Carol Shields has no time for dying. She’s too busy living.
Despite a mastectomy, chemotherapy, radiation and the reprieve of remission, the breast cancer first diagnosed in December 1998 has come back again and again. Shields’ strength has dwindled, and her life expectancy now is measured in months.
But since that diagnosis, the American-born Canadian writer has packed in more living than less resilient people do in a lifetime. She has managed to complete several stories, a prize-winning biography of Jane Austen and “Unless” (4th Estate, $24.95), the novel that no doubt will be her last.
“If anybody could die with grace, it’s Carol,” says Carol Huband, a friend since they were young mothers in Ottawa. “She and [her husband] Don have sat down and worked it out. In the last month or so a friend who’s a nurse will move in with them. Then, at the end, she’ll go to a hospice.
“She’s always been a person with a good grasp of life’s situations. She’s been able to handle things with great equanimity, great calm.”
With another friend and former colleague at the University of Manitoba, Marjorie Anderson, Shields also co-edited in this period “Dropped Threads: What We Aren’t Told,” a volume of essays and stories about women’s lives.
An international reputation
Long one of Canada’s most respected writers, Shields vaulted into the international spotlight in 1994 with “The Stone Diaries,” the story of an ordinary woman made extraordinary by an exquisite prose and astute sensibility.
The best-selling novel won the Pulitzer Prize (dual Canadian and American citizenship made her eligible) and the National Book Critics Circle Award in the States, Canada’s Governor General’s Award and was shortlisted for Britain’s Booker Prize.
For the past two decades, Shields lived in Winnipeg with her husband, an engineering professor at the University of Manitoba. Like other retirees drawn to milder climates, they resettled nearly two years ago in Victoria, British Columbia, on Vancouver Island, where winters are mellowed by the Pacific Ocean.
To interview Carol Shields, you take a narrow, twisting street in one of the city’s imposing neighborhoods. The Shields residence, two stories of ivy-covered gray stucco, has the handsome, classic look of a pin-striped suit. Shields, 67, greets the visitor with a warm smile and a weak handshake. Her face and hands are those of a woman a decade older. She wears a loose-fitting housedress and no makeup.
Before the author took up residence in Canada, home was Oak Park. Shields’ father, Robert Warner, managed a candy factory; her mother, Inez, taught 4th grade.
At Hanover College in Indiana, Carol Warner continued to write stories and “terrible poems,” she says. Canadian Don Shields, then a graduate student in London, entered her life during her junior year abroad in England. They married the week of her graduation in 1957, and she has lived in Canada since.
Like most women of her generation, Shields initially subordinated her own ambitions to her husband’s. She minded the children while he moved up the academic ladder.
All of Shields’ children–a son followed by four daughters–were born during her 20s. The few hours she could spare for writing were devoted to poems.
Her first novel, “Small Ceremonies,” was not published until her 40th birthday, in 1976. By this time she had earned a master’s degree and was teaching part-time at universities. From 1980 through 2000, she taught literature at the University of Manitoba. For the last four of those years, she also served in the largely honorific post of chancellor of the University of Winnipeg. Shields’ early novels of everyday domestic life were quietly received. The reviews she remembers best amounted to dismissive faint praise, the implication being that this was women’s work, small and unimportant.
“I knew it was a serious subject, regardless of what people said,” she says. “So I had a sort of arrogance about that, I guess. I thought these women, the kind of women that I knew, should be in fiction.
“I was kind of late coming to feminism. I guess I was so busy having these children. I read Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer, but I didn’t go off on a lot of marches and demonstrations or anything like that.
“Gradually in the ’80s I became much more involved in a sort of quiet way. That is, I was writing books that were slightly feminist and was interested in women’s writing.”
By the late ’80s, with “Swann,” an academic satire-cum-mystery using multiple narrators, Shields’ critical ascent took flight. “The Republic of Love,” giving new spin to the traditional romance, further enhanced her reputation.
In one sense, “The Stone Diaries” seemed like a step backward into the straitjacket of domesticity. A protagonist could hardly be more humdrum, more ordinary than Daisy Goodwill Flett, a wife and mother whose lifespan coin-cides with much of the 20th Century. Yet Shields makes her into an Everywoman whose loneliness, lost opportunities and quiet triumphs resonate with countless readers.
More than anything, the book exemplified Shields’ contention that there are no ordinary people: “It’s kind of a romantic notion, I know. But I do believe that, in the same way that I believe there are no great people. People are only great in their moments. And people are ordinary or cowardly in their moments too.
“I like the idea of recording the kind of lives that would never be recorded, that you could redeem them somehow.”
In the wake of “Stone Diaries” came a host of honors. Universities bestowed honorary degrees. The government of France named her a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters. Her next novel, “Larry’s Party,” won Britain’s Orange Prize, for novels written in English by women. Recently “Jane Austen” was awarded the Charles Taylor Prize for the best “literary nonfiction” of the past two years in Canada.
Interested in `the play of gender’
“When I look back,” Shields says, “everything I’ve written is about the play of gender. I’m interested in how men and women occupy space in the world and how different they are or alike and how we manage, nevertheless, to somehow make it work part of the time. I’ll never come to the end of it, nor will, I suppose, any of us.”
Gender is certainly central to her new novel, “Unless,” in which a middle-aged Canadian woman struggles with a daughter’s bizarre behavior. Reta Winters, a writer, can’t fathom why her Norah has dropped out of college to beg on a Toronto street corner. The novel takes us deep into the nature of gender and power, goodness and creativity.
If not explicitly about cancer, “Unless” is also about loss. It encompasses the worst scenario Shields can imagine, estrangement from a child or the death of a child.
“I just didn’t want to write [a book] about cancer,” she says, “because so many other people have done that. I didn’t want to write a disease book.”
In some ways, Shields’ experience with cancer has been typical: stunned bewilderment and outbursts of rage and weeping followed in time by a kind of stoic acceptance. But this woman also seems to draw on unusual sources of sustenance. About a month after her diagnosis, Shields wrote in the October 2000 issue of Canadian Living magazine, she determined to not let the disease control her every move: “I took my medications and went to a New Year’s Eve dinner and afterward danced to `Rock Around the Clock,’ my all-time favorite tune.”
A year ago Shields’ doctors conferred on her an unexpected benefit, a grace period enabling her to complete “Unless.” Chemoembolization, a procedure usually used in treating liver cancer, she says, “gave me three months of reasonably good health–June, July and August. I didn’t quite feel my own self, but I had a little bit of energy. I was writing maybe 600 words a day, which is a lot for me.”
What continues to sustain Shields, above all, is the embrace of friends and family. People send flowers. They bring food. Loved ones in Winnipeg or Ottawa keep in touch via letters and e-mail.
“I have a family. I have children,” Shields says. “I feel that I must be brave for them.”
Subversive to the end, Shields wants the world to know that things could be so much worse. That’s the conclusion of her Canadian Living essay: She could be a cancer patient in a country without full health coverage. She could be poor. She could live far from sophisticated treatment centers. She could be a mother with young children. One of her own children could have cancer. She could have cancer and not have a partner.
“My own partner has been with me every step of the way, and it hasn’t been easy …” she wrote. “On the whole, mostly, day by day, sometimes up, sometimes down, with difficulty, with discouragement and with great random bursts of hopefulness, and with the grace and generosity of others, we’re moving forward.”
