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I just completed four years thinking about a project. There were several false starts, many rejected, some reworked ideas. What he wanted to achieve was tangible, but he couldn’t grasp it. When he thought he had a hold on it, it would melt or fly off like squeezed soap. About six months ago things solidified and I began writing in earnest Eileen McHugh, A Life Remade. It is the story of a sculptor who left no work, but who, by accident in this case, had become well-known enough for a biographer to reconstruct her life and remake her lost work.

With the book complete and published, I decided it was time to relax and picked up Carol Shields’ Mary Swann. I found it and bought it in a packed charity shop bag because I knew the author, not the book. I started reading and the experience was amazing.

Mary Swann’s concerns about the life and work of a poet from rural Canada. The town of Nadeau was both small and insignificant, until, that is, the world discovered a slim volume of a hundred poems by one Mary Swann, insignificant herself, until she was murdered – shot, clubbed, dismembered – by her husband in 1965.

Born in 1915, the exact date still debatable, she lived her anonymous life, almost hidden, even from the locals, on the farm. In other parts of the world this would be called a peasant estate and her life would be characterized as poverty-stricken. Mary Swann had no domestic help, no appliances, and none of the trappings of modern life. She never drove a car. Isolated, remote, poor, dilapidated are words that applied equally to the setting of life and to the person who lived it. Not much is known of her relationship with her husband, who committed suicide after murdering his wife. The deletion was complete, except that they had a daughter who is alive, but she is not willing to talk about family matters.

But Mary Swan wrote. She wrote concise, crisp verses that inhabit the world on this side of the garden gate, but seem to delve into the infinite inner space of being. Academics, having discovered her work, took a liking to Emily Dickinson. Mr. Crozzi, who originally accepted her poems for publication and produced a couple hundred copies of Swann’s Songs, the slim volume perhaps appropriately titled, was the last person to see her alive, other than her husband. It is estimated that there are around 20 extant copies of the collection. But the content has found the fans and champions of it. There are even academics whose reputation rests on the critique of Mary Swann’s verse.

There will be a symposium on the poet and her work and Carol Shields follows the lives, testimonies and experiences of a group of interested parties. There are academic researchers who cooperate by competing. There is Rose, the librarian of the town of Nadeau, shy, modest and long-suffering. There’s Crozzi, perhaps a little crazy, the editor and longtime journalist at that local press, even though he himself is an immigrant. He is an eccentric and opinionated guy who misses his late wife very much. He also likes a drink or two. There’s Sarah and Morton, academics with their own lives to live who have championed the work of Mary Swann. And there are others. Through the experiences of these characters and others, we piece together some of the life and work of Mary Swann, though, like everyone else involved, we never meet her and her work remains enigmatic.

What was completely strange to me was that this was the exact shape I had chosen for Eileen McHugh. What exactly makes an artist? Why do we try to express ourselves in these arcane, often esoteric ways? What is authorship? What constitutes recognition? Who controls that process? How does life influence art, or vice versa? How do we remember our past interactions with someone we never thought we would remember? Eighty percent through Mary Swann, I felt like I was reading a different version of my own book and came to the conclusion that I was pretty glad I didn’t read Carol Shields’ book before I invented my own.

But eventually, things diverged. Mary Swann by Carol Shields concludes with the symposium on the poet’s work, a meeting that brings together the characters that we have been following and built in the form of a script. A particular plot thread begins to dominate. Competition arises, insults are perceived and offenses are taken. Hard-to-explain events come together to identify and conclude what has really been going on in the background throughout the book. By the end of this superbly crafted and constructed novel, we are intimately involved in considerable parts of the lives of contemporary characters. Mary Swann, however, persists in a continuous enigmatic anonymity that remains entirely hers, as, thankfully, is that of my own Eileen McHugh.

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