My third installment in the January Book Project is the first novel in Hugh Hood’s New Age cycle of twelve novels set in Toronto. Published in 1975, The Swing in the Garden has the feel of a memoir, evoking Toronto in the years of the great Depression, with a clear sense of local geography and civic politics. Hood presents this as the childhood reminiscences of Matt Goderich, born in 1930 and living first in a rented house on Summerville Avenue which backed onto the railway tracks, then moving to Cornish Road on the north side of the same railway tracks. It’s an area I know well. I was hit by a truck while riding my bicycle not far from Matt’s house on Cornish Road, and later got my very first traffic ticket making an illegal turn just down the road. Although the neighbourhood was too blue for my blood (I only ever passed through it on the way to somewhere else), in the 1930’s, it was not so upscale, serving as rental housing for the servants employed in South Rosedale homes.
Although Matt’s parents weren’t servants, they seemed always to share the impoverishment of their neighbours. His father was a professor of Ethics and Philosophy at University College and, as a committed socialist, resigned his post. It was a matter of personal integrity. It seemed to him that the university was the lackey of government interests which in turn jangled in the pockets of old Toronto merchants. Hood names names. One was Sir Joseph Flavelle, whose slaughterhouses gave Toronto its nickname, Hogtown, and whose name decorates the University’s Faculty of Law down to this day. After his resignation, Andrew (Andy) Goderich moved the family to Jackson”s Point on the south shore of Lake Simcoe where they ran a restaurant (into the ground) in the summer of ’39. In August, they returned to Toronto, taking up three rooms in the Lakeview Hotel on the Toronto Island with a view to operating the Hotel in the off season. Within a month, Canada was at war.
In terms of plot, that’s pretty much it. Then again, plot is not what this book is about. The Swing in the Garden is about topography, the topography of a city emerging into an awareness of itself as a city, and the mental topography of a child emerging into an awareness of himself as a person. The rhythm of the book is a bit like the rhythm of breathing. It is a succession of expansions and contractions. There are moments which focus on the miniscule, the particular, the detailed. Then the book takes a deep breath and we draw in the father’s abstractions, Matt’s mature reflections, and a wider sweep of social history. Matt enumerates all the items of garbage wedged between the shed and the back fence that fronts the CPR tracks. Then the book breathes and we learn something of his father”s social philosophy and his hopes for a new movement taking hold in the prairies. At the end of the book, it’s September of 1939 and Matt and his friends are stealing an outhouse from Cherry Beach to use as a club house. Then the book breathes and we witness another harbour, not unlike the Toronto Harbour, Gdynia in Poland, destroyed by the Nazis on the eve of the invasion of Poland.
Although we sense great themes and tectonic rumblings, Matt (or Hood with Matt as proxy) is unapologetic about his preoccupation with minutiae. Commenting on historical trivia, he writes:
Plantagenet derives from the Latin Planta gensta or genesta meaning the common broom-plant. Does anybody care about that now? Does anybody know that the transfers for the Glen Road/Summerhill bus line were a rich buff colour with red lettering, that the King Street car line had chastely simple black on just-off-white transfers? I care. I care so passionately about these matters that I am sometimes shaken by the power of the feeling. I was early fascinated by the fineness of the type face on these slips of paper, and by the way the coarse weave of the paper accepted colouring, in childhood, almost in infancy.
Just as Andy’s politics pulled him between the broad concerns of history and economics on one side and the fine-grained concerns of workers struggling to keep their families on the other, so Hood’s aesthetics pulls him between the broad arc of narrative and the almost tactile preoccupation with the feel of a word on the tongue.
At the same time, history betrays Andy’s ideals. The ultimate betrayal comes with the looming invasion of Poland when Stalin enters into a non-interference arrangement with Hitler. By its cowardice, socialism, or at least the Stalinist version of it, aids the rise of Nazism. Matt as narrator offers his commentary in the early seventies, adopting his father’s politics and ideals, seizing the optimism of the sixties, and (because the Goderiches are marginally Catholic) the sense of social progress that Vatican II engenders. Reading in 2013, we wonder if perhaps the younger Goderich might soon suffer a similar feeling of betrayal. Saigon would fall in a couple years. The world would come under the spell of Thatcherism and Reaganomics. The Berlin Wall would fall to cries of freedom, or at least freedom of the markets. The Soviet Union would collapse into a market free-for-all which favours organized crime to any other kind of market activity. Desert storm. Iraq. Afghanistan. The conservatism of Pope Benedict XVI. And, here in Toronto, the merchants and bankers continue to dictate to government and to our universities. We have our Munk School of Global Affairs and our Schulich and Rogers Schools of Business, and we have our mayors who hawk furniture on TV and sell labels and tags. Culture is an afterthought, and only then if it turns a profit.
Little has changed in this town of ours. We can see much in its character today that was already evident in the thirties. The swing in the garden. Creaking back and forth. Creating a sense of motion. The illusion of progress. But it takes us nowhere new.