On Writers and Writing

by Margaret Atwood

  5. Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise (London: Penguin, 1961), p. 109.

  6. A. M. Klein, “Portrait of the Poet as Landscape,” The Rocking Chair and Other Poems (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1966), p. 53.

  7. Gwendolyn MacEwen, Julian the Magician (Toronto: Macmillan, 1963), p. 6.

  8. Henry James, “The Author of Beltraffio,” In the Cage and Other Tales (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1958), p. 56.

  9. George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 224.

  10. Baron Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Richelieu, Act I, Scene ii (London: Saunders and Otley, 1839), p. 39.

  11. Percy Bysshe Shelly, “A Defense of Poetry,” Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (eds.), Shelleys Poetry and Prose: Authoritative Texts, Criticism (New York: Norton, 1977), p. 508.

  12. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: Penguin, 1993), p. 247.

  13. Don De Lillo, Mao II (New York: Penguin, 1991), p. 101.

  14. Mavis Gallant, “A Painful Affair,” The Selected Short Stories of Mavis Gallant (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1996), p. 835.

  15. Klein, “Portrait of the Poet as Landscape,” The Rocking Chair, p. 50.

  16. Susan Sontag in an interview with Joan Acocella, “The Unquiet American,” Observer, 5 March, 2000.

  17. Alice Munro, “Material,” Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You (Toronto: McGraw Hill Ryerson, 1974), p. 35.

  18. Ibid., p. 43.

  19. Ibid., p. 44.

  20. De Lillo, Mao II, p. 158.

  21. Archibald MacLeish, “Ars Poetica”, Collected Poems 1917–1982 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985), pp. 106–7.

  22. Gertrude Stein, Four Saints in Three Acts, Gertrude Stein: Writings 1903–1932 (New York: Library of America, 1998), p. 637.

  23. Valerie Martin.

  24. See Rosemary Sullivan’s introduction to Gwendolyn MacEwen, Margaret Atwood and Barry Callaghan (eds.), The Poetry of Gwendolyn MacEwen: The Later Years (Toronto: Exile Editions, 1994).

  25. L. Frank Baum, The Wizard of Oz (London: Puffin, 1982), p. 140.

  26. Klaus Mann, Mephisto (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1982), p. 77. My translation.

  27. George Orwell, “Why I Write,” The Penguin Essays of George Orwell (London: Penguin, 1968), p. 13.

  28. Job 1: 15–19.

  29. Henry James, The Sacred Fount (New York: New Directions, 1995), p. ix.

  30. Kenneth McRobbie, Eyes Without A Face (Toronto: Gallery Editions, 1960).

  31. Brian Moore, An Answer From Limbo (Boston: Atlantic, Little, Brown, 1992), p. 322.

  32. Adrienne Rich, “From the Prison House,” Diving into the Wreck (New York: Norton, 1973), p. 17.

  5 Communion: Nobody to Nobody

  1. Henry Fielding, Tom Jones (New York: Signet, Penguin, 1963, 1979), pp. 24–5.

  2. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” Hannah Arendt (ed.), Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), p. 100.

  3. Peter Gay, The Pleasure Wars (New York: Norton, 1998), p. 39.

  4. Gwendolyn MacEwen, “The Choice,” The Rising Fire (Toronto: Contact Editions, 1963), p. 71.

  5. Henry James, “The Death of the Lion,” The Lesson of the Master and Other Stories (London: John Lehmann, 1948), p. 86.

  6. Anne Michaels, “Letters from Martha,” Miners Pond, The Weight of Oranges, Skin Divers (London: Bloomsbury, 2000), pp. 32–3.

  7. John Le Carré, Smiley’s People (New York: Bantam, 1974).

  8. What he actually said was, “The poet is not heard, he is overheard.” Northrop Frye said this frequently in lectures attended by the author during her undergraduate studies at the University of Toronto.

  9. Hjalmar Söderberg, Paul Britten Austin (trans.), Doctor Glas (first published 1905) (London: Tandem, 1963), p. 16.

  10. George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1949), pp. 8–9.

  11. Ibid., p. 10.

  12. Emily Dickinson, “441 [This is my letter to the World],” Thomas H. Johnson (ed.), The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1890, 1960), p. 211.

  13. Stephen King, Misery (New York: Viking, Penguin, 1987).

  14. Gaston Leroux, The Phantom of the Opera (New York: HarperCollins, 1988).

  15. Edmond Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac (first published 1897) (New York: Bantam, 1954).

  16. Dedicatee of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.

  17. Dickinson, “288 [I’m Nobody! Who are you?],” Complete Poems, p. 133.

  18. “Hypocrite reader! – You! – My twin! – My brother!” Charles Baudelaire, “To the Reader,” Roy Campbell (trans.), Flowers of Evil (Norfolk, USA: New Directions, 1955), p. 4.

  19. Marilyn Monroe, as mentioned in various biographical pieces.

  20. John Keats, Letter to Benjamin Robert Haydon, May 10–11, 1817, Douglas Bush (ed.), Selected Poems and Letters (Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1959).

  21. Graham Greene, The End of the Affair (New York: Penguin, 1999), p. 129.

  22. Ibid., p. 148.

  23. Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1961), p. 129.

  24. Ibid., p. 134.

  25. Ibid., p. 133.

  26. Ibid.

  27. Isak Dinesen, “The Young Man With the Carnation,” Winter’s Tales (New York: Vintage, 1993), p. 4.

  28. Ray Bradbury, “The Martian,” The Martian Chronicles (New York: Bantam, 1946, 1977) p. 127.

  29. It is worth noting in relation to chapter 2 that Borges was a fan of The Martian Chronicles. See Jorge Luis Borges, “Ray Bradbury: The Martian Chronicles,” Eliot Weinberger (ed., trans.), The Total Library: Non-Fiction 1922–1986 (London: Allen Lane, Penguin Press, 1999), pp. 418–19.

  30. Keats defined negative capability as: “… when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Letter to George and Thomas Keats, December 22, 1817, Selected Poems and Letters.

  31. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “Sonnets from the Portuguese,” xxviii, E. K. Brown and J. O. Bailey (eds.), Victorian Poetry (New York: Ronald Press, 1962).

  32. Il Postino, Written by Massimo Troisi et al., directed by Michael Radford.

  33. Eduard Petiska and Jana Svábová (trans.), Golem (Prague: Martin, 1991).

  34. Franz Kafka, “In the Penal Colony,” The Transformation and Other Stories (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 137.

  35. Milton Acorn, “Knowing I Live in a Dark Age,” Margaret Atwood (ed.), The New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English (Toronto: Oxford University Press Canada, 1982), p. 238.

  36. Primo Levi, Raymond Rosenthal (trans.), The Drowned and the Saved (London: Abacus, 1999), p. 142.

  37. François Villon, “Ballade [My lord and fearsome prince],” Galway Kinnell (ed.), The Poems of François Villon (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), p. 197.

  38. Alexander Pushkin, “Eugene Onegin,” Avraham Yarmolinsky (ed.), The Poems, Prose and Plays of Alexander Pushkin (New York: The Modern Library, 1936), p. 301.

  39. John Bunyan, Roger Sharrock (ed.), The Pilgrims Progress (London: Penguin, 1987), p. 147.

  40. Ibid., pp. 151–2.

  41. Ibid., p. 153.

  42. Elias Canetti, Auto da Fé (New York: Picador, Pan Books, 1978), p. 35.

  43. Jay Macpherson, “Book,” Robert Weaver and William Toye (eds.), The Oxford Anthology of Canadian Literature (Toronto: Oxford University Press Canada, 1973), p. 322.

  44. The word as food is an ancient concept. Christ in the New Testament is the Word made Flesh, and the flesh is the flesh of the Communion meal. See also the edible scroll (Isaiah 34: 4) and the edible book (Revelation 10: 8–10). And for sheer pleasure, see the Prologue to Tom Jones, in which Fielding presents a Bill of Fare for his book, which he likens to a meal at an inn. Henry Fielding, Tom Jones (New York: Signet, Penguin, 1963, 1979).

  45. Jorge Luis Borges, “Borges and I,” James E. Irby (trans.), Everything and Nothing (New York: New Directions, 1999), p. 74.

  46.
Abram Tertz, “The Icicle,” The Icicle and Other Stories (London: Collins and Harvill, 1963).

  47. Carol Shields, Swann: A Mystery (Toronto: Stoddart, 1987).

  48. Dudley Young, Origins of the Sacred: The Ecstasies of Love and War (New York: St. Martins Press, 1991), p. 325.

  49. Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (New York: Ballantine Books, 1995).

  50. Compare the memory-hole in Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and the book destruction in Bohumile Hrabal, Michael Henry Heim (trans.), Too Loud a Solitude (London: Abacus, 1990) or in Ursula K. LeGuin, The Telling (New York: Harcourt, 2000).

  51. Dinesen, “The Young Man With the Carnation,” p. 25. Many writers have of course felt they wrote by order of God, or some god – the one that has most recently come to my attention is Canadian novelist Margaret Laurence, who confessed this to fellow writer Matt Cohen. See Typing (Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2000), p. 186.

  6 Descent: Negotiating with the dead

  1. N. K. Sandars (trans.), “A Prayer to the Gods at Night,” Poems of Heaven and Hell from Ancient Mesopotamia (London: Penguin, 1971), p. 175.

  2. D. H. Lawrence, “The Ship of Death,” Richard Ellmann and Robert O’Clair (eds.), The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, second edition (New York: Norton, 1988), pp. 372–3.

  3. Jay Macpherson, “The Well,” Poems Twice Told: The Boatman and Welcoming Disaster (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 83.

  4. Al Purdy, “Remains of an Indian Village,” Beyond Remembering: The Collected Poems of Al Purdy (Madeira Park, BC: Harbour Publishing, 2000), p. 53.

  5. Osip Mandelstam, “[Take for joy from the palms of my hands],” Selected Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1975), p. 67.

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

  7. Dudley Young, Origins of the Sacred: The Ecstasies of Love and War (New York: St. Martins Press, 1991).

  8. Ann-Marie MacDonald, Fall on Your Knees (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), p. 1.

  9. John Irving, A Widow for One Year (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), p. 6.

  10. Anton Chekhov, Ronald Hingley (ed. and trans.), “Lights,” The Oxford Chekhov Volume IV: Stories 1888–1889 (Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 208.

  11. “The fear of death unsettles me,” from “Lament for the Makaris” by William Dunbar (c. 1465–1513).

  12. Edel in conversation with Graeme Gibson.

  13. For more on this subject, see Claude Lévi-Strauss and Wendy Doniger, Myth and Meaning (New York: Schocken Books, 1995).

  14. Spoken by the ghost of Hamlet’s murdered father, William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act I, Scene v.

  15. William Shakespeare, Richard III, Act V, Scene iii.

  16. Consider the oranges offered in China to the dead.

  17. See W. G. Sebald, Michael Hulse (trans.), Vertigo (New York: New Directions, 2000), pp. 64–5.

  18. Rainer Maria Rilke, “6 [Is he of this world? No, he gets],” David Young (trans.), Sonnets to Orpheus, Part I (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1987), p. 13.

  19. See for instance the three drops of talking blood in the Brothers Grimm, “The Goose Girl,” Padraic Colum (intro.), The Complete Grimms’ Fairy Tales (New York: Pantheon, 1972), pp. 404–11.

  20. Francis James Child (ed.), “The Twa Sisters,” The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (New York: Dover, no copyright date given), vol. I, p. 128.

  21. Brothers Grimm, “The Singing Bone,” Padraic Colum (intro.), The Complete Grimms Fairy Tales, pp. 148–50.

  22. See the anonymous folk-song, “The Streets of Laredo.”

  23. Hamlet, Act V, Scene ii.

  24. Macbeth, Act II, Scene iv.

  25. See, for instance, Elizabeth Bowen, “The Demon Lover,” The Demon Lover and Other Stories (London: Jonathan Cape, 1945).

  26. See Louise Glück, “Pomegranate,” The House on Marshland (Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press, 1971, 1975), p. 28. See also the red blood–wine and the round wafer–body of the Christian Communion Sacrament.

  27. Homer, E. V. Rieu (trans.), The Odyssey, Book XI, (London: Penguin, 1991), p. 160.

  28. Lieut.-Col. John McCrae, MD, In Flanders Fields and Other Poems (Toronto: William Briggs, 1919), pp. 11–12.

  29. C. Day-Lewis (trans.), The Aeneid of Virgil, Book VI (New York: Doubleday, Anchor, 1952), p. 133, lines 126–9. My own adaptation.

  30. On this ceremonial money is usually printed the words, “Hell Bank Note.”

  31. As in the Elizabeth Marshall Thomas novel about prehistoric hunters, Reindeer Moon (New York: Pocket Books, 1991).

  32. 1 Samuel 28:15.

  33. See the Other-Worldly arrangements in Ursula K. LeGuin, A Wizard of Earthsea (New York: Bantam, 1984).

  34. See Farley Mowat, People of the Deer (Toronto: Bantam, 1984), also Carlo Ginzburg, Anne Tedeschi and John Tedeschi (trans.), The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).

  35. “Inanna’s Journey to Hell,” Poems of Heaven and Hell from Ancient Mesopotamia, p. 145.

  36. Jorge Luis Borges, Eliot Weinberger (ed., trans.), “Nine Dantesque Essays 1945–1951,” The Total Library: Non-Fiction 1922–1986 (London: Allen Lane, Penguin Press, 1999), pp. 267–305.

  37. Ibid., p. 304. There are numerous examples of writers using their writing to retrieve a lost one. Three recent Canadian ones are: Graeme Gibson, Gentlemen Death (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1995); Matt Cohen, Last Seen (Toronto: Vintage, 1996); Rudy Wiebe, “Where is the Voice Coming From?,” Robert Weaver and Margaret Atwood (eds.), The Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in English (Toronto: Oxford University Press Canada, 1986).

  38. Day-Lewis (trans.), Aeneid, Book VI, p. 137, lines 264–8.

  39. See Italo Calvino’s comment to the effect that shamanism is one of the functions of the writer in Patrick Creagh (trans.), Six Memos for the Next Millennium (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).

  40. Rilke, “9 [You have to have been among the shades],” Sonnets to Orpheus, Part I, p. 19.

  41. N. K. Sandars (trans.), The Epic of Gilgamesh (London: Penguin, 1960, 1972), adapted from p. 177.

  42. D. H. Lawrence, “Bavarian Gentians,” The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, p. 372.

  43. Gwendolyn MacEwen, “Dark Pines Under Water,” Gwendolyn MacEwen: The Early Years (Toronto: Exile Editions, 1993), p. 156.

  44. Adrienne Rich, “Diving Into the Wreck,” Diving into the Wreck (New York: Norton, 1973).

  45. Anne Hébert, “The Tomb of the Kings,” Frank Scott (trans.), Dialogue sur la Traduction (Montreal: Editions HMH, 1970).

  46. Wilfred Owen, Cecil Day-Lewis (ed.), “Strange Meeting,” Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen (New York: New Directions, 1963).

  47. Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstacies: Deciphering the Witches Sabbath (New York: Penguin, 1991), p. 307.

  48. Ovid, Metamorphoses, Mary Innes (trans.). (London: Penguin, 1955), p. 315.

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