{"id":102826,"date":"2015-05-22T08:41:28","date_gmt":"2015-05-22T12:41:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=102826"},"modified":"2024-10-27T18:18:09","modified_gmt":"2024-10-27T22:18:09","slug":"the-books-negotiating-with-the-dead-a-writer-on-writing-orientation-who-do-you-think-you-are-what-is-a-writer-and-how-did-i-become-one-by-margaret-atoowd","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=102826","title":{"rendered":"The Books: Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing<\/i>; “Orientation: Who do you think you are? What is ‘a writer,’ and how did I become one?”, by Margaret Atwood"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"41Uu0QH5AOL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\nOn the essays shelf<\/a> (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!) <\/p>\n

NEXT BOOK: Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing<\/a>\"\"<\/i>, a collection of a series of lectures, given by Margaret Atwood, about writers\/writing.<\/p>\n

I discovered Margaret Atwood in college. It was The Handmaid’s Tale<\/a>\"\"<\/i> that got me hooked. I read her poetry collections (Power Politics: Poems<\/a>\"\"<\/i> terrified me), and her short stories and other novels. Some I responded to more than others. Lady Oracle<\/a>\"\"<\/i> is hilarious. I am not sure Margaret Atwood gets enough credit for her humor, which really is everywhere in her books, grim as most of them are. I read Surfacing<\/a>\"\"<\/i>, an earlier novel, as well as her first novel, The Edible Woman<\/a>\"\"<\/i>. I remember talking with my friend Jackie about Surfacing<\/i>, saying I wasn’t all that crazy about it, and Jackie agreed, saying, in classic Jackie fashion, “Your father’s dead, honey. Put your clothes on.” Ah, humorous friends. For a while there, any new Margaret Atwood book was greeted with terrific excitement. She was like John Irving for me, a contemporary author whose books were events! As important as The Handmaid’s Tale<\/i> is, I think Cat’s Eye<\/a>\"\"<\/i> is her masterpiece. Still. But then at some point, I lost interest. It was around Alias Grace: A Novel<\/a>\"\"<\/i>, a celebrated novel, which I just could not finish. Maybe I should give it another shot. Sometimes one does out-grow authors. It happens. But still, I love her, and anyone who wrote something as magnificent as Cat’s Eye<\/i> will always have a place in my heart. That was the book through which I could see my own life, my own childhood friendships, “being a girl,” the whole thing. Boy, does she nail it. I wonder if men stay away from Margaret Atwood. They shouldn’t. In my opinion, she is far harder on women than on men.<\/p>\n

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<\/i>. 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. <\/p>\n

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<\/i>. 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<\/i> 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. <\/p>\n

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<\/i>.<\/p>\n

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? <\/p>\n

I love hearing writers talk about their own imaginative process, and I especially love hearing them discuss the writers who inspired them. <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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 … <\/p>\n

I find her language hilarious. Biting, yes. Cutting and somewhat mean. But still: very funny.<\/p>\n

Excerpt from Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing<\/a>\"\"<\/i>: “Orientation: Who do you think you are? What is ‘a writer,’ and how did I become one?”, by Margaret Atwood<\/big><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/i> 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<\/i>, 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<\/i>, 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/i> 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<\/i>. The real British impact was being felt through a subversive radio program called The Goon Show<\/i>, which had Peter Sellers in it, and another Monty Python precursor called Beyond the Fringe<\/i>, known through – as I recall – a recording of it.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

\n