by Carol Shields
Curiously marketed as a mystery in Canada, this novel has very little mystery to it, though it did somehow did win the Arthur Ellis Best Crime Novel award. Just so you know about the murder: the husband did it. There is also some mystery about the disappearance of many valuable documents, though the owners of those documents are inclined to blame themselves for forgetfulness. Carol Shields’s interest clearly lies in the minds of her living characters.
Told in four interior monologues plus a “screenplay,” Swann is full of mischief as it gently satirizes the academics who populate the novel and the vast scholarly apparatuses they create.
Terry Gross interviewed Shields shortly after the publication of Shields’s novel Unless. NPR rebroadcast the interview after Shields died from complications of breast cancer in 2003.
Since poetry of a most obscure sort plays a very large role in Swann, I was interested to find Shields was a poet before she became a novelist. The University of Toronto website page devoted to Shields has links to eight of her poems, of which this is one:
Entry
Grandpa who died young kept
a diary of sorts which was really
just a record of the weather
or how often he was obliged
to have his roof repaired
or when his taxes went up
or the latest news of City Hall
but once, a Sunday, in the year 1925
he entered a single word: woe
It shimmers uniquely on the ruled page
so small it makes us wonder and squint
but large enough in its inky power
to unsettle his young-manly script
and throw black doubt on other
previous entries: weather tip-top
or gingko on Crescent Ave.
and even darker doubt
on us
who seize this word
woe — eagerly, eagerly,
making it ours
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt of The New York Times wrote this review of Swann:
New York Times Book Review, Monday, July 17, 1989
by Christopher Lehman-Haupt
In Carol Shields’s intriguing and often charming new novel, “Swann,” there appears a poem that has proved “a puzzle to scholars.” It was written by the title character of the book, the late Mary Swann, who is variously described as “a poete naïve” and “the Emily Dickinson of Upper Canada, and it reads in part as follows:
Feet on the winter floor
Beat Flowers to blackness
Making a corridor
Named helplessness
In fact, only Rose Hindmarch understands these lines. Rose Hindmarch is the town clerk of Nadeau, the tiny village in western Ontario where Mary Swann lived, wrote her poetry and was violently murdered by her husband in 1965. Rose Hindmarch is also the village’s librarian and the creator and curator of the Mary Swann Memorial Room. She actually knew Mary Swann, though she wasn’t quite the friend she has presented herself as being to the growing number of scholars interested in Swann’s work.
Rose understands the poem’s lines because she has been inside Mary Swann’s farmhouse and seen the floral-patterned linoleum floor with its worn-out path. But she would no more reveal her knowledge to Morton Jimroy, Mary Swann’s biographer, than she would press her belief that the water references in “Swann’s Songs” do not reflect “a yearning for baptism, for acceptance of some kind,” as Jimroy asserts, but rather the fact “that there’s no well out there on the Swann property.” After all, Morton Jimroy, biographer of Ezra Pound as well as John Starman “knew everything there was to know about poetry, including what it all meant.”
•
What little is known about Mary Swann emerges in the first four sections of Ms. Shields’s novel. These are told from four points of view—Rose Hindmarch’s and Morton Jimroy’s as well as those of the novel’s two other major characters, Sarah Maloney, the feminist scholar who “discovered” Mary Swann, and Frederic Cruzzi, Swann’s curmudgeonly but kindhearted publisher.
As should be evident by now, the tone here is gently satirical. Ms. Shields—who was born and reared in Chicago and now lives in Winnipeg—takes aim at everything from feminism to academic scholarship to Canadian provincial life and its aspirations to culture.
But it is the gentleness of the satire that should be emphasized. Ms. Shields—who has published four previous novels (“Small Ceremonies,” “The Box Garden,” “Happenstance” and “A Fairly Conventional Woman”), as well as collections of poetry (“Others” and “Intersect”) and short fiction (“Various Miracles”)—has a compassion for her characters that can make you ache for them, and that even extends to Morton Jimroy, Swann’s misogynist biographer whose work sometimes leaves him with the feeling “that not a single man on earth” has “ever spoken the truth.”
Writing about her most interesting character, who is surely the elderly newspaperman Frederick Cruzzi, to whom Mary Swann brought her paper bag full of poems scrawled on scraps of paper, Ms. Shields achieves a pitch of witty eloquence that deviates from satire. In a tragicomic scene, Cruzzi’s adored wife, Hilde, returns from a day of ice-fishing and while preparing dinner absent-mindedly throws the fish entrails in the bag of Swann’s poems. Then, as the couple stay up all night transcribing the sodden verse, even supplying their own words where the ink has run indecipherably, we realize that Ms. Shields has intentionally transcended satire. She is profoundly concerned with the gulfs that exist between art, its creator and its audience. In the best passages of “Swann” these gulfs inspire a feeling that approaches awe.
In the fifth and final chapter of the novel, all the characters gather in Toronto to participate in a Swann symposium. Even Rose Hindmarch attends, though her assertion that Mary Swann was influenced by Edna Ferber and the Bobbsey Twins is not especially welcome to the squabbling scholars in attendance.
This section is a little disappointing. It takes the form of a film script, with pretentious directorial notes advising us, for example, that “appearances and reality” can be said “to define the submerged dichotomy of the film.” The plot resolves itself into a mystery involving the disappearance of everything having to do with Swann’s life—her notebook, the two extant photographs of her, the Parker 51 pen with which she supposedly wrote her poems and all copies of “Swann’s Songs.” At the end, with all evidence of the poet’s existence vanished, the members of the symposium are shown reconstructing Swann’s work from memory, the ultimate deconstructionist proof that the text exists exclusively in the mind of the critic.
Of course, it is bound to occur to the reader that by adopting the filmscript form, Ms. Shields is implicitly suggesting another way in which literature has beendiluted by modern culture and its audience cut off from its sources. But if “Swann” is a parable of literature being destroyed by those who profess to love it, then Ms. Shields has made her point a little too effectively. By the end, we have not only been cut off from the poet the novel is about, we have also lost contact, because of the change of form, with the novel that created the poet.
Carol Shields died in 2003. Upon her death The Guardian published Margaret Atwood’s appreciation of her friend:
To the light house
The Guardian, Sat. 26 Jul 2003
The beloved Canadian author Carol Shields died on July 16 at her home in Victoria, British Columbia, after a long battle with cancer. She was 68. The enormous media coverage given to her and the sadness expressed by her many readers paid tribute to the high esteem in which she was held in her own country, but her death made the news all around the world.
Conscious as she was of the vagaries of fame and the element of chance in any fortune, she would have viewed that with a certain irony, but she would also have found it deeply pleasing. She knew about the darkness, but – both as an author and as a person – she held on to the light. “She was just a luminous person, and that would be important and persist even if she hadn’t written anything,” said her friend and fellow author Alice Munro.
Earlier in her writing career, some critics mistook this quality of light in her for lightness, light-mindedness, on the general principle that comedy – a form that turns on misunderstanding and confusion, but ends in reconciliation, of however tenuous a kind – is less serious than tragedy, and that the personal life is of lesser importance than the public one.
Carol Shields knew better. Human life is a mass of statistics only for statisticians: the rest of us live in a world of individuals, and most of them are not prominent. Their joys however are fully joyful, and their griefs are real. It was the extraordinariness of ordinary people that was Shields’ forte, reaching its fullest expression in her novels Swann, The Republic of Love, and especially The Stone Diaries. She gave her material the full benefit of her large intelligence, her powers of observation, her humane wit, and her wide reading. Her books are delightful, in the original sense of the word: they are full of delights.
She understood the life of the obscure and the overlooked partly because she had lived it: her study of Jane Austen reveals a deep sympathy with the plight of the woman novelist toiling incognito, appreciated only by an immediate circle but longing for her due.
Born in 1935 in the United States, Shields was at the tail end of the postwar generation of North American college-educated women who were convinced by the mores of their time that their destiny was to get married and have five children. This Carol did; she remained a devoted mother and a constant wife throughout her life.
Her husband Don was a civil engineer; they moved to Canada, beginning with Toronto in the 60s, a time of poetic ferment in that city. Carol, who was already writing then and attended some readings, said of that time, “I knew no writers.” Undoubtedly she felt relegated to that nebulous category, “just a housewife”, like Daisy in The Stone Diaries and like Mary Swann, the eponymous poet who is murdered by her husband when her talent begins to show.
(Canadian readers would understand the allusion, but British ones who might consider this plot far-fetched will be interested to know that there was a Canadian woman poet murdered in this way: Pat Lowther, whose best-known collection is The Stone Diary.)
After obtaining an MA at the University of Ottawa, Shields taught for years at the University of Manitoba, in Winnipeg, where she began publishing in the 70s. But this was the decade of rampant feminism, in the arts at least. Her early books, including Others, Intersect, Small Ceremonies, and The Box Garden, which examined the vagaries of domestic life without torpedoing it, did not make a large stir, although some of their early readers found them both highly accomplished and hilarious. She had her first literary breakthrough – not in terms of quality of writing, but in terms of audience size – in Britain rather than in North America, with her 1992 novel The Republic of Love.
Her glory book was The Stone Diaries, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Canadian Governor General’s Award, and then, in 1995, the American Pulitzer Prize, a feat her dual citizenship made possible. Her next novel, Larry’s Party, won the Orange Prize in 1998.
To say that she was not thrilled by success would be to do her an injustice. She knew what it was worth. She’d waited a long time for it. She wore her new-found prominence with graciousness and used it with largesse. One of the last instances of her enormous generosity of spirit may not be well-known: she supplied a jacket quotation for Valerie Martin’s fine but challenging novel, Property – a book which went on to win the 2003 Orange Prize. It takes place in the American south during slavery, and none of the characters are “nice”, but as Carol remarked in a letter she wrote me, that was the point.
Unless, her last novel, was written in the small space of time she spent in England, after beating cancer the first time and before it came back. It’s a hymn to the provisional: the sense of happiness and security as temporary and fragile is stronger than ever.
Unless was published in 2002; although it was shortlisted for just about every major English-language prize, the Munro Doctrine, informally named after Alice Munro, had set in by then – after a certain number of prizes you are shot into the stratosphere, where you circulate in radiant mists, far beyond the ken of juries.
Several months before her death, Carol published – with co-editor Marjorie Anderson – Dropped Threads 2, the sequel to the spectacularly successful 2001 anthology Dropped Threads. This was a frankly feminist collection, taking “feminist” in its broadest sense: contributors were asked to write about subjects of concern to women that had been excluded from the conversation so far.
Those who had heard Carol Shields interviewed were probably surprised by this strain in her character, and by the angry letters addressed to male pundits dismissive of woman writers in Unless, because in conversation she was discreet and allusive. The little frown, the shake of the head, said it all.
Possibly feminism was something she worked into, as she published more widely and came up against more commentators who thought excellent pastry was a facile creation compared with raw meat on skewers, and who in any case could not recognise the thread of blood in her work, though it was always there. The problem of the luminous is that their very luminosity obscures the shadows it depends on for its brilliance.
I last saw Carol Shields at the end of April. Her new house was spacious, filled with light; outside the windows the tulips in her much-loved garden were in bloom. Typically for her, she claimed she couldn’t quite believe she deserved to live in such a big and beautiful house. She felt so lucky, she said.
Although she was very ill, she didn’t seem it. She was as alert, as interested in books of all kinds, and as curious as ever. She’d recently been reading non-fiction works on biology, she told me: something new for her, a new source of amazement and wonder. We did not speak of her illness. She preferred to be treated as a person who was living, not one who was dying.
And live she did, and live she does; for as John Keats remarked, every writer has two souls, an earthly one and one that lives on in the world of writing as a voice in the writing itself. It’s this voice, astute, compassionate, observant, and deeply human, that will continue to speak to her readers everywhere.