Sometimes the darkest problems have simple answers. Going by a statement issued two months ago by Margaret Atwood, Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, inventor, and environement activist who has written often about the question of the status of women in her work, most of women’s problems can be dissolved if men learned basic good manners. “There used to be a lot of etiquette books on how to behave,” she said in an interview with the Guardian this January. “Those seem to have gone out of the window. We used to be bombarded with them in the 50s. So where is the Mr. Manners? There should be a Mr. Manners column – like ‘What do you do when ...?’. I think it can help men to understand what may possibly be expected of them in the behavior department.” She went on to add that these guides could be aimed at “ordinary people who think they’re on a date”, but when asked what should be included in the text said, “I think we should let younger people deal with that. I’m 78.”
Born on November 18, 1939 in Ottawa, Margaret Atwood who believes she is now at the “Gold Watch and Goodbye” phase of her career, spent the formative stretches of her early years in the wilderness—first in northern Quebec, and then north of Lake Superior. Her father, Carl Atwood, was an entomologist, and, until Margaret was almost out of elementary school, the family passed all but the coldest months in virtually complete isolation at insect-research stations. Her mother, also named Margaret was a dietitian who encouraged her daughter to write but was also practical. When Margaret had started to write in earnest in high school her mother told her, “If you are going to be a writer, you had better learn to spell.” To which Margaret replied, “Others will do that for me”. And they do.
She began her career writing poetry. Her first professionally published collection, “The Circle Game,” won the Governor General’s Award in 1966, and has never been out of print. The poems take the ring-around-the-rosy children’s game as a starting point to explore male-female relationships. A lover examines the speaker’s face “indifferently/yet with the same taut curiosity/with which you might regard/a suddenly discovered part/of your own body:/a wart perhaps.” These early poems, according to critics, “show Atwood’s early aptitude for the unflinching, visceral metaphor.”
Others believe that her best fiction is sustained by a specificity of detail—a capacity for noticing—that might be expected from one whose scientist father introduced her to a microscope at a young age. Once, as reported in the New Yorker, she bumped into an old friend, Adrienne Clarkson, a college contemporary who went on to have a distinguished career as a broadcaster, and, for six years, as the governor general of Canada. “We are going to crawl into our eighties together,” Clarkson said, inviting Margaret to her home for tea. The women reminisced about studying with Northrop Frye. “He is the person who talked me into going to grad school instead of moving to Paris, and living in a garret and drinking absinthe,” Atwood said. “But, Adrienne, you did move to Paris.”
“You came to visit,” Clarkson recalled.
“And you were painting your fingernails a beautiful shade of red,” Atwood continued.
“How frivolous of you to remember that,” Clarkson said, fondly.
“How novelistic of me to remember it,” Atwood corrected her.
At university having started with Beowulf and realized the university’s literature curriculum was unapologetically British: (as all of us who study English literature as undergrads throughout the world continue to do so even in the 21st century) she was disappointed to find Canadian literature had yet to be considered worthy of study. A decade later, in 1972, she made a contribution to its establishment as a proper field, with her lucid survey “Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature.” The book made her a household name in Canada.
It comes as no surprise therefore, that today, she is warmly recognized in Toronto, whether she is on the street, in a restaurant, or in the subway. To quote Rebeca Mead in the New Yorker, “Traffic cops nod to her in crosswalks, and every encounter I had with her was interrupted by a supplicant autograph hunter or selfie seeker. She never declined. “In the age of social media, you cannot say no, because you’ll get ‘Mean Margaret Atwood was rude to me in a restaurant,’” she told me one lunchtime, after graciously signing yet another young woman’s notebook. (Atwood speaks in a low, ironical monotone but adopts a querulous squeak when impersonating imagined detractors.) She would look striking even if she were not familiar. She owns an array of brightly colored winter coats—jewel red, imperial purple—with faux-fur-trimmed hoods that frame her face, as do her abundant curls of silver hair. She has high cheekbones and an aquiline nose, the kind of features that age has a hard time withering. Her skin is clear and translucent, of the sort that writers of popular Victorian fiction associated with good moral character.”
Home to her is a mansion in the Annex neighborhood of Toronto, near the university. She does not drive, and, for exercise as well as for efficiency, she likes to walk around her neighborhood; she often encounters en route some friend of a half-century’s standing, and they will stop and discuss the past and future surgeries of loved ones—the inevitable discourse of the septuagenarian.
She is a frequent traveller, and has often spent months at a time living in foreign countries, sometimes under conditions that a less flexible artist might find impossibly distracting. It is said that she started writing “The Handmaid’s Tale” on a clunky rented typewriter while on a fellowship in West Berlin, in 1984. (Orwell was on her mind.)
Unlike most other writers, she does not require a particular desk, arranged in a particular way, before she can work, which means she can write anywhere, and does so, prolifically. Even the palm of her left hand is used at times. “When all else fails, you do have a surface you can write on,” she explains. Her bibliography runs to about sixty books—novels, poetry, short-story collections, works of criticism, children’s books, and, most recently, a comic-book series. Yet, she is offhanded about her versatility. “I always wrote more than one type of thing,” she says. “Nobody told me not to.”
The book Margaret Atwood wrote that has sold so many millions of copies she has lost count, is “The Handmaid’s Tale”. Her daughter was nine when it was published; by the time she was in high school, it was required reading for graduation. Even though the book deals with women’s issues and some reviewers hailed her work as a voice of the burgeoning feminist movement (A reviewer in Time said that the novel had “the kick of a perfume bottle converted into a Molotov cocktail”) she resisted the identification. At one point in her career she said, “I had people interviewing me who would say, ‘How do you get the housework done?’ I would say, ‘Look under the sofa, then we can talk.’”
Voicing the sentiments of all writers, she points out, “Authors are sensitive beings, all positive adjectives applied to them will be forgotten, yet anything even faintly smacking of imperfection in their work will rankle until the end of time.”
Then she adds, “The pen is mightier than the sword, but only in retrospect. At the time of combat, those with the swords generally win.”
Add new comment