Margaret Atwood, Oracle
November 10: Peacoat weather, and the Kenyon Review Literary Festival is underway in Gambier, bringing small-time editors, authors, poets and eccentrics to our freshly leafless Ohio village. The centerpiece, of course, is Margaret Atwood, recipient of this year’s Literary Achievement award. While sycophants in Cleveland, Cincinatti and Columbus top off their cars with antifreeze, Mags slips into CMH on the beefy arm of David H. Lynn, Editor and Pontificus Maxiums, fresh from the previous night’s $1,000-a-plate gala in NYC.
As a Student Associate of the Review, I was invited to a cozy Q&A seminar that afternoon. A circle of chairs was set up in Weaver Cottage, with a rather imperious leather armchair reserved for Ms. Atwood. I came late, and settled into the only chair left–the one next to hers. As the room buzzed with tea-parlor chat, I wondered, perhaps stupidly, what she would look like in person. Probably shorter.
In fact, she was; and older, too. My earnest days under the tutelage of Paul Watkins taught me that author photos are always 15-20 years younger than the author actually is, but Mags, at 68, looks far more wizened than the pixie on the back of Oryx and Crake. She settled into her chair, exhaled, and smiled. “So,” she said, “I understand that you all have questions.”
After the inevitable cold-feet silence, an impetuous Associate pitched her question: What does Mags read while writing?
“I read things by accident,” she explained. She easily falls into old favorites, or anything at a bookstore that grabs here interest, really. Or research. Obviously. Magazines, too, at airports.
“Seldom:” she said, “Hello, Allure. Often: Discovery, Scientific American. Sometimes,” she admitted, with a smile that I can only describe as naughty, “Gentleman’s Quarterly.”
She began to unpack her fascination with scientific journalism, as she has done in many prior interviews. Unlike Ian McEwan, whose defense of scientific writing imagines the form as a medium of clarity for muddled times, Mags likes neat things; like, say, dragonflies genetically mutated to serve as surveillance devices.
“Soon,” she said, “We could all be the proverbial fly on the wall.”
Sometimes, she said, she reads National Geographic, because “They’re very good at digging up bones.”
While she doesn’t watch TV, she does “Surf the ‘net.”
“If I could recommend a particularly amusing YouTube video,” she said, with that pursed smile, “It would be ‘Introducing the Book.”
Her stillness amazes me. I’ve never seen such economy of movement in a human being before. There’s no wasted gesture, and every smile, narrowing of eyes, or change in posture is made with surreal deliberation, as if each were the product of half an hour’s thought. With this awe I swallowed and posed my question. I imagine it went something like this:
“Uhm. So, in a few of your novels–Oryx and Crake, The Handmaiden’s Tale–there’s a sense of alarm, Orwellian future-shock, and, ah, social imperative. They, um, look out as much as they, well, look in. Do you feel like the writer should pay as much attention to social issues as they do issues of, mm, story, or aesthetics?” Deep breath. Re-cross knees, tilt head. Chew on finger? Don’t chew on finger.
She arches an eyebrow, comma-shaped. Her eyes are a perfect, glacial blue, deep like pools of cold water.
“When you say ‘The Writer,’” she says, “Who do you mean?”
“Um.” I lunge for an answer. “You?”
She proceeded to dismantle my question: In addition, what did I mean by “should?” Should the writer do anything but what the writer does?
“Writing doesn’t start with a directive to yourself,” she said. “Nobody forces you to be a writer. And by the way,” she added with an almost imperceptible wink, “there’s no pension plan.”
Heuristic as her logic may have been, I couldn’t argue. I’m an English major, and empty phrases like “the writer” are pistols very close to my belt. What does she care about “the writer” as an empty, abstract concept?
I bow my head and smile. Humble pie.
“Are you all writing?” she asked the room, as if my question inspired some doubt as to whether or not we practiced the craft; or really, if we’d ever picked up a book at all. Nobody raised their hand. “Let me ask a different question: who here is not writing?”
Again, no hands. Plenty of polite smiles, though. I cringed still. She smiled sweetly, as if she had finally realized that this was not Kenyon College, but North Star Assisted Living, the old folks’ home up the road.
Next question, from a practically-minded English major: When she first started writing, how did she support herself financially? After some positing exposition, Mags eased into what is, more or less, the story of her career.
A small girl in Canada circa 1956, there were “no visible writers” in her vicinity.
“My idea of writers was that they lived in other places,” she said. “I had no idea that I would ever make any money out of it.”
Her first attempts at writing courted the ladies’ magazine market. That’s where the money was: cookie-cutter True Romance stories. Mags found them easy to write. They flew off the typewriter.
They were rejected to the last.
“As it turns out, I couldn’t use the vocabulary,” she said. “It seems to always build up to one sentence: And Then They Were One.”
Availed of this particular career path, she “decided to be a journalist.” It seemed proper. Her cousin agreed, telling her that she “would end up writing obituaries and ladies’ pages.”
University, then: she hated “logical positivism with a passion,” and perhaps in rebellion, determined to “to go France, live in a garret, get TB, and drink absinthe.” At work she ran her novel through her typewriter, unnoticed among the rows of other women seated at chattering typewriters, unaware that a bastard first novel was being born in their midst.
(Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky, Associate Editor of The Kenyon Review, slouches in a chair behind the students, his eyes sliding back and forth beneath half-lids, lizard-like. I wonder if he’s falling asleep.)
After the first novel was not a first novel, the First Novel emerged, was published, and was optioned for a movie.
“It doesn’t matter if the movie ever gets made,” she said. “You still get the money.”
She was whisked away to France to write the script, but instead haunting a garret apartment and drinking absinthe, she found herself in a modest mansion, uncorking bottles from Bordeaux and the Cote d’Or. Her co-writer, Tony Richardson–after the “Hungarian scriptwriter” who had his own, incompatible artistic agenda whose thesis could be summed up as “alienation”–looked “like a parrot.”
They lived in the house with an assisting entourage of artist and film types, hammering out a script for The Edible Woman. Inevitably, perhaps, things fell apart. A pretty “assistant” was stolen. A swan dive into the shallow end of the pool ended in blood. Maybe it was an excess of wine, a collective overflow of grape-acid; whatever it was, the movie was never made.
My money is on the assistant.
Regardless, The Edible Woman established Atwood as a writer to watch. Her first novel made money, and the piqued expectations of the literary world gaurenteed her more.
“From that point on, I didn’t have to hold a regular job,” she said.
From there, the Q&A proceeded with courtly predictability, all the standard questions fielded with diligence: How did she see herself as Canadian writer? How much does she think of the reader when she wrote? What kind of music does she listen to? Bleakly, does she think the novel–the paper novel–will last?
“Yes, I do,” she said. “It’s a very tactile form.” A pause. A strange, quiet smile tugged at the corners of her lips. “The book is a violin,” she said, “and the reader is like the violin player. But you cannot know who that reader will be. You cannot try to manipulate the reader.”
Margaret Atwood is old, and in the shadow of the novel question must lurk a dozen other, ancillary questions: will her novels last? Will she last? Her answer doubles as a credo–thou shalt not manipulate the reader. Thou shalt not stretch too far for self-preservation. None of Roth’s embalming fluid. Just natural ingredients, and the lush, young jungle of Oryx and Crake.
November 28, 2007 at 2:57 pm
[...] Another take on Margaret Atwood’s visit to Gambier for the Kenyon Review Literary Festival–pretend you were here… [...]
December 7, 2007 at 5:08 am
[...] Tale attracted an entirely new crowd, who mostly had green hair. A student associate (Rob Kunzig) shared some illustrations he’d found on the internet for Oryx and Crake. Atwood was [...]