 93, 100, 199n17 Gill, Robert, 105, 109, 110 Goderich (Ont.), 24 Gordon, John King, 55 Group of Seven, 115 Guinness, Alec, 109 Guthrie, Tyrone, 55, 102, 105, 109 Harding, Anthony John, 35, 72 Hardy, Thomas, 21, 27, 54, 66, 137 Harris, Lawren, 45 Hart House Theatre. See University of Toronto Hewitt, Nicholas, 30–1, 194 Holocaust, 89–90, 91, 92, 93, 94 Homer, 173, 174, 180, 181 Hood, Hugh – novels: Be Sure to Close Your Eyes, 9, 18, 19, 24, 44, 45, 81, 109, 121, 144, 145, 146–55, 175, 179; Black and White Keys, 10, 11, 18, 29, 32, 44, 45, 77, 80, 89–101, 102, 103, 107, 124, 130, 140, 165, 175, 179; The Camera Always Lies, 22, 39; Dead Men’s Watches, 19, 41, 81, 134, 144, 145, 156–66, 175, 179, 198n6; Five New Facts about Giorgione, 137; A Game of Touch, 21; Great Realizations, 4–5, 18, 45, 117, 144, 145, 164, 165, 167–77, 179, 194, 195, 198n5; The Motor Boys

in Ottawa, 4, 21, 40, 45, 60, 104, 109, 112, 113–22, 125, 128, 130, 131, 133, 173, 198n4; Near Water, 5, 6, 11, 18, 21, 31, 40, 43, 44, 122, 145, 165, 166, 176, 178–92, 195; A New Athens, 7, 10, 20, 24, 27, 32, 34, 35, 41, 42, 44, 45, 64–73, 74, 75, 78, 80, 81, 83, 97, 98, 103, 104, 108, 119, 121–2, 130, 131, 140, 146, 148, 149, 174, 191–2, 194, 195, 197n4, 201n39; Property and Value, 35, 40–1, 45, 81, 119, 124, 125, 126–7, 133, 136–45, 148, 153, 159, 175; Reservoir Ravine, 3, 9, 10, 11, 18, 32, 38, 39, 41, 42, 44, 74–88, 89, 91, 108, 130–1, 153, 179, 201n39; The Scenic Art, 8, 11, 21, 22, 40, 41, 45, 55, 81, 102–12, 113, 116, 117–18, 119, 121, 124, 125, 126, 128, 129–30, 131, 134, 160, 162, 164; The Swing in the Garden, 3, 9, 10, 21, 23, 25, 28, 31, 32, 35, 39–40, 45, 51–63, 64, 74, 76, 80, 82, 86, 95, 100, 109, 125, 133, 160, 168–9, 175, 176, 195, 198n4, 201 n39; Tony’s Book, 8, 11, 18, 35, 118, 119, 123–35, 160, 175, 176, 199n20; White Figure, White Ground, 7, 21; You Cant Get There from Here, 10, 22 – short stories: Around the Mountain, 6, 20, 21, 22; August Nights, 21; “Bicultural Angela,” 20, 21, 36; “Brother André, Père Lamarche, and My Grandmother Eugénie Blagdon,” 80; Dark

Glasses, 21; Flying a Red Kite, 20, 21, 34, 77; “Friends and Relations,” 21; The Fruit Man, the Meat Man & the Manager, 22, 80, 186; “The Ingenue I Should Have Kissed, but Didn’t,” 21; The Isolation Booth, 21; None Genuine without This Signature, 7; “Paradise Retained?” 22; “Recollections of the Works Department,” 21, 77; “Silver Bugles, Cymbals, Golden Silks,” 21; “Starting Again on Sherbrooke Street,” 21; “Three Halves of a House,” 20, 21, 36; “Whos paying for this call,” 186; You’ll Catch Your Death, 21 – non-fiction: “Afterword: What Is Going on,” 7; “Author’s Introduction” to Around the Mountain, 6; “Before the Flood,” 7; “Bringing it all back,” 163; “The Elephant in the Next Room,” 20, 24; The Governor’s Bridge Is Closed, 22; “The Intuition of Being: Morley, Marshall and Me,” 197n2; “The Ontology of SuperRealism,” 37; Scoring: The Art of Hockey, 8; Trusting the Tale, 7; Unsupported Assertions, 197n2 Hood, John, 122 House, Eric, 110 Hutt, William, 110 Innis, Harold, 56, 59, 60 James, Henry, 29 Joyce, James, 5, 11, 22, 29, 31, 44, 52, 54, 61, 72, 84,

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85, 129, 151, 154, 198–9n12, 199n21 Kaplan, Henry, 110 King, William Lyon Mackenzie, 77 King City (Ont.), 153 Knowles, Stanley, 199n22 Lawrence, D.H., 61 Leacock, Stephen, 60, 72 League for Social Reconstruction, 54 Leavis, F.R., 141 Lecker, Robert, 58, 59, 61, 62, 64 Levene, Mark, 111 Lewis, David and Stephen, 199n22 Little, Dave, 94–5, 200n32 Mallory, Dr Dwight, 121, 154 Mallory, Jeanne, 121–2 Mallory, Noreen, 79, 109, 122, 135 Manitoba, 77, 101 Manley, Skip, 8, 106, 108, 109 Mann, Thomas, 61, 137, 141, 162 Maritain, Jacques, 55, 197n2 Maritimes, 18 Massey, Raymond, 92–3, 95 Mathews, Lawrence, 70, 71, 96, 100 Maurois, André, 19 Mills, John, 28, 29, 53, 61, 70, 71 Milton, John, 46, 152, 182 Mitchell, W.O., 105, 154 Montreal, 18, 19, 21, 55, 81, 114, 120, 133; Expo 67, 22, 133, 175; October Crisis, 113, 115; Université de Montréal, 17 Moose Factory (Ont.), 164 Moosonee (Ont.), 156, 165, 200n35 Munro, Alice, 51

National Gallery of Canada, 45, 137, 167, 169, 171, 173, 194, 198n5 New Democratic Party, 55, 114, 115 Newman, John Henry, 10 New Testament, 7, 150 Nova Scotia, 19 Old Testament, 7, 150, 151 Ontario, 19, 52, 54, 57, 62, 65, 71, 72–3, 107, 135, 176, 177, 180, 189 Orwell, George, 61, 170, 171 Ottawa, 116, 173, 175, 194. See also National Gallery of Canada Owen, I.M., 92, 96, 115 Pater, Walter, 7, 152, 190 Paul, Saint, 171, 180, 181, 182, 191 Pearson, Lester, 55, 77, 107, 121 Pilgrim’s Progress, 180 Poe, Edgar Allan, 133 Pope, Alexander, 71 Pound, Ezra, 200n36 Powell, Anthony, 4, 5, 8, 11, 17, 19, 23, 26, 40, 41, 43, 80, 134; Dance to the Music of Time, 3, 22, 30–1, 42–7, 51–2, 85, 140; Miscellaneous Verdicts, 47 Prescott (Ont.), 81 Proust, Marcel, 5, 8, 17, 19, 26, 29, 30, 31, 44, 51, 52, 55, 60, 61, 62, 76, 79, 85, 109, 136, 139–40, 151, 176; A la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), 11, 27, 37–42, 43, 45–6, 83, 138–9, 141–3, 153, 162; “Filial Sentiments of a Matricide,” 40 Pseudo-Dionysius, 182–4, 185, 188, 189, 191. See also Dionysius

Quebec, 17, 19, 23, 52, 77, 101, 113, 120, 132, 133 Rabelais, François, 29 Regina (Sask.), 150 Reid, Kate, 110 Rigelhof, T.F., 197nn2–3 roman-fleuve, 17, 26–32, 194, 201n39 St Lawrence River, Seaway, 68, 69 Saint-Simon, Duc de, 17, 29, 34 Sandler, Linda, 9, 39, 59 Saskatchewan, 19, 150, 154 Scott, F.R., 54 Scott, Sir Walter, 54 Second World War, 43, 57, 58, 89, 126, 175 Segal, Seymour, 8 Shakespeare, William, 102, 105, 128–9, 133, 154, 190 Sharon Temple (Ont.), 62 Snow, C.P., 3–4, 5 Snow, Michael, 135 Solecki, Sam, 9, 19, 24, 29, 89, 91 Spencer, Stanley, 10, 45, 72, 95, 96, 97 Stegner, Wallace, 154 Stoppard, Tom, 104 Stratford Festival (Ont.), 8, 24, 102, 104, 105, 106, 109, 130 Struthers, J.R. (Tim), 9, 20, 34–5, 36, 58, 70, 154, 168, 174, 194–5 Tennyson, Alfred, 46 Titian, 45, 167, 168, 169–70, 171, 173, 174, 175, 194–5 Tolstoy, Leo, 29, 32, 33, 54, 61, 99 Toronto, 17, 18, 19, 23, 39–40, 53, 54, 60, 75, 76, 81, 82, 91, 95, 96, 100, 102, 107, 109, 116, 122, 126, 139, 190; Brank-

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some Hall, 121; Leslie Street Spit, 172, 176–7, 195; Maple Leaf Stadium, 90, Pontifical Institute, 55; Rosedale, 40, 57, 176; Toronto Island(s), 9, 35, 57, 176, 195, 201n39. See also University of Toronto Town, Harold, 135 Trollope, Anthony, 5 Trudeau, Pierre Elliott, 55, 113, 114, 119–20, 172 Tucker, James, 47 Underhill, Evelyn, 182, 183

Underhill, Frank, 54 University of Toronto, 57, 66, 76; Hart House, 77, 105, 109–10; St Michael’s College, 23, 197n2; University College, 75, 76; Victoria College, 23 Venice, 40, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 167, 172 Veronese, Paul, 44 Virgil, 46, 154 Wall Street Crash, 10, 23, 83, 84, 86, 88, 151 Waugh, Auberon, 31

Waugh, Evelyn, 118 Whitehorse (Yukon), 19, 165 Wilson, Edmund, 129 Winnipeg, 79; Winnipeg General Strike, 19 Woodsworth, J.S., 55 Woolf, Virginia, 54 Wordsworth, William, 11, 22, 34–7, 42, 60, 61, 66–7, 68, 70–1, 72, 85, 125–6, 133, 134 Yanofsky, Joel, 144 Yukon, 19, 200n35 Zola, Émile, 27, 30, 33