On Writers and Writing

by Margaret Atwood

  In fact, as Lewis Hyde has so definitively pointed out in his book The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property,12 any equation that tries to connect literary value and money is juggling apples and oranges. Chekhov began his career by writing exclusively for money, and never for any other reason, in order to support his poverty-stricken family. Does that make him ignoble? Shakespeare wrote for the stage, much of the time, and naturally he cranked out stuff he thought would appeal to his audience. Once he got his start, Charles Dickens tossed his day job and lived by the pen. Jane Austen and Emily Bronte didn’t, though they wouldn’t have minded some extra cash. But you can’t say any one of these is a better or a worse artist simply because of the money factor.

  Nevertheless, as Hyde points out, the part of any poem or novel that makes it a work of art doesn’t derive its value from the realm of market exchange. It comes from the realm of gift, which has altogether different modes of operating. A gift is not weighed and measured, nor can it be bought. It can’t be expected or demanded; rather it is granted, or else not. In theological terms it’s a grace, proceeding from the fullness of being. One can pray for it, but one’s prayer will not therefore be answered. If this were not so, there would never be any writer’s block. The composition of a novel may be one part inspiration and nine parts perspiration, but that one part inspiration is essential if the work is to live as art. (The parts vary for poetry, but both are still involved.)

  There are four ways of arranging literary worth and money: good books that make money; bad books that make money; good books that don’t make money; bad books that don’t make money. Those are the only four combinations. All are possible.

  Again according to Hyde, the serious artist would be well advised to acquire an agent who can mediate between the realm of art and that of money; this saves the writer from any undignified and contaminating haggling on his own behalf. He may thus remain modestly apart, single in intent and pure in heart, while others with more mercenary talents bid him up and knock him down, behind closed doors.

  Lacking such protection, he will have to maintain a very firm division in his own soul. It is a case of rendering unto Caesar what is his, and then paying your respects to the other one – or the other ones – who are in charge of non-Caesarly artistic affairs. One half keeps the accounts, the other worships at the shrine. Here is the useful Isak Dinesen, in a story called “Tempests,” describing a wily old actor and theatrical producer:

  Herr Soerenson in his nature had a kind of duplicity which might … even be called demoniacal, but with which he himself managed to exist on harmonious terms. He was on the one hand a wide-awake, shrewd and untiring businessman, with eyes at the back of his head, a fine nose for profit, and a completely matter-of-fact and detached outlook … And he was at one and the same time his art’s obedient servant, a humble old priest in the temple, with the words “Domine, non sum dignus” graven in his heart … Herr Soerenson at times had been characterized … as a shameless speculator. But in his relations to the immortals he was chaste as a virgin.13

  I would like to draw your attention to two suggestive phrases here. “A humble old priest in the temple”; and, “ ‘Domine, non sum dignus.’ ”14 The temple of what, we may ask? Who is the Lord being addressed? Herr Soerenson does not sacrifice his art to Mammon; but who is the god he serves as a humble old priest? We strongly suspect that it isn’t Jesus.

  The ease with which Isak Dinesen was able to make use of such loaded language is the result of a long, hard battle, fought back and forth over the intellectual and aesthetic and spiritual high ground of the nineteenth century, and some very swampy low ground as well. She herself had been an art student in Paris in the first decade of the twentieth century, and would have been more than familiar with the issues at stake in this war. The contestants were those who wanted art to have some worthy agenda outside itself – to have a religious aim, or at least a moral purpose, or a socially redeeming agenda, or at the very least an uplifting intent, or at the very, very least, an optimistic and healthy-minded and cheerful effect – and, in the other corner, those who proclaimed the self-sufficiency of art and its exemption from any need for social justification whatsoever. This war is by no means over; it breaks out anew every time there’s a fight over some piece of public funding for, say, an art show that might include pee in a bottle or a dead cow or a picture of a Moors Murderer. So, since what any sort of artist – writers included – actually does is influenced in part by what he thinks he’s supposed to be doing, and what on the other hand he thinks he’s prohibited from doing, it’s as well to run briefly over a few past features of the fray.

  At the outset of this war, it was only established religion that was in the habit of claiming a more or less total freedom from external judgment: it reserved the right to dole out the moral standards and not be subjected to any, apart from those concocted by itself. Were the champions of art for art, then, aspiring to the status of a religion? In a word, yes. And couldn’t that be considered blasphemous? Yes, again. To be a poet, in the middle of this war, meant you might have to be a poète maudit, doomed to Hell but defiant, like Mozart’s Don Giovanni, who achieved a cult status in the nineteenth century of a kind he never had in the eighteenth. Or like Byron. Or like Baudelaire. Or like Rimbaud. Or like Swinburne. And so forth.

  There was a certain nobility in such damnation: you were true to your position, however reprehensible that position might be, even though it might land you in Hell itself. There might even be a higher truth involved: the Victorians were fond of higher truths, so if you were going into battle it was just as well to have a higher truth on your side. The reasoning, had it been spelled out, might have gone something like this:

  “The truth shall make you free,”15 said Jesus. “Beauty is Truth, Truth, Beauty,”16 said John Keats. By the rules of the syllogism, if truth is beauty and the truth shall make you free, then beauty shall make you free, and since we are in favor of freedom, or have been off and on since it was extolled in the Romantic age, we should devote ourselves to beauty-worship. And where is beauty – widely interpreted – more manifest than in Art? This train of thought pursued to its end leads to the conclusion that even the aesthetic turning away from the moral dimension had, itself, a moral dimension. And if the pursuit of perfect artistic expression is not the sole aim of the artist, what other aims might he or she legitimately be expected to have?17

  Tennyson set himself this problem early on in his career, in a somewhat programmatic poem called “The Palace of Art.”18

  I built my soul a lordly pleasure-house,

  Wherein at ease for aye to dwell.

  I said, “O Soul, make merry and carouse,

  Dear soul, for all is well.”

  So it begins. There follows an interior-decoration catalog of objets d’art worthy of Dorian Gray or of any of Henry James’s dubious aesthetes; but it turns out not to be enough. The Palace of Art is a lovely building, with many well-wrought urns and golden fountains and Greek statues and other inspiring doo-dads in it, but the soul can’t live there. To do so would be too isolated and thus selfish, and also too sterile; in addition, the soul has made a god of Art, and is thus guilty of idolatry. “ ‘I sit as God holding no form of creed,’ ” she says, “ ‘but contemplating all.’ ” Thus she is guilty of “serpent pride,” the worst sin, and shortly falls into a deep despair.

  As an artist – especially as an artist – the poet’s soul has to go where the human action is, and for Tennyson that always means a descent from the heights, because love – whether for one person or for humanity – is of the valley The Palace of Art isn’t repudiated and destroyed in this poem, but it has to be humanized.

  So when four years were wholly finished,

  She threw her royal robes away.

  “Make me a cottage in the vale,” she said,

  “Where I may mourn and pray.

  “Yet pull not down my palace towers, that are

  So lightly, beautifully built;


  Perchance I may return with others there

  When I have purged my guilt.”19

  Once you’ve got down and dirty and done some suffering and atonement, maybe you can move back in, and bring other folks with you, thus turning the Palace of Art into – well, the National Gallery, perhaps.

  The artistic insights of one age become the clichés of the next. I remember two popular songs from the fifties, one of which urged me to come down from my ivory tower and let love come into my heart, and another in which the woman is addressed as Mona Lisa, and asked whether she is warm and real, or just a cold and lonely lovely work of art. Art is cold, life is warm, goes this formulation: a reverse of the situation in Keats’s Grecian urn in the eponymous Ode, in which time is frozen and the rape-scene-in-progress depicted on it is arrested at its hottest moment, and it is the human observers who will grow old and cold. (This Grecian urn, with its alive–dead, cold–hot reverses, is The Picture of Dorian Gray20 in the making.)

  The nineteenth-century battle over the proper function of art was fierce, but all attempts to bend art to some useful purpose, or to prove that it had such a purpose – even attempts by the likes of art-lovers such as Ruskin and Matthew Arnold – came to grief in the end, because what they amounted to was censorship. If beauty is truth and the truth will make you free, is there a kind of truth that ought to be suppressed? Yes: ugly truth, or any truth that might be bad for you, which is why John Ruskin destroyed many of Turner’s erotic drawings. Those who preached the social usefulness of art wanted the warts covered up, much as the Pope had covered up the dangly bits on Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel during the Counter-Reformation.

  It wasn’t only sex that needed to be expurgated: it might be rabble-rousing political ideas, or critical notions about religion, or undue violence and squalor, and so forth. Still, most often it was sex, and novelists of the time knew quite well that there were some things they couldn’t write for general publication, because such things simply would not be printed. Thus the heroes of Art became those who were willing, as they say now, to push the envelope.

  Some writers pushed the envelope too far and came into overt conflict with the authorities. “Flaubert,” says Borges, “was the first to consecrate himself (and I use the word in its full etymological rigour) to the creation of a purely aesthetic work in prose.”21 Flaubert is thus another priest in the temple – a self-consecrated priest at that – who dedicated himself to the purely aesthetic, and was thus a natural suspect in the war between art and moral purpose. He was put on trial for Madame Bovary, and found himself in the unpleasant position of having to play by his enemies’ rules – that is, to demonstrate that his book had a healthy moral. He defended it by claiming that the moral was healthy because Madame Bovary died a gruesome death as the result of her adulteries. (Strictly considered, untrue – if she hadn’t foolishly overspent, she would have got away with it.)

  The censors and the Mrs. Grundys were busy bees for many decades, their efforts culminating in such triumphs as the banning of James Joyce’s Ulysses, but the hypocrisy demanded by the pillars of society fueled the revolt of the artists. Taken to its extreme, this gave us Henry Miller and William Burroughs: it wasn’t a case of dreaming the impossible dream, but of printing the unprintable word. The scrum went on for a long time. When I was an undergraduate, Lady Chatterley’s Lover still hadn’t passed its court test in Canada, and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer had to be smuggled into the country.

  To put all of this in context: you could not then – in the late fifties – buy contraceptives over the counter, and you couldn’t buy them at all if you were an unmarried woman; you could not get an abortion except somewhere else, or on a kitchen table; the first time I read Hemingway’s story “Hills Like White Elephants,” I had no idea what the man and the woman were discussing. You could not advertise sanitary products for women and call them what they were, which gave rise to a degree of surrealism unmatched in advertising since. I remember in particular a woman in a white Grecian-style evening gown standing on a marble staircase and gazing out over the sea, with a caption under her that said, “Modess … Because.” Because what? I wondered as a child. This is a question that still recurs in dreams.

  But back to the art wars. “Art for art,” the strange device on the banner22 raised by Théophile Gautier – in defiance of the social good, of the improvement of the individual, of moral earnestness, and so forth – this device was the credo that finally prevailed among the devotees of Art. Toward the end of the century, Oscar Wilde could proclaim, without being any more shocking than he intended to be,

  The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist … No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. Vice and virtue are to the artist instruments of an art … The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.23

  What then of the kinds of people who were to make these useless but admirable things – admirable in their own right, since “beauty is its own excuse for being,”24 said Emerson, just like God? “The artist is the creator of beautiful things,” says Wilde. “To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim.”25 Far from being the self-expressing Romantic genius, the artist is now to be self-effacing; he is to be hidden from view, and he is to serve his calling. James Joyce’s already cited trio, “silence, exile, and cunning,” argues an asceticism and a self-denial worthy of a Dominican monk in training. The writer-as-artist is to be, according to Joyce, a “priest of the imagination.”26

  Art is an abstract category. A priest, however, implies a god: you can’t have one without the other. If Art is to be a god, or to have a god, then what sort of god? There’s one answer in the poem “A Musical Instrument,” written in 1860 by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, in the midst of the war I’ve been describing, but before the scales had tipped definitively in favor of art for art. Here it is:

  I

  What was he doing, the great god Pan,

  Down in the reeds by the river?

  Spreading ruin and scattering ban,

  Splashing and paddling with hoofs of a goat,

  And breaking the golden lilies afloat

  With the dragon-fly on the river.

  II

  He tore out a reed, the great god Pan,

  From the deep cool bed of the river;

  The limpid water turbidly ran,

  And the broken lilies a-dying lay,

  And the dragon-fly had fled away,

  Ere he brought it out of the river.

  III

  High on the shore sat the great god Pan

  While turbidly flowed the river;

  And hacked and hewed as a great god can,

  With his hard bleak steel at the patient reed,

  Till there was not a sign of the leaf indeed

  To prove it fresh from the river.

  IV

  He cut it short, did the great god Pan

  (How tall it stood in the river!),

  Then drew the pith, like the heart of a man,

  Steadily from the outside ring,

  And notched the poor dry empty thing

  In holes, as he sat by the river.

  V

  “This is the way,” laughed the great god Pan

  (Laughed while he sat by the river),

  “The only way, since gods began

  To make sweet music, they could succeed.”

  Then, dropping his mouth to a hole in the reed,

  He blew in power by the river.

  VI

  Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan!

  Piercing sweet by the river!

  Blinding sweet, O great god Pan!

  The sun on the hill forgot to die,

  And the lilies revived, and the dragon-fly

  Came back to dream on the river.

  VII

  Yet half a beast is the great god Pan,

  To laugh a
s he sits by the river,

  Making a poet out of a man;

  The true gods sigh for the cost and pain –

  For the reed which grows nevermore again

  As a reed with the reeds in the river.27

  Or, as D. H. Lawrence later put it, “Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me.”28 Or, as Rilke says in his third Sonnet to Orpheus,

  … song is existence. Easy for the god. But

  when do we exist? And when does he spend

  the earth and the stars on our being?

  When we love? That’s what you think when you’re young;

  not so, though your voice forces open your mouth, –

  learn to forget how you sang. That fades.

  Real singing is a different kind of breath.

  A nothing-breath. A ripple in the god. A wind.29

  In Barrett Browning’s poem, the poet is an instrument for the making of music, and it is beautiful music. But the poet doesn’t make the music of his own volition. First, he is chosen by the god. He is set apart from the rest of his fellows, and can never rejoin them. Second, he is mutilated. His heart is taken out of him, and he becomes hollow, dry, and empty. He can make music only through inspiration – the god blows through him. Not only that, the god isn’t a very nice god: Pan is half a beast – the bottom half. The Great God Pan cares only for the music, not at all for the poet whom he has hollowed out, and who will – we assume – be cruelly cast aside as a broken reed when the god is finished with him. There are other gods in the poem – the “true gods,” who care about the cost and pain; but we suspect they are lousy musicians. In Art, you don’t get aesthetic points for good intentions. The pagan God of Art may be a nasty piece of work, and an idol too – a false god – but you can’t say he isn’t good at what he does. So if it’s art you crave – beautiful art – love him or hate him, this is the god you must pray to.