On the essays shelf (yes, there are still more books to excerpt in my vast library. I can’t seem to stop this excerpts-from-my-library project. I started it in 2006!)
NEXT BOOK: Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing
I discovered Margaret Atwood in college. It was The Handmaid’s Tale
Her background is well-known. She was born in 1939, to somewhat unconventional parents. Her father was an entomologist, and her mother a nutritionist. She spent her childhood summers traveling with her family to bare-bones hunting/fishing camps throughout the wilds of Canada, so that her father could conduct his studies. She did not have a “girlie” childhood. Her early formative years were not spent being socialized to girlishness in the suburbs/cities. Her early years were spent playing with worms, sleeping in cabins, fishing, and rolling around in the mud with her brother. It was when they moved to Toronto that she was introduced to the treacherous world of girls. This is the subject of Cat’s Eye. Perhaps it was because of her somewhat outsider status, and the fact that her parents were independent-minded people … maybe that was one of the things that helped create the “writer” in Atwood. She entered a brand-new world at age 9, 10 … and did not know the rules at ALL. Girls were a totally foreign territory to her. She knew how to deal with boys. Girls? Terrifying.
Atwood has written a lot about the total lack of a “literary scene” that had a Canadian identity. What was a “Canadian identity”? It was nothing. You were British. The books were British. The publishers were British. There were no literary magazines focusing on Canadian-ness. It was a completely vacant landscape, creatively. No set-up, no formal world to enter into. Atwood, and other writers like her, in that generation, had to create the Canadian literary scene. And they did. But it was an uphill battle, and Atwood can be quite vicious about the “provincialism” of Canada. The “who do you think you are” of the title of this essay comes from an Alice Munro short story, and that title pretty much sums up their experience of Canada’s attitude towards anyone who is different/special.
In 2000, Atwood was asked to give the Empson Lectures at the University of Cambridge. 6 lectures, for the general public, but also students and scholars. The focus on writing and literature. Those lectures are compiled in this beautiful little volume called Negotiating with the Dead.
It’s a wonderful book, not just in terms of her memoir-writing (I love it when she writes about her own childhood and adolescence) … but also because of her descriptions of the books that she loved as a kid, the books that transported her, the prudish intellectual landscape of Toronto, where sex was so forbidden that literature itself was hobbled. Because even in the classic books there’s a ton of sex. So what is a prude to do?
I love hearing writers talk about their own imaginative process, and I especially love hearing them discuss the writers who inspired them.
The following excerpt is from the first lecture Atwood gave. In it, she lays out her own background, for those who may not be in the know. Her childhood, the bugs and worms and mud, and then the treachery of girls and how it blindsided her. The conventions of Toronto. How one day, when walking across a field, age 10 or so, she wrote a poem in her head and then wrote it down later. And from that point on, she never thought about being anything else. It was that random.
Here, she describes going to university. 1957, 1958. People are starting to divide up in groups. It’s fascinating, how she describes it. And add onto that the “Canadian-ness” of it …
I find her language hilarious. Biting, yes. Cutting and somewhat mean. But still: very funny.
Excerpt from Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing
I was seventeen; the year was 1957. Our professors let it be known that we were a dull lot, not nearly as exciting as the war vets who’d come back a decade earlier, filled with hard experience and lusting for knowledge, and not as exciting either as the lefties who’d caused so much ferment in the thirties, when they themselves had been at university. They were right: by and large, we were a dull lot. The boys were headed for the professions, the girls for futures as their wives. The first wore grey flannels and blazers and ties, the second camel-hair coats, cashmere twin-sets, and pearl button earrings.
But there were also the others. The others wore black turtlenecks and – if girls – black ballerina leotards under their skirts, pantyhose not having been invented yet and skirts being mandatory. These others were few in number, often brilliant, considered pretentious, and referred to as “artsy-fartsies.” At first they terrified me, and then, a couple of years later, I in turn terrified others. You didn’t have to do anything in particular to inspire this terror: you just had to understand a certain range of likes and dislikes, and to look a certain way – less manicured, paler in the face, gaunter, and of course more somber in your clothing, like Hamlet – all of which implied you could think thoughts too esoteric for ordinary people to understand. Normal youths sneered at the arrestees, at least at the male ones, and sometimes threw them into snow banks. Girls of an artistic bent were assumed to be more sexually available than the cashmere twin-set ones, but also mouthier, crazier, meaner, and subject to tantrums: getting involved with one was therefore more trouble than the sex might be worth.
What the artsy-fartsies were interest in was not Canadian literature, or not at first; like everyone else, they barely knew it existed. Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation had hit the scene in the late 1950s and were well known through the pages of Life magazine, but they hadn’t made as much of a dint in the arrestees as you might suppose: our interests were more European. You were supposed to be familiar with Faulkner and Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway, and Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill for the dramatically inclined, and the Steinbeck of Grapes of Wrath, and Whitman and Dickinson to a certain extent, and Henry Miller for those who could get hold of a smuggled copy – his works were banned – and James Baldwin for the civil rights crowd, and Eliot and Pound and Joyce and Woolf and Yeats and so forth as a matter of course, but Kierkegaard, Steppenwolf, Samuel Beckett, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Franz Kafka, Ionesco, Brecht, Heinrich Boll, and Pirandello were the magic names. Flaubert, Proust, Baudelaire, Gide, Zola, and the great Russians – Tolstoy, Dostoevsky – were read by some. Occasionally, to shock, someone would claim to like Ayn Rand: it was thought to be daring that the hero rapes the heroine and the heroine enjoys it, though that was in fact the subtext of a good many Hollywood movies featuring spats, slaps in the face, slammed doors, and clinches at the end.
For a country that was supposed to be such a colony, so firmly – still – in the cultural grip of the crumbling British Empire, contemporary British writers had a fairly small toehold. George Orwell was dead, but read; so was Dylan T Thomas. Doris Lessing’s Golden Notebook was admitted to by a few very formidable women, and read in secret by a lot more. Iris Murdoch was just starting out, and was considered weird enough to be of interest; Graham Greene was still alive, and was respected, though not as much as he was later to become. Christopher Isherwood had a certain cachet because he had been in Germany when the Nazis were on the rise. The Irish writer Flann O’Brien had a small but devoted following, as did Connolly’s The Unquiet Grave. The real British impact was being felt through a subversive radio program called The Goon Show, which had Peter Sellers in it, and another Monty Python precursor called Beyond the Fringe, known through – as I recall – a recording of it.
The first artistic group I got involved with was the theatre folk. I didn’t want to be an actress, but I knew how to paint sets, and could be dragged in to act, in minor parts, in a pinch. For a while I designed and printed theatre posters as an alternative to working in a drugstore; I wasn’t really very good at it, but then, there wasn’t much competition. The artsy group was small, like the artsy group in Canada itself, and everyone connected with it usually fiddled around in more than one field of activity. I was also pals with the folk-singers – collecting authentic ballads and playing such instruments as the autoharp were in style – and through them I absorbed a surprisingly large repertoire of plangent lovers’ laments and murderous gore-filled plots, and truly filthy ditties.
All of this time I had been writing, compulsively, badly, hopefully. I wrote in almost every form I have since written – poems, fiction, non-fiction prose – and then I laboriously typed these pieces out, using all four of the fingers I have continued to employ until this day. In the college reading room I was able to obsess over the few thin literary magazines – I think there were five – then published in the country in English, and wonder why the poems in them might be judged by some white-bearded Godlike editor to be better than mine.
Thanks for sharing this. Always felt an affinity with Margaret Atwood and her characters, how they reflected separateness, of being observers who didn’t realize or understand their impact on others or on the world around them.
“She knew how to deal with boys. Girls? Terrifying.” So true. Maybe this is why I connected with her stories especially Handmaid’s Tale as a young woman. Men did terrible things in that book but it was the other women that were frightening and unknowable.
“Canadian identity” Can’t remember which story of hers included discussion of a Canadian election as part of the background, but she had this fascinating contrast of American vs Canadian which opened my eyes. What an egocentrical assumption that they are simply nice Americans that live a little further north. Yet there was haziness as to what that identity truly meant.
Paula – I too felt such an affinity with Atwood! I think that affinity was strongest for me in college, but I continue to be interested in what she’s up to (and her Twitter feed is great!)
One of her books that has haunted me for years is Bodily Harm – I really should go back and re-read that one. It practically terrorized me, that book.
// Men did terrible things in that book but it was the other women that were frightening and unknowable. //
Yes, yes. She really nails how a patriarchy isolates women from one another – makes women suspicious of one another. I remember, too, in Cat’s Eye – her descriptions of early “women’s group” meetings – early 1960s – and how radical and dangerous it felt: women talking to each other openly, like that wasn’t allowed.
Her Twitter feed is awesome! Takes you to unexpected places like Future Library which I thought was some online literacy event but turned out to be Norwegian art exhibit. Those twists make my morning.
Yes, exactly!! It’s such a broad and entertaining mix of content.
Also, people ask her to RT things to signal-boost – and a lot of those RTs are just so fascinating – highlighting stuff that’s not on my radar at all.
I love, too, that she seems to visit Twitter once a day. Like, there’s a huge burst of Margaret Atwood once a day, and then she vanishes, to go about her life for the rest of the day.
// What an egocentrical assumption that they are simply nice Americans that live a little further north. //
Yes! So difficult to not feel completely dominated by the cultural/financial superpower down South – how to differentiate oneself, how to assert “Canadian identity” against THAT – made even more difficult because Canada is a British colony, and so the dominant conversation was always about British-ness. “Canadian-ness” did not exist. At least not officially. She (and others like her) had to create it.
This reminds me of a lot of Seamus Heaney’s writing on what it was like to be an Irish person growing up in Northern Ireland in the 50s and early 60s. You were a British citizen. The books were British, the literary magazines were published out of London, there WAS no “Northern Irish” identity (at least not officially). He and his fellow Irish writers had to create it.
I had mostly thought of Tall Poppy Syndrome
as an Australian thing, but it sounds like it’s also part of Canadian culture. And looking it up on Wikipedia, it seems like a common thing for Commonwealth countries. The story from Herodotus tells the origin of the saying – though originally applied to wheat. I wonder how we dodged that in the US. Maybe another reason to be grateful for 1776. I could understand how a group of colonists who came over as religious dissenters could develop a clannishness that led to TPS (kicking out Roger Williams and giving us the great state of Rhode Island), but I don’t know enough about the history of Canada to know if those groups played a greater role in the culture there than they did here. Perhaps some of the Canadian commenters can provide some enlightenment.
To Paula’s point, I thought there was something in Cat’s Eye about American draft dodgers coming north and expecting just a colder version of Yankeetown. Her descriptions of the Elaine’s childhood – friends dreading coming over for sleepovers because her family did not have TV – is so precise and specific. And Elaine’s mean mouth – “Suck much?”
Margaret Atwood is like Jeanette Winterson in that the interior, “fictional,” part of her characters is the thing that interests her.
Wasn’t trying to lump Women Writers together, just referencing previous conversations.
Tall Poppy Syndrome! Interesting!
A good friend of mine, Shelagh Carter, hails from Winnipeg. I met her in grad school in NYC, and after grad school she moved back to Winnipeg to teach in the university. She is also fascinating on Canadian identity – she has dual citizenship – she works in the US quite a bit – but her first feature film – Passionflower – based on her own Winnipeg childhood – is wonderful in its assertion of a Canadian identity. I interviewed Shelagh about the film, as well as Kristen Harris, the lead actress. I’ll find links and put them here. It’s a wonderful and painful film – not sure if it’s available to be rented anywhere, but I highly recommend it.
And in re the US: my first thought is, we have in our Declaration of Independence the guaranteed “pursuit of happiness.” We are not guaranteed happiness itself – but we are guaranteed the “pursuit of happiness.” It’s realistic – as all of “those guys” (as I lovingly call them) were – because YOUR pursuit of happiness may conflict with MINE – and sometimes the fights are huge and brutal, and sometimes we have gone to war over those differing pursuits – – but that’s the thing about the language of that Declaration. It almost guarantees that MESS will be a part of the national conversation. It’s gonna be a MESS and it SHOULD be. There’s a meritocratic thing going on there, too – where a poor illegitimate immigrant like Alexander Hamilton can rise to be Secretary of the Treasury, based only on his merit. He was a superior person, he was extraordinary, he sought out opportunities, people recognized his merit, ignored his background (well, many continued to sneer, but still: he rose), and Hamilton was able to rise to the top. Hated, feared (in many respects), but that’s part of the whole “Mess” thing that is practically guaranteed us. Of course we have a huge class divide in our country – nobody can deny that – but the examples of those who have risen to the top from nothing do tell another story. Tall Poppies can actually grow here. We’re also just a younger country. We don’t have the Downton Abbey culture here. We have great wealth, but the wealth just doesn’t operate in the same way, along ancestral lines. Even the mansions on mansion row in Newport (speaking of Rhode Island – I had my senior prom at one of those mansions) … those were examples of explosions of ridiculous and out of control wealth from the robber barons at the tail-end of the 19th century – and they are so over the top that they make Downton Abbey look restrained. It’s grotesque – the nouveau riche grotesque.
LM Montgomery, maybe the most famous Canadian writer of all time, placed most of her books on Prince Edward Island, a magical place (to her) where she herself had grown up. Once she got married she moved to the mainland, living in small towns, and then also in Toronto. She found the mainland culture absolutely stultifying, strict, rigid, provincial, judgmental … and never stopped longing for the fishing-based sea-faring culture of PEI … where people were not so stuck-up and so concerned with status quo, and religiosity, and keeping a stiff upper lip, etc. All told, LM Montgomery lived on PEI for about 25, 26 years of her life – and lived the rest elsewhere – but every single book she wrote took place primarily there. She put PEI on the international map! (Atwood has written a lot about Anne of Green Gables, and LM Montgomery – in terms of helping to create a Canadian identity – at least in terms of how the outside world saw Canada.)
I’ve read Cat’s Eye a couple of times. It’s such an intense book I find it difficult to deal with, but I love it. Yes, “suck much” – good memory!!
And that final scene on the airplane: “This is what I miss, Cordelia. Two old women giggling over tea.” The loss of a friendship, the loss of a future. Devastating.
Atwood tells some incredible stories about her early years, trying to get published. There was incredible condescension – not just because she was a woman, although that was going on too – but that she came from Canada. And what the hell does Canada have to say about itself and who cares? It took great stamina to withstand that kind of identity-assault. It’s really quite amazing.
Tall poppies and America. I don’t want to become Dr. Pangloss, but there are times when I feel like we have just the right amount of snobbery, small-mindedness, and conformity to rebel against, and enough love for rebels that we welcome them if they have something to offer. Or if they (we) just have a non-conforming temperament. The Rebel is certainly an American archetype. I realize that the sexual side of things has a big contingent pushing for conformity, so people who are rebels from the waist down (or those who are full-body rebels) do get a lot more push-back than someone whose oddity is of a non-sexual sort. Maybe those folks would say they still have too much to rebel against. And women have more nonconformity-shaming to deal with than guys do (and much of it from other women). Maybe it’s just the right amount for some of us, but we still need to loosen things up for others who are weird in ways that aren’t of well-understood economic or artistic value. Nathan Lane’s “I’m forty years old and in musical theater. Do the math.” comes to mind.
I think some of us would be unhappy in a fully open-minded and accepting society. Sounds boring. In fact, would it be a society if there weren’t boundaries? Now I’m hearing John Lennon’s “Imagine.”
I’m with you about 1776 and the Declaration. Our country did start as an idea, and it was an idea about how individuals are the important thing. Government serves us. “Those guys” were such a blessing to us.
It was interesting to read in the Wikipedia article that Margaret Thatcher described her philosophy as “let your poppies grow tall.” She didn’t seem popular with the artist sorts in Britain. Perhaps she only meant (or they only thought she meant) poppies of the business/economical sort. And people can agree with a philosophy, and disagree with the implementation.
// In fact, would it be a society if there weren’t boundaries? Now I’m hearing John Lennon’s “Imagine.” //
I just joked on FB the other day that any person running a political campaign based on the tenets of John Lennon’s “Imagine” is a fascist and we should run for the hills and hide all of our possessions from his grabby grabby hands. Ha. Way to make friends, Sheila. But oy, that song. Beautiful song, love John Lennon. But the REALITY of his Utopia is North Korea. That’s the way those things ALWAYS end up.
Don’t run for the hills. Shoot them. Never concede territory.
But yeah, grabby fascism with a beautiful melody and lovey-dovey lyrics. I wonder what a Jack Black parody of the all-white “Imagine” video would look like. I’m picturing his demonic smirk as he stares right into the camera.
… “Imagine no possessions …” Jack Black tiptoeing away with your Blu-Ray collection in the middle of the night, making “Shhh” gestures at the camera.
dying. LOL.
hahahaha right?
What, you’re gonna commandeer my Elvis box-set, Mr. Lennon? How far are you willing to take this nonsense??
Sheila levels the sawed-off, John finds himself hoping that she merely has rock salt in the cartridges.
“Nobody touches my Elvis but me, pot-head.”
“First they came for my Elvis box-set …”
Perfect!
I wonder what John would have thought of “Instant Karma” selling expensive athletic shoes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmmpbSlr8UQ
This was a great ad.
Ha! I forgot about that ad! That really was a great ad.
I’ve only ever been to Ottawa in Canada. Four or five times on business trips, visiting engineers at the networking companies. It struck me as a cosmopolitan place (this was in the early 00’s). Silicon Valley-ish in the number of foreign-born folks in the room. There were more Scots amongst the Ottawa networking engineers than one normally sees in The Valley – but the usual smattering of Hong Kongers, Indians, and Taiwanese, along with the white folk. Perhaps because I was accustomed to the accents of the others, the Scots were the toughest to understand.
At any rate, my experience of Canada is a lot different from what Margaret Atwood writes about, but then I only experienced a small and unrepresentative slice – at a different time from when she was growing up. It’s one of those things where I have to tell myself that my experience is not at all a good representation of the truth.
And having watched “Slings and Arrows” and loving “Orphan Black” I now think of Canada as a place where they make kick-ass TV all on their own. Not just a cheaper place for Americans to make our shows.
I think Atwood’s “version” of Canada (Toronto, especially) really is the 1950s, early 1960s Toronto. Provincialism and 100% conformist.
Haven’t been around much in Canada – Quebec a couple of times, Montreal a couple of times – love Montreal, and I think that city has a much more cosmopolitan reputation than Toronto.
My friend Shelagh is from the prairies – as is Guy Maddin – I often joke with her that there must be something in the water out there in Winnipeg. Now THAT town has fostered a pretty amazing community of weirdos and rebels and totally original artists.
// Margaret Atwood is like Jeanette Winterson in that the interior, “fictional,” part of her characters is the thing that interests her.
//
That’s a really good observation!
In the next lecture, she talks about the “double” – both in terms of fictional characters (Jekyll and Hyde, Dorian Gray’s painting, etc.) and the writer herself. There is the normal person, who gets along with people, who goes grocery-shopping, and then there is the “writer” – who is a maniac wild-woman screaming her rage on the heath. And can these things be integrated? Should they?
My interview with Shelagh Carter about her film Passionflower:
http://www.sheilaomalley.com/?p=54171
And my interview with Canadian actress Kristen Harris:
http://www.sheilaomalley.com/?p=54198
Those interviews, holy cow! They were great!
Kristen Harris’ comment about mental illness //It was getting more and more difficult for her to hide. I think it’s much like the bumper sticker, When Preparation Meets Opportunity. I think you could say the same thing for any kind of illness, or mental illness: when the groundwork meets the opportunity to express itself, there’s quite a chemical reaction.//
That just seemed so insightful to me. Wow.
Passionflower is available for rent/purchase/streaming from Amazon Prime and iTunes (cheaper to rent from iTunes – not the norm). I’m watching it tonight.
Oh I’m so excited!! Let me know what you think. Shelagh wrote and directed it – it’s based on her childhood. Terrific film!!
I, too, loved that comment from Kristen Harris. She took such a non-victim approach to the woman. You’ll see it in the performance.
Oh you thought tall poppys were an Australian thing did ya? Well la di dah. Hey Bruce, get a load of this guy, he thinks he’s smarter than us!
The sixth rule of Australian Tall Poppy Club is …
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_f_p0CgPeyA
At dinner tonight someone was talking about Jante Law and how Scandinavians view over achievement. “Oh, like Tall Poppy Syndrome?” Boom. Thanks mutecypher for raising my game.
There’s no such thing as trivia, just knowledge you haven’t used yet.
I watched Passionflower this evening. There aren’t a lot of movies with such melancholy in them. I thought everyone in it was excellent. The chemistry between Sarah and Charlie was very sweet. I loved their kisses. Beatrice and David were also wonderful, in the terrible way that things played out. I could see his love for her, his hurt and confusion. And Beatrice, you were right, she wasn’t played as a victim. It was terrible how her personality and illness combined to make her need to be the alpha sex object – even toward her son. She resisted any sexualizing of her daughter – resisted anything affirming. She had such anger and contempt for almost every woman. Beatrice did seem to have love for her mom, though. But then there was her breakdown in the road and neglecting to pick up Thomas. Did that love then trigger something that was the opposite? There seemed like a hint of ODD in her behavior, but I don’t want to do too much in the way of amateur diagnosis.
I think “ambiguous” is about the kindest term that could be applied to the ending. Sarah was fortunate to have art and the barbershop (loved that) and Charlie going for her. It would be awful for a kid to be in that situation and not have attractive attributes to get positive attention from some adults.
The movie was very good, thanks for recommending it.
Oh I am so happy you saw it. With your permission, I’d like to forward your comment onto Shelagh. She’d love to hear it.
I loved the relationship with Charlie too, and the barbershop detail. I was so struck by the sexuality of the film, its hothouse feeling, its sheer aggression – I think Shelagh and her actors absolutely NAILED that very specific dynamic. And those child actors. Amazing!!
Of course, go ahead and forward them.