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COPYRIGHT 1998 University of Wisconsin Press
It is not surprising to learn that Carol Shields belongs to the Jane Austen Society. The novels of this American-born Canadian writer have the wit and high polish of her great English predecessor, as well as a comparable appreciation of the subtleties and dilemmas of "ordinary life." In Shields's case, of course, we are talking primarily about the North American WASP middle class in the latter part of this century--people who move back and forth across the border between Canada and the United States, whose lives reflect the social upheaval caused by the women's movement, and who feel a concomitant sense of new possibility. Shields's characters do not take their good fortune for granted, however. They reflect upon its social, moral, and metaphysical implications; they wonder what it means. The position of Jack Bowman, the historian-husband of Happenstance (1982), is typical: "Pure happenstance had made him into a man without serious impairment or unspeakable losses.... He was healthy and solvent--solvency in the year 1978 was not to be despised." Or here is Daisy Goodwill, of The Stone Diaries (1993), thinking back about the drama of her birth: "History indeed! As though this paltry slice of time deserves such a name. Accident, not history, has called us together, and what an assembly we make. What confusion, what a clamor of inadequacy and portent." Like the author, these characters are preoccupied with the intersection of personal and social history, with life's ironies, surprises, and fundamental mystery.
In addition to her eight and a half novels, Carol Shields has written two collections of short stories, three books of poems, four plays, a critical study of Susanna Moodie, essays on Jane Austen and Alice Munro, and numerous reviews. Her work has won many prestigious prizes, most recently, in 1995, the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Stone Diaries. Shields did not think of herself as a professional writer, however, until well after she graduated from college. She grew up in the 1940s and 1950s in Oak Park, Illinois, a predominantly middle class suburb of Chicago, which she once described as "like living in a plastic bag." (Shields has since revised this view of Oak Park, realizing that it reflected other people's assessments and that, in fact, poor people lived there too.) She began writing poems and class plays in elementary school, encouraged by her parents and teachers, and then sonnets in high school. Although she majored in English literature at Hanover College, she also got a teaching license, married soon after graduation in 1957, and moved to Canada with her Canadian husband. She and her husband have five children.
After taking a magazine-writing course at the University of Toronto in the late fifties, Shields began writing professionally when the teacher sold her first short story, written as a class assignment, to the CBC. She continued to Write stories when she and her growing family moved to England in the early sixties, a point in her life of new political awareness. After she returned to Canada in 1964, she began writing with a greater sense of purpose, and she won her first award, for poetry, in 1965. In 1969, she began a master's degree in Canadian literature at the University of Ottawa, eventually writing a thesis on Susanna Moodie. Her first novel, Small Ceremonies (1976), emerged from that thesis; the week she turned forty, it was accepted for publication by McGraw-Hill. Since the 1980s, Shields has been writing plays as well as fiction and poetry. Her most recent play, Fashion, Power, Guilt and the Charity of Families (1995), was written in collaboration with her daughter Catherine.
Most of this interview was conducted by letter during the winter and spring of 1997. It was continued on June 2 over lunch at the Faculty Club of the University of Manitoba. We were seated at a large window overlooking an even expanse of green. It happened to be Carol Shields's birthday. The concluding exchange took place by e-mail in January 1998.
Q. In an earlier interview [West Coast Review, 1988], you said that you have always beef, interested in history. Could you elaborate on the development of this interest? Has it changed from when you were a schoolgirl growing up in the United States?
A. I've always been interested in history--what it is, who gets to write it, and what it's for. My 1980 novel Happenstance asks this question rather directly, with Jack, the hero, offering up his theories, and his wife, a nonhistorian, offering hers. I think Jack is right, that having a historical sense is built into our wiring; we have a feeling for the past or we don't. I am enormously grateful to be one of the wired. I know, as everyone knows now, that history is a branch of fiction, a series of selections and personal commentary. The history I learned as a child--what we now call the Maps and Chaps version--had a pronounced and not so secret agenda. We were asked to memorize all sorts of patriotic literature, the Gettysburg Address, the Declaration of Independence (thrilling, I thought), and the Preamble to the Constitution, which I still chant on sleepless nights. We know better now than to believe what we are told--the romance of the melting pot, for instance, and the virtual absence of women--but I prize the rather detailed image of the country that emerged and that still lives in my head, the dates lined up like hooks that I can hang...
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