Margaret Atwood sat down with Stephen Marche for Gloves Off, Marche’s podcast about the threat the U.S. poses to Canadian sovereignty.Chris Young/The Canadian Press
For a Canadian writer, interviewing Margaret Atwood is a bit like interviewing Santa Claus; it doesn’t feel altogether real. There’s no precise equivalent for the situation in other countries. It’s as if an American novelist could go and chat with Mark Twain, or a French poet have a drink with Baudelaire. It doesn’t seem like it should be possible. But I know it’s possible because I recently did it. We are a young country, indeed. You can still go and interview the leading canonical figure of our national literature.
For Gloves Off, my podcast about the American threat to Canadian sovereignty, I wanted to interview Atwood about the state of the new nationalism, how it compared with the original nationalism of the 1960s. For various reasons having to do with home renovations, she agreed to the interview on the condition that it took place at my house. My wife started cleaning frantically. I was worried about my lawn, which I had burned by overfertilizing in the spring, leaving it spotty in patches, but there was nothing I could do about it.
My anxiety was ridiculous but natural enough. Over the course of my life, I have been more exposed to the Margaret Atwood brand than I have been to Coca-Cola. Teachers weren’t forcing me to drink Coca-Cola from the age of 10, after all. If you’re a Canadian writer, you cannot have an uncomplicated relationship with her. Her presence inevitably conjures the anxiety of influence, cubed and on speed.
Margaret Atwood receives lifetime Griffin Poetry Prize
They say never meet your heroes. Atwood was never quite a hero to me. She was the leading saint of a religion I was throwing myself out of, the ultimate icon of the Canadian literary establishment, from which I have been actively excluded at every turn, so that the vast majority of my career has been in the United States. No one, I think, who’s being honest can deny the power of The Journals of Susanna Moodie, Cat’s Eye or The Handmaid’s Tale or half a dozen other Atwood masterpieces, but when a writer has been shoved down your throat since you’re a kid, it’s natural to gag. In the process of finding yourself as a Canadian writer, “Atwood” is a token you are pushing around a board in your mind.
I don’t know about heroes, but it’s good to meet saints in person, to remove them from the niches of your mind. Here’s the thing about Atwood in person. She’s hilarious. The first time I met her was at the Giller Prize many years ago where she told me about young men she knew in northern Quebec who lost their virginity to chickens.
Atwood is optimistic, she told Marche, despite the state of the world. “You have to be optimistic to be a writer,” she says.Fred Lum/the Globe and Mail
Later, somebody gave her a copy of my book On Writing and Failure, in which I told the following story.
“A friend of mine, a fellow novelist, ran into Atwood at a party once, and, as a way of introducing himself, mentioned an op-ed he’d written in The New York Times on the subject of Orhan Pamuk, a writer they both admired. Automatically, defensively, she snapped back, ‘I’ve written for the Times, too.’ My novelist friend ate out on this story because, to him, and to me, and everyone we knew, she was Margaret Atwood and we were a bunch of chancers. Only after we aged, and accumulated a few accidental successes, did we understand that Atwood is a chancer. She’s a chancer even though she’s on a stamp. Everybody who writes is a chancer.”
Another writer would have been offended by that anecdote. Atwood, however, wrote several lovely things about On Writing and Failure. She is a chancer. She knows it. It’s the best part of her.
Margaret Atwood memoir to explore seminal moments, inspiration behind famous books
During the interview, I asked her if she was optimistic, given the state of the world. “I’m always optimistic,” she told me. “You have to be optimistic to be a writer. You know that. Am I gonna finish this? Is it gonna be any good? Will anyone buy it? Am I gonna be able to sell it? Will anybody read it? Will I get horrible reviews?”
Just so you know, if you are out there worried about your next project, about whether you will ever feel safe and arrived, struggling with some vision you are trying to make real in the world, so is Margaret Atwood, and she has a book on the bestseller list today that she wrote 40 years ago. “They’re not anxieties,” she told me when I slightly challenged her assessment of the current state of her career. “They’re just givens.”
Atwood is out there working. She is taking risks. For that reason, perhaps, she is the opposite of the CanLit institutions she created and rules over. Canadian literature has been overwhelmed by propriety; every syllable must go to committee for approval of its appropriateness. The literary institutions – the CBC, the prizes, the vast majority of the mainstream publishers – operate by establishing postures of political morality. Everything else – the quality of work, its impact on the public, even the survival of the institutions themselves – comes after. The first thing members of the Canadian literary establishment ask themselves is who could potentially, in any condition whatsoever, be offended by any given remark. Not Atwood. She says what the hell she likes.
The Steven Galloway scandal was the ultimate example. The destruction of his career during the height of the #MeToo movement was one of the first progressive self-immolations by the Canadian literary community. She could easily have joined in the frenzy of scattershot revenge against masculinity. When she refused, and the othering force of the social-justice movement came for her, she could have done what everybody else did, and duck. She didn’t duck. She ran right into the fight. And when young women called her a “bad feminist,” she didn’t cringe. She laughed at the insanity of it.
Atwood: Am I a bad feminist?
Margaret Atwood takes to Twitter to respond to criticism of #MeToo Globe op-ed
In my interview for Gloves Off, the leading feminist voice of her generation told me, “Men have now been burdened with original sin.” However you feel about that statement, it is a sign of her sheer guts. I mean, they’re wearing costumes from her novels at pro-choice rallies. She doesn’t follow the crowd, even when the crowd is following her. She says what she sees, and she lets the chips fall where they may. She is a master of her immense celebrity, but she is no poser.
Atwood has escaped the vices of the establishment she founded, just as saints escape the vices of the church. And that’s why she’s so worth talking to. The interview for Gloves Off ranged over a broad swath of subjects, but her principal lesson for the new nationalism is not to mistake anti-Americanism with pro-Canadianism, and to remember that at least half the Americans in the struggle for democracy on this continent are on our side.
When she saw my fried lawn, she did tell me that I should turn it into boxes of native flowers and grasses. Better for the butterflies. As so often is the case, she’s probably right.
