The weather’s in a tricky mood these first few days of April. From inside, the sun appears warm, almost sensuously so, but if you leave the house and linger too long, look out. There’s a distinct, vaguely menacing chill. The wind can’t keep its fingers out of your hair.
Still, Carol Shields wants to see Chicago, the great geographical grab bag of it, the city and its ever-spreading nimbus, from Old Town to Oak Park to Andersonville to Winnetka. As much as she can pack into four days, with dwindling stores of energy.
It is research for her 11th book — a book she never thought she’d live to write — and it is something else as well: a quiet and reflective homecoming for the Pulitzer Prize-winning author who, at 67, is dying of breast cancer.
“Things do come back to me,” Shields says of the Chicago area, which has lived vividly in her memory since she left in 1957, with occasional trips back to visit friends and family members. She hears a certain sound — the clack and roar of an “L” train, for instance, shouldering its way through the city as if it owned the place — or sees a particular image and it all comes back, all of it, the private library of memories that furnishes her mind.
And Shields returns the favor, putting Chicago in her fiction. Several of her major characters — Larry in “Larry’s Party” (1997), Sarah Maloney in “Swann” (1987) — call the area home, while others talk about it or visit it or dream about it. Shields has lived in Canada for more than four decades, but Chicago lingers at the periphery of her work like an ink smudge in the margin.
That work, you realize, resembles this early April weather. On the surface, it’s all polished warmth, the depictions of domestic life cozy and soothing. Dig past that serene exterior, though, and you’re into rougher, darker, colder territory: a land of thwarted lives, muted desperation and the recognition that love, in the end, changes nothing and saves no one.
And you realize, if you hadn’t already, that Shields — a shy-seeming, self-effacing woman, petite and polite — is also a fierce realist, able to look into the abyss of life’s deeper mysteries with a clear, unblinking gaze.
Consider the moment in “The Stone Diaries” (1993), which won the Pulitzer Prize and brought Shields international fame, when 80-year-old Daisy Flett is stricken with illness: “Suddenly her body is all that matters. How it’s let her down. And how fundamentally lonely it is to live inside a body year after year and carry it always in a forward direction, and how there is never any relief from the weight of it, even when sleeping, even when joined, briefly, to the body of another.”
In 1998, just before Christmas, Shields was diagnosed with advanced breast cancer. The usual arsenal was deployed: mastectomy, chemotherapy, radiation. But the cancer has been relentless, and Shields and her family — husband Don, a retired civil engineer and university administrator, five children and 10 grandchildren — have come to terms with her imminent death.
“I’ve stopped writing several times, through some of the worst phases” of cancer treatment, Shields says. “But I always start again. It’s a kind of consolation. And there’s something about wanting to go home to write that final book.”
Co-existing peacefully
And come home she has, to test her memories against the city’s realities. Shields and her husband hoped to be able to cover a lot of ground, seeing Chicago from pavement level, but her frail health intervenes; the touring has been in a car, with frequent breaks. Shields doesn’t complain, but her fatigue is obvious: There is a flat pallor to her skin, a hint of distance in her eyes. She sometimes looks away before replying to a question, as if gathering the strength to speak. Her voice is steady, but possesses the gossamer quality of tissue paper.
Shields is sitting on a dark sofa in the parlor of the Old Town Chicago Bed & Breakfast Inn, a spacious, comfortable room that backs up against the Brown Line tracks. The noise of the frequent trains — here one comes again — would, you might think, easily drown out the author’s soft, non-insistent voice. Oddly, though, it does not; the small woman and the big train manage to co-exist peacefully. It’s almost as if the train, too, wants to lean in and give a listen.
“I feel when I write as if I’m doing the only thing I can do, with this illness,” Shields says. Asked if cancer has changed her writing, she quickly replies, “Oh, yes.” She adds, “I tend to be very optimistic. That optimism got blown away when I became ill.”
Until the blindside blow of her diagnosis, Shields admits, she had little to be pessimistic about. She was born in Oak Park and lived in a big house on Kenilworth Avenue, the third child of Robert and Inez Warner, he the manager of a candy company, she a 4th-grade teacher.
“It was an absolutely wonderful place to have grown up,” she says. She put a White Sox sticker on her chest of drawers, wrote for the Crest, at that time the name of the literary magazine of Oak Park High School, and dreamed of becoming a writer. “I got this reputation as the `literary kid.’ I was encouraged [to be a writer] by my parents and my teachers. I think writers must live in a place where writing is honored.”
And when she brought home her first serious boyfriend, a lanky, long-haired Canadian whom she had met while both were college students studying in England, her mother had a single request for him, Shields recalls. “She said she hoped he would encourage my writing. He said, `Her what?'”
Shields had never told him about her literary aspirations. But that was typical of the day, she says; women put their own dreams away in a cupboard, like carefully folded linen, and focused instead on their husbands and children — which is why Shields’ first novel was not published until she was 40.
Best-seller ranks
After that, though, the work tumbled out: novels, short stories, plays, poetry, a biography of Jane Austen. Always cherished by critics, she made the leap into the best-seller ranks with “The Stone Diaries” — a work whose vast success made her feel “as if it was all happening to someone else,” Shields recalls with a tiny, bemused smile. “It brought me lots of mails, lots of invitations.” When a story about her appeared in People magazine, she heard from dozens of Oak Park friends. “It was rather thrilling,” she admits.
On her visit to Chicago last week, Shields and her husband drove past what had been the Warner family home on Kenilworth Avenue. “It was white in our day. Today, they’ve called in the color consultants,” she says. “It’s taupe with slashes of fuchsia and deep blue.” She is tempted to knock on the door and ask the present occupants if she might go inside and look around, but never works up the nerve.
“I love to read about Chicago. I read Saul Bellow’s biography and I loved the Chicago bits — but it did seem to me that his life had much more freedom than mine had, going everywhere with his mates,” Shields muses. “I was huddling in Oak Park with my girlfriends.”
There it is again, then, the gentle but ever-present reminder that women’s lives are different from men’s lives, more pinched, narrower. Shields’ novels are filled with the same sort of quiet, insistent feminism. In “The Stone Diaries,” she writes, “Men, it seemed to me in those days, were uniquely honored by the stories that erupted in their lives, whereas women were more likely to be smothered by theirs. Why? Why should this be? Why should men be allowed to strut under the privilege of their life adventures, wearing them like a breastful of medals, while women went all gray and silent beneath the weight of theirs?”
Make no mistake: Shields is not complaining. She has had a splendid life, she will tell you, raising a family with her husband, a handsome, courtly man with a twinkle in his eye and a way with a wisecrack. They have lived in various Canadian cities — Vancouver, Toronto, Winnipeg — as his career progressed. Two years ago, they settled into a rambling house in Victoria, British Columbia, where they will await the end of Shields’ life.
First, though, there will be another novel. She assumed “Unless” (2002) — a critically acclaimed story about a woman whose daughter drops out of college to beg on the streets — would be her last, and told people so. Yet an unexpected burst of energy after her final chemotherapy treatment has enabled her to undertake “Segue,” the working title for her novel about a woman in her 60s who lives in Andersonville and writes sonnets.
Most writing about the old is done by the young, Shields says. “We don’t hear it expressed by the people who are there. They [older people] want to write about other things — as if to prove that there’s living tissue up there,” she says, pointing to her head with a rueful smile.
The next day, Shields and her husband are driven to Winnetka, where she addresses a crowd of about 50 people at The Book Stall, a local bookstore. In attendance are several friends from her Oak Park childhood — friends with whom she’s kept in touch for more than half a century, Shields tells the delighted audience.
“I should tell you that I’m a Chicago girl,” she declares, explaining that she is in the area as a “tourist” for several days, to gather material for a forthcoming work. Then she reads from “Unless,” which will be published in paperback early next month. Her work is splendid when read aloud — the language clear and unadorned, the imagery fresh. With every paragraph, Shields proves what she says about her education in Oak Park public schools: “I learned how to write a sentence.” That sounds like damning with faint praise, but it is not; literature is built with sentences, and Shields’ are among the best around.
Clive Priddle, publicity director for her publisher, Fourth Estate, makes the same point. “We admire the quality of her phrases,” says Priddle, a slender Englishman with dark spectacles and a dapper gray vest, who flew from New York to attend the Winnetka event.
Savoring the small things
By week’s end Shields will have left Chicago once more; most likely, she knows, she will have left it for the last time. She has become accustomed to doing things for the last time, which is both sad and happy: sad for the obvious reasons, happy because it makes one savor the small things.
She returns to Victoria, where she will continue to write a bit each day, when she has the energy and the inclination, because she is a writer — not, apparently, because she has any faith in the endurance of art. “I don’t think literary reputations live on,” she told an interviewer last year. “Books fall out of the public eye. So I don’t have a sense of leaving anything permanent . . . Naturally I like to write books that people enjoy reading, but the literary legacy, no, it’s very unimportant to me.”
Whether important to her or not, the legacy exists, and it is impressive. Shields has won major prizes in Canada, the United States and around the world, from the Pulitzer to the National Book Critics Circle. She has bagged honorary degrees. Her style of writing — the careful, well-crafted sentences about seemingly ordinary things that, upon reflection, prove to be far more extraordinary than flashy, shattering events rendered in melodramatic prose — is more in favor today than ever. The world has come round to Shields’ way of writing, just as Shields prepares to leave the world.
Roberta Rubin, owner of The Book Stall for 21 years, says Shields’ work creates an unusual bond of intimacy with readers. “She has a position in peoples’ hearts. So many readers, for instance, knew she was ill. The good readers, the serious readers, know about her.”
Men and women alike appreciate her work, Rubin says. “She writes about feminism, yes, but I don’t classify her as a `woman’s read.’ In fact, I’m sending `Unless’ to a male friend who’s looking for something to read.”
Rubin says readers are drawn to Shields’ “optimism and wisdom, and her straight, simple prose. She’s a name, very respected.” Her work entertains as well as illuminates, Rubin believes, a point on which many critics insist. Time magazine recently noted that Shields “swings easily from comedy to tragedy and back again.” A critic for the London Observer says her “large and varied fan base” looks forward to the fact that in her fiction, “humankind seems to be revealed in all its mundane, wonderful glory.”
What matters to her now, it seems, is what has always mattered to her: family and work. She is lovingly tended to by her husband, who remembers precisely the first moment he saw her. A group of students was vacationing in Scotland at a small country inn. “There was a fire burning with huge logs,” Don Shields recalls, “and this beautiful young woman walked in, wearing a green woolen dress.”
Of their life together, of the long and eventful years, he might say, as Shields says on behalf of a character in “The Stone Diaries: “His body at the end of the afternoon is pleasantly tired, but he cherishes each minor ache of bone and muscle, knowing that his day, even an ordinary Monday like today, will be rounded by rapture.”
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A Carol Shields sampler
“Swann” (1987)
Clever men create themselves, but clever women, it seems to me, are created by their mothers. Women can never quite escape their mothers’ cosmic pull, not their lip-biting expectations or their faulty love. We want to please our mothers, emulate them, disgrace them, oblige them, outrage them, and bury ourselves in the mysteries and consolations of their presence . . . It’s my belief that between mothers and daughters there is a kind of blood-hyphen that is, finally, indissoluble.
“The Stone Diaries” (1993)
Well, a childhood is what anyone wants to remember of it. It leaves behind no fossils,
except perhaps in fiction.
“Larry’s Party” (1997)
O’Hare International Airport is a giant puzzle, with its various color-coded terminals, its concourses, its hundreds of gates — an immense sorting-machine for the savvy, and a bafflement to strangers. Travelers emerge blinking at the exit doors, their luggage miraculously in hand, scarcely able to believe they’ve worked their way out to the benign freshness of the rooted world.
“Unless” (2002)
But happiness is not what I thought. Happiness is the lucky pane of glass you carry in your head. It takes all your cunning just to hang on to it. And once it’s smashed, you have to move into a different sort of life.
