On Writers and Writing

by Margaret Atwood

  … if we look at writers through the ages we see that they have always been political … To deny politics to a writer is to deny him part of his humanity.

  Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise5

  Some, patagonian in their own esteem,

  and longing for the multiplying word,

  join party and wear pins, now have a message,

  an ear, and the convention-hall’s regard.

  Upon the knees of ventriloquists, they own,

  of their dandled brightness, only the paint and board.

  A. M. Klein, “Portrait of the Poet as Landscape”6

  A shame he couldn’t manipulate natural elements as he could manipulate human logic and belief … If success did not come, the magic-maker could sigh for the plight of the human race, its loss of mystical dignity and his loss of money; if success came, the magic-maker could take it with delicacy and restraint, keeping a good eye on practicalities. Or he could double under the weight of his people’s devotion if he were an unusually sincere magician with super-respect for his craft. And fear for its real power.

  Gwendolyn MacEwen, Julian the Magician7

  In the last chapter I said that images were once gods, but the corollary of that is that gods were once images. We know of god-images that appeared to eat, others that appeared to speak, and yet others with furnaces inside them in which children were sacrificed. Artificers made the images, priests acted as the puppeteers behind the scenes.

  The images themselves – those graven images of the sort denounced and derided by the Old Testament prophets – were cold, hard, and inert; yet they were of considerable fascination to the art-for-art writers in the second half of the nineteenth century. They were works of art; they might also be semi-animate idols, like the Vénus de l’Isle that crushes her beloved to death in Mérimée’s eponymous story, or like the death-dealing goddess in Flaubert’s brutal and much-bedizened Salammbô. Underneath the raging conflict between the producers of art and its potential consumers was a subtext that had to do with idolatry. Is the worship of “false” gods – including the false gods of Art and Beauty, when split off from the needs of human society – not merely neutral, but the worship of evil? How guilty – therefore – should a writer feel about his art?

  No writer appears to have felt more anxiety in the face of such questions than Henry James. In 1909, he published The Lesson of the Master, in which were collected a number of stories written primarily in the 1890s for The Yellow Book. This was the magazine of the Aesthetic Movement, of which he fundamentally disapproved. Each of these stories is about a writer, or writers: an older writer who urges a younger one to adopt a selfless, priestly dedication to his art, along with sexual abstinence, and then marries the desired girl himself; a wonderful, obscure writer who is discovered and “lionized” by a social world that doesn’t understand his art, an experience which kills him; a poor, authentic writer who vainly longs for money and recognition, while a rich, famous, vulgar one – a woman – vainly longs instead for the artistic cachet that comes with popular failure; a master writer, the central secret of whose art no one can quite make out; and a writer who has a brilliant reputation, but is, underneath it all, a fraud. James had nervous fun with these stories, and taken together they demarcate the essentially Flaubertian attitudes toward “being a writer” which had coalesced into received writerly wisdom by that time.

  There is another story that might well have been included in this gallery: “The Author of Beltraffio,” first published in 1884. But this tale is altogether darker. A writer called Marc Ambient – Marc for Marcus Aurelius, possibly, and Ambient as in ambient glow, perhaps – this master writer has produced a masterwork, a novel called Beltraffio, which is a kind of “aesthetic warcry.” He lives in a charming “palace of art, on a slightly reduced scale,” and has a lovely little son; but he is married to a “narrow, cold, Calvinistic wife, a rigid moralist,” who despises his love of beauty and thinks his books are evil – so much so that she tries to keep her son away from his father, and dreads the day when he will be old enough to read Ambient’s work, thus becoming corrupted by it. Of her, it is sneeringly said that she believes art should have a “ ‘purpose.’ ” Among those who ascribe to the “gospel of art,” what heresy!

  On the surface of things, the perfection-seeking Ambient might seem to be the “good” embodiment of James’s own artistic views, with the wife incarnating nasty constipated philistinism. But that is just on the surface: Henry James had too much of the American Puritan in him to be an amoral aesthete. Marc Ambient considers “all life” to be “plastic material” for his art, and that art is of a suspicious nature. He says of it,

  “This new affair must be a golden vessel, filled with the purest distillation of the actual; and oh how it worries me, the shaping of the vase, the hammering of the metal! I have to hammer it so fine, so smooth … And all the while I have to be so careful not to let a drop of the liquor escape!”8

  The Grecian urn again, perhaps, but in a context that suggests not only the sort of Daedalus-like craftsman-artificer invoked at the end of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but also the alchemist, dabbler in distillations. And what sort of vessel is he making with such toil, and what does it hold? The elixir of life, or the blood of a sacrifice?

  The latter, we suspect by the end of the story; for husband-artist and wife-society manage to kill their child between them. That the wife does not bear the sole responsibility – that the child is sacrificed not just to the mean, cramped idol of conventional morality, but also to the gilded idol of Art – is suggested by the name of Ambient’s masterwork. “Beltraffio” is not a real word, and does not appear to be a place name, Italian or otherwise; but it is worth mentioning that “tra” in Italian means “among,” while “fio” means “penalty.” As for “bel,” it is “beautiful,” of course; but Belzebù is the Italian word for Beelzebub, the Devil – cognate with all the Bels and Baals of the ancient Middle East, so frequently anathematized in the Bible. At the end of her life, we are told, the wife dips into “the black ‘Beltraffio.’ ” We can only hope her soul survived the reading, for, in the Western literary tradition, a black book can have only one owner.

  As for the child, he might have been saved by a compromise between art and society; but what form might such a compromise have taken? This is certainly a question that kept James awake nights.

  In the last chapter I spoke about the often drastic mythologies concerning the writer as artist, a self-dedicated priest or priestess of the imagination, serving the exacting, demanding, and potentially destructive cult of art for art’s sake. If a writer places himself within this framework, then he will see his duty as devotion to his art, and his desired goal as the creation of a perfect work. In truth, if you do not acknowledge at least some loyalty to this ideal, as the musician Klesmer tells the society girl Gwendolen Harleth in George Eliot’s novel Daniel Deronda, you are unlikely to achieve more than mediocrity, and perhaps a “glaring insignificance.”9 An art of any kind is a discipline; not only a craft – that too – but a discipline in the religious sense, in which the vigil of waiting, the creation of a receptive spiritual emptiness, and the denial of self all play their part.

  But that is to consider the artist only in relation to his art. What about his relation to the outside world – to what we call society? Large claims have been made in this respect. The pen is mightier than the sword,10 we are told; the poet is the unacknowledged legislator of the world.11

  This may be overdoing it a bit, especially in the age of the atom bomb, the Internet, and the rapid disappearance of other species from this earth. But still, let us suppose that the words the writer writes do not exist in some walled garden called “literature,” but actually get out there into the world, and have effects and consequences. Don’t we then have to begin talking about ethics and responsibilities, and other, similarly irksome things that the priest of the imagination has claimed it as his prerogative to disregard?
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br />   But let us think again about the word priest. Isn’t a priest more than a worshiper, one who serves in a ritual sense? Isn’t he also a shepherd of the people, a mediator between God and everybody else? Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus sets out to “forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”12 Conscience: that’s a morally loaded word. If the writer has such powers, let us consider the wielding of these powers, both in relation to the wielders – the writers – and to the wieldees – the rest of us.

  Nobody hates writers more than writers do. The most vicious and contemptuous portraits of writers, both as individuals and as types, appear in books written by writers themselves. Nobody loves them more, either. Megalomania and paranoia share the writer’s mirror. The writer-as-Faust looks into it and sees a grandiose and evil and superhuman Mephistopheles, master of magic, controller of destinies, to whom other human beings are as puppets whose strings he controls, or as fools whose hearts and deepest secrets he holds in the palm of his hand; the writer-as-Mephistopheles looks into the same mirror and sees a shivering and pathetic Faust, longing for eternal youth and terrific sex and untold riches, and clutching desperately to the pitifully delusional belief that he can conjure up these things through the miserable scribbling, the puerile fooling around with words, that he has the overweening nerve to call “art.”

  In the twentieth century, writers have on the whole been haunted by the specter of their own inconsequence. Not Shelley’s powerful world-shaping poet, but Eliot’s hesitant J. Alfred Prufrock, has been the general pattern. Books about the loathsomeness or enviousness or pettiness or foolishness of the writer proliferate. Here is a portrait of the writer as messed-up geek, from Don De Lillo’s Mao II. An editor is describing his work, to a writer:

  “For many happy years, I’ve listened to writers and their brilliant kvetching. The most successful writers make the biggest complainers … I wonder if the qualities that produce the top writer also account for the ingenuity and size of his complaints. Does writing come out of bitterness and rage or does it produce bitterness and rage? … The solitude is killing. The nights are sleepless. The days are taut with worry and pain. Bemoan, bemoan …”

  “It must be hard for you,” [says the writer], “dealing with these wretches day after day.”

  “No, it’s easy. I take them to a major eatery. I say, Pooh pooh pooh pooh. I say, Drinky drinky drinky. I tell them their books are doing splendidly in the chains. I tell them readers are flocking to the malls. I say, Coochy coochy coo … There is miniseries interest, there is audio-cassette interest, the White House wants a copy for the den.”13

  And here, from a short story by Mavis Gallant called “A Painful Affair,” is a letter from English writer Prism to French writer Grippes, explaining why Grippes should not come to live in London, as he has suggested he may do:

  In Paris, Prism wrote, Grippes could be recognized on sight as a literary odd-jobs man with style. No one would call him a climber – at least, not to his face. Rather, Grippes seemed to have been dropped in early youth into one of those middling-high peaks of Paris bohemia from which the artist can see both machine-knit and cashmere blazers hanging in the Boulevard Haussmann department stores and five-thousand-franc custom tailoring. In England, where caste signs were radically different, he might give the false impression that he was a procurer or a drug pusher and be gunned down at a bus stop.14

  Prism and Grippes are both vain, both highly sensitive about their own reputations; each tries to do the other down over the most trivial of imagined slights. Martin Amis’s novel The Information is similar, as are many, many more, among the most recent being – for instance – the “writer” characters in David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews With Hideous Men. Why this self-loathing? Perhaps it’s the gap between the image – inherited from the Romantics – and the reality. What will the glorious dead, the giants of literature, make of their ninety-pound-weakling descendants?

  Here is A. M. Klein on the modern poet’s ignominious obscurity:

  We are sure only that from our real society he has disappeared; he simply does not count, except in the pullulation of vital statistics – somebody’s vote, perhaps, an anonymous taunt of the Gallup poll, a dot in a government table – but not felt, and certainly far from eminent – in a shouting mob, somebody’s sigh.

  O, he who unrolled our culture from his scroll – the prince’s quote, the rostrum-sounding roar – who under one name made articulate heaven, and under another the seven-circled air, is, if he is at all, a number, an x, a Mr. Smith in a hotel register, – incognito, lost, lacunal.15

  (This psychic wound appears to be suffered largely by men. Women writers weren’t included in the Romantic roll-call, and never had a lot of Genius medals stuck onto them; in fact, the word “genius” and the word “woman” just don’t really fit together in our language, because the kind of eccentricity expected of male “geniuses” would simply result in the label “crazy,” should it be practiced by a woman. “Talented,” “great,” even – these words have been applied. But even when they really did affect their own societies, female artists have not often confessed to the ambition to do so. Consequently those of the present day don’t feel a slippage in their power or a demotion in their place on the world’s stage, and they may suspect that they’re doing better today than previously, so they don’t feel too puny by comparison with a horde of illustrious female ancestors.)

  I will now attempt to discuss some of the alternatives to the high-minded art-for-art identity of the writer, and the crises of self-perception such alternative identities may involve. One of these concerns the curious node where art and money and power intersect; the other – and it is not unrelated – concerns something we refer to as “moral responsibility,” or else as “social responsibility.” The place where others touch the artist – in ways that might control what is produced – we could label “money and power.” The place where the artist touches others through what he produces we could label “moral and social responsibility.”

  The money-and-power question can be boiled down to its shortest form: is your soul on the market, and if so what’s the price, and who’s the buyer, and who will crush you like a soft-shelled crab if you don’t sell, and what do you hope to get in return?

  Here is a joke:

  The Devil comes to the writer and says, “I will make you the best writer of your generation. Never mind generation – of this century. No – this millennium! Not only the best, but the most famous, and also the richest; in addition to that, you will be very influential and your glory will endure for ever. All you have to do is sell me your grandmother, your mother, your wife, your kids, your dog and your soul.”

  “Sure,” says the writer, “Absolutely – give me the pen, where do I sign?” Then he hesitates. “Just a minute,” he says. “What’s the catch?”

  Suppose the writer signs the Devil’s document, and suppose that worldly power is part of the contract, as it would have been for Jesus had he succumbed to the Tempter in the desert. If a writer gets this kind of power, at what point can he be said to be misusing it? The short form of the social responsibility problem is probably: are you your brother’s keeper, and if so to what extent, and are you willing to mangle your artistic standards and become a Pulpiteer, a preachy manipulator of two-dimensional images, in order to ram home some – usually somebody else’s – worthy message or other?

  And if you aren’t your brother’s keeper, if you stay shut within your ivory tower, are you, by default, Cain the homicidal – no, the fratricidal, since all men are brothers – with blood on your hands and a mark on your forehead? Does your inaction lead to societal crime?

  There are no neat answers; but if you take up writing, you’ll run into the questions sooner or later. Perhaps I shouldn’t even call them questions. Perhaps I should call them “conundrums.”

  First, the problem of moral and social responsibility in relation to the content of a work of art. For instance, if a man murders som
eone, then he is a murderer, and will be caught if possible, and put on trial, and so forth. But if a writer murders someone in a book – if he has a character dedicate himself to the commission of the perfect murder as an aesthetic act, a work of art, as for instance André Gide has done in Les Caves du Vatican – then what is he guilty of, and how are we to judge his crime? Should we – indeed, can we – evaluate his book simply according to aesthetic standards, as an art-object – how mellifluous the paragraphs, how symmetrical or lopsided the structure, whether or not the metaphors are both apt and unusual, or whether the plot ends with a satisfying bang or an ironic whimper? And what if his paper murder inspires someone else to commit a real one?

  Is the writer above the moral law – is he a Nietzschean Übermensch, to whom the ordinary rules observed by the boring, dimwitted, talentless, run-of-the-mill hoi polloi ought not to apply? On the other hand, if writing does not express merely Itself-as-an-art-object – if it really is self-expression, on the part of the writer – what kind of self can such a murder-creating writer be exposing to view? Not a very nice one, you’d say. An amoral self at best; at worst, a gloating monster.

  Susan Sontag, chief priestess of both high modernism and high postmodernism, speaking recently about her early anti-traditional essays, delivered herself of the following confession:

  I was involved in an intense self-mortification … Those essays aren’t just austere, they’re positively ascetic, as if I didn’t trust the sensuality of my imagination. I think I was afraid of getting lost. I just wanted to support things that were good and that would be improving to people, and that was natural to me, because I always had a moralistic frame of mind.16

  Improving to people. Ah yes. Every parent longs for it, this improving function of art, and every school board in North America would agree with it, and some of them would then use their agreement as an excuse for censorship. But improving to people how? And which people, and in what ways do they need to be improved? Improved, and also protected from influences that some might consider counter-improving?