CHANGE IS IN THE AIR FOR ANNIE PROULX
Blue Metropolis Grand Prix laureate, whose road to greatness included a crucial early stop in 1970s’ Montreal, is taking a new direction at 83
Annie Proulx is in Montreal this weekend to accept Blue Metropolis’s Grand Prix. As events honouring literary eminences go, this one stands out as more than a satisfyingly apposite match of festival and recipient. It marks a great writer’s return to a city where she took crucial early steps on her life’s path, and to a province where her family has significant roots.
“Montreal seemed to me to be so vividly alive and free from the strictures of Yankee New England, where my Quebec ancestors ended up in the textile mills.”
Interviewed by email from her home in Washington state — “a few hours from Victoria” is how she describes the location — Proulx, 83, was recalling her first impressions of the city where she obtained a master’s degree in history in the 1970s.
Enduring a daily 60-mile commute from her home in St. Albans, Vt., Proulx — whose paternal grandfather emigrated from Quebec to New England as a teenager — attended Sir George Williams University just as it was transitioning into Concordia. Asked for some of her abiding memories of that time, she responded with an evocative, impressionistic, time-capsule list.
“Gauloise cigarette smoke in a tiny office. Monty Python on the hallway televisions. A young student who came up to me and said she had not been able to do the weekend assignment because she had been in jail. Going blank when asked a simple question during the oral exam. ... An occasional sandwich at a nearby bistro said to be frequented by gangsters. The faces of half a dozen fellow students, only one of whom I am still in touch with — my friend historian Liana Vardi. A marvellous toy store on Sherbrooke Street where I bought Hergé’s Tintin books and beautiful articulated puppets for my children. The astonishing furs on the wall at the McCord Museum.”
A lasting legacy of Proulx’s time at Sir George Williams was her absorption of the Annales school, a French approach to the study of history that emphasizes deep, context-setting research into daily domestic-level life. It has remained a hallmark of much of her work ever since.
“The geography and geology, the crops and food, the prevailing weather, the old written records, the cemetery shadows, the natural world, all the tangential forces that would shape the lives of the people in those specific regions,” Proulx said of her fiction’s essential underpinnings. “From working out the basic backgrounds of places, believable characters and their stories could emerge.”
It took some time for Proulx to realize that her true vocation was fiction and not teaching or journalism. Even then, her prominence came later than it does for most major writers — for years the responsibilities of raising a family on a limited budget took precedence. While many of her earliest published stories were in the science fiction genre, for much of the reading public she emerged fully mature in 1992, with a work far more representative of her subsequent oeuvre: the epistolary novel Postcards.
Proulx then moved on to the Newfoundland-set The Shipping News, a formally daring work that not only won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, but unexpectedly became an enormous international seller, leading to a Hollywood adaptation (more on that later) and changing the author’s life in measurable ways.
“Probably the most fundamental way was increased mobility,” she said. “More income allowed me to move around, and greater literary exposure resulted in invitations to writing festivals in different parts of the world. So I began enlarging the geography of the fiction I wrote.”
Among the first fruits of that greater freedom was Accordion Crimes, the 1996 novel that followed the ownership of the titular instrument on an odyssey around North America. Of all her books, she said, “Accordion Crimes was the most fun to work on, as it involved hearing a lot of terrific music and meeting some extraordinary people.”
Proulx hit an especially rich seam of inspiration when she began to write about what she saw around her in Wyoming, where she lived in a series of increasingly remote settings for 20 years, beginning in the mid-1990s. Ranch workers, rodeo riders, barflies, waitresses and numinous landscapes were fodder for three story collections every bit as crucial to her oeuvre as the novels. Brokeback Mountain, a novella-length story from 1999’s Close Range, was a word-of-mouth sensation on its original publication in the New Yorker. Some might say Proulx had tapped into a zeitgeist where people were ready for a new kind of depiction of gay male relationships, but there’s just as strong an argument that it was the power and originality of Proulx’s vision that effected the change.
In a 2016 interview with Montreal journalist Richard Burnett for Concordia, Proulx commented: “By making the protagonists individualistic, hard-working tough cowboys, the most masculine American identity, the story packed a stronger punch than if the characters had been any other profession.”
Ang Lee’s Oscar-winning 2005 adaptation of Brokeback Mountain, starring Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal, continued a relationship between Proulx’s work and Hollywood that had begun less than completely auspiciously. Lasse Hallström’s 2001 feature version of The Shipping News diverged from the novel in ways that left a lot of readers unsatisfied — a subject on which Proulx professes no strong feelings pro or con.
“I recognize that books and films are two different art forms and that an exact and faithful transference of book to screen is not always, or even often, possible or desirable,” she said. Brokeback Mountain the film, on the other hand, “was successful without too much addition or subtraction from the original story. I am glad that the story and the film have helped bring about greater acceptance of sexual diversity.”
In 2016, Proulx published the novel that may be seen as the one she was always building toward: her late-career masterpiece Barkskins, an epic of environmental destruction and deforestation as told through the fitful multi-generation progress of two logging families. The book’s three-century time frame allowed her to incorporate narrative strands inspired by her family tree.
“In trying to learn about my Quebec and French ancestors I came up with a few interesting connections,” she said. “One of those connections, Jean Prou, who came from Anjou to Quebec City as a domestique in 1673, I subjected to literary imagination and made him the character René Sel. As I knew very little about the real person, I could at least imagine a life for him. So in a curious way this unknown ancestor became a great help to me.”
Remarkably for a book of such vast range, the novel is shot through with a palpable urgency, a reflection of the author’s desire to write about the subject occupying more and more of her time and thoughts: climate change.
“I became more sure that we were on the hell-bound train and I felt I had to write about it,” she said. “Every other subject paled in comparison.”
As with all of Proulx’s work, intense curiosity and tireless observation provided the spur. Even living in some of the continent’s more unspoiled corners, the signs of creeping disaster were undeniable.
“The Earth has survived five previous extinctions, but humans have never before been through such a massive event,” she said.
“It took a few years of noticing small changes in my own time in the natural world before I realized the stunning magnitude of climate change could, in fact, be the beginning of the sixth extinction.”
Though Proulx is curious to see how National Geographic’s forthcoming TV serialization of Barkskins turns out, it’s clear we shouldn’t expect another novel on its scale from her — not anytime soon, and probably never. Not only does she say she’s had it with the public duties that go with commercial publishing, her priorities have pushed her definitively in a different direction.
“I continue to write, but not fiction,” she said. “Climate change has pushed all thoughts of stories away. I am reading much science and participating in citizen science projects.”
Fittingly for someone who still thinks of herself “primarily as a reader rather than a writer,” Proulx points to some recent reading she has found galvanizing: sociologist Kari Marie Norgaard’s Living in Denial — Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life.
Proulx describes Norgaard’s study of a winter in the life of a Norwegian town as a book that underlines “how difficult it is to get past the private, almost secret realization that something immense is around the corner. We need to say out loud how each of us is experiencing climate change. We need to recognize it. We need to ask if and how humans can survive the coming changes.”
Never one to place a lot of personal stock in awards (hers are kept not at home, but in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library, along with her archives), Proulx nonetheless appears pleased by the Blue Metropolis honour, not least for the opportunity to come back to a city that has loomed large for her.
“It has been many years since I have been in Montreal, and although I hold the city as an ideal, I know it may have changed very much,” she said in anticipation, also revealing that several years ago her enduring affinity for Quebec extended to thoughts of emigrating here.
“I filled out a long, tiresome application form online but was told that I probably would not be accepted — no reason given. I imagine age and lack of French facility were the primary factors.”
Maybe she should try again.