A Bite of the Apple

by Lennie Goodings

  One of the contributors was June Eric-Udorie who came to mind when I was on the stage at that literary festival back in Bradford. Aged seventeen at the time of our publication, she had already run a successful petition to get the study of feminism added to the A-level politics curriculum in the UK and the following year was one of the BBC’s 100 Inspirational and Influential Women. She went on to edit a book for us about intersectionality: Can We All Be Feminists?

  We launched I Call Myself a Feminist in March 2015, at the WOW (Women of the World) festival at the Southbank Centre in London. A woman in the audience, who said she was twenty-five, told us that when she had told her friends where she was going, they asked her, ‘Do you hate men?’ I felt like holding my head in my hands: after all these years, is that still what some women think about feminism?

  This woman wanted to know what to say.

  Wise June just nodded and said you don’t have to take on everything that’s wrong with the world; try not to feel overwhelmed; do what you need to do. Choose your battle. Learn what matters to you.

  Fuck the patriarchy!

  Just let me count the ways . . .

  Chapter Six

  What Stories Can Do

  Fiction

  I first met Margaret Atwood on the page. I remember, at seventeen, pulling from the library shelf a slim, home-made-looking poetry book entitled The Circle Game and then earnestly telling my English class at my high school in St Catharines, Ontario, that we should read and support this writer because ‘she is Canadian and going to be important’. A beautiful little volume, it gave me a sense of private discovery. I learned later that Margaret had made the cover herself—with red Letraset dots.

  I met her again on the page at Queen’s University in Kingston in the mid-1970s in a relatively new course: CanLit. There were so few Canadian Literature books—or at least those deemed worthy of study—that it was only a half-year course. I read Atwood’s Survival, a non-fiction book that came to define Canadian writing at that time as being, in part, a literature of us against the elements, of survival, metaphorical and real. ‘A country needs to hear its own voice,’ she wrote, and indeed it was extraordinary to begin to hear it. We learned that CanLit had themes: mild anti-Americanism, immigration, nature, survival, self-deprecating humour, and, above all, the search for self-identity. Canada was then obsessed with the search for what was Canadian. In the early 1970s, referencing the saying ‘As American as apple pie’, a CBC Radio programme ran a competition asking listeners to finish the sentence ‘As Canadian as . . .’ The winner proved our humour: ‘As Canadian as possible under the circumstances.’ The Canadian writer Mavis Gallant, who lived most of her life in Paris, said a Canadian is ‘someone with a logical reason to think he may be one’.

  We also studied Atwood’s The Edible Woman; a funny, prescient novel about a girl who unwillingly commits herself to marriage and then finds she can’t eat. We read Michael Ondaatje, Margaret Laurence, Alice Munro, Robertson Davies, Anne Hebert among others. I was aware that this surge of activity was partly down to the small presses: Anansi, Coach House, and also an older one that styled itself as ‘The Canadian Publisher’, McClelland & Stewart. The idea that Canadians could write and get published, and that there was a creative industry in my own country, opened my mind to new possibilities.

  Atwood, especially, was a giant in my literary landscape, so when only a few years later she was there in the Virago offices, in the flesh—though actually not very tall or big—and looking to me to accompany her around Britain to her publicity interviews, I was, frankly, overwhelmed. I had worked with some famous authors already, but this one? It was inconceivable to me that I would eventually be her Virago paperback editor and publisher—and friend.

  Margaret Atwood immediately understood and heartily approved of Virago (and I expect she knew how to deal with a starry-eyed young Canadian too). ‘Virago felt like home to me, as many Canadian writers of my generation had been involved in similarly small ventures . . . [Carmen] was a wild colonial girl, like me, only wilder. In her hands the Old School Tie publishing network was about to become macramé.’ We got down to business—just as we have been doing ever since; Margaret has been with us since 1979 and we’ve published nearly thirty of her books. She is central to Virago. Though we share her fiction and non-fiction with Bloomsbury and Vintage, gratifyingly to my younger self, we are her sole UK poetry publishers.

  We have been Margaret’s main UK paperback publisher since Carmen first brought her books to Virago. She licensed the paperback rights from André Deutsch for Surfacing, The Edible Woman, and Lady Oracle, and published them as Virago Modern Classics. Liz Calder at Jonathan Cape then became Atwood’s UK hardback publisher so we bought our paperback licenses from Cape until Liz moved to co-found Bloomsbury. Atwood followed her there in 1989 and we made a paperback arrangement with Bloomsbury, where Alexandra became her hardback publisher.

  Initially people in the UK didn’t know quite what to make of this savvy Canadian writer. Canada was thought to be wild, snowy, and empty; Margaret Atwood’s childhood in the backwoods accorded with that vision but Canadians were also supposed to be a bit dull and here was a woman who knocked that annoying notion on its British head. That dry wit of hers still flummoxes some British interviewers, whom I see approach her gingerly. Formidably clever and very funny, she, rightly, expects the most of others. It is something I have learned to step up to.

  When we first launched her books in 1979 I was aware that at home she was commanding audiences of 2,000—just for her poetry readings. Now, forty years on, that is the case worldwide, but back then we were still introducing this writer to the UK, so Margaret and I slogged up and down the country, mostly by train, seemingly leaving no interview, bookshop, or event untried or unvisited. One of the many things I love about Margaret—or Peggy, as she is called by her friends and publishers—is just how game she is. I often quote her to younger writers, particularly when they need consoling. When things on our endless road trips were not going quite to plan, if we had bad hotels or late trains or when interviewers were clueless, I would apologize and she would just laugh and say in her low drawl, ‘Never mind, it’s all material’—for a novel or short story, I would imagine. On reviews that didn’t please us she would say she would prefer the reviewer to review the book that was written, not the one the reviewer wished was written, but, oh well.

  There was—and still is—a ‘Do It Yourself’ quality about her. She didn’t mind sharing taxis with large display cases (dumpbins) and boxes of her novels—she would tell tales of dragging her books on a sleigh through ice and snow to readings in northern Ontario; she didn’t mind readers asking odd questions because she told us she’d even been asked if her hair was naturally curly; she left the choice of covers to us: ‘I am sure you know what you are doing in your market’; she didn’t mind long publicity hauls with terrible food and indifferent hotels—she’d done them all her working life.

  What she did, and does, want is careful attention to the things that matter. I don’t know another mind as capacious as hers; she has a forensic brain, one that can hold the smallest business detail, read across all genres, manage a family, involve herself with Canadian politics, enjoy being funny—silly even—for charity events, support many causes, and all at the same time as developing profound ideas. No boundaries, genres, boxes, classifications, or categories can contain her; nothing is beneath her notice and everything is of interest to her.

  Unafraid of new frontiers, she was one of the first authors on Twitter and one of the first to write fiction online on Wattpad, and then there is her great invention, the LongPen machine—created so that authors can sign books remotely. She was at the forefront of warning us about climate change—in fact, reversing her literary thesis about the elements being something people have to defend themselves against. Her most famous novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, and its sequel, The Testament, warned long ago of the consequences of an authoritarian government th
at, among other things, controls women’s reproductive rights. As she said in a brilliant essay about witches, ‘When times are tough . . . those in authority start looking around for someone to burn.’

  All this, at the same time as writing more novels, essays, short stories, children’s books, and poetry.

  Atwood’s trajectory has mirrored the women’s movement. Even before the remarkable effect of The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments, which has made her rock-star famous, she was a voice that we listened to. She is in my ‘inspiring women’ pantheon because she has the knack of seeing and naming, writing in 1982: ‘Why do men feel threatened by women? I asked a male friend. They’re afraid women will laugh at them. He said, “Undercut their world view.” Then I asked some women students . . . Why do women feel threatened by men? “They’re afraid of being killed,” they said.’

  She’s never shied from uncomfortable truths. Cat’s Eye was likened to William Golding’s Lord of the Flies—showing the particular cruelty girls can inflict on each other; The Robber Bride has at its core a dastardly woman, Zenia, who steals the men of her ‘friends’. Both were a challenge to the notion of sisterhood, or that women were better than men and she got some flak about being ‘anti-feminist’. But we women know the many truths about female friendships; yet again Margaret is right in fearlessly showing the full gamut of female experience in her novels—women’s lives are the motor of her fiction.

  Over the years, each new Atwood manuscript has been received by Virago with deep curiosity and great excitement. Where other writers, even literary ones, might be predictable, Atwood never is. Her fiction gives the reader exactly what I remember her saying she desires in novels: surprise and pleasure. Of course, she does so much more than that too, but those two elements are firmly within all her work. Her novels are wide-ranging; she’s written thrillers, speculative fiction, historical fiction, contemporary and satirical novels but they are always recognizable, such that she’s earned her own adjective: ‘Atwoodian’. I remember the startling and terrible chill of reading The Handmaid’s Tale, staying up all night unable to stop turning the manuscript pages until the very end; I remember the compelling, shivery reading of Alias Grace—the word ‘Murderess. It rustles, like a taffeta skirt across the floor’—and coming to work the next day and telling the office: now she’s written an historical novel! Very few literary writers were doing that then. The same could be said for her prescient speculative fiction, the Oryx and Crake trilogy that followed the magnificent, sprawling The Blind Assassin. Wonderfully, The Blind Assassin won the 2000 Booker Prize. Margaret, Bloomsbury—Liz Calder and later Alexandra Pringle—along with her agent, Vivienne Schuster, and one of us from Virago had trotted to the award dinner with her a few times by then. Three times nominated—for The Handmaid’s Tale, Cat’s Eye, and Alias Grace—and three times disappointed. I remember on that glorious night in 2000 Nigel Newton, CEO of Bloomsbury, saying, ‘I am glad we won, but I am even happier we didn’t lose,’ and we all knew what he meant. She finally got what was deserved—and just brilliantly, again in 2019 with The Testaments—but Margaret has never been short of prizes; she’s been much garlanded and heaped with over 130 honours around the world, from the Order of Canada to Ms. magazine’s Woman of the Year, from the Edinburgh International Book Festival Enlightenment Award to the PEN Pinter Prize.

  On a long train ride from London to Glasgow (in the days when that journey took nearly eight hours) as part of one of our tours, I told her a story.

  The summer before my final year at university I went on a rubber raft ride through the whirlpool rapids beneath Niagara Falls and the trip ended tragically. A 30-foot wave tipped us over and three people out of the nearly thirty of us on the ride sadly drowned. Margaret remembered the incident: the accident had been headline news. She listened carefully to my description of fighting the waves, determined to stay alive, and then when I had finished, she asked, ‘May I have that?’ Her version of my unbelievably lucky escape from death appeared a few years later as a short story in Bluebeard’s Egg, called ‘The Whirlpool Rapids’. There are my thoughts, perfectly remembered, though Margaret took no notes.

  To find myself on Atwood’s pages was a surprise, and a deep pleasure.

  She is terrific company; such good conversations, and we have all had so many laughs with her and her late partner, Graeme Gibson. She’s got a tremendous sense of humour and she’s splendidly generous. Her contribution and importance to Virago is incalculable, beyond the over four million copies of her books we have sold, in itself an astonishing contribution.

  Ultimately, what I really treasure is her seriousness—maybe it’s a Canadian trait—and her belief in the written word: ‘The writer retains three attributes that power-mad regimes cannot tolerate: a human imagination . . . the power to communicate; and hope.’

  Unlike Virago non-fiction, where we actively seek out a woman’s point of view, in fiction we look for talented women writers. We have never had an ideal feminist novel in mind; that would be an overly prescriptive brief, for a propaganda novel and not a great work of fiction. We’ve welcomed our authors taking a feminist slant on genre fiction—most particularly crime fiction, publishing Sara Paretsky, Barbara Wilson, Sandra Scopottone, Amanda Cross, and the early crime novels of Sarah Dunant and Gillian Slovo. One of Virago’s first big novels was a feminist generational saga, Stand We at Last by Zoe Fairbairns.

  We also published contemporary fiction writers including Tatyana Tolstoya, Lisa St Aubin de Teran, and Nina Bawden; Lucinda Montefiore acquired an early Barbara Kingsolver and Ruthie bought Ali Smith’s first collection of short stories, Free Love, which we still publish alongside her novel Like. Alexandra launched Lucy Ellmann’s career with Sweet Desserts, which won the Guardian Fiction Prize; Ursula Doyle brought us the magnificent and angry novel The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud, and Paula McLain’s The Paris Wife, which told the Hemingway story from his wife Hadley’s point of view. Today’s excellent Virago editor Ailah Ahmed is taking us further afield: to Greenland with Crimson by Niviaq Korneliussen, about LGBTQ identity, and to America’s past with C. Pam Zhang’s How Much of These Hills is Gold, a Western-style novel about Chinese-American sisters during the Gold Rush.

  Gillian Slovo and Sarah Dunant both eventually found the constraints of the crime genre too binding. Gillian went on to write marvellous big sweeping novels including The Ice Road, about the siege of Leningrad. We stood holding our breath the year it was shortlisted for the 2005 Orange Prize alongside Shirley Hazzard’s The Great Fire and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, which Andrea Levy won for her novel Small Island.

  Sarah Dunant, who I have now published for over twenty-five years, moved to provocative thrillers, including Transgressions, which included a bold and controversial rape scene. That gave us both some tough media coverage to handle and was a bonding moment, though we’ve always had a rewardingly intense and honest relationship—one I value. Most surprisingly, Sarah then suddenly turned to historical fiction and The Birth of Venus launched her on an outstanding and bestselling path of novels about the lives of women in the Italian Renaissance, which she followed with two novels about the Borgias. Over the last few decades feminist and social historians have opened up vast reams of research that illuminate previously unknown ordinary lives, particularly those of women, and Sarah, a historian before she became a novelist, acknowledges that none of her historical novels could have been written even twenty-five years ago: ‘The research into courtesans, convents, women as healers, visionaries, artists and musicians had not been done . . . Inevitably, some of what historians found was tantalisingly fragmentary: like watching salmon swimming upstream—the odd glimpse as they leap out, the sun catching their scales, before plunging back into the deep. But put all those glimpses together and you can start to see the shape of the shoal under the water.’

  Her great skill is to put those very glimpses together to create characters who might well have trodden the dirty stre
ets in Rome, smelled the fetid canals of Venice, mixed oil paint in Florence, howled to escape a convent in Ferrara, danced in heavy velvet at court, saw beauty in frescos—set against a perfectly rendered backdrop. Sarah has always been keenly alive to the beat of politics, rumours, and ideas that affect our individual worlds and she is scrupulously historically accurate. I think of Sarah like a little ferret—down she goes and then up she comes—grinning with the prize—the truth. Combine that scholarship with her beguiling and visceral powers of description and we are there, on the ground, in that time.

  This imaginative truth-telling enlarges our contemporary world and gives us new understanding of women’s lives from earlier times. As Sarah says, ‘One of feminism’s great achievements is the way it has changed not only the present, but also the past.’

  Some readers believe that truth lies only in non-fiction. But to Sarah and to me and so many, it’s through imagination that we understand veracity, authenticity, and one another. I hold George Eliot in esteem for many things but especially for her view that ‘art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot’.

  Though, interestingly, Marilynne Robinson says she does not read much fiction, she does write profound novels that accord with George Eliot’s belief in the power of fiction and echoes Eliot when she says art is ‘imagining—generously—life that is not your life’, adding ‘beauty gives people hope’. Like many, I adored Marilynne’s beautiful first novel, Housekeeping, and so I made it my business to visit Ellen Levine, her long-time agent, every time I was in New York to say IF Marilynne ever wrote another novel and IF her UK publishers were not keen, I was.