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W. J. Keith
A Canadian Masterpiece: Hugh Hood's The New Age

Hugh Hood died on 1 August 2000; Near Water, the twelfth and final volume in his novel-series The New Age / Le nouvelle siècle, upon which he had been working for more than a quarter of a century, was published a few weeks later. The obituaries and memoirs that appeared in the national press at the time of his death summarized his career as a distinguished Canadian writer and paid tribute to the range and quality of his work. Perhaps inevitably, they placed special emphasis on his short stories that have deservedly attracted attention ever since the publication of Flying a Red Kite in 1962. Reference to his longer fiction, though respectful, was more restrained, partly because The New Age (to employ the shorter, more convenient, and even more accurate title) was not yet complete, but also, one suspects, because many of our literary commentators have been reluctant to commit their time and energy to the kind of sustained reading that the series demands. For the most part, they have tended to fall back on the safe statement that it represents the most ambitious literary project yet undertaken in Canada.

With the publication of Near Water, however, we are in a position to appraise the series as a whole, and to consider both its importance as a cultural document and its success as a work of art. The former is hardly in question, the latter somewhat more controversial. A number of reviewers (and, doubtless, readers) clearly found the going heavy as volume relentlessly followed volume; there were some ominous - though surely premature - grumblings about a falling off around the mid-point of the series, and it is no secret that sales of the later books have not equalled those of the earlier. But now that The New Age is complete, the time is ripe for a more informed assessment of its merits, and I for one have no hesitation in declaring it a masterpiece.

This is a large claim, and my main purpose here is to substantiate it. First, however, it will be necessary to present some basic facts about both the narrative and the narrator. I shall then discuss the challenge of reading an extended series, and, as someone who has read each book several times, indicate some of the subtleties and satisfactions to be enjoyed in Hood's text. And I shall end with some comments about the current failure to appreciate the quality of the series together with suggestions concerning how the situation might be remedied.

I

The first volume of The New Age, The Swing in the Garden, was published in 1975, and subsequent books appeared regularly at two- or three-year intervals.¹ Together, they present an unforgettable portrait of a thoughtfully inquisitive life spent in eastern Canada in the twentieth century. The protagonist, Matthew or Matt Goderich, was born in Toronto in 1930, and the series is extrapolated into the future until he dies of a stroke at his lakeside cottage in southern Ontario in 2012. Matt grows up to become an art historian with a special fascination for anything Canadian. The series chronicles both his personal and his intellectual/artistic life. The effect is complicated by deviations in chronological ordering and in the form of narration. Two novels, Reservoir Ravine and Be Sure to Close Your Eyes, probe back into the lives of Matt's parents and in-laws, the earliest scene dating back to 1906. Much of the work is presented as first-person narrative (generally but not exclusively Matt's), but this approach is punctuated by a number of sections, and two whole books, that invoke traditional third-person omniscience. Yet even these pages are unmistakably infused with Matt's consciousness. Throughout the series, an effort is made to characterize each chronological period (usually by decade) with equal emphasis on its artistic tendencies and social assumptions. The focus, to be sure, is on middle-class attitudes, while the geographical concentration, despite various gestures towards coverage of other parts of the country, falls on Toronto, southern Ontario, and Montréal; yet nowhere has so much that is essentially Canadian been so deftly contained within a single work.

Matt Goderich himself is a shrewd observer, interested in everything, with a keen understanding and an earnest desire to describe and explain all that he sees. Hence the so-called "digressions," which are a notable feature of the series but are not digressions at all since they are responsible for the distinctive texture of the work - are, indeed, in large measure what The New Age is ultimately about. Matt can be assertive, even opinionated, and some early reviewers criticized him as a bore; but in so doing they revealed the limits of their own interests and missed the all-important humorous element in Hood's work. Yes, Matt can sometimes be a bore, but he usually knows when he is boring, and this lends complexity to his character as the series develops. He is, in the jargon of literary commentary, a generally "reliable" narrator, but his attitudes allow for cool and often amused or irritated detachment on the part of his readers. Yet his intellectual and cultural range makes him ideal for Hood's purpose. It should also be noted that, like his creator, Matt is a devout but liberal Catholic. As a result, the series is endowed with a coherent world-view that allows for the discussion of religious and spiritual issues but should prove in no way oppressive for intellectually tolerant non-Catholics or non-Christians.

On a personal level, we see Matt growing up in Toronto, attending university, and becoming absorbed in the study of southern Ontario architecture. At this point he meets his future wife, Edie Codrington, who introduces him to the financially comfortable society of small-city Ontario and, in her capacity as art-student, to the bohemian theatrical world of the Stratford Festival and the more precarious life of a struggling painter. At about the same time, his father is elected to the federal Parliament, so he gains some insight into the political issues of the country - all the more so when the family decides to move to Montréal in the late 1960s. The uncertainties and tribulations of love are illustrated when the marriage breaks up, like so many others, in the 1970s, but are set against attendant satisfactions when, a few years later, Matt has an idyllic though tragically brief romantic love-affair. Later novels chronicle his lifelong friendship with the homosexual actor Adam Sinclair, his efforts to bring a great painting to Canada, and a final casting-up of accounts as he finds himself dying in his early eighties. An unspectacular but full and in many respects fulfilling life that impinges on an extraordinarily broad range of human experience.

What happens to Matt Goderich, then, is ultimately less important than what it enables him to observe, assess, and talk about. The historical and sociological details which characterize the novels are fascinating, but it is important to insist that Hood deals essentially with imaginative constructs. The details are absorbing because they have been filtered through a thinking and feeling human being. The New Age will always prove useful for its insights into the historical period that it chronicles, but its true quality ultimately reveals itself in its artistry. It belongs in the company of the supreme works of art that are so often celebrated within its pages.

II

The art of reading an extended novel-series is almost as rare as the art of writing one. Moreover, it is virtually impossible while the whole series is still in progress. When books appear at intervals of two or three years, readers can be forgiven if they find difficulty in keeping track of individual characters, let alone small details of plot or recurrent allusions. It is possible to appreciate the shape of the particular novel being read, but its formal relation to the whole can only be guessed at. Above all, the larger rhythms and interconnections are not yet evident.

These difficulties are well-known to readers of Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu and Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time. These are the only literary works that can be compared with The New Age in terms of length and artistic seriousness, and Hood readily acknowledged them as influences. But an additional challenge faces Hood's readers that is not encountered when grappling with his predecessors. Once we have come to terms with the array of characters in Proust and Powell, and with their very different but characteristic literary styles, their works proceed in relatively predictable fashion. Once we "get on their wavelengths," as it were, we can continue with some confidence. In Hood's case, however, while the plot develops and the characters appear and reappear in the usual way, the form of each fiction varies, sometimes quite drastically. To take just a few examples of contrasting modes, The Swing in the Garden is an evocative memoir that resembles non-fiction reminiscence, while The Scenic Art might best be described as situation-comedy blending into sexual farce; The Motor Boys in Ottawa takes the form of a politico-historical chronicle, while Property and Value is a love-romance, albeit with a tragic ending; Black and White Keys contains scenes of intrigue that recall spy-novels, while Great Realizations moves towards science-fiction; both A New Athens and Be Sure to Close Your Eyes explore in their very different ways the relation between the arts, spiritual experience, and religious belief, while Near Water concludes the series with a modern equivalent of medieval allegory. Readers eager to respond fully to the series must be prepared to approach each succeeding novel without formal preconceptions, ready to adjust sights or shift gears according to the tonal demands of the individual volume. It is a challenging process, but the results can be exhilarating.

All novels that are worth reading once deserve to be read more than once, and nowhere is this more true than in the case of novel-series. If we reread a classic novel, for instance, the opening chapter is likely to light up with increased significance once we are aware of events that occur later; phrases and allusions that originally conveyed little are then discovered to contain intriguing delayed meanings. Such experiences are multiplied when novel-series are involved; indeed, it is not uncommon for an early reference to be picked up three, seven, or even ten novels later. The opportunities for increased understanding and appreciation become infinite, and in the following paragraphs I can hope to draw attention only to a small fraction of the effects that rereadings of The New Age gradually reveal.

The first novel, The Swing in the Garden, opens in a Toronto garden backing onto the railway, where the three-year-old Matt and his elder sister play a painful trick involving a swing on a neighbourhood boy-victim named Adam Sinclair. Hood has chosen both these names with artful care, and the first certainly draws attention to Eden connections. The hint of allegorical movements hovering over a personal - and typical - narrative is strong. But Adam goes on to become a successful actor well-known for his homosexual preferences, and eventually, in the eleventh novel (Dead Men's Watches), dies of AIDS in Matt's arms. When we come to reread The Swing in the Garden, that opening scene reads differently because we are now conscious of the status of victim that, despite material success, dogs Adam throughout his life. A flashback to an even earlier scene shows railway brakemen passing on a handcar, an episode echoed, again with fatal associations, in an early chapter of Be Sure to Close Your Eyes. Later, the infant Matthew is carried into the house at nightfall, and careful rereaders will recall a comparable scene set in England during the Second World War; this occurs in the opening pages of Tony's Book, which thus opens the second half of the series with an echo of the opening of the first. Such effects, to be sure, occur in the rereading of a single novel, but when a series is involved the opportunities are increased and become far more elaborate.

A related (but, in a sense, opposite) effect occurs in connection with the ninth novel, Be Sure to Close Your Eyes. This is Hood's version of a Künstlerroman, a novel that explores the development of an artistic sensibility. Here we are presented with events in the early life of May-Beth Sleaford, later Codrington: her religious upbringing; her suffering when her musician-fiancé, with whom she discusses the mysteries of art, dies suddenly in a freak accident; an extended period of shock and grief followed by attempts to rebuild her life. All this is moving and meaningful in itself, but doubly effective because, as early as the second novel (A New Athens), we have seen the adult May-Beth, Matt's mother-in-law, at work on her visionary canvases, and know that her artistic genius eventually bears fruit in works of remarkable profundity and imaginative power. When we go back to read A New Athens, however, the character of May-Beth comes across as deeper and more rounded because we bring to it an appreciation of her chronologically earlier struggles that are only revealed in the later book.

Black and White Keys, Hood's war-novel, presents a different challenge. The obvious contrast here is between the dangerous realities of war (an attempt to smuggle a Jewish philosopher out of Dachau) and the ignorance of what was happening in Europe on the part of Matt and his teenage friends in Toronto - and, indeed, of Torontonians in general. But the most resonant scene occurs when Andrew Goderich, Matt's father, strips naked in a German barn and tries to revive the old man through the warmth of his own body. The scene has an obvious naturalistic impact, strengthened by the historical fact that victims of experiments in Dachau were rewarmed by female bodies, this in turn harking back to the story of David and Abishag the Shunamite in 1 Kings 1. But Hood does not stop here. Gradually, we realize that a gentile is bringing a Jew back to life in a scene that counters the Nazi attempt to exterminate Judaism, all this occurring in a setting traditionally associated with the beginnings of Christianity. A powerful religious message is invoked here, but it is also an example of supreme art, one that has reverberations throughout the series, including the scene where the heterosexual Matt comforts Adam in his last moments. Black and White Keys disappointed some readers on first publication because it seemed to depart from that loving presentation of the texture of Canadian life characteristic of the opening novels. Ultimately, however, we realize that Hood is broadening his Canadian subject-matter and raising it to a higher level of significance. "The Holy Land is in Manitoba and in Québec," remarks a historian debater in Reservoir Ravine, and the scene here translates intellectual comment into moving reality.

Given the constraints of space, I am unable to comment with any cogency on Hood's style, which would require abundant illustration. But it is important to stress that he was a consummate stylist, and that The New Age is as remarkable for the variety of its prose as for its range of subject-matter and its narrative skill. It is neither an elaborate, ever-extending style like Proust's, or the dry, witty, consciously studied style of Powell. Just as Hood varies the form of each novel, so he rings all possible changes on stylistic tone. He clearly believes that a long work requires a smoothly flowing prose that reads, as it were, trippingly on the page, but what he offers is infinitely supple and never stodgily correct: his mot juste is more likely to be strikingly idiomatic. Most often, of course, he records the meditative speech of Matt Goderich, but other idiolects can readily be supplied - Hal o' the 'peg's monologue in Reservoir Ravine, Jeanne Three Streams' summarized autobiography in Dead Men's Watches, and in particular the voices of Linnet, Tony, and Edie juxtaposed with Matt's in Tony's Book. Above all, Hood can change the pace and tone of his prose with enviable ease. Readers sensitive to the subtle effects of rhythm and word-choice will appreciate Hood's extremely funny exchanges of dialogue at one extreme, and Matt's serious and moving renditions of the numinous at the other.

Above all, The New Age offers a fictional experience in which readers' minds are always fully engaged; we are invited - even impelled -to share in the interrelating complexity of the work. From moment to moment - and often simultaneously - our historical, imaginative, emotional, aesthetic, spiritual, and philosophical faculties are brought into play, though this should not be interpreted to mean that reading Hood is a complicated, heavy ordeal; on the contrary, the combination of humour and seriousness, of the nostalgic and the forward-looking, the material and the visionary, can be immensely refreshing. There is a richness, an amplitude, here that I do not find elsewhere in Canadian literature. Hood has created an intricate world that can be explored and re-explored. If I would hesitate to describe The New Age as "the great Canadian novel," this is only because I have doubts whether "novel" is an adequate word. Hood himself once observed that he might not be writing novels "in the customary sense," and that he would rather call them "big narrative pieces."². The categories of creative and discursive prose break down here; the already mentioned "digressions" are really non-fiction essay-like meditations that are at least as important, intellectually and artistically, as the Matt Goderich who produces them. We carry away from the series information, insights, a greater understanding of human nature, of art, and of Canada in a way that is unusual in traditional fiction. In his famous Conclusion to the Literary History of Canada (1965), Northrop Frye wrote cautiously of the cultural situation of that time: "Canada has produced no author who is a classic in the sense of possessing a vision greater in kind than that of his best readers. ... There is no Canadian writer of whom we can say what we can say of the world's major writers, that their readers can grow up inside their work without ever being aware of a circumference."³ When I come to the end of a reading of The New Age I am convinced that this is no longer true.

III

If "great Canadian novel" is not quite the appropriate phrase for what Hood provides, surely "great Canadian fiction" is applicable? I believe it is, but this inevitably raises another question: in a country that, in the last generation, has vigorously asserted the claims of its literature to an as yet unacknowledged international acceptance, why has The New Age not received the attention and praise that are its due? Several reasons can be offered, one of them having to do with its publishing history. The first three novels appeared with Oberon Press, an admirable publishing house but too small to have the resources for handling a work of this magnitude. After a disagreement over the publication of Reservoir Ravine, Hood moved to ECW Press for Black and White Keys. But at that time ECW was primarily an academic press unsuited for the distribution of fiction. The series was then taken over by Stoddart, a division of General Publishing, a company large enough, one would have thought, to provide appropriate backing for the series. Matters did not, however, develop as might have been hoped. Stoddart published the next three novels under that name, but when General/Stoddart acquired the House of Anansi Press responsibility for The New Age passed to this new publishing division. The rest of the series, from Property and Value onwards, has appeared under the Anansi imprint, but ever since then, by some unaccountable publishing decision, the books have been produced in hard-cover only, with the inevitable result that sales have diminished. The potential paperback market for the later books has not yet been tapped. While the earlier volumes have for the most part remained available in paperback, the later have remained out of reach of a less affluent popular audience. The popularizing and marketing of a work of such proportions is a delicate undertaking. A vicious circle is clearly involved: readers cannot obtain copies of books not in print, yet publishers are reluctant to reprint for fear that a public doesn't exist. At university level, a text cannot be assigned unless cheap copies are available, yet publishers maintain that the series is not in sufficient demand. Still, the equivalent situation relating to Proust and Powell's respective series is worth considering. A la recherche du temps perdu was available for most of the 1980s in three thick Penguin Classic volumes, and paperback printings of the recently revised translation have now been released; A Dance to the Music of Time can be found in two four-volume paperback versions in the United Kingdom, and one in North America, each containing three novels - and, as an added convenience (in the University of Chicago Press edition, at least), each reproducing the pagination of the first editions. (This last may seem a small point, but it is a major factor when scholarly citation and cross-referencing are involved.) Clearly, it is essential that efforts be made to see that The New Age becomes widely known. In commercial terms, of course, a country with a small population labours under a serious disadvantage, yet one cannot help suspecting that, in any other country in the world, the author of a work of such high quality would be widely known and internationally acclaimed. Coincidentally, I have recently been rereading Powell's memoirs and journals, and it is instructive to see the amount of interest aroused by A Dance to the Music of Time on its completion, and even before its completion. One reads of numerous interviews, photographic portraits for the popular press and glossy magazines, translations into numerous European (and other) languages, proposals for a television-series (which took a long time to be realized but eventually occurred not long before Powell's death), the founding of Anthony Powell societies in various parts of the world (including one in Canada!). Hood's situation, alas, is very different. In his own country he was named an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1988, yet, astonishingly, was never recipient of a Governor General's award. His name is known to serious students of Canadian literature, but outside this group he is in no way a household word. Though he is well-known in the area of the short story, I doubt if his full-length fiction receives the attention in university courses in Canadian fiction that its quality merits. Outside Canada, he is hardly known; none of the New Age novels has been published or translated abroad. His name rarely appears, so far as I know, in the numerous Canadian Studies programmes that exist in other parts of the world; this is nothing less than a cultural tragedy, for what texts are better suited to instilling knowledge and appreciation of Canadian attitudes in foreign readers? This brings me to my final point: a literature is superfluous without a literary public to support it. The reluctance of Canadians to read their own literature is notorious, and the neglect of The New Age illustrates the matter all too clearly. But in this case the reading public is not wholly to blame. First and foremost, the books must be available and accessible in reasonably inexpensive texts; second, the literary critics - both those in academic institutions and those in the public press - must wake up to the fact that in Hugh Hood Canadian literature now possesses a major figure who needs to be read and appreciated both at home and abroad. Once these conditions are met, and the reading public is alerted to his importance, especially to the considerable and varied pleasures of his text, then The New Age will take its place among the truly remarkable extended works of the twentieth century. Notes

1. The individual novels are The Swing in the Garden (1975), A New Athens (1977), Reservoir Ravine (1979), Black and White Keys (1982), The Scenic Art (1984), The Motor Boys in Ottawa (1986), Tony's Book (1988), Property and Value (1990), Be Sure to Close Your Eyes (1993), Dead Men's Watches (1995), Great Realizations (1997), and Near Water (2000).

2. Hugh Hood and John Mills, "Hugh Hood and John Mills in Epistolary Conversation," The Fiddlehead 116 (Winter 1978), 140.

3. Northrop Frye, "Conclusion," in Carl F. Klinck, gen. ed., Literary History of Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965), 821.