Atwood Invites Readers Into Heart and Soul of Writing

NEGOTIATING WITH THE DEAD

A Writer on Writing

By Margaret Atwood

Cambridge University Press

220 pages, $18

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Almost anyone can write, but relatively few people actually become professional writers. In the Canada of the 1940s and 1950s, as Margaret Atwood remembers it, anyone with aspirations in that direction was regarded with suspicion: not for nothing did Canadian writer Alice Munro title one of her story collections “Who Do You Think You Are?” Unappreciated by their fellow countrymen, aspiring authors also worried about being considered too provincial by the wider world: After all, everyone knew that real writers lived in places like London or New York.

All that has certainly changed, and Atwood has been a highly visible part of that change. In 2000, the internationally known poet and novelist took up Cambridge University’s invitation to deliver a series of six lectures on the rather general subject of writing and being a writer.

The six essays contained in “Negotiating With the Dead” grew out of those six lectures. The result is an engaging book--erudite yet informal, playfully witty yet down-to-earth.

Atwood’s focus is on what it feels like to be a writer. She consults her personal experience, she reports what other writers have told her, and, of course, she looks at what famous writers, past and present, living or dead, have had to say on the subject.

The first essay draws on her youthful experiences. With humor borne of hindsight, she recounts some of the ways in which she naively hoped to earn a living by her pen (composing romance novels turned out to be harder than she’d reckoned). She describes how she felt on composing her first poem while crossing the football field on her way home from high school. She recalls how surprised she was in college to discover the previously unsuspected existence of arty coteries right under her nose. She also remembers wondering, as she observed the uneven quality of the work recited at coffeehouses and published in literary journals, how on earth a budding author could tell whether her work was really any good.

For the writer inhabits, at the very least, two worlds: the world of imagination and language in which writing is done and the world in which one needs to make a living and a name for oneself.

If not endowed with extra-literary sources of financial support, how do writers make their livings? “The money factor,” Atwood rightly notes in her essay on that topic, “is often underplayed in biographies of writers, the biographer being as a rule much more fascinated by love affairs, neuroses, addictions, influences, diseases, and bad habits generally.... When I found I was a writer at the age of sixteen, money was the last thing on my mind, but it shortly became the first.” Yet the true value of a work of art, she reminds us, is not determined by the marketplace. Nor, on the other hand, is a writer’s high-minded indifference to such grubby concerns a guarantee of the high quality of her work.

Robert Louis Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde, Robert Browning’s Childe Roland, Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, Lewis Carroll’s Alice, Jorge Luis Borges’ dual persona in “Borges and I” are among the presiding spirits of Atwood’s essay on the double-ness of being a writer. On the one hand, there’s “the person when no writing is going forward--the one who walks the dog, eats bran for regularity, takes the car in to be washed ... --and that other, more shadowy and altogether more equivocal personage who shares the same body, and who, when no one is looking, takes it over and uses it to commit the actual writing.”

The soul who would not harm a fly in real life may, in her capacity as a writer, create fictional scenes of heinous crimes or heart-rending tragedies. Another, even more unavoidable, kind of double-ness seems intrinsic to the very process of writing anything down: The words on the page come to have an existence of their own, even as the person who inscribed them there goes on to develop and change.

Another essay examines the question of the writer’s moral responsibilities. Though the aesthetic doctrine of l’art pour l’art urged artists to free themselves from moralistic concerns and devote themselves entirely to their art, Atwood points out that it is also true that “like it or not--language has a moral dimension built into it.” If a novelist tells a story, readers will make moral judgments about what happens in it. Here again, Atwood has no firm and simple answer to the questions she airs, but she discusses these perennial conundrums with vivacity, verve and common sense.

Indeed, if one discerns a certain lack in her general approach, it is not that she is sometimes inconclusive, but rather that she sometimes sounds a little too glib and pleased with her performance, more interested in strutting her stuff than in truly engaging the questions she raises.

The magical, intense relationship between two people who may never have met--the writer and the reader--is the subject of Atwood’s penultimate essay, while her closing chapter is a meditation on what she sees as the writer’s journey to the underworld in search of creative material. And for the reader, too, she points out, “A book is another country. You enter it, but then you must leave; like the Underworld, you can’t live there.” Atwood’s riffs on writing not only will delight readers who are fans of her fiction but also may serve to cheer fledgling writers as they set out on their imaginative journeys.