On Writers and Writing

by Margaret Atwood

  This version of the God of Art – a cruel and selfish god – may seem to smack of high-Victorian moralism, but it underlies even the most fervent aestheticism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The God of High Art – just as in Barrett Browning’s poem – requires human sacrifices. If Art is a religion and artists are its priests, it follows that artists too must sacrifice. What they must sacrifice is the more human parts of themselves – the heart first. They must sacrifice the possibility of human love, like priests, in order to more perfectly serve their god.

  “Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated,” says Oscar Wilde, defending his own book. “For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty.”30 This is the language of Christianity – hope being the hope of salvation, and “the elect” being those predestined for it. A small band of initiates, then; a select few, a saving remnant.

  But among the elect, martyrdom is always a possibility; and to be an artist is not altogether a choice – the God of Art picks you, not the other way around. Therefore the artistic vocation has an aura of tragedy and doom about it. “We poets in our youth begin in gladness,” said Wordsworth, “But thereof comes in the end despondency and madness.”31 Consider Franz Kafka’s story, “A Fasting-Artist.” The fasting-artist is an artist, dedicated completely to his art. This art is grotesque: the artist stays in a cage and starves himself – much like a self-mortifying Christian ascetic of old – and at first he is very popular: crowds flock to marvel at him. Then fashions change – the art-for-art’s sake fashion was by Kafka’s time falling out of widespread favor – and the fasting-artist ends up in a neglected corner of a circus menagerie, and people forget he’s in the cage. Finally they poke around in the rotten straw and rediscover him, more dead than alive. Here’s what happens next:

  “I always wanted you to admire my fasting,” said the fasting-artist. “And we do admire it,” said the overseer obligingly. “But you shouldn’t admire it,” the fasting-artist said. “All right, we don’t admire it then,” said the overseer, “but why shouldn’t we admire it?” “Because I have to fast, I can’t help it,” said the fasting-artist. “Whatever next,” said the overseer. “And why can’t you help it?” “Because,” said the fasting-artist … “I could never find the nourishment I liked. Had I found it, believe me, I would never have caused any stir, and would have eaten my fill just like you and everyone else.” Those were his last words …32

  The fasting-artist’s hunger, like that of the saints, is for a food not of this world; in this he is sublime. But he is also ridiculous, because he is such a dingy misfit. The God of Art has chosen the fasting-artist as his disciple, but the Kafkaesque result is a combination side-show freak and Freudian compulsive.

  Once you start counting the bodies – the bodies at the foot of the altar of Art – they are numerous. By the time of George Gissing’s 1891 novel, New Grub Street, writers had come to view themselves and their activities as fitting subjects for their own art, thus giving rise to the huge – and growing – number of books in which writers write about writers writing. In New Grub Street, there are three main writers. The first is caddish Jasper Milvain, an out-and-out worshiper of Mammon who’s in the literary game for money and has no aspirations to be a priest of the imagination. He says he’s not “cut out for the work” of novels – “It’s a pity, of course – there’s a great deal of money in it.”33 He prospers, as the wicked often do in this world. The second is Edwin Reardon, who has talent and sensitivity and high principles, and marries a socially conscious woman on the strength of a modest literary success. But under the pressure of his wife’s expectations of money, inspiration deserts him, and he suffers one of the most agonizing attacks of writer’s block ever described. When he can’t produce, his wife leaves him; then he gets ill and dies. The third writer is poor Harold Biffen, who has toiled away, Flaubert-like, at a slice of realism called Mr. Bailey, Grocer. This novel is a failure – “A pretentious book of the genre ennuyant,”34 say the reviewers – but Biffen opts for the a-man-can-but-do-his-best Ivanhoe defence. “The work was done – the best he was capable of – and this satisfied him.” Finally, having run out of both hope and money, he chooses suicide. His death is peaceful – “Only thoughts of beautiful things came into his mind; he had reverted to an earlier period of life, when as yet no mission of literary realism had been imposed upon him …”35 Ah, that fateful imposed mission. Many are called, but few are chosen, and among those few, some will be martyred.

  If sacrifice was demanded of the male artist, how much more so of the women? What leads us to suspect that the fancifully embroidered scarlet letter on the breast of the punished and reviled Hester Prynne, in Hawthorne’s novel of the same name, stands not only for Adulteress, but for Artist, or even Author? A man playing the role of Great Artist was expected to Live Life – this chore was part of his consecration to his art – and Living Life meant, among other things wine, women, and song. But if a female writer tried the wine and the men, she was likely to be considered a slut and a drunk, so she was stuck with the song; and better still if it was a swan song. Ordinary women were supposed to get married, but not women artists. A male artist could have marriage and children on the side, as long as he didn’t let them get in the way – a faint hope, according to James, Connolly et al. – but for women, such things were supposed to be the way. And so this particular way must be renounced altogether by the female artist, in order to clear the way for that other way – the way of Art.

  Thus Malli, the young actress who is to play Ariel to Herr Soerenson’s Prospero in his production of The Tempest, in the Isak Dinesen story already mentioned. In great distress, Malli gives up her passionate human love for her art. “ ‘What do we get in return?’ ” she then quite reasonably asks Herr Soerenson. “ ‘In return,’ ” he says, “we get the world’s distrust – and our dire loneliness. And nothing else.’ ”36

  That’s bleak, but it can get bleaker. Thus the young actress Sibyl Vane in Dorian Gray – what chance has she got, with a name like that?37 Like the Lady of Shalott – Ophelia’s younger sister, and the singing-and-dying prototype for female artists in the nineteenth century, whom Sibyl dutifully quotes – she falls in love with a flesh-and-blood man, and because she is now putting her emotion into her life and not into her art, the God of Art punishes her, and her talent deserts her. “Without your art you are nothing,” says Dorian, deserting her in his turn. What can poor hollow, dry, empty, broken-reed Sibyl do after that but commit suicide?

  When she had herself photographed lying in her own coffin, the actress Sarah Bernhardt knew exactly what she was doing. The necrophilia and black drapery played well, because this was the image of a woman artist the public wanted and could understand: a sort of half-dead nun.

  When I was an aspiring female poet, in the late 1950s, the notion of required sacrifice was simply accepted. The same was true for any sort of career for a woman, but Art was worse, because the sacrifice required was more complete. You couldn’t be a wife and mother and also an artist, because each one of these things required total dedication. As nine-year-olds we’d all been trotted off to see the film The Red Shoes as a birthday-party treat: we remembered Moira Shearer, torn between Art and love, squashing herself under a train. Love and marriage pulled one way, Art another, and Art was a kind of demonic possession. Art would dance you to death. It would move in and take you over, and then destroy you. Or it would destroy you as an ordinary woman.

  But you didn’t have to be a nun of the imagination or nothing. The feminine of priest is not only nun but priestess, so you had a choice, and there was a difference: the Christian religion had no priestesses, so there was something pagan and possibly orgiastic implicit in the term. Nuns were cut off from men, priestesses weren’t, though their relations with men were not usually what you would call domestic.

  I first ran into the priestesses of Art in Robert Graves’s book, The White Goddess,38
in which it is maintained that women can’t be real poets unless they take on the role of the Nightmare Life-in-Death Triple Goddess, and, as her priestesses, crush men underfoot like bugs and drink their blood like wine.39 I read this when I was nineteen or so, and it was not encouraging to a girl who had been runner-up in the Consumers’ Gas Miss Homemaker Contest: drinking the blood of my paramours was not my idea of a fun-time Saturday-night date. Provincial of me, but there you are. Graves did shake me up, though, and cause me to wonder whether I was really cut out for the life of Art.

  I wondered even more when I ran across George Eliot’s 1876 novel Daniel Deronda. The hero’s mother has been a great opera singer, and has passed Daniel into other hands at the age of two, partly because she doesn’t want motherhood getting in her artistic way. She’s had lots of admirers, but having been dominated by her father she is a cold fish, and prefers men prone, with her foot on their necks. She claims she’s not a monster, but the language describing her gives us pause. She is “not quite a human mother, but a ‘Melusina’ ” – half woman, half snake.40

  “Looking at her,” says Eliot, Daniel feels “the sort of commotion that might have been excited if he had seen her going through some strange rite of a religion that gave a sacredness to crime.”41 We can make a good guess as to what that religion is, especially when we are told that she has put all of her emotions into her art, and has “nothing to give.”42 She remains partly human in that she suffers, but the largest amount of her suffering is connected with her abandonment of her art, not with the abandonment of her child. Giving up her singing is a sin against her religion – the religion of Art – and she has been punished for it.

  Daniel’s mother is also called a sorceress, and it’s a short step from that to the femme fatale, dozens of which species litter the scene by the end of the nineteenth century. One of the favorite figures of this era was Salomé, whose name I learned early as a skipping rhyme: Salomey was a dancer, she did the hootchie kootch, And when she did the hoochie kootch, she didn’t wear very mooch. On the artistic level, we have Flaubert’s “Salomé” (the short story), Oscar Wilde’s Salomé (the play), Richard Strauss’s Salomé (the opera), and many a painting. It is to her that T. S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock refers when he envisages his own head being borne in upon a platter. What was the appeal? Salomé is a figure in whom the fatal woman and the female artist are combined. She’s very good at her art, good enough to seduce most viewers, but she allows this art to be corrupted by the promise of reward, first by Herod, who promises her anything she wants in return for her dancing, and then, in some versions, by her erotic passion for John the Baptist: if she can’t have all of him, she’ll take at least the head. Finally – in Wilde and Strauss, at least – she is crushed to death for being so perverse, or else for taking off the seventh veil – we’re never entirely sure.

  Oddly enough, a remarkable number of the poems submitted by young women to the college literary magazine I helped to edit in 1960 were about Salomé. The fear seemed to be that your involvement with art would prove fatal to any man hapless enough to cross your sexual path, and you’d wake up one morning to find his head on a plate. It’s a vaguely Freudian position, I suppose: women who are too active or too smart cause men to shed their body parts at the drop of a veil.

  This was the decade just after Phillip Wylie’s Generation of Vipers had placed the blame for all the ills of the world on “Momism,” which in turn continued the nineteenth-century tradition – still very much alive then – of worrying about the castrating female. Here is Irving Layton, in the Foreword to his 1958 collection, A Red Carpet for the Sun:

  Modern women I see cast in the role of furies striving to castrate the male; their efforts aided by all the malignant forces of a civilization that has rendered the male’s creative role of revelation superfluous – if not an industrial hazard and a nuisance. We’re being feminized and proletarianized at one and the same time. This is the inglorious age of the mass-woman. Her tastes are dominant everywhere … Dionysus is dead …43

  A strange brew for me to encounter at the age of eighteen, while striving to be a poet. From this distance I can spot the mixed metaphors – the Furies usually went after men for the sin of matricide, and the Maenads, those frantic dismemberers of men and of Orpheus the poet, were not the slayers of Dionysus but his worshipers; though this fact did not make the male poets of the day feel any safer from women and their supposed lust for gonad-snipping.

  And sometimes female writers allied themselves with this mythology. If you’ve got the name, you might as well join the game. Both the nun of the imagination and the priestess of the imagination may finish up in a non-living condition at the foot of Art’s altar, but the difference is that the priestess takes someone else with her when she goes. “I eat men like air,” says death-defying, death-embracing Lady Lazarus, with her sorceress’s long red hair, in Sylvia Plath’s poem of that name – thus placing herself firmly in this tradition.

  The drawbacks to being a female writer – especially a female poet – were well known by the time I got there. Germaine Greer, in her very thorough book Slip-Shod Sibyls,44 has recounted the sad careers and frequently grim deaths of female poets from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Emily Dickinson and her reclusiveness, Christina Rossetti looking at life through the worm-holes in a shroud, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and her drug-addiction and anorexia, Charlotte Mew, a suicide, Sylvia Plath, another suicide, Anne Sexton, yet another. “The blood jet is poetry,” wrote Sylvia Plath, ten days before her own suicide. “There is no stopping it.”45 Is that where the priestess of the imagination was fated to end up – as a red puddle on the floor?

  The doomed female artist is far from dead, especially as a theme for novelists to explore. A. S. Byatt’s novel Possession rings complex changes on this figure – the female poet who renounces human love – and so, even more wickedly, does Carol Shields’s novel Swann – a female poet dedicated to her art and murdered by her husband because he can’t stand the competition. However, one of these novels is set in the past and another in a remote rural area. Unless you make your female artist a self-destructive, drug-raddled, promiscuous, hugely famous rock-singer, as in Salman Rushdie’s latest novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet, it’s not as easy today to play this image of the dying swan as fully contemporary, and, also absolutely straight, the way it was once played.

  However, it was still being played straight enough when I was starting to write. So much a part of the job description did it appear that after my first two slim volumes had been published I was asked, in all honesty, not whether I was going to commit suicide, but when. Unless you were willing to put your life on the line – or rather, dispose of it altogether – you would not be taken quite seriously as a woman poet. Or so the mythology decreed. Luckily I wrote fiction as well as poetry. Though there are some suicidal novelists too, I did feel that prose had a balancing effect. More meat and potatoes on the plate, you could say, and fewer cut-off heads.

  Now it is more possible for a woman writer to be seen as, well, just that: neither nun nor orgiastic priestess, neither more nor less than human. Nevertheless, the mythology still has power, because such mythologies about women still have power. Maenad and Pythoness wait in the wings, or their empty costumes do, and nothing is more likely to call them back again than the cult of art for art.

  In the first chapter, I spoke about the fact that various expectations and anxieties are projected onto the role of the Writer, capital W. In this chapter I touched on one batch of these – the ones having to do with the rejection of the worldly values of Mammon in favour of a total dedication to Art, and with the notions of sacrifice that came to be associated with this dedication.

  But what happens when you avoid the Slough of Despond on the “narrow is the road and strait is the gate” path of Art-for-Art’s Sake, and take another path – the one signposted Social Relevance?46 Will you end up on a panel discussion, and if so, is it the panel discussion in
Hell? But if you turn your back on Social Relevance, won’t you end up making the equivalent of verbal doilies for the gilded armchairs in the Palace of Art? It’s always a possibility.

  4

  ———

  Temptation:

  Prospero, the Wizard of Oz, Mephisto & Co.

  Who waves the wand, pulls the strings, or signs the Devil’s book?

  Again, the devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them;

  And saith unto him, All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me.

  Matthew 4: 8–9

  One must be possessed of the Devil to succeed in any of the arts.

  Voltaire1

  This court jester is expensive!

  Frederick the Great, of Voltaire2

  I hope you will not ask me what it all means, or what the moral of it is. I rank myself with the historian in this business of tale-telling, and consider that my sole affair is to hunt the argument dispassionately. Your romancer must … affect a genial height, that of a jigger of strings; and his attitude should be that of the Pulpiteer …

  Maurice Hewlett, The Forest Lovers3

  … the poet must not be a poet, he must be some sort of moral quack doctor.

  Edith Sitwell4