 Booker winner, icon, guru:
Peter Guttridge checks out the Margaret Atwood mythology in
the flesh
Booker winner, icon, guru: Peter Guttridge checks out the
Margaret Atwood mythology in the flesh
Margaret Atwood is sipping
Guinness in a quiet pub just off the Seven Dials in Brighton.
In jeans and jumper, abundant hair tied back, the 51-year-old
Canadian novelist has just returned from a trip down the local
sewers. Well, clearly that is her idea of a good time: "I
hear the ones in Paris are really something too," she
says.
Atwood is in Brighton for an
appearance at the Festival, en route to Canada after nine
months in Provence. She has a reputation among some
interviewers as 'frosty' and 'remote'. She has been dubbed
'the high priestess of pain'. But today she is relaxed and
composed, with a deadpan way of speaking that makes everything
sound droll or ironic. In photographs her smile is warm but
controlled and in person she grins often and laughs easily,
sometimes to take the sting from caustic remarks.
She seems unfazed by her fame,
by her iconic position as a writer to whom women respond and
may indeed have changed womens' lives. Her mailbag is full of
letters from her readers who tell her how accurately she has
exactly caught their feelings and experiences, in books as
diverse as The Handmaid's Tale, Cat's Eye, Lady Oracle and
Bluebeard's Egg and how she helped them, how she might guide
them.
"I am inundated with mail
and that is very flattering. But for a lot of it I have a
computer and an assistant. We have different types of letter.
The 'No' letter or the 'Look in the Library' letter. I say,
'Send this one a Number Five.' "
Let us for a moment rewind to
1992 and her debut appearance at the Brighton Festival. She is
yet to win the Booker Prize, yet to write her late, great trio
of major novels, Alias Grace, The Robber Bride and the Booker
Prize winner The Blind Assassin.
Fast forward nine years and all
the things that applied to Margaret Atwood's life then apply
now, but more so. She suffers from RSI, not from writing but
from signing autographs. Now she is returning to the Festival
as an International Guest of Honour alongside Richard Ford,
Carlos Fuentes and Annie Proulx.
In 1992 I was a literary
journalist for The Independent conducting that interview in
the Brighton pub. Now, as the Literary Associate for the
festival, I am talking to Margaret Atwood again; but this time
by e-mail.
She has been a writer since the
age of 17 and was first published when she was 24. Her first
volume of poetry The Circle Game won the Governor General's
Award in 1966. She has since published more than 30 books of
fiction, poetry and critical essays. Her work is now
translated into 20 languages and published in more than 25
countries. She is taught in around three quarters of British
universities.
The Handmaid's Tale in 1985 and
Cat's Eye in 1988 established her reputation but she had
attracted votaries long before that. The Margaret Atwood
Society, which produces a regular newsletter about her, was
established in 1982.
Atwood's reaction was
embarrassment, "I feel silly about the Society, as if I
should be dead. I should be Robert Browning or somebody. I
feel the same about being taught in university. But what can I
do? If I dwelt on it I would probably get a terrible skin
disease. I do, however, refuse to tell them the answers to
these questions about the one true meaning of what I do. They
have to figure that out for themselves."
Writing was not her first
intention. She was born in Ottawa and grew up in Northern
Quebec and Ontario. Her father was a biologist and
entomologist who took the family on long field trips, living
under canvas. Atwood is still a keen backpacker and
birdwatcher.
In those days she hoped to be a
painter. Now she is merely: "Someone who paints, interior
stuff mostly. I'm not very good at landscapes although I do a
very good Northern Quebec in fog."
Next she decided to become a
dressmaker: "I can still set a zipper like nothing you've
ever seen" but realised that "of the five careers
for women proposed in career guidance books, home economics
was the best paid." So the future entrant in the Gas
Consumers Miss Homemaker Contest took home economics in
preference to dressmaking and typing. "Mistake of my
life," she sighs.
Becoming known as a poet first
was a Canadian trait. "A lot of my generation wrote what
they wanted, poetry, novels, radio plays, because we were
never told not to. It was a lot harder to get a novel
published in Canada in the sixties. Oral poetry was popular.
It was a time of coffee house readings. After a reading you
could sell the little pamphlets that you had manufactured
yourself."
She has described herself as a
young poet, "I wore horn-rimmed glasses and a lot of
black to show in that post-existentialist, neo-beatnik age
that I was a serious proposition." Her contemporaries
included Michael Ondaatje and "sort of" Leonard
Cohen. She shared readings with all of them.
"It was pretty gritty. The
coffee house I used to read in, The Bohemian Embassy in
Toronto, kept getting closed down by the fire department for
being unsafe. It reopened at the start of the nineties and I
launched a book there. It was just the same, except that when
I asked for a cup of coffee they said, "I don't think we
have any." I said, "but you're a coffee house…"
After studying English and
philosophy at University in Toronto, Atwood led the life of an
academic hobo. She lived in Boston, Vancouver, Edmonton,
Montreal, Edinburgh and London. Atwood funded herself through
teaching until she had earned enough money to go off and
write. When the money ran out she would then apply for another
teaching post. "Those were the days when Canadian writer
was an oxymoron." she explains.
Atwood doesn't easily accept
the role of guide or guru. Asked about the vocational aspect
of her university teaching, she says drily: "Oh, opening
people's lives! If that had been my calling in life I would
still be doing it. I enjoyed teaching but the problem was
everyone thinks you're their mother or another relation. You
get all their projections."
The same goes for her writing.
Asked back in 1992 whether it was, as they say, her human
condition, she choked on her Guinness. "When I was a
graduate student in the early Sixties that was the
professorial catchphrase. We used it as a joke. If you dropped
ketchup on your pants you would say, "Oh well, it's the
human condition." I certainly write all the time. What
condition that puts me in, I don't know."
Margaret Atwood is appearing at
Theatre Royal, New Road on Sunday May 20 at 8pm. Tickets £8
from Dome Box Office.
Peter Guttridge is the
Literature Associate for the Brighton Festival.
copyright New Insight
2001
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