On Writers and Writing by Margaret Atwood

Author:Margaret Atwood [Atwood, Margaret]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-7710-0688-3
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2014-08-26T04:00:00+00:00

Nobody hates writers more than writers do. The most vicious and contemptuous portraits of writers, both as individuals and as types, appear in books written by writers themselves. Nobody loves them more, either. Megalomania and paranoia share the writer’s mirror. The writer-as-Faust looks into it and sees a grandiose and evil and superhuman Mephistopheles, master of magic, controller of destinies, to whom other human beings are as puppets whose strings he controls, or as fools whose hearts and deepest secrets he holds in the palm of his hand; the writer-as-Mephistopheles looks into the same mirror and sees a shivering and pathetic Faust, longing for eternal youth and terrific sex and untold riches, and clutching desperately to the pitifully delusional belief that he can conjure up these things through the miserable scribbling, the puerile fooling around with words, that he has the overweening nerve to call “art.”

In the twentieth century, writers have on the whole been haunted by the specter of their own inconsequence. Not Shelley’s powerful world-shaping poet, but Eliot’s hesitant J. Alfred Prufrock, has been the general pattern. Books about the loathsomeness or enviousness or pettiness or foolishness of the writer proliferate. Here is a portrait of the writer as messed-up geek, from Don De Lillo’s Mao II. An editor is describing his work, to a writer:

“For many happy years, I’ve listened to writers and their brilliant kvetching. The most successful writers make the biggest complainers … I wonder if the qualities that produce the top writer also account for the ingenuity and size of his complaints. Does writing come out of bitterness and rage or does it produce bitterness and rage? … The solitude is killing. The nights are sleepless. The days are taut with worry and pain. Bemoan, bemoan …”

“It must be hard for you,” [says the writer], “dealing with these wretches day after day.”

“No, it’s easy. I take them to a major eatery. I say, Pooh pooh pooh pooh. I say, Drinky drinky drinky. I tell them their books are doing splendidly in the chains. I tell them readers are flocking to the malls. I say, Coochy coochy coo … There is miniseries interest, there is audio-cassette interest, the White House wants a copy for the den.”13

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