On Writers and Writing

by Margaret Atwood

  These days I do manage to keep a journal of sorts, more in self-defense than anything else, because I know who the reader will be: it will be myself, in about three weeks, because I can no longer remember what I might have been doing at any given time. The older one gets, the more relevant Beckett’s play Krapp’s Last Tape comes to be. In this play, Krapp is keeping a journal on tape, from year to year. His only reader – or auditor – is himself, as he plays back bits of the tapes from his earlier lives. As time goes on, he has a harder and harder time identifying the person he is now with his former selves. It’s like that bad stockbrokers’ joke about Alzheimer’s Disease – at least you keep meeting new people – but in Krapp’s case, and increasingly in mine, you yourself are those new people.

  The private diary is about as minimalist as you can get, in the writer-to-reader department, because writer and reader are assumed to be the same. It is also about as intimate, as a form. Next comes, I suppose, the private letter: one writer, one reader, and a shared intimacy. “This is my letter to the World / That never wrote to me,” said Emily Dickinson.12 Of course she might have got more replies if she’d mailed it. But she did intend a reader, or more than one, at least in the future: she saved her poems up very carefully, and even sewed them into little booklets. Her faith in the existence, indeed the attentiveness, of the future reader was the opposite of Winston Smith’s despair.

  Writers have of course made copious use of the letter as a form, inserting letters into the narrative, and in some cases building whole novels out of them, as Richardson did in Pamela, Clarissa Harlowe, and Sir Charles Grandison, and as Laclos did in Les Liaisons dangereuses. For the reader, the fictional exchange of letters among several individuals provides the delight of the secret agent listening in on a wire: letters have an immediacy that the past tense cannot provide, and the lies and manipulations of the characters can be caught in flagrante delicto. Or this is the idea.

  A few words about letter-writing and the anxieties specific to it. When I was a child, there was a game that was popular at little girls’ birthday parties. It went like this:

  The children stood in a circle. One of them was It, and walked around the outside of the circle holding a handkerchief, while the others sang:

  I wrote a letter to my love

  And on the way I dropped it,

  A little doggie picked it up

  And put it in his pocket.

  Then there was talk of dog-bites, and a moment when the handkerchief was dropped behind someone, followed by a chase around the outside of the circle. None of this part interested me. I was still worrying about the letter. How terrible that it had been lost, and that the person to whom it was written would never get it! How equally terrible that someone else had found it! My only consolation was that dogs can’t read.

  Ever since writing was invented, such accidents have been a distinct possibility. Once the words have been set down they form part of a material object, and as such must take their chances. The letter from the king that is exchanged, unknown to the messenger, causing an innocent person to be condemned to death – this is not merely an old folktale motif. Forged letters, letters gone astray and never received, letters that are destroyed, or that fall into the wrong hands – not only that, forged manuscripts, entire books that are lost and never read, books that are burned, books that fall into the hands of those who don’t read them in the spirit in which they are written, or who do, but still resent them deeply – all these confusions and mistakes and acts of misapprehension and malice have taken place many times over, and continue to take place. In the lists of those targeted and imprisoned and killed by any dictatorship, there are always quite a few writers, whose works have reached – self-evidently – the wrong readers. A bullet in the neck is a very bad review.

  But for every letter and every book, there is an intended reader, a true reader. How then to deliver the letter or book into the right hands? Winston Smith, writing his diary, finds he cannot be content with himself as his only reader. He chooses an ideal reader – a party official called O’Brien, in whom he believes he detects the signs of a subversiveness equal to his own. O’Brien, he feels, will understand him. He’s right about this: his intended reader does understand him. O’Brien has already thought the thoughts that Winston Smith is thinking, but he’s thought them in order to be prepared with the counter-moves, because O’Brien is a member of the secret police, and what he understands is that Winston is a traitor to the regime. He proceeds to arrest poor Winston, and then to destroy both his diary and his mind.

  O’Brien is a negative or demonic version of Writer-to-Dear Reader, that ideal one-to-one relationship in which the person reading is exactly the person who ought to be reading. A more recent variation of the Demon Reader has been created by Stephen King, who specializes in extreme paranoia – and since he has a different kind of paranoia for every taste, he has a special one just for writers. The book is Misery,13 and in it a writer of suffering-heroine romances featuring a hapless maiden called Misery falls into the hands of a deranged nurse who styles herself “your biggest fan.” Veterans of book-signings would know right then to run for the washroom and escape out the window, but our hero can’t do that, because he’s been incapacitated in a car crash. What his “biggest fan” wants is to force him to write a book about Misery, just for her. Then, he realizes, she plans to bump him off so that this book will only ever have one reader – herself. It’s a version of the sultan’s-maze motif – used, among other places, in The Phantom of the Opera14 – in which the patron of a work of art wishes to murder its maker so only he will possess its secrets. The hero of Misery escapes with his life after the required amount of guck has messed up the furniture, leaving us to reflect that the one-to-one Writer-to-Dear-Reader relationship can get altogether too close for comfort.

  It is altogether too close for comfort as well when the reader confuses the writer with the text: such a reader wants to abolish the middle term, and to get hold of the text by getting hold of the writer, in the flesh. We assume too easily that a text exists to act as a communication between the writer and the reader. But doesn’t it also act as a disguise, even a shield – a protection? The play Cyrano de Bergerac15 features a large-nosed poet who expresses his love for the heroine by pretending to be someone else – but it is he who writes the eloquent letters that win her heart. Thus the book, as a form, expresses its own emotions and thoughts, while concealing from view the person who has concocted them. The difference between Cyrano and the book in general is that Cyrano gives vent to his own emotions, but the thoughts and emotions in a book are not necessarily those of the writer of it.

  Despite the hazards a reader may pose, a reader must be postulated by a writer, and always is. Postulated, but rarely visualized in any exact, specific form – apart that is from the primary readers, who may be those named on the dedication page – “Mr. W. H.,”16 or “my wife,” and so forth – or the group of friends and editors thanked in the acknowledgments. But beyond that, the reader is the great unknown. Here is Emily Dickinson on the subject:

  I’m Nobody! Who are you?

  Are you – Nobody – Too?

  Then there’s a pair of us!

  Don’t tell! – they’d advertise – you know!

  How dreary – to be – Somebody!

  How public – like a Frog –

  To tell one’s name – the livelong June –

  To an admiring Bog!17

  “Nobody” is the writer, and the reader is also Nobody. In that sense, all books are anonymous, and so are all readers. Reading and writing – unlike, for instance, acting and theatre-going – are both activities that presuppose a certain amount of solitude, even a certain amount of secrecy. I expect Emily Dickinson is using “Nobody” in both of its senses – in the sense of an insignificant person, a nobody, but also in the sense of the invisible and never-to-be-known writer, addressing the invisible and never-to-be-known reader.

  If the writer is Nobody addressin
g the reader, who is another Nobody – that hypocrite reader who is his likeness and his brother, as Baudelaire remarked18 – where do the dreary Somebody and the admiring Bog come into it?

  Publication changes everything. “They’d advertise,” warns Emily Dickinson, and how right she was. Once the catalog is out of the bag, the assumed readership cannot consist of just one person – a friend or a lover, or even a single unknown Nobody. With publication, the text replicates itself, and the reader is no longer an intimate, a one to your one. Instead the reader too multiplies, just like the copies of the book, and all those nobodies add up to the reading public. If the writer has a success, he becomes a Somebody, and the mass of readers becomes his admiring Bog. But turning from a nobody into a somebody is not without its traumas. The nobody-writer must throw off the cloak of invisibility and put on the cloak of visibility. As Marilyn Monroe is rumored to have said, “If you’re nobody you can’t be somebody unless you’re somebody else.”19

  And then doubt sets in. The writer-while-writing and the Dear Reader assumed as the eventual recipient of this writing have a relationship that is quite different from that between the mass-produced edition and “the reading public.” Dear Reader is singular – second-person singular. Dear Reader is a You. But once both book and Dear Reader become multiplied by thousands, the book becomes a publishing statistic, and Nobody can be quantified, and thus becomes a market, and turns into the great plural third-person Them, and Them is another thing altogether.

  Becoming known to Them results in the condition known as Fame, and the attitudes to fame, and to being famous, changed radically from the end of the eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth. In the eighteenth century, the readership was assumed to be educated, to have taste; Voltaire, for instance, saw his fame as a tribute to his talents, not as a minus factor. Even the early Romantics had nothing against fame; in fact, they longed for it. “The Trumpet of Fame is as a tower of Strength the ambitious bloweth it and is safe,”20 said John Keats in a letter. But by the end of the century, a bigger slice of the public was literate, the dreaded bourgeoisie – not to mention the even more dreaded masses – now determined how many copies would sell, publishing had become a business, “fame” and “popularity” were equated, and to have a small but discriminating readership now had a definite appeal.

  This attitude persisted well into the twentieth century. Here is a Graham Greene character from The End of the Affair – a rather grubby novelist called Maurice Bendrix, who knows he is about to commit the art-for-art-influenced blunder of becoming a “vulgar success.”21 This is what he thinks as he prepares to be interviewed by a critic who wants to write him up for a literary journal:

  I knew too well … the buried significance he would discover of which I was unaware and the faults I was tired of facing. Patronizingly in the end he would place me – probably a little above Maugham because Maugham is popular and I have not yet committed that crime – not yet, but although I retain a little of the exclusiveness of unsuccess, the little reviews, like wise detectives, can scent it on its way.22

  Greene is being satirical, but the attitude he is satirizing was real enough : popularity – too much of it – was still regarded as a crime if you aspired to being what used to be called a “highbrow” writer. In Cyril Connolly’s Enemies of Promise, too much failure and too much success are equally to be feared. Among the other things a young writer has to look out for are his own potential readers, because once you start comforting yourself with the idea that they at least love you no matter what the critics say, you’re finished as a serious writer. “Of all the enemies of literature, success is the most insidious,”23 says Connolly. He then quotes Trollope: “ ‘Success is a poison that should only be taken late in life, then only in small doses.’ ”24 It seems churlish to remark that only successful people ever say things like that; but Connolly expounds. He breaks success down into social success: not too bad, because it can provide material; professional success: the regard of one’s fellow artists, on the whole a good thing; and popular success, a grave danger. This last he also divides into three: a writer may become popular for his entertainment value, for political reasons, or because he has the human touch. Of these, the political factor is the least fatal to art, he thinks, because politics are volatile and complacency is therefore unlikely. An entertainer does not benefit from informed criticism because nobody ever offers any; his fate is simply to “go on and on until he wakes up one day to find himself obscure.”25 But those with the human touch may be ruined as artists: Connolly says, “Neither harsh reviews, the contempt of equals, nor the indifference of superiors can affect those who have once tapped the great heart of suffering humanity and found out what a goldmine it is.”26

  Connolly was not alone in his analysis; in fact, by his time – and by mine – this attitude was endemic among those with ambitions as artists. Take, for instance, Isak Dinesen’s story, “The Young Man With the Carnation.” It begins with a writer called Charlie who has achieved a remarkable success with his first novel, which was about the struggles of the poor. Now he feels like a fraud, because he doesn’t know what to write next; he’s sick of the poor, he doesn’t want to hear another word about them, but his admirers and the public have decided he’s noble, and are expecting yet more and better things about the poor from his pen. If he writes about anything else, they will think he’s superficial and hollow. No matter what he does, he feels, he will be doomed – doomed to disappoint – to disappoint the public, the great Them. He wouldn’t even be able to commit suicide with impunity: “Now he had had the glaring searchlight of renown set on him, a hundred eyes were watching him, and his failure or suicide would be the failure and the suicide of a world-famous author.”27

  There is no writer who has achieved any success at all who has not confronted this package of doubts. Repeat yourself and satisfy Them, or do something different and disappoint Them. Or worse – repeat yourself to satisfy Them, and then be accused of repetition.

  There are certain stories you read – usually quite early in life – that take on an emblematic quality for you. One of these for me is a Ray Bradbury story from The Martian Chronicles, the title of which is “The Martian.” It goes as follows:

  The Americans have colonized Mars, and part of it has been turned into a sort of retirement town. The original Martians are possibly extinct, or have taken to the hills. A middle-aged American couple, who have lost their young son Tom back on Earth, hear a knock on their door in the middle of the night. A small boy is standing in the yard. He looks like the dead son. The man sneaks down and unlocks the door, and in the morning there is Tom, all fresh and shining. The man guesses it must be a Martian, but the wife accepts Tom unquestioningly, and the man goes along with it because the facsimile is better than nothing.

  All goes well until they travel into town. The boy doesn’t want to go, and with good reason: shortly after they arrive he disappears, but another family suddenly recovers a daughter believed to be dead. The man guesses the truth – that the Martian is shaped by the desires of others, and by his own need to fulfill them – and goes to fetch Tom back. But the Martian can’t change: the wishes of the new family are too strong for him. “ ‘You are Tom, you were Tom, weren’t you?’ ” the man asks plaintively. “ ‘I’m not anyone, I’m just myself,’ ”28 says the Martian. A curious statement; this equation of selfhood with nonentity.29 “ ‘Wherever I am, I am something …’ ” says the Martian. And so it proves. The Martian turns back into Tom, but the new family gives chase, and so do all the people the Martian passes as he runs away, with his mirror-like “face like silver” shining in the lights of the town. Cornered, the Martian screams, face after face flitting across his own. “He was melting wax shaping to their minds,” says Bradbury, “his face dissolving to each demand.” He collapses and dies, a puddle of various features, unrecognizable.

  Once I’d begun to publish books, and to see them reviewed – and to find that several people I didn’t much re
cognize were running around out there with my name on them – this story took on a new significance. “So that’s it. My face is melting,” I thought. “I’m really a Martian.” It does explain a lot. Keats praised negative capability,30 and unless a writer has something of this quality, she will write characters that are mere mouthpieces for her own views. But if she has too much negative capability, doesn’t she risk being turned into melting wax by the strength of her audience’s desires and fears, interacting with her own? How many writers have put on other faces, or had other faces thrust upon them, and then been unable to get them off?

  At the beginning of this chapter I raised three questions. The first was about writers and readers – for whom does the writer write? The answers have included Nobody and the admiring Bog. The second question was about books. Considering the book’s position as the intermediate point between writer and reader, what is the book’s function, or its duty?

  The use of the word “duty” assumes something with a will of its own, and the book as autonomous creature is a literary notion worth examining. There’s a department of the post office called the Dead Letter Office, for letters that can’t be delivered. This term implies that all the other letters are alive; which is nonsense, of course, but nonetheless an ancient and pervasive way of thinking. For instance, the Bible has often been called the living Word of God. Another for instance: it was the fashion a few hundred years ago for male writers to speak of their pregnancy – got with wordchild by the Spirit, or even by the Muse, if you can wind your head around that kind of gender transposition: such writers would then describe the book’s gestation and its eventual birth. Of course a book is nothing like a baby really – some of the reasons are scatological – but the convention of the living words has been persistent. Thus Elizabeth Barrett Browning, among many others: “My letters! All dead paper … mute and white! – / And yet they seem alive and quivering.… ”31