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home > fun stuff > interview with Carol Shields

1997 INTERVIEW WITH CAROL SHIELDS
when she was on tour promoting Larry's Party,
for Boswell Literary Magazine

Henry: Do you believe that words are dying out?

Shields: Well, I'd think I'd heard—which is quite alarming—that 5,000 words have dropped out of the average vocabulary in the last 10 years—if that's true, that's very alarming, isn't it? If it's true.

Henry: It doesn't seem like many people even have 5,000 words.

Shields: One of the words that occurs to me is the word feisty. The New Yorker never used to allow that word. And I can see why because it replaces about 10 other words, gradations of feistiness.

Henry: What other words does it replace?

Shields: Oh, irritability, different grades. I think that's only one example, but I expect this is what's happened. When we call someone a nerd or nerdy you know there are other words and I think for every single word that comes in it replaces quite a few. That must be one of the reasons.

Henry: Why do you think that's happening?

Shields: We're an image culture. I suppose we used to be a word culture, we are still, many people are still very concerned about language and books and words.

Henry: Do you think that the language of images is as rich as the language of words?

Shields: Not for me it's not. It's not ever. And you know I've had this argument with people, film people, especially, would defend this. I always say I prefer books to films because I want to know how people think. They say oh, well, we just get the actor's face and that expression tells you what's he's thinking. But not for me. It's not accurate enough. It's never as nuanced as what that interior voice is saying.

Henry: So what happens if words are lost? Why is that important?

Shields: Words are our life. We are human because we use language. So I think we are less human when we use less language.

Henry: You're a playwright. When I read your novels the things that strike me are the lush use of language as well as that you have a good sense of a colloquial voice. I hear the person's voice inside my head and I believe him as a person who's truly speaking. But then there's also this for example in the Stone Diaries "the daze and rumble of airline ritual," just this one little clause that you had, but you have millions of clauses like that peppered all the way through the book. When you write plays are you able to use that part of your skills?

Shields: No, no, no. You don't. You use other things. Actually I love to write plays and I love to be in the audience as well. I suppose what replaces that are such things as pauses or visual images on stage. Gesture. I'm amazed, when I have seen my plays in rehearsal, I'm amazed at the detailing of acting. In the first day of plays, the actors assemble, they read it through, and it's always so flat and just wanting. At the second reading there are a hundred new details throughout. By the fourth reading, it's extraordinary. So my respect for actors and directors has gone straight up because it's these pauses, these isolated moments that make up for some of this. It's something else that's being offered. You're never going to get that interior voice in quite the same way.

Henry: Earlier you were saying that when you watch a movie you feel like so much depth is gone. What is the difference between a movie and a play that you find only the latter has the underlying richness? Do you think it's the script?

Shields: I always remember a play I saw, a dramatization of David Copperfield. On stage, there's a scene when he gets into this stage coach, and of course there are no horses, there's just a box up there, and they cover the box with a blanket and away they go. And you really—the audience is right with you. Together you assume, yes, horses. Now imagine doing that in a film. No one would buy that. You'd have to have the horses.

Henry: So it's the literalness of film that has made it flatter?

Shields: It's the literalness. And I love theatre that is theatrical. This of course was a very theatrical gesture. Wonderful.

Henry: Names as well as words are important to you. Did you choose Larry Weller's name—the name of the main character in Larry's Party—first or did you deliberately think about what you wanted his name to mean.

Shields: I chose his name deliberately and I chose it first. I knew I wanted someone born in 1950. It was a kind of Larry age. And there are certain connotations around the name Larry, and I wanted to overturn some of those connotations.

Henry: You're making the gesture of someone lifting something up, seeing what's underneath. Does Larry explore all of those?

Shields: Larry does explore his name in one of the chapters.

Henry: Does he explore all the things that you thought of, or only a part?

Shields: Only a part. There are different voices, there's my voice, the narrator's voice, and there's his interior voice, and this is how I picture it there's this sort of sandwich, and that's this guy talk voice, that I keep having to remember to go back to.

Henry: Your name also has other meanings.

Shields: Yes, they are words. It's a word. Sword and shields.

Henry: Do you like your name?

Shields: You mean my last name?

Henry: Both Carol and Shields.

Shields: It's OK. Carol is invisible to me now. I can't see it or hear but I remember when my daughter Anne was 30 she called me and said thank you for naming me Anne. And I could tell she had not always felt that way, just by the way she—she's come in to it. Do you like your name? You have a very nice name?

Henry: I read that you already had another name picked out for the Fletts, and you went to Orkney and there was no one by this name in the phone book. What name had your originally wanted?

Shields: You know I can't remember. It must be in my original drafts, so it's retrievable, but I can't really remember. It was a "Mc" name, it was a Scottish name when I got and looked in the phone book there weren't any.

Henry: The thing that interested me about that was when you said you so deliberately chose Larry's name, then why not stay with the name you had originally imagined?

Shields: My fictional name? I could have. It was interesting to me that so many of Orkney Fletts came to Manitoba, we have a lot of Fletts in Mannitoba, and they are Orkney people so that was just preserving a little ribbon of history that was running through the book.

Henry: I had been surprised because it seems like what you do in your books is reordering the truth and coming back and reobserving and looking at it, paring it down, always coming back and reexamining things, putting a new framework on it, and that got me thinking about why does fiction exist as opposed to—you could have possibly researched a real Flett and told their real story.

Shields: I could have. I could have.

Henry: Does fiction exist to make the connections and tell the story that is lacking in the real world and that we long for?

Shields: That's why I read novels. I also read biographies. The thing that's missing in biography is the interior thought process of people. Some biographers do that but it's considered very trashy, purple biography. I think this is the great opportunity that fiction offers. To me that's everything. I think that's why certain kind of action narratives can be handled perfectly in film. But the kind of novels I'm interested in can't really be filmed, because of the interior voice.

Henry: Do you spend a lot of time talking to people?

Shields: Novelists are quite sociable people, actually. I think people think we're not. And there is certainly a lot of time you have to spend by yourself, and writers complain about this, having to live this lonely life. But we choose it, don't you think?

Henry: Both Larry, your main character in Larry's Party, and Daisy, of the Stone Diaries, were both ordinary people, although sometimes extraordinary things happened around them. Is it the voice of the ordinary, unremarkable person that is of interest to you? A lot of times it seems as if fiction is built up, especially commercial fiction, around people who are much larger than life, and have—

Shields: Is that really true? I hear this, yet when I ask people to point me to an example, they have a hard time.

Henry: Well, when I think about what's on the best seller list, especially paperbacks, its things like spy novels, and Steven King, and Judith Kranz...

Shields: Spooky, scary, have extraordinary jobs or—is that what you mean?

Henry: Or very powerful or extraordinarily beautiful. Or there are all those consumer novels, where they mention the brand names of every expensive thing they buy or wear, and they use that as shorthand for what the person is like.

Shields: I guess I am interested in the unrecorded voice. The voice that doesn't make the public record is much more interesting to me than the one that does. I understand the new Don Delillo novel uses a lot of real people. I'm not interested in that kind of fiction. I've read one of his novels and loved it, White Noise, but the others haven't meant much to me. But I will probably read this one.

Henry: I know that work is important to you, and it really shows in Larry's Party, where everyone has a job and some part of their job is described at some point. Why is work important to you?

Shields: It's part of the texture of most of our lives. Most of us work. We don't all work—well, we probably all do, to a certain extent. In some way. It's just one of the absences that I see in fiction. And I think that's one thing novelists like to do is to plug those holes where the texture is faulty. It's a big part of our waking lives, but I don't see much of it in our fiction. I love the idea of work. I always want to know what people do for a living. It's considered an impolite question these days to ask what people do. There are a lot of people without jobs at the moment. So I'm always a little careful, so I try to find a way into that conversation.

Henry: In Larry's Party, you have lists of work-related words. It doesn't seem that a list of all the kinds of plants that could make up a hedge would be interesting, or a list of all the tools that are used in a certain profession, but they are fascinating. Is that part of what interests you about work is the...?

Shields: The intricacy. The intricacy of the work. The whole vocabulary of particular areas of work. This very precise kind of work that requires its own situation, its own tools, its own vocabulary. It's really what sets apart. They get to be king of these little kingdoms, don't they? I had a wonderful tour through the bus factory in Winnipeg to find out about upholstery, and the man who took me through was very calm about all this, he didn't exclaim, or dramatize what he did, but I could tell while he stood in that piece of the factory floor, that he ruled that floor, because he knew just how everything worked. When Larry talks to his co-worker, Vivian, in the flower shop, there's an unending flow of conversation that takes place as they are working. And the fact that their friendship ends when the work ends.

Henry: Freud said the two most important things are lieben und arbeiten, love and work—would you say that characterizes much of what you write about?

Shields: Yes. In fact, I quote that in another book I've written, Republic of Love.

Henry: Why did you choose a man to be your point of view character for Larry's party?

Shields: I wrote a book called Happenstance from the point of view of a man. That was written in the late 70s, a very different time for men, and I didn't do it enough. I did his life, I mean I was very sympathetic toward him, in some ways he's one of the characters I like best. He's an historian. I was interested in the definition of history in those days. I just wanted to see if I could do it about men today, to go a little further with it. I've written enough of novels to find out about the lives of women. I thought it was just time.

Henry: Have you heard back from your male readers as to how they feel about how you portrayed a man?

Shields: I have. I have. But it's only at the start. But it's been reviewed by a lot of men. I can't say that anyone who has said. There's one male interviewer, he was a radio interviewer, and he said, well you know, Larry's a bit of a wimp, isn't he? And it made me laugh a little bit because we're all wimps, aren't we? I mean I don't believe in the male swagger. I think it's a great act, but I don't believe in it.

Henry: Do you think that an author can ever really be successful to be a person of another race or another sex?

Shields: It's pretty hard. I think that no, that moving into that body, the body is what is strongest you. I remember years ago there was a non-fiction book called Black Like Me. He took something to change the color of his skin. But he doesn't really, he's never been a black person inside that darker skin.

Henry: Breastfeeding is something you have to have done to understand truly what it is like.

Shields: I think when you read men's accounts of childbirth, who was it, that Australian writer is it Tim Wincott, he's got childbirth all wrong, and I can see why. I'm sure I have things wrong about that male body.

Henry: When you first conceived the idea for Larry's Party, was it the maze you began with or was it that you wanted to write about a man?

Shields: I wanted to write about a man. And I was interested in mazes at the same time. And I thought first of all of writing two different books, then I thought, maybe I could bring this together. And I wanted to write about a party, too. I have parties in all my books, but I wanted a bigger party, and I had the title from the beginning, I think it the first time I ever had.

Henry: Why were you interested in mazes? They are so prominent in mythology and literature—what is it that interests you.

Shields: I'm interested in all kinds of mythology. Republic of Love was a book about mermaid, a kind of feminist look at that iconography. These things just interest me impossibly, especially mazes because they exist in every culture. That was the thing about mermaids they are ubiquitous. Every continent has a mermaid myth. They go right back to prehistory. And so do mazes. They're everywhere. Different forms but definitely a maze.

Henry: Why do you think that is? Is there an Uber maze or Ur-maze?

Shields: I think probably there is. I think it's a concept of the complexity of life. The spiritual, there's all kinds of theories about it. Part of it's pleasure. I think we just think it's rather almost fun to be involved in a maze. There's something frightening and at the same time, comforting. The orderly boundaries. And there's an exit. You're promised an exit; you're promised a goal. These things are built into the maze sequence.

Henry: The structure of Larry's party—the short-story likeness of it when you restate some of the pertinent facts, but always there's a half-inch turn,

Shields: Exactly. That's exactly the way I wanted it to be perceived. I decided to try to write this book so that each chapter was independent. And I tried to do that once before with a novel called Swann with four novellas and a screen play. But I didn't manage it. They all lean on each other just that little bit. It was a kind of a narrative task I assigned myself to see if I could do it. But the reason I liked it because as he moves, well, you've said it better than I can say it, he repositions himself as he goes through and he takes his pulse in his sense, and everything looks slightly different.

Henry: What about the child in the high chair on the cover of the book?

Shields: I found that in our family photos, but I don't know who it is. The full photo is wonderful because you can see that the highchair has been carried outdoors. There are trees and it's rather surreal. And I love the look on that little child's face, it looks like he's saying to himself I have to grow up and be a man. It's going to be terrible. Or frightening. Or problematic, any way. So I thought it was, I was glad they used it. I wasn't sure they would. I think we do have a sort of image of who we were as a baby. I do, I mean I've seen photographs and it always surprises me a little to see that face, that's my face, and how much of the world it comprehended. Which was very little.

Henry: I read you started writing "again" at 40. Had you written before?

Shields: A little bit. I was a kind of high school writer, I did the class poem and the class play. There's always one of those girls. Worked on the literary magazine. Then I married young and had all these kids, and didn't do anything for a while. In my 30s I had two books of poetry published. So I was writing in a very small. And very gradually the children were all at school. And I started to think, maybe I'll write a novel.

Henry: How do you think being a mother has changed you as a writer?

Shields: Oh, completely. I couldn't have been a novelist without being a mother. It gives you a unique witness point of the growth of personality. It was a kind of biological component for me that had to come first. And my children give me this other window on the world. I just wouldn't have, I was a very girlish young mother, I needed to grow up, and those children made me grow up. I had to start paying attention.

Henry: So they made you pay attention to—

Shields: Everything. They made me pay attention to the world. You can't be a lazy mother. You just can't let things go or neglect certain parts of their lives. So I had to wake up. and I had to—you, know, I suppose I was very self centered, and I was just an undeveloped person.

Henry: Do you still teach?

Shields: Yes, but I have a year's leave of absence. I only teach one course. I've never taught more than one course. I teach different things. I have a specialty in Canadian literature. I sometimes teach creative writing. We have other people in the department who teach that too. Introduction to Literature. One year I did a course on the short story. Women's writing. In a small way, I'm a Jane Austen scholar.

Henry: I read that you were a stickler about punctuation.

Shields: It's not so much I'm a stickler, I just love punctuation, and when I read, I see it. I see every comma. I think punctuation can make an amazing difference to a sentence.

Henry: I've seen three sentences linked by semi-colons and a similar structure, only separated by commas. Each made complete sense.

Shields: American publishers don't like semicolons very much. English publishers love them. Of course, I'm always in between.

Henry: When you're teaching creative words, you break a lot of rules, in the Stone Diaries, the point of view fluctuates between 1st person 2nd person 3rd person.

Shields: I was worried about this switching of voices. I felt I had to do it. I was worried it would be confusing. I spent a lot of time at the end. I felt I was going along with a flat iron and working out these places where they would be in place. It comes down to this, sometimes you do think of yourself in the third person, you do see that self further away.

Henry: You said you had to do this, you had to structure it that way. Why?

Shields: The whole book has some of this. The whole book is in her consciousness. Everything else in the book is filtered through her consciousness. It's what she thinks people are saying about her, what she thinks people are doing. Because she is someone who worries about what people think about her. Her place. Sometimes I think she feels in that I voice, where she is herself, is fairly rare. I tried to make one moment—here's the schematic part coming forward—in each chapter, where she has one moment of clarity. It's usually—she's in the dark, and usually she's lying on her back. That was the kind of motif I set up for the 10 chapters. So I suppose this is one of them.

Henry: How much did you have to rewrite the scene of Larry's Party, where there's very little in terms of attribution.

Shields: It was quite pleasurable to do. I had thought of absolutely writing it as a play. One of my daughters dissuaded me. So I thought I'll just use as much dialog as I can and see if I can give that sense of a lot of people around a table cutting in, and bringing forth their non sequiturs, and so on into the conversation. It kept getting longer and longer, that was the problem. And it was already twice as long as any other chapter, but I kept finding more that I wanted to add to it. I suppose it's like wanting to stay longer and longer at the party. I could have made it even longer, but I decided, no, this is enough taxing the reader, because it does take some concentration. I usually—and I don't think authors generally do this—I set up a kind of structure so that I know, even before I know what the novel's about really, I know how many chapters I'm going to have, I know about the length of them. I need that kind of structure.

Henry: How can you know that if you don't know what the novel is about? You must know something about what the novel's about.

Shields: I know something. But I do set them up that way. And sometimes I change it. But mostly I don't. Mostly I find a structure that's useful. I love structures, and I love making new structures for novels, because I think the old structure is dead. The old conflict and climax shape. So I wanted this to have this linear line of time, the timeline of 20 years, but then I wanted the vertical structure, which is the compartmentalizing of his life. This is one thing that I do believe about men, that on the whole most men compartmentalize their lives more than women. So I wanted them to be like CAT scan slices, so I knew right away that this was more or less the structure. It was useful to me, because when you write a novel, you have this image you have to carry around with you for a couple of years. This took me two years. And I could just haul out that image in my head the way you would call it up on your computer, and I've got it. So I can hang on to it a little better. I see the shape.

Henry: How has life changed since you won the Pulitzer? It seems like you were a person who wrote novels that were well reviewed, and that you produced regular works that got recognition, but within a certainly smaller circle than it is now.

Shields: My life hasn't changed very much. Part of this is age, the patterns, I think, are pretty well set. I live in the same place, same city, married to the same person, have lunch with the same people, go to the same office. I do have sales. I have big sales now that I never had before. In a funny way you don't feel the impact. I mean when you get a royalty check you might feel it, but you don't think about it all the time. I never think about it.

Henry: Is it different to go to readings and have more people be there?

Shields: (Laughs.) Yes. That's nice. But you never know. It's not always a big crowd.

 

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