Flying a Red Kite

by Hugh Hood

It all started towards the end of the 1930s when the young Hugh Hood serviced a flourishing Saturday Evening Post route with more than fifty weekly customers. That was where the author-to-be first encountered the short story, in the formula fiction of the famous magazine writers, Damon Runyon, Guy Gilpatric, Arthur Train, and of course the Master, P.G. Wodehouse. By the '40s, Hood had discovered Pocketbooks, and, in particular, My Life and Hard Times (included in The Thurber Carnival ) which led first to a story called `Recollections of the Works Department' and later to some of the methods employed in his opus , The New Age / Le nouveau siècle. For a writer who once professed `If in the course of my life I can get a half a dozen stories printed, I'll be satisfied', Flying a Red Kite marked a different kind of beginning. The first selection of ten stories was completed in March of 1962 by John Colombo and Robert Weaver for publication by the Ryerson Press. Both editors felt at the time that an additional story was required to round out the sequence to a cohesive volume. Hood wrote `The End of It', and that is how we have it here -- the eleven stories of Hood's first book-length publication, to which the author has added a lengthy introduction and a checklist of bibliographical data.

Genres: Short Stories

248 pages, Paperback

First published September 15, 1987

Reviews

[1.1 · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am definitely biased, but let me just state that Hugh Hood always writes a masterful short story. I hear plenty about Monroe, but for my money I would read a Hugh Hood number simply out of preference. Lots of authors I have spent less time reading start from better places and go nowhere, while Hoody can seemingly start at an unpromising juncture and knocks it out of the park. There is a singular tone to most of these works (with the possible exception of 'After the Sirens') but it is a great, mature, nuanced tone.

At the time Hood wrote this he was a 'young' writer with lots of promise, and what strikes me as strange is I have yet read anything of his I would call stagnant. This collection has a fantastic variety of shorts, all of which I found at bare minimum to be worth my time reading, and at best they were not only inspired and great, but seemingly instructive.

What's best, I suppose, is that these are all from his youth. He falls into the young-writer business of writing either autobiographically or semi-autobiographically – either way the stories are never ostentatious and always deeply interesting and well done. His recollections of the Toronto Works Department struck me as particularly timeless: anyone who has worked the labor beat will relate to it in some way, even if they've not had the fortune to end up in a municipal work crew.

Essentially as good as it gets, but tragically an unmoving part of the past from a largely (unfairly) forgotten author. If I can get even three short stories published – each half the quality of these – then I'll be happy, and perhaps will feel like I've finally earned the right to call myself a writer. Hugh Hood is the kind of writer who makes the business seem like a truly hallowed one.

[Gail Berman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent selections!