Lewis Jones

The call of the wild

Annie Proulx (pronounced ‘Pru’) began her writing career — quite late, in her fifties — as E.A. Proulx, to baffle misogynist editors; then she was E. Annie Proulx, until she dropped the E and became simply Annie the Proulx.

Annie Proulx (pronounced ‘Pru’) began her writing career — quite late, in her fifties — as E.A. Proulx, to baffle misogynist editors; then she was E. Annie Proulx, until she dropped the E and became simply Annie the Proulx.

Annie Proulx (pronounced ‘Pru’) began her writing career — quite late, in her fifties — as E.A. Proulx, to baffle misogynist editors; then she was E. Annie Proulx, until she dropped the E and became simply Annie the Proulx. (Her father’s ancestors, who left Anjou for Canada in the 17th century, were called Prou or Preault; her mother’s arrived in New England soon after the Mayflower.) Her fiction tends to be about hard times in rural America, and though her new book is a memoir it runs true to form.

It tells the story of the house she built, or had built, in the wilds of Wyoming, where she has set much of her fiction, most notably her gay cowboy romance, Brokeback Mountain. Just west of the Medicine Bow mountains, on the site of an old sheep ranch, the house is set on a 400-foot cliff, ‘the creamy cap-rock a crust of ancient coral’, on the North Platte river. She named it Bird Cloud because on her first visit there she saw a cloud that resembled a huge bird. It is evidently a beautiful place, but fiercely inhospitable, embattled by wind and snow: ‘In winter hurricane winds, loose snow loops sidewise in a grinding haze and the whole sky rolls like the ocean, hurling birds like rocks.’

It is pleasant to read, from a comfortable distance, of Proulx’s hard times, which are familiar to anyone who has had the builders in, but on a scale most of us are spared. For three years, on a site that is ‘a combination gravel pit, mud slide, snow bowl and wind tunnel’, as delays lengthen and costs soar, she deals with ‘sanding, varnishing, prepping, priming, caulking, hanging, installing, mudding, trimming, drilling, assembling, capping…’

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in