Mary Swann by Carol Shields

I have just completed four years thinking about a project. There were several false starts, many rejected, some ideas reworked. What he wanted to achieve was tangible, but he couldn’t understand it. When you thought you were holding it, it melted or flew off like squeezed soap. About six months ago things fell into place and I began to seriously write Eileen McHugh, a life remade. It is the story of a sculptor who did not leave work, but who, by accident in this case, had become recognized enough 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 grabbed Mary Swann by Carol Shields. I found it and bought it in a bag full of charity because I knew the author, not the book. I started reading and the experience was amazing.

Mary Swann refers to the life and work of a poet from rural Canada. The city of Nadeau was both small and insignificant, until, that is, the world discovered a meager volume of a hundred poems by one Mary Swann, herself insignificant, until she was murdered (shot, beaten, dismembered) by her husband in 1965.

Born in 1915, the exact date still debatable, she lived her anonymous life, almost hidden, even from the locals, on the farm. In other parts of the world, this would be called a peasant exploitation and their life would be characterized as mired in poverty. Mary Swann had no housekeeping, no appliances, none of the trimmings of modern life. She never drove a car. Isolated, remote, poor, ruinous are words that apply equally to the scene of life and to the person who lived it. Not much is known about her relationship with her husband, who committed suicide 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. He wrote a crisp, concise verse that inhabits the world on this side of the garden gate, but seems to delve into the infinite inner space of being. Scholars, having discovered her work, compared her to Emily Dickinson. Mr. Crozzi, who originally accepted her poems for publication and produced a couple hundred copies of Swann’s Songs, the perhaps appropriately titled slim volume, was the last person to see her alive, aside from her husband. There are an estimated 20 copies of the collection. But the content has found its fans and champions. There are even scholars whose reputations are based on criticism of Mary Swann’s verses.

There will be a symposium on the poet and her work and Carol Shields follows the life, testimonies and experience of a group of stakeholders. There are academic researchers, who cooperate by competing. There is Rose, the librarian of the city of Nadeau, shy, humble and suffering. There is Crozzi, perhaps a little crazy, the editor and a longtime journalist in that local press, although he himself is an immigrant. He is an eccentric and stubborn guy who misses his late wife very much. He also likes to have a drink or two. There are Sarah and Morton, academics with their own lives who have championed the work of Mary Swann. And there are others. Through the experiences of these characters and others, we reconstruct some of Mary Swann’s life and work, although, like everyone else involved, we never meet her and her work remains enigmatic.

What was absolutely strange to me, was that this was the exact shape I had chosen for Eileen McHugh. What exactly makes an artist? Why do we try to express ourselves in these arcane, often esoteric ways? What is authorship? What constitutes recognition? Who controls that process? How does life influence art or vice versa? How do we remember our past interactions with someone we never thought we would remember? Eighty percent through Mary Swann, I felt like I was reading a different version of my own book and came to the conclusion that I was very glad I didn’t read Carol Shields’ book before inventing my own.

But eventually, things diverged. Mary Swann, by Carol Shields, concludes with the symposium on the work of the poet, a meeting that brings together the characters that we have followed and constructed in the form of a script. He begins to master a particular thread of the plot. Competition surfaces, insults are perceived and offense is taken. Hard-to-explain events come together to identify and conclude what has really been going on in the background throughout the book. At the end of this superbly crafted and constructed novel, we are intimately involved in considerable parts of the lives of contemporary characters. Mary Swann, however, remains in a continuous and enigmatic anonymity that remains completely hers, as does, thankfully, my own Eileen McHugh’s.