Booker Prize finalist Margaret Atwood can enter the mind of a murderer or a child bully with ease. She can convey human suffering like no one else. Her image is austere, yet her presence warm. Katharine Viner disentangles the woman from the writer Margaret Atwood would like to clear a few things up from the start. She is not a murderer (this in spite of writing as a murderer in Alias Grace). She was not bullied by her childhood best friend (unlike the narrator of Cat’s Eye). She is not a femme fatale about to steal your man (The Robber Bride), she does not have an eating disorder (The Edible Woman), and she is not a woman whose lover committed suicide (Life Before Man), nor a woman searching for her lost father (Surfacing). People often think she lives the lives of the characters in her books, she says. But they are not her. This is the message of her new novel, too, which could almost be read as a plea not to confuse the author with the narrator. In The Blind Assassin we have two narrators: Iris, 82 and looking back over her life, and Laura, her sister, author of a pulpy romance bestseller. Iris’s story is a bitter one, a loveless tale of abusive marriage, bad loyalties and dissatisfaction. By contrast, Laura’s novel within the novel is the tale of a scandalous love affair between a 1930s lady in mink and a sexy young Bolshevik. But as time passes, the reader starts to wonder if Laura really did write the novel, and if the extraordinary events in it really did happen to her. What if it were someone else who caused the scandal? Are we right in believing that whoever wrote the novel must have had such experiences in real life? It is also, perhaps, the message of our meeting. All we know and read about Margaret Atwood is that she is “frosty” and “scary” and “witch-like” and “remote”. She’s the “high priestess of pain”. She’s the “authority on malevolence”. Canadians, who know her better than anyone, warn that she’s a ferocious interviewee: if she says you can have an hour, you’ll get spot-on 60 minutes. She’ll fight you, ridicule you, chew you up and spit you out and make you sorry you came.
But when we meet on a sticky Toronto midsummer day, Atwood keeps suggesting more things we can do together, kindness after kindness. We go for breakfast, in her favourite cafe. And then lunch, with her husband (more of him later). A hotel for coffee and fruit and meringues. She takes me to her home, her garden. She becomes my tour guide for Toronto (“This is where I went to college; this is our legislature”); she takes me on a tour of locations in her novels (the bridge Laura Chase drives off in The Blind Assassin; the bridge from which Elaine is led down an icy, dark and terrifying ravine in Cat’s Eye; a street Roz crosses in The Robber Bride); then, even, a mini-tour of where she used to live. Sometimes when she speaks she puts on the voice of a child; sometimes when she’s standing and asking a question she bends one leg inwards, at the knee, like young girls do when they want something. A sweet sort of intimacy. Why do people find her scary? “They confuse me with the characters in my books,” she says. (Don’t forget. She’s not her narrators, and she’s not as her image would have her. It’s all about what’s real and what’s not.) It is impossible to overstate just how famous Margaret Atwood is in Canada. For many years, before Jim Carrey and Shania Twain, Atwood was pretty much the only Canadian with international fame. When she started writing, there was no literary tradition. (In 1972 Atwood tried to draw some themes and conclusions about the limited number of writers in Canada’s history in her extraordinary book of literary criticism, Survival.) But the fallow was fertile for her. “I didn’t feel all those genius men hanging over me,” she says. “Canada was a wide open prairie.” Today, there’s a fiction boom – Michael Ondaatje, Carol Shields, Alice Munro – and Atwood has been at the heart of it since The Edible Woman, her first novel, was published in 1969. Her work since has been a roll call of gleaming successes, novels at once intellectual and popular, emotional and neatly plotted: from Surfacing, her 1979 novel about a woman’s investigation into her father’s disappearance; to the million- selling The Handmaid’s Tale, perhaps her greatest work and certainly a classic, a feminist sci-fi horror story in which fertile women are turned into breeding machines; to Cat’s Eye, the best novel ever written about how girls can bully each other. Three of her books – The Handmaid’s Tale, Cat’s Eye and Alias Grace – have been nominated for the Booker Prize. This year The Blind Assassin is on the short list. After 30 years at her craft, Atwood’s new novel is a work by a writer who knows how to command an audience. Readers develop quite obsessive relationships with her work. She’s popular with women (her novels actually feature female characters you can believe in), but also men (she says she gets a large amount of fan mail from British men). Atwood is taught in more than three-quarters of British universities. She’s an industry on her own: The Blind Assassin is her 10th novel, her 37th book (she also writes poetry, children’s books, literary criti-cism); she is published in more than 30 languages; even her assistant has an assistant. She arrives for breakfast wearing dark, loose clothing and a big, dark hat that shadows her face. Her eyes are a pale and memorable blue, her skin translucent and unlined, a trait she shares with her 92- year-old mother. She is tiny. She was once described as “not like other people”, and there’s something in the description – her appearance is both everywoman and strangely ethereal, her voice both quiet and impossible to ignore. Her manner, too, is unusual. Her conversation is wry, educated, knowing; a bit superior, challenging you to get the joke. Later, when we’re eating a fruit plate and I question the identity of an unfamiliar berry, she says it’s a “boobleberry”. I don’t realise that she is making it up, using a little ridicule, at which her eyes glitter: “We’re going to have fun with you.” (She once said that her humour was just like everyone else’s in Atlantic Canada – deadpan. “They’ll tell you the most outrageous lies with a straight face.”)
We order – or, rather, she does. “I would like a freshly squeezed orange juice,” she drawls, turning to me, “and so would you.” (I quickly nod.) “Then I would like a cappuccino,” she turns to me, “and so would you.” (I nod again.) “And then I would like a toasted bagel,” she turns to me, “and so would you.” This time, I shake my head, say no to the bagel. She looks perplexed, and rather thrilled, as if it were rare and fascinating for someone to say no to her. She opens up her grasp, and there’s a handful of vitamins. So it’s the tablets that explain her youthful appearance? “Actually, I’m 2E000 years old,” she says. “And dead.” That Atlantic sense of humour again. Actually, at 60, she does not smoke, drinks in moderation and has never been out in the sun. She has facials, eats well, takes all those pills. It’s not magic that makes her look so good: she’s in control of what might harm her, takes steps to avoid the possibility of pain. It might be good advice to do something similar before you read an Atwood novel. She is a writer who revels in suffering, who describes pain so that it hurts. One night, after reading The Robber Bride, I was awake until dawn, so upsetting was her portrayal of Charis, who changed her name from Karen to try to obliterate the horrors of an abusive childhood. When, in Toronto, Atwood drove me to the bridge featured in Cat’s Eye, the location of a hugely distressing incident of childhood torture in the novel, it was an overwhelming experience … I had to turn back and leave. In a way, I suppose I’d been there before – through her fiction, she’d already taken me. So what about this “high priestess of pain” label? “I’m not responsible for other people’s metaphors,” she says. “What that means is that I’m good at describing certain kinds of emotions. That’s all it means. I also can do other things. I’m good at writing fake newspaper reports. High priestess of fake newspaper reports.” But she describes pain so that it’s unbearable, which is a shock when we think we see pain every day on television, news and dramas and chat shows and Oprah. “There’s a difference between describing and evoking something. You can describe something and be quite clinical about it. To evoke it, you call it up in the reader. That’s what writers do when they’re good. Then there’s another thing, which is just as difficult, and just as honourable, and that is to be able to evoke joy. There are some people who do that very well, Carol Shields, for example. Some do rage. Others do a disjointed kind of melancholy.” But what is it that makes a particular writer good at a particular emotion? Why is she so good at pain? “We don’t know it. If we did, we’d package it and sell it.”
Readers tend to assume that Atwood must have had some terrible pain in her life, to convey it so well in her work. This infuriates her. “If you feel that there’s the author and then the character, then the book is not working. People have a habit of identifying the author with the narrator, and you can’t, obviously, be all of the narrators in all of your books, or else you’d be a very strange person indeed. I do it myself when I’m reading a book … attach myself saying, I wonder if that really happened to her, or, oh, I didn’t know she’d had an affair. It’s because we’re human beings. And human beings are social animals and they form groups of people that they know, and when you read a novel you feel you know the narrator. You can catch yourself in the act, you know it’s not real, but you do it anyway, because that’s what humans do.” It must also have to do with the fashion for biography, the gossip culture, the cult of personality: that knowing that a writer committed suicide, or couldn’t have children, or hated his mother, colours our understanding of the work on its own. “Sometimes it is,” she says, “but only if you’re that kind of person.” What kind? “The kind,” she says, slowly, “who’s interested in gossip to the exclusion of form. “Let’s put it this way,” she says. “Who knows which daffodils Wordsworth wrote his poem about? Perhaps there weren’t any daffodils. What does it matter? All kinds of people have all kinds of really, really interesting things happen to them, and they don’t write books about them. And all kinds of other people sit there in their rooms and you can’t tell if it’s real, you the reader can never actually know” The Blind Assassin tackles this head on, asking the reader to work out how much of the novel within the novel is really fiction. It’s a brilliant example of an author in control of her readers, as if she’s saying: you think you understand, but do you? Really? She’s playing with our assumptions about who is the author, who is the narrator. It makes her angry when readers try to look for psychodramas in her background to explain the intensity of her books.
“The darkness is really out there,” she says. “It’s not something that’s in my head, just. It’s in my work because it’s in the world.” Of course, she says, there must be some hook-in to something deeply personal if the book is going to work as art; but fiction is never the whole and literal truth. “Take the Bront?s,” she says. “Was there really a Heathcliff? I doubt it very much. Maybe there was a proto-Heathcliff, or someone like Heathcliff, or someone glimpsed on a street corner one day. The passion was there, but it probably wasn’t lived out in the way of their books. If you did, you probably wouldn’t bother writing.” This is quite a confession; confirmation – if any were needed – that writers don’t have exciting lives, that her life isn’t as eventful as her novels. But then, this is not much of a surprise. All reports of Atwood point to a full and happy personal life.
At school a teacher said she showed “no particular promise”, but it didn’t matter: she loved books, Grimm, Poe, then Austen, then reading her own poems at a Toronto cafe called The Bohemian Embassy. Her father died of a stroke, but her mother is still alive at 92. She has a daughter, Jess, aged 24, who is a student of art history and who loves her mother’s books. When she was 27, Atwood married James Polk, an American writer with a “very entrancing mind”, but it lasted less than five years; she has lived, for the 28 years since, with fellow writer and fellow Canadian Graeme Gibson. Now then, Graeme Gibson. These are two people who fit well together. Graeme is a very tall, very big man with a huge white beard, a little yellow at the edges. He writes novels, which are moderately successful in Canada. He founded the Writers’ Union, and the Canadian chapter of PEN, which fights for writers’ human rights. He used to run bird-watching tours to Cuba. And this man exudes, bursts, beams with pride for his wife. While we’re having lunch he tells a story about something that happened in Argentina. There was a reviewer on a live literary TV programme trashing a woman writer’s novel. It’s garbage, says the reviewer – it’s the biggest pile of garbage I’ve ever read. Anyway, the writer’s husband was watching this live show at home. And he’s furious, he’s so furious that he gets into his car and drives to the studio and “beats the shit” out of the critic. “‘Way to go!’ That’s what we were all saying!” exclaims Graeme, laughing and punching the air. He would, of course, do exactly the same. Atwood herself is more relaxed when he’s around, happy to let him be gregarious while she shields herself from the glare with her big floppy hat. A British interviewer, quoting an American female novelist, once said “every woman writer should be married to Graeme Gibson”. What did Atwood think of that? “Oh, that was cute,” she smiles. “We got that put on to a T-shirt for him, in fact.”
This small intimacy is a little bit of Peggy coming out. Atwood was named Margaret, after her mother, but to avoid confusion she has always been known as Peggy to those close to her. It is Margaret who is usually on show in interviews – official, rather above it all, broadening everything out from the personal to the general. Why does she avoid getting personal in public? “Oh, I can talk about all kinds of personal things, but they probably won’t have anything to do with the book. It’s the same as everyone else. It’s factoid trivia. Am I a perfectionist? No. Do I spend hours playing with my nails? No. But once in a while I file them so that they’re even and sometimes I paint them, but I never bite them.” But she goes out of her way to give interviewers nothing of herself. “What do you mean, nothing?” she says. “There are some things that are not anyone else’s business. You’d have to be quite strange to sit down and tell somebody everything about your entire life.” People do. “No they don’t. They’re giving you a facsimi-le of what you think is all about their life.” Here it is, her double: the public and private personas, the real and unreal identities. The cold versus warm, the scary versus the approachable, the chilly reputation versus the personal guided tours of her Toronto. Margaret versus Peggy. “I have a frivolous side,” she once said, “but you notice which name I use for writing. In a way, I had an alternate personality in reserve.” Neither is her completely; she is both.
And this is true of her narratives, too. In The Blind Assassin, Iris says of her sister: “Laura was my left hand, and I was hers.” In Alias Grace, her 1996 novel, the central character, a murderer called Grace, has amnesiac fits during which, she claims, she cannot be responsible for her actions. It was during one such episode that she committed her crime. Or did she? Atwood never tells us whether Grace has a split personality or is a very good liar – and who knows if the narrator is a reliable one? And all these alternate personalities fit neatly with a comment Atwood once made that “the national mental illness of Canada was schizophrenia” – bilingual, always threatening to split in two. But Atwood does not agree that this is a feature peculiar to her work – partly, surely, because she pulls away from specific comments about her books in favour of broader comments about being “human” and hates to have her work categorised.
‘Duality particularly interests fiction as a form,” she says. “It is particularly interesting from the word go – by which I mean Cain and Abel, Romulus and Remus. It’s the structures of siblings. Look at Christianity – having had God, they had to have the Devil. I think it’s the structure of the body and the brain. Two hands, two eyes, two halves of the brain – but one heart. This has been something that has interested people writing about being human.”
Zenia, one of her most memorable characters, finds a way of hurting her closest women friends in horrific, emotionally devastating ways, exploiting their gravest fears, accessing them through their vulnerabilities. In Atwood’s 1988 novel Cat’s Eye, in childhood, Elaine’s girlfriends, led by Cordelia, turn on her in terrifying ways that will affect her forever. Your friend is your enemy, your enemy your friend – and women, as they have always appeared in Atwood’s novels, can be both.
“In real life, the best friend can be the worst enemy, because she can turn on you, ruin your life, steal your man,” she says. “It is life. There are mean girls. I think there was a period of time in the 1970s when you weren’t supposed to say that, when you were supposed to polarise things so that bad behaviour came from men. And even if some bad behaviour did come from women, then it was the fault of the patriarchy, and if the patriarchy wasn’t there then all women would be nice. Well, I don’t happen to believe that. There are all kinds of things that people do – and people do them, not boys or girls, even though they might do things in different ways. It’s all about their struggles for power, survival, a position, self-definition.”
Of course, the idea that women can be bad, and that women authors can write about bad women without betraying their sex, is commonplace now: it is hard to imagine what it must have been like to have been 29 in 1969, having published The Edible Woman, a feminist novel written before women’s liberation kicked in, and have had interviewers ask you: “Do men find you attractive?” as one did. (Her reply, although she now denies it, was recorded as: “Do women find you attractive? Because I don’t.”)
“At that stage, you really were seen as a freak,” she says. “It was still the cusp of the women’s movement. Reviews of The Edible Woman divided into people who hadn’t caught up with the early women’s movement and said this is a novel by a very young woman and she’ll get more material later, and those who said this is cutting-edge feminism. Well, actually, it was not quite either one.”
This is an important point. Atwood is absolutely a feminist – many years of standing up for equality, supporting women workers, writing letters, protesting, testify to that. But that her books are feminist has sometimes been questioned – mainly because it is women who are evil in her fiction, not men. It could be argued, however, that her work is feminist in a much less literal and more mature sense, in that it features women who are good and bad, neat and messy; normal, damaged, whole, human. “The idea of a female person writing – in fact, doing anything other than the traditional roles – it was very early days for that,” she says. “You were really seen as someone who was quite eccentric and peculiar.”
This was especially true in Canada. “You have to take into account the colonial factor – Australians talk about having had ‘cultural cringe’, because things come from elsewhere. The arts were very marginal then. Then, in the late 1960s, you get this sudden upsurge, with all these people getting all this attention and what are you going to say about them? What they usually said was: aren’t they weird? It almost cancelled out the female weird – arty weird. “In my early days of being interviewed on the radio, I’d get people saying, ‘Why should I read your book?’ or, ‘Tell me in 25 words or less: what’s the plot?’ Or they’d kick off with, ‘Haven’t read your book, I’m not going to, but what’s it about?’ As far as they were concerned, I was just this jumped-up little shit. Things are quite pleasant for me these days, but what you see is the veteran of many battles.” When Atwood said that she had a frivolous side, she was talking about Peggy, not Margaret, and I think I met both. We had a bit of fun, touring round Toronto. We ate a lot. She put on funny voices. She let me a little into the world of Peggy, a world Margaret-readers don’t often get to see. But not that much. Even though I had all these personal experiences with Atwood I still didn’t get that close to knowing who she is. She is so very good at the mirrors behind the mirrors. Perhaps there’s a Margaret, for the world; a Peggy, for her friends (and the odd privileged acquaintance); and then a Pegs, the secret, private bit of her who only a few get to know.
This is, of course, a very, very smart thing. Because, perhaps, if people knew her as Peggy or Pegs they wouldn’t believe her books in the same way. Wouldn’t knowing about her happy life spoil our understanding of Zenia’s evil, of Cordelia’s viciousness? If we knew the intricacies of her day-to-day domestic life with St Graeme, the garden, the cat, surely we would find it more difficult to be convinced by the emotional violence in her work? She does want us to know that her life isn’t completely as painful as the novels. (She once said: “Women see me as living proof that you don’t have to come to a sticky end – put your head in an oven, stay silent for 30 years, not have children – to be a good and serious writer.”) And perhaps there is a deep, dark secret of some terrible pain that informs her most horrifying creations. But I doubt it. Instead, she plays up to the scary identity that has been constructed for and by her, in order to maintain Peggy’s privacy. She likes her doubles: “Everything has a positive space and a negative space. So there’s you. And then there’s the space that would be there if you weren’t.” She says, “People shouldn’t talk too much with authors, or they destroy their image of the writing.” She has also said that “self-definition is a kind of prison”. Atwood’s life’s work, for 30 years, has been about playing with reality, and she can take you to places you’d rather not go, in ways that few writers are able. She plays with reality in her fiction; she does it with her public persona, too. Why shouldn’t Margaret Atwood, world-famous novelist, Canadian institution, be as much a construct as her heroines, her anti-heroines? The wry, deadpan humour belongs to both Peggy and Margaret, but Peggy keeps a lot in reserve for those she loves. So we’re back to what’s real and what’s not. Atwood says that the Margaret who’s the “person on the big billboard … is sort of like having a twin who looks exactly like you, who is running around out of control. A lot of it is mythology.” She doesn’t want you to read her through her books, but she doesn’t want you to read her through her interviews. She doesn’t really want you to read her at all. What have you been doing reading this interview? Read her books instead.
The Blind Assassin is published by Bloomsburg and will be available in South Africa next month