Margaret Atwood,
Interviewed by Mary Morris
The Paris Review, The Art of Fiction No. 121
The manuscript of “Frogless,” a poem that appears in
this issue, by Margaret Atwood. Ms. Atwood wrote the poem on an SAS Hotel’s
bedside notepad while she was in Gothenburg, Sweden last September for the Nordic
Book Fair. “I’ve written quite a lot under those circumstances. Perhaps it’s
being in a hotel room or a plane with no ringing phone and no supervision.
Also, there’s something about jet lag that breaks down the barriers.”
Margaret Atwood was born in Ottawa,
Ontario in 1939. As a child, she lived in the wilderness of northern Quebec and
also spent time in Ottawa, Sault Sainte Marie, and Toronto. She was eleven
before she attended a full year of school. In high school Atwood began to write
poetry inspired by Edgar Allen Poe, and at sixteen she committed herself to a
writing career, publishing a collection of poems, Double
Persephone, six years later.
Her second book of poetry, The
Circle Game, earned her the Governor General’s Award—Canada’s
highest literary honor—and from that time forward she has been a dominant
figure in Canadian letters. In 1972 Atwood sparked a hot debate when she
published a controversial critical study of Canadian literature, Survival:
A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. In it she claimed that
Canadian literature reflects the submissive as well as survivalist tendencies
of the country, born from its being a subordinate ally to the United States, a
former colony, and a country with vast stretches of untamed land. Following the
publication of this volume, Atwood retreated from Toronto, where she had been
working as an editor at the publishing house Anansi, to a farm in Alliston,
Ontario, where she began to write full time.
Atwood has published nineteen collections
of poetry—including The Circle Game(1964), The
Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970), Power
Politics (1971), You
Are Happy(1974), True Stories (1981) and Interlunar (1984)—but she is best known for her
novels, which include Surfacing (1972), Lady
Oracle (1976),
and Cat’s Eye (1988). Her most widely read novel is The
Handmaid’s Tale (1986),
a chilling account of a puritanical theocracy that won Atwood a second Governor
General’s Award and was recently made into a motion picture. She is also the
author of two children’s books, Up in the Tree (1978) and Anna’s
Pet(1980) and two collections of short stories, Dancing
Girls (1977) and Bluebeard’s
Egg(1983). She has edited Oxford anthologies of Canadian verse and
Canadian short stories and, with Shannon Ravenel, the 1989 volume of The
Best American Short Stories.
The question of the status of women has
frequently been an issue in Atwood’s work, and feminists have seized upon her
writing as a product of the movement. Atwood has also made other political and
philosophical issues themes in her work, such as Canada’s struggle to create an
identity and, in recent years, her concern for human rights.
This interview was conducted in a house
near Princeton University, where Atwood had gone to give some readings and
lectures. In person, Atwood is much as one might expect from reading her
work—incisive. For many hours over a period of two days, while teenage boys
bounced basketballs and played music outside, people walked in and out, and
football games played on the television in the next room, Atwood sat,
attentive, answering each question without hesitation. She never strayed from
her point, never seemed to tire, and remained, like a narrator from any one of
her books, unflappable.
INTERVIEWER
Has the theme of survival always been
intrinsic to your work?
MARGARET ATWOOD
I grew up in the north woods of Canada.
You had to know certain things about survival. Wilderness survival courses
weren’t very formalized when I was growing up, but I was taught certain things
about what to do if I got lost in the woods. Things were immediate in that way
and therefore quite simple. It was part of my life from the beginning.
INTERVIEWER
When did you make the leap from
considering survival to be a physical battle to considering it to be an
intellectual or political struggle?
ATWOOD
When I started thinking about Canada as a
country it became quite evident to me that survival was a national obsession.
When I came to the States in the sixties, I felt that nobody knew where Canada
was. Their brother may have gone there to fish or something. When I was at
Harvard, I was invited as a “foreign student” to a woman’s house for an evening
for which I was asked to wear “native costume.” Unfortunately I’d left my
native costume at home and had no snowshoes. So there I was, without native
costume with this poor woman and all this food, sitting around waiting for the
really exotic foreign students in their native costumes to turn up—which they
never did because, as everybody knew, foreign students didn’t go out at night.
INTERVIEWER
You’ve written about the theme of
foreignness a good deal.
ATWOOD
Foreignness is all around. Only in the
heart of the heart of the country, namely the heart of the United States, can
you avoid such a thing. In the center of an empire, you can think of your
experience as universal. Outside the empire or on the fringes of the empire,
you cannot.
INTERVIEWER
In your afterword to The
Journals of Susanna Moodie you
write that if the mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of
Canada is paranoid schizophrenia. Could you say something more about
that?
ATWOOD
The United States is big and powerful;
Canada is divided and threatened. Maybe I shouldn’t have said “illness.” Maybe
I should have said “state of mind.” Men often ask me, Why are your female characters
so paranoid? It’s not paranoia. It’s recognition of their situation.
Equivalently, the United States’s feeling that it is big and powerful is not a
delusion. It is big and powerful. Possibly, its wish
to be even bigger and more powerful is the mentally ill part. Every Canadian
has a complicated relationship with the United States, whereas Americans think
of Canada as the place where the weather comes from. Complication is a matter
of how you perceive yourself in an unequal power relationship.
INTERVIEWER
How do you view Canada and its literature
within this political relationship?
ATWOOD
Canada is not an occupied country. It’s a
dominated country. Things are more clear-cut in an occupied country—the heroes
and the villains are obvious. One of the complicating things, of course, is
that the United States will eagerly swallow anything. It’s very welcoming in
that way. Canadian writers often find that they have a better time in the
United States than they do in Canada, because living in Canada is to some
extent like living in a small town. They will rally around you when you break
your leg, but on the other hand, if you get too big for your britches, well,
they perceive it as exactly that. Alice Munro’s book, which is titledThe Beggar Maid in the United States, is called Who
Do You Think You Are? in
Canada . . . as in, Who do you think you are, behaving like that—the Prime
Minister? The U.S. loves success, the American dream that anybody can be
president of the United States or get intoPeople magazine. But with Canadians, it’s
much more likely to be, You know, people might not like it if you did that.
There are a lot more snipers in the bushes.
INTERVIEWER
Where have you been treated better as a
writer, would you say?
ATWOOD
I suffer more vicious attacks, more
personal attacks, in Canada, because that’s where I’m from. Families have their
most desperate fights among themselves, as we know. However, if you look at per
capita sales figures, people recognizing me in the street, of course it’s more
in Canada. If I sold as many books per capita in the United States as in
Canada, I’d be a billionaire.
INTERVIEWER
Is it more difficult for women to get
published than men?
ATWOOD
I’m afraid the question is simply too
broad. Do we mean, for instance, in North America, or in Ireland, or in
Afghanistan? There are categories other than gender. Age, class and color, for
instance. Region. National origin. Previous publication. Sexual orientation. I
suppose we could rephrase the question and ask, is it more difficult for a
first novelist who is female than for her male counterpart of the same age,
class, color, national origin or location, and comparable talent, whatever that
may be. Judging from the experience of Latin American female writers—of which
there are many, though few are known in translation—the answer would be, yes.
Women in many countries find it difficult to get published at all—consider the
Middle East, for instance. Or black women in South Africa. In fact, they find
it difficult to write. Or difficult to become educated. The barriers to women
writing are often put in place at a very early age and in very basic ways.
But if we’re just talking about, say,
North America, obviously commercial publishers want to publish things they can
sell. Whether such publishers will publish a given book— whether by a man,
woman, or turtle—depends a lot on what they think its reception will be. I
don’t think there’s an overt policy against books by women or an overt quota.
Much depends on the book and on the intuition of the publisher. It’s true,
however, that the majority of books that do appear are still written by men and
reviewed by men. Then there’s the subject of reviewing. That’s where you’re
most likely to see gender bias, bias of all kinds.
INTERVIEWER
Is it difficult to write from the point of
view of a male?
ATWOOD
Most of the “speakers” or narrative points
of view in my books are those of women, but I have sometimes used the point of
view of a character who is male. Notice I try to avoid saying “the male point
of view.” I don’t believe in the male point of view any more than I believe in
the female point of view. There are a good many of both, though it’s true that
there are some thoughts and attitudes that are unlikely to be held by men on
the one hand or women on the other. So when I do use a male character, it’s
because the story is about something or someone that can’t be otherwise
conveyed or that would be altered if it were to be conveyed through a female
character. For instance, I recently published a story inGranta called “Isis In Darkness.” It’s about
the relationship—the tenuous relationship over the years—between a women poet
and a man who has, I guess, a sort of literary crush on her and how the woman
affects the man’s life. If I’d told it through the woman herself . . . well,
you can’t tell such stories about romantic infatuation from the point of view
of the object of the infatuation without losing the flavor of the emotion. They
would just become “who is that creep hanging around outside the balcony” stories.
INTERVIEWER
Can you tell the gender of a writer from
reading the text alone?
ATWOOD
Sometimes, certainly, but not always.
There’s a famous case in England of an Anglican vicar who said he couldn’t get
anything published. So he wrote under the name of an East Asian woman and got a
novel accepted by Virago. There’s a certain amount of opinion around that says,
for instance, that women can’t or shouldn’t write from a male point of view and
so forth. Men are very sniffy about how they’re portrayed by women, but the
truth is that most of the really vicious, unpleasant male characters in fiction
or theater have been written by men. The ethnic joke principle seems to be at
work—it’s OK to say a man has smelly feet, no ethics, and bad table manners if
the writer is a man, but if it’s a woman saying exactly the same thing, then
she somehow hates men. The male amour propre is wounded. And if she writes nice
male characters, they’re seen as “weak” by other men—though if a man puts a man
in the kitchen, that’s realism. And on and on.
We have fallen very much into the habit of
judging books by their covers. “Authenticity” has become a concern. I tend to
side with creative freedom. Everyone should write as she or he feels impelled.
Then let’s judge the results, not the picture of the author on the back flap.
Your question also assumes that “women”
are a fixed quantity and that some men are “better” at portraying this quantity
than others are. I, however, deny that the quantity is fixed. There is no
single, simple, static “women’s point of view.” Let’s just say that good
writing of any kind by anyone is surprising, intricate, strong, sinuous. Men
who write stereotyped women or treat them like stuffed furniture or sex aids
are portraying something—their inner lives, perhaps—and that’s interesting to
know about up to a point. But it should not be mistaken for life outside the
author’s head.
INTERVIEWER
How do the activities of writing poetry
and writing prose differ for you?
ATWOOD
My theory is that they involve two different
areas of the brain, with some overlap. When I am writing fiction, I believe I
am much better organized, more methodical—one has to be when writing a novel.
Writing poetry is a state of free float.
INTERVIEWER
I have the feeling that you work out
problems in your poetry, but that you hold onto the metaphors and dramatize
them in your novels.
ATWOOD
The genesis of a poem for me is usually a
cluster of words. The only good metaphor I can think of is a scientific one:
dipping a thread into a supersaturated solution to induce crystal formation. I
don’t think I solve problems in my poetry; I think I uncover the problems. Then
the novel seems a process of working them out. I don’t think of it that way at
the time—that is, when I’m writing poetry, I don’t know I’m going to be led
down the path to the next novel. Only after I’ve finished the novel can I say,
well, this poem was the key. This poem opened the door.
When I’m writing a novel, what comes first
is an image, scene, or voice. Something fairly small. Sometimes that seed is
contained in a poem I’ve already written. The structure or design gets worked
out in the course of the writing. I couldn’t write the other way round, with
structure first. It would be too much like paint-by-numbers. As for lines of
descent—that is, poem leading to novel—I could point to a number of examples.
In my second collection of poems, The Animals in That Country,
there’s a poem called “Progressive Insanities of a Pioneer.” That led into the
whole collection called The Journals of Susanna
Moodie and that in
turn led into Surfacing. Or,
another line of descent, the poems in parts ofTrue Stories have obvious affiliations with the
novel Bodily Harm. It’s almost as if the
poems open something, like opening a room or a box or a pathway. And then the
novel can go in and see what else is in there. I’m not sure this is unique. I
expect that many other ambidextrous writers have had the same experience.
INTERVIEWER
Do writers perceive differently than
others? Is there anything unique about the writer’s eye?
ATWOOD
It’s all bound up with what sorts of
things we have words for. Eskimos, the Inuit, have fifty-two words for snow.
Each of those words describes a different kind of snow. In Finnish they have no he or she words. If you’re writing a novel in
Finnish, you have to make gender very obvious early on, either by naming the
character or by describing a sex-specific activity. But I can’t really answer
this question because I don’t know how “others” observe the world. But judging
from the letters I receive, many others recognize at least part of themselves
in what I write, though the part recognized varies from person to person, of
course. The unique thing about writers is that they write. Therefore they are
pickier about words, at least on paper. But everyone “writes” in a way; that
is, each person has a “story”—a personal narrative—which is constantly being
replayed, revised, taken apart, and put together again. The significant points
in this narrative change as a person ages—what may have been tragedy at twenty
is seen as comedy or nostalgia at forty. All children “write.” (And paint, and
sing.) I suppose the real question is why do so many people give it up.
Intimidation, I suppose. Fear of not being good. Lack of time.
INTERVIEWER
Do you ever feel struck by the limitations
of language?
ATWOOD
All writers feel struck by the limitations
of language. All serious writers.
INTERVIEWER
Why is there so much violence in your
work? Bodily Harm in particular.
ATWOOD
Sometimes people are surprised that a woman
would write such things. Bodily Harm, for
instance, was perceived as some kind of incursion into a world that is supposed
to be male. Certainly violence is more a part of my work than it is of Jane
Austen’s, or George Eliot’s. They didn’t do it in those days. Charles Dickens
wrote about Bill Sikes bludgeoning Nancy to death, getting blood all over
everything, but if a woman had written that, nobody would have published it.
Actually, I grew up violence-free and among people who were extremely civilized
in their behavior. When I went out into the wider world, I found violence more
shocking than would somebody who was used to it. Also, during the Second World
War, although there was not violence in my immediate vicinity, the angst—you
know, the anxiety about the war—was ever-present. Canada went into the war in
1939, about two months before I was born. The per capita death rate was high.
INTERVIEWER
Yet you write as if you’ve lived through
violence.
ATWOOD
But I write as if I’ve lived a lot of
things I haven’t lived. I’ve never lived with cancer. I’ve never been fat. I
have different sensibilities. In my critical work I’m an eighteenth-century
rationalist of some kind. In my poetry I’m not at all. There’s no way of
knowing in advance what will get into your work. One collects all the shiny
objects that catch the fancy—a great array of them. Some of them you think are
utterly useless. I have a large collection of curios of that kind, and every
once in a while I need one of them. They’re in my head, but who knows where!
It’s such a jumble in there. It’s hard to find anything.
INTERVIEWER
Is sex easy to write about?
ATWOOD
If by sex you mean just the sex act—“the earth
moved” stuff—well, I don’t think I write those scenes much. They can so quickly
become comic or pretentious or overly metaphoric. “Her breasts were like
apples,” that sort of thing. But sex is not just which part of whose body
was where. It’s the relationship between the participants, the furniture in the
room, or the leaves on the tree, what gets said before and after, the
emotions—act of love, act of lust, act of hate, act of indifference, act of
violence, act of despair, act of manipulation, act of hope. Those things have
to be part of it.
Striptease has become less interesting
since they did away with the costumes. It’s become Newtonian. The movement of
bodies through space, period. It can get boring.
INTERVIEWER
Has motherhood made you feel differently
about yourself?
ATWOOD
There was a period in my early career that
was determined by the images of women writers I was exposed to—women writers as
genius suicides like Virginia Woolf. Or genius reclusives like Emily Dickinson
and Christina Rossetti. Or doomed people of some sort, like the Brontës, who
both died young. You could fall back on Harriet Beecher Stowe or Mrs. Gaskell;
they both led reasonable lives. But then George Eliot didn’t have any children;
neither did Jane Austen. Looking back over these women writers, it seemed
difficult as a writer and a woman to have children and a domestic relationship.
For a while I thought I had to choose between the two things I wanted: children
and to be a writer. I took a chance.
INTERVIEWER
In much of your work, love and power seem
to be intricately connected—love as a power struggle in Power
Politics. Do you see any other way between men and women?
ATWOOD
Love relationships between men and women
do involve power structures because men in this society have different kinds
of, and more, power than women do. The problem for a woman in a relationship is
how to maintain her integrity, her own personal power while also in a
relationship with a man. Being in love with somebody is an experience that
breaks down ego barriers. The positive part of that is a feeling of “cosmic
consciousness,” and the negative pole is a feeling of loss of self. You’re
losing who you are; you’re surrendering—the fortress has fallen. But is it
possible to have an equal exchange in a society in which things aren’t entirely
equal? Power Politics is fourteen years old. People tend to
put it in the present tense. Each of my books is different—presenting different
situations, characters, and involvements. My most domestic novel is Life
Before Man. In it there’s an equilateral triangle. There are two
women and one man, and viewed from any one point in the triangle the other two
are not behaving properly. But you can go around the triangle and look at it
from all sides. To be asked what I think as a person is a different thing. I
have a very good relationship with a man and I’ve had it for some time. The
novel is not merely a vehicle for self-expression or for the rendition of one’s
own personal life. I’m quite conservative in that way. I do see the novel as a
vehicle for looking at society—an interface between language and what we choose
to call reality, although even that is a very malleable substance. When I
create characters in novels, those characters aren’t necessarily expressing
something that is merely personal. I draw observations from a wide range of
things.
INTERVIEWER
How do you work? Can you describe how you
write your first draft?
ATWOOD
I write in longhand and preferably on
paper with margins and thick lines with wide space between the lines. I prefer
to write with pens that glide very easily over the paper because my handwriting
is fast. Actually, I don’t churn out finished copy quickly. Even though I have
this fast handwriting, I have to scribble over it and scratch things out. Then
I transcribe the manuscript, which is almost illegible, onto the typewriter.
INTERVIEWER
Do you have a time, a day, or a place for
writing? Does it matter where you are?
ATWOOD
I try to write between ten in the morning
and four in the afternoon, when my child comes home from school. Sometimes in
the evenings, if I’m really zipping along on a novel.
INTERVIEWER
Do you write a novel from page one through
to the end?
ATWOOD
No. Scenes present themselves. Sometimes
it proceeds in a linear fashion, but sometimes it’s all over the place. I wrote
two parts of Surfacing five years before I wrote the rest of
the novel—the scene in which the mother’s soul appears as a bird and the first
drive to the lake. They are the two anchors for that novel.
INTERVIEWER
What is the most difficult aspect of
writing?
ATWOOD
That would be book promotion—that is,
doing interviews. The easiest is the writing itself. By easiest I don’t mean something that is lacking
in hard moments or frustration; I suppose I mean “most rewarding.” Halfway
between book promotion and writing is revision; halfway between book promotion
and revision is correcting the galleys. I don’t like that much at all.
INTERVIEWER
Do you work closely with editors?
ATWOOD
I used to be an editor, so I do a lot of
self-editing. I rewrite a lot before I show things to people. I like to have a
manuscript in more or less its final shape before anyone sees it. That doesn’t
mean I can spell. There’s that, and the fiddley things like
punctuation—everyone has different ideas about that. So I work with an editor
to improve that aspect of the text, of course. Ellen Seligman of McClelland and
Stewart was devoted and wonderful when we worked on Cat’s
Eye. Things like: You have soggy twice on the same page. Meticulous.
And I’ve had great fun doing some stories by phone with certain magazine
editors—Bob Gottlieb of The New Yorker and Bill Buford of Granta,
for instance. These sessions always take place when you’re in Switzerland or
about to get into the bath, and they have to have it done right away.
Bargaining goes on, horse-trading. You can have the dash if I get the
semi-colon. That sort of thing. But an editor doesn’t just edit. She or he sees
the book through the whole publishing process. I have close and long-standing
relationships with, for instance, Bill Toye of Oxford, Canada; Nan Talese,
who’s been my U.S. editor since 1976; and Liz Calder of Bloomsbury in the U.K.
One of the things you want from an editor is simply the feeling that he or she
understands your work. Money is no substitute for that.
INTERVIEWER
I’ve noticed that money is a very
important factor in your thinking. Have you always seen things in such sharp
economic terms?
ATWOOD
When you’re poor you do. I went through a
period of being quite poor, of having to really watch it in order to buy myself
time to write, and indeed in order to eat. My poverty wasn’t the same as real
poverty in that I had some sense of direction. I didn’t feel trapped. Actually,
because my family lived in the woods, it was rather difficult to tell whether
we were rich or poor because none of those things applied. It didn’t matter. We
had what we needed—we grew a lot of our own vegetables and things. So I grew up
outside of that. I wasn’t in a social structure in which it mattered at all.
Then I was out on my own quite early. I was brought up to believe that I should
support myself. I had a bank account quite early on and learned how to use it.
I was taught to be financially independent and I always have been. Money is
important for women, because you’d be amazed how it alters your thinking to be
financially dependent on someone. Indeed, anyone.
INTERVIEWER
Have you ever thought of writing a novel
in which a woman had an extremely important job?
ATWOOD
Yes, I have thought of doing that. But
I’ve shied away for the same reason that George Eliot never wrote a novel about
a successful English nineteenth-century woman writer, although she was one.
It’s still so atypical as to be a social exception. Besides, I’m not a business
person. I’m a self-employed person. I don’t have to deal in a power structure
in the same way. I don’t have to claw my way up through the corporate world.
There is a successful woman in one of my books. She’s the young, female judge
that Rennie interviews in Bodily Harm.
She’s just so perfect. She has modern paintings, a wonderful husband, children.
She loves her work—remember her? Rennie interviews her and can’t stand it. A
woman interviewer—of the “lifestyles” variety—once got very peeved with me
because she felt I wasn’t telling her the real dirt. She wanted the inner guck.
I finally said to her, If you had your choice, what would you like me to say to
you? She said, Well, that you’re leaving Graham, right now, and that I’ve got
the scoop on it, and that I can come home and watch you pack.
INTERVIEWER
Have you always questioned institutions?
ATWOOD
Well, I grew up in the woods outside of
any social structures apart from those of my family. So I didn’t absorb social
structures through my skin the way many children do. If you grow up in a small
town you instinctively know who is who and what is what and whom you can safely
be contemptuous of.
INTERVIEWER
How do you come by your titles?
ATWOOD
I like “come by,” because that’s about the
way it is. I come by them, much as you come by some unexpected object in a junk
store or lying beside the road. Sometimes the title arrives almost at the beginning
of the writing of the book—The
Edible Woman and Lady
Oracle are cases in
point. Sometimes you’ve been looking very hard in other directions and the
right title will just leap at you from the side. Bodily
Harm came while I was
doing some unrelated reading of a legal nature. Several books have gone through
a number of working titles; for Surfacing there were two serious previous titles
and about twenty possibilities—some of them variations on the final one. Cat’s
Eye—I think that came early on and was very necessary in view of
the central physical object in the book. The Handmaid’s Tale was calledOffred when I first began it. It changed by
page a hundred and ten. I know this because I kept a sort of working diary—not
notes, but a running total of pages written—to encourage myself. I’ve read and
continue to read the Bible a lot—partly as a result of being in all those hotel
rooms, partly a long-standing habit—so the final title really did come from
Genesis 30. I think too that it was one of those words that puzzled me as a
child. Handmaid. Likefootman. It’s a
very odd word.
INTERVIEWER
Is the Bible a literary inspiration to
you? I know that you’ve spoken of having “the gift” in almost religious terms.
ATWOOD
That’s not an analogy I’m particularly
comfortable with because it is religious. But “the gift” is real. Along with it
goes a sense of vocation and dedication. You get the call.
INTERVIEWER
At the end of Lady
Oracle, Joan says, “I’m not going to write Costume Gothics anymore.
Maybe I’ll write science fiction. Maybe I’ll write about the future.” In a
sense you have done this in Handmaid’s Tale.
There is an evolution in your work toward a larger focus on the world.
ATWOOD
I think the focus has become wider, but
surely that happens with every writer. What you do first is learn your craft.
That can take years. In order to do that, you have to pick subjects that are
small enough for you to handle. You learn how to do a good job with that. Of
course, in the larger sense, every novel is—at the beginning—the same opening
of a door onto a completely unknown space. I mean, it’s just as terrifying
every time. But nevertheless, having made the journey a few times, you have
little guideposts, little signposts in the back of your mind. One of the most
salutary things is writing a novel that fails, doesn’t work, or that you can’t
finish, because what you learn from these failures is often as important as
what you learn from doing something that succeeds. The prospect of having it
happen again isn’t so terrifying because you know you got through it.
INTERVIEWER
Can you look over your past work with
pleasure? Would you change it if you had the chance?
ATWOOD
I don’t look over my past work very much.
I would not change it anymore than I would airbrush a photo of myself. When I
do look at my work, I sometimes don’t recognize it immediately, or I’m
indulgent, as one is towards the work of the young. Or I wonder what I could
possibly have been thinking about—and then I remember. I suppose when I’m
eighty I’ll have a good old pig-out on my past productions, but right now I’m
too preoccupied with what’s on my plate. What a lot of food metaphors!
INTERVIEWER
Have Canadian critics been hard on you
lately?
ATWOOD
My Canadian critics haven’t been any
harder on me than they usually are. If anything, maybe a bit easier; I think
they’re getting used to having me around. Growing a few wrinkles helps. Then
they can think you’re a sort of eminent fixture. I still get a few young folks
who want to make their reputations by shooting me down. Any writer who has been
around for a while gets a certain amount of that. I was very intolerant as a
youthful person. It’s almost necessary, that intolerance; young people need it
in order to establish credentials for themselves.
INTERVIEWER
You seem to know a great deal about visual
art. Does this come from research or first-hand experience?
ATWOOD
All writers, I suspect—and probably all
people—have parallel lives, what they would have been if they hadn’t turned
into what they are. I have several of these, and one is certainly a life as a
painter. When I was ten I thought I would be one; by the time I was twelve I
had changed that to dress designer, and then reality took over and I confined
myself to doodles in the margins of my textbooks. At university I made pocket
money by designing and printing silk-screen posters and by designing theater
programs. I continued to draw and paint in a truncated sort of way and still
occasionally design—for instance the Canadian covers of my poetry books. It’s
one of those things I’m keeping in reserve for when I retire. Maybe I can be a
sort of awful Sunday painter like Winston Churchill. Several of my friends are
painters, so I’ve witnessed the difficulty of the life. The openings with the
bad wine and drying-up cheese, the reviews with the perky headlines that don’t
quite get it, and so forth.
INTERVIEWER
Is there anything that sticks in your mind
as having been your greatest reward as a writer?
ATWOOD
The first poem I ever got published was a
real high. Isn’t it funny? I mean, all the other things that have happened
since then were a thrill, but that was the biggest.
INTERVIEWER
I mean something more personal, though.
ATWOOD
Alright, yes. I was in Copenhagen and just
walking along, you know, window shopping in a crowded mall. Denmark has a
historical relationship with Greenland where a lot of Inuit live. Along the
street came some Inuit dancers done up in traditional Greenland dress. They had
their faces painted and they had furry costumes on, impersonating beasts and monsters,
spirits of some kind. They were spirit dancers, growling and making odd noises
to the crowd. They had clawed hands and face-distorters in their mouths—pieces
of wood that made their cheeks stick out in a funny way. One of these furry
spirit-monsters came over to me, took his face-distorter out of his mouth, and
said, Are you Margaret Atwood? I said yes. He said, I like your work. And then
he put his face-distorter back in his mouth and went growling off into the
crowd.
The Paris Review No.
117, Winter 1990
