Flying a Red Kite

William Blackburn is a professor of English at the University of
Calgary.

The only true biography of the artist, as George Bernard Shaw once observed, is the work itself. The wisdom of this remark is particularly apt in the ease of Hugh Hood, a writer whose apparent realism causes many unsophisticated readers to conclude that his work is a shameless transcription of personal experience very thinly disguised as art. Even if it did nothing more than correct this misconception, this new edition of Hugh Hood’s first book (originally published in 1962) would be a valuable addition to the shelves of our libraries.

Mr. Hood is himself well aware of the way in which he is very often misread. In an introduction written especially for this edition, he observes that “I have often been treated as a writer who relies on actuality, on what has happened, for his material, whereas I know myself to be a writer in whose work imagination and fantasy, the purely private and extrahistorical, take the primary place.” Though the apparent realism of his fiction is often almost too successful, careful consideration of his work reveals that, while his work is realistic in detail, it is certainly emblematic at heart. (Sceptics should note that “After the Sirens,” the earliest story collected in this anthology, describes a family struggling to cope with a nuclear attack — an event which the author has obviously not experienced personally.) The fact of the matter is that all eleven stories in this collection — however diverse their apparent subjects — meet on the level of theme. Each of them is, in one way or another, about our ongoing struggle in the face of expected failure — a struggle by no means confined to young writers. Such a writer in “Where the Myth Touches Us” decides that “I’d be wiser not to try for impossibilities, but to set down records of things possible”; and it is through these “records of things possible” that Hood seizes his grand theme: “the characteristic, the human thing, the beginning to think and struggle to live.” Despite the sneers of those who nibble and run, Hood’s 30-year career demonstrates his profound and compassionate sensitivity to our human predicament. This timely reprint of his first volume proves — if proof were needed — that he has always been far, far more than a dreary chronicler of the quotidian. So Flying a Red Kite remains a splendid introduction to all the work of this subtle and prolific author.