Startle and Illuminate

by Carol Shields

  No one will be looking beyond your head now. Good on ya.

  Another of my favourite letters was from a bemused man named Larry Weller, the same name of the protagonist of Larry’s Party. In an eloquent, handwritten letter, Larry expresses his shock to find that he has become the hero of a novel. (“How did you know? When were you watching?”)

  I also came across correspondence between my mum and her mother. There were letters about family, letters about work and letters about writing. I found a lovely letter from my mum detailing my growth as a toddler:

  Nicholas is UNFOLDING these days before our eyes. He has a wonderful analytic dispassionate intelligence which awes me. I told you I thought I might love them too much, but I think I meant Nick. He is so lovely, thoughtful, watchful and intelligent that I fear that to love him so much must tempt fate.

  These nuggets of personal interest were interspersed with the material that will follow. I found hundreds of pages that included writing advice. I read through years of correspondence between my grandmother and a number of writers: some experienced, and some trying to figure out where to start or where to go next. I read course notes and assignments from when my grandma was preparing and teaching creative writing classes. I read speeches that were read to graduates and talks given at conferences. Across continents, people sought out my grandmother to hear her ideas and learn from her. The scale at which she was sought after and adored was enormous, too big for me to comprehend. I learned of her humility and her sense of self and her interest in others. My grandmother wrote back to almost everyone who contacted her, and her letters show unfailing care and respect; the same woman who had read to me at night and taken me for hot chocolate in the morning, and who had seemed to have all the time in the world for me.

  In order to begin reading my grandmother’s stories in high school, I needed the push of discovering her name in that anthology. My mum provided a similar push for me to go to the archives and learn about my grandmother in a different light. At the time that my mum proposed the project, I had been aware of the existence of the collection for a few years. I even once prepared an application to view the material, but I never followed through. For four years, those files existed literally blocks from my home and I never once approached the building. I first needed to find a reason to go there. All I needed was to have that first phone call with my mum, to hear her determination to understand Carol, and her determination for me to understand as well. She could have hired a researcher, but instead she asked me. She wanted me to see a new side of my grandmother.

  I don’t think my perception of my grandmother will stop growing any time soon. Just recently, one of my mother’s sisters, my aunt Meg, asked me to digitize a boxful of two-reel home movies from the 1950s and ‘60s, recording life at my grandparents’ homes in Ottawa and Toronto, and so I’ve also had the chance to immerse myself in this silent history. I’ve been incredibly lucky to learn about her in these movies, and in photos, in her papers and in her advice.

  The advice on writing I found in the archives is, as it happens, advice I very much want to take. The writer in me—and there is one—has countless areas in which to grow and mature, but what I read while doing research for this book may have given me some of what I need if I decide, as I just might, to start writing myself.

  ~ 1 ~

  WRITERS ARE READERS FIRST

  I’VE NEVER BEEN ABLE TO SEPARATE MY READING AND MY WRITING life. As you know, there is a time in our early reading lives when we read anything, when we are unsupervised, when we are bonded to the books we read. When we are innocent of any kind of critical standard, so innocent and avid and open that we don’t even bother to seek out special books, but read instead those books that happen to lie within easy reach, the family books, the in-house books. These books have a way of entering our bodies more simply and completely than library books, for example, which are chosen, or school texts that are imposed.

  It’s a literary cliché, largely aristocratic, largely male, that writers in their young years are “given the run of their father’s library.” You imagine oak panelling, a fire, a set of leather-bound volumes, Shakespeare, of course, but also the Greek dramatists, the Latin poets, the Fathers of the Church, Dickens, Scott, an almost exclusively masculine offering with little visible connection between book and reader.

  My parents’ library was a corner of the sunroom, a four-shelf bookcase stained to look like red maple that had been thrown in with the purchase of the 1947 edition of the World Book Encyclopedia. There was also room on those shelves for a set of Journeys through Bookland and two volumes of poetry, the works of James Whitcomb Riley, who I thought was a great poet before I went to university and found he wasn’t, and A Heap o’ Livin’ by Edgar A. Guest. The rest of the shelf space, only a few inches, was filled with my parents’ childhood books.

  My father was represented by half a dozen Horatio Alger titles, Luck and Pluck, Ragged Dick, Try and Trust, and so on, which I read, loved, and never thought to condemn for didacticism, for didn’t I attend a didactic Methodist Sunday School, sit in a didactically charged classroom, absorb the didacticism of my well-meaning parents? This was the natural way of the world, half of humanity bent on improving the other half. Nor did it seem strange that I, in the 1940s and ‘50s, should be reading books directed at a late nineteenth and early twentieth century audience. I scarcely noticed this time fissure, entering instead a seamless, timeless universe, scrubbed of such topical events as the wars, elections, social upheavals with which we mark off periods of history. Occasional archaisms were easily overleapt, since a child’s world is largely a matter of missing pieces anyway, or concepts only dimly grasped.

  Horatio Alger aside, it was mainly the books of my mother that I read, four of them in particular, two of which were Canadian, not that I noticed at the time: Anne of Green Gables, Beautiful Joe, Helen’s Babies, and A Girl of the Limberlost. No Shakespeare, Hawthorne, Poe, no Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Willa Cather—just these four.

  My mother, the youngest child of Swedish immigrants, grew up on an Illinois farm, attended Normal School at DeKalb and, as a young woman came to Chicago to teach school. She and three other girls roomed for a year on the third floor of the Hemingway house in Oak Park, Illinois. Ernest’s sister, Sunny Hemingway, was in college, and the family needed the extra money. Ernest was away in Paris writing The Sun Also Rises, though my mother didn’t know this of course; she only knew that his parents spoke of him coldly. “Is he an artist?” my mother once asked. “He is a time waster,” his father Dr. Hemingway replied. The Hemingways were difficult landlords; they were stingy with hot water and they wouldn’t allow the four young women to entertain their boyfriends, and so in a year they moved on, ending our mother’s accidental brush with the world of real literature, which always excited her children more than it did her. In fact, she never read Hemingway; he was not, despite her thrilling connection, a part of her tradition.

  It’s easy to see what she found in Anne of Green Gables. She found what millions of others have found, a consciousness attuned to nature, a female model of courage, goodness, and candour, and possessed of an emotional capacity that triumphs and converts. Unlike Tom Sawyer, who capitulates to society, Anne transforms her community with her exuberant vision. She enters the story disentitled and emerges as a beloved daughter, loving friend, with a future ahead of her, and she has done it all without help: captured Gilbert Blythe, sealed her happiness, and reshuffled the values of society by a primary act of re-imagination.

  And then there is Beautiful Joe, Marshall Saunders’ enormously popular—though it’s hard to see why today—1893 faux-autobiography of a mongrel dog. Like Anne Shirley, the ironically named Beautiful Joe is not conventionally beautiful, and, like Anne, his name is both his shame and his glory. Also like Anne, he is cruelly treated, but, through virtue and courage, he finds love, and he tells all this through a voice that is characterized by the most delicate, undoglike tints of feeling—though as a child I
never questioned his right to a voice nor to his insights.

  Nor did I worry about the sentimentality in my mother’s books. Sentimentality, like coincidence, seemed to be one of the strands of American existence; it could be detected every week, after all, in the last two minutes of Amos ‘n’ Andy; it was a part of the human personality.

  Anne Shirley, you remember, adored literature: “The Lady of the Lake,” Thomson’s Seasons, and something called “The Dog at His Master’s Grave” from the Third Reader, all this making an eclectic sampling, typical of the randomness of early reading lists. What Anne demanded of poetry, she said, was that it give her a “crinkly feeling” up and down her back. I too was devoted to that crinkly feeling, and think, today, how different this is from Emily Dickinson’s insistence that a poem must take the top of her head off. Perhaps this, then, is the difference between American and Canadian sensibility: decapitation, the big bang, versus mere vertebral crinkling.

  Nellie McClung, the Canadian social activist and writer—you see how we Canadians feel obliged to stop and identify our literary figures—recounts in her autobiography how she burst into tears reading a piece titled “The Faithful Dog” in the Second Reader, and how her response was reinforced by a teacher who pronounced: “Here is a pupil who has both feeling and imagination, she will get a lot out of life.” And we all know she did.

  There was no Willa Cather on my mother’s shelf, no Virginia Woolf, no George Eliot, no Jane Austen. My mother, even without dipping into these books, would have thought these writers too heavy, too intimidating for someone of her background. Always a reader, she read her way around the popular edges of literature. As a child I was, like my mother, approaching literature very much as an outsider, and I was intimidated by that dark dense sort of book described as a classic, though a kindly high school teacher, speaking of Silas Marner, demystified the term by telling us it referred to books that people have liked rather a lot for a long time. Later, though, I found that some of these so-called classics—Hemingway, to a certain extent Conrad—refused to open to me because they projected a world in which I did not hold citizenship, the world of men, action, power, ideas, politics, and war.

  We use the expression “being lost in a book,” but we are really closer to a state of being found. Curled up with a novel about an East Indian family, for instance, we are not so much escaping our own splintered and decentred world as we are enlarging our sense of self, our multiplying possibilities and expanded experiences. People are, after all, tragically limited: we can live in only so many places, work at a small number of jobs or professions; we can love only a finite number of people. Reading, and particularly the reading of fiction—perhaps I really do have a sales pitch here—allows us to be the other, to touch and taste the other, to sense the shock and satisfaction of otherness. A novel lets us be ourselves and yet enter another person’s boundaried world, share in a private gaze between reader and writer. Your reading can be part of your life, and there will be times when it may be the best part.

  I’ve always seemed to be able to take in information through print and not through other means—which is why I am so bad at languages I think. Why this should be so with some people I don’t know. I rather envy people who have their senses more fully open to the world than I seem to. On the other hand, relying exclusively on one’s own experience seems to me to be condemning yourself to a very narrow shelf. We can only do so much in our lives, pathetically little exposure in fact, and this seems to me to be the great benefit of fiction—that it is expansion, not escape. Shall dwell more on this—but I suppose you have to have a balance of direct and indirect experience (not sure reading is indirect however).

  —Letter to Anne Giardini

  There is nothing to fear from the new technology—but a written text, as opposed to electronic information, has formal order, tone, voice, irony, persuasion. We can inhabit a book; we can possess it and be possessed by it. The critic and scholar Martha Nussbaum believed that attentive readers of serious fiction cannot help but be compassionate and ethical citizens. The rhythms of prose train the empathetic imagination and the rational emotions.

  We need literature on the page because it allows us to experience more fully, to imagine more deeply, enabling us to live more freely. Reading, you are in touch with your best self, and I think, too, that reading shortens the distance we must travel to discover that our most private perceptions are, in fact, universally felt. Your reading will intersect with the axis of my reading, and of his reading and her reading. Reading, then, offers us the ultimate website, where attention, awareness, reflection, understanding, clarity, and civility come together in a transformative experience.

  It’s a curious fact that once one has written a book or two, an aura of expertise is assumed. Writers are asked questions, probing questions, questions followed by short, expectant silences—which they are somehow expected to fill with pronouncements that they have not yet articulated even to themselves. What is a short story? Should a writer take political responsibility? What is the difference between prose and poetry? What is literature? What is … life?

  The question that is never asked, but which I nevertheless dread, is: why do you write? Writing after all is a rather presumptuous act, particularly since every day I meet people who have lived longer, who are wiser, who have travelled farther, have lived lives richer in adventure and courage. So isn’t it a little audacious—yes, it is—to expect people to trouble themselves reading what I might write? I simply throw this out—I haven’t yet found a satisfactory answer—but I suspect it would involve the belief that each of us has, however limited, a perspective that is unique. And this perspective is determined—there’s no escaping it—by how and where we spent our first eighteen years or so.

  Once in an interview I described Oak Park, the town where I grew up, the town where the taverns leave off and the church steeples begin, how in my childhood the population was entirely white, composed of church-going families, how teenage girls, on weekends, put on hats and white gloves and went to each other’s teas, how I had never heard a really harsh four-letter word spoken aloud until I went away to university. My interviewer said, “It sounds like growing up in a plastic bag.” I said, “Yes, it was,” then later regretted it.

  In fact, though there was much that was narrow, smug, and hypocritical in Oak Park in the fifties, eccentricity flourished on these tree-lined streets, though it was a phenomenon I hadn’t yet learned to name. The occasional iconoclasts offered surprise. Human drama existed beneath the calm republican surface, and I furthermore came to see that all human relationships were complex, even those in that risky literary territory known as the suburban middle class, which has been too often neglected in our fiction.

  To go back to the plastic bag, there were a number of breathing holes, if I may use E. M. Forster’s term. Fortunate glimpses of the otherness that adds subtlety and shading to the perspective we’re saddled with. There was the Walsh family, who lived across the street, Frank, Liz, the twins, and Jo, who became lifelong friends and who provided what every writer requires: an image or a promise even, that there is more, more possibility, more ways of being, something beyond this cheerful parochial world.

  There was that Oak Park trinity: school, church and library, and from the start the library claimed my primary allegiance. As a child, I read a lot but owned only three books of my own: Under the Lilacs, which I thought was dull, the poems of Whitcomb Riley, and Seventeenth Summer, which I read, I’m sure, a hundred times. There was no need to own other books, and no sense of deprivation about not having them, because we went at least once a week to the library, in my early childhood to the South Branch. And it was at the story hour, with its combination of narrative and drama, when I found pure enchantment, my first glimpse of theatre. We met in the large basement room. One of the librarians, a kindly unmarried middle-aged woman—all the librarians and schoolteachers at that time were unmarried middle-aged women—stood up and told—not read—a story.
A transcendent experience. I remember one terribly cold and stormy Saturday when only four or five of us turned up. Instead of going downstairs, we sat upstairs around one of the little tables, and when I looked into the eyes of the other children there, I saw, clearly marked, the light of fanaticism. We were different. Other children loved this Saturday morning ritual, too, but we, for some reason, required it.

  Every fall, Miss Mayes, the head librarian, visited the schools and talked to the children about libraries. She told us about the Dewey Decimal System. She told us the story of Abraham Lincoln walking twelve miles to return a book. She showed us how people right here in Oak Park abused books, turning down the corners of pages or employing strange inappropriate objects as bookmarks: a blue jay feather, a burnt kitchen match, and once—”once, boys and girls”—a strip of bacon. The thought of this person, and this audacious act of barbarism, thrilled me.

  I remember one summer evening walking home with my stack of books, never fewer than my rightful limit, and passing a house not two blocks from the house where I lived on Kenilworth Avenue. Through the dark window screen I could hear people in the house talking—and to my astonishment, they were speaking in a foreign language. Who were these people and what did this mean? Hearing them, so unexpectedly, so close to home, I felt a bolt of happiness, the same kind of happiness I extracted from the rhythms of poetry or the turnings of the stories I read.

  I should say here that I was very anxious, when I had children of my own, that they feel at home in the public library, and for quite a long period I seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time on my hands and knees groping under beds for books that were four days overdue, or four months overdue. The library fines I paid were in the double digits, and once I asked the librarian if we were the worst in the neighbourhood. No, she said, sparing me, there is one other family … Once I had a phone call from the librarian in Parry Sound, Ontario, inviting me to come to give a reading. But my first thought when I heard the librarian on the line, though I’d never been to Parry Sound, was: one of the children has an overdue book.