On Writers and Writing

by Margaret Atwood

  I was holding forth about this a while ago at a dinner for a bunch of writers. “Gilgamesh was the first writer,” I said. “He wants the secret of life and death, he goes through hell, he comes back, but he hasn’t got immortality, all he’s got is two stories – the one about his trip, and the other, extra one about the flood. So the only thing he really brings back with him is a couple of stories. Then he’s really, really tired, and then he writes the whole thing down on a stone.”

  “Yeah, that’s what it is,” said the writers. “You go, you get the story, you’re whacked out, you come back and write it all down on a stone. Or it feels like a stone by the sixth draft,” they added.

  “Go where?” I said.

  “To where the story is,” they said.

  Where is the story? The story is in the dark. That is why inspiration is thought of as coming in flashes. Going into a narrative – into the narrative process – is a dark road. You can’t see your way ahead. Poets know this too; they too travel the dark roads. The well of inspiration is a hole that leads downwards.

  “Reach me a gentian, give me a torch!” says D. H. Lawrence, that most chthonic of writers, in his poem, “Bavarian Gentians.” “Let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of this flower / down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness / even where Persephone goes …”42 Yes, but why does the poet himself want to go down those dark stairs? It isn’t a question he answers in the poem, but I’d guess it’s not because he wants to die. Rather it’s because he’s a poet, and he must make such a descent in order to do what he does. He must partake of both realms, as Rilke claimed.

  The Underworld guards the secrets. It’s got the skeletons in the closet, and any other skeletons you might wish to get your hands on. It’s got the stories, or quite a few of them. “There is something down there and you want it told,”43 as poet Gwendolyn MacEwen says. The swimmer among the jeweled dead – double-gendered, like the seer Tiresias – in Adrienne Rich’s poem “Diving Into the Wreck” has a similar motive:

  There is a ladder.

  The ladder is always there …

  We know what it is for,

  we who have used it …

  I go down.

  I came to explore the wreck.

  The words are purposes.

  The words are maps.

  I came to see the damage that was done

  and the treasures that prevail …

  … the thing I came for:

  the wreck and not the story of the wreck

  the thing itself and not the myth44

  The Québecoise poet Anne Hébert also wrote an astonishing poem along these lines. It’s called “The Tomb of Kings.” In it, a dreaming child – a girl, “amazed, barely born” – goes down into a tomb, through an underground labyrinth, carrying her heart on her fist in the form of a blind falcon. Down there she finds the dead kings; she also finds their stories, “a few patiently-wrought tragedies” which now appear as jeweled works of art. An exchange takes place – a vampiristic ritual in which the dead drink the living, and try to kill her. She shakes the dead away and frees herself; but as a result of whatever it is that has gone on, her heart – the blind bird – shows signs of being able to see.45

  The dead get blood; as I said earlier, they are assumed to be hungry and thirsty. In return, the poet gets clairvoyance, and the completion of her identity as a poet. It’s an old arrangement.

  All writers learn from the dead. As long as you continue to write, you continue to explore the work of writers who have preceded you; you also feel judged and held to account by them. But you don’t learn only from writers – you can learn from ancestors in all their forms. Because the dead control the past, they control the stories, and also certain kinds of truth – what Wilfred Owen, in his descent-to-the-Underworld poem, “Strange Meeting,” calls the “truth untold”46 – so if you are going to indulge in narration, you’ll have to deal, sooner or later, with those from previous layers of time. Even if that time is only yesterday, it isn’t now. It isn’t the now in which you are writing.

  All writers must go from now to once upon a time; all must go from here to there; all must descend to where the stories are kept; all must take care not to be captured and held immobile by the past. And all must commit acts of larceny, or else of reclamation, depending how you look at it. The dead may guard the treasure, but it’s useless treasure unless it can be brought back into the land of the living and allowed to enter time once more – which means to enter the realm of the audience, the realm of the readers, the realm of change.

  We could go on to make explicit what has been implicit. We could talk about inspiration, or about trances and dream visions, or about charms and invocations – all of them linked with poetic traditions of long standing; then we could go one step further, and talk – as many have about the shamanistic role of the writer. This may of course be a metaphor, but, if so, it does seem to be one that has held a central significance for writers over a very long period of time.

  Such subjects can get murky or pretentious with astonishing rapidity, but I’ll try to lend some respectability to the proceedings by leaving you with the words of a real scholar. This is from the Italian social historian Carlo Ginzburg’s book, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath:

  Indubitable … is the deep resemblance that binds the myths that later merged in the witches’ Sabbath. All of them work a common theme: going into the beyond, returning from the beyond. This elementary narrative nucleus has accompanied humanity for thousands of years. The countless variations introduced by utterly different societies, based on hunting, on pasture and on agriculture, have not modified its basic structure. Why this permanence? The answer is possibly very simple. To narrate means to speak here and now with an authority that derives from having been (literally or metaphorically) there and then. In participation in the world of the living and of the dead, in the sphere of the visible and of the invisible, we have already recognized a distinctive trait of the human species. What we have tried to analyze here is not one narrative among many, but the matrix of all possible narratives.47

  As the best authorities have it, easy to go there, but hard to come back; and then you must write it all down on a stone. Finally, if you are lucky and if the right reader comes along, the stone will speak. It alone will remain in the world to tell the story.

  I will give the last word to the poet Ovid, who has the Sibyl of Cumae speak, not only for herself, but also – we suspect – for him, and for the hopes and fates of all writers:

  But still, the fates will leave me my voice,

  and by my voice I shall be known.48

  Notes

  Epigraphs

  1. “The Robber Bridegroom” is to be found in any standard edition of Grimms’ Fairy Tales. The translation is mine. In this excerpt, the heroine is telling a true story in the guise of a dream.

  2. Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Millers Prologue,” from The Canterbury Tales, lines 3173–7, F. N. Robinson (ed.), The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (London: Oxford University Press, 1957). The author is advising the reader who doesn’t like what he’s reading to read something else.

  3. A. M. Klein, “Portrait of the Poet as Landscape,” The Rocking Chair and Other Poems (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1966), p. 55.

  Introduction: Into the labyrinth

  1. Elias Canetti, The Agony of Flies (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1994), p. 13.

  2. Mavis Gallant, Preface, Selected Stories (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1996), p. x.

  3. Marguerite Duras, Mark Polizzotti (trans.), Writing (Cambridge, MA: Lumen Editions, 1993), p. 7.

  4. Percy Bysshe Shelley, “A Defense of Poetry” (1821), Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (eds.), Shelleys Poetry and Prose: Authoritative Texts, Criticism (New York: Norton, 1977).

  5. James Reaney, “The Bully,” Robert Weaver and Margaret Atwood (eds.), The Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in English (Toronto: Oxford University Press Canada, 19
86), p. 153.

  6. Ian McEwan, “Reflections of a Kept Ape,” In Between the Sheets (London: Jonathan Cape, 1978), p. 438.

  7. Reena is an acquaintance of the author.

  8. Gallant, Preface, Selected Stories, p. ix.

  1 Orientation: Who do you think you are?

  1. E. K. Brown, “The Problem of a Canadian Literature,” A. J. M. Smith (ed.), Masks of Fiction: Canadian Critics on Canadian Prose (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1961), p. 47.

  2. James Reaney, “The Canadian Poet’s Predicament,” A. J. M. Smith (ed.), Masks of Poetry: Canadian Critics on Canadian Verse (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1962), p. 115.

  3. Milton Wilson, “Other Canadians and After,” Masks of Poetry, p. 38.

  4. Alice Munro, “Cortes Island,” The Love of a Good Woman (Toronto: Penguin, 1999), p. 143.

  5. Kobo Abé, E. Dale Saunders (trans.), The Woman in the Dunes (New York: Vintage, 1964, 1972).

  6. A. M. Klein, “Portrait of the Poet as Landscape,” The Rocking Chair and Other Poems (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1966), p. 50.

  7. Northrop Frye said this frequently in lectures attended by the author during her undergraduate studies at the University of Toronto.

  8. Elmore Leonard, Get Shorty (New York: Delta, Dell, 1990), p. 176.

  9. Alice Munro, Who Do You Think You Are? (Agincourt, ONT: Signet, 1978).

  10. Ibid., p. 200.

  2 Duplicity: The jekyll hand, the hyde hand, and the slippery double

  1. Gwendolyn MacEwen, “The Left Hand and Hiroshima,” Breakfast for Barbarians (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1966), p. 26.

  2. Nadine Gordimer, Introduction, Selected Stories (London: Bloomsbury, 2000), p. 4.

  3. See Isaiah Berlin, Henry Hardy (ed.), The Roots of Romanticism (Princeton University Press, 1999).

  4. King Lear, Act III, Scene iv.

  5. Robert Browning, “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” E. K. Brown and J. O. Bailey (eds.), Victorian Poetry (New York: Ronald Press, 1942, 1962), p. 220.

  6. In Adelbert von Chiamisso’s novel of the same name (London: Camden House, 1993). For a full account of romantic doubles, see Ralph Tymms, Doubles in Literary Psychology (Oxford: Bowes and Bowes, 1949).

  7. Daryl Hine, “The Doppelgänger,” The Oxford Book of Canadian Verse (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1960), p. 318.

  8. Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop (Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1998).

  9. E. L. Doctorow, City of God (New York: Random House, 2000), p. 65.

  10. Isak Dinesen, “A Consolatory Tale,” Winter’s Tales (New York: Vintage, 1993), p. 296.

  11. Patrick Tierney, The Highest Altar (New York: Viking, 1989).

  12. The poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti uses this idea in his well-known picture, How They Met Themselves.

  13. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1992).

  14. William Fryer Harvey, The Beast with Five Fingers (New York: Dutton, 1947).

  15. Malleus Maleficarum or Hexenhammer (1484), published by the Dominican inquisitor and the prior of Cologne, was the contemporary textbook on witchcraft.

  16. Danny Shanahan, “The moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on to a three-week, twenty-city book tour,” New Yorker, February 21, 2000, p. 230.

  17. Jorge Luis Borges, “Borges and I,” James E. Irby (trans.), Everything and Nothing (New York: New Directions, 1999), pp. 74–5.

  18. Robertson Davies, The Merry Heart: Robertson Davies Selections 1980–1995, (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1996), p. 358.

  19. See Leigh Hunt’s poem, “Abou Ben Adhem,” anthologized in The Book of Gems (1838), David Jesson-Dibley (ed.), Selected Writings (Manchester: Fyfield Books, 1990); see also the many war memorials in which an angel holds a book, in which, we may assume, the names of the blessed are written.

  20. Except for St. John’s gospel 8: 6–8, where he writes on the ground with his finger. But we aren’t told what he writes.

  21. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Purloined Letter,” Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1956).

  22. Revelation 22: 18–19.

  23. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Hannah Arendt (ed.), Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969).

  24. See Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism.

  25. In the legends of ouiskijek, the trickster, who punished his own asshole for speaking out of turn.

  26. William S. Burroughs, The Naked Lunch (New York: Grove Press, 1992).

  27. Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, p. 47.

  28. Dinesen, “A Consolatory Tale,” p. 309.

  29. Primo Levi, The Periodic Table (New York: Schocken Books, 1984), pp. 232–3.

  3 Dedication: The Great God Pen

  1. Théophile Gautier, Preface, Mademoiselle de Maupin (New York: Modern Library, 1920), p. xxv.

  2. Anna Akhmatova, “The Muse,” Stanley Kunitz with Max Hayward (trans.), Poems of Akhmatova (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1973), p. 79.

  3. Rainer Maria Rilke, “26, [But you, godlike, beautiful],” David Young (trans.), Sonnets to Orpheus, Part I (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1987), p. 53.

  4. Irving Layton, Foreword, A Red Carpet for the Sun (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1959).

  5. Henry James, The Lesson of the Master and Other Stories (London: John Lehmann, 1948), p. 60.

  6. Elmore Leonard, Get Shorty (New York: Delta, Dell, 1990), p. 313.

  7. Maxwell Perkins (1884–1947), as editor-in-chief of Scribners, was the archetypal nurturing editor who published works by Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe. The character of Foxhall Edwards in Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again (1941) is thought to be based on him.

  8. A paraphrase of the well-known couplet, “He who fights and runs away/Will live to fight another day.”

  9. Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1961).

  10. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: Penguin, 1993), p. 241.

  11. Eudora Welty, “The Petrified Man,” Selected Stories of Eudora Welty (New York: The Modern Library, 1943), p. 55.

  12. Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (New York: Vintage, Random House, 1979, 1983).

  13. Isak Dinesen, “Tempests,” Anecdotes of Destiny (London: Penguin, 1958), p. 72.

  14. “Lord, I am not worthy,” Matthew 8: 8.

  15. John 8: 32.

  16. See John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” Douglas Bush (ed.), Selected Poems and Letters (Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1959).

  17. For a definitive and condensed treatment of this conflict, see Henry James’s story, “The Author of Beltraffio,” first published in 1884. See also chapter 4.

  18. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “The Palace of Art,” George Benjamin Woods and Jerome Hamilton (eds.), Poetry of the Victorian Period (Chicago: Scott, Foresman, 1930, 1955).

  19. Ibid.

  20. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1992).

  21. Jorge Luis Borges, Esther Allen (trans.), “Flaubert and his Exemplary Destiny,” Eliot Weinberger (ed.), The Total Library: Non-Fiction 1922–1986 (London: Allen Lane, Penguin Press, 1999) p. 392.

  22. The banner with the strange device is in Longfellow’s poem “Excelsior,” so devastatingly illustrated by cartoonist James Thurber.

  23. Wilde, Preface, Dorian Gray, pp. 3–4.

  24. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Rhodora,” Reginald L. Cook (ed.), Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Prose and Poetry (New York: Rinehart, 1950), p. 370.

  25. Wilde, Preface, Dorian Gray, p. 3.

  26. Joyce, Portrait of the Artist, p. 215.

  27. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “A Musical Instrument,” E. K. Brown and J. O. Bailey (eds.), Victorian Poetry, Second Edition (New York: Ronald Press 1962).

  28. D. H. Lawrence, “Song of a Man Who Has Come Through,” Loo
k We Have Come Through! (New York: B. W. Huebsc, 1920).

  29. Rilke, “3 [A god can do it. But tell me how],” Sonnets to Orpheus, Part I, p. 7.

  30. Wilde, Preface, Dorian Gray, p. 3.

  31. William Wordsworth, “Resolution and Independence,” stanza 7, Stephen Gill and Duncan Wu (eds.), William Wordsworth: Selected Poetry (Oxford University Press, 1998).

  32. Franz Kafka, “A Fasting-Artist,” Malcolm Pasley (trans.), The Transformation and Other Stories (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 219.

  33. George Gissing, E. J. Taylor (ed.), New Grub Street (London: Everyman, 1997), p. 7.

  34. Ibid., p. 452.

  35. Ibid., p. 459.

  36. Dinesen, “Tempests,” Anecdotes, pp. 145–6.

  37. “Sibyl,” as in the prophetess beloved by Apollo, who doesn’t come across and ends up in a bottle; “Vane” as in weathervane, and vanity, and “in vain.”

  38. Robert Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (London: Faber and Faber, 1952), p. 431.

  39. In Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Other Poems (New York: Dover, 1992), cited by Robert Graves.

  40. George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 536.

  41. Ibid., p. 537.

  42. Ibid., p. 543.

  43. Layton, Foreword, A Red Carpet for the Sun.

  44. Germaine Greer, Slip-Shod Sibyls: Recognition, Rejection and the Woman Poet (London: Penguin, 1995).

  45. Sylvia Plath, “Kindness,” February 1963, The Collected Poems (New York: Harper and Row, 1981), pp. 269–70.

  46. The reference is to John Bunyan, Roger Sharrock (ed.), The Pilgrims Progress (London: Penguin, 1965, 1987).

  4 Temptation: Prospero, the Wizard of Oz, Mephisto & Co.

  1. Voltaire, quoted in Nancy Mitford’s Voltaire in Love (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1957), p. 174.

  2. Ibid., p. 160.

  3. Maurice Hewlett, The Forest Lovers (London: Macmillan, 1899), p. 2.

  4. Edith Sitwell quoted in Victoria Glendinning’s Edith Sitwell (London: Phoenix, 1981), p. 140.