THE HOUSE IS RAMBLING AND OVERSTUFFED and quite likely inhabited by ghosts, but not the hooting and malicious kind. The benign, wistful kind. The kind that thread their flaccid selves in and out of people’s thoughts and weave coyly around doorframes and finally settle down to business: cupping a pale, boneless paw atop the writer’s hand and pushing the pen across the page, indefatigable in that weird, mysterious, not-subject-to-human frailty sort of way.
How else to explain Margaret Atwood’s range and productivity, except through the intercession of the supernatural?
Here in this house in Toronto, where she’s lived for two decades with fellow writer Graeme Gibson, Atwood does her work. The woman who will receive the 2005 Chicago Tribune Literary Award on Nov. 6 writes in other places too, of course-on planes and trains, in hotel rooms and friends’ homes around the world-but this is her base, her true north, the place where her intelligence and anxieties and inimitable eye for the nuances of the human comedy all seem to coalesce.
This is the place where one would naturally seek the secret of Atwood’s astonishing literary fecundity, this house with its dark passageways, blind curves, steep staircases, big rooms and small cubbyholes, this house filled with “quite a lot of stuff-stuff just flows in,” as Atwood says with a touch of exasperation, adding, “The more you clear out, the more that comes in.”
Yet just when you think you can define her with reasonable precision-after strolling through her home, after reading and re-reading her books, after engaging in a long afternoon’s conversation with her at a tiny Toronto diner, where the diminutive table forces the two of you to lean in close enough to bump foreheads-she slips away again, wraithlike, and all you feel is a breeze lifting your bangs.
“Writing people always have at least two personalities,” she says. “There’s the writing self, and the other self. And you can add more within that.”
Selves within selves. It goes a good part of the way toward explaining Atwood, who writes not just frequently and marvelously, but in a variety of genres and styles. The novels you know about, top-selling, award-winning novels such as “Cat’s Eye” (1988) and “The Blind Assassin” (2000). But Atwood has an equally deft hand with poetry, essays, short stories, historical fiction, children’s books, tales of all kinds and sizes.
Tales about romantic relationships, about women’s and men’s inner lives and sexual yearnings, of course, but also tales about future worlds made bleak and forbidding by tendencies already alarmingly present: “The Handmaid’s Tale” (1985) and “Oryx and Crake” (2003). The former paints an all-too-plausible civilization where women have become mere incubators; the latter, an equally possible landscape of acid ruin.
“You read the back pages of newspapers,” Atwood says, justifying her dire predictions of what’s in store for us. “The little stories. Stories not deemed important enough. They disappear for a while, then they come back, a bit bigger, a little bit closer to the front. The next thing you know, they’re on the front page.”
Given recent events, Atwood notes, people no longer ask how she was able to concoct such disasters so casually.
“Now they say, ‘How did you know?’ “she says ruefully.
SHE KNOWS BECAUSE she’s Margaret Atwood. The author, who will turn 66 on Nov. 18, is at the top of her game. In a career that’s now going on four decades, her writing has never been sharper, funnier, more topical, more profound, more essential.
Her best-known work still is undoubtedly “The Handmaid’s Tale”-the one that’s constantly read in college literature courses, the one that makes a lot of earnest sophomores rethink their lives. But there’s so much more than that, close to four dozen published books, and now there’s “The Penelopiad,” a forthcoming novella about the wife of Odysseus, the wandering Greek hero. Like so much of Atwood’s work, it evokes startled laughter as well as admiration at her crisp sagacity: “It never hurts to be of semi-divine birth,” Atwood writes in Penelope’s wry voice. “Or it never hurts immediately.”
Atwood is a writer who loves throwing curves. Who relishes the demolishing of expectations. Who delights in the fact that, if readers think they know what’s coming next from her, they will be wrong, and not just a little bit wrong but embarrassingly wrong.
They might read a nostalgic ramble of a novel such as “Cat’s Eye,” with its spot-on evocation of an eccentric girlhood, and plump the couch cushions and settle in for more stories about the creative development of female artists, for more quietly incisive tales. Whereupon, a few years later, Atwood comes up with “The Robber Bride” (1993)-a dark, savagely funny novel about a vicious female who steals husbands just for kicks. Atwood’s work can be as gentle and pastoral as Willa Cather’s, then do a violent switchback and be as deliciously bitchy as Candace Bushnell’s.
Her novels have been transubstantiated into operas and films; she’s widely anthologized, and if you sat down and started listing her literary awards, you’d be sitting a long time.
But if you think you know her, you don’t. “The author is the name on the book,” Atwood has cagily written. “I’m the other one.”
Or as she put it in “Cat’s Eye”: “There is never only one of anyone.”
Not surprisingly, given this aversion to being pegged, Atwood doesn’t carry herself with the antic bombast of the Great Author. She doesn’t swagger. She doesn’t preen or pontificate. She’s petite-how, one may be excused for wondering, can all of those sprawling books and big ideas and unstoppable ambitions come out of this tiny person? -and she’s soft-spoken, her sentences often short, clipped and notoriously to the point.
Her hands are an artist’s hands, supple and long and ever in motion. Her pale eyes lock onto you and don’t let go. When especially focused, she’s apt to press an index finger to each temple and really bore in. You always seem to have her complete attention-which is both flattering and ferociously intimidating.
She’s blunt, but never rude. She’s known mostly for fiction but is constantly enthralled by reality, by the physical world and its immutable laws. As she observed in a marvelous verse, “Small Poems for the Winter Solstice,” included in her collection “True Stories” (1981), she is “stuck here, in this waste of particulars, truths, facts.”
Two years ago, she wrote a short essay for The Nation titled “Letter to America” that was widely reprinted. It was elegiac, not hectoring or disrespectful. “You’re gutting the Constitution . . . You’re torching the American economy . . . If you proceed much further down the slippery slope, people around the world will stop admiring the good things about you,” she warned. And then there is “Oryx and Crake,” the novel that speculates about a world destroyed by technology run amok, a world of dead oceans and rusted landscapes, a world that discovers, as Atwood has written, that “no animal can destroy its resource base and hope to survive.”
Yet she dismisses any notion that it takes special bravery to write about America’s missteps or modern civilization’s impending catastrophes. “I’m not courageous,” Atwood insists. “I’m just as scared as anybody else. I’d actually call myself a cowering person of rather feeble courage. But I just say things in a rather clear way.
“Quite frankly, I’m a writer. That’s what you do. If you’re a writer, it’s not easy to not write.”
Atwood’s personality-the abrupt truth-telling, the mild prickliness, the diffidence-has been attributed, at various times by various Atwood scholars, to the fact that she is Canadian. Thus it literally comes with the territory.
Atwood herself has written perceptively about her native land and its literature, and about how the latter, until fairly recently, was pretty much invisible to the rest of the world. “It was a standard witticism in some quarters-even in Canada, especially in Canada-to say that the term ‘Canadian literature’ was an oxymoron,” she wrote in “Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature” (1996). “Poets wrote satirical poems about its shoddy and derivative state, including recipes for its concoction that included such ingredients as one beaver, two Mounties, a sprinkling of maple leaves, and so on.”
CANADIAN AUTHORS SUCH as Alice Munro, Robertson Davies and Carol Shields are familiar names today, but not so in the 1950s and ’60s, when Atwood and her countrywomen and countrymen were finding their voices.
Unlike the United States and Europe, where literature constituted a stately, well-established intellectual tradition, Canada, established in 1867, was a relatively young country with a national identity that emerged only gradually.
Now, of course, when anyone thinks “Canadian literature,” they think “Margaret Atwood.” Says Karen Macfarlane, associate professor of English at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, “She’s an iconic figure in Canada. Everybody’s acquainted with her work, even non-scholars.
“She was right there at the beginning, along with [literary critic] Northrup Frye, of articulating a national Canadian literary tradition,” adds Macfarlane, president of the Margaret Atwood Society, a scholars’ group. “She has a simultaneous appeal to the popular, the academic and the political.”
But it was a long, slow climb, Atwood recalls. “Canada in the ’50s did have poets, but only they knew each other,” she says. “It was like a secret world. Once you were in it, it was very busy, but you’d never know from the outside that there was anything going on.”
Her determination to be a writer was helped, as she readily acknowledges, by an offbeat childhood that left her unusually resistant to trends and expectations. The early years are crucial for a writer, she believes. “Our first stories come to us through the air,” Atwood mused in “Writing with Intent,” a 2005 essay collection. “We hear voices.”
She was born in Ottawa in 1939 to an entomologist named Carl Atwood and his wife, Margaret, a nutritionist. Both had moved there from Nova Scotia to find work.
Atwood and her brother, Harold, elder by two years, were packed along on their father’s frequent field expeditions like extra rations or insect repellent; as she writes in “Cat’s Eye,” a novel that seems to quiver with autobiographical associations, the two “were used to seeing our father in windbreakers, battered gray felt hats, flannel shirts with the cuffs tightly buttoned to keep the blackflies from crawling up his arms, heavy pants tucked into the tops of woolen work socks.”
They were a gloriously self-contained family, living in the woods of northern Canada, where Carl Atwood could do his work. She and her brother learned to make do with little more than their own rich imaginations.
As Atwood has related many times-it’s an obvious question for an accomplished author-she can remember the specific moment when she decided to be a writer. On an otherwise unremarkable day in 1956, while walking across the football field of her high school, she just suddenly realized she wanted to write, and that she wanted to do it more than she wanted to do anything else.
How did she figure out that she was good at it? “You have to think you’re good before you are,” Atwood says. “Otherwise, you don’t have the confidence to keep on. But as I say to friends who are writers and who moan about not having a pension plan or whatever, I say, ‘Nobody held a gun to your head. Nobody made you be a writer. You chose it. Or you chose to continue with it when it offered itself.’ “
Naturally, her parents-being, after all, parents-wished she had chosen more reliably gainful employment. “They thought it was pretty strange that I wanted to be a writer, but they didn’t take any steps to stop me from doing it. They had the usual parental worries-i.e., how are you going to make a living? But I had answers for that: Day job. Any day job.
“I wasn’t inhibited,” she adds. “Coming from that Nova Scotian, ultimately Scottish background, you were not supposed to hide your light under a bushel. It was, ‘If you have it, use it.’ And if you had been favored by being given such a gift, it would really be quite wrong not to use it.”
She picked up a degree in English from the University of Toronto and then headed to Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Mass., for graduate work, but it was writing that called to her, it was writing that really mattered. Atwood published poetry, but the watershed moment came in 1969 with the release of her first novel, “The Edible Woman.”
Many readers caught on right away: Here, at last, was a female writer who wrote with passion and humor and even audacity, who had no patience for self-pity, who wasn’t afraid to make a woman’s experiences-in this case, Marian McAlpin’s inability to eat and then a conviction of being eaten-the center of a narrative. The woman wasn’t peripheral, wasn’t a sidelight or sidekick to a man’s ordeals.
“When I was becoming well-known, it was right at the moment of the advent of feminism,” Atwood says. “A lot of people were scared by that, and a lot of people wanted to make me into this goddess of feminism. That was difficult to manage. I would keep saying, ‘I’m a writer. I’m a writer.’ And it was, ‘Well, don’t you want to put the woman’s cause first?’ And I would say, ‘Well, uh-no.’ I’m a writer. I’m also a woman. I don’t separate those things.
“Am I going to devote my life to doing what you want me to do? Actually, no, I’m not. I’m going to write what I’m going to write.”
But it has dogged her, this perception among some critics and readers that she’s exclusively a “woman’s writer,” the kind of storyteller whose works would infuriate or bore a man.
Carlin Romano, critic-at-large for The Chronicle of Higher Education and literary critic for The Philadelphia Inquirer, is familiar with that take on Atwood-and rejects it.
“A male reader can easily respond to women’s issues when a wry and incisive intelligence draws him in,” Romano said in an e-mail. “To pigeonhole Atwood as a ‘woman’s writer’ ignores her Susan-Sontag sexiness.” Like the late Sontag, Atwood is appealing because of, not in spite of, her great intelligence and wit.
“The magic of Margaret Atwood,” he continued, “is that someone so intense and imaginative packs such a sardonic, self-aware sense of humor.”
Macfarlane, who has taught “The Handmaid’s Tale” for several years to undergraduates, reports that male as well as female students respond to its eerily prescient depiction of a world in which women are forced to wear robes and be subservient to men.
“The men are just as intrigued as the women,” Macfarlane says. “Students just love it. They eat it up. It’s amazing. There are so many things they recognize as having happened in the world since the novel was published-in the pre-Taliban world-that are predicted in the novel.”
And yet it’s true that a book such as “Cat’s Eye” is unerringly focused on the female experience, which may have begun to remedy a venerable inequity: the lack of distinguished stories about women’s lives, especially their childhoods.
Boys’ lives are everywhere in literature, cluttering the ground. You can’t take a long step without having to kick one away-“The Red Badge of Courage” or “Huck Finn” or “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.” Boys’ lives, boys’ coming-of-age tales in which the protagonist grows in stature and maturity and learns to grapple with the world, are legion.
But complex portraits of girls’ lives? Self-aware female childhoods?
You can find them here and there in classic literature, but often there’s a fragile, doll-like quality to the heroines, an impending victimhood. Cathy in “Wuthering Heights,” Jo in “Little Women,” Elizabeth in “Pride and Prejudice”-they are largely described from the outside, according to others’ expectations, and directed by others’ ideas of what their lives should be.
In books such as “Lady Oracle” (1976), “Cat’s Eye,” “Alias Grace” (1996) and “The Blind Assassin” (2000), Atwood rescues women’s lives from the realm of fairy tales and simple-minded romances. And she does this artfully and wittily, not heavy-handedly.
In her fictions, she creates female protagonists who suffer and ruminate. She presents women who have rich intellectual and emotional lives, who laugh at themselves and others, who are fragmented and conflicted. Atwood’s female characters have actual destinies-sunny ones and dreadful ones-which is a privilege that male writers such as Philip Roth rarely extend to women.
And she does it while writing some of the best sentences in the language-sentences that almost never end up where you think they’re going to. Witness this line from “The Blind Assassin,” as a young woman trapped in a loveless marriage goes upstairs to lie down and contemplate the horror her nuptials have wrought: “And this was the ceiling I would be staring up at from now on, through the muslin fog, while earthly matters went on below my throat.”
The final clause in that sentence is at once grimly amusing and terrifyingly accurate. It is pure Atwood: funny and awful and inarguable.
“Her novels force you to think,” says Mary Kirtz, emeritus professor of English at the University of Akron who, in 1984, became the first person to write a doctoral dissertation exclusively on Atwood’s work. “She’s not writing just for entertainment.” And yet the novels are fun to read, Kirtz adds.
Vivian Mortensen, reader services manager at the Park Ridge Public Library, agrees. “So many writers can write either as a wordsmith, or have good plots or realistic characters or provocative themes-but Atwood can blend all of these elements. You can read her on so many different levels.”
And all of those works, with all of those levels, emanate from a small woman who, on this late-summer day, sits in a Toronto diner, dressed in tan khaki pants, a light pink Oxford-cloth blouse and a rust-colored shawl that she tossed over her shoulders at the last moment, after suggesting a walk through the pleasantly eclectic Toronto community in which she and Gibson live. It’s a region of old homes, new homes, homes that squat behind fancy hedges, well-cared-for homes and some not-so-well-cared-for homes.
Their home was once a boarding house, Atwood explains during the walk back from the diner. “When we bought it, it had been divided up,” she says. “And we’ve been through those phases ourselves-every one of our kids plus my sister have been there at some point, running through the third-floor flat. There’s also a fair number of other people.”
The roster includes Atwood’s stepsons, Matt and Grae, and Gibson and Atwood’s daughter, Jess, a graduate student in art history at Yale University, and Atwood’s younger sister, Ruth, who helped her with research for “Alias Grace.” Harold Atwood, the author’s older brother, is a professor of physiology and zoology at the University of Toronto.
Often parked in the half-circle driveway of Atwood’s home these days are the motley vehicles of contractors who are putting in a new kitchen. “Renovating the kitchen has been just like moving, because you think, ‘Why did we keep this?’ We’re reorganizing everything. And I think we probably should do it every 10 years.”
Atwood and Gibson love the house, but sometimes its sheer size gets overwhelming, she says. A few years ago they tried to shed it: They purchased two condos across the hall from each other in a new Toronto building. They were set to be the first tenants. “We thought, ‘This is going to be terrific!’ Then we realized that eventually there were going to be other people in the building. Yes, we could’ve had our little dinners out on the balcony, but other people would be having their little dinners out on the balcony too.”
Fame is nice, awards are swell, but there’s the small matter of cherishing one’s solitude. Do the letters and lecture requests and interviews and constant interruptions by nosy journalists ever get on her nerves?
“It’s part of the job,” Atwood replies. “It’s not necessarily part of the job of writing-but it’s part of the job of publishing what you write. You ration. You ration time.
“These are sincere questions. People want to know whether you’re a real person, whether you eat and drink and pay your bills like them.”
Still, travel is a tonic, she admits, because when she’s en route somewhere, “Nobody can get at you.”
She, Gibson and their daughter recently returned from a visit near the Arctic Circle, where they spent a week among Inuit women. Some of the women were reluctant to write, Atwood says. “Then I heard the elders giving women skins to make things, and they’d say, ‘What are you going to make and who is it for?’ It was always for someone.
“So I told them that writing is like that. It’s always for somebody. It’s putting your voice on the page and somebody else-you may not even know who-will hear your voice. Every head went down, every pencil came out, and everybody wrote.
“You have to have the belief that it’s for somebody other than you-even if it’s you at a later date, some future you,” Atwood says.
And now about those ghosts again, the ghosts in Atwood’s house that may secretly explain her success. It’s not as far-fetched a theory as you might think.
In the 1970s, Atwood notes in “Negotiating with the Dead,” she and her family were living in an old farmhouse in rural Ontario. A ghost apparently predated their tenancy and was causing a few problems. Following the instructions of a neighbor, Atwood left out food overnight to make the ghost feel welcome. “It worked,” Atwood reports.
What if that same ghost simply followed her to Toronto and now runs the show?
Writing, Atwood says, is as much about the spirit-haunted world of the past as it is about the future. It’s a descent into the dark cave of the underworld to pry loose treasures that must be ferried to the surface forthwith. And ghosts are cozily at home in the darkness. “You don’t look back along time but down through it, like water,” Atwood wrote in “Cat’s Eye,” adding, “Nothing goes away.”
Yes, it’s a stretch, this poltergeist-as-muse theory. But no more outlandish than the notion that a sharp-eyed, coolly opinionated young woman raised in the Canadian bush could one day write books that would upend our ideas about men and women and the impossibly complicated relationships therein; that would warn us and scold us even as they amuse and entertain us; that would fight the good fight, and light the way.
It’s a lot to ask of anyone. She knows it. “Of course there are easier ways to live,” Atwood says. “But not for me.”
– – –
We learned to whisper almost without sound. In the semidarkness we could stretch out our arms, when the Aunts weren’t looking, and touch each other’s hands across space. We learned to lip-read . . . In this way we exchanged names, from bed to bed: Alma. Janine. Dolores. Moira. June.”
–“The Handmaid’s Tale” (1985)
“But it wasn’t more honesty that would have saved me, I thought; it was more dishonesty. In my experience, honesty and expressing your feelings could lead to only one thing. Disaster.”
–“Lady Oracle” (1976)
Margaret Atwood
“True Stories”
“The true story lies
among the other stories,
a mess of colours, like jumbled clothing
thrown off or away . . .
The true story is vicious
and multiple and untrue
after all. Why do you
need it? Don’t ever
ask for the true story.”
–from “True Stories”
“The facts of this world seen clearly
are seen through tears;
why tell me then
there is something wrong with my eyes?
To see clearly and without flinching,
without turning away,
this is agony, the eyes taped open
two inches from the sun.”
–from “Notes Toward a Poem that Can Never Be Written”
“A word after a word
after a word is power.
At the point where language falls away
from the hot bones, at the point
where the rock breaks open and darkness
flows out of it like blood, at
the melting point of granite
when the bones know
they are hollow & the word
splits & doubles & speaks
the truth & the body
itself becomes a mouth.
This is metaphor.”
–from “Spelling”
“I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
& that necessary.”
–from “Variation on the word Sleep”
‘DIVINE BEAUTY IS SUCH A BURDEN’
A SPIRITED CONVERSATION BETWEEN TWO HOMERIC DIVAS
HELEN TAKES A BATH
I was wandering through the asphodel, musing on times past, when I saw Helen sauntering my way. She was followed by her customary horde of male spirits, all of them twittering with anticipation. She gave them not even a glance, though she was evidently conscious of their presence. She’s always had a pair of invisible antennae that twitch at the merest whiff of a man.
“Hello there, little cousin duck,” she said to me with her usual affable condescension. “I’m on my way to take my bath. Care to join me?”
“We’re spirits now, Helen,” I said with what I hoped was a smile. “Spirits don’t have bodies. They don’t get dirty They have no need of baths.”
“Oh, but my reason for taking a bath was always spiritual,” said Helen, opening her lovely eyes very wide. “I found it so soothing, in the midst of the turmoil. You wouldn’t have any idea of how exhausting it is, having such vast numbers of men quarrelling over you, year after year. Divine beauty is such a burden. At least you’ve been spared that!”
I ignored the sneer. “Are you going to take off your spirit robes?” I asked.
“We’re all aware of your legendary modesty, Penelope,” she replied. “I’m sure if you ever were to bathe you’d keep your own robes on, as I suppose you did in life. Unfortunately”-here she smiled-“modesty was not among the gifts given to me by laughter-loving Aphrodite. I do prefer to bathe without my robes, even in the spirit.”
“That would explain the unusually large crowd of spectators you’ve attracted,” I said, somewhat tersely.
“But is it unusually large?” she asked, with an innocent lift of her eyebrows. “There are always such throngs of these men. I never count them. I do feel that because so many of them died for me-well, because of me-surely I owe them something in return.”
“If only a peek at what they missed on earth,” I said.
“Desire does not die with the body,” said Helen. “Only the ability to satisfy it. But a glimpse or two does perk them up, the poor lambs.”
“It gives them a reason to live,” I said.
“You’re being witty,” said Helen. “Better late than never, I suppose.”
“My wittiness, or your bare-naked bath treat for the dead?” I said.
“You’re such a cynic,” said Helen. “Just because we’re not, you know, any more, there’s no need to be so negative. And so-so vulgar! Some of us have a giving nature. Some of us like to contribute what we can to the less fortunate.”
“So you’re washing their blood off your hands,” I said. “Figuratively speaking, of course. Making up for all those mangled corpses. I hadn’t realised you were capable of guilt.”
This bothered her. She gave a tiny frown. “Tell me, little duck-how many men did Odysseus butcher because of you?”
“Quite a lot,” I said. She knew the exact number: she’d long since satisfied herself that the total was puny compared with the pyramids of corpses laid at her door.
“It depends on what you call a lot,” said Helen. “But that’s nice. I’m sure you felt more important because of it. Maybe you even felt prettier.” She smiled with her mouth only. “Well, I’m off now, little duck. I’m sure I’ll see you around. Enjoy the asphodel.” And she wafted away, followed by her excited entourage.
— Reprinted from “The Penelopiad” by Margaret Atwood with permission from Canongate. (c) 2005 by O.W. Toad Ltd.
———-
jkeller@tribune.com
