Death of a Catholic novelist (CANADA).

Montreal--Hugh Hood, one of Canada's small number of Catholic fiction writers, died here on August 1, following a stroke. In a talk he gave at St. Michael's College several years ago, he remembered with great affection, and in astonishing detail, his years as a student at the college, and the kindness of its legendary registrar, Father Basil Sullivan, who generously provided him with a new pair of glasses when he needed them and had no money to buy them. He graduated with a Ph.D. from Toronto in 1955, but spent most of his teaching career at the University of Montreal.

Three qualities of his writing were given special emphasis in obituary comments on him. One was its scope. His New Age series of novels began with The Swing in the Garden in 1975 and was to finish with a twelfth book, New Water, this year. U. of T. Professor Emeritus W.J. Keith, who helped him prepare this final volume for publication, called this series the most ambitious fiction project in Canada.

Second, he was able to create an atmosphere and capture a mood-to give the feel of what it was like, for example, to live in Toronto during the years when he was growing up. Fellow novelist and critic John Metcalf praised his collection of stories Around the Mountain for its "absolutely magnificent quirky but intense understanding of Montreal as a city". His book Unsupported Assertions (1991) contained an essay entitled "The intuition of being: Morley and Marshall and Me." Here, Philip Marchand wrote in 1991, he placed himself in a sketchy English Catholic literary tradition, consisting of himself, Morley Callaghan, and Marshall McLuhan, writers connected to St. Michael's College in Toronto. "Whatever the implications of Hood's adherence to this tradition," Marchand wrote, "it does mean he occasionally takes politically unfashionable stands. The War against the Fetus, for example, makes clear his horror of abortion. On a more intellectual plane, he takes issue with academic trends such as semiotics. In the es say The Persistence of Romanticism, Hood defines semiotics as a science that maintains that "everything means, but nothing means anything."

Third, letter writer Ken Dewar pointed out that his New Age series dealt with the moral demands of living in the 20th century. Metcalf said that he was "passionately religious--saturated in Catholicism and able to give great seriousness and importance in his fiction to common occurrences."

In a very perceptive column in the National Post, another Toronto Emeritus Professor, Dennis Duffy, described Hood as a Catholic Romantic for whom everything had meaning since he had a sacramental view of creation. "What he sought to convey through his writing," Duffy claimed, "was his sense that our world--often dark and cruel-is nonetheless charged with grandeur." His narrator in A New Age, Matthew Goderich, "remembered because he noticed, because he cared about every aspect of our common life." Hood insisted that all his work was inspired by his faith, though he thought that in our epoch God has withdrawn himself: "This era, with its death-centred culture, abortion and so on, will be considered a cancerous splotch on history."

Clearly, Duffy agrees with Hood's own conviction that he did not receive the recognition he deserved in his lifetime, but that posterity would award him the reputation which is his due.