Oscar Wilde warned that “all art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.” While a work of fiction such as Swift's Tale of a Tub may demonstrate the peril of both a literal and an interpretive reading, the problem with Hugh Hood's fiction is that it rarely threatens the reader with either peril. The surface seldom is engaging enough to stand alone and the symbol often remains too insistently at the forefront of the narrative. If this were the problem of only the weaker of Hood's stories, I would simply praise Dark Glasses (Hood's fourth collection of short stories) for containing three or four of the best examples in all of literature of how the short story works. The weaker of the twelve stories could be dismissed on the assumption that they were included because of Hood's predilection for arranging his “pieces according to complex numerologies” that provide “a scaffolding for the imagination”: “I once wrote the rough draft of a book in two main sections and when I had finished each half of the manuscript was precisely 144 pages long: twelve twelves doubled.” Such structural patterns have been Hood's rule. The above quotations are from The Governor's Bridge Is Closed which contains twelve essays and 144 pages. Dark Glasses has twelve stories and 143 pages. The printer must have caught Hell.

Hood's strength lies in his ability to shape what he calls the “physical form” of material as diffuse as metaphysical speculation. Thus in terms of both manner and matter Hood is like the painter Alex Colville. Neither artist can rid himself “of those four or five bloody sets of metaphysical states” that Mathew Goderich (the persona for Hood's projected twelve volume prose epic) complained about: “Permanence and change; sameness and difference; being and becoming; form and matter.” Mathew is torn between his father's wish “to see conflict between dialectic poles resolved” and his own wish “to see permanence coexist with change” (A Swing in the Garden, p. 68). Both Hood and Colville react to the same dilemma by concentrating on the spirit of the shapes of things: “If you pay close enough attention to things, stare at them, concentrate on them as hard as you can, not just with your intelligence, but with your feelings and instincts, you begin to apprehend the forms in them” (The Governor's Bridge is Closed, p. 132). Hood is less impressive in his fiction than in his journalism because he frequently exploits artifice to impose an extrinsic pattern on his fiction. On a television show with Robert Fulford, Hood explained that his swing in the garden is constructed in the shape of St. Andrew's cross and that it stood across the street from St. Andrew's Gardens in Toronto. By emphasizing this kind of extrinsic symbolism Hood reinforces his “scaffolding of the imagination” at the expense of obscuring the more important implications of the metaphor concerning time and space. The child may be thought safe from the railroad tracks that lie beyond the garden fence but the pendulum motion of the swing suggests that the real journey from the garden is a temporal one.

At his best Hood succeeds in complementing the physical form of his stories with an inner scaffolding developed through the manipulation of metaphors which seem to emerge from within the incident. “Going out as a Ghost” is an excellent story that presents two strands of action which appear to be unrelated but actually are connected through the metaphor of the mask—the convincing disguises of a family's Halloween costumes and the suspected disguise of a convicted con-artist. The two story lines complement one another and then meet when the father suspiciously hangs up the phone on his desperate friend and then turns to reward the small Halloween visitor who is dressed as a ghost—the same unimaginative costume which the father had considered suitable for himself. This and the other successful stories illustrate the epigraph that Hood chose for the collection: “For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face.” Most of Hood's characters quickly retreat from the impact of the brief moment of self-revelation. “Dark Glasses” presents an intolerant writer who clips dark lenses over his glasses because he cannot bear to recognize his own savage self in the eyes of two older fanatics. In “Thanksgiving: Between Junetown and Caintown”, a breast-shaped mountain and a boar with hemisphere-like testicles represent the domestic world of sexual politics in which a domineering wife feels threatened by the evidence that her strengths must be complemented by her husband's.

When Hood fails to develop an intrinsic metaphor he reveals his weakness as a story-teller and leaves himself wide open to the charge first made ten years ago by Robert Fulford that his natural medium is journalism rather than fiction. Hood can objectify his metaphysical speculations into a story through the manipulation of metaphor but when he fails with metaphor he has no skill with character or incident to fall back on. “The Chess Match” is the one story in which the portrayal of character is the dominant feature. The eighty-six year old Page Calverly is a match for Margaret Laurence's Hagar Shipley. His petty crankiness is comical but understandable as we see how he maintains his dignity by determining what can be endured with the least discomfort. Yet “The Chess Match” still demonstrates how Hood's metaphors work best when they inform the story rather than supply external scaffolding. Even the minor metaphors are well exploited here. “Tortoise-like” is an adjective that describes Calverly's walk but it also anticipates the image of the impaled spider that Calverly resembles after he has slipped and fallen which in turn raises the insolent question of why such an ugly specimen should be preserved.

In “The Hole” the metaphor is given no story to support. As the idle musings of a philosophy professor, “The Hole” is really little more than a commentary on a song by Thomas Carew. Hood's explanation of the story in an essay from The Governor's Bridge presents a more clear, more suggestive, and hence more exciting discussion of the story's metaphysical speculations. “The Pitcher” is ostensibly a satire on the American dream in which the common man through dedication (and money) becomes an inspiration to American youth. But the satire seems no more than an excuse for some exciting sports talk for which again we should turn to an essay from The Governor's Bridge on the pleasures of hockey to see how much closer to the action Hood can get us.

As the latest addition to Hood's canon, Dark Glasses makes it difficult to judge the nature of Hood's talent. Documentary fantasy is the term he has coined to describe the compromise between fiction and journalism that he is seeking to achieve: “Historical mythology, the articulation of the past, the articulation of the meaning of our society in terms of the way we live our lives, in terms of the institutions that we're so intensely aware of that we don't even think we're thinking them … that's what I want to get at. Documents like Eaton's catalogue. I want an artistic perception of the full meaning for me of Eaton's catalogue” (Tamarack Review, 66 (1975), 66).

Personal journalism with epic intentions is a genre which Hood has not mastered. A comparison of the title essay from The Governor's Bridge Is Closed (Hood's personal recollection of his childhood in Toronto during the 1930s) and the first volume of his documentary fantasy, A Swing in the Garden (similar recollections now objectified as the gospel according to Mathew Goderich), suggests that Hood's gifts are more suited to journalism. His essay is personal, informal, and speculative. His documentary fantasy must depend on character, structure, and incident, but being weak on character and incident it is little more than a longer and less personal essay, sustained only by its structure. Mathew admits that his younger brother is the story-teller of the family: “Tony would make the events of the broken window and later strapping into a vivid tale of crime and punishment.” And it is rather his sister who takes part “in one of the epic encounters of the neighbourhood.” Her one-sided defeat in a fight with a schoolboy was one which Mathew “was expected to avenge and never did.” Mathew is the recollective one of the family, the commentator who ponders the sources of events (A Swing in the Garden, pp. 109, 33, 109).

Hood could overcome the problem of his documentary fantasy by being more directly personal as he is in his essays. The fictional persona of Mathew, however closely he resembles Hood, remains a barrier between this intellectually exciting author and his audience. But any wish that Hood would abandon all pretense of fictional techniqe must be modified by the brilliance of some of the short stories from Dark Glasses which proves that he is capable of producing great fiction. Still the nature of the strength of these stories, being limited to the exploitation of metaphor, reveals the problems that Hood must confront if the epic which he is devoting his life to is to serve the nation.