[Music] Welcome to The Power of
Ideas. Brought to you by the
Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education. Today Professor Davis is talking
with Margaret Atwood, a world renowned novelist, story
writer, poet, and essayist about her
work. She is this year's winner of the
Peggy V Helmerich Distinguished Author Award, given by the Tulsa
Library Trust. Margaret Atwood, I remember
reading some place that you began your sort of professional
career teaching grammar to engineering students
at 8:30 in the morning. And that your fear at the
time was that it was going to go on forever. You know, as you said in a
writing some place. Do you ever reflect to that time
much now and what's it like thinking about that time and
being the internationally known and much admired writer that you
are today? Well let's see now. First of all, it was only my
professional teaching career which wasn't a very long
duration. Second of all, the engineering
students weren't that bad. You know they were in
engineering but they weren't, they were quite bright. And what I did was that I taught
them Franz Kafka because I felt it would be useful to them in
their later lives. And we actually, and so far we
were awake, we got on fine, but
it wasn't something I wanted to go on forever. And what you're really asking me
is then versus now. Well then I was 24 and now I'm
60. So if things haven't changed a
bit in the interlude there would have to something really wrong. Did you daydream that the kind
of thing that's happened to you, the incredible success or
productivity? No, because this was Canada and
it was Canada in the early 60's. And nobody had in Canada at that
time, although people had had it
earlier and they were to have it later but right at that time
they didn't have that kind of international success. Canada was the boonies even for
Canadians. So I read some place that a very
small percentage of Canadians during that time could actually
live as writers. Very small. Oh I would say 1%. [Laughter] Yeah, yeah,
are you shocked at what's happened in a way? Shocked? Well it's happened gradually and
not without considerable effort, shall I say, on the part of some
of us. And uh... You've been busy the past few
years writing. No, no, no, the last 30 years. I can remember being the first
in to places like Sweden, Finland, etc. And having people
say, Where is this Canada? [Laughs] Or, Are there any
other writers besides you? And of course there were. But they simply hadn't been
picked up yet. What's it like to be a literary
celebrity? Uh, is it exhilarating and
exciting? Is it sort of confusing and kind
of a burden? Does it get in the way of
writing? Well let's qualify this again. Literary celebrity. Elisabeth Taylor is a celebrity. [Laughing] I'm a literary
celebrity. There is a difference. You know people do not tear off
my shoe laces in public. I have seen you face on book
covers all my adult life though. I have to tell you that. I know, but crowds of people
don't follow me down the street ripping of pieces of my
clothing. You know for which I am daily
grateful. I think that readers as fans are
a different kind of person. Okay. You know their idea is not to
get into a crowd and scream and yell and have hysterics. Their idea is to get in a room
with the book all by themselves and have their own communication
with the book. And the writer in a way is
incidental to that. In which you've written the
book, you can be dispensed with. But at some level doesn't it get
in the way that you are constantly asked to fly off to
Sweden or some other place and people want the actual writer
there? Well I have a wonderful,
wonderful assistant called Sarah and she answers the phone. And she's very good at saying no
in a polite way. Okay. So that is what I do and she
runs my schedule and says you can't do this because you don't
have time. And then she just does it all
for me, but of course the question you
are asking is quite pertinent. And many is the writer that has
come to us, and by us I mean Sarah and
myself and said I've just had a successful book,
it's my first one, I'm being driven crazy, what am
I going to do? I'm getting all of these
letters. People are making these
requests. I have no life anymore and... That's not a problem for you. You've worked it out. You have found a way to live
with it. Yeah, but's it took me some
years to do that... Yeah, but was there a point
where it was a crisis? Being marketed that way? Yeah because you get inundated. Um, and apart from that, you
know, once you realize that there
are only 24 hours in a day then you just have
to cope with that. When you're less well known you
get maybe, let's pretend you get 10
requests a year. All of which you can fulfill. Okay so you are fulfilling 100%
of the requests you get. When you are better known you
get much greater number of requests but you can still only
do 10 a year so start feeling very negative because you are
saying no all the time. But you've had to create a space
around yourself ... Somebody to say no for me. A professional person to say no. She can say no and I
don't even know about it most of the time. Yeah, yeah. Now you hear about those writers
who have so much success at very early and it
destroys them as a writer. Well this is the Scott
Fitzgerald myth. Exactly. And also to a certain extent the
Hemingway myth. Uh, and no doubt that happens,
particularly in America. Amy Tan I think a little too had
that happen. Particularly in America where
the levels of celebrity can get very, very dizzying. And to somebody like Erica Jong
at a certain age, it's too much. They can't handle it. You get sort of drunk. The time where talk shows sort
of take up your writing time. And you don't know enough to,
you know, not pose nude for Playboy or
whatever the request is. [Laugh] You 're too young. People take advantage of you. Right. Okay. But let me point out yet once
again that I live in Canada and E. L. Doctorow
came up there once, and he'd just
published a book, and he said to me, They didn't
like my book. And I said, They loved your
book. And he said, How can you tell? [Laughter] It's more
understated there. Uh-huh. And they're much more
likely to say, instead of this is magnificent,
this is terrific, this is the most wonderful book
of the past million years, the way they go overboard in
some other countries. They're much more likely to say,
This is alright, but they could have done better
and its flawed. E. L. Doctorow sat
at this table about a year ago
and he complained about being a celebrity, he's
not nearly as comfortable with the attention he gets as as you
are. I don't... And see he lives right in the center of
the hurricane; he lives in New York State, he used
to live right in New York and I expect a lot of people are coming to him
and saying either, publish my book, read my
manuscript, fall in love with
me, you know, do... Yeah, do something. - Some
kind of interaction. Yeah, do something. -
Other than write. Other than write. - Yeah. And sure, but he ought to
know by now and he does pretty
much know by now and in fact he does more
than me because I said, what do you do with
this stuff? And he says, I throw it in the
waste paper basket. [laughing] Whereas we dutifully,
you know, we answer... You answer every piece of mail,
I've heard that. Unless they are completely out
of the question, you know. - Yeah. I would like you to talk about
one of your books, I'm thinking of The
Edible Woman, 1969. Of the many distinctive
qualities that your readers really love in your work I think
one is the sort of lack of closure, at least what people
call lack of closure. Could I impose on you to talk
about the end of Edible Woman and sort of set it up a little
bit so our readers who haven't read it might understand and
just talk about it. You want me to blow the ending
of one of my books? Oh I yeah that's okay. Shame on you. Okay, okay. Let's talk about what we mean by
lack of closure. What we mean by lack of closure
is that it does not say at the end: and then
they got married and lived happily ever after. Okay. That that would be closure. Or
conversely, and then everybody was dead; that also would be closure. Well, let me come back to you on
that. Henry James said at one point that the art of the novelist is
a kind of exquisite geometry, the lines of character
development and association really go out into infinity and
you sort of try... Well, they do with him. [Laughs] ...Seem to come back
around, and I think there's still a point here that your
readers feel, and they like
this, that there is that art of
geometry, that exquisite geometry has been
shifted a little bit so there is a little
more openness than we sometimes see
in other writers. Well, you know this isn't new
with me. Um, in fact you can trace it back even to such a
person as Charlotte Bronte. Mhmm. Who at the end of Villette said
dear reader, you may wish to feel that
the ship came into harbor and I met mister so and so and we got married and it was
all very happy, you may believe that if you
wish. [Laughter] Right, but in
fact... No, she doesn't say what in fact
happens. Yeah yeah. She gives you two choices; she
doesn't tell you which it is. And famously of course at the
end of Great Expectations, Charles Dickens wrote two
endings. Right. One in which it was all just
awful and nothing happens and the other one in which, because that was too negative, the other one in which he gets
together with Estella and maybe there is going to be something
going after all. So this is this is not new, and
then as you move into the
into the moderns and for instance somebody
like Franz Kafka who is nothing but
lack of closure. So it's... Even in the beginning there is
lack of closure. It's a modern culture
attribute. I would say. To a certain extent
that it is and it only really strikes
people as odd if they have read nothing
but harlequin romances, You know I... Let me move
to... Nothing but Great... Nothing but
Pride and Prejudice, which does have a traditional
happy ending although we don't
really find out what goes on after
they get married... Let me move to another novel and I won't try to, you know, talk about the end
of Surfacing, 1972, but I was in graduate
school when that book came out and I remember there being
quite a furor among my friends just because
everybody... It was a book that
everybody was reading, passing it around, I think one of my friends sent
you a love letter, he was just so taken. Was I [inaudible] Oh he was in
love with the book and absolutely... [Laughing] You were, you were on
everybody's minds in 1972 But a limited group of
people. [Laughing] Well they were an
appreciative group of people and I won't describe
the ending but I think I can say this, the book
is about a young woman who sort of cuts her ties with a lot of people
including some people very close to her, finds herself
in nature... put it... Goes off the deep end of the
trolley truck. Yeah yeah. [Laughing] But, uh, I think most
people have felt that the end there's a kind of
positive spin to it, a lot of readers interpreted it
that way. I want to ask you something
biographical here, that that book is
such a strong vision of this woman
following this path and nobody can really
go with her on; does it represent some kind of
turning point in your own life? I mean it's one of those sort of
lyrical books I think that's what my friends were responding
to. Oh okay, well this is always a
great compliment when people think that, because it was
so real to them that it has to be true
and if it's true it has to be true
about somebody, and who better for it to be
true about than the author? So, thank you for the
compliment, but no I did not do that. Okay, it didn't represent any
such moment in your life. Well, things can represent
moments in your life and the moment that book represents in
my life is that I figured out how to write that book which I
had been... Actually I started on
it at the same time I was writing Edible
Woman and could not actually get as we say a
handle on it, how to do it. It's one of those powerful
lyrical books. I think it haunts
a lot of people and it's a wonderful book. The Handmaids Tale of
1986. Um. here is a... Which I finished in Tuscaloosa,
Alabama, and began in Berlin before
the wall went down, yes. Wow, and so you were what were
you teaching in Tuscaloosa, it wasn't grammar anymore I
don't think. I was one of the graduate chairs
in creative writing. Now, this is a book about a kind
of future time it's a very sort of very repressive surveillance
sort of culture where women seem to be kept... Well women and men both; I mean
you cannot alter the position of women in society without also
altering the position of men and vice versa, it's completely
relative. Could you talk about the
reaction you got on that book? What was it like? What was the reaction I got
on the book? Well, it was different in
different countries, for instance in England they
said jolly good yarn, great story, but they didn't
think of it as particularly real for them because they'd had
their period of that sort under Cromwell in the 17th
century and they didn't feel in much danger of repeating it. In Canada being nervous as
Canadians always are they said couldn't happen here and in the
United States they said how long have we got? Wow, weren't you getting sort of
death threats and so on? No, because the kinds of people
that read my books aren't the kinds of people who would get
death... Who would send death
threats over that. When the movie came out, the movie company got a few
outraged people. But it's a catch 22 for the
death threaters because what are they objecting to? Were you pleased with the movie? Is this the kind of world the
kind of world they have in mind? So, if it is why would they
object to anybody depicting it. I haven't seen the movie, was it
a good movie? Were you pleased with it? Let me quote to you a
contest that was run in a Canadian magazine in which
you were supposed to fill in the statement as Canadian as in
American as apple pie. And the person who won, won it
by saying as Canadian as possible under the
circumstances. [Laughing] So I would say this
is as good a movie as possible under the circumstances. Who is in the movie?
I I don't even remember that. Oh boy! Lots of people. Are they big names? Fay Weldon was in it. Yes. But I'm very bad at movie
names. But you like the movie under the
circumstances. Elizabeth McGovern was terrific. Oh wow. She was excellent. They were they were all good.
It was well acted. It was... I think
theoretically there were
a few problems with it. For instance let me put it to
you this way: if you were on
the run and you were going to hide
out from people with helicopters would you do it in a red trailer
on the top of the hill? [Laughing] Bit of a credibility
problem in that choice. Well, I mean for me, yeah, but
not for everyone. You don't people may not think
these things through quite in the same way but... You've written about women in a
way that people have liked a very powerful way, a very
sympathetic way. I think right at the beginning
of your work and it never seems to have been a kind of forced
issue to write about women and and you know one could argue
that in the 60s that wasn't an easy thing to do that
wasn't the mainstream.. Okay let's just set this to the
women's movement as we now call it didn't hit didn't really hit
until '68... '69. Yeah. A couple of books that were
around before that time, one of them was Simone de
Beauvoir, A Second Sex and the other one was Betty
Friedan's Feminine Mystique. They were around during in
60s But there was no movement. I began writing in
1956. You know, women's
movement... [laughing] Nobody was thinking about it. We still had at university a
couple of older women who were left over from the twenties
and thirties and kept telling us not to be so silly about boys
and to do our homework and you know, that kind of thing. Um, but essentially the
50s and the 60s until '68 were that period when women
had been shoved back into the home after the war. It was those pictures you see of
the mom with the apron and the turkey and the stove and... Norman Rockwell paintings. Soap was very big, well, a
little bit after Norman Rockwell but that kind of thing. - Yeah. Domesticity, smiling
mom, people after the war
had four kids, etc. It's where we got
the baby boomers. So, I began in '56 long
before there was any women's movement. Where does this come from in
your past? Where what was the platform? Why did I start writing? How did you have the ability uh
the insight uh to focus on women in the way that you did? I was lazy. Use your head. [Laughing] It's easier for me to
write about women. But other people weren't doing
this, you know. Yes they were. They were doing it lots. Iris Murdock was was writing
then. And she's wonderful. Sure. Yeah there were lots of writers,
there were lots of women writers around even then, but they
weren't... They had a different take on things because society
was different and they and I also write about men but you
know there's a funny thing, men don't like it much when
women write about men because either they write Heathcliff who
men all detest, they don't like these superhero
men turning up in women's books. Because Heathcliff is bigger and
stronger and sexier and more handsome than they are and who
wants that? Or else they do a nice man
and the men don't like that either because they think he is
a wimp. So, let's be totally honest
about this: it's hard for a woman
writer to write a man character
that men approve of, even if you take all the bad
things that men say about themselves in their own men
characters and put them into a man character in
a book by a woman, then the men think they are
being attacked. Even though you got it straight
from the horse's mouth. I think a lot of your readers
would say that you are doing something special and especially
powerful in your treatment of women before a lot of other
people would. So are you... you're not
buying that. But you see. I'm not alone.
No I'm just being... I'm just being trying to be
accurate here. We look at Alice Munro for
instance. If you look at Marian Engle
then you may not know but they published her first book when I was probably
twenty-nine or so. These were people who were
trying to write out of.. you take Margaret Lawrence.. They were trying to write... The Stone Angel. Yeah or even the later books. They were trying to write um
honestly about how women actually lived their lives as
opposed to how they were supposed to live their lives. So, there is quite a broad uh
range and that's that's just in my own country. And then there's lots of writers
here and in England, and in Europe so it's not
unique. Okay, okay. Nice of you to think so but it
isn't. Let me take you in another
direction for a second. We talked about E.L. Doctrorow a little while ago, he
sat at this table about a year ago, Elizabeth George was here
a couple of years ago. Rilla Askew the Oklahoma writer
was here and each had the idea that there's a kind of fictional
imagination a kind of poetic imagination each of these people
said well you can't have both ya know you're on the fiction
side you're on the poetry side. Now, you have written as much
wonderful poetry as you have written fiction and my sense is
and maybe I'm wrong about this is that in Canada I think they
sort of know you more as a poet and in the states know you more
as a fiction writer. No? Well, you definitely are on both
sides of that divide umm... What's it like? Is it difficult? Are there two halves of you? Do they do they fit comfortably
together? Are they at war with each other? The poet and the fiction side? Well, usually when we say poetic
novel we immediately think I don't want to read that. [Laughing]. That's kind of too
too many words and not enough happening right? Be honest. Is that what you
think? Too far away from things... Too many lyrical embroideries,
that's not what I mean by poetic imagination. What I mean by poetic
imagination is um is a structural imagination, poetry
being more into music and mathematics and then for
instance people talking pros in an elevator are. So when I think poetic
imagination I think I think large structure where things
fit. So, I'll admit to having that. I will not admit to having the
other kind in which there's too many words and you don't want to
read it. [Laughing] You know what I mean though, I mean you write poetry that a
lot of people like. And Michael Ondaatje writes
poetry in pros and so does Ann Michaels Canadian writer
from Sri Lanka right? Michael Ondaatje? Umm very very originally from
Sri Lanka, and very very um the family
background is interesting he's got everything in there
[inaudible] Sri Lankan, anyway, he was in Canada since
the age of about 16 and that's where he began to write
and so on and so forth. Anyway, he writes both. Lots of people have written both
because we weren't told not to. You know we came before there
were creative writing skills in which they said are you a poet
or are you a pros writer? And let me point out.. You didn't know you couldn't do
it... That Herman Melville wrote both
just for instance and there have been several English writers who
wrote both. Not always as successfully,
Mellville was better at pros but uh they have written both. Poe wrote both.
You know Edgar Allen? He wrote both and he became
famous for both. So it's not an anomaly and if
your so inclined I don't see why you shouldn't do it. I want to bring you up a little
closer to the present in the last few years you have written
The Journals Susanna Moodie. That was nineteen
sixty...nine... seventy okay and Alias Grace
that works off of that that material umm.. 1996 97.. 1996. Umm okay why at this point in
your career are you turning so strongly toward historical
fiction? Alias Grace is this uh uh
powerful book about an actual event in the mid-19th century in
Canada. Why is that your focus at this
point? Well now you never know why you
do anything really? It's not a plan. You know you don't think well
not I am gonna do this. What you usually really think is
I feel strongly inclined to do
this but it's a really stupid idea
and that's what you end up You always end up doing the
things that you think are probably a bad idea. Why are they a bad idea? Because
they're hard. They're difficult. So you think why don't I just do
something easy? Well the fact is that the easy
things aren't very appealing. Did the Alias Grace book sort
of simmer all of those years between... Okay, the Alias Grace book
went like this. Susanna Moodie was an English
immigrant who came to Canada thinking she was going
to someplace like the south of France. Cows, grapes, playing the flute
You know... pastoral simplicity, and instead the tract of land
that they ended up getting was in the middle of a bare and bug
infested swamp. From which they who were
from genteel class were not at all suited. And they had a dreadful time,
Susanna Moodie and her husband and the children, some of who
died and it was all quite
awful. And she wrote a book called
Roughing It in the Bush, in which she describes the
awfulness of it and says don't do this. You know, if you are of my class
stay or let the peasants do it, they know how. And she got in
quite a bit of trouble because the Canadians objected to being
called peasants and the English objected to the idea of somebody
going off and living in a swamp and describing it so
graphically. But it was quite a hit in
England. Then she wrote another book
called Life in the Clearings in which she went around to towns
and looked at all the stuff and what you did in those days you
always visited the jail and the lunatic asylum because these
were the big public institutions and people were quite proud of
them. And so she hi hoed off to the
penitentiary in Kingston and saw the famous Grace Marks and Grace
Marks was like a star. She was like the OJ Simpson of
her time. This 16 year old woman who
was accused of murdering... Yeah she had actually got
convicted for being a party to a double murder. Her employer and
the employer's housekeeper who was also the employers
mistress both were found in the cellar in a non-alive
condition. And she and the manservant
had run off to where else, the United States. With the silverware and the
wardrobe. And were found in a, shock
horror, hotel. Wow... But not in the same room. They were both hauled back.
They were convicted. She had a fan club who got her
committed to life. And nobody ever knew whether she
did it or not. And this was what was
interesting to me. Did she or didn't she? I hate to stop you. We are out of time. Margaret, I would thank you very
much. It's been a treat having you
here today. I'll hope you'll
come back and see us. Thank you, we'll see you next
week for The Power of Ideas. See you then. [Music]
