On Writers and Writing

by Margaret Atwood

  What the artsy-fartsies were interested in was not Canadian literature, or not at first; like everyone else, they barely knew it existed. Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation had hit the scene in the late 1950s and were well known through the pages of Life magazine, but they hadn’t made as much of a dint in the artsies as you might suppose: our interests were more European. You were supposed to be familiar with Faulkner and Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway, and Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill for the dramatically inclined, and the Steinbeck of Grapes of Wrath, and Whitman and Dickinson to a certain extent, and Henry Miller for those who could get hold of a smuggled copy – his works were banned – and James Baldwin for the civil rights crowd, and Eliot and Pound and Joyce and Woolf and Yeats and so forth as a matter of course, but Kierkegaard, Steppenwolf, Samuel Beckett, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Franz Kafka, Ionesco, Brecht, Heinrich Boll, and Pirandello were the magic names. Flaubert, Proust, Baudelaire, Gide, Zola, and the great Russians – Tolstoy, Dostoevsky – were read by some. Occasionally, to shock, someone would claim to like Ayn Rand: it was thought to be daring that the hero rapes the heroine and the heroine enjoys it, though that was in fact the subtext of a good many Hollywood movies featuring spats, slaps in the face, slammed doors, and clinches at the end.

  For a country that was supposed to be such a colony, so firmly – still – in the cultural grip of the crumbling British Empire, contemporary British writers had a fairly small toehold. George Orwell was dead, but read; so was Dylan Thomas. Doris Lessing’s Golden Notebook was admitted to by a few very formidable women, and read in secret by a lot more. Iris Murdoch was just starting out, and was considered weird enough to be of interest; Graham Greene was still alive, and was respected, though not as much as he was later to become. Christopher Isherwood had a certain cachet because he had been in Germany when the Nazis were on the rise. The Irish writer Flann O’Brien had a small but devoted following, as did Connolly’s The Unquiet Grave. The real British impact was being felt through a subversive radio program called The Goon Show, which had Peter Sellers in it, and another Monty Python precursor called Beyond the Fringe, known through – as I recall – a recording of it.

  The first artistic group I got involved with was the theatre folk. I didn’t want to be an actress, but I knew how to paint sets, and could be dragged in to act, in minor parts, in a pinch. For a while I designed and printed theatre posters as an alternative to working in a drugstore; I wasn’t really very good at it, but then, there wasn’t much competition. The artsy group was small, like the artsy group in Canada itself, and everyone connected with it usually fiddled around in more than one field of activity. I was also pals with the folk-singers – collecting authentic ballads and playing such instruments as the autoharp were in style – and through them I absorbed a surprisingly large repertoire of plangent lovers’ laments and murderous gore-filled plots, and truly filthy ditties.

  All of this time I had been writing, compulsively, badly, hopefully. I wrote in almost every form I have since written – poems, fiction, non-fiction prose – and then I laboriously typed these pieces out, using all four of the fingers I have continued to employ until this day. In the college reading room I was able to obsess over the few thin literary magazines – I think there were five – then published in the country in English, and wonder why the poems in them might be judged by some white-bearded, Godlike editor to be better than mine.

  After a while I began publishing in the campus literary magazines, and then – via a self-addressed, stamped envelope, the secret of which I had learned from Writers Markets – in one of the thin, desirable five. (I used my initials instead of a first name – I didn’t want anyone important to know I was a girl. Anyway, in high school we’d studied an essay by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch which said that the “masculine” style was bold, strong, vivid, and so forth, and the “feminine” one was pastel, vapid, and simpy. Writers are fond of saying that writers are androgynous as to their capabilities, and that is no doubt true, though it is telling that most of those who make this claim are women. But they are not gender-neutral in their interests. Most importantly, they are treated differently, especially by reviewers, however that difference in treatment may manifest itself; and sooner or later that will affect them.)

  When I received my first literary-magazine acceptance letter, I walked around in a daze for a week. It was a shock, really. All that effort directed toward what even I had, in my heart of hearts, considered to be an unreal goal, and now it was not unreal after all. Everything was about to come true, as in some vaguely threatening dream or wish-granting fairy-tale. I’d read too much folklore – gold that turned to coal in the morning, beauty that caused your hands to be cut off – not to know that there would now be trickery and hazards, and some hidden, potentially lethal price to be paid.

  Through the literary magazines, and also through some of my professors, who wrote for them, I discovered a concealed door. It was like a door in a bare hill – a tumulus in winter, or an anthill. Outside, to the uninformed observer, there was no life to be seen; but if you’d found the door and managed to make your way inside, all was furious motion. There was a whole microcosm of literary activity going on, as it were, right under my nose.

  It seems that poets did exist, in Canada; they existed in small clumps, and even in schools – the “cosmopolitan,” the “native.” They denied they belonged to these schools, and then attacked other poets for being in them; also they attacked the critics, most of whom were their fellow poets. They called one another scatological names; they wrote blurbs and reviewed one another’s books, stroking their friends and knackering their enemies, just as in literary histories about the eighteenth century; they pontificated and uttered manifestos; they fell upon the thorns of life; they bled.

  There were several factors that added to the ferment at that time. Northrop Frye, a professor at the very college in which I was enrolled, had just published The Anatomy of Criticism (1957), which had caused quite a stir not only at home but abroad, and had set off a spate of roaring among the poets, who quickly divided themselves into pro-myth and anti-myth factions. It was Frye who made a revolutionary statement – revolutionary not just for Canada but for any society, especially any colonial society: “… the center of reality is wherever one happens to be, and its circumference is whatever one’s imagination can make sense of.”7 (So you didn’t have to be from London or Paris or New York after all!) Just down the road at an adjacent college was Marshall McLuhan; he published The Gutenberg Galaxy in 1960, causing another stir, this time about the media and their effects on perception, and the possible obsolescence of the written word. (So writers in London and Paris and New York were in just as much trouble as us provincials!)

  The yelling over myth and media and literature in general was mostly done by poets. Novelists and short-story writers, unlike the poets, had not yet grouped themselves into clumps and palships. There were very few published Canadian novelists, few knew one another, and of these many were living in other countries, having gone there because they did not think they could function as artists in Canada. A lot of the names that would become familiar in the later sixties and the seventies – Margaret Laurence, Mordecai Richler, Alice Munro, Marian Engel, Graeme Gibson, Michael Ondaatje, Timothy Findley, Rudy Wiebe – had yet to put in a definitive appearance.

  I found that it was quite a lot easier than I’d thought to get into the magic anthill – the place where people other than yourself might think you were a writer, and might also accept this as a desirable thing to be. There was at that time a real bohemia – a layer of society apart from, and very different from, the rest of it – and once you were in it, you were in.

  There was, for instance, a coffee-house called The Bohemian Embassy, situated in a falling-apart factory building, where poets congregated once a week to read their poems out loud. Once I had “published,” I too was asked to do this. It was, I found, quite different from acting. Other people’s words were a screen, a di
sguise, but to get up and read my own words – such an exposed position, such possibilities for making an idiot of yourself – this made me sick. (The “poetry reading” was rapidly becoming an accepted thing to do, and would shortly be an expected one. Little did I know I had ten years of behind-the-scenes throwing-up to look forward to.)

  These coffee-house gatherings were remarkable in many ways. One thing about them was their promiscuity, by which I mean the extreme kinds of mixture that took place there. Younger and older, male and female, published and not yet, established and neophyte, raving socialist and tense formalist, all mingled together at the tables with checked tablecloths and the mandatory Chianti-bottle candle-holders.

  Another thing was – how can I put this? It was borne in on me that some of these people – even the published ones, even the respected ones – weren’t very good. Some were wonderful at times, but uneven; others read the same poems at every event; others were insufferably mannerist; others were clearly there mostly to pick up women, or men. Could it be that getting through the door into the swarming poetic anthill wasn’t necessarily a guarantee of anything? What then was the true Certificate of Approval? How would you ever know whether you’d made the grade or not, and what was the grade, anyway? If some of these people were deluded about their talents – and it was clear they were – was it possible that I might be, as well? And come to think of it, what was “good”? And who determined that, and what litmus paper did they use?

  I’ll leave myself there, back in 1961, twenty-one years old, biting my fingers and just beginning to realize what I’d got myself into, and return to writing as an art, and to the writer as the inheritor and bearer of a set of social assumptions about art in general, and about writing in particular.

  There’s one characteristic that sets writing apart from most of the other arts – its apparent democracy, by which I mean its availability to almost everyone as a medium of expression. As a recurring newspaper advertisement puts it, “Why Not Be A Writer? … No previous experience or special education required.” Or as Elmore Leonard has one of his street crooks say,

  … You asking me … do I know how to write down words on a piece of paper? That’s what you do, man, you put down one word after another as it comes in your head … You already learned in school how to write, didn’t you? ? I hope so. You have the idea and you put down what you want to say. Then you get somebody to add in the commas and shit where they belong … There people do that for you.8

  To be an opera singer you not only have to have a voice, you have to train for years; to be a composer you have to have an ear, to be a dancer you have to have a fit body, to act on the stage you have to be able to remember your lines, and so on. Being a visual artist now approaches writing, as regards its apparent easiness – when you hear remarks like “My four-year-old could do better,” you know that envy and contempt are setting in, of the kind that stem from the belief that the artist in question is not really talented, only lucky or a slick operator, and probably a fraud as well. This is likely to happen when people can no longer see what gift or unusual ability sets an artist apart.

  As for writing, most people secretly believe they themselves have a book in them, which they would write if they could only find the time. And there’s some truth to this notion. A lot of people do have a book in them – that is, they have had an experience that other people might want to read about. But this is not the same as “being a writer.”

  Or, to put it in a more sinister way: everyone can dig a hole in a cemetery, but not everyone is a grave-digger. The latter takes a good deal more stamina and persistence. It is also, because of the nature of the activity, a deeply symbolic role. As a grave-digger, you are not just a person who excavates. You carry upon your shoulders the weight of other people’s projections, of their fears and fantasies and anxieties and superstitions. You represent mortality, whether you like it or not. And so it is with any public role, including that of the Writer, capital W; but also as with any public role, the significance of that role – its emotional and symbolic content – varies over time.

  The title of this chapter was borrowed from a 1978 collection of short stories by Alice Munro. In Canada this book was called Who Do You Think You Are?9 but the British publishers changed it to Rose and Flo and the American publishers to The Beggar Maid. Presumably these other publishers thought the original title was somewhat obscure for their respective audiences; but it was all too comprehensible to any Canadian reader of the time, especially any reader who had ever had artistic aspirations.

  The book is a Bildungsroman – an account of the youth and education – of a girl called Rose, who grows up to be a minor actress. As a girl, she attends a rough small-town Canadian high school, and the English class is set the task of copying out and then memorizing a poem. Rose has a talent for this and is able to recite the poem immediately, without having first done the copying. “What did [Rose] expect to follow?” asks Munro. “Astonishment, and compliments, and unaccustomed respect?” Yes, but that isn’t what she gets. The teacher concludes that Rose has been showing off, which is true enough. “ ‘Well, you may know the poem,’ ” she says, “ ‘but that is no excuse for not doing what you were told. Sit down and write it in your book. I want you to write every line three times. If you don’t get finished you can stay after four.’ ” Rose does have to stay after four, and when she hands in the copy the teacher says, “ ‘You can’t go thinking you are better than other people just because you can learn poems. Who do you think you are?’ ”10 In other words, Rose is not to believe she can escape from the common herd just because she can do some tricky, inessential thing most people can’t.

  For actress, read writer; for memorizing a poem, read composing a story. The teacher’s attitude is one that all artists in the Western society of the past two hundred years, but especially those in smaller and more provincial places, have found themselves up against. Indeed, they have repeatedly formulated a series of questions about this very issue, along the lines of the dialogue I began with – the one between Nikki and his inner voice in The Woman in the Dunes. Is the writer – the writer who aspires to be not just a provider of newspaper copy or an adept at formula fiction, but an artist – is such a person special, and if so, how?

  2

  ———

  Duplicity:

  The jekyll hand, the hyde hand, and the slippery double

  Why there are always two

  But when thou doest alms, let not they left hand know what thy right hand doeth;

  That thine alms may be in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly.

  Matthew 6: 3–4

  Bards of passion and of mirth,

  Ye have left your souls on earth!

  Have ye souls in heaven too,

  Double-lived in regions new?

  John Keats, “Bards of Passion and of Mirth”

  … you have the jekyll hand, you have the hyde hand …

  Gwendolyn MacEwen, “The Left Hand and Hiroshima”1

  Powers of observation heightened beyond the normal imply extraordinary disinvolvement: or rather the double process, excessive preoccupation and identification with the lives of others, and at the same time a monstrous detachment … The tension between standing apart and being fully involved: that is what makes a writer.

  Nadine Gordimer, Introduction, Selected Stories2

  I grew up in a world of doubles. My generation of children had no television – ours was the age of comic books – and in these, a superhero was nobody unless he had an alter ego who really was nobody. Superman was really the bespectacled Clark Kent, Captain Marvel was really the crippled newsboy Billy Batson, Batman was really a Scarlet Pimpernel sort of fellow who acted a playboy twit in “real life” – or was it the other way around? I understood these people at the emotional level – every child did. The superhero, large and powerful and good, was what we wished to be; the “real” alias, the one who lived dans le vrai and was small and
weak and fallible and at the mercy of beings more powerful than us, was what we actually were. Yeats and his theory of personae had nothing on us.

  Little did we know that our superheroes were – among other things – projections cast by the setting sun of the Romantic movement. Yes, there were earlier examples of disguises and doubles. Yes, Odysseus disguised himself to reenter his halls in Ithaca; yes, in the Christian religion God came to earth as Jesus of Nazareth, a poor carpenter. Yes, Odin and Zeus and St. Peter wander the world as beggars in legend and fairy-tale, rewarding those who treat them well, settling the hash of those who don’t. But it was the Romantics, par excellence, who fixed this doubleness in the popular consciousness as a thing to be expected, and expected above all of artists.

  Isaiah Berlin, in The Roots of Romanticism,3 has done a much better job than I ever could of spelling out the differences between the “enlightenment” writer or artist in the eighteenth century – servant of universal ideas, upholder of the establishment, patronized by the powers that be – and the Romantic version, as popularized (among other places) in the Puccini opera La Bohème – rebellious, poor, not for hire. Them in their garrets, starving and creating works of genius; the rest of society stuffing itself at its materialistic dining table, burping and ignoring them. Yet it is the artists who possess the secret identities, the secret powers, and – if posterity goes their way – the last laugh. There is so much more to them than there seems!