sewn paper
Fiction
1989
176 pages
ISBN 0-88984-134-9
$10.95
A Short Walk in the Rain
Hugh Hood
For a writer who once professed `If in the course of my
life I can get half a dozen stories printed, I'll be
satisfied', Flying a Red Kite (1962) marked the start of
a very much more productive career.
A new edition of that title,
released by the Porcupine's Quill in 1987, formed volume one
of a proposed `Collected Stories'.
A Short Walk in the Rain (Volume Two) includes thirteen stories written
between 1957 and 1961, which for one reason or another were left
out of Red Kite, and which have never since been
published. They include five of what the author delicately
calls `instructive artistic failures', two `interesting failed
tries' and half a dozen `unpretentious successes' which Hood would
rank with anything in Flying a Red Kite.
The title story (one of the successes) is the first story Hood wrote,
in January 1957. The author would admit it is derivative - he was certainly
aware at the time that the final action of A Farewell to Arms
consisted of a short walk in the rain, and he came to realize later
that its title was an exact metrical echo of The Old Man and the Sea -
an iamb, a single heavily-stressed syllable and an anapest, but that is the
point. What Hood tries to demonstrate in this book is something of the
process by which he started to emulate the masters and somewhere along the
way found the voice to write accomplished fiction in his own style.
The last story in this collection, `From the Fields of Sleep' was written in
August 1961. It has all of Hood's trademarks - a title from the `Immortality'
Ode, insistent use of bright colour imagery, and the use of an indirect free style
which hovers between the first and third person, allowing the narrative
to move from mimetic description to something pretty close to interior
monologue.
There is
also a fascination with death and dying and the gradual emergence
from terror through hope to final exhilaration.
It is odd
that `From the Fields of Sleep' was written just a month after
Hood wrote `Flying a Red Kite', perhaps his most famous story,
and yet `From the Fields' has never yet been published.
Apart from its literary-historical and writing-craft interest, A
Short Walk in the Rain demonstrates the author's firm commitment
to Roman Catholicism and portrays two of the enduring social
institutions, the Church and the University, as they were in
Quebec of the 1960s.
`The title story is, I think, the strongest in the collection,
skilfully interweaving an account of a young man's coming of age with a
story of the inexplicable relationships of an Italian family. Though
brief, this piece quivers with life and mystery, and its characters
and situations feel completely authentic.' `These are good stories of surprising maturity from a young writer now famous.' `In one way or another, the collection, with its diversity of characters, tone,
and point of view, conveys the dawning of self-knowledge - if not of the characters,
then of the narrator. What emerges is a wry and humane look at the discrepancy between
reality and illusion.'
- Montreal Gazette
- Ottawa Citizen
- Canadian Book Review Annual
Photo by Noreen Mallory
His work includes: Flying a Red Kite (1962), White Figure, White Ground (1964), You Cant Get There From Here (1972), Black and White Keys (1980), The Motor Boys in Ottawa (1986), which won the first annual QSPELL Award, and You'll Catch Your Death (1992).
Hugh Hood was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1988.