Ross King takes the Proust questionnaire
Ross King has won the Governor General's Literary Award for nonfiction twice, for books on art and history. He grew up in Saskatchewan, then moved to England for postgraduate studies, which is where he lives now. His new book is Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies. The book was a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction.
Below, Ross King answers The Next Chapter's version of the Proust questionnaire.
Name your favourite writers.
I think John Banville is the best prose writer in English at the moment. In some senses he tells the same story again and again, which is this wonderfully solipsistic narrator, always first person narration, who describes in delectable detail everything this character sees, everything he thinks. The thoughts are often very dark and in some ways unflattering to the character, but it's told in such beautiful, melodic, meditative prose.
I recently re-read Dante's Divine Comedy with great attention, and it truly is remarkable that someone could have that many rhymes and that many beautiful metaphors. T.S. Eliot had a line where he said that Dante and Shakespeare divide the world, there is no third. I would say that that overrates Shakespeare and there is only Dante. There is no second.
Who is your favourite painter?
Tom Thomson. I think he was a wonderful painter, Canada's greatest painter, and a mysterious individual. Many of the other people I've written about — Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Claude Monet — I was able to get inside of their heads, because of letters and anecdotes about them. But Thomson was a mystery — he gave nothing away in his letters, and even his friends struggled... they created a mythology around him but I think they missed the essential mythology, which was that he was inscrutable, unknowable.
What is your greatest fear?
For 14 years, I was a student living close to the poverty line, and the spectre of the impoverished writer is there for anyone who works freelance. What wakes me up at night sometimes is the idea that, what if all this evaporates and I'm forced to... who knows what?
What do you do that makes you feel the most Canadian?
I suppose what makes me feel most Canadian is when I get in a Tim Horton's lineup and wait to order my doughnut.
Ross King's comments have been edited and condensed.