Annie Proulx, in west Cork, wants to find out what made the Irish who emigrated land-hungry, avaricious and destructive of the very territory they claimed, writes MARY LELAND
IT'S HARD to believe that the slight elderly woman holding more than 500 people in thrall as she reads of a slow death in childbed, of an infant corpse unearthed by coyotes, of two cowboys frozen under a buffalo robe – hard to believe that this woman is the author of Make Your Own Insulated Window Shutters.But this is Annie Proulx, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and writer of short stories of which the current public favourite, after the film's success, is Brokeback Mountain. The story she is reading for the West Cork Literary Festival in Bantry comes from her latest collection, Fine Just the Way It Is. And because this is Annie Proulx it is no surprise that just the way it is usually turns out to be anything but fine. What matters is that this is the way it is. Get on with it.
In her work, endurance, stoicism and acceptance of the perennial triumph of experience over hope emphasise the need for insulated window shutters which it is probably always better to make yourself.
Before she comes to the lectern, the big picture window – one of the few concessions made by the Maritime Hotel to its waterside location – revealed a ridge of green tree-fringed fields illuminated by the summer twilight. But the curtains are drawn to cancel the view and the scarlet flocked wallpaper closes the audience in to something like a theatre. This is the setting Proulx herself required and in it she remains in complete if amiable control. As she reads, the gems disguised in her prose style blink like signals to Martin Amis’s description of a writer’s craft – the knack of knowing what goes where. She has the knack: the swing doors of a saloon letting in planks of light; the bunk-house awareness that “every man had something of value beyond the horizon”. Sentences which make her listeners, and her readers, re-focus their attention on how the story is told.
Inviting questions she throws some of them back to the audience, explaining her affection for remote places, defending the late start (at 58) in fiction – "the world is full of awards for young writers but the truth is that you really have to know something about human beings, the tough stuff, the hard stuff" – and her current work on the libretto for an operatic version of Brokeback Mountainwith composer Charles Wuorinen and director Gerard Mortier (now with Teatro Real in Madrid). The evening's reading is Them Old Cowboy Songs, chosen because it starts – or at least the lives of its chief characters start – in Bantry. Also it had won the New YorkerMagazine Award for fiction so that here and now "seemed like the right time and the right place" in which to read it. This is the story of Archie and Rose McLaverty, extinguished by the terrible never-to-be-forgotten Wyoming winter of 1886-1887. A writer to whom research, much like reading, is now more passion than habit, Proulx is wondering what it was that the Irishmen and women who left the Beara peninsula and the townlands of Kilcrohane and Ardgroom brought with them when they settled in Wyoming in the 1870s and 1880s.
“There’s nothing known in Wyoming about the men and women from west Cork who started ranches and became the sheep and cattlemen of the state; people who set the tune for the state, and formed its character.”
MEETING HERthe following morning to discuss the thrust of this research and expecting a marginally sympathetic commentary on the grit and courage of such people – an expectation flavoured by stories we have heard before – I find that no, in fact these men seem to have ruined Wyoming even as they left their names on its landscape. What Annie Proulx wants to find out is why. What was it about their Irish background or communities or religion which made them land-hungry, avaricious and destructive of the very territory they claimed?
She is to be joined on this exploratory visit by Dr Dudley Gardner, archaeological historian at Western Wyoming Community College, with whom she worked on a study of Wyoming's Red Desert area. Although she is shortly to move to New Mexico, and Them Old Cowboy Songsmay be the last story she will write about Wyoming, that territory is very dear to her. Not in any sentimental way; sentiment is not a word likely to describe any of Annie Proulx's responses. But dear to her because she knows its wonders: having a cup of coffee one morning she saw a mountain lion walking along the top of a nearby cliff and going down, undisturbed by her presence, to its den. Working such experiences into a memoir of her Wyoming home at Bird Cloud she wonders, and wants to find out, if the Irish immigrants who moved from locomotive works to ranching brought with them a sense of entitlement, of a right to exploit the land: "How deeply was that related to religion, to having dominion over the creatures of the earth?"
The eldest in a family of five girls with a peripatetic father and a mother who was an amateur naturalist encouraging her children to be observant of the life around them, she had lived in 20 different places by the time she was 15. Graduating in history and choosing Renaissance economics as the theme for an uncompleted doctorate, she has had three marriages and three children. She worked as a journalist for years, living in lonely places and reporting, as a practitioner, on the self-sufficiency movement. While she still enjoys the feeling of having the self-hewn log-pile all stacked and ready for the winter, she had also begun to write short stories almost, one suspects, as a break from making cider and bottling fruit or maple syrup.
When she did these things – bottling, sawing, canoeing, writing – she did them thoroughly. Now she takes my pen which, wouldn’t you know, won’t work for her at once. Shaken into function it is used to sketch the way Abraham Lincoln’s government devised land allocation along the route of the transcontinental railroad, a chequerboard scheme extending for 20 miles on each side, with the smallest unit amounting to 640 acres. Beneath the soil lay rich mineral deposits but the land itself was fit only for grazing and sheep-runs and by now has been run into ruin.
“It was something to exploit, rather than to care for,” Proulx explains. “That mindset came from those men, and we still have it today, the attitude that the land and its wildlife are essentially without value, that their only worth is what humans can extract from them.”
As at her reading, Proulx has an acute sense of advantageous placement and we are sitting side by side rather than face to face. This hampers our engagement – well, it hampers mine – but as a strategy it protects her from any assault on faculties exhausted by a long journey, a foreign environment and an exceptionally generous public performance the evening before.
We're not really here to talk about her books and their immense success; or her writing, with its terse anticipatory dialogues, or her research into the innards of accordions or seafaring in Newfoundland or roping and branding and them old cowboy songsin Wyoming. So we don't. Although when I mention the feeling from Them Old Cowboy Songsthat she is describing the times and the people among whom aphorisms begin, she admits that for her the tale of Archie and Rose was "a bit of a dig" at the "success through the generations" story, the immigrant aspirations which also lay behind Accordion Crimes.
Although Kilcrohane seems to her to be the place that Wyoming itself came from, she and Dr Gardner won’t be combing parish records. “What I’m interested in is a feeling for character: what made the Irish people who came to Wyoming do what they did?” I say I hope she finds out.
As I leave I feel some regret. We have been talking for 45 minutes and we haven’t quite met. There is a moment at which we’re almost having fun. A digression on feminism in Argentina brings us momentarily close, an attempted one on women writers of the American Midwest parts us again. But I take my tune from her, remembering that for here, for now, this is just the way it is. And it’s fine.