The Ottawa Citizen from Ottawa, Ontario, Canada • 84

"uu yjr jfy "ur" Page 84, The Citizen, Ottawa, Wednesday, September 7, 1977 A New Athens Author sics his imagination on Brockville area J- MOVIES 1 Entertainment 84-87 vf A V' -1 A 1 By Burt Heward Citizen book editor Hugh Hood sics his imagination on the St. Lawrence River country around Brockville in A New Athens, the second of 12 volumes planned in his multi-novel work. The New AgeLe nouveau Steele. The University of Montreal professor won the Toronto Book Award with the first novel of the 12, The Swing in the Garden. Although it came out in the middle of last fall's postal strike.

Swing became a Canadian bestseller and went through five printings for Oberon Press of Ottawa. Hood's third novel in the set. Reservoir Ravine, is in the hands of Oberon's Michael Macklem, done except for some last touches for publication in 1979. It has to do with his narrator's father and grandfather, both Marit-imers, and has a lot about the banking business. "I want the last one to come out in 1999," said Hood.

The fourth book in The New Age is to be out in 1982. Hood knows the action and scenario but needs to do some research in Switzerland and Germany. Another volume, with Prairie background, will include something about the Winnipeg general strike. Ottawa setting The sixth book in The New Age, The Motor Boys in Ottawa, is set in Ottawa. It will be about political wheelings and dealings of the automobile trade and the oil industry.

Laughs Hood: "It turns quite mean." What interested him was "the tremendous power" and potential for meanness be and Stoverville rich "engrossed" the coveted riverfront properties: "A hereditary antagonism between the citizens of the Front and the back country of eastern Ontario is aboriginal. Those privileged persons who possessed direct, landed access to the river were much more likely to prosper in their enterprises than others later arrivals or' lower in the social scale whose land grants were located in townships like 'Rear of Yonge and He reflects on Ralph Connors's globally popular books about Glengarry, not far from Leeds and Grenville: "The schoolboys in their tiny backwoods Glengarry school were perpetually preparing themselves to play a game of shinny immediate forebear of ice hockey against a team from the Front. I used to wonder what those words meant. Years afterward, when I undertook close study of the history of eastern Ontario, I found that the name 'the Front' recurred at every point. Edie and I built our summer place in 'Rear of Yonge and One of Hood's goals is to publish 100 short stories and he has published at least 72.

He now publishes them only in books and Oberon will bring out four more in Ghosts at Jarry this fall. His much anthologized story, "Recollections of the Works Department," is the basis of 16 musical numbers he has written. Hood wants to find composer and producer to turn them into Cement: A Street Opera. A problem, said Hood, is that Canadians seem unable to generate an original, new Canadian work of musical theatre. They are hind the oil and automobile industries.

Hood thinks A New Athens will be "the big fall book," and although the Toronto setting of A Swing in the Garden must have helped it sell, its success should bring back curious customers for volume two of The New Age. A New Athens takes up the story of the Toronto boy. Matt Goderich, as a young man married to a girl from Stoverville, Hood's mythical St. Lawrence River community BrockvillcPres-cottCardinal). Hood's wife, the former Noreen Mallory, is one of many Brockville-area Mallorys.

Trained at the Ontario College of Art, she recently had a successful exhibition of 30 paintings at the Lois Shayne Gallery, Montreal, resuming her career in art after raising four children (now aged 12 to 19). A New Athens begins on July 1 (O Canada!) with Matt Goderich "mooching along beside Highway 29 six miles north of Stoverville, carrying a small pack with pyjamas and a toothbrush inside, expecting to stay on the road for a few days, on what used to be called a walking tour." He observes that the old road was "begun the year Queen Victoria succeeded and named for her at that time, the Victoria Macadamized Road." 'Vision of history' And so it goes in what Hood calls his "dream or vision of history." As the narrator walks, his richly cultured reflections, as well as telling his surface story, take him back to 1870 and 1885 when the area was settled, when W2f Hugh Hood 'The big fall book' uncomfortable unless "inside a performance tradition." 'A mug's game' As Eliot said of poetry, Hood says of short-story writing: "It's a mug's game." Hood, whose grandfather was born in Trois Rivieres, and ended up teaching in Montana, said he doesn't believe Quebec will separate. He said the Parti Quebecois is saying, as the Roman Catholic church did 25 and 30 years ago. "We are the people." Quebecers, he believes, are expansionary and outward-looking: "It seems to me that's just the way Canada works." "If the Liberals had Jean Chretien and Jean Beliveau," mused Hood. "Beliveau and Chretien would steamroller the PQ at the next election." Hood explained his factual style: "Canadians want it to be documentary.

They want things to be fact, so I say. 'Okay, I'll make it look like "Anything is art that has been imagined." Hood said Oberon is "a very important publisher. I would not change my publisher for any inducement. When I said to Michael Macklem I'm going to write a 12-volume novel, he said, 'You write them, we'll publish HOURGLASS ivl -1 ''fa i pages Athens was a couple of intersecting trails in scrub and rock about six miles north of Charleston Lake (where the Hoods have a summer cottage). He meditates on the last train ride before the railway from Westport shut down and has a vision of skating on the St.

Lawrence. He has a vision of a ghost ship sunk below a river's surface, later sees the Rideau River gunboat an archeologist dug up and that now is on display at Mallorytown. He's an authority on Eastern Ontario dwellings, setting off observations about the United Empire Loyalists' stone houses in Eastern Ontario. "The fictional action is a dream of history," said Hood. Although "intensely local," it has something to say to people everywhere, he believes.

Rare pre-Celts The narrator is reminded of England's "ghosts of rare pre-Celts already in the day of the Caesars vestigial, almost forgotten, haunting outland downs and sea-caves on the Channel coasts, emerging occasionally from concealment on unwarlike purpose, food-finding, shelter-seeking, little black men from a removed myth." "Such folk are neither found nor feared in southern Ontario in Anno domi-ni 1966, I thought. There are no elvish scurrying westerners retreating toward our Cornwall; we haven't the culture-memory There seems little doubt; the show has been tabbed a sure winner in the 1977-78 sweepstakes by most predicters. "The worker is harder, the hours longer," Asner said. "It's different, too. Instead of trying to make a believable comedy, with elements of drama, we're trying to make a believable drama with the inclusion of comedy.

The producers say the new show is about 70-30 in favor of drama, while the Moore show was about the same proportion in reverse. "Naturally, there is more stress and strain when you are the so-called top banana, rather than just a second banana. There is so much more of the people who live in Anglia-land, layer on layer on layer on less discernible lawyer on faint mark on mere suspected prehistoric spume of cross-hatched human purposes, or have we, or have we? Who tarred over those scratches on the roadway? How much past is past? Some country people in the south of France tell tales in which 'the little red man' who is their local imp or pixie, appears side by side with Bonaparte, moving on the same level of reality. And why not? Napoleon, Richard III, the little red man, the little green man, Coeur de Lion and Cordeleone, Ti-tania, Oberon, Bottom, Snug, Puck, may co-exist. Do.

"History traces the footpaths of the Divine Being," the book continues. "If we hold that nothing that has once existed can ever stop existing (a belief cherished by the most various theorists) then the only conceivable repository for past realities not their physical traces like the scratches across Highway 29 but the act of past beings, their state as present when they were present in act, must be some infinite catch-all. We have recourse to this repository when we investigate present evidences that cause in us a perception of the realness of past empires." Front and rear The narrator later notes that the privileged officers banana you are responsible for. You feel you must do your conscientious best to have the show succeed and create a happy company." Moore was a three-camera show performed before an audience. Lou Grant is filmed with one camera before a movie crew only.

"The joy of building the laughs in a three-camera show is gone," he observed. "It's more difficult to sustain your energy through a number of retakes for different camera angles." Has Lou Grant changed with his shift of jobs and scenery? He will have more serious moments, but his basic character will remain the same. Asner gets own show Lou Grant now top LAST DAY L. Klaray proudly presents the famous semi-annual EXIBITION And Sale of Original OIL PAINTINGS Also Graphic Art Works by: DAU, CHAGALL, MIRO, RIOPELLE, LALANDE, MASS0N, APART, TOBLASSE, TREMOIS, APPEL, BOULANGER, ate. Excellent selection tor YOU to choose froml CHATEAU LAURIER CONVENTION HALL 12 noon 10 p.m.

Chargex Last Day: Wednesday. September 7 Glenda Jackson as The Divine Sarah fire missing an film tale of Bernhardt Little Elgin THE INCREDIBLE SARAH. Directed by Richard Fleischer. Screenplay by Ruth Wolff. Starring Glenda Jackson, Daniel Massey, Da-Z vid Langton.

Simon Williams and John Cas-tle By Noel Taylor T' Sarah Bernhardt and the Readers Digest organization might have been intended for each other. She, the legendary turn-of-the-century Parisian flamboyantly unreal in her off-stage antics, Tthe absolute free spirit of the artist and RD, purveyor of all things idiosyncratic and the treasurer of romantic conceptions. The combination, for those who like their bio-- graphical meat more raw than tender, is resistible; a disappointment if you were looking for something -with a Ken Russell flavor. Reminder of old pleasures For the rest who remember those lush screen lives of the great composers from the '40s and "Os, The Incredible Sarah comes along as an undemanding reminder of traditional pleasures. They may be surprised to find a razor-edge ac- tress like Glenda Jackson in the title role when they were used to the more toothsome talents of a da Havilland or a Greer Garson, but what fire Jackson displays comes in gaudy rockets rather Zthan smoldering volcanoes.

Jackson is too much her own screen eccentric to "fully succeed in another's image, though she flares magnificently and enjoys a destructive studio set "tantrum more than she should. Tit isn't really her fault though that this film by Richard Fleischer (whose last movie in town was the trashier Mandingo), only bounces from one 'small crisis to the next, when it could have surged through a tempestuous career. Appeal was hypnotic The divine Sarah's appeal to an audience, we find out, was hypnotic, capable of converting a mob of tomato-tossers into a packed house of ecstatic fans pleading for more. A glance from Bernhardt was enough; not even a reprimand. Of sich are theatrical myths created.

Ruth Wolffs screenplay glides carelessly over explanations and hardly gets to grips at Lall with what gave Bernhardt her motive power. Acting, she announces early on, "is something Il've got to do." So it's a compulsion. But what Telse? Jackson stands in the spotlight after the final eyes flashing, cheeks sucked in, to suggest the ecstasy of an orgasm. So she needs acknowledgement like a boxer needs blood. But that's all "the enlightenment to be proffered.

Of the men in her life, the playwright and the non-actor in her company she married on impulse and quickly rejected, there's almost no impression except for a row of teeth (Daniel Massey as Sardou) and a petulant scowl (John Castle). There's a brief glimpse of war, but the film "stops short of the accident which cost her her leg. In the end there's little left but the romanticized image of a consummate actress whose private excesses were no more than an extension of her on- stage performance. All of this is slim satisfaction, though Jackson's performance makes it diverting instruction. SbOWTIME 9 FP ATI IRINfm FEATURING By Bob Thomas Associated Press staff writer LOS ANGELES Lou Grant's new news room is larger, less funny and located in Los Angeles.

Fired from WJM-TV in Minneapolis, the bald, blustery journalist has been hired as city editor of the Los Angeles Tribune. His admirers will be able to see what happens when Lou Grant premieres on CBS television Sept. 20. Lou Grant is Ed Asner, or Ed Asner is Lou Grant, depending on how you look at it. There seems to be little difference between the two characters, at least on the surface.

Both are combative but fair-minded, self-assured without being overbearing. Thin look Tuesday night viewers will be seeing less of Asner. He has dropped 35 pounds since The Mary Tyler Moore Show went off the air. No, it wasn't so he could cut a more romantic figure now that he is starring in his own show. "When I came to California in 1961, I weighed between 215 and 220, and I got as high as 240 in my second year," he recalled.

"Last year I reached the stage in my life when it seemed wise to take off the pounds. "How do I feel? Not much different. I think my 14 NO JEANS I Edward Asner Still blustering head is in better shape but I don't notice any change in energy." Ed Asner has never been allergic to work. During his seven years with The Mary Tyler Moore Show, he filled the hiatus periods with TV movies like Rich Man. Poor Man and Roots or did plays for regional theatres.

He now faces enough work to satisfy any actor: starring in a weekly, hour-long series. Lou Grant started filming last June and will continue through next March, presuming CBS picks up the option for 22 shows. steadily y- i mwmjr-f MOTOR INN 3700 Richmond Bells Comers 828-2741 MMHsSUfflllS starring Bill Cole Robert Jeffrey Maida Rogerson Marie Truty Production conception, English lyrics, additional material by Eric Blau and Mort Shuman Based on Bret's lyrics and Commentary Music by Jacques Brel Walter Pidgeon improving OPENING TONIGHT! ed through medication, was related to a phlebitis-like condition in his legs. There was no date set for Pid-geon's release from the hospital. Pidgeon, a tall, distinguished leading man, made 85 motion pictures and was twice nominated for an Academy Award.

He was best remembered for his film roles opposite Greer Garson in Mrs. Miniver and Madame Curie. hospital last month and this month. He was admitted to the hospital Augg. 4 for surgery to remove a blood clot on his brain and, although that operation was successful, he lapsed into critical condition a short time later when he developed breathing problems and a new blood clot was discovered on his lung.

A hospital spookeswoman said the clot on his lung, which was 7 MONICA, Calif. (UPI) Actor Walter Pidgeon, 78, "improving steadily" after a suffering a relapse from surgery to remove a blood clot on his brain, was taken off the serious list at St. John's Hospital Tuesday and was reported in-satisfactory condition. The veteran motion picture actor had battled his way back from critical and then serious condition at the.