Swann

by Carol Shields

  Ah, but on that same morning, in the same lot of mail, came the latest issue of PMLA (a periodical, by the way, that I often feel contributes to the gastritis of the lit business). On this particular morning I opened the journal to your article on Swann. Who is this Mary Swann? I wondered. And who is this Sarah Maloney? I read quickly through your introduction to our poet. And then came to those eight quoted lines from “March Morning.” (By coincidence, it was a March morning, a murky, tenebrous Winnipeg morning.) Reading, I felt a oneness with this Mary Swann. (I never think of her by her Christian name alone, do you?) I felt that same “Iron flower of my hand/Cheated by captured ice and/Earth and sand.” (I have little patience with those who consider Swann a primitive because she didn’t use four-syllable words. She was—is—a poet of great sophistication of mind.) But it was the vigour of the lines that struck me at first, the way they shifted and worked together, cross-bonded like plywood sheets. (You see how she infects me with her colloquial images.) My only disappointment was in finding she had written so little, though one is grateful for what does exist, and there are the love poems to come—if they come, I’ve never trusted Lang—and, of course, the notebook.

  About Swann’s notebook, I am wondering once again if I can persuade you to change your mind about sharing its contents, at least partially. My research here has gone extremely well, but I’ve been frustrated by having to rely on secondary and tertiary sources almost exclusively. (Swann’s daughter, whom I’ve been interviewing, is a woman of opaque memory and curious insensitivity—she has, for instance, saved only the most cursory notes from her mother, not the confiding letters that I am sure must have existed.) It seems to me that a page or two from the notebook—I would of course pay for photocopying and so on—would bring our graceful Swann out of the jungle of conjecture and, as she herself would say —

  Into the carpeted clearing

  Into the curtained light

  Behind the sun’s loud staring

  Away from the sky’s hard bite.

  Do, Sarah, let me know if this request from a fellow scholar is impertinent. I feel, and I am sure you will agree with me, that Mary Swann belongs to all of us, to the world, that is—her poems, her scraps and ciphers, her poor paltry remains.

  It now looks as though I will be able to come to the symposium after all, and I will be happy to deliver a few remarks, as you suggest, on the progress of the Life. I am sorry to hear that Buswell has cancelled, though it seems a trifle paranoid of him to think his notes were stolen. Mislaid, perhaps; but—stolen!

  I so look forward to meeting you in person, though I know you already as a dear friend. Such is the power and warmth of your letters.

  With affection,

  Morton Jimroy

  He’s ingenious, Morton Jimroy. But worrying. Every sentence, the way it shapes itself around a tiny, tucked grimace—I feel the weight of it all. (Lifting the paper to my face I inhale the faint smell of cigarettes.) I will have to write him a careful letter. (Now I’m dressed in the old sweatshirt I wear to bed, part of my dark ritual. I’ve already phoned Brownie to whisper good night, and I’ve propped myself up in bed with my reading light shining over my shoulder.) I will have to tell the good persevering Morton Jimroy how pleased I was to hear from him, how warmed I was to hear him assert, once again, that it was I who introduced him to the work of Mary Swann. All of this is true. It will flow out of my pen untroubled.

  But I will have to say no to him about the notebook. Politely. Correctly. But conceding nothing. No, Morton. I cannot. I am sorry, Morton. I regret. I wish. I understand your position. But no, no, no, no, no. I am not yet ready to publish the contents of Mary Swann’s notebook.

  Dear Morton. (I’m sliding into sleep, adrift between layers of consciousness.) Dear Morton. Soon the prima facie evidence will be in the public domain, available to all, et cetera, et cetera, but now, for a few months longer, until January, please forgive me (yawn), Mary Swann’s notebook is mine.

  7

  Happiness is not my greatest need. My greatest need is to feel that every part of me is fully in use, or engagé as people used to say a mere ten years ago, and that all my sensory equipment is stretched as nervously as possible between a state of apprehension and a posture of pounce. I want my brain to be all sinew and thrum, chime and clerestory, crouch and attack.

  Which more or less describes my condition on Saturday, a gilded October afternoon, when I attended a new exhibition of pencil drawings executed by my extraordinary friend and sometime mentor, Peggy O’Reggis.

  I had spent a frivolous morning in bed with Virginia Woolf, lunched on herrings in sour cream, and then taken the bus down to the Dearborn Gallery. By the time I got there the room was filled with a zesty mix of friends and strangers, mostly between the ages of twenty and forty, all of them chatting, nodding their heads, embracing, drinking wine and peering with squinty eyes into Peggy’s tiny crowded drawings, which always remind me of snapshots of the brain’s prescient vibrations. The colours she favours include a lollipop pink and a rich oily green, and what she draws are ideas. With resolute angular turnings, each pencil line duplicates the way that precious commodity thought is launched and transformed. Here there was a calculated mimetic thrust, there a microscopic explosion of reason, here an intellectual equation of great tenderness and, next to it, a begging void exerting its airy magnetism.

  As in her previous exhibitions, the drawings were all titled—for which, being part of the word culture, I thanked God. Images can speak, yes, but some of us need to be directed toward the port of entry. Yet there’s never anything authoritarian about Peggy’s titles, just a nudging, helpful “Untroubled Night” or “Open Heart” or, the one I most admired yesterday, “Vision Intercepted.”

  Standing before “Vision Intercepted” with my glass of red wine in hand, I experienced that sharp electrical fusing that sometimes occurs when art meets the mind head-on. Beside me, sharing my brief flight of transcendence, were a yellow-haired woman in a rawhide jacket and my old friend Stephen Stanhope, the juggler. We didn’t speak, not even to exchange greetings, but instead continued to gaze. The moment stretched and stretched, the kind of phenomenon that happens so rarely that the experience of it must be cherished in silence and persuaded to linger as long as possible.

  And so, riding home on the bus, I gave myself over to the closed eye’s bright penetration, trying to call back the image of Peggy O’Reggis’s circling, colliding lines and colours. A pattern or perhaps a sensual vibration began to dance across my retina and grope toward form. I summoned it, let it emerge, luxuriously let it have its way. But something kept spoiling my satisfaction, some nagging thought or worrying speck at the periphery of vision. I opened my eyes. The sun poured in the dirty windows, warming my arm. A woman with a blanket-wrapped baby on her lap sat across from me, a slender, long-necked black woman with amber eyes, clearly infatuated with her child’s beauty. With a free hand she stroked its knitted blanket. The baby made cooing sounds like a little fish and stared dreamily up into an advertisement for men’s jockey shorts. In the ad, a man with a bulging crotch was leaping over a bonfire, an expression of rapture on his daft face. He and the small baby and the baby’s mother and I seemed suddenly to form one of those random, hastily assembled families that are hatched in the small spaces of large cities and come riding atop a compendium of small pleasures. But today’s pleasures, pungent though they were, made me less willing than usual to surrender my earlier perception.

  What was it that was getting in the way? I poked part way into my subconscious, imagining a pencil in my hand. There was my usual catalogue of shame. Wasted time? Careless work? Had I forgotten to phone my mother?—no. Shopping to be done? Someone’s feelings hurt?

  Guilt has the power to extract merciless sacrifices, but it was not guilt that was interfering with my attempt to bring back the voluptuous sensation that briefly enclosed me in the Dearborn Gallery. It was something smaller and less formed, an act of neglect or loss that scuttled like
an insect across my consciousness and that, because of the wine or the wooziness of the sunshine, I was unable to remember.

  Later it came to me. It was midnight of the same day. I was ready to go to bed, but first I was locking the doors, checking the windows, turning out the lights, listening to the silence and darkness that blew through the house. My thoughts were of Mary Swann, how she must also have performed night rituals, though not the same ones as mine. I tried to imagine what these rituals might be. Might she have looked out the kitchen window into the windy, starry night, trying to guess at the next day’s weather? Would she hook a screen door or perhaps set a kettle of soup or oats on the back of the woodstove? Perhaps there was a cat or dog that had to be let out, though she had never in her poems or in her notebook mentioned such a cat or dog.

  And then I remembered—Lord!—what had been begging all day to be remembered. It was Mary Swann’s notebook, which I keep on a bookshelf over my bed. I had not seen it there for several days.

  8

  In a sense I invented Mary Swann and am responsible for her.

  No, too literary that. Better just say I discovered Mary Swann. Even Willard Lang admits (officially, too) that I am more or less—he is endlessly equivocal in the best scholarly tradition—more or less the discoverer of Swann’s work. He has even committed this fact to print in a short footnote on page six of his 1983 paper “Swann’s Synthesis,” naming me, Sarah Maloney of Chicago, the one “most responsible for bringing the poet Mary Swann to public attention.” This mention on Willard’s part is an academic courtesy and no more.

  Ah, but Willard’s kind of courtesy amounts to a professional sawing off, a token coin dropped in a bank to permit future withdrawals. Willard Lang’s nod in my direction—“S. Maloney must be cited as the one who”—is a simple declaration of frontier between authority and discovery, Willard being the authority, while S. Maloney (me) is given the smaller, slightly less distinguished role of discoverer.

  In truth, no one really discovers anyone; it’s the stickiest kind of arrogance even to think in such terms. Mary Swann discovered herself, and therein, suspended on tissues of implausibility, like a hammock without strings, hangs the central mystery: how did she do it? Where in those bleak Ontario acres, that littered farmyard, did she find the sparks that converted emblematic substance into rolling poetry? Chickens, outhouses, wash-day, woodpiles, porch, husband, work-boots, overalls, bedstead, filth. That’s the stuff this woman had to work with.

  On the other hand, it’s a legacy from the patriarchy, a concomitant of conquest, the belief that poets shape their art from materials that are mysterious and inaccessible. Women have been knitting socks for centuries, and probably they’ve been constructing, in their heads, lines of poetry that never got written down. Mary Swann happened to have a pen, a Parker 51 as a matter of fact, as well as an eye for the surface of things. Plus the kind of heart-cracking persistence that made her sit down at the end of a tired day and box up her thoughts into quirky parcels of rhymed verse.

  It was an incredible thing for a woman in her circumstances to do, and in the face of so much implausibility I sometimes chant to myself the simple list that braces and contains her. Girlhood in Belleville, Ontario; schooling limited; nothing known about mother; or father; worked for a year in a local bakery; married a farmer and moved to the Nadeau district, where she bore a daughter, wrote poems, and got herself killed at the age of fifty. That’s all. How Jimroy intends to boil up a book out of this thin stuff is a mystery.

  My own responsibility toward Mary Swann, as I see it, is custodial. If Olaf Thorkelson hadn’t badgered me into near breakdown and driven me into the refuge of northern Wisconsin where Mary Swann’s neglected book of poems fell like a bouquet into my hands, I would never have become Swann’s watchwoman, her literary executor, her defender and loving caretaker. But, like it or not, that’s what I am. Let others promote her and do their social and psychoanalytical sugarjobs on her; but does anyone else—besides me that is—detect the little smiles breaking around her most dolorous lines? Willard Lang, swine incarnate, is capable of violating her for his own gain, and so is the absent-minded, paranoid, and feckless Buswell in Ottawa. Morton Jimroy means well, poor sap, but he’ll try to catch her out or bend her into God’s messenger or the handmaiden of Emily Dickinson; or else he’ll stick her into a three-cornered constellation along with poor impotent Pound and that prating, penis-dragging Starman. Someone has to make sure she’s looked after. Because her day is coming. Never mind what Willard Lang thinks. Mary Swann is going to be big, big, big. She’s the right person at the right time for one thing: a woman, a survivor, self-created. A man like Morton Jimroy wouldn’t be bothering with her if he didn’t think she was going to take off. Willard wouldn’t be wasting his time organizing a symposium if he didn’t believe her reputation was ripe for the picking. These guys are greedy. They would eat her up, inch by inch. Scavengers. Brutes. This is a wicked world, and the innocent need protection.

  Which is why I find it impossible to forgive myself for losing her notebook.

  9

  It’s been lost for several days. Since Monday probably, maybe Tuesday.

  I’m not willing yet to admit that it is irretrievably lost; it is just—what?—misplaced. Any day now, tomorrow maybe, I’ll find it under a pile of letters in my desk drawer. It might have got slipped into a bookcase, it’s so small, one of those little spiral notebooks the colour of cheap chocolate. It’s just waiting, perversely, to surprise me one day when I least expect it. It might be under a corner of a rug. Or right out in plain sight somewhere, only my eyes are too frantic to focus on the spot.

  I’m not a careless person, though I remind myself a dozen times a day, as a kind of palliating commentary, that this is not the first thing I’ve lost. Once, when I was married to Olaf, I lost my wedding ring. I was devastated, almost sick, and hadn’t been able to tell Olaf about it because I knew he would see it as a portent; and there it was, two weeks later, in a little ceramic dish where I kept my paperclips. Another time I lost my first-edition copy of The Second Sex, which I’d bought at Stanton’s for ten bucks back in the good old days. For months I’d wandered around like a mad woman, wrenching cushions off chairs and wailing to the walls, “Books don’t just get up and walk away.” In the spring a dear friend, Lorenzo Drouin, the medievalist, found it wedged behind a radiator in my living-room.

  About the lost notebook my mother is sympathetic but vague. She asks if I’ve checked the pockets of my raincoat or lent it to a friend or thrown it out with the newspapers—preposterous suggestions all, the utterance of which points to her essential helplessness and to how little she understands my life. “It’ll turn up,” she murmurs and murmurs, my comforting plump spaniel of a mother. But helpless, helpless.

  I visit my mother every Sunday. On Sunday morning in the city of Chicago other people wake up thinking: How will this day be spent? What surprises will it bring? Sunday is a day with a certain lustre on it, a certain hum. The unscheduled hours seduce or threaten, depending on circumstances, on money or friends or on health or weather; but there is always, I’m convinced, an anticipatory rustle, a curtain sliding open onto possibility.

  Not for me, though. You might say I’m a professional daughter, or at least a serious hobbyist. On Sundays I get on the L and go to see my mother, who lives in a third-floor apartment on the west side. She expects me at 1:00 P.M. give or take five minutes. She watches from the window as I come trotting down the tree-lined street, slips the brass chain off the lock, and enfolds me in her heated feathery arms, saying, “Hi there, sweetie pie.”

  Immediately the two of us sit down in the dinette to a full dinner, roast chicken or ham with mashed potatoes, frozen peas or string beans, and for dessert ice cream in a cereal bowl. My mother and I talk and talk, and if I stop now to think of those scattered others outside in the streets or parks of Chicago who are freely disposing of the day, it’s with scornful pity. The beckoning Sunday spaces are revealed in al
l their dinginess. Whatever possibilities had winked and chittered in the morning have by this time dried up, and here sit I, the luckiest of women, brimming with home-cooked food and my mother’s steady, unfocused love.

  Nevertheless, I’m full of jumps and twitches today.

  “Something’s bothering you,” she divines.

  “That idiotic notebook,” I rage. “I still can’t find the damn thing.”

  “Oh, dear.” The mildest profanity confuses her. “Let me give you some more coffee. It’ll calm you down.”

  My mother’s the only person I know who believes coffee possesses tranquilizing properties. She lifts the coffee pot, holds on to the lid, and pours. Light filters through the Venetian blind. Above her head, on a small shelf, is her row of Hummel figurines and Delft plates. Also a small Virgin Mary, rather crowded to one side, which she was given as a young girl. (I’d be a better woman if I didn’t notice such things.) My mother’s dressed today in a pantsuit, her new coral double-knit, which is generously cut and comfortable around the hips. She never wore pants until she was in her late fifties; then her legs lost their shapeliness, overnight becoming straight and thick as water pipes. Her grey hair is always combed and pinned in place to form a roll at the back of her head; if this roll of hair were pinned a mere eighth of an inch higher, it would be stylish instead of matronly. Still, she takes pains with her appearance. Even when she’s home alone in her apartment, she wears lipstick, a bright pink shade, and a touch of blue eye shadow. She also wears large button earrings; she likes silver; not real silver, of course—she’s never been able to see the sense of expensive jewellery. She owns about twenty pairs of these large round earrings, which she keeps on a clear plastic earring rack on her bureau.