Getting Out From Under

MR. POTTS:

It is my understanding that our guest today is not one who is easily shocked! Nevertheless, I must confess that the tactics, to which I resorted, in inducing her to accept my invitation were shocking to say the least.

I had tried the orthodox approaches in an endeavour to track her down-telephone calls during normal business hours in and about Toronto and New York City-but with no appreciable success. My wife was a co-conspirator, as is usually the case, in my little escapades, so when I reached for the telephone one morning at about 7:30, she exclaimed-"You're not going to call Margaret Atwood in New York at this hour?"-to which I replied, "But of course." In the result I aroused our guest from her slumbers, talked to her when her resistance was low, and told her all kinds of wonderful things about The Empire Club-all of which were true. She told me she was intrigued with my proposal, that she would have to break some selfimposed rules as to her own conduct, but finally she succumbed and graciously accepted.

Miss Atwood, we are all delighted to welcome you to The Empire Club and we rejoice in the frailty of women! Although our guest has had a truly remarkable career to date, she is different from so many of us here today in that her future is not behind her.

I won't tell you how old she is except to say that she was only seven years old when I entered the University of Toronto.

She is now the Writer in Residence at that University having previously graduated from Victoria College and subsequently having taught at the University of British Columbia, Sir George Williams University, University of Alberta and York University. In addition she has worked as a cashier, a summer camp tripper, a waitress, a writer for a market research firm and as a film script writer. Also a director and editor of House of Anansi.

She is the author of five books of poetry, one of which, The Circle Game, won the Governor-General's Award for poetry in 1966. She also won the E. J. Pratt medal in 1961, first prize in the Centennial Commission Poetry Competition in 1967 and the Union Poetry Prize (Chicago) in 1969.

Permit me to cite a few lines from one of them, "Power Politics" which I found particularly appealing.

"You refuse to own yourself, you permit others to do it for you:

You become slowly more public, in a year there will be nothing left of you but a megaphone."

She has published widely in a variety of magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly, The Tamarack Review, The New Yorker, Harpers and the Canadian Forum. She is the author of two novels, the first, The Edible Woman, was published in 1969. It is a fascinating book and has been described as "the intelligent woman's guide to survival in the contemporary world . . . . "

The second novel, entitled Surfacing, was published last Fall. Kildare Dobbs, who is with us today, had this to say-I quote: "The restless, fastidious eye that saw, in The Edible Woman, the civilized world as an orgy of cannibalism is not to be placated. Surfacing presents a vision no less horrible and desolating, redeemed only by the perfect control and imaginative richness of the telling. The narrator may be at the far edge of sanity, but the novelist shows more than she knows.

"To concede that, of course, is to concede everything. Margaret Atwood's second novel is even better than her first, confirming her power and mastery of the form. A superb storyteller who brings intelligence and wit to bear in a compelling personal vision, she all but persuades us to go back to the woods-where none of these gifts will help us to survive."

Shortly thereafter her first work of nonfiction was published, entitled Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. It started out as a teacher's guide for colleges and high schools, a way of telling teachers how to handle Canadian literature, but as Robert Fulford has said-I quote,

"the book turned out to be much more than the author first planned. It turned out, in fact, to be that very rare thing, a critical work which is also a significant literary event. She does for Canadian literature in this book some of what D. H. Lawrence did for American writing half a century ago in Studies in Classical American Literature. Like Lawrence, she has written a book that is at once searching and challenging, a book that forces the reader to think not only about the books of his country but about the environment that produced these books."

Margaret Atwood concludes an explanatory note to "Survival" entitled "What, Why and Where is Here?" with the following words: "What a lost person needs is a map of the territory, with his own position marked on it so he can see where he is in relation to everything else. Literature is not only a mirror; it is also a map, a geography of the mind. Our literature is one such map, if we can learn to read it as our literature, as the product of who and where we have been. We need such a map desperately, we need to know about here, because here is where we live. For the members of a country or a culture, shared knowledge of their place, their here, is not a luxury but a necessity. Without that knowledge we will not survive."

Ladies and gentlemen it is now my pleasure and very great privilege to invite our exciting and a very distinguished Canadian to speak to us on the subject "Getting Out from Under".

MARGARET ATWOOD:

That account of how I come to be here was more or less correct. I explained to Mr. Potts at eight o'clock in the morning that I don't make speeches and anything I had to say might be rather disconnected. He said that was alright because they just had Marshall McLuhan. I also understand that Mr. Potts is a fund raiser for the Liberal Party and having been subjected to his technique, I now understand why the Liberal Party has so many friends. He also kind of indicated that he wanted some sort of title for what I was going to say so he could put it on the program, so I made one up. He then sent me a little red book and in this little red book there were the speeches of everybody else who had spoken at The Empire Club plus photographs of them all with their mouths wide open. Then after taking a look at the speeches I realized that every single one of them was on a heavy political trip of some kind so I thought that I couldn't speak on Getting Out from Under or everybody would get indigestion. So this speech is now untitled.

The prospect of speaking at this organization once I had woken up later in the day I found quite intimidating partly because The Globe and Mail phoned and asked me for my text. And I said "Text?" And secondly because Mr. Potts proudly informed me that The Empire Club had just let women in last year. And this reminded me of when I used to be a student at Harvard. There was a kind of somber hall where they all used to eat dinner and before they let women in there if a woman ever showed her nose during the luncheon proceeding they would all throw buns at her. So I thought you know that there might be a danger that some of these bun-throwing tendencies had lingered on at The Empire Club. But then I thought about that and I thought well if they're going to throw anything I would rather that it be buns rather than plates or forks. So I decided that I wasn't going to give a political speech partly because I'm not a politician and just about everybody else who speaks here is, so what was I going to talk about instead, and I thought I would give you some of my personal insights into my current situation.

My current situation is being a "thing". When I was in New York my editor said to me "What are you in Canada now anyway? I mean, here you are a writer but what are you up there?" And he said "Are you a 'thing'?" And I said "Yes, I think I'm probably a thing." Now I must explain to you that being a thing is different from being distinguished. You can get to be distinguished without ever being a thing. As a matter of fact you can go from nonentity to distinguished without making that transitional phase. I know I thought of distinguishment as something that starts at your feet and works up and when it's got to the top you are a statue. I thought for a while that I was in danger of becoming merely distinguished, now however I am a thing. The difference between being a thing and being distinguished is that when you're distinguished people ask for your opinion on things but never listen to the answers because your role is simply being distinguished and it doesn't really matter what you say. Being a thing, however, is a culmination of being an icon, that is something that people worship, and being a target, that is something that they shoot at. I was informed by one of the Toronto newspapers this fall that I am the Barbra Streisand of Canadian literature. I'm not sure what the points of comparison are. To me Barbra Streisand is someone with a long nose and a very loud voice and I certainly have the wrong nose and I am gradually developing the loud voice but I had always thought of myself rather as the Mary Pickford of Canadian literature. Spreading joy. So when you're distinguished they ask but don't bother listening to the answers. And when you're a thing people make up what you are supposed to think without asking you about it and then they either praise or attack you for what they have in fact made up. This can be aggravating. It also gives you indigestion. So having found myself this kind of thing I paused and looked back over my life to see how I had become this thing. I used to be a writer and the difference between being a writer and being a thing is that writers just write books and they write away and they write away and most of the time nobody pays much attention to them because they are either ahead of their time or behind it. But what you happen to be saying coincides with what is going on in society; then you become a thing and this is what seems to have happened to me.

What is it then that I have said which has coincided with what is going on in the society thereby turning me into a thing. I think that it probably goes back to this book I wrote called Survival. The sub-title to Survival is "A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature" and I consider this to be essentially a literary exercise and I think the assumptions on which it is based are quite rational and nothing to really have a lot of fuss made over. The assumptions are that a literature that a society creates and the society itself are not separable. That is they don't exist in water-tight compartments-there is some kind of relationship between them and that writers, especially novelists, are influenced to an extent by this relationship. If this weren't so we wouldn't have all those academic papers about Charles Dickens and his society and George Elliott and his society, and so on and so forth. I see no reason why Canada should be any exception to this general literary rule. If this weren't true in Canada we would, indeed, be unique among nations and that would be our unique Canadian identity.

So I started with this assumption and I then proceeded to discuss several key patterns, what I felt to be key patterns in the literature which taken together I felt made up the overall shape of the literature. But this is not a very eccentric thing to do. Those of us who are internationally minded and do read books from other places may have encountered a book called The Englishness of English Art and they may also have encountered a book by Mr. Fiedler called The Love and Death in the American Novel. Both of these books do essentially the same kind of thing that Survival attempted to do. However, when the book appeared, great shakes and cries went up from all kinds of quarters and I found that this reaction, or possibly over reaction, to what I considered a rather modest and small scale literary endeavour quite surprising and this gets us back to how you become a thing. If this book had appeared ten years earlier no one would have noticed it and if it were to appear ten years later it would be obsolete either because Canada will have overcome the problems which are noted in Survival and gone on to other problems or because there won't be a Canada. But right now this book seems to have hit a tender part of the national consciousness dead centre, thereby my state of thinghood.

Now, as I've said, part of being a thing is that you are a target and people shoot at you and this means that you are either-the metaphor is either that of a rifle range or sitting duck or that of a battlefield. I will choose the battlefield one because it gives you more scope. When you are on a battlefield you locate your relative position by where the bullets are coming from. Now several of the bullets have been fired shall we say at random and I'll pass over those lightly such as the remark by someone called Mr. Callaghan, Mr. B. Callaghan, that Survival will make high school teachers lazy which is, among other things, an interesting comment on the contents of the heads of high school teachers-dull sluggards. And I'll also skip over the man who didn't like my appendices and I'll also pass very lightly over the one who thought I was a bad influence on young minds as if in fact I had written a book of porno. If you squash Canadian puritanism in one place it pops up in another. It's sort of amusing to be considered an evil influence.

There was also a very strange reaction from Quebec which went something like-If English Canada is having an identity crisis, it shouldn't, because it doesn't have an identity and even if it does it's bad for them to talk about it because that isn't humanism. Better we should be modest, virtuous and humble, labouring in our narrow sphere and leave identity crises to those who deserve it more, namely Quebec. For them separatism, for us humanism. I found this reaction sort of peculiar, especially since it came from a place which had surely been through a lot of this before and therefore ought to have recognized some of the symptoms and I wondered, how come? And I figured, well, the usual Quebec cliche is that we are a country without a culture and they are a culture without a country and if we turn out to have a culture after all it leaves their parallelism disturbed and it leaves them odd man out. We get to have two things and they only get to have one.

However, let's go on to some other bullets fired from the extreme left and the extreme right. To the left we have claims that the real literature of Canada is one of the struggle of the workers versus the capitalists and not the literature that I have described at all, which was written by a lot of bourgeois copouts or defeatists, etc. Therefore, Survival and myself included are two of either the nasty yankees or something called-"my imperialist mentors." I did forget to ask you which Empire this is the Club of.

From the extreme right, which is located, of course, in the United States, word comes from "my imperialist mentors" that Survival is, I'm happy to inform you, considered subversive. Subversive is quite an interesting word. Think about it!

From centre right comes the cry that there is no Canadian literature anyway and another variation of this is that we are all something called "earth people", not Canadians. Earth people, I thought about that for a while-it was kind of science fiction. I think that what it meant was that we all should be thinking in terms of the planet and things like that being an earth person is just great. I'm an earth person myself but I think if you don't pay attention to the earth that you are standing on you aren't going to get very far with the rest of it. Another version of that is that we are all earth people but somehow Canadians are an inferior kind of earth people and that we should pay attention to our biggers and betters to see how being a real earth person is done.

From the moderate left we have general agreement and from the centre, and I judge the centre by what comes in through the mail slot from people who are not literati or critics or anything like that but just ordinary readers, I gather that Canadian literature is something that they had never heard of or thought of before but when they read this book it somehow coincided with their own cultural experience, or lack of it. Now, from all this reaction I deduced that I'm slightly left of centre but it is a centre which is rapidly moving left. That's on political information. But at this point we have to stop and reassess these traditional directional signals because left and centre are becoming obsolete themselves and we are into something called "nationalism". Now, being a person who is concerned with words, I think that every once in a while certain words become unusable and I think that this is one of these words-like bourgeoise, which has lost its meaning because it's been used for so many things. You don't know anymore if someone calls himself a nationalist just exactly what is meant and I propose that we abolish this word and introduce some more specific terms by which we will be able to identify which kind of nationalism we have to deal with because this nationalism seems to be a general cultural movement which cuts across class and regional boundaries and has many manifestations, some of them silly. Here are a few of them: one is advertising nationalism. I always keep an eye on the beer ads, I think they are very important. If you've been watching the beer ads you will see that nationalism has crept into them because we have people going up in balloons singing songs about what a great country it is. That's advertising nationalism number one. Advertising nationalism number two has to do with where the advertisements are made. There is some furor over the fact that some are made in the States.

Then there is businessman's nationalism which simply says-make it here rather than importing it because that way you can make more money. And there is also worker's nationalism and this is a movement in which instead of being dominated by American unions, workers are attempting to pull away and form Canadian unions. And those interested in that subject might go back and study a bit of labour history. Once upon a time there were some Canadian unions. The story of what happened to them is edifying.

Then there is cultural nationalism and there is two forms of that. One serious and one silly. The serious kind says "Let's pay attention to what is going on in our own cultures." The silly kind says "Let's pay attention to nothing but."

Then there is ecological nationalism and for this I will quote Mr. Drew who says "The only context in which Canadian nationalism can be acceptable is in the service of the ecological conscience as a decentralist and anti-status movement. " If it can be conceived as a responsibility to the land then the term 'nationalism' would transcend its connotations and acquire significance as a means rather than an end and ecological nationalism says, more or less, the primary concern is cleaning up the atmosphere, cleaning up the land, preserving, but you can do that a lot more easily if you are in control of the land that you are attempting to do this with.

Then we have educational nationalism which is all that stuff about who should teach in the universities and, strangely enough, athletic nationalism, a new variant which I have recently noted.

Then there is publishing nationalism and that just means, you know, let's publish books here.

And then there is women's lib nationalism. I was quite interested to discover this one. Apparently at one women's lib conference held in Toronto the Canadian sisters locked out the American sisters because the American sisters would keep insisting that their definition of women's problems was the only one and Canadian sisters wanted to have theirs too. And in opposition to that there is also anti-women's lib nationalism. We have it on authority from Robin Mathews that there are no male chauvinist pigs in Canada. And I was very pleased to hear that. But it left me at a loss as to how to explain a certain behaviour on the part of some of my Canadian brothers, especially some of the laws that they are making. So, I felt okay then they aren't pigs-then what shall we call them? And I settled on the "moose" as being an appropriate term. The reason I chose the moose is that it is more stately, patriarchal, dignified, solitary and monogamous than the pig. It is also easier to fool and when I thought about that for a while I came to an unfortunate conclusion namely that judging from some of their political actions in the past, the plural of the moose is mice.

So that's a rundown on some of the forms of nationalism but since it's a cultural form which is proliferating like medieval cathedral architecture we can expect no more forms of it to appear and those of us who have taken a kind of detached interest in these matters will have our eyes open for them as they come up.

Now, there seems to be a certain amount of, you know, activity, mental activity, mental and emotional activity going on around all this, some of it fairly paranoid on both sides, and on the anti-nationalist side we get a fear of nationalism, especially when combined with socialism, as producing a tiny man with black mustaches. We also have a kind of racial memory of English imperial jingoism but I think Canadian nationalism in general can be classified as defensive rather than aggressive, although you do sometimes find things like students on the campus with signs saying "Let the Canadian Army invade the United States". I don't think that this is likely to happen. Even the Canadian National Anthem is defensive rather than aggressive.

In the publishing sphere, which I am most personally concerned with, we get a certain amount of paranoia there, too, and it seems to involve a fear of government involvement. If the government gives money to publishing companies won't they start telling them what to print. Now, I'm against government involvement in publishing myself. However, we are up against facts here and what you want is not always the same as what you need. You can see this very simply when you consider something like cannibalism. In our culture not many people would choose another person as what they want to have for dinner. But when you are up against staying alive, you have to take certain things that you may need but don't necessarily want and I think any small publisher would probably agree with me.

In the literary sphere we have a fear of distorted judgment of writers, that is people being given points because they are nationalist rather than because they are good and I think that this is a legitimate kind of fear and something we ought to consider. I don't think that being Canadian equals being good in writing but I don't think the old style is true either, that is once upon a time being Canadian equalled being bad. That's as far as most critics were concerned. I think we ought to take "Canadian" as simply a descriptive term rather than a term that passes moral judgment on the author. And novelists, after all, are people who tell stories and we ought to judge them by how well they tell their stories whatever the story may be. However, going back to my original point, there is a connection between a culture and the literature it produces. Now that nationalism exists we can expect it to be used as material in novels-used either with points given to it or points detracted from it, depending on the point of view of the writer.

Now, in my recent experience, when something polarizes the way this thing has been doing a certain amount of hysteria gets generated and hysteria causes distortion, that is an hysterical person perceives things which are not always true. For instance, I think this happened in some of the Canadian reviews-none of the American ones because why should they be hysterical about this yet. In some of the Canadian reviews of my novel, Surfacing, some people felt that this novel was anti-American or that it was nationalist and when people ask me this question I say "Because you put a preacher in a novel does that make it a religious novel?" Well, there is a nationalist in my book and also ask people who have read it whether they think this person is a very nice person.

What causes hysteria then of this kind? I think that hysteria is usually most present in people with some kind of a vested interest who feel a threat to that interest and others say that that is true of both extremes, that is the wildly nationalists and the wildly anti-nationalists. Instead of hysteria I think we should emulate the scientist and at least attempt to observe, when we read a book, what is in fact there.

Now there are a couple of sort of general comments of opinion you might say among Canadians and I take the ones who are anti-nationalist just for fun. Some Canadians, and they have often been characterized like this, are quite cautious and pessimistic and you would think that they had been brought up on the parable of the Frogs and their King. You probably know this fable. The frogs demanded a King and the Gods gave them a King in the form of a log but this log didn't do anything, it just sat in this puddle, and the frogs became impatient and they demanded a different King. And the Gods had become irritated with them by this time so the Gods sent them a stork which proceeded to eat them up and Canadians of this kind feel that any change is a change for the worse.

Then we have people preaching something called internationalism and I myself am an inter-nationalist, I believe in it profoundly as long as the word is defined correctly. You take the first part of the word "inter" as in "inter-provincial". It implies two things otherwise you can't have something going between them and it implies reciprocity, that is what is going between them is going in equal amounts and I think that that would be just absolutely fantastic. For instance, if I could sell as many books in the United States as here, I'd make it one in a thousand. I'd have sales of around 200,000 copies; I think that would be fabulous. The second part of the word, "national", implies that there are in fact nations. So inter-national implies something going back and forth between two nations just as interprovincial implies provinces and as I understand it nations are separate and selfdetermining entities. Before we can have true internationalism we have to decide that we want to be, or continue to be, a nation and my internationalism I would extend and say let's have more coming into this country than for instance just American and English literature. We aren't exactly swamped right now with translations of Japanese novels. Why not? Let's hear more from Iceland. Finland is one of my favourites and I would also like to have more Swedish literature here.

I'll end with a question, a paradox and some easy thoughts for the day. The question is-What is it people want, that's human beings, any kind, earth people? This question, of course, has many answers and among them, it's not the only answer but surely it's included among the answers, is that they want participation in shaping their future and participation in the life of their community. And I think a lot of the nationalist fervour has been stirred up because people here have felt that they have been, for one reason or the other, denied that.

The paradox is that nationalism right now is an international movement. I'll just leave that paradox with you.

And thoughts for the day-the first one is from Ann Landers-and it is very simple-before anyone else can respect you you have to respect yourself.

The second group of thoughts is from a remarkable person who is the Premier of St. Vincent, an Island in the Caribbean, and I kind of envy the Premier of St. Vincent his territory because he has such a small territory that in fact being the Premier of it means that he can influence how it's being developed. And I quote from a couple of his speeches-first quote: "Only the dead remain in a fixed position." The second quote: "In exploring a jungle the explorer must clear his own path and the path that exists is then the one which he has created." And the third one: "How can we love the land if it is not ours."

Margaret Atwood was thanked on behalf of The Empire Club by the Very Reverend Ernest M. Howse, Honorary Assistant Treasurer of the Club.

DR. HOWSE:

Long years ago, just slightly this side of the Renaissance, when I was a young minister in Westminster Church in Winnipeg, we had at one time to get a new soloist for the Church. She came along, a very young, beautiful girl, a young girl named Evans. We didn't know then we had one of the most talented girls not only of her land but of her generation. A girl I think could have been one of the greatest singers of our time. She left Canada, going to London first, to Washington and having an untimely death. But the first time she came we heard her sing. She was then unknown. We didn't know much about her talent but we did know that she was a doll. Nobody could escape that. When I got through with the service I went down and I asked the Chairman of the Music Committee "Cyril, what did you think of our new singer?" A look came into his eye "She doesn't have to sing! All she has to do is just stand there once a week and let us look at her. But," he said, "she can sing, she can sing." I'm sure it wouldn't take a psychiatrist to understand why looking and listening to Miss Atwood today, out of the long past that incident would come unexpectedly to the upstairs vacancy which in moments of vanity I call my mind.

Miss Atwood speaks as a poet, a poetess above all and always a poet. Poetry is, after all, the most widely effective, the most impressive and beautiful way of saying anything. But from the time of Homer the people who have really looked into our society and understood our society have been the poets. "Of all the people," said Sir Phillip Sidney, "the poet is the least a liar. " Because a poet knows, as Miss Atwood has demonstrated she knows, the facts are only the bare bones. The facts alone are insufficient but they have to be rounded into a circle because the fact is only part of reality and Miss Atwood looks at things as a seer. Who else could divide Canadians into groups to determine whether or not they were pigs or moose. Unsatisfactory a choice as we sometimes have between Prime Ministers or Presidents of the United States.

But here today she has opened our eyes because of her eyes and in poetry, of course, the words are the heavy part. Imagination is the true part. Today we have come for a while into the presence of the golden glow of imagination. We have been enabled to do what we weren't able to do ourselves-to see. This is the function of the poet and for what she has done today, we express our thanks. From what she has written, from what she now says and, I am sure, from what she will say, you can be sure that every time she speaks you will hear in the distance some golden echoes of the inexhaustible song of humanity.