E. ANNIE PROULX waited a long time for success, but when it came, it came rapidly.
Author Proulx (rhymes with true) published her first volume of fiction, Heartsongs and Other Stories, when she was 53 years old, in 1988. Four years later, her sprawling first novel, Postcards, an aching tragedy about the decline and fall of rural America in the years after World War II, won her the prestigious Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction.
Just one year later, she published The Shipping News, a chronicle of a lonely man's redemption in his icy ancestral home of Newfoundland. The book astonished readers and critics alike by what one called the "poetic compression" of its language, its vivid accounts of such northerly pursuits as ice fishing and boat building, and its sympathy for characters spending their lives in the shadow of the region's deadly waters and weather. The book in short order won Proulx the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.
Proulx comes to Tucson courtesy of the Arizona Humanities Council, to give a free talk at 8 p.m. Thursday, March 30, at the Main Library. The newly celebrated author has just moved to Wyoming from Vermont, the starting-off point for Postcards and the place where she's lived most of her life. And she's deep into the writing of her third novel, Accordion Crimes, a musical melange flavored by styles from Cajun to Quebecois and Czech.
Though she's at the height of literary success now, for two decades she labored as a "brutally poor" freelance writer, she once said. Divorced several times over, she raised her three sons and supported herself by writing carefully researched articles on the blackfly menace of the northern lands, or the right clothes to wear outdoors, or what was on the typical logging camp menu in late 19th century New England. Her byline appeared in all manner of outdoor magazines, from Blair & Ketchums Country Journal to Outdoor Life and Organic Gardening. She even wrote a couple of nonfiction books, including a tome on apple cider.
Literary reference books updated to include the newly famous Proulx give short shrift to her journalism, but it's not as unrelated as the literary authorities might suppose. Her great fictional works have a fierce compassion for traditional country people and blue collar workers being chewed up and spit out by the vast changes of the late 20th century: the farmers of Vermont, the trappers of the West, the fishermen and shipbuilders of Newfoundland. Proulx covered their beat for years in the country and outdoor magazines. In "The Cedar Oil Man," a 1980 story for Country Journal, Proulx writes of Marc Laurencelle, a man who extracts precious oils from trees in Vermont. Though he doesn't have one of her exotic fictional names and she hasn't yet established her inventive staccato style, this Laurencelle could be a character in Postcards. "The lanky, thirty-one-year-old distiller lives in a small house at the end of a bewildering tangle of country dirt roads," she writes. "Marc is quiet and reticent--unless he's talking about his work." Laurencelle is the last of a breed, soon to be put out of business by laboratory imitations of his oil, and Proulx doesn't let him get away until she finds out every last detail of his dying trade.
Before she turned to writing, Proulx did graduate work in history. Perhaps it was those studies that help ground the extraordinary factual detail in her novels within the broader sweep of social and economic change. If Postcards teaches readers just how a trapper extraordinaire keeps his own scent off his animal traps, it also helps us understand just why family farms are going under. We learn the way to fashion a boat seaworthy enough to withstand the Newfoundland gales in The Shipping News, and we also discover the reasons for chronic unemployment in Canada's seaward provinces.
Proulx herself has lived the outdoor life. She fishes and hunts and delights in the kind of hearty cooking that often finds its way into The Shipping News (one of her freelance clients was Gourmet magazine). Still, she says her books are not autobiographical but the products of intense research. An old book about mariners' knots that she picked up at a yard sale got her started on the novel that won her the Pulitzer Prize. There's no telling what she might not find to write about. The new terrain of Wyoming and the new decade she's entering --she turns 60 this year--may yet find their way into her fiction.
E. Annie Proulx will give a free talk at 8 p.m. Thursday, March 30, at the Tucson Pima Main Library, 101 N. Stone Ave. For more information call 7914393. She will also speak in Phoenix, at 7:30 p.m., Friday, March 31, at the Phoenix Public Library, 12 E. McDowell Road. For more information call 6022570335.
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