On Writers and Writing

by Margaret Atwood

  As for the artists who are also writers, they are doubles twice times over, for the mere act of writing splits the self into two. In this chapter, it is therefore the doubleness of the writer qua writer I will discuss.

  I’ve always been intrigued by Brownings nightmarish poem, “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.” The narrator is Childe Roland, who has undertaken a quest, the object of which is never specified, though we assume it’s not the Holy Grail. Usually in a quest you have some worthy object in view – something to find, something to gain – and many difficulties to overcome along the way, and so it must be with Childe Roland. But his quest becomes more hopeless and squalid with every step he takes. An old man jeers at him – this is always a bad sign, in quests – and courage gives way to despair as the landscape he travels through becomes more and more blighted and swamp-like. Finally, when he’s least expecting it, there is the Dark Tower itself, and he sees he’s been caught in a trap: the landscape has closed in on him and there’s no way out. Not only that, but all around him are the ghosts of those who have gone before him on the same quest, and have failed, and are now waiting for him to do the same, and he realizes his quest is doomed.

  The Tower is a threatening structure, squat and impenetrable and unique in the world, we are told; and hanging on it is something called a slug-horn. This is a bothersome musical instrument; Browning probably got the word from Chatterton, who used it to mean “trumpet,” and I expect Browning liked the suggestively disgusting sound of it because it fitted in with the rest of the scenery. Anyway, the slug-horn is what you must blow to challenge whoever or whatever lives in the Dark Tower: some kind of monster, we strongly suspect.

  Childe Roland’s Dark Tower is – I feel – like Winston Smith’s Room 101 in George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four: it holds for each individual what that person most fears. Let’s take it as a working hypothesis that Childe Roland is a writer – that is, a stand-in for Robert Browning himself – and that the quest is a quest in search of the as yet unwritten poem called “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” and that the monster inside the Dark Tower is Childe Roland himself, in his poem-writing aspect. Here is my evidence. First, Browning wrote the poem in one go. It wasn’t a project, it was – if you like – an overwhelming impulse, and such impulses usually come from the deepest part of the writing self. Second, it was inspired by three lines of Shakespeare’s, from the blasted heath or mad scene in King Lear:

  Childe Rowland to the Dark Tower came:

  His word was still – “Fie, foh, and fum,

  I smell the blood of a British man.”4

  As we remember from childhood, this is what the giant says in “Jack the Giant-Killer” and similar stories. But in Shakespeare’s lines, it is Childe Roland himself who speaks them. Therefore – for Browning when he was reading the lines, and then writing the poem – Childe Roland is his own giant. But he is also his own giant-killer. He is thus his own murderous double.

  And so, when the fatal slug-horn is blown, the monster who is also Childe Roland comes out of the Tower, and matter and anti-matter merge, and the quest is accomplished, because the poem, “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” is now finished. The last lines of the poem are: “Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set / And blew. ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.’ ”5 The hero thus vanishes into the last line of the poem named after him, which is the same as the title. Paradoxically, then, the foredoomed failed quest has not failed after all – since its goal was the composition of the poem, and the poem has in fact been composed – and even though Childe Roland both manifestations of him – has been evaporated by its completion, he will continue to exist inside the poem he himself has just written. If that makes you dizzy, think of the second of the Alice books, Through the Looking Glass, and Alice’s question – who dreamed it?

  What is the relationship between the two entities we lump under one name, that of “the writer”? The particular writer. By two, I mean the person who exists when no writing is going forward – the one who walks the dog, eats bran for regularity, takes the car in to be washed, and so forth – and that other, more shadowy and altogether more equivocal personage who shares the same body, and who, when no one is looking, takes it over and uses it to commit the actual writing.

  There’s an epigram tacked to my office bulletin board, pinched from a magazine – “Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté.” That’s a light enough comment upon the disappointments of encountering the famous, or even the moderately well-known – they are always shorter and older and more ordinary than you expected – but there’s a more sinister way of looking at it as well. In order for the pâté to be made and then eaten, the duck must first be killed. And who is it that does the killing?

  Now, what disembodied hand or invisible monster just wrote that cold-blooded comment? Surely it wasn’t me; I am a nice, cosy sort of person, a bit absent-minded, a dab hand at cookies, beloved by domestic animals, and a knitter of sweaters with arms that are too long. Anyway, that cold-blooded comment was a couple of lines ago. That was then, this is now, you never step twice into the same paragraph, and when I typed out that sentence I wasn’t myself.

  Who was I then? My evil twin or slippery double, perhaps. I am after all a writer, so it would follow as the day the night that I must have a slippery double – or at best a mildly dysfunctional one – stashed away somewhere. I’ve read more than one review of books with our joint surname on them that would go far toward suggesting that this other person – the one credited with authorship – is certainly not me. She could never be imagined – for instance – turning out a nicely browned loaf of oatmeal-and-molasses bread, whereas I … but that’s another story.

  You might say I was fated to be a writer – either that, or a con-artist or a spy or some other kind of criminal because I was endowed at birth with a double identity. Due to the romanticism of my father, I was named after my mother; but then there were two of us, so I had to be called something else. Thus I grew up with a nickname, which had no legal validity, while my real name – if it can be called that – sat on my birth certificate, unknown to me, ticking away like a time-bomb. What a revelation it was for me to discover that I was not who I was! And that I had another identity lurking out of sight, like an empty suitcase stashed in a closet, waiting to be filled.

  Waste not, want not – I was bound to do something with this extra name of mine, sooner or later. My earliest work was published in high-school magazines, under my nickname; then there was a transitional period, during which I resorted to initials. Then, finally – and after being told by someone older than me that no one would take me seriously as a writer if I stuck to my nickname, and that initials had been used up for ever by T. S. Eliot – I caved in to Fate, and embraced my doubleness. The author is the name on the books. I’m the other one.

  All writers are double, for the simple reason that you can never actually meet the author of the book you have just read. Too much time has elapsed between composition and publication, and the person who wrote the book is now a different person. Or so goes the alibi. On the one hand, this is a convenient way for a writer to wriggle out of responsibility, and you should pay no attention to it. Yet on the other hand, it is quite true.

  You see how quickly we have begun talking about hands – two of them. Dexter and sinister. There has been a widespread suspicion among writers – widespread over at least the past century and a half – that there are two of him sharing the same body, with a hard-to-predict and difficult-to-pinpoint moment during which the one turns into the other. When writers have spoken consciously of their own double natures, they’re likely to say that one half does the living, the other half the writing, and – if of a melancholy turn of mind – that each is parasitic upon the other. Still, like Peter Schlemihl,6 who sells his shadow to the Devil and then realizes that without it he no longer has a valid existence, the relationship is symbiotic as well. T
he double may be shadowy, but it is also indispensable.

  I should interpose here that not all doubles are bad news. Some can be noble self-sacrificing substitutes, as in the Brothers Grimm’s tale “The Gold Children,” the Kurosawa film The Shadow Warrior, and the Rossellini film Il Generale Della Rovere, the sultan-and-beggar duo in Isak Dinesen’s “A Consolatory Tale,” and the two sisters in Christina Rossetti’s poem “Goblin Market.” In “good double” stories, however, both “halves” are as bound together as they are in “bad double” stories: on the fate of one depends the fate of the other.

  Here is Daryl Hine on the subject of doubleness, from his poem, “The Doppelgänger”:

  So split and halved and twain is every part,

  So like two persons severed by a glass

  Which darkens the discerning whose is whose

  And gives two arms for love and two for hate,

  That they cannot discover what they’re at

  And sometimes think of killing and embrace …7

  The speaker, or speakers – there are perhaps two – identifies himself as a poet. Or at least one half is a poet. But which, if either, is “real”?

  Where does it come from, this notion that the writing self – the self that comes to be thought of as “the author” – is not the same as the one who does the living? Where do writers pick up the idea that they have an alien of some sort living in their brain? Surely it wasn’t Charles Dickens the fun-loving paterfamilias, keen deviser of Christmas games for his kiddies, who caused poor Little Nell8 to die an early death? He cried the whole time his pen-wielding hand was pitilessly doing her in. No, it was the necrophiliac he carried around inside himself, like a tapeworm made of ink.

  As E. L. Doctorow says in his latest novel, City of God, “Migod, there is no one more dangerous than the storyteller.”9 Here is the Danish writer Isak Dinesen, describing the transformation in an otherwise insignificant man as soon as he assumes the mantle of narration: “ ‘Yes, I can tell you a story,’ he said. During this time, although he kept so quiet, he was changed; the prim bailiff faded away, and in his place sat a deep and dangerous little figure, consolidated, alert and ruthless – the story-teller of all the ages.”10 I would say Isak Dinesen had read her Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, except that she wouldn’t have to have read it, since this kind of transmutation would have been one she was already familiar with from her own experience. As a person she was Karen Blixen; as a writer of fiction, she was Isak Dinesen. Like several other women writers, she went Dr. Jekyll one better and got a sex change into the bargain.

  Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde owes something to old werewolf stories – the ordinary man who is transformed into a fanged madcap, given the right conditions – but it also owes a great deal to old stories about the Doppelgänger. Robert Louis Stevenson was far from being the first to have taken an interest in this species of duplicity. Identical twins – not quite the same thing as doubles – have always attracted attention. In some African societies they were killed, to ward off bad luck, and we still find something uncanny about them: perhaps such exact replication suggests to us a denial of our own uniqueness.

  I remember twins first catching my attention through an advertisement in a magazine, when I was twelve. This advertisement was for a home permanent known as a Toni, and it showed two identical girls, each with waved hair. The slogan was, “Which Twin has the Toni?” – the idea being that one of them had a cheap home perm and the other one had an expensive salon job, and nobody could tell the difference. Why was it that I suspected fraud? Perhaps because of the suggestion that one twin was somehow the original – the authentic, the real thing – of which the other was merely a copy.

  Twins and doubles are a very old motif in mythologies. Usually they are male – Jacob and Esau, Romulus and Remus, Cain and Abel, Osiris and Set – and often they struggle for dominance. They can be associated with the founding of a city or a people, though often one twin or double does not fare so well as the other. In his book on human sacrifice, The Highest Altar,11 Patrick Tierney would have it that the successful twin represents the living society, and the unsuccessful one his dark alter ego – the one who was sacrificed and then buried under the cornerstone in order to deal with the Underworld, propitiate the gods, and protect the city.

  Twins or twin-like siblings continued to exert a fascination into the age of “literature” – Shakespeare’s good Edgar and bad Edmund, in King Lear, or, for less drastic effect, the two sets of identical masters and servants in The Comedy of Errors. But the double is more than a twin or sibling. He or she is you, a you who shares your most essential features – your appearance, your voice, even your name – and, in traditional societies, such doubles were usually bad luck. According to Scottish folklore, to meet your own double was a sign of death: the double was a “fetch,” come from the land of the dead to collect you.12 The ancient Greek story of Narcissus may be connected with a similar superstition about seeing your double: what Narcissus sees is his own reflection – himself, but a self on the other side of the watery mirror – and it lures him to his death.

  Those who have taken an interest in the Salem witch trials in seventeenth-century New England will be familiar with the concept of “spectral evidence,” which was accorded the same legal status as more tangible exhibits, such as wax effigies stuck full of pins. Witches were supposed to have the ability to send out their “specter,” or incorporeal likeness, to do their dirty work for them. Thus if someone saw you in the barnyard hexing the cows and you could demonstrate by witnesses that you were home in bed at the time, what was proven was not your innocence, but the fact that you had the ability to project your own double, and were therefore a witch. (It was not until spectral evidence was barred from the courts that the New England witchcraft trials finally ended.)

  Among the things that fascinated the early Romantics were folk-stories and folklore, so it is perhaps through this door that so many doubles got into the literature of the Romantic and post-Romantic periods. The atmosphere of these “double” stories and their many descendants is usually delirium and terror – as moviegoers will recognize if they’ve seen, for instance, such “double” films as The Stepford Wives, The Other, or Dead Ringers. One of the earliest English-language literary “double” stories of this type is James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), in which the protagonist – convinced he’s predestined to salvation, and is therefore free to sin as he likes – wakes from what he thinks is a long sleep to find that a man who looks just like him has been doing nasty things, for which he himself will have to take the blame. Poe’s story “William Wilson” (1839) is similar: the protagonist is haunted by a man with the same name who looks exactly like him, and who functions as an interfering conscience. Our hero ends by killing the other William Wilson, thereby killing himself: like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the two William Wilsons share their mortality, and one cannot exist without the other. Later in the nineteenth century, Henry James has a more psychological “double” story: in “The Jolly Corner” (1909) an American aesthete returns from Europe, and becomes convinced that his former house is inhabited, not by an exact replica of himself, but by the ghost of what he would have been if he’d stayed in America and become a rich tycoon. He stalks this shadow, finally confronts it, and is horrified: his potential self is powerful, but he’s a brute, a monster.

  Then of course there is Dorian Gray,13 he of the magic picture. Because the artist who painted the picture put too much of something or other into it – himself? His repressed passion for Dorian? – the picture is partly alive. It takes on the effects of age and experience, while Dorian (a golden boy, and related to the ancient, pagan Greeks, as his first name suggests), is freed from the consequences of his own cruel and depraved actions, remains young and beautiful, and is able to sin and collect objets d’art as much as he likes. He isn’t an artist or a writer – nothing so banal. His life is the work of art, and a decadent one at that. But when he finally decides to be good and to d
estroy the picture, doom falls. He can’t maintain his vow of virtue; realizing that the picture is his conscience, he sticks a knife into the canvas, the picture is restored to youth, and Dorian perishes. He and the uncanny picture have changed places, and Dorian now looks like what he really is – a degenerate old man. Motto: if you’ve got a magic picture, don’t mess around with it. Leave it alone.

  There’s another story I would add to this collection – a strangely terrifying piece called “The Beast with Five Fingers.”14 At least I found it strangely terrifying when I read it as a teenager, at night, while baby-sitting. It belongs to a group which, if we were ethnographers, we might term “The Double as Cut-Off Body-Part.” We might note, for instance, the penises coaxed away from their owners by witches and lodged in birds’ nests, in that supreme metafiction, the Malleus Maleficarum;15 or Gogol’s story “The Nose,” in which a man’s nose runs away and becomes a court functionary in full uniform until it is trapped and reattached. “The Beast with Five Fingers” is less amusing. A baddish nephew visits his saintly but sickly old uncle, hoping for something in the will, and notices that although the old man is asleep, his hand is not. It is busily writing – practicing, among other things, the old man’s signature. The nephew considers this an interesting example of automatic writing, and thinks no more of it.

  Imagine his shock when the old man dies and he receives a package containing the hand – it has forged the will, and directed that it be cut off and mailed. It is not dead at all, but leaps out and scrambles up the curtains, and begins to plague the protagonist and ruin his life, much as other doubles do. (It can write letters, for instance, and sign them with our hero’s name; an inconvenient talent for such a hand.) The man traps it and nails it to a board, but it escapes, and now it has a jagged hole in it from being nailed, and is bent on revenge. Things end badly, as you might imagine: the man destroys the hand, but the hand also destroys the man, thus revealing its literary ancestry.