Too Sincere, Or Worse: An Interview with Annie Proulx
The archetype of the mysterious author is an obsession of the American psyche. Inaccessibility heightens fascination, to the point that the Recluse of American Letters is the most stylish occupation one can have. Annie Proulx is known for writing the short story “Brokeback Mountain” and the Pulitzer-winning novel The Shipping News, but she is also known for being notoriously hard to reach. A writer for the Paris Review in 2009 quoted her as saying “I loathe interviews and getting me to sit still for a whole day is unprecedented.” In an interview with The Atlantic in 1997 Proulx described the interruption posed by media attention as intolerable. “Most [journalists] don’t particularly care about your writing,” she said. As a writer with intense interest in both journalism and Proulx, this was a barb to my heart, because I care deeply about her writing. The world, it seems to me, needs her and her work.
Proulx’s novels, which she started publishing in her fifties, are stunning and tragic portraits of life in rural spaces, told over grand scales with unflinching detail. She has a gift for capturing dialect; the diversity of settings in her stories match a diversity in language. Her characters are complicated and imperfect, engendering very real sorrow when they meet their respective demises. A curious empathy filters through Proulx’s worlds like light through water, a sense that it is necessary to feel compassion for people who are not like us.
Fen, Bog, and Swamp is a work of nonfiction in the tradition of Proulx’s practically-minded nature writing and landscape-aware fiction. Striking and expansive, the project examines the cultural histories and histories of destruction of wetlands worldwide. She devotes a section to the Kankakee marsh, which once covered much of Illinois and Indiana. She discusses, in aching detail, how the swamp was drained, an irreplaceable habitat lost and grieved too late. Wetlands, she argues, are a critical line of defense against climate change, and their history serves as a model for how to grieve, process, and even prevent and restore ecological losses to come.
Proulx’s prose makes swampland riveting; moss releasing spores into the wind becomes thrilling. It also brings the imminent loss of wild spaces into unbearable light. What few glimmers of optimism appear are austerely tempered, and at one hopeful point she notes “the restoration news was so cheering that I had to remind myself that… the reality is a world plagued by melting permafrost, sea rise, unmanageable fires that burn even rain forests, terrifying storms including tornadoes and derechos and a sharp decrease in animal and insect species.”
Fen, Bog, and Swamp takes an approach not commonly seen in books about climate change and habitat destruction, interlacing science with personal essay. Proulx takes a long detour to explore the archaeology of bodies and objects found preserved in bogs, including agricultural implements and lumps of preserved dairy and fat known as bog butter. She discusses the roles wetlands played in ancient military battles. Most touchingly, she weaves interior associations and details her experiences with wetlands over the course of her life; in one especially moving story, she recounts venturing out into a swamp alone as a young girl.
Having absorbed Proulx as a writer, I was deeply fascinated with Proulx as a person. The magnificent writing, the hardy ruggedness, the prickle and terseness are all so compelling. But was all of it–the distance from media, the individualism and isolation–affectation or genuine? I couldn’t tell if it was journalistic impulse or admiration that compelled me to reach out to her, or simply that when you encounter a striking person, whether in real life or on the page, it is natural to want to approach them. I feel now that I was subsumed with the hubris of youth.
Even so, I got in touch with a member of her agency. He wrote me a few lines saying, “it’s not that she HATES interviews.” (I have still been unable to pinpoint what, exactly, it is that she hates.) We came to an agreement. He would be the middleman: I’d send him my questions and he’d forward Annie Proulx’s response. The questions poured out of me, I wrote with a brazen optimism that now seems shameful in its naivete. They ranged from acute to grandiose; minutiae in the notes of Fen, Bog, and Swamp, but also, what does she think of social media, television? What does she think of God? Was I too wheedling, verging on pathetic? I started to worry I sounded too sincere, or worse, amateurish.
With no small ache in my heart I winnowed my question list down to just fifteen. I care about your writing! I tried to convey. I hoped. Of these fifteen, she answered six, with a total response length of almost one page.
1. “What was the transition from writing fiction to nonfiction like?”
Seamless. Like everyone else I have been writing nonfiction most of my life.
2. “Can you tell me a bit about the process of researching Fen, Bog & Swamp? What order did you write it in, and how long did it take?
It took about 2 years but I was involved with a major household move throughout the writing. It was begun in Washington state and finished in New Hampshire. Research involved broad reading and specific rereading of appropriate material. The book was not written in any order beyond grouping peatland accounts and events in the natural stages of passing from fen to bog to swamp over long time periods. It began as an effort to satisfy my own curiosity about peatlands and why they are so important in this period of climate shift.
3. “You describe the history behind a number of specific peatlands and the stories of their destruction and/or protection. How did you decide which wetlands to highlight?”
Some illustrated specific histories that I found interesting and so those received more attention. When I remembered Defoe’s story of the fen-men who married many women I included it. It could not have gone any other place but in the discussion of the English fens.
4. “Do you intend to do more science (or science-adjacent) writing?”
I don’t think one “intends” to do that sort of partition in writing—at least, I don’t. I have always written about situations and places that interest me whether in fiction or more reportorial prose. I shall continue to do so.
5. “How do you know when your books—nonfiction and novels alike—are finished?”
I always have a sharp sense of what the ending must be when I start a story whether fiction or not. And when I reach that pre-determined point I stop writing. I can’t imagine starting a story or essay without knowing where it is going.
6. “Would you eat bog butter, given the chance?”
I would not. And I would not see the offer as a “chance” but as a ghastly experiment.
Best regards, Annie Proulx
I reflected on this. Six answers were more than zero, but they were conspicuously less than fifteen. Her voice here, as it is in so much of her work, is direct and sharp, so refreshing it verges on chilling. Her responses are short and hard like river stones, written as to seem obvious. She couldn’t possibly imagine writing a story without knowing the ending, she has been writing nonfiction “like everyone else,” there is nothing more to say.
Yet these answers belie something critical to me, the fact that Proulx is so very unlike everyone else. She glosses over what makes her and her writing distinct to such an extreme degree, it seems almost absurd. Why such an unwillingness to indulge curiosity? Why agree to be interviewed, only to provide a minimum amount of engagement? It makes some sense given her previous remarks about media incursions into her writing process, but it also seems like there is something deeper lurking here, a guardedness that approaches antipathy.
I have spent a lot of time thinking about Proulx’s reclusion, especially how it has related to the fame of her work, and in particular the film adaptation of her short story “Brokeback Mountain.” She has since claimed she wished she had never written it, that the film adaptation has led to widespread misunderstanding and therefore insult. The source of her irritation is fanfiction: she noted to the Paris Review “a lot of men have decided that the story should have had a happy ending. They can’t bear the way it ends—they just can’t stand it. So they rewrite the story . . . it just drives me wild.” Tragic endings were commonplace in almost all queer American literature prior to Stonewall; the longing for a queer romance with a happy ending is hardly an unreasonable desire, especially at a point in time before marriage equality, when a life of lasting, happy queer love may have seemed elusive. Besides, if all authors disavowed their works that received fan rewrites, practically no fiction would remain.
Proulx also wrote a frankly petulant diatribe entitled “Blood on the Red Carpet” when the film failed to win the Academy Award for best picture. (This fraught relationship with adaptation extends to other works of hers; in an interview with Financial Times, she called the National Geographic adaptation of her novel Barkskins “Disgusting. Very poor. Absolutely dreadful.”) I am not the first to suggest that Proulx seeks a form of unrealistic control over how her work is absorbed; her Oscar gripes, her chilly scolding of her fans who want a queer love story that doesn’t end in homophobic tragedy, all indicate that she doesn’t seem to understand that control of art does not equate to control of how the art is received. I suspect much of her outward treatment of the public and the press is rooted in a disdain for the life her work has outside of her; how it is received, adapted and transmogrified. When art changes culture, as Proulx’s has, the art is swept into a life of its own, one that is no longer the author’s to shape.
Success also changes—or in some cases creates—the author’s image; status can confer popular interest on anyone. In an astute essay, Stephen Marche suggests that a literature of the pose is replacing literature of the voice, where the style or personality of an author has superseded their literary voice in importance. He writes “the writing of the pose is the literary product of the MFA system and of Instagram in equal measure—it brings writing into the ordinary grueling business of the curation of the self which dominates advanced capitalist culture today.” Although Proulx is by no means a recent arrival on the literary scene, she is splashed all over with drops of the pose.
While it may appear that Proulx has abandoned what Marche has called the curation of the self, but it seems she has instead pursued curation of her work with voracity, a separate kind of vanity and self-obsession. I was drawn to Proulx because of how strongly she rejected her own magnetism; it now seems queerly ironic that reclusion foments romance, that rejection of fame has instead engendered mystique. Marche argues that literary careers are like games, and Proulx’s gambit is that denying fame, or incarnation as a public figure, does not necessitate abandoning pose.
What does it mean to be a great author, and what does it mean to be a famous author?
Some literary circles (and certainly Proulx) seem to believe these two categories are separated completely, inharmoniously divorced. I detect anxieties from readers and writers alike: the quality is being diluted out of the literary pool by dilettante celebrities. People who are already famous write terrible books (e.g. Cat Marnell, any celebrity memoir) or, in the most paradoxical and perverse instance, get more famous for not writing a memoir (Caroline Calloway). People who ostensibly became famous for their writing remain celebrities while not publishing anything new for four decades (Fran Lebowitz). The bestseller list, perhaps the easiest quantification of literary fame, is essentially sterilized of serious literature.
But is this really cause for concern? Obviously writers can be both great and famous, and many still become famous for outstanding writing. Tawdry drivel and serious literature can coexist and always have. The broader and deeper the literary pool, the more people can swim—and we are all the richer for it. Yet snobbishness persists, as does the idea that rejecting fame will confer something of value on one’s work, be it greatness, sincerity, or something else. No one encapsulates this false dichotomy more than Proulx; in denying the frivolities of the life of a writer in a public eye, she has only rendered herself frivolous in a stranger, lonelier way.
My experience seems typical of Proulx’s general attitude towards journalists, fans, and the public at large; if I expected anything different, that was my error. Also, I think that if you write something as luminous and urgent as Fen, Bog and Swamp you are allowed to do whatever you want, and that includes being mean to people who care about you. It was well within her rights to answer six, five, or zero of my questions, and her treatment of critics and fans doesn’t nullify the beauty and necessity of her work, even if it makes her seem bitter and unpleasant. Proulx’s chafing against the limits of authorial control—and, to some extent, the limits of self-seriousness—is only truly problematic to those who want a flawless idol of an author. Proulx will never be as perfect as her writing is; no writer ever will be.
In some ways it feels like this interview was itself a ghastly experiment, but not in all respects. The world knows a tiny bit more about Proulx than before—that part of my job was accomplished. And the experience served me both confirmation and comeuppance; it doesn’t seem like she is attempting to be a mystery, and I am unable to ascertain her sincerity or lack thereof; it would be besides the point, anyway. Proulx and other authors should be left to their ways, be they reclusive or otherwise. The world needs artists, but it needs art more.