‘People think I’m scary, but they’re easily frightened’
Joint-Booker Prize winner Margaret Atwood addresses misconceptions about herself and discusses growing up in rural Canada in the 1950s, in this interview with Barry Egan, originally published in June 2006
DO YOU have dependants? Margaret Atwood employs her trenchant gaze on me as she gives the question considerable thought. She takes a deep breath before setting off on a reply that will last five minutes and which only she could have constructed.
“Over the years, I’ve had the following: three children — of whom two are stepchildren and one is biological; I have two grandchildren by one of the stepchildren; in addition I have had nine cats, two dogs, two horses, cows, sheep, peacocks, a turtle, geese, ducks, chickens… am I missing anything out?” There is a Pinteresque pause. “Oh, a mouse!” she shrieks. It was supposed to be a pet mouse, she adds, but it wasn’t very satisfactory.
One of her cats, she continues, is pretty smart. Apparently her Einstein-brained moggy can engage in “symbolic” thinking.
“For example, the front door is there in our house and you couldn’t see it from the part of the kitchen where we usually are. If he went and miaowed at the front door, you wouldn’t see or hear him. So he would come into the kitchen and scratch at the place where we kept the food behind the door and then we would open the door. Then he would see that we had got the idea that he wanted the door opened,” she explains.
“But he wanted the other door opened, and it went from there because he thought we were quite stupid.”
How did you know that the cat thought you were an idiot?
“You could tell by the expression on his face.”
Oh. It isn’t easy to tell a lot by the expression on Margaret Atwood’s face. Apart from the fact that the internationally acclaimed (at the time of writing she has received 60 awards for her writing, and 14 honorary degrees) grand dame of Canadian letters appears to have been having fun at my expense for the past hour.
In fact, she speaks in such a dry, slow, measured way that it is difficult to tell either way.
“I will tell you what Canadians like to do, particularly if they’re from the Maritimes,” she smirks, not admitting to anything, least of all that she is playing with me as she might tease a kitten with a ball of wool.
“They like to tell you completely outrageous lies with a totally straight face; and they will go on with that until you either catch them out or they are overcome with guilt or pity and tell you the truth.”
You have to be on your guard against it, she explains.
Margaret instead remembers a lie she told once to a girl who was watching her ducks swimming with her ducklings. The girl said to Margaret that she wondered how a mammy duck feeds baby ducks. “Under the water line she has this little row of nipples,” Margaret explained to the poor girl. “Really?”
An afternoon with Atwood is not unlike an audience with a brittle but brilliant dowager duchess who appears wickedly amused by everything. Some people have settled on the word “wicked” alone. The New York Times, for example, in 1996 remarked that at various points in her career, Margaret has been called Medusa-like, the dragon lady and even a black witch.
Her reputation for being testy and formidable is not supported today. This slightly bonkers silver-haired lady crunching on a club sandwich in Bono’s hotel in Temple Bar doesn’t tally with the fire-breathing shrew of lore.
She was born two-and-a-half months after the outbreak of World War II on November 18, 1939 in Ontario. Did this mean Margaret Atwood had an intrinsic anxiety towards the world?
“Absolutely, that’s true,” she says. “November 1939, Canada went in at the beginning and we were in the whole time. Things looked pretty desperate.”
The daughter of forest entomologist Carl Edmund Atwood, Margaret grew up in the inspiringly bleak wilderness of Ottawa, Northern Ontario, on the shore of a large lake in the woods. “It was a thousand miles of shoreline,” she recalls, “and it was easy to get lost.”
She explains “You spend the whole time listening, because anything that is going to come at you, you are not going to see; you are going to hear it first. So indigenous woodland people speak quite slowly and don’t talk and laugh as much when they’re in the woods because they are always listening.”
This explains, then, her careful and low voice. She says living in the woods “without a doubt” influenced her writing. “We didn’t have money as such. There was no other form of amusement when it rained except reading, writing and drawing.”
Growing up in the forest also meant she wasn’t properly socialised, she explains. “They thought I was weird, anyway.”
She adds that her joke is that she
‘Canadians like to tell you outrageous lies with a totally straight face...’
grew up in an all-male household: “My dad was a man, my brother was a boy and my mother was also a boy.” Margaret Dorothy Killam, she explains, was a “very extreme tomboy — by which I mean she was very athletic and she was not interested in frocks, make-up, shoes, hats”. How did that affect you? “I became quite interested in them,” she smiles. “I was kind of thrown into all that, as it were, with no guidance, because my mother was, quite frankly, no help in that department. I, of course, paid a lot of attention to that, which is why I always make sure that the people in my books have proper clothes.”
She once wrote that she wouldn’t consider herself a serious female writer if she hadn’t had a suicide attempt under her belt by the age of 30. “That was the Sylvia Plath days,” she chides.
Her teenage years in Canada in the ’50s were “not the years of teenage sex”, she recalls. “We were not told anything in school.” Her family were biologists, so the birds and the bees were “not a big mystery. But as for sexual behaviour and what you were supposed to do — the manners, the deportment, the customs… you had magazines for girls on how you should comport yourself on these occasions. ‘How To Say No Nicely’… We didn’t get taught that in school. ‘Get Your Hands Off Me!’,” she laughs.
“People ‘went steady’ in those days. You weren’t expected to marry them. You weren’t expected to have sex with them, though I’m sure some people did. And if you were really living the Archie comics teenage high-school life, you might wear their athletic letter jacket or their identity bracelet.”
She can remember playing spin the bottle. It was all pretty innocent childish play. “Why are we talking about kiddie-sex?”
We’re not. I am asking you about your childhood.
“I had a very nice boyfriend called Jamie Knowles when I was eight. I wonder where Jamie Knowles is now? He was very nice. A lot of my childhood was spent in the woods, and then in the winters we would always be in cities. So it was an ambidextrous sort of life.”
Once you get her dry sense of humour, Margaret Atwood’s wicked wit emerges, blinking, into the sunlight. Asked how Graeme (her late partner, the Canadian novelist Graeme Gibson who died on September 18) would describe her, she replies: “My spouse.”
And how would she describe herself: “Shorter than you thought I would be. Brainwashed by the Brownies — that harmful organisation.”
How did the ‘brown skirts’ brainwash you?
“They taught me I had to be helpful to older people.”
A far from frosty Atwood believes the biggest misconception people have about her is that they “probably think I’m scary”. And why would they think that? “Because they’re easily frightened.” She pauses for a second, then laughs. “I’m not scary at all. I’m very nice to people unless they start being mean to me.”
Her sharpness of tone possibly grew out of an early need to protect herself against a deeply prejudiced literary establishment. When she first started book tours, there weren’t many Canadian writers. It was assumed if you were a Canadian writer “you were mentally defective in some way and/or you were some kind of idiot and a loser”, she explains. On top of that, the decade or two after World War II was the “most male period of literature” that had been seen for many years. “And they treated you as such. ‘What makes you think you can write, you stupid Canadian female person?’.”
Atwood is now undeniably one of the most respected writers — female or otherwise — in the literary world. But she is not a snob in terms of what she likes to read.
“I like different things, not only at different times of your life but at different times of day,” she laughs. “At night, usually a good thick book of trash: things that other people would frown upon, like detective novels, sci-fi of the more lurid description.”
In the morning, she is more awake and can read more bracing tomes, especially when it is for the purposes of reviewing for the New York Review of Books.
Her new book (2006) The Tent is, she explains, “like the first Harry Potter book when they’re on the train and they can buy all sorts. The Tent is all sorts. They are all short and they are fiction and they are all sorts.”
When one of your characters asks, “whose life am I failing to live?” is that question directed at yourself ?
“What do we mean by ‘I’, ‘me’ and ‘mine’ when we are talking about a writer?” But it came out of your pen. “You can write anything with a pen, like forgeries. A lot of them are dramatic monologues and some of them are dialogues.”
What great truths have you learned about life? That you should have stayed in the forest?
“Nothing like that. Remember, I was brought up on Beckett. ‘What did you think of the carrot? It’s a carrot.’ I like life. It’s a carrot.”