On Writers and Writing

by Margaret Atwood

  Without his art, Prospero would be unable to rule. It’s this that gives him his power. As Caliban points out, minus his books he’s nothing. So an element of fraud is present in this magician figure, right from the beginning: altogether, he’s an ambiguous gentleman. Well, of course he’s ambiguous – he’s an artist, after all. At the end of the play Prospero speaks the Epilogue, both in his own character and in that of the actor that plays him; and also in that of the author who has created him, yet another behind-the-scenes tyrannical controller of the action. Consider the words in which Prospero, alias the actor who plays him, alias Shakespeare who wrote his lines, begs the indulgence of the audience: “As you from crimes would pardoned be, / Let your indulgence set me free.” It wasn’t the last time that art and crime were ever equated. Prospero knows he’s been up to something, and that something is a little guilt-making.

  The third illusionist I promised you is the actor Henrik Höfgen, from Klaus Mann’s 1936 novel Mephisto. Höfgen is an artist – a real artist. He’s an actor, and a very good one; his best role is Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust. But the novel is set during the Third Reich, and Höfgen becomes his own Mephisto; he tempts the susceptible Faust part of himself, and leads himself down the unholy road to worldly power. To get this power, he cuddles up to the Nazis, not because he believes their creed but because that’s where the goodies are. He betrays his erstwhile left-wing friends, including his best pal Otto, and throws over his lover because she’s black. “ ‘The theatre needs me,’ ” he says, “ ‘and the regime needs the theatre.’ ” How right he is – totalitarianism is always somewhat theatrical. And, like the theatre, it leans heavily on illusion: grand facades, with squalor and string-pulling behind the scenes.

  Finally Höfgen is visited by a messenger – a young man bearing a message from Otto, who has just been tortured to death by the SS. The message is, roughly, We shall overcome, and when we do, we’ll know who to hang. Höfgen is unnerved by this visit. “ ‘What do people want from me?’ ” he whimpers. “ ‘Why do they pursue me? Why are they so mean to me? I’m only a poor actor!’ ”26

  When things get tough, Mephisto dumps his costume and reverts to the frightened human being behind the illusion. But does that let him off the hook for the things he’s done in order to obtain his high position and his loot, with his art as both disguise and instrument?

  In all such magician or wizard or illusionist figures, the question of imposture, of trickery, of manipulation for power of one kind or another, is never very far away. It seems that when the artist tries for a sphere of power beyond that of his art, he’s on shifty ground; but if he doesn’t engage himself with the social world at all, he risks being simply irrelevant – a doodler, a fabricator of scrimshaw, a fiddler with bric à brac, a recluse who spends his time figuring out how many angels can prance on the head of a pen.

  What to do? Where to turn? How to proceed? Is there a self-identity for the writer that combines responsibility with artistic integrity? If there is, what might it be? Ask the age we live in, and it might reply – the witness. And, if possible, the eyewitness.

  It’s an old role, this. I was there, I saw it, it happened to me: these are seductive recommendations, and make a deep appeal to the imagination, as writers from Herodotus on have known. “Good prose is like a window-pane,”27 says George Orwell, implying that what we see through this clear window will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

  “I only am escaped alone to tell thee,” say the four messengers in the Book of Job.28 Someone has to survive in order to tell what happened, an old man says to the starving violinist portrayed by Vanessa Redgrave in the concentration-camp film Playing for Time, as he hands her his own bit of sausage. Captivity narratives, castaway narratives, war stories, civil-war stories, slavery narratives, catastrophe stories, memoirs of hard-done-by outlaws and pirates, incest-survivor stories, Soviet Union gulag stories, atrocity stories: how much more compelling we find them if we think they’re based on real events, and especially real events that have happened to the writer!

  The power of such narratives is immense, especially when combined with artistic power. And the courage required to write them, and sometimes to smuggle them across borders so they can be published, is equally stupendous. These stories exist in a realm that is neither fact nor fiction, but perhaps both: let us call it enhanced fact. To mention two supreme examples of this form – the Polish writer Ryszard Kapuscinski’s book The Emperor, about the fall of the Emperor of Ethiopia; and Curzio Malaparte’s astonishing book Kaputt, written secretly by him, in fragments, behind the Nazi lines in World War II – a book for which he would certainly have been shot, had any of its pages been found in his possession.

  Real life’s jagged extremes mixed with verbal artistry are a potent and sometimes explosive combination. This is why so many people have faked such stories, beginning at least with Daniel Defoe. Some have even concocted false identities in order to do so. Fake North American Indians, fake Australian indigenous people, fake Holocaust survivors, fake mistreated women, even fake Ukrainians – over the years, the totals have added up, and these are only the ones who’ve been found out. Even when an eyewitness story isn’t forged, but is a piece of fiction and admitted to be such, writers can be accused of appropriating the voices of others. A socially conscious writer can quite easily be charged with exploiting the misery and misfortune of the downtrodden for his own gain. Does that put Oliver Twist in a new light? Is Charles Dickens a social reformer and upholder of virtue and justice, or a filthy moral idiot, like Alice Munro’s Hugo? The line between these is sometimes thin, and sometimes it’s only in the eye of the beholder.

  Then, too, the eyewitness can be a kind of voyeur. In Leon Edel’s introduction to Henry James’s 1901 novel The Sacred Fount, Edel reports a review of that time as saying that James’s novel gave “the effect of a man peeping through a keyhole at a man peeping through a keyhole.”29 The protagonist of that novel is, not incidentally, a novelist; but the joke is that although he’s always spying on people, he isn’t sure in the end exactly what he has really seen. The Henri Barbusse novel L’Enfer takes place in a hotel room, from which vantage point the narrator looks through a peephole at the gritty goings-on in the next room. This is quite a distance from those favorite eighteenth-century onlooking personae, the idler and the spectator, and a distance too from our familiar twentieth-century friends, “angle of vision” and “point of view,” but they’re in the same club – there’s the one who looks, namely the writer, and those who are looked at. Thus the huge pair of spectacles that dominates the scene in The Great Gatsby – a leftover ad for an oculist, but functioning in the book like the eyes of an amoral and indeed powerless God – seeing everything, doing nothing, with vacancy in place of a head. Eyes Without A Face, proclaimed the title of one of the first modern poetry collections I ever read.30

  I Am A Camera, stated the title of the well-known Christopher Isherwood book. Actually, nobody is a camera, so where did this particular self-definition come from? From the same place the private eye came from, we suspect: that particular blend of aestheticism and science that produced, toward the end of the nineteenth century, both Sherlock Holmes, the dope-taking, violin-playing, eagle-eyed snoop, and Oscar Wilde’s Lord Henry Wotton, the supreme aesthete, detached observer, and chemist-like experimenter with other people’s emotional lives.

  What did Yeats mean when he told a future generation of poets to cast a cold eye on life and death? Why does the eye have to be so cold? That bothered me for years. Perhaps Yeats was throwing in his lot, finally, decisively, on the side of craft, on art as artifice, as opposed to the political involvement that had occupied him earlier in his day. Or perhaps he meant something like this, from Brian Moore’s 1962 novel, An Answer from Limbo. The protagonist, a writer, stands at his mother’s graveside:

  Above the pit, their shovels moving as one, the gravediggers dug, filled; dug, filled. Earth fell on earth … The priest shut
his prayer book. Remember this.

  And then, as though he had come up beside me, that drunken, revengeful Brendan … repeated in my ear his angry words at Dortmunder’s party: STANDING BY HIS WIFE’S BEDSIDE WATCHING HER FACE CONTORT, THE BETTER TO RECORD HER DEATH AGONY. HE CAN’T HELP DOING IT. HE’S A WRITER. HE CAN’T FEEL: HE CAN ONLY RECORD.

  “ ‘I have altered beyond all self-recognition,’ ” thinks the writer. “ ‘I have lost and sacrificed myself.’ ”31

  So here we are again, with the cold-eyed, cold-hearted artist, the one who has sacrificed himself for his art and forfeited his human ability to feel, but this time there’s a distinct suggestion of a pact with the devil. Not only the heart has gone, but the soul has been lost as well.

  There can be, however, another reason for the coldness of the artist’s eye. Consider the ending of Adrienne Rich’s poem, “From the Prison House”:

  This eye

  is not for weeping

  its vision

  must be unblurred

  though tears are on my face

  its intent is clarity

  it must forget

  nothing32

  This is the eye of the scribe of the Egyptian and Mesopotamian Underworlds, or of the recording angel of the Christian Heaven. The eye is cold because it is clear, and it is clear because its owner must look: he must look at everything. Then she must record.

  How is the writer to determine his or her position in relation to the rest of humanity? Where on the ladder of power should he take his place, if indeed such a place is even on offer any more? How to choose? As I’ve said, I have no answers. But I’ve indicated some of the possibilities, some of the dangers that may lurk; some of the conundrums. As for advice, should you be a young writer – I could say, as Alice Munro has said, “Do what you want and live with the consequences.” Or I could say, “Go where the story takes you.” Or I could say, “Take care of the writing, and the social relevance will take care of itself.”

  And this in fact is true, because the secret is – and you are welcome to use it at any panel discussion you may find yourself serving on – the secret is that it isn’t the writer who decides whether or not his work is relevant. Instead it’s the reader. And it is to the reader that we will turn our attention in the next chapter.

  5

  ———

  Communion:

  Nobody to Nobody

  The eternal triangle: the writer, the reader, and the book as go-between

  How pleased therefore will the reader be to find that we have, in the following work, adhered closely to one of the highest principles of the best cook which the present age, or perhaps that of Heliogabulus, hath produced … By this means, we doubt not but our reader may be rendered desirous to read on for ever, as the great person, just above-mentioned, is supposed to have made some persons eat.

  Henry Fielding, Tom Jones1

  A man listening to a story is in the company of the storyteller; even a man reading one shares this companionship. The reader of a novel, however, is isolated, more so than any other reader … In this solitude of his, the reader of a novel seizes upon his material more jealously than anyone else. He is ready to make it his own, to devour it, as it were.

  Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller”2

  As Detlev von Liliencron wrote, his rhymes dripping with sarcasm: it is hard for the poet to evade fame. If he cannot secure the favor of the masses in his lifetime, posterity will praise his heroic way of starving to death. In a word, to sell was to sell out.

  Peter Gay, The Pleasure Wars3

  … for we are great statements in our days and on the basis of that we can expect small audiences.

  Gwendolyn MacEwen, “The Choice”4

  The big blundering newspaper had discovered him, and now he was proclaimed and anointed and crowned. His place was assigned to him as publicly as if a fat usher with a wand had pointed to the topmost chair … In a flash, somehow, all was different; the tremendous wave I speak of had swept something away. It had knocked down, I suppose, my little customary altar, my twinkling tapers and my flowers, and had reared itself into a temple vast and bare. When Neil Paraday should come out of the house he would come out a contemporary. That was what had happened: the poor man was to be squeezed into his horrible age.

  Henry James, “The Death of the Lion”5

  I rip the envelope and I’m in Bangkok

  … You pour from these squares, these blue envoys.

  And just when I feel I’ve lost you to the world,

  I can’t keep up,

  Your postcard comes with the words

  “wait for me.”

  Anne Michaels, “Letters from Martha”6

  I would like to begin by talking about messengers. Messengers always exist in a triangular situation – the one who sends the message, the message-bearer, whether human or inorganic, and the one who receives the message. Picture, therefore, a triangle, but not a complete triangle: something more like an upside-down V. The writer and the reader are at the two lateral corners, but there’s no line joining them. Between them – whether above or below – is a third point, which is the written word, or the text, or the book, or the poem, or the letter, or whatever you would like to call it. This third point is the only point of contact between the other two. As I used to say to my writing students in the distant days when I had some, “Respect the page. It’s all you’ve got.”

  The writer communicates with the page. The reader also communicates with the page. The writer and the reader communicate only through the page. This is one of the syllogisms of writing as such. Pay no attention to the facsimiles of the writer that appear on talkshows, in newspaper interviews, and the like – they ought not to have anything to do with what goes on between you, the reader, and the page you are reading, where an invisible hand has previously left some marks for you to decipher, much as one of John Le Carré’s dead spies has left a waterlogged shoe with a small packet in it for George Smiley.7 I know this is a far-fetched image, but it is also curiously apt, since the reader is – among other things – a sort of spy. A spy, a trespasser, someone in the habit of reading other people’s letters and diaries. As Northrop Frye has implied, the reader does not hear, he overhears.8

  So far I’ve spoken primarily about writers. Now it’s the turn of readers, more or less. The questions I would like to pose are, first: for whom does the writer write? And, secondly: what is the book’s function – or duty, if you like – in its position between writer and reader? What ought it to be doing, in the opinion of its writer? And finally, a third question arising from the other two: where is the writer when the reader is reading?

  If you really are in the habit of reading other people’s letters and diaries, you’ll know the answer to that one straightaway: when you are reading, the writer is not in the same room. If he were, either you’d be talking together, or he’d catch you in the act.

  For whom does the writer write? The question poses itself most simply in the case of the diary-writer or journal-keeper. Only very occasionally is the answer specifically no one, but this is a misdirection, because we couldn’t hear it unless a writer had put it in a book and published it for us to read. Here for instance is diary-writer Doctor Glas, from Hjalmar Söderberg’s astonishing 1905 Swedish novel of the same name:

  Now I sit at my open window, writing – for whom? Not for any friend or mistress. Scarcely for myself, even. I do not read today what I wrote yesterday; nor shall I read this tomorrow. I write simply so my hand can move, my thoughts move of their own accord. I write to kill a sleepless hour.9

  A likely story, and it is a likely story – we, the readers, believe it easily enough. But the truth – the real truth, the truth behind the illusion – is that the writing is not by Doctor Glas, and it’s not addressed to no one. It’s by Hjalmar Söderberg, and it’s addressed to us.

  The fictional writer who writes to no one is rare. More usually, even fictional writers writing fictional journals wish to suppose
a reader. Here is a passage from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, a book I read as a young person, shortly after it first came out in 1949. As we know, Nineteen Eighty-Four takes place in a grimy totalitarian future ruled by Big Brother. The hero, Winston Smith, has seen in a junk-store window a forbidden object: “a thick, quarto-sized blank book with a red back and a marbled cover” and “smooth creamy paper.”10 He has been seized by the desire to possess this book, despite the dangers that owning it would entail. Who among writers has not been overcome by a similar desire? And who has not been aware, too, of the dangers – specifically, the dangers of self-revelation? Because if you get hold of a blank book, especially one with creamy pages, you will be driven to write in it. And this is what Winston Smith does, with a real pen and real ink, because the lovely paper deserves these. But then a question arises:

  For whom, it suddenly occurred to him to wonder, was he writing this diary? For the future, for the unborn … For the first time the magnitude of what he had undertaken came home to him. How could you communicate with the future? It was of its nature impossible. Either the future would resemble the present, in which case it would not listen to him: or it would be different from it, and his predicament would be meaningless.11

  A common writerly dilemma: who’s going to read what you write, now or ever? Who do you want to read it? Winston Smiths first readership is himself – it gives him satisfaction to write his forbidden thoughts in his diary. When I was a teenager, this account of Winston Smiths blank book was intensely attractive to me. I too attempted to keep such a diary, without result. My failure was my failure to imagine a reader. I didn’t want anybody else to read my diary – only I should have access to it. But I myself already knew the sorts of things I might put into it, and mawkish things they were, so why bother writing them down? It seemed a waste of time. But many have not found it so. Countless are the diaries and journals, most obscure, some famous, that have been faithfully kept through the centuries, or the centuries of pen and paper, at least. For whom was Samuel Pepys writing? Or Saint-Simon? Or Anne Frank? There is something magical about such real-life documents. The fact that they have survived, have reached our hands, seems like the delivery of an unexpected treasure; or else like a resurrection.