A Celibate Season. Carol Shields
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three polished pages a day.
Separation has never happened to either of us in real life. Unlike our protagonists, Chas (for Charles) and Jock (for Jocelyn), Carol and I have settled quite happily wherever our husbands have taken us. This may be due in part to the social strictures of the times that shaped us; I was a young wife and mother in the ‘5os while Carol was still an adolescent, but in that decade when housework and husband-support was raised to what Galbraith dubbed a “convenient social virtue,” it seemed a natural thing to do and be. Indeed, to yearn otherwise carried social disapprobation. When entering the hospital in labour, Erma Bombeck attempted to have “writer” entered under vocation, but a no-nonsense nurse scratched it out and put in “housewife.”And, as Carol has pointed out, writing is a portable vocation that can be done satisfactorily whenever the children (five for Carol, three for me) are tucked into bed or off to school.
In A Celibate Season Chas says he’s not prepared to abandon the middle class, since “the good old middle class has, after all, been good to us.”The middle class is where most of us hang our hats, although following the century-defining ‘60s, many were bent on denying it. Jeans and headbands were in and skirts and pearls were out, and Carol and I joked at Writers’ Union meetings in Vancouver about the need to shed our middle-class images, since writers above all were not supposed to be co-opted by the middle class.
In the end, it is Carol who has done the co-opting. With her Jane Austen-like asides that prod our foibles and pretensions, she has carved out her territory from the milieu in which she lives. In an introduction to The Heidi Chronicles Carol wrote, “Feminism sailed into the sixties like a dazzling ocean liner, powered by injustice and steaming with indignation.” For a time the ocean liner came close to refitting itself as a warship, or even a destroyer, lobbing its ideological bullets at those with differing takes on the truth.
“Truth,” Iris Murdoch says, “is always a proper touchstone in art…requiring that courage which the good artist must possess.” Fiction is not the handmaiden of politics, any more than the bleaker side of sexual politics is the honest experience of every writer. We don’t lack for novels that crawl into the many hearts of our darkness, and bookstores are lined with thought-provoking essays by articulate feminists like Gloria Steinem. What we have lacked, and what Carol has brought us, is an intelligent and articulate witness to the ordinary and often happy lives of women and families.
Carol and I met—or rather, didn’t meet—Gloria Steinem once. At breakfast the day after A Celibate Season launched in Regina, we sputtered over an unpleasant review whose main preoccupation was with the names we had given our protagonists. By way of a restorative we hurled ourselves against an icy gale in minus twenty degree temperatures for several blocks to a bookstore. Almost nobody was there, except for a lone woman who was sitting in a chair waiting to sign books. “Who is it?” Carol whispered to me. “I think it’s Gloria Steinem,” I whispered back. It was. We didn’t introduce ourselves. Carol thought it might be intrusive—and I agreed—since we hadn’t read Steinem’s new book. I regret it now.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. When we began A Celibate Season, Carol wanted to write the male part, and so I kicked off the process with Jock writing from Ottawa, where she has accepted a position as legal counsel for a Commission looking into “The Feminization of Poverty.” I sent the chapter off to Carol on October 26, 1983: “Well here’s chapter one, and I can’t tell you how much more fun it is to write something for someone else’s eyes than just to write for the faceless mass who may or may not read it.”
It was enormous fun for us, lobbing curves at the other. “Killing off Gil was a stroke of genius.” “Please feel free to revive Gil.” I wrote that I laughed out loud at Chas’ irritated postscript, “Fuck the purple boots.”
When both Jock and Chas do something they can’t risk telling the other, we had, somehow, to transcend the limitations of the epistolary novel. The only solution in a two-way correspondence is the unsent letter, although Carol was bothered, initially, by what she feared might be “the narrative dishonesty of it.”
Since I was coming through Winnipeg in November of 1984, we vowed to complete the first draft by then. I stayed in the Shields’ lovely Victorian-style home, the kind with oak panelling and big halls and a wide, sweeping staircase. On a bitterly cold and slippery night (me smug in the superiority of Vancouver rain), we went to the university to see Carol’s delightful little play Departures and Arrivals, and the next day we worked diligently all day at the dining room table, each reading aloud our own letters and interrupting one another with corrections, cutting, adding, changing, arguing over commas. At five o’clock Carol announced that eight people were coming to dinner so we had to clear the table.
I remember that the evening was merry and that we involved the guests in a vigorous discussion of whether or not “A Celibate Season” was a good title. Some said yes, some said no, but nobody (including the authors) knew of a possible derivation that was pointed out later by an astute reviewer (Meg Stainsby, whose comments are included at the end of the novel): St. Paul, in a letter to the Corinthians, asserted that celibacy is desirable within a marriage, but only for a “season.” As far as we knew the title was entirely original, but we may have been deceived; the brain has its hidden ways, it can explore forgotten recesses and toss used tidbits up like newly minted gems.
Carol sent along two reworked chapters in short order, and in December came the “big” chapter, the one where Chas admits to his somewhat bizarre episode of infidelity. She worried that I might think it “unacceptably kinky”; instead I found the letter “wonderful, pathetic and touching.”
The end was in sight. Letters flew back and forth. We started sending the manuscript to publishers in January of 1985.
I thought it would be fun to try adapting the novel to the stage, and by September, while publishers were (very slowly) considering the novel, I was sending drafts of the play to Carol in France. “Davina is better in the play than in our book, funnier and fuller, also more likeable,” she wrote back. As for the novel, when Carol came to Vancouver in the spring of 1986 we still hadn’t sold it, and again we went over the manuscript. The first third, Carol wrote to me after spending a July weekend on it, was perhaps too slow, the second third really crackles, and the final third was perhaps too amiable. Re-worked once again, and once again I started mailing it out until we had racked up nine rejections. In the meantime, the play was faring well; it was being workshopped by the New Play Centre in Vancouver and when I sent it to the Canadian National Theatre Play writing competition, it was a finalist and came back with soul-restoring comments.
The Shields invited us to spend a week with them in Paris in the spring of 1987, and while there I read the galleys of Swann and was quite sure it would win the Governor General’s Award. It didn’t, although it was shortlisted.
By now the manuscript had been temporarily abandoned. Then at a conference in Edmonton I bumped into fellow writer and mutual friend Merna Summers. How did we expect to sell the novel, she asked, from a desk drawer? Get it out there, she urged, and she suggested Coteau Books. I sent it in September, and in May of 1990 Coteau agreed to publish it. In June we got word that the play would be produced by a small North Vancouver drama company in the fall.
That summer my husband and I rented a gite near the stone house the Shields had bought in France, and once more, in the sunny days of June, this time looking out over the lovely Jura mountains, serenaded by cows in the neighbouring fields, we went through the manuscript and began editing for publication.
Carol told me once that if she didn’t write she would become neurotic. I think this is true of most writers; Freud may have merely put a new spin on an old truth. Certainly writing is a search that may, like psychoanalysis, lead us into secret labyrinths where thoughts we had never suspected are discovered, where ancient and forgotten fears thrust themselves, like stalagmites, into consciousness, where we catch glimpses of desires so evanescent that they scatter like cockroaches before the light. And always, the compulsion, the need, to know more.
The following summer we were returning on the ferry after Carol’s appearance at the Sechelt Writers’ Festival and Carol was gently probing me about my