Oklahoma State University Library Electronic Publishing Center

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[Music] Welcome to The Power of Ideas. Brought to you by the Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education. Today Professor Davis is talking with Margaret Atwood, a world renowned novelist, story writer, poet, and essayist about her work. She is this year's winner of the Peggy V Helmerich Distinguished Author Award, given by the Tulsa Library Trust. Margaret Atwood, I remember reading some place that you began your sort of professional career teaching grammar to engineering students at 8:30 in the morning. And that your fear at the time was that it was going to go on forever. You know, as you said in a writing some place. Do you ever reflect to that time much now and what's it like thinking about that time and being the internationally known and much admired writer that you are today? Well let's see now. First of all, it was only my professional teaching career which wasn't a very long duration. Second of all, the engineering students weren't that bad. You know they were in engineering but they weren't, they were quite bright. And what I did was that I taught them Franz Kafka because I felt it would be useful to them in their later lives. And we actually, and so far we were awake, we got on fine, but it wasn't something I wanted to go on forever. And what you're really asking me is then versus now. Well then I was 24 and now I'm 60. So if things haven't changed a bit in the interlude there would have to something really wrong. Did you daydream that the kind of thing that's happened to you, the incredible success or productivity? No, because this was Canada and it was Canada in the early 60's. And nobody had in Canada at that time, although people had had it earlier and they were to have it later but right at that time they didn't have that kind of international success. Canada was the boonies even for Canadians. So I read some place that a very small percentage of Canadians during that time could actually live as writers. Very small. Oh I would say 1%. [Laughter] Yeah, yeah, are you shocked at what's happened in a way? Shocked? Well it's happened gradually and not without considerable effort, shall I say, on the part of some of us. And uh... You've been busy the past few years writing. No, no, no, the last 30 years. I can remember being the first in to places like Sweden, Finland, etc. And having people say, Where is this Canada? [Laughs] Or, Are there any other writers besides you? And of course there were. But they simply hadn't been picked up yet. What's it like to be a literary celebrity? Uh, is it exhilarating and exciting? Is it sort of confusing and kind of a burden? Does it get in the way of writing? Well let's qualify this again. Literary celebrity. Elisabeth Taylor is a celebrity. [Laughing] I'm a literary celebrity. There is a difference. You know people do not tear off my shoe laces in public. I have seen you face on book covers all my adult life though. I have to tell you that. I know, but crowds of people don't follow me down the street ripping of pieces of my clothing. You know for which I am daily grateful. I think that readers as fans are a different kind of person. Okay. You know their idea is not to get into a crowd and scream and yell and have hysterics. Their idea is to get in a room with the book all by themselves and have their own communication with the book. And the writer in a way is incidental to that. In which you've written the book, you can be dispensed with. But at some level doesn't it get in the way that you are constantly asked to fly off to Sweden or some other place and people want the actual writer there? Well I have a wonderful, wonderful assistant called Sarah and she answers the phone. And she's very good at saying no in a polite way. Okay. So that is what I do and she runs my schedule and says you can't do this because you don't have time. And then she just does it all for me, but of course the question you are asking is quite pertinent. And many is the writer that has come to us, and by us I mean Sarah and myself and said I've just had a successful book, it's my first one, I'm being driven crazy, what am I going to do? I'm getting all of these letters. People are making these requests. I have no life anymore and... That's not a problem for you. You've worked it out. You have found a way to live with it. Yeah, but's it took me some years to do that... Yeah, but was there a point where it was a crisis? Being marketed that way? Yeah because you get inundated. Um, and apart from that, you know, once you realize that there are only 24 hours in a day then you just have to cope with that. When you're less well known you get maybe, let's pretend you get 10 requests a year. All of which you can fulfill. Okay so you are fulfilling 100% of the requests you get. When you are better known you get much greater number of requests but you can still only do 10 a year so start feeling very negative because you are saying no all the time. But you've had to create a space around yourself ... Somebody to say no for me. A professional person to say no. She can say no and I don't even know about it most of the time. Yeah, yeah. Now you hear about those writers who have so much success at very early and it destroys them as a writer. Well this is the Scott Fitzgerald myth. Exactly. And also to a certain extent the Hemingway myth. Uh, and no doubt that happens, particularly in America. Amy Tan I think a little too had that happen. Particularly in America where the levels of celebrity can get very, very dizzying. And to somebody like Erica Jong at a certain age, it's too much. They can't handle it. You get sort of drunk. The time where talk shows sort of take up your writing time. And you don't know enough to, you know, not pose nude for Playboy or whatever the request is. [Laugh] You 're too young. People take advantage of you. Right. Okay. But let me point out yet once again that I live in Canada and E. L. Doctorow came up there once, and he'd just published a book, and he said to me, They didn't like my book. And I said, They loved your book. And he said, How can you tell? [Laughter] It's more understated there. Uh-huh. And they're much more likely to say, instead of this is magnificent, this is terrific, this is the most wonderful book of the past million years, the way they go overboard in some other countries. They're much more likely to say, This is alright, but they could have done better and its flawed. E. L. Doctorow sat at this table about a year ago and he complained about being a celebrity, he's not nearly as comfortable with the attention he gets as as you are. I don't... And see he lives right in the center of the hurricane; he lives in New York State, he used to live right in New York and I expect a lot of people are coming to him and saying either, publish my book, read my manuscript, fall in love with me, you know, do... Yeah, do something. - Some kind of interaction. Yeah, do something. - Other than write. Other than write. - Yeah. And sure, but he ought to know by now and he does pretty much know by now and in fact he does more than me because I said, what do you do with this stuff? And he says, I throw it in the waste paper basket. [laughing] Whereas we dutifully, you know, we answer... You answer every piece of mail, I've heard that. Unless they are completely out of the question, you know. - Yeah. I would like you to talk about one of your books, I'm thinking of The Edible Woman, 1969. Of the many distinctive qualities that your readers really love in your work I think one is the sort of lack of closure, at least what people call lack of closure. Could I impose on you to talk about the end of Edible Woman and sort of set it up a little bit so our readers who haven't read it might understand and just talk about it. You want me to blow the ending of one of my books? Oh I yeah that's okay. Shame on you. Okay, okay. Let's talk about what we mean by lack of closure. What we mean by lack of closure is that it does not say at the end: and then they got married and lived happily ever after. Okay. That that would be closure. Or conversely, and then everybody was dead; that also would be closure. Well, let me come back to you on that. Henry James said at one point that the art of the novelist is a kind of exquisite geometry, the lines of character development and association really go out into infinity and you sort of try... Well, they do with him. [Laughs] ...Seem to come back around, and I think there's still a point here that your readers feel, and they like this, that there is that art of geometry, that exquisite geometry has been shifted a little bit so there is a little more openness than we sometimes see in other writers. Well, you know this isn't new with me. Um, in fact you can trace it back even to such a person as Charlotte Bronte. Mhmm. Who at the end of Villette said dear reader, you may wish to feel that the ship came into harbor and I met mister so and so and we got married and it was all very happy, you may believe that if you wish. [Laughter] Right, but in fact... No, she doesn't say what in fact happens. Yeah yeah. She gives you two choices; she doesn't tell you which it is. And famously of course at the end of Great Expectations, Charles Dickens wrote two endings. Right. One in which it was all just awful and nothing happens and the other one in which, because that was too negative, the other one in which he gets together with Estella and maybe there is going to be something going after all. So this is this is not new, and then as you move into the into the moderns and for instance somebody like Franz Kafka who is nothing but lack of closure. So it's... Even in the beginning there is lack of closure. It's a modern culture attribute. I would say. To a certain extent that it is and it only really strikes people as odd if they have read nothing but harlequin romances, You know I... Let me move to... Nothing but Great... Nothing but Pride and Prejudice, which does have a traditional happy ending although we don't really find out what goes on after they get married... Let me move to another novel and I won't try to, you know, talk about the end of Surfacing, 1972, but I was in graduate school when that book came out and I remember there being quite a furor among my friends just because everybody... It was a book that everybody was reading, passing it around, I think one of my friends sent you a love letter, he was just so taken. Was I [inaudible] Oh he was in love with the book and absolutely... [Laughing] You were, you were on everybody's minds in 1972 But a limited group of people. [Laughing] Well they were an appreciative group of people and I won't describe the ending but I think I can say this, the book is about a young woman who sort of cuts her ties with a lot of people including some people very close to her, finds herself in nature... put it... Goes off the deep end of the trolley truck. Yeah yeah. [Laughing] But, uh, I think most people have felt that the end there's a kind of positive spin to it, a lot of readers interpreted it that way. I want to ask you something biographical here, that that book is such a strong vision of this woman following this path and nobody can really go with her on; does it represent some kind of turning point in your own life? I mean it's one of those sort of lyrical books I think that's what my friends were responding to. Oh okay, well this is always a great compliment when people think that, because it was so real to them that it has to be true and if it's true it has to be true about somebody, and who better for it to be true about than the author? So, thank you for the compliment, but no I did not do that. Okay, it didn't represent any such moment in your life. Well, things can represent moments in your life and the moment that book represents in my life is that I figured out how to write that book which I had been... Actually I started on it at the same time I was writing Edible Woman and could not actually get as we say a handle on it, how to do it. It's one of those powerful lyrical books. I think it haunts a lot of people and it's a wonderful book. The Handmaids Tale of 1986. Um. here is a... Which I finished in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and began in Berlin before the wall went down, yes. Wow, and so you were what were you teaching in Tuscaloosa, it wasn't grammar anymore I don't think. I was one of the graduate chairs in creative writing. Now, this is a book about a kind of future time it's a very sort of very repressive surveillance sort of culture where women seem to be kept... Well women and men both; I mean you cannot alter the position of women in society without also altering the position of men and vice versa, it's completely relative. Could you talk about the reaction you got on that book? What was it like? What was the reaction I got on the book? Well, it was different in different countries, for instance in England they said jolly good yarn, great story, but they didn't think of it as particularly real for them because they'd had their period of that sort under Cromwell in the 17th century and they didn't feel in much danger of repeating it. In Canada being nervous as Canadians always are they said couldn't happen here and in the United States they said how long have we got? Wow, weren't you getting sort of death threats and so on? No, because the kinds of people that read my books aren't the kinds of people who would get death... Who would send death threats over that. When the movie came out, the movie company got a few outraged people. But it's a catch 22 for the death threaters because what are they objecting to? Were you pleased with the movie? Is this the kind of world the kind of world they have in mind? So, if it is why would they object to anybody depicting it. I haven't seen the movie, was it a good movie? Were you pleased with it? Let me quote to you a contest that was run in a Canadian magazine in which you were supposed to fill in the statement as Canadian as in American as apple pie. And the person who won, won it by saying as Canadian as possible under the circumstances. [Laughing] So I would say this is as good a movie as possible under the circumstances. Who is in the movie? I I don't even remember that. Oh boy! Lots of people. Are they big names? Fay Weldon was in it. Yes. But I'm very bad at movie names. But you like the movie under the circumstances. Elizabeth McGovern was terrific. Oh wow. She was excellent. They were they were all good. It was well acted. It was... I think theoretically there were a few problems with it. For instance let me put it to you this way: if you were on the run and you were going to hide out from people with helicopters would you do it in a red trailer on the top of the hill? [Laughing] Bit of a credibility problem in that choice. Well, I mean for me, yeah, but not for everyone. You don't people may not think these things through quite in the same way but... You've written about women in a way that people have liked a very powerful way, a very sympathetic way. I think right at the beginning of your work and it never seems to have been a kind of forced issue to write about women and and you know one could argue that in the 60s that wasn't an easy thing to do that wasn't the mainstream.. Okay let's just set this to the women's movement as we now call it didn't hit didn't really hit until '68... '69. Yeah. A couple of books that were around before that time, one of them was Simone de Beauvoir, A Second Sex and the other one was Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique. They were around during in 60s But there was no movement. I began writing in 1956. You know, women's movement... [laughing] Nobody was thinking about it. We still had at university a couple of older women who were left over from the twenties and thirties and kept telling us not to be so silly about boys and to do our homework and you know, that kind of thing. Um, but essentially the 50s and the 60s until '68 were that period when women had been shoved back into the home after the war. It was those pictures you see of the mom with the apron and the turkey and the stove and... Norman Rockwell paintings. Soap was very big, well, a little bit after Norman Rockwell but that kind of thing. - Yeah. Domesticity, smiling mom, people after the war had four kids, etc. It's where we got the baby boomers. So, I began in '56 long before there was any women's movement. Where does this come from in your past? Where what was the platform? Why did I start writing? How did you have the ability uh the insight uh to focus on women in the way that you did? I was lazy. Use your head. [Laughing] It's easier for me to write about women. But other people weren't doing this, you know. Yes they were. They were doing it lots. Iris Murdock was was writing then. And she's wonderful. Sure. Yeah there were lots of writers, there were lots of women writers around even then, but they weren't... They had a different take on things because society was different and they and I also write about men but you know there's a funny thing, men don't like it much when women write about men because either they write Heathcliff who men all detest, they don't like these superhero men turning up in women's books. Because Heathcliff is bigger and stronger and sexier and more handsome than they are and who wants that? Or else they do a nice man and the men don't like that either because they think he is a wimp. So, let's be totally honest about this: it's hard for a woman writer to write a man character that men approve of, even if you take all the bad things that men say about themselves in their own men characters and put them into a man character in a book by a woman, then the men think they are being attacked. Even though you got it straight from the horse's mouth. I think a lot of your readers would say that you are doing something special and especially powerful in your treatment of women before a lot of other people would. So are you... you're not buying that. But you see. I'm not alone. No I'm just being... I'm just being trying to be accurate here. We look at Alice Munro for instance. If you look at Marian Engle then you may not know but they published her first book when I was probably twenty-nine or so. These were people who were trying to write out of.. you take Margaret Lawrence.. They were trying to write... The Stone Angel. Yeah or even the later books. They were trying to write um honestly about how women actually lived their lives as opposed to how they were supposed to live their lives. So, there is quite a broad uh range and that's that's just in my own country. And then there's lots of writers here and in England, and in Europe so it's not unique. Okay, okay. Nice of you to think so but it isn't. Let me take you in another direction for a second. We talked about E.L. Doctrorow a little while ago, he sat at this table about a year ago, Elizabeth George was here a couple of years ago. Rilla Askew the Oklahoma writer was here and each had the idea that there's a kind of fictional imagination a kind of poetic imagination each of these people said well you can't have both ya know you're on the fiction side you're on the poetry side. Now, you have written as much wonderful poetry as you have written fiction and my sense is and maybe I'm wrong about this is that in Canada I think they sort of know you more as a poet and in the states know you more as a fiction writer. No? Well, you definitely are on both sides of that divide umm... What's it like? Is it difficult? Are there two halves of you? Do they do they fit comfortably together? Are they at war with each other? The poet and the fiction side? Well, usually when we say poetic novel we immediately think I don't want to read that. [Laughing]. That's kind of too too many words and not enough happening right? Be honest. Is that what you think? Too far away from things... Too many lyrical embroideries, that's not what I mean by poetic imagination. What I mean by poetic imagination is um is a structural imagination, poetry being more into music and mathematics and then for instance people talking pros in an elevator are. So when I think poetic imagination I think I think large structure where things fit. So, I'll admit to having that. I will not admit to having the other kind in which there's too many words and you don't want to read it. [Laughing] You know what I mean though, I mean you write poetry that a lot of people like. And Michael Ondaatje writes poetry in pros and so does Ann Michaels Canadian writer from Sri Lanka right? Michael Ondaatje? Umm very very originally from Sri Lanka, and very very um the family background is interesting he's got everything in there [inaudible] Sri Lankan, anyway, he was in Canada since the age of about 16 and that's where he began to write and so on and so forth. Anyway, he writes both. Lots of people have written both because we weren't told not to. You know we came before there were creative writing skills in which they said are you a poet or are you a pros writer? And let me point out.. You didn't know you couldn't do it... That Herman Melville wrote both just for instance and there have been several English writers who wrote both. Not always as successfully, Mellville was better at pros but uh they have written both. Poe wrote both. You know Edgar Allen? He wrote both and he became famous for both. So it's not an anomaly and if your so inclined I don't see why you shouldn't do it. I want to bring you up a little closer to the present in the last few years you have written The Journals Susanna Moodie. That was nineteen sixty...nine... seventy okay and Alias Grace that works off of that that material umm.. 1996 97.. 1996. Umm okay why at this point in your career are you turning so strongly toward historical fiction? Alias Grace is this uh uh powerful book about an actual event in the mid-19th century in Canada. Why is that your focus at this point? Well now you never know why you do anything really? It's not a plan. You know you don't think well not I am gonna do this. What you usually really think is I feel strongly inclined to do this but it's a really stupid idea and that's what you end up You always end up doing the things that you think are probably a bad idea. Why are they a bad idea? Because they're hard. They're difficult. So you think why don't I just do something easy? Well the fact is that the easy things aren't very appealing. Did the Alias Grace book sort of simmer all of those years between... Okay, the Alias Grace book went like this. Susanna Moodie was an English immigrant who came to Canada thinking she was going to someplace like the south of France. Cows, grapes, playing the flute You know... pastoral simplicity, and instead the tract of land that they ended up getting was in the middle of a bare and bug infested swamp. From which they who were from genteel class were not at all suited. And they had a dreadful time, Susanna Moodie and her husband and the children, some of who died and it was all quite awful. And she wrote a book called Roughing It in the Bush, in which she describes the awfulness of it and says don't do this. You know, if you are of my class stay or let the peasants do it, they know how. And she got in quite a bit of trouble because the Canadians objected to being called peasants and the English objected to the idea of somebody going off and living in a swamp and describing it so graphically. But it was quite a hit in England. Then she wrote another book called Life in the Clearings in which she went around to towns and looked at all the stuff and what you did in those days you always visited the jail and the lunatic asylum because these were the big public institutions and people were quite proud of them. And so she hi hoed off to the penitentiary in Kingston and saw the famous Grace Marks and Grace Marks was like a star. She was like the OJ Simpson of her time. This 16 year old woman who was accused of murdering... Yeah she had actually got convicted for being a party to a double murder. Her employer and the employer's housekeeper who was also the employers mistress both were found in the cellar in a non-alive condition. And she and the manservant had run off to where else, the United States. With the silverware and the wardrobe. And were found in a, shock horror, hotel. Wow... But not in the same room. They were both hauled back. They were convicted. She had a fan club who got her committed to life. And nobody ever knew whether she did it or not. And this was what was interesting to me. Did she or didn't she? I hate to stop you. We are out of time. Margaret, I would thank you very much. It's been a treat having you here today. I'll hope you'll come back and see us. Thank you, we'll see you next week for The Power of Ideas. See you then. [Music]