Mary Swann by Carol Shields

 

I have just completed four years of thinking through a project. There were several false starts, many rejected, some reworked ideas. What I wanted to achieve was tangible, but I could not grasp it. When I thought I had it held, it would melt away or fly out like squeezed soap. Some six months ago things gelled and I began in earnest to write Eileen McHugh, a life remade. It’s the story of a sculptor who left no work, but who, by accident in this case, had become sufficiently recognized for a biographer to reconstruct her life and remake her lost work.

With the book complete and published, I decided it was time to relax and took up Mary Swann by Carol Shields. I found and bought it in a charity shop bag full because I knew the author, not the book. I began to read and the experience was uncanny.

Mary Swann concerns of life and work of a poet from rural Canada. The town of Nadeau was both small and insignificant, until, that is, the world discovered a slim volume of a hundred or so poems by one Mary Swann, insignificant herself, until she was murdered - shot, bludgeoned, dismembered - by her husband in 1965.

Born in 1915, the exact date still debatable, she lived out her anonymous, almost hidden life, even from locals, on the farm. Elsewhere in the world this would be called a peasant holding and her life would be characterized as mired in poverty. Mary Swann had no domestic help, no appliances, none of the trappings of modern life. She never drove a car. Isolated, remote, poor, dilapidated are words that applied equally to the setting of the life and the person who lived it. Nothing much is known of her relationship with her husband, who killed himself after murdering his wife. The erasure was complete, except that they had a daughter who is alive, but is unwilling to discuss family matters.

But Mary Swan wrote. She wrote pithy, crunchy verse that inhabits the world this side of the garden gate but seems to dig deep into the infinite internal space of being. Academics, having discovered her work, likened her to Emily Dickinson. Mr. Crozzi who originally accepted her poems for publication and produced a couple of hundred copies of Swann’s Songs, the perhaps appropriately titled slim volume, was the last person to see her alive, apart from her husband. There are estimated to be about 20 extant copies of the collection. But the content has found its admirers and champions. There are even academics whose reputation is built on the critique of Mary Swann’s verse.

There is to be a symposium on the poet and her work and Carol Shields follows the lives, testimonies and experience of a group of interested parties. There are academic researchers, who cooperate by competing. There is Rose, the Nadeau town librarian, timid, self-effacing and suffering. There is Crozzi, perhaps a little crazy, the publisher and a long-standing journalist in the local press, though himself an immigrant. He is an eccentric, opinionated type who dearly misses his deceased wife. He also likes a drink or two. There are Sarah and Morton, academics with their own lives to live who have championed Mary Swann’s work.  And there are others. Via the experiences of these characters and others, we piece together something of the life and work of Mary Swann, though, like everyone else involved, we never know her and her work remains enigmatic.

What for me was utterly uncanny, was that this was the exact form I had chosen for Eileen McHugh. Exactly what makes an artist? Why do we try to express ourselves in these arcane, often esoteric forms? What is authorship? What constitutes recognition? Who controls that process? How does life influence art, or vice versa? How do we recall our interactions from the past with someone we never thought we would remember? At eighty per cent through Mary Swann, I felt like I was reading a different version of my own book and I concluded I was very glad I had not read Carol Shields’s book before inventing my own.

But eventually, things diverged. Carol Shields’ Mary Swann concludes with the symposium on the poet’s work, a meeting that brings together the characters we have been following and constructed in the form of a screenplay. A particular thread of the plot begins to dominate. Competition surfaces, insults are perceived, and offense is taken. Difficult to explain events coalesce to identify and conclude what really has been going on in the background throughout the book. By the end of this superbly crafted and constructed novel, we are intimately involved in considerable slices of the contemporary characters’ lives.  Mary Swann, however, lingers in a continued, enigmatic anonymity that remains entirely her own, just as, thankfully, does that of my own Eileen McHugh.

Ways Of Escape by Graham Greene

Ways Of Escape is one of the most rewarding and, surprisingly, surprising reads one might encounter. On the face of it, the book is Graham Greene’s artistic, literary autobiography. A second half and companion volume for A Sort Of Life, Ways Of Escape deals chronologically with Graham Greene’s works, his inspiration and his development as an author. All of this, we may believe as we start this book, is well known, well document, even public knowledge. 

Ways Of Escape reveals, however, that much of Greene’s inspiration was quite personal, often very private, and it is through this that surprise emerges. The book catalogues brilliantly the sometimes direct, sometimes loose relationship between experience and inspiration. Graham Greene is apparently candid about the nature of his invention. Whether it is achieved via amalgamation, imitation or juxtaposition, for the author it appears to be eventually rooted in experienced reality. 

What Ways Of Escape communicates above all is how much Graham Greene was occupied with his writing alongside a life that seemed already utterly packed with travel, journalism, various employment and risk, so packed that people encountered along the way could never have suspected that they were being analysed for their potential as future fictional characters. 

 Graham Greene is self-deprecating throughout, appearing to belittle his own work, thus showing little respect for the critical acclaim of others which, by the end of the period in question, was considerable. Many of the scenes from his work that he values seem to relate strongly to, perhaps clarify his own experience. And, for Graham Greene, experience was usually vivid and sought out to be so. He samples local prostitutes freely, drinks whatever is to hand and chemically alters the reality to which he otherwise seems to remain encountered as a participant rather than as an observer. 

 There are indicators to Greene’s ambivalence towards religion. He expresses respect for a simple, unquestioning faith. But he despises a middle class, “suburban” Catholicism that seems to assume an ownership of God. Greene, of course, belonged to that latter group by virtue of class, education and marriage, but one feels he yearned for a simple, stated and genuflecting responsibility to an omnipotent God. One also feels that this might be Romanticism, a desire to become an ideal to which he feels he may only aspire as a result of the mired filth of the life he perceives he lives. He relates some of his contact with the press, as well as with film. 

There are brushes with the law in the form of libel actions. Throughout, one feels his respect for his fellow professionals is at best limited. He even describes the word “media” as applicable to bad journalism, clearly placing himself above the label. But above all it is experienced reality that provides the gems. His description of bombardment in Sinai rings both true and vivid. “I remembered the blitz, but the blitz had one great advantage – the pubs remained open.” Such attention to detail alongside direct experience is what brings Graham Greene’s prose to life, and it is this rooting in the reality of experience that prods the reader into reaction. 

This is a masterwork by a master technician. But it is the book’s epilogue that, for me, provided a supremely apt and yet provocative coda. Here is a man who has imagined others, given them life in print and film, a man who seems to have little confidence in his own ability or thought for his consequence. And, we learn, he is a man who might even be someone else, someone who claims to be him, an Other. The juxtaposition of this idea with a life lived is both thought-provoking and disturbing – a masterstroke by a master of his craft, even his art. 

 View this book on amazon Ways of Escape (Vintage Classics)

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

Sometimes, when reading a big book, one gets the feeling that the author set out to achieve size, as if that in itself might suggest certain adjectives from a reader or reviewer – weighty, significant, deep, serious, complex, extensive, perhaps. Sometimes – rarely, in fact – one reads a big book and becomes lost in its size, lost in the sense that one ceases to notice the hundreds passing by, as the work creates its own time, defines its own experience, shares its own world. Even then, reaching the end can often be merely trite, just a running out of steam, the process thoroughly engaging, the product, however, something of a let down. Rarely, very rarely indeed, one reads a big book that actually needs its size, justifies itself, continues to surprise as well as enchant and then, finally, stuns. Margaret Atwood’s Blind Assassin is such a book, a giant in every sense, a masterpiece beyond question. 

Blind Assassin was awarded the Booker Prize in 2000 and charts intersecting histories of two well-to-do Canadian families, Chase and Griffen. The two Chase sisters, Iris and Laura, are quite different people. Born into the relative opulence of a Canadian manufacturing family, they have a private education of sorts, experienced throughout and yet alongside something vaguely like a childhood. Various aspects of twentieth century history impinge upon their lives and eventually force their family to reassess its status. Economic downturn, war and family tragedy take their toll on the father, who becomes less able to manage either his own life or his business. Something has to give. Ways of coping must be found. 

Iris, the elder sister, is the first person narrator of about half of the book, the other half being devoted to a book within a book, a novel in the name of Laura, the younger sister. This novel, entitled The Blind Assassin, is an eclectic mix of experience, sex, fantasy and politics. It has made a name for Laura and retains a significant cult following many years after its publication. Laura, herself, died in a car accident. She drove off a bridge into a ravine. The car belonged to Iris. 

There was never any real explanation for the event. Iris, meanwhile, has been married off to an older man, a Griffen, who seems to treat her like so much chattel. But then he is an industrialist with the wherewithal, not to mention capital, to assist the bride’s family business in its time of need. Iris, therefore, experiences the Canadian equivalent of an arranged marriage. 

Perhaps the word marriage is a little overstated. The partnership could be better described as a merger, or a union, if that were not a dirty word because of its political connotation. And so the octogenarian Iris, clearly anticipating the end of her days, embarks upon a cathartic outpouring of personal and family history in the hope that an estranged granddaughter might just understand a little about other peoples’ motives. 

The book takes us through Canada and north America, across to Europe, via an imagined universe, to political commitment, direct action and its inevitable reaction. Iris needs to write it all down. And so she works her story out, constructing it, perhaps reconstructing it, maybe inventing it from memory and relived experience against a backdrop of contemporary Canada and her own failing health. Her vulnerability, in the end, is our debt, our penance, perhaps. She is a wise old woman with much to hide, but her acerbic wit is undiminished by age, her observations of others stunningly perspicacious. It is not often that a novel, a mere flight of another’s fancy, achieves the subtle, stunning and surely enduring power of the Blind Assassin. 

View this book on amazon The Blind Assassin