[In the following excerpt, Garebian provides a stylistic and thematic analysis of Hood's short fiction, in particular his use of allegory.]

As a Catholic, Hood cannot help making the redemption of man a central creed in his fiction. The theme is not turned into a sectarian inquiry, however. Redemption becomes something available to everyone, no matter what his natural talents or opportunities, his psychic or cultural development. Catholic theology is a moral force that implicitly informs his deepest vision. The moral tone is high, but without being injunctive or doctrinaire. Hood espouses without preachment; he observes without necessarily forcing issues or moral victories. Yet, by some special balance in his craft, he is always interpretive—never simply a passive documentarian. And sharpening this sense of significance is a strong physical form for the fiction. Sometimes this sense of form becomes a game with numerologies. Most often, however, it is intrinsic and is crystallized by the device of the emblem.

An emblem is distinct from a symbol. Both are iconic embodiments of thought and feeling, but while a symbol “at once reveals and conceals,”¹ an emblem is a visual design that is a speaking picture—more precise than a symbol but no less effective in its ability to mediate between the physical and the divine. An emblem and a symbol are both analogies for reality, but a symbol is a metaphor “one half of which remains unstated and indefinite,”² whereas an emblem, deriving as it does from hieroglyphics, is always particular, though it can vary in character from the explicit allegory of an Aesopian fable to the enigmatic subtlety of a metaphysical conceit in John Donne's poetry. Where a symbol, because it is a figure or an image used as the sign of something, is primarily aesthetic,³ an emblem combines the beautiful with the didactically moral. Both symbol and emblem share, however, the power to externalize the hidden. Religious symbolism and Christian emblems both flourish as handmaidens of the supernatural, and in Hood everything expresses the divine signature.

As with Baudelaire (who in “Correspondances” makes the poet a seer who sees into the infinite), Hood practices a method of reaching a vision in which the reader can participate. Also, like Emanuel Swedenborg, Hood believes in a reciprocity between the natural and spiritual worlds. But for Hood the code of this emblematic correspondence is not hermetic; it is a profound but apprehensible language whereby the infinite addresses the finite.

Hood's emblems are numerous: a Halloween gorilla-mask; a mountain overlooking a metropolis; a sunken “ghost” ship; an oil painting of white light; garden swing; an Olympic stadium whose “O” shape is an analogy for nothingness. The list could go on intriguingly, but it is sufficient to say that this iconography of the imagination produces an allegorical mode which is an extension of literary symbolism.

When Hood first came to critical attention in 1962, he was praised condescendingly for his “sound English” and marvelous sense of place, as if the only criteria for literary distinction were correct grammar and a regional ambience. Not many critics read him according to the conventions he was using, and so did not know how to deal with him. While Ronald Sutherland and Robert Fulford rushed to proclaim him as part of the Canadian mainstream, Margaret Atwood and Doug Jones ignored him altogether in their descriptive grids for Canadian literature. He was lumped by A. J. M. Smith together with Sinclair Ross, Hugh Garner, Jack Ludwig, Mordecai Richler, and Alice Munro for realism and a “peculiar amalgam of irony and sentiment,”⁴ which was really quite a startling lump considering the many radical ways in which Hood differs from these writers. There are still too many critics and reviewers who refuse to believe that he writes something other than sheer realism. Even in 1980 it was possible to find a reviewer who could write with touching innocence of Hood's natural “figures of speech” drawn from “physical geography.”⁵

Hood has spoken so frequently about his allegorical method that a critic who does not read his fiction as allegory is either inordinately perverse or helplessly naive. Northrop Frye contends that “genuine allegory is a structural element in literature”⁶ and that commentary itself is “allegorical interpretation, an attaching of ideas to the structure of poetic imagery.”⁷ So it is certainly not inappropriate to undertake an allegorical interpretation of Hood, a writer who, in trying to “assimilate the mode of the novel to the mode of fully-developed Christian allegory,” believes that he is “more ‘real’ than the realists, yet more transcendent than the most vaporous allegorist.”⁸ Hood follows what he conceives as the synchronous method of Dante.⁹ His fiction creates relationships with the gospels and biblical parables, and he is one of few novelists who are concerned with the holy life or the life of grace. Those who would object to a reading of Hood's fiction as religious allegory have less of a quarrel with literary criticism than with the genesis of literature itself. They forget that “the origins of allegory are philosophic and theological rather than literary. Most of all perhaps they are religious.”¹⁰

The world of classical antiquity provides us with abundant evidence of religion finding its perfect expression in narrative that combines a psychic level with the material, as in the myths of Demeter and Persephone, Leda and the swan, the rape of Europa, or Orpheus and Eurydice. Even Virgil's Aeneid, not ostensibly a religious narrative, is “an allegory of the dark night of the soul as it is tempered to become the instrument of divine purpose.”¹¹

It was Christianity, however, that truly widened the use of allegory and made it the general foundation of narrative. Figural and narrative allegory, so common in ancient Greece and Rome, became common types in the Bible, although the most characteristic form became typological allegory, “a New Testament exegetic method which treated events and figures of the Old Testament as combining historical reality with prophetic meanings in terms of the Gospels and the Christian dispensation.”¹² Old Testament events and personages became “types” or figurae of New Testament events and personages, so that it was characteristic of this method to read Christ as the second Adam, or the manna in the desert as a correspondence to the Eucharist, or Moses as a prefigurement of Christ, or the Song of Solomon as an allegory of the mutual love of Christ and the Church. The new point of view saw history as a process, directed by God from Creation and the Fall toward the Incarnation, Redemption, and, finally, the Apocalypse.

Hood's allegory in its full emblematic force is not a primitive species of cyphering. It is not at all like medieval allegory or naive allegory where ideas are always their images, and where criticism has to apply itself to the text as if to a document. It never loses its sensory appeal or allows its inner meaning to antagonize the literal reality under and through which the signification is maintained. Hood's allegory is a convention by which inner drama of conscience or soul is revealed in a discursive narrative, and it fluently reconciles emblem with idea. Fiction and idea are always in continuous emblematic interdependence. In this way, Hood's fiction is expansive rather than narrow, and its deliberate didacticism in no way seeks to reveal by minute dissection. The narrative is always coherent, never suffocated by what Erich Auerbach calls “the vines of allegory.”¹³

Hood has an allegorical imagination that is able to bring together various meanings at a single moment of action, by conducting correspondences of the natural to the supernatural, for instance, or of the low to the high, of time to eternity. His purpose is to show what humans are capable of, with as many associations or patterns as his own mind can make. He starts with the commonest of things, and his images are natural, perhaps even inevitable—streets, buildings, and geography he has known, people he has observed, the two languages he has been formed by. In these things the significant emblems emerge; from them the divinely human comedy takes shape; by them he rounds off a meaning for his fiction. Nature yields to his powerful analytical and synthesizing mind, but Hood, for all his pursuit of the Divine Essence in common and uncommon history, does not shatter man's commitment to the physical world.

Hood's allegory demonstrates a familiar paradox where “the generalities of allegory acquire power over the moral sense and the imagination by way of their relevance to the particular.”¹⁴ While his analogies and emblems sometimes yield static meditations, they are rooted in actions that are never pulverized into ghostly departed quantities. His imagination never becomes what Allen Tate has called “the angelic mind”—a mentality that, in its quest after direct knowledge of essences, denies man's commitment to the physical world, and sets itself up in “quasi-divine independence.”¹⁵ What Tate perceives in Dante's symbolic imagination is what we can comment on concerning Hood's emblematic imagination. His fullest image is “an action in the shapes of this world: it does not reject, it includes; it sees not only with but through the natural world, to what may lie beyond it. Its humility is witnessed by its modesty. It never begins at the top; it carries the bottom along with it, however high it may climb.”¹⁶

From his very first book of short stories, Hood's emblems have shaped ideas and structures. The title story in Flying a Red Kite¹⁷ turns the human spirit into a sacramental which is no sham. It begins with signs of things gone awry—sometimes in comically grotesque images. The main character, Fred Calvert (whose surname forms an association with Calvary), is riding home on a bus one hot Saturday afternoon. The ride begins badly as Fred, encumbered by parcels, queues up for the wrong bus, which waddles up “like an indecent old cow” that stops “with an expiring moo” (FRK, 176). Fred has to join another queue and wait under the “right sign.” Fred and his wife, Naomi (another biblical association), had “thought of Montreal as a city of the Sub-Arctic and in the summers they would have leisure to repent the misjudgment” (FRK, 177). We learn of Fred's boyhood failures in fishing and hockey, and of how, as “one by one the wholesome outdoor sports and games had defeated him,” he had transferred his belief in sports to his young daughter, Deedee.

The mood of frustration continues as he climbs into a crowded bus. An Irish priest (one of two loud, vulgar revelers) mutters, “It's all a sham” as the bus passes a cemetery (FRK, 181). Fred's depression is not cured at home. A drink of Coke bloats him and upsets his stomach; he regrets having bought a red kite for his daughter; the “spoiled priest” stays in his mind; and it is the wrong weather for kite-flying.

All the portents of wrongdoing or infelicity are linked to a sequence of passions for Fred. He and his daughter start up a mountain, and Fred makes a covenant with her, not to come down until they have flown the kite. The ascent makes him victim to a scourge of bugs, and he twice fails to launch the kite, his “natural symbol” of something holy (FRK, 178). He ascends higher than he has ever been before, and the weather, now changed into dazzling sunshine, dry and clear, is perfect for his pastoral pastime. Deedee finds a wild raspberry bush and eats from it, relishing the fruit, which is not bitter. As trickles of dark juice run down her chin, Fred, on his third attempt, manages to loft the kite, which soars up and up. The flying kite and “the dark rich red of the pulp and juice of the crushed raspberries” become complementary natural symbols of grace or benediction as Fred realizes in a flash that the “spoiled priest,” who claimed that life and monuments to immortality were a sham, was wrong. The resurrection of the red kite (a tongue of fire, as it were, whose string burns his fingers) matches the resurrection of Fred's spirit (FRK, 188).

The act of flying the kite becomes an analogy of faith for Fred because his various empirical crises pass away at the moment of the kite's soaring, and this becomes the climactic epiphany in the story—a gift of the spirit that meets its challenges without yielding. The kite now is, indeed, something holy, for it joins heaven to earth via the ball of string and brings a feeling of accomplishment and peace to Fred (whose name, by the way, is etymologically related to “peace”). The kite-flying justifies Fred's belief in the “curative moral values” of sports and games, and heals his discomfort over the “spoiled priest's” cynicism. As he and his daughter kneel and embrace in the dust and squint at “the flying red thing,” his spiritual passion is relieved and he is regenerated, as it were, through signs of grace: faith, the Spirit (the kite's ribs form a cross), and sacramental water/blood (the berry juice).

Most of the other stories in the book coalesce around two complementary themes—various gifts of the spirit, and the alarming “doubleness” in life. The “doubleness” can produce a disturbing ambiguity, as in “Nobody's Going Anywhere!” (FRK, 158–75), with a teasing image of black comedy as an emblematic “talisman,” or it can give rise to a comedy of manners as in “He Just Adores Her!” (FRK, pp. 136–57), where the “doubleness” arises out of the bipartite structure and tension between the love of one couple and the envy of another.

Hood's success in the short story obtains to a large extent from his attention to texture. The literal documentary approach in “Recollections of the Works Department” (FRK, 63–98) chronicles a season of manual labor. This story, set in the spring and summer of 1952, refuses to be dated. Much anthologized, it has a freshness in its good humor, easy observation, and benign satire. It begins casually (the way Hood often begins his fiction) but the innocent, peaceful languor is not permanent. The narrator, a graduate student, becomes a laborer in the Toronto Roadways Division and has to deal with blue-collar hostility to his university education. He knows nothing about the rigors of shoveling or the conflicts among the work crew, but he learns quickly and soon adapts to the “cityese” folk around him. There is nothing pretentious about his recounting, and the occasional flirtations with the jocund are diversionary without being superfluous. They carry us into a world that invites special participation, but they do not strain to become an elaborate myth of the working class. The narrator knows his own limits as a documentarian and individual, and he observes these limits wisely. We see in his historical impulse the sort of power that later informs the New Age series.

Another short-story memoir crystallizes its own moral around an heraldic emblem. “Silver Bugles, Cymbals, Golden Silks” (FRK, 40–62) shows how the gift of mature love preserves the myth of the past once time has faded old reality. Here Hood is definitely out to create a pastoralism in decline, with remembered summer-camp lore and all the rituals of flag-raising and bugle-retreat. But the point is analogical. His ideal as a youth is to be a part of the Oakdale Boys Band, whose splendid uniforms of gold and glittering silk fill him with awe. The story becomes a recitation of the Band's history—a history of decline and corruption. The gold uniforms fade, the music deteriorates, the manners of the musicians fall into disrepute. And yet in the “changing light” of time, the “past glories, things that are utterly vanished, that will never come back again,” do acquire a real value that is not merely sentimental. The narrator's tender love for the past leaders of the band is genuine and healing.

Nowhere in this book is Hood's sense of texture and structure so brilliantly in evidence, however, as in “Fallings From Us, Vanishings” (FRK, 1–17). On the surface, this is a story of how a young man loves not only a girl but her mother and a whole host of memories as well. But it is much more than a Wordsworthian lyrical exercise. Wordsworth inspires the title and some of the emblematic suggestions, but the piece is really a Grail story where the Arthur figure is quite literally an Arthur who goes in quest of all the glory in things, past, present, and future.

The title comes from the “Intimations of Immortality Ode” and suggests decline and evanescence—a ghostliness that somehow does not vitiate the material substantiality of experience. But more than Wordsworth, the story suggests medieval legend and emblem. It begins with the protagonist, Arthur Merlin (whose names connote questing king and magician), “brandishing a cornucopia of daffodils, flowers for Gloria” (FRK, 1). The cornucopia (“horn of plenty”) is here a golden cup because it holds the bright yellow daffodils—Wordsworth's symbol of lyric exultation. In legend, a cornucopia is Jupiter's cup, and Hood fills his opening paragraph with emblems of Jupiter in the fertility and arboreal images. Hood also maintains the element of romance so that the mood helps to color the deeper thematic underpinnings.

Gloria lets us remember Wordsworth's “clouds of glory” and “glory in the flower,” especially when Merlin hands her the daffodils and watches her bury her face in the petals. She is “the daffodil girl, the primavera” (FRK, 7). She wears a “flowery robe” and daffodils are “her favorite flower” (FRK, 8), so she is Merlin's golden one. But there is an illusion here—just as there were ghostly, wandering fires in the Grail legend. She is unattainable because she is a “ghost” who haunts Arthur, no less than she is haunted by the “ghosts” of the past. Indeed, her “ghostliness” forms an important part of the central leitmotif where time quivers without being forgotten or laid to rest in the mind or soul.

Gloria would prefer to forget the past because it holds too many tragic memories for her. Her father had died in a sinking ship, and she cannot accept Arthur's sacral association for water (FRK, 10). Nor does she wish to remember her mother's death in a car smashup. Gloria would much rather live in the present and place her trust in the senses, which help her experience concrete particulars rather than abstract generalizations. “I only see what's there,” she maintains once to Arthur (FRK, 11), and her state of being is frequently described in terms of the external senses of touch, taste, and sight.

In contrast, Arthur is tense with memory, but grateful for it. An historian, “builder of archives, ranker of green filing cabinets,” he loves documents and relishes the past (FRK, 5). He does not censor experience or memory, and his sense of period provides the documentary relish in the story. He has the gift of triple vision in the sense of his mental presence in three levels of time.

On the allegorical level, the story is a version of time and feeling, and of Arthur's magical (Merlinesque) reconciliation of the two. As a boy, he had adored Gloria's mother, Mrs. Vere, “that golden widow” (FRK, 4), whose name etymologically means “the truth.” But she's a part of his past, and his present involvement is with Gloria, his glory in the present, who cannot or will not connect the triple levels of time. She is thereby haunted, “packed full of sensation” almost exclusively from time present, and he cannot exorcize her of her spiritual demons, although she appeals to the magician in him: “You exorcist! Just come and get me!” (FRK, 16). What to her is an unsettling possession is to him a beneficent condition. Their dialogue here does sound melodramatic and arch at times, but it is Hood's way of signaling his didactic intent and of building to an emotional climax.

The final paragraph is quieter, lyrical, and poignant as Gloria disappears, merging with the twilight, wavering away—one of “a long file of daffodil girls marching out of the past and into the future.” As the title shows, she vanishes, and by being one of “the descending heirs of Eve” she falls away from him (FRK, 17). His eyes lose her, just as King Arthur's eyes lost the Holy Grail, but Arthur Merlin does not lose his feeling for or idea of her. Although his setting acquires the image of a wasteland (“a sandy place”), he is content and blessed with his memories.

The pattern of light and darkness merges with the theme of decline. Arthur's yearning to see Gloria “illuminated by the sunset” occurs on “nearly the longest day of the year” (FRK, 5). All through their beach encounter that fades into the “dying sunlight” (FRK, 7) Arthur is very conscious of disappearing light and the oncoming twilight. The sun throws a shadow across them, and the sand under them grows black and loses its daytime warmth (FRK, 12). “The soul of the world turns in on itself and is quiet, just before the dark” (FRK, 13): Arthur is ever conscious of the passage of time. Gloria's final merging with the twilight occurs after a phase of sexual yearning, and seals the pattern of ghost-ridden beauty “going out of the light through the twilight and into the dark” (FRK, 17). Her going, however, is a thing of beauty that quivers with a twinge of glory and is, therefore, reminiscent of Wordsworth's “cloud of glory.”

Another story equally impressive in its synecdoche is “Three Halves of a House” (FRK, 99–123), and this, too, is a version of ghostliness as it tells its own tale of possession. It begins as a geographical documentary as Hood, with conversational ease, conducts us on a guided tour of Thousand Islands. The islands “sprout in and all around the ship channel, choking and diverting the immense river for forty amazing miles … a third of the continent leans pushing behind the lakes and the river” (FRK, 99). The images of a human body (“pulse, circulation, artery, and heart”) all fortify the sense of palpable, living force.

Hood shifts his narrative voice frequently in the story, modulating the tone and strengthening the sense of aesthetic distance. Soon after his description of the islands comes a description of the oceangoing freighters, and then he brings in the theme of ruin and decline via third-person, objective narrative. This is virtually a Gothic story, quasi-Faulknerian in its sense of the land and its haunting spirit. It is a tale of ancestral conflicts and madness. The house of the title is occupied by Grover Haskell and his insane wife, Ellie, but Mrs. Boston insists that it belongs to her and her daughter, Maura.

The story works up to the special knowledge obtained by Maura and the mad Ellie, and Hood uses the image of eyes in order to emphasize the haunting spirit of ruin and dispossession. Ellie has violet eyes that give her an “ineffable saint's gaze, visionary, violet, preoccupied.” She yearns for Maura to be her daughter figure, and though she seems quite crazy in her behavior, she is considered a religious visionary who speaks in symbols and who has “second sight” (FRK, 110). Only Maura can see the true pathos in the situation, for her mother's “agate eyes” are cold and unclear.

The ghost of Ellie's “terrible father” still hovers about the house, which has a spectral, icy form in winter. Ellie sees the ghost of an unborn daughter in Maura, and Mrs. Boston sees the ghost of her husband in the house, as the house itself becomes unearthly, taking possession of the neurotic relatives—even those who wish to be dispossessed of it.

Ellie, who believes the house is haunted by ghosts, turns into something of a ghost herself, moving with “no footfall,” passing soundlessly in Maura's memory (FRK, 115). When Ellie embraces Maura, the latter can hardly feel her hug and thinks of her aunt as “an invisible tissue of air.”

The most haunted figures are Ellie and her husband, Grover Haskell. Contrary to Mrs. Boston's conception of him, Grover does not want the house, which is killing him as surely as the river is strangling Stoverville. He actually pleads with Maura to accept the place from him (FRK, 122). For her part, Ellie is haunted by several things which have become the ghosts of her tormented conscience. Her unrequited passion for Wallace Phillips has made her covetous of the Phillips daughter. She glares at Maura and says: “You'd have been my child and you are my child though you won't admit it” (FRK, 117). Her life in the house becomes a harrowing punishment decreed by the gods and the dead. She continues to see her dead father and to hear his command forbidding her to marry Grover.

Hood's narrative voice switches again in the final section to get inside Ellie's “milky brains.” In her bedroom, which is a bizarre synthesis of virgin womb, nun's cloister, and tomb, she goes through the mimesis of a woman in childbirth. But what is born is not even a phantom child—it is an eternal now, carrying the story full circle with its images of water, ships, and sirens. The strong landscape, a frame for the story, is internalized within Ellie's disintegrating mind, and the conclusion reveals a special ghostliness—a voyage unto death, as the dying Ellie's dissolving mind flows like the river current of Anna Livia Plurabelle in Joyce's Finnegans Wake.

The ending is apocalyptic in its symbolism. Many of the elements (seven stars, seven coronets, the trees, and river as mouth) are drawn from the Book of Revelation, for Hood's point here appears to be a special vision for Ellie as her soul travels to its final translation. Her inner voice is identified with that of the river, and she is swallowed up by eternity as she goes to meet her Redeemer.

Secular redemption is offered to Maura, who is the only one to survive in life the ghostly haunting and ruin. Because she succeeds in making a career for herself in Montreal, she prevents a family pattern of destruction from repeating itself in her life. When she returns to Stoverville, it is only a temporary visit. She feels no fatal ties. She is not like Grover, who is “an outsider who's gotten stuck fast inside” (FRK, 113).

Flying a Red Kite is such a virtuoso performance that it is hard to believe it is a beginner's collection. The emblems are organizing principles rather than sheer symbolic elements, and the apocalyptic endings obtain a special force. Unlike those writers whose cynicism turns into a peculiar sentimentality of revolt, Hood offers a hard-centered optimism that holds because of his technical sincerity. This allegorist suffers from no anemia of the imagination. While it is true that at his worst he touches melodrama, he possesses a poetic sensibility and a vision that is refreshingly different from that of anyone else. He sharpens our hunger for truth in the fascinating guise of fiction, before feeding us with apocalypse.

Hood is the type of literary craftsman who believes in shaping all his work into a single piece. For him, stories and novels are “slices off the same ham,”¹⁸ and although his literary reputation has been made chiefly on his short stories, he makes no distinction in importance between his long and short fiction, suggesting that all his books make up “one huge novel anyway, the one bright book of the redemption and atonement.”¹⁹ It is not that he repeats the same stories or that he is technically limited. It is simply that his themes and essential style have not changed radically, though there have been widenings, focal alterations, and varnishings of his emblematic form. As Flying a Red Kite shows, he has never had to learn to wipe his feet before entering the salon of superior fiction-makers, and each new collection of short stories simply consolidates his emblematic style. His idea is that “underlying everything there is some kind of intelligible and meaningful unity” which he rounds off in stories that tend to coalesce in groups or assimilate themselves into larger fictions.²⁰

Around the Mountain: Scenes from Montreal Life²¹ shows how Hood's documentary talent unites with literary skill to yield a mode of journalistic literature that is a rich mixture of scenes, sketches, incidents, and full-fledged stories. Hood's documentary eye is as apt to take in a political riot in a public park (“One Way North and South”—AM, 95–111) as it is beguilingly drawn to mysterious characters who become obsessions to others (“A Green Child”—AM, 127–39). A strong heart, unabashed sentimentality, and a wide mind capable of subtle associations become valuable gifts to the writer.

Although subtitled “Scenes from Montreal Life,” this book is not mere photographic documentary realism. The twelve stories (each centered in a different calendar month) form a cycle that is more than calendar art. They are located in fascinating environments, and their various emblems signal a mythology of place. In them, everything connects: topography, sociology, history, religion, politics, sport, art. Hood's narrative facility develops from the exigencies of life around him:

“Where do you get your ideas from anyway?”

There's an answer to that question but it never satisfies anybody. However, I gave it to them in all its banality.

“All around me; there's a story in everybody around us.”

(AM, 148)

Hood's craft takes ordinary situations and by the slightest pressure or rearrangement brings patterns to the surface.

Around the Mountain fuses Hood's documentary talent with his emblematic mode in a perfect harmony of revelations. The very title and chapter divisions make it abundantly clear that this is not a mere sketch book in the manner of Turgenev's A Sportsman's Sketches or Dickens's Sketches by Boz or George Eliot's Scenes of Clerical Life. The title implies a focus for epiphany. Mountains, because of their elevation, are sites of refined insights, transcendental truths, pure revelations. They provide a vantage point of superior perception. Hood indicates that his revelations will cluster around this symbol.

The mountain is Mount Royal—the very source for the place-name, Montreal. Many of the stories trace patterns of ascent and descent; many, too, mention the qualities of vision, modes of knowing that are altered by geographical position or weather. (“Fair weather implies heightened perception …” [AM, 81].) Though the early stories are set in the city, at low sea-level, there are frequent references to climbing and descending, to snow and fog, rain and sun, and as the weather, location, and color alter, so do the author's vision and our insights. As Hood himself explains:

The stories begin on the flat land up in the northeast of the Montreal region and they gradually make their way up to the top. In the June story they're at the top looking down from above, and that is, if you like, the holiest story. … Then it winds around the mountain and back down to the flat land north of Montreal but this time in the west. A complete rotation around the mountain from east to west takes place, and the stories are calculated to how high up the mountain they are.²²

There are calculations even in the narrative voice. The narrator changes. One story has no first-person pronouns and is a third-person, distanced story. In some of the other stories, the narrator is called Hugh. Some of the stories are autobiographical; others are not.

The twelve stories form a year's circle, though not every chapter is set in a single month. Chapter 1, for instance, begins in mid-December, but Chapter 2 ends in February, without mention of January. Each of the other stories manages to find a different calendar month for itself, though in some instances months overlap, and at the end we return to mid-December. This structure achieves several things: it shapes the book somewhat along the lines of Spenser's Shepheardes Calendar or the Duc de Berri's Book of Hours.²³ It makes the stories part of a natural cycle and, hence, part of a natural ritual. It provides a scaffolding for Hood's emblematic imagination. And it makes a clever mythology out of the banal, without any inordinate literary or moral pressure.

The opening piece, “The Sportive Center of Saint Vincent de Paul” (AM, 1–20), uses ice-hockey lore as a coloring and anecdotal device in order to touch on the ritualistic and ethical aspects of a simple pleasure. There is a “high moral line” which is mocked, so that the tone never becomes pontifical or self-righteous.

Hockey is a slippery game played on ice, and Around the Mountain has its various icy settings that help to freeze moments of revelation without deadening the narrative or congealing the central idea. The eleventh and twelfth stories carry us back to the winter season, moving from a bleak vision of political intrigue and cruelty in “Predictions of Ice” (AM, 155–66) to a climactic revelation in the final story, “The River Behind Things” (AM, 167–75). The “solitary black figure” with a long black pole jabbing the ice becomes an emblem of death, as vapor wraps around him. Hood tells us that he experienced such a figure himself, and that he was immediately reminded of the little black Dance of Death figure in paintings of Brueghel or Hieronymus Bosch.²⁴ Capitalizing on this association, he creates a poetic complex of hills, mystical experience, fog, snow, dark figure, death. In his eyes, the moment becomes virtually purgatorial in an eerie way:

Everything in my range of vision was softened or obscured by mist, except those agitated thin black limbs. I raised my eyes to the source of the river, several miles westwards where the lake contracts. Shore, water, air were all enveloped and changed, the city inexistent. Far off northwest, the high hills rose ghostly from the melting ice and snow.

(AM, 175)

This is the type of meditative emblem so mastered by Wordsworth—who expressed it in the leech gatherer, the daffodils, the solitary reaper—but in Hood's transforming art, it wipes away the city teeming with its thousands of stories and leaves us with solitary man making a single-minded effort to clear a place for himself near the river, under the mountain.

There is a small element of the grotesque in Hood—such as the hideously deformed old woman in “Looking Down From Above” (AM, 81–94)—but his humanism enables him to soften the grotesque. “Looking Down From Above” is a model of his symmetry and depth. The ugly, dwarfish old lady struggling up a steep city street appears to have none of the advantages given to another key character in the story, M. Bourbonnais, a janitor who works hard for his pleasures, which he enjoys thoroughly. But fate strikes Bourbonnais with cancer, and his modest family picnic in June on the mountain becomes a sort of last supper in which the narrator accidentally, but fortuitously, shares. There is a tender scene of pastoral celebration, tinged with a foretaste of tragedy. The narrator, who obviously admires the dying man for his greatly energetic persistence in working for and enjoying worldly pleasures, leaves the family and climbs to the summit, from where he can survey the whole city below. The view provides “the sense of the world dropping away” (AM, 93)—a symbolic correspondence to the narrator's feeling at the brink of eternity (AM, 94). The worldview encompasses all the human perspectives, including Bourbonnais's contentment and the old lady's doggedness. Every human has his right to life in whatever measure of perception he can use. This moral synthesis projects the lesson that “human purpose is inscrutable, but undeniable” (AM, 94).

The pastoral moment in this story brings up the issue of the book's dominant mode. Hood himself calls Around the Mountain his “urban pastoral” because it presents correspondences to countryside, flowery meads, and pastoral activities.²⁵ He attempts to write a pastoral about Montreal which mediates between Stephen Leacock's nostalgia and Bertolt Brecht's infernal inversions. His city contains elements of both corruption and innocence, but is never purely hellish or paradisal. “A Green Child,” where the narrator talks about the symbolic landscape of Antonioni's films of alienation, gives us the edge of the city, whose huge, unfinished building constructions look colossally impersonal and apocalyptic. The narrator descends into a valley of shadows (rue Valdombre) in quest of his fleeting green child, a girl with a green scarf, and here the green color and vanishing illumination are emblems of the grail light. But at the opposite end of this finally frustrating story is quite clearly the refreshingly innocent peace in the last story, where Hood and his young son, Dwight, drive out to the west island and find simple pleasures. Such contrasts attest to Hood's balancing act, which shows us multiple ways of looking at the same subject. And what is particularly subtle about this mode of vision is that it is not ironic or dualistic, but revelatory and monistic. It is all one city, and though we see Wordsworthian “spots of time” in calm scenes that “rest in one's faculties,” stay, rotate, restate themselves repeatedly in “changing colours and meanings, exciting feelings, instincts, memory, imagination, seeming to have special powers to enlighten and give form to the rest of our lives” (AM, 30)—particularly in “Light Shining Out of Darkness” (AM, 21–33)—we really have but one spacious vision that allows connections to emerge without arid intellectualizing.

If Around the Mountain can be thought of as a cycle of stories spinning about the emblem of the mountain that gives us increased perception, then The Fruit Man, The Meat Man & The Manager²⁶ can be read as a series of panels about grace and penance.

Grace, in Catholic theology, has a trinitarian aspect, and Hood puts us in mind of the Trinity by the very title, which he explains as follows: “The Fruit Man is God proffering the apple, and the Meat Man is Christ incarnate, and the Manager is the Holy Spirit moving the world. The Manager manages the world, the Meat Man offers himself for us to eat, and the Fruit Man places the knowledge of good and evil in the middle of paradise and tells us not to strive too high for it.”²⁷ The title story (FM, 188–97) is very much about the economy of grace, which magnifies the God who is present in all men who open themselves to Him.

Hood's story begins with the Greenwood Groceteria run by three partners—Morris Znaimer, the manager; Jack Genovese, the fruit and vegetable man; and Mendel Greenspon, an experienced butcher. Znaimer is the father-figure, a “shrewd judge of credit” (FM, 188), and together the trio keep abreast of their competition by “maintaining high standards of goods and services and fast free delivery” (FM, 189). The small store cannot really compete against supermarkets, but Znaimer's fatherly look and genial business manner attract customers such as Sarah Cummings. A turning-point is reached when the university next to the store wants the land for a new sports center. The university makes a good offer, and Jack and Mendel want to take it, though Znaimer does not. Since he cannot afford to buy them out and since he cannot talk them into fighting expropriation, he agrees to close the store. The atmosphere changes: “The give and take among the partners had not the familiar ease; the drivers booked off drunk more often. Shirley the cash-girl would talk discontentedly from time to time of quitting” (FM, 194). The closing comes on Halloween. The store goes out as a ghost, as it were, with traditional festive displays of pumpkins and black and orange candies in the window.

The haunting mood deepens as even the truck threatens to die, making terrible expiring noises. Znaimer notices how bare and cold the trees look and how steely the sky is: “He was in his own place in this neighbourhood and could not bear to leave. He felt that nothing holy was left in his life” (FM, 197). His partners find other jobs; he disappears. But a year later, Sarah Cummings receives a Christmas card from him with a short handwritten message inside expressing his nostalgia and desire to return to business. The poignant ending has a dual significance: it seals the economic defeat of Znaimer, but provides a spiritual consolation both for him and Mrs. Cummings. His goodness is its own reward, spreading love to her heart and providing satisfaction to its benefactor. Znaimer is not obliged to send a card. His free, loving gesture acquires a special virtue. Znaimer had always been the special one of the business trio. Charity with him was a permanent habit, expressed most concretely in his system of credit for customers. This permanent habit signifies “a permanent hold of God in man's very being.”²⁸

Another benign character in the book is Brother André, an authentic historical person whose sainthood awaits confirmation by the Vatican. Following his inclination toward a mixture of fact and fiction, Hood uses Brother André, a diminutive porter at Montreal's St. Joseph's Oratory, as a real-life emblem in his numinous autobiographical story, “Brother André, Pere Lamarche and My Grandmother Eugénie Blagdon” (FM, 55–71). Brother André's shrine atop the mountain in Montreal provides witness, contrary to the narrator's disbelief, that the “penitential intention” is not dying. Petitioners do, indeed, ascend the oratory on their knees, reciting the rosary sometimes, and this public display of penance is a sign of spiritual humility in an age where religious faith is supposedly in decline. Hood obtains ironic humor by playing off the narrator's adult skepticism against religiosity (FM, 56–57). Yet, it becomes clear that the narrator has never forgotten the strong, ineradicable impression that the little porter, Brother André, made on him the summer of 1937. The bulk of the story (more of a reminiscence than a conventional tale) is concerned with getting “the impression down accurately, for the record” (FM, 58)—another instance of Hood's documentary zeal.

Hood's love of fact informs the story, which is radiant with the name, image, and charity of Brother André. Here, again we have the case of one whose way of life is Christian grace and humility. Although he is obviously a household name with Quebec Catholics and a visitor of special importance to the French Catholics in Toronto, Brother André does not act pontifically. Called upon to rescue Réjeanne Moore from her lapse of faith, he accepts the challenge quietly but decisively, comforting the woman by getting her to repent before he leaves quietly. This gentle, unsensational memoir is shaped in such a way that we observe how a penitent is converted to her true nature by a living saint who is surrounded by “some numinous envelope greater than life” (FM, 71). Hood's purpose is to make us reflect on holiness and saints: “Ignorance and superstition are one thing, and holiness another, which we touch sometimes, rarely, and half-miss. At nine years of age, how could I find the saint in the dying old man? Yet he brought poor Mrs. Moore friendship and hope and peace. Saints. What are saints?” (FM, 71).

The figures of holy men appear with surprising frequency in this book, although their holiness is sometimes false and called into question. In “Cura Pastoralis” (FM, 173–87) a young Catholic priest is accused of molesting a seven-year-old girl and suffers qualms of conscience. Graham Greene's whiskey-priest in The Power and the Glory or Morley Callaghan's Father Dowling in Such Is My Beloved might each have recognized something of himself in Fr. Fitzgibbons, who is given moral support by his ecclesiastical authorities in the struggle to preserve what is good and natural in himself without making his life insupportable or destructive. But the priest's personal salvation is not the true theme; neither is his “puritanical guilt” that begs to be punished. Hood hits on the nature of sin that leaves the soul empty and desolate, and implies that by remaining a pirest, young Fr. Fitzgibbons is performing a form of penance that converts the sinner again to himself.

A different holy man appears in the comic “Whos Paying for This Call” (FM, 198–207), Hood's version of pop legend where a vulgar secular figure becomes a myth in his own time and mind. Written in the first-person, avant-garde pop style (which is to say, it is indiscreetly liberated from the niceties of punctuation, paragraphing, good grammar, and elegant syntax) the story is a parody of archetypes that have become clichés two years after Bob Dylan's advent as a counter-culture hero. The narrator thinks of himself as a poet:

Wrote a long poem in prose about fronds all the different kinds of fronds saw a number of pictures by an amateur painter rousseau full of fucking fronds frightened you to look at them big green things about to grab you i put in orange peacocks and jokes about orange peacock tea next thing the phrase turned up on a beatles track Orange Peacock Tea

words that end in cock are pronounced coe in england as it happens and the reference did me a power of good i had a book come out with that on the cover saying i had invented the phrase i dont suppose i had anybody could have thought of it but i did first then I realized those things i would say in fun were poetry stopped giving my jokes away now people tell me orange peacock tea was one of the significant phrases of the sixties uniting in holy grandeur sex urine pot.

(FM, 198–99)

The narrator falls victim to the mystique of the idol. His beard gives him authority, especially as he travels the circuit looking “heavenly,” posing for a Life photographer who wants the idol to act like the pope blessing the multitude. He goes through this ridiculous charade and even writes a winter poem called “The Snow Pope” with lines plagiarized from Wallace Stevens. His twisted ethics allow him to defend such plagiarism (“good poets steal all the time”—(FM, 203), and his instant fame distorts his psyche. He is the center toward which the edges of a superficial world turn, but soon this center discovers its own hollowness.

A desperate devotee from Tampa, Florida, calls long distance for advice. At the end of his rope because he is dying from leukemia, the fan awaits “some word” from the master. The hero, unfortunately, finds he is no “lord”; he has no miracles. But the special edge of this anguish is blunted by the narrator's bathos: the first thing to bother him is not the failure of his thaumaturgy; it's the price of the long-distance phone call! But out of his whacko worries comes genuine insight: “if you look at it that way you can see that every prayer is a collect call all these collect calls drifting up out of nowhere for god to accept the charges” (FM, 207).

His failure to find a healing word for the dying devotee is, ironically, his way to self-redemption. “We ask too much of god,” he sees now after he has played a false god with somebody, depending on him for “the word of life.” The only message he can give is like the air escaping through a pinhole in his blue kazoo. He resolves to scale down his ambitions and stop acting so saintly and just be a humble poet from now on. The essential penitential truth of the story shines through the comic dialectic of acid despair and pop legend, as the tale becomes a form of prayer or worship by the end.

Another holy man is Menahem Luboshutz, jilted by his lover, who moves from the profane to the sacred, changing his appearance and life-style (FM, 102–18). After his conversion to orthodox piety (through Jewish ritual), Manny's presence becomes charismatic (FM, 113). He forgives all those who had rejected or mocked him, but his piety is not a life of passive reflection; he acts by giving “spontaneous delight” to children and adults.

Manny's reluctance to gloat stands in direct contrast to the feeling of vengeance and moral superiority in “The Singapore Hotel” (FM, 162–72), where Lew Cutter, always under the dominating shadow of Dougal Baird, his British banking rival, gets an opportunity to exult in Baird's eventual failure. Like many others in this book, the story is constructed like a parable. The main banking floor of Toronto Branch resembles a cathedral, and its windows, with “a velvet translucent very light gray” glass, suggest stained glass, “perhaps depicting biblical scenes: Christ welcoming the money-changers to the Temple, the Samaritan paying off the landlord, other commercial scenes” (FM, 162). The contrast between Scripture and commerce intensifies as Baird enters the scene, delivering his commandments about banking practices as his employees sit in a semicircle “like disciples arranged around their great teacher” (FM, 165). Baird becomes a veritable idol. By contrast, Lew Cutter uses only his common touch to build up a clientele for his branch. But this is precisely the turning-point in the story. Baird disappears from view—we discover later that he has suddenly died alone in a Singapore hotel—and Lew is in the ascendant. Lew cannot control his passionate gloating. His survival and success are rewards for his earlier spiritual self-mortification in Baird's presence. But instead of being purged of bitterness, Cutter has a defiled heart.

Loneliness and neurosis often form the basis for a life of penance. In “Paradise Retained?” (FM, 153–61) Lassiter is a parody of the romantic hero—the man of superior talents who is bound to be misunderstood. His name suggests lassitude and physical decline, and he lives in the ultramod apartment complex of Habitat, where he is “cut off from civilization, except those parts of it on display under his window” (FM, 153). His neighbors have good manners but offer no camaraderie. His own friends stay away from the site—it is too forbidding—and soon Lassiter begins to live “almost entirely in his imagination.” He becomes a creature of habit, much like Hannon of “The Good Tenor Man” (FM, 72–87), who follows rituals of clothing, food, and exercise. Like Hannon with his Crispy Crunch, Lassiter eats the same food at the same restaurant. By Labor Day he has eaten eighty-six times, and has had three sausage rolls and two cups of coffee seventy-seven times, at the same snack bar. His Expo familiars are always the same: a tall, slightly fat German with “three smooth tight waves of hair going up the side of his head like stacked frankfurters”; a young Caribbean waitress; a sewing-machine woman, “eternally writing names on (hat) brims” while singing a loud obscene ditty. Lassiter and these familiars form “a trio in a folktale condemned to repeat the same action eternally” (FM, 155–56). Where Hannon expends energy in a work of mercy, Lassiter's daily rituals are devitalized and despirited. Lassiter becomes a voyeur, doomed to watch trains or ships, and so grows into a Crusoe on his own island (FM, 154).

Lassiter's will diminishes. The Expo grounds, the site for Habitat, become a dying Leviathan (FM, 158). November, with its “malarial mists, dampness,” and “threatened freeze,” emphasizes Lassiter's state of mind (FM, 159), and as December wears on frigidly the buildings “crumble visibly.” Expo Theatre flakes and peels and takes on the look of a relic from a prehistoric era. It all begins to look like a morbid fantasy, as Lassiter meditates gloomily on the symbolic parallels between Expo and the “complex ceremonials” from a pagan era (FM, 160).

Vigor returns to Lassiter only in a pale yellow February, after he has attended divine service in the morning. Expo enjoys “the first warmth of this year's sun,” and as Lassiter comes to the place of summer fountains, he has a vision of the whole of Expo '67 rising up in front of him “like the bodies of the Elect at the last trumpet.” The decadent island becomes an apocalyptic setting of the dead, not the blessed. Lassiter thinks of all the myths of Camelot, the Blessed Isles, the Great Good Place, and dismisses them with an effort (FM, 161).

Lassiter's story is a parable of destruction. A man who is given the means to free himself by enlarging his mind, will, and heart immerses himself in a monstrous setting which denies human commerce and imposes on himself ritual bondage. His setting becomes false and impalpable, as if it were an airy dream, and so it is no surprise when it does tear apart for the inevitable working out of divine justice. There is simply no dispensation for this ritualistic antilife.

Hood's aesthetic complex and synthesis are achieved through a religious approach to life, and here Coleridge serves as an inspiration, for he, like Hood, sees God as the embodiment of a Trinitarian view which “resolves dualities through the creation of a synthesizing Holy Third.”²⁹ The Trinitarian view (fundamentally Catholic rather than purely Coleridgean) dominates Hood's moral vision, which perceives that “unit and trinity are built into existence,” and that “life is shot through with Trinitarian structures.”³⁰

The first three stories are “a deliberately-related triptych” in which, as Hood contends, “human art and love are models of immortality.” Each of the three shows a soul-defining struggle within a texture of feelings. “Getting to Williamstown” (FM, 9–21), the first one, uses a car journey as its vehicle of omniscient observation. The main character, Harry Fessenden, has a bad heart (though no ill feeling toward others) and lives on borrowed time. His preoccupation—against all advise—is with a journey to Williamstown, and the story filters through his mind and soul. Harry is dying through the story, which ends startlingly inside his coffin. But aside from this gimmick of narration, the story is quite a simple one as we witness internecine family strife over his estate. Harry remains benign to the end, and even in death his spirit remains kindly.

“The Tolstoy Pitch” (FM, 22–37) takes an artist as its central figure and shows the pain of his compromise with materialism. Frank Pastore tries to be a “close-mouthed writer” who does his own work and minds his own business, but he gets neurotic in the process, becoming “invisible” in the world. Aware that a writer must care “about the world and the flesh, by definition,” he is anguished by his withdrawal and further beset by troubles in the way of materialistic temptation. Hence the title with its literary and commercial allusions—the name of Leo Tolstoy bound in with a sales pitch for vulgar success.

Pastore's dilemma as an artist resembles, as he thinks to himself, the “classical first stage of the religious life, the gradual detachment from sense” (FM, 29). He loves his wife, Sandra, his friends, and God. But things are “beginning to melt” on him and “run off the table.” He wonders “what has happened to that minute obsessed interest” he used to have in “the details of physical life, skirt lengths, peoples' incomes” (FM, 30). In this state of weakened sense and will, he has to make a crucial choice between writing out of large literary ambition so as to end up as good as Tolstoy, or writing simply to make money. His talent is in demand by a film producer, but Pastore is disturbed by the profane suggestions of commercializing a high, serious, “religious” craft. Therefore, the image of “the money changers in the temple” is entirely appropriate to his disturbed conscience (FM, 32). Actually, the mixture of Tolstoy and Christ is craftier than is first suggested. It was Tolstoy who wrote explicitly about Christ in his didactic tracts and stories, and Tolstoy, like Christ, used the parable to entertain and instruct. Now Hood's story takes on the form of a parable as it follows Pastore's desire to “affect the attitudes of a great and simple man, precisely what Tolstoy did,” without falling victim to the delusion that he is either a saint or a great artist (FM, 34).

The film producer has a story which he wants Pastore to expand into a novel so that the book can be sold to the movies on the basis of Pastore's name. Hood's emblem of this temptation is an analogy Pastore draws with a Huckleberry Hound cartoon in which the character grows Bigger and Bigger and Bigger(FM, 33). In actuality, Pastore feels diminished as a craftsman—though he well knows that it is no sin to want to make money. In the end, he accepts the producer's proposition (the story idea sounds oddly Russian to Pastore) and is praised for being “a real pro, sincere, and a great guy” (FM, 37). The upshot, of course, is that Pastore is professional but not sincere. He compromises to save his hide and fails to magnify his soul as an artist.

The third part of the triptych is “The Solitary Ewe” (FM, 38–54), which Patricia Morley characterizes as having “a recurring mood, almost a hallmark (Hoodmark?)” of “a funny-sad feeling, a combination of humour with irony and pathos.”³¹ This story is about a romantic triangle. Peter, a McGill graduate, “handsome and well fed,” always has “the look of one whom the gods had blessed with every gift, intelligence, health, modest wealth, a clear conscience” (FM, 38). He has his own very popular TV show in Montreal and enjoys a healthy reputation as a media celebrity. He is the type who equates love with “the glands and glandular secretions” (FM, 40). His friend Charlie, on the other hand, scorns love as an idea from nineteenth-century novels (FM, 40). As it develops, the two fall in love with the same woman, Janine, who works for International Service. Charlie comes to experience love and discovers to his amazement that the feeling is, indeed, mysterious—not especially sexual or painful or quasi-religious, and very difficult to specify (FM, 47). But it is Peter who appears to win Janine because he is expert in selling himself, as Charlie is not. So Charlie, at the height of desperate anger and disillusioned by “lies all around us,” vows to fight for what he wants—the love of a woman. The scoffer is scoffed at by fate, and is up against high odds.

The Fruit Man, The Meat Man & The Manager skirts the banal before leaping to larger matters. Sentiment and wit are always in good supply, whether Hood is being merely playful (“The Dog Explosion”—FM, 143–52), keenly sensitive to voice and motivation (“Harley Talking,” “Whos Paying for this Call,” “Cura Pastoralis”—FM, 133–42, 198–207, 173–87), or technically experimental (“Places I've Never Been”—FM, 88–101). The impressive range shows Hood's continuing attempt, as William New puts it, “to reach from the known to the unknown” and to explore “the unanswerable paradoxes of human behaviour.”³²

Hood's mind never sleeps, yet it has a controlled dynamism rather than an anarchic restlessness. It always conjures up an essentially religious fiction without being solemn or ramified to the nth degree. In spite of its meditative cast, this mind does not suppress the ecstasies of the senses.

Dark Glasses³³ is probably Hood's most meditative collection, for it examines characters who fight spiritual battles against fear, guilt, deception, and other imperfections. Taking as its guiding text a quotation from St. Paul to the Corinthians, Dark Glasses is about the difficulties of seeing into the nature and truth of reality. “For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face” (1 Cor. 13:12). St. Paul's text is fraught with significance, for it touches on three important allied things: vision, the imperfection of human knowledge, and prophecy. Hood's twelve stories coalesce around two of these themes and derive most of their force from qualities of light and disguise. They are arranged so that they begin with problems of penetrating disguises and paradoxes of matter and end with an allegory of man's fate.

The first story, “Going Out as a Ghost” (DG, 7–21), is a Halloween story that starts in the “sombre mysterious end of October” when children adopt comic and archaic disguises (DG, 7). The central figure is a family man who jokes about going out as a ghost—the most facile, clichéd, and unimaginative mode of Halloween disguise, “the lowest deep of impoverished fantasy” (DG, 7). Yet this impoverished fantasy transforms itself. We have a hint of this in the gorilla-mask in his children's collection. The father is troubled by “the human cast of the bestial shape” (DG, 8) and has special reason to be so troubled when he is forced into the fate of a former school acquaintance, Philly White, a con-artist of the first degree.

Philly White, detained at the Centre de Prévention, a quasi-jail, makes a ghostly appearance as a disembodied voice on the telephone. At first, the protagonist thinks this melodious voice sounds familiar, but then finds it wholly unrecognizable. The mood of uncertainty is compounded by the air of mystery and deception surrounding Philly White. To begin with, White is convicted of fraud but continually lies about many things. The detention center is a glass building that is called “deceptive” and “the embodiment of a lie” (DG, 11). White's lies blacken his own reputation and are an ironic counterpoint to his surname and white complexion (DG, 11).

The protagonist does not want any responsibility for White or any role in the man's life, but Philly White will not simply go away or dematerialize. He keeps phoning his unwilling “friend” and lying on and on about his life. When the protagonist finally spurns White's last phone-call and then receives a young Halloween visitor dressed up as a ghost, he wonders about the morality of his action, and we wonder, in turn, who the real ghost is.

Lawrence Mathews argues:

… the protagonist's effort to help White can be interpreted as an attempt to go out as the Holy Ghost, to affect White's life in a way analogous to the way in which the Holy Spirit changes the lives of the Christians in Acts 2. The protagonist can, to some extent, be associated with the Holy Ghost as the continuous presence of God in this world; but he also fails to personify the Holy Ghost successfully, fails to embody the unlimited outpouring of love signified by the feast of Pentecost, and withholds part of his humanity from White.³⁴

Reality sometimes costs us a vital part of our humanity. In “Socks” (DG, 22–28) the Calabrian immigrant Domenico Lercaro tries to take control of his new life in Canada, away from the “unchanging metallic sky, crazily turbulent weather, an everlasting feeling of being at the edge of the world” (DG, 22).

The twin story, “Boots” (DG, 29–35), with its wry tongue-in-cheek humor, is about a married woman's stubborn fight against the tyrannical politics of fashion. Her battle is essentially a moral one against the immorality of popular fashion, and transcends purely chauvinistic elements.

In Dark Glasses, Hood's brilliance is never obtained by contrived glamour or brittle cleverness. The prose has a hard glitter, and the wit pays homage to man's ingenuity without ugly cold pride. Apparently unable to write a boring paragraph, Hood successfully mediates between the secular and the sacral, keeping his characters intensely human while probing their souls with deft sensitivity and delicacy.

In “Thanksgiving: Between Junetown and Caintown” (DG, 63–75) Hood shows us how to transform what could easily emerge as a merely chauvinistic story of a woman's scorn for her husband's “pathetic dependence on what people tell him” (DG, 63) into a tropological story of subtle tremors. On the surface, the story is a contest between male and female. It opens with an image of a hill shaped like a female breast and ends with an image of a boar's testicles.

As husband and wife lose their way during a hill-climbing adventure, the wife panics and becomes resentful, but the cheerful husband becomes full of ideas and advice. They arrive at a pig farm in Junetown, where they find an enormous boar glaring balefully from “a stinking square of fenced dirt” (DG, 74). After a thanksgiving meal in a farmhouse along the Caintown road, they drive homeward with the wife silent instead of thankful for her husband's intelligence and cheer.

As Lawrence Mathews points out, the story links the secular and the sacral. He points to Hood's use of the names “Junetown” and “Caintown”—“Junetown having unmistakable overtones of Eden after the Fall, especially when set beside a town named after the first murderer”³⁵—and Mathews shows how the husband is the woman's savior. The narrator's meditation on “personal incapacity” (DG, 69) becomes a metaphor for spirtual lapse, “an identification which Hood reinforces by describing the narrator's subsequent experience in terms of being lost (itself a conventional image of alienation from God) and fearing death (which, traditionally, came into the world as a result of the Fall).”³⁶ The pig farm, with its “stinking square of fenced dirt” at “a crossroads,” is their earth, their dwelling-place after their descent, and the crossroads become an emblem of their crossed positions of power and grace. What Mathews fails to see is that although the wife is not as “dreadful” as she once was, she is still mean-spirited because, in failing to give thanks on Thanksgiving, she becomes symbolically a child of Cain—a creature incapable of ending her feelings of rivalry that ultimately close off her ranges of action and freedom.

Many of the stories in Dark Glasses can be read as panels in an allegorical sequence of virtues and vices. To the themes of justice, fear, contempt, and dependency, which we have already seen, we can add themes of guilt (“Incendiaries”—DG, 53–62) and ambition (“The Pitcher”—DG, 97–109). Yet, none has the philosophic tenor and comic tone of “The Hole” (DG, 110–18), the force of “Dark Glasses” (DG, 119–29), or the subtlety of “An Allegory of Man's Fate” (DG, 130–43).

In “The Hole,” Hood attempts to articulate extremely difficult philosophic paradoxes about matter. The story is about Professor Laidlaw, Waynflete Professor of Mental and Moral Philosophy at a provincial university, who is laid low (even unto death!) as he tries to grapple intellectually with the phenomenology of matter. At the beginning, he is a thinker given completely to wonder and silent meditation in Sam and Kitty's diner, where he looks at the hole in a doughnut to contemplate its meaning. The doughnut hole is Hood's witty way of satirizing the hole in Laidlaw's mind and the problem of the “whole” in philosophy. The deeper he goes into reflection, the closer Laidlaw gets to self-hypnosis or sleep: “There was something powerfully soporific about this kind of speculation: perhaps it was dangerous, and this was nature's warning” (DG, 112). So we chuckle at Laidlaw's grave self-absorption and yet take the warning seriously.

Laidlaw goes through various existential states of wonder, doubt, fear, nausea, and perplexity, but these do not divert him from the problem of the impenetrability of matter. By meditating deeply, he puts himself into a state of catalepsy, and Hood's comic exaggeration lampoons all those academics who take their own thought so seriously as to have the world fall away from them. Hood's parody of philosophic reflection (where Laidlaw resembles a bullfrog as he shuts his eyes tight and inflates his chest—DG, 115) does not, however, reduce the high seriousness of the philosophic underpinnings. Laidlaw meditates on God, infinity, number, the universe, and causality, in addition to surfaces, space, and matter. But his fundamental problem is not merely the fact that he is grappling with the unknowable; rather, it is the problem of his approach to reality. When he quotes from Carew's lovely, elegant, and witty poem about “the fading rose” (DG, 113), he misses the incongruity in the situation of a man trapped in imageless thought yet quoting from a courtier poet who thrived on conceits or highly exaggerated images of reality. It is only as he starts dying that Laidlaw begins to turn thought into imaginative images before succumbing to the phantasm of death:

He began to imagine he'd arrived at an unconditioned sense of pre-existence where he was in his cause, that is, in or annexed to or issuing from or conceived by or held in the Divine Mind, in a state of unmixed creaturehood before locality caught him. Not before birth. More like in the idea of himself in the Creator's eternal contemplation of His Essence.

This was colourless but not invisible or outside the possibility of experience. It was not an annihilation of himself. It was like finally grasping the definition of himself, seeing everything he meant, unconditionally and in an instant.

Outside students came and went, expecting the professor to hand back their papers, neatly graded, but he never did. He wasn't dead, not what you'd call dead precisely. But a lot of people came to somebody's funeral.

(DG, 118)

Laidlaw's abstract reasoning is gently mocked at the end as, in trying to take on the wholeness of matter and being, he loses the whole of life.

Laidlaw appears to incarnate Descartes's intellectual nominalism when he allows so much to the intellect that conceptual reality becomes his only reality, and his imagination fails to develop. By repeating Carew's verses as an incantation or prayer, Laidlaw tries to banish nausea (DG, 113), but, in essence, he is really attempting to lose sensory awareness of his body as he indulges in pure intellection. When his imagination does exercise itself in images, it produces appealing forms that might be products of delirium. The final passages quoted above work out what Berkeley believed was the monism of knowledge—the lack of distinction between inner and outer—and Laidlaw's final “feeling” of reality is the presence of the known in the knower as he becomes a ghost.

Pure meditation, then, is not the way to triumph over or cope with reality. Man requires negative capability and persistent faith. This is apparent in “An Allegory of Man's Fate,” which has been unwisely dismissed as a “trifle about a suburbanite named Bronson who puts together a do-it-yourself sailboat.”³⁷ Critics like the one just quoted persist in misreading Hood as a literal realist or a satirist rather than an allegorist: “At his best Hood has the eye of a Boswell or Pepys, except that he turns his mania for detail into mild satire instead of the biography or diary of an earlier age.”³⁸ The same critic goes on to state that “the sailboat story is more satire than allegory, certainly, and even Hood's inexhaustible fascination with the material of society gives the impression of one who is feeling the fabric for flaws.”³⁹ Now such a comment in attempting to be incisive simply becomes fatuous. Surely it does not require the perception of a genius to notice an allegorical emblem in the sailboat that Bronson is building. It is an ark of his own making, and the entire story, though wonderfully satirical in its illustration of Bronson's marital and avocational tensions, is shaped carefully.

In Hood's mind, boat-building never exists as an act in itself: “If you start thinking about building a boat, you're going to be led to all kinds of scriptural analogies—like the boat on the lake of Gennesaret where Peter says, ‘Lord, save me,’ or the building of the ark, or the sending out of the dove, all those things—and there's no way to deny or remove that from contemporary writing.”⁴⁰ Hood brings in associations with Noah's ark, The Seafarer, the Titanic, and even The Poseidon Adventure, because “you can't write a story in a vacuum. Any boat story is going to have all these things carried along.”⁴¹

The moral thrust of the story is felt early. Bronson's work begins just after Thanksgiving, and has the benediction of his own optimism: “There is no difficulty that cannot be overcome” (DG, 131). Though doubt, frustration, and anger corrupt his soul at times, Bronson holds fast to his belief. Yet his character is not simplified or idealized; there are intimations of hubris:

“It's for all of us,” Bronson said. “We'll all have fun building it, and then sailing it.” Afterward he wondered if this speech had exhibited the savage, unknowing pride of strength and power called hubris by the Greeks—an attitude that delivers punishment in its very structure.

(DG, 135)

Religious symbolism enters via the ark image and makes its impression through the “mana” of family spirits and folk narratives, and in the “tabernacle” housing the unassembled boat (DG, 136). In spring, the family cover the “tabernacle” with a tarpaulin and return to town to “meditate” (DG, 136), and so the “actual unveiling” takes place in the summer. The boat-building is a holy task to Bronson, who never loses faith in himself, despite the inadequacy of his technological resources. “I am enlarging my range, confronting and overcoming obstacles; nothing human is alien to me,” Bronson thinks. “There is no difficulty that cannot be overcome” (DG, 140). The last sentence becomes a refrain, a chant or prayer of hope. Nothing is simple about the boat-building, and Bronson knows that it might take months, possibly years, to complete. But he finds in this fact an analogy for life itself: man's fate is to endure, to go on to the end because existence takes years to round off, to be given a discernible shape (DG, 141–42). Difficulties—even in his own marriage—do pass away, and the completed boat is an emblem of man's self housed in the gifts of his own spirit.

The ark in this story points to an important feature in Hood's aesthetic. As J. R. (Tim) Struthers has pointed out, Hood begins with an object and builds the universe or fictional world to which that object belongs.⁴² Hood has something of Alice Munro's density, but his range is wider than hers, and his materialism provides a sense of existence where objects serve as structural elements. Cases in point are the old radio in “Where the Myth Touches Us” (FRK, 189–217), the documentary movie of the miracle-mile race in “The End of It” (FRK, 218–39), and the picture of W. C. Fields in “Nobody's Going Anywhere!” (FRK, 158–75). The details are a transmission of the fullness of life, because particular realities are never merely themselves but are things that set off vibrant radiations of association with even abstract ideas.

Dark Glasses amply demonstrates Hood's metaphysical style where a concern with the physical facts of existence is allied to a metaphoric sense. The most virtuoso writing in this book is in the title story, which links up three main themes—justice, vision, and the impenetrability of reality. It is such a compact story and so craftily constructed that its language of confession brings to light various things that are embedded in a matrix of emotion and reason. Through his revelations of a Jewish couple scrupulously dedicated to the pursuit of social justice, the narrator shows the psychology of the justice-seeker.

“Dark Glasses” (DG, 119–29) is not simply about relative or finite or optimal justice. It is about the psychology of a scrupulous conscience as this alienates the just man from others and, perhaps, ultimately from himself. In this way, it is a complex tropological story. The justice-seeker becomes blind to himself and loses his objectivity and virtue.

The story, we are informed in the opening sentence, comes from “the quality of the light,” and it becomes increasingly clear that Hood has St. Paul in mind. It is a mid-February afternoon with “strong sun-glare over snow, a hard-edged Northern Lights dazzle,” and the anonymous narrator, a faculty member of a distinguished institution, needs the smoked lenses of his clip-ons (DG, 119). He is on his way to a party devoted to “the public life of politics and affairs and institutional art, to intrigue among persons seeking to have their writing published, and avowals of liberal and even radical social ethics on all sides” (DG, 120). He feels uneasy about his dark glasses, remembering that psychiatrists consider the wearing of them to be a hostile act (DG, 119). He confesses, however, that he likes “manufactured opaqueness” and “swimming deception” (DG, 120). His cityscape disguises things the way his smoked lenses tint his vision. As he climbs around Westmount, the houses seem big and bogus, though no less false than the party conversation.

The dark glasses become an intriguing emblem. On the one hand, the protagonist remains apart from the other guests and their phony talk. Yet, he is clearly hostile when he is engaged by a guest in a brief discussion of his literary work. The sad stories he writes reflect the vision he has of the world: “Some people are crippled like that and can only see disfigurement; we smell out hurt the way a dog traces his quarry. Most days I feel fairly good, but I'm always on the alert for others' misgivings” (DG, 122–23). His brusque comment is made as his eyes hide behind the dark glasses. This is an impious moment, a deliberately stiff-necked rebuke to a well-intentioned guest. But a much bigger shock is yet to come whereby the narrator is himself defiled and learns the shame of hiding from the course of things.

He sees a Jewish couple, the Leventhals, whose acts have touched his life in a significant way. He feels like a son to Herman Leventhal, a distinguished lawyer and liberal thinker who, like his wife, Yetta, is a social radical always agitating for justice. It has been some time since he appeared as a defense witness for Herman Leventhal in an obscenity trial that fought against censorship, and the narrator knows that the Leventhals have recently and tragically lost Chaim, their only son. He moves toward them, revering their courage and persistence, but meets with a strange reception. The environment takes on a subtle chiaroscuro, but the drama in the room is no less subtle. The Leventhals treat him as a stranger as they engage in a vehement discussion of true socialism. The narrator wonders if he is having an hallucination, for the couple seem crazily off key to him as the dark light intensifies around them. Metaphorically, the dark light, as Lawrence Mathews has observed, can be related both to the narrator's own artistic vision (which sees only sad stories) and to the dark psychological state of the Leventhals. It is Hood's mood of decline, for the “dark light” suggests Milton's “darkness visible” in Book 1 of Paradise Lost.⁴³

When the narrator moves to offer the couple his condolences on their recent bereavement, the husband brushes away the gesture and continues with his impassioned discourse on social justice. The narrator is shocked beyond belief. Chaim's ghost seems to stand in front of him, and the Leventhals become a grotesquely shrunken couple whom the narrator cannot bear to face. He clips on the dark lenses and hides his eyes, wishing the couple would do the same. He wants their faces covered up (DG, 129).

The Leventhals are people who, in rejecting charity, hide from God's love. If they are justified in their cold action, the course of things no longer has much meaning. Their situation is uncomfortably equivocal. On the one hand, by their total commitment to the idea of social justice they are laudable; on the other hand, their abstraction and detachment from charity render them less worthy of respect. Ironically, their impious brusqueness and vehemence become a form of injustice because they are in exile from love and outside the totality of being.

There is further equivocation, for the narrator is himself culpable. Where the Leventhals are extravagantly zealous of social reform, he hides behind the dark glasses of self-righteousness. Yet we see through his dark glasses the very imperfect heart of man.

In his most recent collection of short fiction,⁴⁴ Hood turns to the signatures of our times, whether these be in sports, commerce, media, interpersonal relationships, music, et cetera. This is, perhaps, Hood's most accomplished collection, where the language dances differently from story to story, acquiring additional grace from the signature of Hood's calm, spiritual self.

Several qualities make Hood an exceptional writer of fiction. First, there is a documentary sense that has few contemporary equals. Texture becomes a finely wrought substance obtained basically from an encyclopedic compass of fact. We always know how a particular period or society looks and feels and sounds, because Hood constructs his representations with minute detail and precision. It would be no exaggeration (or hostile criticism, for that matter) to call this skill a cataloging craft.

The story which yields the greatest evidence of this, and to fine satiric effect, is “God Has Manifested Himself Unto Us As Canadian Tire” (NG, 1–11), which first appears to be about the consumer society. The title is deliberately profane as it takes mass production of goods to be a form of God's signature of creation and plenitude. The narrator is obsessed with Canadian Tire newspaper advertisements, as is his mistress, Dreamy, who snuggles up beside him on the arm of their Naugahyde recliner:

“I want the eight-ply steel-belted Polyester Radials,” she whispers, “with the added protection of Hiway-Biway Winter Big Paws.” She leans closer, blows in my ear as I turn the supplement inside out. There's a terrific buy on STP in the centrefold.

“We smoke up? We get a little potted, baby?”

“What have we got?”

“There's this little baggie of Tucumcara Gold, smell it sweetie.” She rolls over on top of me and I think: beachballs.

(NG, 1–2)

This appears to be rather glib satire, but it is effectively cumulative and repercussive, for it unites manners and morals and emphasizes temptations of appetite. Cheap sex and drug usage come in for some digs, but Hood's point appears to be that if appetite is all, there is bound to be a deadening of the senses. His two characters, whose voices show that they are really “types,” live in order to consume, but they do not discriminate in their consumption. The male narrator (whose initials, A. O., suggest that he is the Alpha and Omega catalog of all goods) has been so devastatingly conditioned to be a consumer that he sees his mistress as a collage of commercial products: “Dreamy is covered, I think, triple-armour-proofed from head to toe, my Breck girl, my One-a-Day girl, made of necessary iron supplements” (NG, 2).

We find that the two had first met in a large shopping plaza—Miracle Mart (what an ironic yoking together of the sacral and the profane!). The two find sex and drug “highs,” but they are a sad pair as they sit in bed and watch TV commercials. Taste dies (literally, as when all food tastes “pretty much the same” to A. O.—NG, 5) and so does sex (“The bedroom has been like a desert.”—NG, 8).

Yet at the last, as A. O. listens to a TV hard-sell pitch, and rehearses the clichéd, hip slogans of the 1960s, culminating in the phrase “Keep on truckin',” the colloquial snazziness is given edge by Hood's implication that endurance may yield a richer perception.

The temptations of Mammon are also seen in “February Mama” (NG, 118–33), a bittersweet Calypsonian story set in Nevis, whose exotic Caribbean ambience is well suggested. Here the pastoral qualities of Peace Haven Inn and the paradisal feelings of the island are resisted and violated by a middle-aged woman with a hot passion for big business deals. Her husband, Rafe Salvidge (whose surname suggests that he is salvaging peace in his later years), has retired to a resort hotel, and his wife of sixty (who looks and acts much younger) visits him for only six weeks in the year. When she discovers Rafe has composed a banal but attractive calypso with a reggae sound (“February Mama”), she jumps at the chance to convert this wooing song into a gold or platinum record. She, an agent who is all ears when it comes to profit and loss, percentages, and royalties, has a vault instead of a heart. Her materialism corrupts her husband's dream of a paradise, and at the end the story is marked by the image of death, as we see in the shrouded faces that flood Salvidge's mind.

Hood lets us witness how internal changes in society are inevitably reflected in the emergence of new styles in life and art, each with its own evolution, transformation, and apocalypse. In “Crosby” (NG, 30–43) Hood, a lifelong fan of the great crooner, shows us how an individual so identifies himself with an idol that his personality and style (mimicry of someone else's genuine signature) are in continual conflict with the restless activity of time and fad.

Though Hood is not an experimentalist in the sense of a John Barth or an Alain Robbe-Grillet or a Jorge Borges, he is not as conservative a writer as many Canadian critics mistakenly believe. Even his thin stories in the book have something peculiar in their form. “New Country” (NG, 65–76) is a quest story which unfolds as a car trip in which a middle-aged couple gets lost and meets an abrupt end in unknown territory. The couple's chitchat (and how genuinely ordinary it is) has a wry humor but is not at all touched up for literary effect. The chat centers on physical ailments and the couple enters a ghost town. The tenor of death produces a sudden, though not unpredictable, ending.

Also abrupt but in a less melodramatic way is “A Childhood Incident” (NG, 57–64), which is anecdotal but reveals the effects of meddling with someone's trauma. There is at first a smart party-scene feeling that is extended by a game of confessionalism: “Everybody at the party had, or claimed to have, something long-concealed and shameful which they now proposed to confess, some nasty fear, some blockage of self-creation under which they had laboured for long and only now were free to unveil, and so escape” (NG, 57). But when pressure is put on one guest, young Kate Lynn, to divulge her secret phobia, we are launched into a tale of shame and guilt that changes the entire cast of the story. Her genuine, nightmarish distress feeds the inane appetities of party gossips, but the quick, malevolent ending is poetic justice.

As a general trend, Hood's endings do not shrink his stories; in fact, they do the opposite. Each story expands, emblems unite, and when the literary form is grasped, a sharper meaning grows for us. Such is the case in “Breaking Off” (NG, 12–29), where the title becomes a multiple pun. The setting of Commerce Court (“Commerce” acquires several connotations in the story) creates a pleasantly solid and balanced environment, and the name itself joins the mundane and the courtly. The tall floors of this building are towers of bliss, but there is not much bliss in the plot, which traces an unsatisfactory romance between Emmy Ivey (who is an allegorical figure in her “small cave of fact,” the photocopy center—NG, 14) and Basil Mossington, her nervous suitor. Once again, Hood obtains sharp satiric effect by yoking together incongruities. Emmy, who is a “phantom of delight” with a golden aureole about her (NG, 15) and a “ministering angel” or a Passover messenger (NG, 16), is also, more profanely, the “office pet” who has no real moral vocabulary. She is surrounded by caricatures and grotesques such as Daffy Duck (the lisping head of the Finance Department), her talking parrot at home, and the blundering Basil. Both she and her suitor are clinically desexed, and their romance has an hallucinatory quality that breaks off in a disco underworld. Basil is presented as a strange, shadowy vibration, and his silly nervousness is contemptible to Emmy, who, however, is more vulnerable at the end than he is, because while Basil finds a way to profit quite literally from their broken romance (by raffling her birthday ring), Emily is humiliated by the development and entertains only malign visions of violent revenge.

More than a romance breaks off. Emmy's imagination breaks off her ex-lover's limbs. Friendships are sundered. Emmy breaks apart psychologically, and the story delivers motifs of fission and fragmentation. After a painstaking exposition of business bureaucracy, Hood breaks off into a very human tale, and he extends the sense of dislocation and disorientation by displacing two characters (Olive and Les) who, for a while, appear to be central in the story. Hood also shows in Emmy's failure to understand her grandfather that a new society has broken off from an older one. Finally, of course, he breaks off the story with Basil's pragmatic resolution of his ruptured love affair and with Emmy's visions of severed limbs.

Hood's style and diction are admirably modulated according to the demands of a story, and this is really a matter of form emerging from the manifold activities of temperament and curiosity. A writer invokes Proteus rather than Procrustes, and when his style alters, the changes in technique represent what the writer has seen of reality. So technique is not merely a trick or device; it is a mode of representing artistic vision which, in turn, represents the writer's external world.

Hood's experiments with technique come to the fore in three stories. “The Good Listener” (NG, 134–44) is a montage of voices, unified by the largely silent but hypnotic figure of the “listener”—a mysterious, ghostly, yet palpable figure who makes no sound (except once) as he fades in and out “like a special effect in a film fantasy” (NG, 144), listening to various conversations of human distress. He appears to be the inverse of Coleridge's Ancient Mariner because of his compulsion to listen rather than to unburden himself. He might well be the Christ among us, taking on the sins and sufferings of this world, and he is certainly a compelling force that fosters communion among the living. A confessor figure, he moves from spot to spot, “sweeping other people's minds, drinking up their sorrows, emptying them” (NG, 144). However, in one startling passage, we note that the listener fails to work his “miracle” on his own son, who resists unburdening himself of Pinterian pauses and questions (NG, 143–44).

“The Good Listener” is practically all voice without images, but even more mannered, though much more substantial, is “Doubles” (NG, 167–89), which takes its time to announce its themes and strike its key chords, but those doubled patterns spiral together in ghostly waves of haunting obsessiveness. The story is interested in mysteries of personality—in how different people are joined through the reflections of one man's eyes—but the compendium of enigma, analogy, and duplication makes for a very subtle form that suggests music. The narrator is a musical composer who, in spite of various vicissitudes of fortune, and even when his life twirls into romantic disappointment, never loses a fundamental benevolence. Most of his récit strikes deep metaphysical chords that braid like a musical score. The remote setting of the Qu'Appelle Valley in Saskatchewan provides the emblem of a magic valley out of which the narrator has to climb in order to reach the meaning of himself. Nature provides yet another emblem in the extraordinary image of a sun inside a rising moon (NG, 170–71).

Everything proceeds in pairs in this story. There are two women—one seen in the eyes of the other—and two men. Their lives intersect and unite at different points, as the narrator struggles to grasp the nature of choice and that of love. But these are, perhaps, more distinct patterns than others in the story, for we also have the serpentine double operation of soul and mind, smugness and confusion.

Four “doubles” assert themselves: the twinning of the women; the shared features of the two men; the difference between outer and inner; and a ghostly immanence of being. At times, the style seems stiff and awkward, only because the narrator is groping his way through experience. His knotty contemplativeness, which tries to sort out the doubling realities, struggles with the mystery of a human being and shows an unabashed negative capability: “You can't express a human person, your own or somebody else's. All you can do is think about it and care about it. Rocks, lions, stars, I can handle those, but a person? You have to accept the mystery” (NG, 181–82). At their best, his meditations are like strains of music that round off the story with a poignant coda: “Music is the right medium for me. In music, in a song, you can freely mix vice and bliss. Bliss has a better sound” (NG, 189).

Cherished by a former girlfriend, Belle, whose path crosses his repeatedly, his final thoughts echo optimism. He is large-souled, healthy rather than neurotic, capable of seeing one form in another and appreciating the duplications of reality. In these ways, he is blessed and blissful. Rather than waste away in envy and meanness of spirit, he rejoices in Belle's contentment and in the role she played in predicting Flory, his wife, to him. Out of such joyful epiphanies come his musical compositions, and as his mental movements follow the motifs of “doubles,” the story's final chords fill his soul with spiritual fulfillment.

The story floats in and out of the mystery of the human person, but in so doing gathers together various notes and measures that develop like a fugue into a suspended disclosure, a delayed resolution. The story, through the meditative opening, takes its time, mixing colors and emotions until we reach not a tediously solemn moral but a crystalline climactic moment. The text's tonality is achieved through the revelation of truth and the coordination of action. There is the same constraint in the gradual order of narrative as there is in the order of melody.

“Gone Three Days” (NG, 98–117) is an entirely different experiment that first seems unnecessarily quirky and protracted in diction and onomatopoeia. It is divided mechanically into two parts—the first one being impressions of a severely retarded boy in a world whose brutality and rejection he fears; and the second being a male social worker's account of his attempt to rescue this boy from a life of animal suffering. Except for one or two lapses in diction (words such as “shudder” and “crank” are, perhaps, alien to a severe retard), Hood manages (as well as Faulkner does in The Sound and the Fury or As I Lay Dying) to suggest the burdens of an inarticulate soul who is struggling to express himself and the strange world. The second section clarifies the entire story and reveals it to be a touching tale of love, but in deliberately dividing his story so mechanically and by placing the boy's inarticulate impressions first, Hood tries his reader's patience and ends up telling the story twice.

As in his previous collections, all the stories have firm textures, but one of the most closely textured stories is “Ghosts at Jarry” (NG, 44–56), which is about its narrator's attempts to repossess the past and renounce the large emptiness of a new order. The physical contrasts between “the Big O” (Montreal's spanking new Olympic stadium) and old Jarry Park (the narrator's favorite sports haunt) are really contrasts between old and new dispensations. The narrator blesses the old and curses the new, and his disenchantment with the Big O is built by a preponderance of negatives (NG, 45).

Using a radio broadcast, he creates a scenario for himself at the old Jarry Park, inventing an audience, playing baseball games in his head, reminiscing about some eccentric fans (“the Gautama of the bleachers” and the whirling dervish—NG, 52). Life at Jarry becomes a surrogate experience, yet superior and mandalic, for the narrator feels at home and integrated with Jarry's environment, especially when he meets a young woman who has also come to the park to recapture old feelings. She is a ghost to him, just as he is to her, and they are joined by other ghosts who exorcise the spirit of the Big O by refusing to take it seriously as a replacement for Jarry. The ghosts of Jarry, then, are the true spirits of place, mind, and heart, and the imaginary baseball scenario with its huge audience is the quantification of form—evidence of an ineradicable signature.

The signature theme culminates in “The Woodcutter's Third Son” (NG, 77–97) and “None Genuine Without This Signature” (NG, 145–66)—the first a rhetorical exercise in analogy and the second a playful satire. Actually, both stories owe something to fairy tale because in “The Woodcutter's Third Son” the uses of enchantment develop a parable, whereas in “None Genuine Without This Signature” the story unfolds like a dream of awesome, magical success. Both stories also share in Hood's didactic craft and power, with the first one casting a spell of language and wit while the second one is offered to us as a mental movie.

“The Woodcutter's Third Son” is about the testing of a human. The first few pages have an elegant formality in their sophisticated wit and acutely turned syntax as we meet John Flamborough, a man quivering with anxiety about “his green middle-age” (NG, 77), but who is preoccupied with ideas of law and justice. He is quite enchanted by Cecy Howard, the daughter of a late chief justice of the provincial supreme court and a rather minxish character who brings up the analogy between myth and life. She introduces him to Bruno Bettelheim's view in The Uses of Enchantment that “we rule our lives by our inheritance from folklore, by spell, by conjuration” (NG, 82). She goes on to explain that we invent spirits that live in things and, moreover, that we identify with a spirit of some principal, major, or famous character in legend, fairy story, or folktale. Flamborough, who never before in his life had identified with fairy tales, immediately reveals that he is the woodcutter's third son—the prototypical darling, the “spoiled favoured child of fortune” (NG, 85), with a “fated, angel-protected career” (NG, 90). Luck he certainly possesses: “a cloudlessly happy marriage, a spouse who continued marvellously beautiful and wonderfully loving, freedom from any want or the necessity of the least hope deferred, a promising and extravagantly healthy pair of children, girl and boy, almost every blessing, all this had come true” (NG, 89).

Flamborough has always subscribed to biblical analogies, trying to live out their implications, but discovers that he is becoming a perplexed, confused, seeking man. Now the world of religious revelation begins to be displaced by the world of folklore and legend. Flamborough wonders what part of his life is arbitrary, magical, and compulsive, and what is virtuous, graceful, and truly spontaneous. The difficulty is to distinguish the two courses of life via their effects upon the soul. An expert in law with a celebrated book to his credit, Flamborough (like Jeremiah, his favorite Old Testament author) becomes harshly denunciatory of others who know nothing of themselves as individuals or as a group. He seeks a deep source in himself and in the divine nature of what he may or may not do. The man who has “had it all” tests himself by using Cecy as the bait and discovers that he has been trying to operate under two contradictory notions of character. His role-playing, as the woodcutter's third son, has divided his soul and turned him against himself. He's neither a fairy prince nor a pilgrim, and he can not live in his fairy tale any longer for his marriage has gone shaky (his wife is suspicious of Cecy), and Cecy accuses him of smugness—“the homage hypocrisy pays to virtue” (NG, 97). He is left like a naked, solitary victim, “shivering in the blast, alone on a withered plain which at its verge began to slope downhill” (NG, 97). The final image of a magical transformation occurs in many fairy tales that show a life gone wrong beyond repair, and it also has a biblical connotation of spiritual damnation. Flamborough's real signature is revealed to be smug yet confused, an ornamentation of something corrupt.

It is in his title story that Hood spins a hugely entertaining secular analogy for scripture. “Selling is strange. Human,” all right, as the narrator contends (NG, 146), but so is religion, which spreads its own propaganda, person to person, offering spiritual consolations and blessings instead of material ones. Harry Felker, the protagonist, is a salesman supreme who has faith in his products and can sell anything because he seems to be dead honest. When he becomes involved in the production of natural fruit syrups at Ma Hislop's boarding-house in Sweet Cream, Manitoba, he puts his sales knowledge to good use, assisted by three “disciples”: Ma Hislop; her sensually attractive daughter Peaches; and the raw-boned, trustworthy Bodsworth. Having cast his old samples and fine carrying case into the river, Harry now has to find a new way of selling new products, and he develops incantatory slogans which spread the illusion of a lost Eden miraculously retrieved. The bright colors and tones of the Hislop products are not only aesthetically appealing (like the palette of Bonnard—NG, 162), they are also a graceful means of giving identity to the products and consumers. In a theological parody, Harry comments: “We're a real presence this holiday season. And I've always believed in the real presence” (NG, 163). In the Michaelmas month of September, his strategy is to persuade a buyer to feel “kind of like self-sacrificing. Mortified” (NG, 164). And being a concocter of syrups and lotions gives him an enchanting liturgical or sacerdotal feeling, set off by the pharmacist's three globes with rich colors in a window that suggests an altar (NG, 152–53).

The religious analogies are intriguing. Harry's revival of his sales techniques is a new dispensation. It occurs in a town, Sweet Cream, whose name (though in one sense highly sexual slang) suggests paradisal milk and honey. The fragrance of Peaches in the bathtub and the glow of viscous syrup color the mood of nocturnal secrecy in Ma Hislop's house, where Peaches puts her luscious body to use to squeeze fruit into pulp. At first there is the suggestion of forbidden knowledge and faintly corrupt events, but Harry joins Ma Hislop, Peaches, and Bodsworth in attempting to get rich by a sweet sacramental.

The ending is comic because of the nuptials of Peaches and Bodsworth, and the journey eastward of the senior pair, Ma and Harry. We might well wonder if the seniors journey east of Eden, but the general mood is one of bliss.

All these clever religious analogies are not presented crudely. Hood is too good a storyteller to be stiffly academic. He gives his tale erotic touches and something of the exotic intrigue of the Arabian Nights, but he never obscures underlayers of hard truth. Finally, what matters in a didactic sense is not the commercial success of Felker and his “disciples,” or the comic ending. What is left to tease us is the slogan: “None Genuine Without This Signature.” Harry knows that Ma Hislop's name on the labels will be a testament of honesty and integrity to the lotion-buying public who think that they are getting old-fashioned quality for their money. Though there is quality in the Hislop product, there is also an element of deception. Ma Hislop does not affix her real signature in full. She uses a purely commercial likeness. This signature is nongenuine.

Hood's book of twelve stories has an organic form suggested by the numerology and by intrinsic patterns. The final story looks back to the first one, for both take root in commerce and media folklore. Indeed, most of the stories could be grouped as media folktales, for they touch such familiar themes as promotion, pop music, baseball, and salesmanship. Hood's title, a clever jest, makes a claim for the value of his own work, and, in giving us the signatures of our times, Hood does so in a voice that is uniquely his own.

Notes

1. William York Tindall, The Literary Symbol (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955), p. 12.

2. Ibid.

3. W. Fowlie, “Symbolism, Literary,” in A New Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1967), 13:871.

4. A. J. M. Smith, ed., The Canadian Century (Toronto: Gage Educational Publishing, 1973), p. xviii.

5. I. M. Owen, “The Hood Line: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,” review of None Genuine Without This Signature, Books in Canada, August-September 1980, p. 10.

6. Frye, Anatomy, p. 54.

7. Ibid., p. 89.

8. “Hugh Hood and John Mills in Epistolary Conversation,” Fiddlehead, no. 116 (Winter 1978), p. 145.

9. Struthers, “An Interview with Hugh Hood,” p. 49.

10. John MacQueen, Allegory (The Critical Idiom: 14) (London: Methuen & Co., 1970), p. 1.

11. Ibid., p. 5.

12. Ibid., p. 18.

13. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Trans. Willard Trask (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1953), p. 229.

14. MacQueen, Allegory, p. 68.

15. Allen Tate, “The Symbolic Imagination,” in The Man of Letters in the Modern World (New York: Meridian Books, 1955), p. 97.

16. Ibid., p. 112.

17. Hood, Flying a Red Kite. All quotations are from this edition and are denoted by FRK in the text.

18. “Hugh Hood and John Mills in Epistolary Conversation,” p. 43.

19. Ibid., p. 137.

20. Struthers, “An Interview with Hugh Hood,” p. 43.

21. Hugh Hood, Around the Mountain: Scenes from Montreal Life (Toronto, 1967). All quotations are from this edition and are denoted by AM in the text.

22. Struthers, “An Interview with Hugh Hood,” p. 45.

23. Ibid., p. 44.

24. Ibid., p. 47.

25. Ibid., p. 52.

26. Hugh Hood, The Fruit Man, The Meat Man & The Manager (Ottawa, 1971). All quotations are from this edition and are denoted by FM within my text.

27. Struthers, “An Interview with Hugh Hood,” p. 38.

28. E. M. Burke, “Grace,” in A New Catholic Encyclopedia, 6:662.

29. Robert Lecker, “A Spirit of Communion: The Swing in the Garden,” in Before The Flood, p. 188.

30. Struthers, “An Interview with Hugh Hood,” p. 41.

31. Patricia Morley, The Comedians: Hugh Hood and Rudy Wiebe (Toronto, 1977), p. 108.

32. New, “14: Fiction,” p. 265.

33. Hugh Hood, Dark Glasses (Ottawa, 1976). All quotations are from this edition and are denoted by DG in the text.

34. Lawrence Mathews, “The Secular and the Sacral: Notes on A New Athens and Three Stories by Hugh Hood,” in Before The Flood, p. 214.

35. Ibid., p. 220.

36. Ibid., p. 221.

37. Wayne Grady, “Fiction Chronicle,” Tamarack Review 77–78 (Summer 1979):100.

38. Ibid.

39. Ibid., pp. 100–101.

40. Struthers, “An Interview with Hugh Hood,” p. 32.

41. Ibid., pp. 32–33.

42. Ibid., p. 32.

43. Mathews, “Secular,” p. 218.

44. Hugh Hood, None Genuine Without This Signature (Downsview, 1980). All quotations are from this edition and are denoted by NG in the text.