On Writers and Writing

by Margaret Atwood

  Occasionally, however, a writer will try. Here is the wonderful Italian writer Primo Levi, who was also a chemist, at the end of his book called The Periodic Table. He has been talking about a carbon atom, and this is what he says:

  … I will tell just one more story, the most secret, and I will tell it with the humility and restraint of him who knows from the start that his theme is desperate, his means feeble, and the trade of clothing facts in words is bound by its very nature to fail.

  It is again among us, in a glass of milk. It is inserted in a very complex, long chain, yet such that almost all of its links are acceptable to the human body. It is swallowed; and since every living structure harbors a savage distrust toward every contribution of any material of living origin, the chain is meticulously broken apart and the fragments, one by one, are accepted or rejected. One, the one that concerns us, crosses the intestinal threshold and enters the bloodstream: it migrates, knocks at the door of a nerve cell, enters, and supplants the carbon which was part of it. This cell belongs to a brain, and it is my brain, the brain of the me who is writing; and the cell in question, and within it the atom in question, is in charge of my writing, in a gigantic minuscule game which nobody has yet described. It is that which at this instant, issuing out of a labyrinthine tangle of yeses and nos, makes my hand run along a certain path on the paper, mark it with these volutes that are signs: a double snap, up and down, between two levels of energy, guides this hand of mine to impress on the paper this dot, here, this one.29

  An atom in motion. Something invisible, but common, but miraculous. We believe in it, sort of, but what we believe in more is the immediacy of Primo Levi’s hand, because he uses the present tense, which means that we are right here with him while reading, and look – here is the dot his hand has just made: the period at the end of The Periodic Table. Still, the writer behind the hand conceived of as a bit of chemistry, the writer as carbon atom – it is somehow too bloodless for us, after all.

  And so I turn to Alice Through the Looking Glass, always so useful in matters of the construction of alternate worlds. At the beginning of the story, Alice is on one side of the mirror – the “life” side, if you like – and the anti-Alice, her reflection and reverse double, is on the other, or “art” side. Like the Lady of Shalott, Alice is a mirror-gazer: the “life” side is looking in, the “art” side is looking out. But instead of breaking her mirror and thus discarding the “art” side for the hard and bright “life” side, where the “art” side is doomed to die, Alice goes the other way. She goes through the mirror, and then there is only one Alice, or only one that we can follow. Instead of destroying her double, the “real” Alice merges with the other Alice – the imagined Alice, the dream Alice, the Alice who exists nowhere. And when the “life” side of Alice returns to the waking world, she brings the story of the mirror world back with her, and starts telling it to the cat. Which at least solves the problem of audience.

  It is a false analogy, of course, because Alice is not the writer of the story about her. Nevertheless, here is my best guess, about writers and their elusive doubles, and the question of who does what as far as the actual writing goes. The act of writing takes place at the moment when Alice passes through the mirror. At this one instant, the glass barrier between the doubles dissolves, and Alice is neither here nor there, neither art nor life, neither the one thing nor the other, though at the same time she is all of these at once. At that moment time itself stops, and also stretches out, and both writer and reader have all the time not in the world.

  3

  ———

  Dedication:

  The Great God Pen

  Apollo vs. Mammon: at whose altar should the writer worship?

  Nothing is truly beautiful unless it cannot be used for anything; everything that is useful is ugly because it is the expression of some need, and those of man are ignoble and disgusting, like his poor and infirm nature.

  Théophile Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin1

  All that I am hangs by a thread tonight

  As I wait for her whom no one can command.

  Whatever I cherish most – youth, freedom, glory –

  Fades before her who bears the flute in her hand.

  And look! She comes … she tosses back her veil,

  Staring me down, serene and pitiless.

  “Are you the one,” I ask, “whom Dante heard dictate

  The lines of his Inferno?” She answers: “Yes.”

  Anna Akhmatova, “The Muse”2

  … They tore you to pieces at last, in a frenzy,

  while your sound lingered on in lions and rocks,

  and in trees and birds. You still sing there.

  Oh you lost god! You everlasting trace! Only

  Because that hatred ripped and scattered you

  Are we listeners now, and one mouth of Nature.

  Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, I, 263

  And so rapturously, too, does he sing of his griefs, this poet, while the dull muttonheads pick their teeth and mount their females. Miserable clown! Can one think of anything more ludicrous? ironic? zany? … Will the Poet, as a type, join the Priest, the Warrior, the Hero, and the Saint as melancholy museum pieces for the titillation of a universal babbitry?

  Irving Layton, Foreword, A Red Carpet for the Sun4

  “I refer to the mercenary muse whom I led to the altar of literature. Don’t, my boy, put your nose into that yoke! The awful jade will lead you a life!”

  Henry James, “The Lesson of the Master”5

  Long ago, we are told, images were worshiped as gods, and were thought to have the powers of gods; so were certain words – the holy names. Then images became representations of gods – icons, sacred in what they pointed to, not sacred as what they were in themselves. Then they became allegorical – the images alluded to or figured forth a set of ideas or relationships or entities not presented as themselves, but by stand-ins, as it were. Then art shifted its attention, and became descriptive of the natural world, a world in which God was not visible as such but was inferred as the original fabricator, thought to be lurking somewhere in the past or behind the Newtonian scenery. Then even this assumption faded. A landscape was a landscape, a cow was a cow: they might point toward states of mind and feeling, but the mind and feeling were human. The divine Real Presence had withdrawn.

  But in the West, as religion lost helium in society at large, the Real Presence crept back into the realm of art. Throughout the nineteenth century, the perception of the artist’s role shifted: by the end of it, he or she was to serve this mystic entity – Art with a capital A – by assisting in the creation of sacred space, as contained within the borders of the work of art itself. When he spoke of making a new religion and building a church filled with examples from the poetic tradition, Yeats was not alone, he was simply exemplary. The sacred space of art was conceived of as either purer or more monstrous than the norm, but certainly distinct from the vulgar, money-grubbing, banal, and profane life of society at large. The artist was to be its priest, bringing Real Presence into being as the Roman Catholic priest was thought to bring the Real Presence of God into present time and place in the celebration of the Mass. Heady stuff.

  There was a corollary. One mark of a true priest is his lack of interest in money: so goes the tradition, or rather the traditions, for many cultures share this view. But in a society that increasingly has come to value little else, where does that leave the artist and his sacred work, not to mention his heating bill?

  In the last chapter I spoke about the writer’s perception that he or she is two: one that does the living and consequently the dying, the other that does the writing and becomes a name, divorced from the body but attached to the body of work. Now I would like to explore a different dichotomy – that between art and money. Put more simply, this – to use a North American colloquialism – is where the rubber meets the road. This is where the writer finds herself squeezed between the rock of artistry and the hard place of
having to pay the rent. Should a writer write for money? And if not for money, then for what? What intentions are valid, what motivations pass muster? Where to draw the line between artistic integrity and net worth? To what, or to whom, should the writer’s efforts be dedicated?

  Already you may be thinking it’s perhaps a little vulgar of me to have brought this up – this money business. I’m thinking it myself, since, for my generation – penny-pinchers though we were – talking about money was right down there with talking about your dirty laundry. But times have changed, and dirty laundry is now a salable commodity or else an installation in a cutting-edge gallery, so although you may be thinking this is vulgar, you may also be thinking it’s direct and honest – indeed, almost respectable – for isn’t money now the measure of all things?

  In Elmore Leonard’s deconstructing-Hollywood thriller Get Shorty, a movie star and an agent are discussing a writer, considered by both of them to be a pretty low form of pond life. “ ‘A writer can spend years working on a book he isn’t sure will ever sell. What makes him do it?’ ” says the movie star. “ ‘Money. The idea of hitting it big,’ ” says the agent.6 The money explanation has at least the virtue of being democratic – everyone can understand it – and also plausible, whereas any shufflings and ramblings about Art, capital A – such as those to which I will shortly subject you – would have had an antiquated and phony air in the light of Hollywood’s uncomplicated and shining materialism.

  Nor is this true just of Hollywood. Don’t publishers leak the news of large advance sums in the hope that readers will then respect the book more? Why pretend people aren’t interested? And the further away from the university classroom they get, the more interested they may admit to being. Back in 1972, I did a one-person poetry-reading tour the length of the Ottawa River Valley. This was then a somewhat remote area and not thickly strewn with bookstores; I went by bus, carted my own books with me to sell – I was good at making change, having once worked at a sports-equipment fair – and at one stage I hauled these books around behind me on a toboggan, due to a flash blizzard. In the four small towns I visited, I was the first poet to appear within living memory, or possibly ever. The readings were packed, not because people loved either poetry or me, but because they’d already seen that week’s movie. The two best questions I got asked were, “Is your hair really like that or do you get it done?” and “How much money do you make?” Neither of these were hostile questions. Both were pertinent.

  The hair question was aimed at discovering – or so I felt – whether my wild and disheveled, dare I say inspired or slightly crazed look – the right look, as everyone suspected, for a female poet – was natural to me or had been manufactured. As for the money question, this was simply an acknowledgment of my humanity: the writer has a body, which includes a stomach. Writers too must eat. You can have money of your own; you can marry money; you can attract a patron – whether a king, a duke, or an arts board; you can have a day job; or you can sell to the market. These are the choices, for a writer, in relation to money, and they are the only choices.

  The money factor is often underplayed in biographies of writers, the biographer being as a rule much more fascinated by love affairs, neuroses, addictions, influences, diseases, and bad habits generally. Yet money is often definitive, not just in what a writer eats but in what he or she writes. Certain tales are emblematic – poor Walter Scott, for instance, who signed a promissory note for a partner, and upon the latter’s bankruptcy scribbled himself to death to pay off the debt. Such nightmares haunt our waking moments, let alone our sleeping ones. Chained to the desk. Forced to crank out the literary fretwork, regardless of inclination, regardless of whether it’s any good. Slave of the pen. What purgatory.

  Even if we avoid signing promissory notes, there are many pitfalls. There is, for instance, the publishing system, and its growing domination by the bottom-line bean-counters. “We don’t sell books,” one publisher said, “we sell solutions to marketing problems.” We’ve all heard the story about the writer whose first novel hasn’t done well, and who then presents the second one. “If only this were a first novel,” sighs the agent. “Then I might be able to sell it.” Moral: a publisher will gamble, but – increasingly – only once. Gone are the days – when were those days, anyway? – when a Maxwell Perkins-like publisher7 might support a writer through two or three or four financial failures, waiting for the big breakthrough. Nowadays,

  He who writes, and makes it pay,

  Will live to write another day.8

  If you absolutely insist on eating, and can neither sell your next novel nor get a job as a waitperson, there are literary grants, should you be able to elbow aside the thousands of others in the queue. There are creative-writing teaching posts, but there’s a queue for those as well. For the newly or the effectively published, there are also international writers’ festivals; there are the dreaded twenty-city book tours; there are interviews in newspapers. There didn’t use to be any of those things.

  Failing all of that, there is hackwork. There’s publishing yourself on the Internet. And, as a last resort, there are pseudonyms. That way you can make your novel look like a first novel, even if it isn’t one. It’s a jungle out there in alphabet-land. No, it’s more like a machine. It’s cog eat cog.

  When I found I was a writer at the age of sixteen, money was the last thing on my mind, but it shortly became the first. As I turned seventeen and eighteen and nineteen and took stock of the situation, the anxiety increased. How was I was going to live? I was brought up by my Depression-hardened parents to be, as they say now, fiscally responsible, and was expected to support myself. I had no doubt that I could do so, one way or another; but I didn’t know what danger I was in as a young person attempting to live in the world as a writer, where so many forces might conspire to snuff out my light.

  I didn’t encounter any writing about writers and their writing lives until I’d made it to university and had run headlong into Cyril Connolly’s Enemies of Promise, originally published in 1938 but reissued in time for me to be frightened by it.9 It lists the very many bad things that can happen to a writer to keep him – him is assumed – from producing his best work. These include not only the practice of journalism – a bloodsucker for sure – but also popular success, getting too involved with political agendas, not having any money, and being a homosexual. About the most effective thing a writer could do to support himself, said Cyril Connolly – both he and I were living then in the age before the proliferation of grants – was to marry a rich woman. There wasn’t much hope of this for me, but all other avenues, according to Connolly, were fraught with peril.

  I did not for an instant think I would be able to make any money from writing – or not from the kind of writing I saw myself as doing. But then, selling out to the marketplace wasn’t much of a threat to me at that time. For one thing, much of what I was writing was poetry. Enough said. As far as the rest of it went – by the rest of it I mean novels – as I’ve mentioned, everyone enters the scene at a certain point in time and also in a certain place, and this was Canada in the late 1950s. Everything has changed now, of course, and in my country a six-figure advance is within reach of the favored young novelist; but such things were out of the question then. There were few local publishers, and those few made their living from acting as agents for imported work, and from selling school texts. They weren’t inclined to take risks, since there wasn’t much demand for indigenous writing. The colonial mentality was still in force, meaning that the Great Good Place for the arts was thought to be somewhere else, such as London, Paris, or New York, and if you were a Canadian writer you were assumed by your countryfolk to be not only inferior, but pitiable, pathetic, and pretentious. Wyndham Lewis, who sat out the war in Toronto, was asked by a local matron where he was living, and when he told her, she said, “Mr. Lewis, that is not a very fashionable address.” “Madam,” replied the writer, “Toronto is not a very fashionable address.” Nor was it at the ti
me I began writing. If you wanted to be a serious writer, you had to do it for art’s sake, because there was faint hope of being able to do it for money.

  By the time I was twenty I knew some people who wrote, but not one of them expected to make a living at it. To get even a crumb fallen from the literary movable feast, you’d have to publish outside the country, and that meant you would have to write something that might snare you a foreign publisher. It went without saying that these foreign publishers were not much interested in Canada. Voltaire’s dismissal of the place – “quelques arpents de neige” – was still the consensus. James Joyce’s well-known triple-barreled slogan, “silence, exile, and cunning,”10 had a distinct resonance for aspiring Canadian writers, especially the exile part of it.

  Thus my generation was doomed, faute de mieux, to a devotion to art for its own sake, though we had by no means explored the history and the iconography of that position. If we had, we might have thought that our remoteness from the temptations of Mammon was good for us: there were those who held that money, although necessary for life, was a necessary evil, at least for an artist. Starve in a garret, get some visions. However, to stay alive, one had to have at least a bit of loot – best if it was inherited, because then one didn’t have to grub around for it and demean oneself; but to write for money, or even to be thought to have done so, put you in the prostitute category.

  So it remains in certain quarters to this day. I can still hear the sneer in the tone of the Parisian intellectual who asked me, “Is it true you write the bestsellers?” “Not on purpose,” I replied somewhat coyly. Also somewhat defensively, for I knew these equations as well as he did, and was thoroughly acquainted with both kinds of snobbery: that which ascribes value to a book because it makes lots of money, and that which ascribes value to a book because it doesn’t. For the young writer who has purist ambitions, who wants to be authentic, who wants to be an artist of some sort, it’s a Catch-22, especially when society in general shares the view expressed in the Eudora Welty story, “The Petrified Man” – “ ‘If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?’ ”11 Either poor and real, or rich and a sell-out with a price-tag on your soul. So goes the mythology.