Startle and Illuminate

by Carol Shields

  It might be thought that I would be dismayed to discover the limited nature of human interaction, but instead I was heartened, in the same way I was heartened, and relieved too, when I realized that the Methodist God, with whom I’d grown up, did not necessarily observe every ripple of sensation that passed through my head. To be known was to be incapacitated, and stripped bare. To be solitary, that is, to be left in a state of privacy, was to hang on to the forces of originality and innocence.

  We are born alone, we die alone: those two austere existential declaratives were a comfort to me as I grew to adulthood. But to be alone in the midst of life brought to the table a degree of solitude that required a certain amount of philosophical accommodation. I found the premise, in fact, close to unbearable. Human activity with its random jets of possibility and immobilization was the oxygen I sought. The hum of human busyness engaged me at every level; it was what illuminated my imagination and what found its way into my novels. My own life—what a sorry admission, and yet it was true!—was not quite enough. I desperately needed to know how other people lived, how they moved about from room to room in their ordinary houses and gardens, what ordinary or extraordinary things they said to each other and to themselves as the clock struck midnight or 9 a.m. or noon, even though I saw my curiosity about such things as lying side-by-side with the idleness of gossip or the wasteful longing of voyeurism.

  Judith Gill, the narrator of Small Ceremonies, announces her need openly, that she requires for her survival the narratives of other lives, and that she is willing to suspend judgment and direction and moral imperative in order to do nothing more than peer into the windows of alternate human arrangements. Her need is so strong, in fact, that she becomes a professional biographer, a vocation that allows her to snoop, sniff, interview, eavesdrop, interpret and bring to ripe conclusion the motives and figurative possibilities of her subjects.

  When I first began writing novels, friends asked me what it was I wrote about. At first I didn’t know what to say, for, in fact, I wasn’t sure what my subject was. I soon found out—by reading reviews of my books, and listening to these same friends.

  It seemed I wrote about ordinary people—whoever they are—and their ordinary, yet occluded, lives. And I also wrote, more and more, about that subjunctive branch of people (mea culpa) who were curious about the details of other ordinary people, so curious, in fact, that they became biographers or novelists, those beings who are allowed societal permission to investigate—through the troughs of archival material, through letters and diaries and blurred photographs, by way of offhand conversations and reminiscences and abrupt literary interpolations and fictional thrusts directed at the lives of the famous and the not-at-all famous.

  How do we arrive, then, at the lives of others, their assumed kernel of authenticity? As a child, I did poorly at mathematics, but enjoyed what we called “story problems.” Mary Brown is sent to the grocer’s for two pounds of cheese at a dollar and a half a pound. How much change will she get back from a $20 bill? The answer came easily, or not so easily, but it was the tug of biographical curiosity I chiefly felt. Who was this Mary Brown and what was she doing with all that cheese? Was she old enough to be trusted with a $20 bill? And what of her wider dreams and aspirations, or even her immediate thoughts as she skipped home with her sack of groceries and her pocketful of coins?

  I remember trying to “interview” my Canadian mother-in-law when she was in her eighties, wanting to access a portion of the childhood she had spent on a pioneer farm in Manitoba. The project was doomed from the beginning. I didn’t know the right questions, and she didn’t have any idea what I wanted to know. My line of inquiry, even to my own ears, felt intrusive and inappropriate, and her answers were, not surprisingly, vague and, for my purposes, not at all useful. What I hoped for was the precise, inch-by-inch texture of that early twentieth century Icelandic farmhouse located on a threadlike river sixty miles north of Winnipeg, the furniture, the floor coverings, the ceiling, the ornaments that rested on the rough kitchen shelves. What I got were generalities: Well, it was homey. Well, we made our own cheese. The sheep, they were a bother. It was cold in winter. In short, the experiment was a failure. I half expected it would be.

  There is something oddly shaming about possessing so avid a sense of curiosity.

  Naturally when I find myself on buses or trains, I feel a compulsion to know the titles of the books my fellow passengers are reading. And when I am being interviewed about one of my books, I often find myself interviewing back: How did you happen to become a journalist? What sort of articles are you usually assigned? Do you have any children? Tell me more.

  More is what the indecently curious always want. They want the details, and no detail is too small to be of interest.

  Speaking of curiosity, I was talking to some women friends, and we got onto the subject of wondering what it’s like to be a man at the end of our century.

  I started asking some of the men I knew this question and I started writing a novel called Larry’s Party.

  My informal survey wasn’t always successful. Almost every man I put this question to rebounded by saying, “Well, but—I’m not a typical man.” And therein may lie the path to understanding. Other men went immediately into their jocularity mode—and I knew what that meant, that they were strenuously avoiding any kind of serious thinking on the subject.

  But some men listened thoughtfully and replied candidly; a few confessed to me that they had never had this discussion before and that they welcomed it, and they hoped I’d be patient if their response came awkwardly framed. Their lives had not always been predictable, not easy or settled, not as anchored as their fathers’ lives, and certainly not accompanied by the same guarantees of authority.

  I’ve always been interested in men and women and the curious ways they are matched and mismatched in the world. Toni Morrison talks in one of her essays about the split consciousness of most Americans, and the fact that this splitting is caused by an ever-present consciousness of race, the guilty and haunting sense of “the other.”

  But my “other” was men. What they were, who they were or what they wanted, despite having a father, a brother, a husband, a son, and a few—not a lot but a few—men friends. And as I wrote Larry’s Party I thought often of the immense mysteries men keep from women. And the mysteries women keep from men.

  I do think it’s important that men try to write about women and women about men. Otherwise we’ll end up with two separate literatures, just as, I’m told, we have girl movies these days and boy movies. Perhaps our literature is already segregated. You can test this thesis by asking your friends who Jo March is. Almost no men know the answer to that question; almost all women do.

  Yet we all know that a fully furnished universe is made up of men and women, and that women writers are often called upon to write about men, and male writers about women. Writers go even further at times, not just writing about the other sex, but speaking through its consciousness as I tried to do in Larry’s Party.

  The question can be asked, and often is, how successful is this gender-hopping? Does any truth at all seep through? Maybe more than we think. Oscar Wilde had the notion that we can hear more of the author’s true voice in her or his fictional impersonations than we can in any autobiography, not that he bothered with the niceties of gender pronouns. “Man is least himself,” he said, “when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.” A mask, he said, but he might also have said a skirt. Or, for women writers, a small pointy beard.

  “You’re not really going to write about a man called Larry, are you?” my daughter said.* The name Larry reminded her of someone standing in a sixties rec room wearing polyester pants.

  I was pleased with this description; it was exactly what I wanted.

  Who is this Larry Weller from Winnipeg and what’s he like? He’s growing up, for one thing, emerging from today’s long, long childhood. He’s born in the year 1950 and the novel take
s him from age twenty-six right up to the present. He has two parents, two wives, one son, a sister, a handful of friends.

  He’s someone trying to be a good man in a world that doesn’t always encourage him to think in terms of goodness. And I wanted to give him some dignity, having observed that men in movies and on TV have become buffoons: when did this happen? My first draft didn’t quite manage this dignity, and I had to go through the final draft with a small piece of sandpaper, as it were, restoring him to himself and to my initial image of who he is.

  I knew I’d have to have some male furniture, cars and sports in the book, areas I usually avoid, out of ignorance and also disinclination. But what concerned me far more was trying to understand how the thought synapses in a man’s head work. We talk about the linear male mode and the circular female style, but I knew that was too simple. Of course I worried about getting it right, but I comforted myself by remembering that I was only writing about one man, not men.

  And then there’s that question of body. The sexes can learn a lot about each other by patient observation and by sympathy, but in the end that other body is the place men and women can’t quite go. Nevertheless, since this is a novel about a man, there is a chapter called “Larry’s Penis.”

  There are other chapters called “Larry’s Folks,” “Larry’s Work,” “Larry’s Love,” “Larry’s Friends”—fifteen of these chapters that move forward in time and also, I like to think, provide a kind of CAT scan look at Larry Weller’s life. An ordinary life, if there is such a thing.

  I fell into discussion with two male writers while I was working on the book, Jack Hodgins and John Ralston Saul, and they asked me if I had written about Larry’s clothes. Well, no, I said, I hadn’t thought his clothes were important. They convinced me, though, and I’m grateful, that socks and underwear and tie choices are part of the male profile, and so there is a chapter called “Larry’s Threads.”

  While I was thinking of the problems of men and women, I was also pursuing my interest in mazes and labyrinths. It happened that a few years ago I was walking across a public park in Saffron Walden in England and found myself standing in the middle of a medieval turf maze, one of the most famous in the world, though I’d never heard of it.

  I started, then, reading about mazes, and visiting those I was able to. There are all sorts of theories about why mazes, these doodles on the earth’s skin, exist. They’re found in almost every culture and corner of the world, hedge mazes, stone mazes, engravings on rocks or on ancient coins. They may be symbols of the turnings and twistings of life. A way to represent the birth journey or the journey to God. Some are probably sexual in meaning, a part of courtship rituals, or else they’re games, diversions, distractions from the hardships of existence.

  It seemed natural to give Larry Weller my passion for mazes. He becomes, gradually, a designer of mazes—and so this ordinary man has an extraordinary profession. In fact, there are only about a dozen maze makers in the world, but their impact is being felt as more and more contemporary mazes are being constructed.

  Writing this novel I thought of each chapter as a small maze with an entrance and an exit, and it is in the final chapter, called “Larry’s Party,” where Larry confronts the major maze of his life, the maze of love and of being loved, of permanence, of wisdom, and, in a sense, of a return to the knowledge of his self.

  The editing of this novel was a peculiar pleasure. The line editor lived in a cottage in the wolds of Oxfordshire, and, since we’d both discovered email at the same time, we decided to go about our day-to-day negotiations using this amazing technology, so much more immediate than a fax and more satisfying than the telephone.

  Of course with three English-language publishers working together, there were wrinkles to work out. My chapter called “Larry’s Shingle,” in which Larry goes into business for himself, was completely unintelligible to the UK publisher, who thought shingles were those stones that lie about on the beaches. We settled for “Larry Inc.” as the chapter title.

  And there were questions of historical accuracy. Three editors thought I was fantasizing when I had Larry drinking cappuccino in Winnipeg back in 1977. I phoned a friend of mine, Mark Morton, who had just published a book about food, and asked him. “Give me half an hour,” he said, and came back with the information that an Italian café had brought cappuccino to Winnipeg in the fifties, though it was a café from which women were casually excluded.

  One morning there was an urgent email from England about a scene in which Brussels sprouts are eaten, at an August Sunday dinner in Chapter 3. Brussels sprouts don’t appear in the market until October, the editor said, so I would either have to change the month or the vegetable. “Nonsense,” came the word from New York—an editor who buys her Brussels sprouts frozen in a little box any time of the year she chooses.

  We did, in fact, move the scene to October, but I marvelled over the fact that a novel devolves in the last days of its shaping to questions of Brussels sprouts and their proper season.

  In Brief …

  Getting other people right:

  • It’s important that men try to write about women and women about men. Otherwise we’ll end up with two separate literatures.

  • If your first draft doesn’t quite capture the character you mean to create, you might need to go through the final draft with a small piece of sandpaper, restoring your character to your initial image of who he or she is.

  * Anne is certain she was the daughter; she remembers the conversation. It is possible, though, that one of her other sisters made the same observation and that this may have led to a similar discussion.

  ~ 9 ~

  THE LOVE STORY

  To be a romantic is to believe anything can happen to us.

  THE REPUBLIC OF LOVE

  LIKE MOST CHILDREN I STARTED OUT BELIEVING ROMANTIC love belonged to the world of fairy stories and Saturday afternoon matinees, but I had the good luck, once, to witness my uncle bending over at the dining room table to kiss the back of my aunt’s neck. It was summer time, and she was wearing a sundress and just lifting a spoonful of sherbet to her lips. They were middle-aged then, probably in their fifties, and I was a child of nine or ten—but, with a delicious shudder, I recognized “it”: love, tenderness, ardour, romance, ravishment. All that was desirable and baffling, and, in this tight domestic space of our dining room, so utterly surprising.

  Despite this revelation I very early fell into the trap of believing love and intelligence lived on different sides of the track. Silly folks fell in love, and love itself was a manic, puppyish disease from which people were expected to recover, assuming in time their roles as responsible citizens.

  One night, not many years ago, I found my daughter rummaging in my bookshelves. She was exasperated. “Don’t you have any love stories?” she asked.*

  Love, after all, was what all of us wanted, yearned for, even at times died for, so why wasn’t it showing its face on the publishing lists? It struck me that the problem was partly one of language; the syntax of love has been co-opted by pop culture—rock lyrics, greeting cards—just as the language of ardour had been taken over by the porn industry. To see the word kiss or embrace was to invite a flush of embarrassment.

  More serious, perhaps, was the profound skepticism about the components of love—the sense that love was no more than a cocktail of chemicals and momentary encounters and sentimental echoes, leading inevitably back to the blackness of alienation and betrayal. To produce A Love Novel was to dabble, to sentimentalize, to enter the realm of triviality.

  My own attempt to write A Love Novel, The Republic of Love, published in 1992, was summed up in the Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature as “a good humoured urban fantasy.” This is either a monumental misreading—the book is as much about loneliness as it is about love—or an expression of profound cynicism: love as illusion, as wistful fantasy. Do we really believe this, that romantic love no longer powers and transforms ourselves and our society? Have we
announced that the written word and perceived world are permanently disconnected? (The no-longer-quotable Woody Allen has commented on how writers of comedy are always seated at the children’s table; if this is true, writers who attempt The Love Story are seated beneath the table.)

  Once The Love Story held parity with The Story of Good and Evil, and it manifested itself in subtle ways. Consider Jane Austen’s use (non-use, really) of body parts in her books. (Fortunately there is a concordance available to help you out.) There are something like two ankles and one nose in all of her six novels. Also three breasts—though these breasts belong exclusively to men and represent the seat of fine feeling and not the heaving bosoms of female passion. And so the rise on Austen’s romantic thermometer is signalled obliquely, a flutter of a hand standing in for a major amorous response, and all of it on a curious miniaturized scale, like looking into a doll’s house of sensuality.

  It may be that a permissive society allows us to say whatever we like now, and so there is no longer a prohibitive, punishing construct to push against. Or it may be that gender shifts in the last half-century have bred distrust. Or that loveless sex has spread widths of confusion and grief. Or that Erich Segal’s version of The Love Story made us wary and unwilling to be taken in again. Or that fiction often feeds on inferior fiction, not life, with love scenes no larger than quick retakes of what we glimpse through the Hollywood keyhole, and pillow talk coming straight out of the beaten meringue of the Harlequin universe. Look out for the brilliant young soap-opera physician about to perform brain surgery on his ex-wife. He’s been given all the bad lines, and they’ve led love straight into contempt.