Margaret Atwood, writer

0:00Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast from BBC Radio 4. Every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book and luxury, that they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island. For rights reasons, the music's shorter than on the original broadcast, but you can find a version with longer music tracks on BBC Sounds. Listeners will also get access to episodes 28 days earlier than everyone else. I hope you enjoy listening.

0:44My castaway this week is the writer Margaret Atwood, one of the most critically acclaimed authors in the world. She's won the Booker Prize twice and, since 1961, has published poetry, short stories, children's books, essays, the librettita operas and, of course, her novels, including Cat's Eye, Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin and 1985's The Handmaid's Tale, which has gained a new resonance in our politically polarised times. Placards at the Women's March in Washington bore the legend Make Margaret Atwood Fiction Again, though, as she points out, everything that takes place in the dystopian setting of Gilead has in fact already happened in the world we live in.

1:23She was born just weeks after the outbreak of World War II and says that gave her an interest in totalitarian regimes and their rise and fall. She also had an early appreciation of the natural world and a critical distance on the society she was part of. Her father was an entomologist and the family lived in the Canadian woods for eight months of the year while he pursued his research. Fertile ground for a creative imagination and good practice for life as a castaway too. She says every writer is at least two beings, the one who lives and the one who writes. Margaret Atwood, welcome to Desert Island Discs.

1:58Very pleased to be here. I should say welcome back. Second trip to the island for you, Margaret. Yes, it is. So I'm coming prepared. You know what you're in for. Let's start with that duality, Margaret. The two of you, the one who lives and the one who writes. How different are those two people? Well, I think it's a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde arrangement. So the Mr. Hyde, that would be the writer. And I'm kindly Dr. Jekyll. So that's who's here today. Yes, that's the one. Yes, yes. And when you are being Ms Hyde, does that mean you're kind of stepping into another life too? Do you leave your ordinary routines and cares behind?

2:39I think every writer does that when they're in mid-right, as it were. So, however, there are interruptions. You have to be able to shift back and forth pretty quickly, especially if you're in the midst of a family. So I did have a sign on my writing door that said, Do Not Disturb, that nobody ever paid any attention to. Well, Margaret, you are still publishing and still working very hard. Having been asked many times over the years when you were going to write a memoir and always saying you never would, you recently gave in. I wonder how the process was for you. How was it looking back at your life and sharing it with the rest of us?

3:19Well, what is a memoir? It's not an autobiography. It's not a biography with footnotes and you know lots of historical research and so forth. A memoir is what you remember. And if you think yourself about what you remember, it's usually stupid things you did, stupid things other people did. You remember those even better. Bad things people did to you, not so much bad things you did. You tend to repress those. and high points, unexpected ones, surprises and near-death experiences and catastrophes and then at my age, people dying. You remember that. You're sharing your music with us today, Margaret.

4:07What role does music play in your life? Are you someone that writes listening to music or thinks about the music that your characters would enjoy? I listen to a lot of music but not when I'm writing because if I hear music, I have to listen to it. So I can't just have background music. Let's get started with your first disc today then, Margaret Atwood. Disc number one. What are we going to hear and why are you taking it to your desert island? Well, I tried to pick something from each decade and there are quite a few decades by now. So here I am in the 1940s. The war is still on. My mother sent, there weren't any kindergartens at that time, you know, or the war shortage.

4:51So she sent me to Miss Pickering's dance class in Sault Ste. Marie, north of Lake Superior. And for this dance recital, we learned two dances, one being one involving Dutch outfits. Dutch and Canadians were very close during the war, and their royal family spent their time in Ottawa, so we were dressed up as little Dutch girls in pairs. We made windmills out of our arms. We slanted our arms one way, and then we switched like that, giving a windmill effect. So I have a picture of that. I don't have a picture of the one you're about to hear because they took one, but the top of my head is cut off.

5:39And for that, we wore little sailor suit outfits with either blue or red trim. Mine had red. And we did a tap dance to the tune you're about to hear. And three of us stood on round cheese boxes decorated like drums and did our tap dancing up there. And the tune is Anchors Away. Sounds adorable, Margaret. You're not averse to a dance these days, though. I mean, you went viral on TikTok not that long ago for dancing online when you were still in hospital. Let me say that a combination of heroin and fentanyl gives you a little bit of an opera. Oh, yeah, I've been there. I understand. No, you don't.

6:23Yes, it was a pacemaker being put in. That's what it was, just to assure everyone. Yeah, but you were dancing in recovery. Absolutely, and why not? And why not?

7:02Very jolly. very wartime. Anchors away the US Navy band. So Margaret let's go back to the beginning. You were born in Ottawa Canada 1939 the second of three children to Carl and Margaret. Now in your memoir you write that you owe your existence to a large green caterpillar. Tell me more about that. Well I did include as an appendix at the end of my memoir something that my dad wrote when he was fairly old about how he got started. And he came from very, very, very backwoods, rural, rural, rural Nova Scotia. And he describes walking to school, because they walked miles to school, and seeing a large green caterpillar.

7:49And he took it home. He made it a little cage. he fed it leaves and it turned into a beautiful moth. It was something we call a cecropia moth. Very gorgeous. And then he found another kind and it turned into a luna moth. Even more beautiful. And that's what hooked him on entomology. So had he not seen that caterpillar he would have taken some other path in life. Never met my mother and I would not exist. And how did the two of them meet your mum and dad? Well, if you've read Anne of Green Gables... Of course. You know that they, in those days, they enlisted teenagers to go and teach in one-room schoolhouses.

8:37And both of them did this. My mother was from a more upmarket family. Her father was a country doctor rather than a really backwoods shingle maker. so they met at something called the normal school in Truro Nova Scotia normal school had always baffled me did you go there to learn to be normal my father saw my mother sliding down the banister of the Truro normal school and thought to himself that is the woman I will marry. That's the one. And she did. In your earliest years, so the family spent more than half of the year living in the forests of northern Quebec. Tell me more about that, that upbringing under canvas.

9:28What was it like? No electricity, no running water. Do you know what an outhouse is? Yeah, toilets. A little house in the woods with a hole underneath it. And lighting would be any kerosene lamps or candles or flashlights had been invented by then. So you would call those torches. And no school, no television. There wasn't any anyway. Radio a bit, though it was hard to really get anything. No theater, no movies. Name something else, and there wasn't any of that either. But there were lots of books and there were always drawing and writing materials. So, of course, books became the art of choice.

10:18I'm wondering about, you know, your mum sliding down that banister and what she made of life in the woods. Basically, she liked riding horses, speed skating, skiing, and the outdoor life generally. Oh, so she must have loved it. She did. You would have had to go fairly far afield to find somebody willing to go up to the woods with you with two small children. But she, in fact, loved it because there were no hats. You didn't have to wear a hat. You didn't have to wear white gloves. Housework was minimal. And she was a good canoeist and good fisherwoman, although she had a deal with my dad. She would catch them.

11:01He could clean them. I think we'd better hear your second disc, Margaret Atwood. What's it going to be? We're going to move to the 50s. So here comes rock and roll. Elvis makes his big debut in 1955, but he wasn't the first. So here's an old favourite of mine called Hearts of Stone by the Charms. And we are in the age of jukeboxes. so you could go into a diner and have a jukebox at your little booth and you could put your money in and select your song that you wanted to hear. Arts made of stone Will never break For the love you have with them They just won't take You can ask them please Please, please, please beg And all your love is that day Yes, hearts of stone The charms and hearts of stone.

12:06My guest Margaret Atwood, knowing every word, singing along there, Margaret. So you would have been 12 before you spent a whole year, an academic year, at school, is that right? That's correct. So forest school then, what was that like, learning at home in the woods. You said, you know, that books and painting, that was everything. That was how you spent your time. Well, we got the lessons from the school and then did them. And it made me a very superficial person. In what way? Well, if you could do them really fast, then you could do whatever you liked after that. So whizzing through and then going outside and turning over logs to see if there was a newt.

12:45You were writing, though, because you wrote your first book at the age of seven. Yes, I did. It was about an ant. It is a lesson in structure. So the thing about ants is they don't do anything for three quarters of their life. They're an egg, nothing happens. They're a larva, nothing happens. They're a pupa, really nothing happens. And then they get legs and can move around. But you know, that's a long time to wait for any action. It's a challenging protagonist. I don't recommend it. And at the end of the novel, the ant does something that no ant has never been known to do. What was it? It's an altruistic act.

13:29They will do altruistic acts to save other ants, but not usually to save anybody else. Okay. And then I stopped writing and took to drawing. And that was a big passion for you. Still is something that you enjoy, I think. I still do a lot of drawing. It's taken different forms throughout my life. I did some of my own book covers. It was cheaper. I'm still very engaged in cover choices for my books. And what about your reading material? You know, as a young person, what were you able to access and what did you enjoy? Absolutely everything. So anything in the house, and that would include scientific books and a lot of murder mysteries of the kind that had the keyhole on the spine with the eye looking out of it.

14:20They were Dell mysteries. And worked my way through the classics. I was in love with Sherlock Holmes, speculative fiction, George Orwell, whom I read at a very impressionable age. What did you read first? What was the old one? I read Animal Farm as younger than 12, and I thought it was going to be like Winnie the Pooh, Wind in the Willows. It horrified me, especially The Fate of the Horse. I was very upset by that. Oh, yeah. Then I read 1984 when it first came out in a cheesy paperback. And I've been interested in George Orwell ever since. And I just got my picture taken beside his statue outside this building.

15:08I'm thinking about you reading Orwell as a young girl. You said, you know, that because of the time that you were born, you were fascinated by totalitarian regimes. You know, this idea of the kind of rise and fall. And obviously we see that in 1984, you know, that it ends with a postscript that tells us that this time of Big Brother and Newspeak and all that is over, it's past. What was that backdrop like and how aware were you of it, having been born at the beginning of the war and kind of growing up throughout it? Oh, I think very aware. I mean, we lived through Hitler and Mussolini and the war in the Pacific, and then it was a Cold War, and we were very aware of that.

15:50So, yes, how do these things start? How fast does it take to put them into place? Depends how many people you're willing to kill on the night of the long knives. How they crumble from within. How long it takes them to crumble from within. And why people gravitate towards them. So all of great interest to me. remember I'm of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Generation. That comes along at the end of the 40s. But I am an observer of trends and patterns. Margaret, let's go to the music. It's your third choice today. Tell us a little bit about this piece. We're going to do the Barker roll from Offenbach's Tales of Hoffman.

16:39And this is from the Home Economics Opera that I wrote in high school. and performed in. It was about fabrics, wasn't it? It was about fabrics, yes. The teacher, who had no sense of humour, I have to say, made a terrible mistake. She allowed democracy into the home economics classroom. Always a risk. She said that we could vote on a special project and she thought that we should vote for making stuffed animals. I did not wish to make stuffed animals, So I subverted part of the class and got them to vote on a home economics opera. And she had to permit it because it was a vote. And she said, all right, as long as it really was about home economics.

17:26So it was about three fabrics called Orlon, Nylon, and Dacron. And their father, Old King, C-O-A-L, because they were all coal tar derivatives. and the love interest was Sir William Woolley. It turns out he was wool and had a terrible problem. He shrank from washing. So the dilemma was resolved because a blend was created. And this song was about laundry day and it was set to Hoffman's Barcaroll and I sang it in an elevator to the director of the Canadian Opera Company, Richard Bradshaw, who said I had ruined Hoffman's Barker role for him forever. Would you be averse to conjure up the spectacle of the opera?

18:19Well, fabrics need a swim in the suds. It makes them feel just like new. Plink, plink, plink. Whites are whiter. Colors are brighter. Take on a brilliant hue. Plink, plink, plink. When you wash them do not slosh them do not squeeze or ring plink plink plink When you rinse get all the soap out in the laundry sink Now we're going to hear the real one Your first libretto, marvellous

19:36Oh

20:05CHOIR SINGS

20:12So Margaret, you started writing poetry first. You were published in the School magazine and then other publications and actually created your first book when you were just 21. That was published and went on to win the E.J. Pratt Medal, which must have been so exciting. How committed were you to writing back then? Did it feel like a calling? Yes, it was a calling, but I did not expect to be able to support myself doing it. I would have to think of something else. And in terms of the vocational aspect of it, what were you writing for? What was the aim? Did you want to change the world? Did you want to just change how people thought?

20:49No, I wanted to write deathless masterpieces. We were in the age of aesthetic excellence. So the fight between moral purposes for art, which we'd had quite a lot of in the 30s, and aesthetic purposes for art. Let's think about Oscar Wilde and indeed The Great Gatsby to a certain extent. So Deathless Masterpieces versus Let's Improve the World and that has been a fight for a very long time. So I was on the Deathless Masterpieces side at that point. That's a high bar to set yourself at, you know, just out of your teens, isn't it? I was still in my teens. so from the get-go it was deathless masterpieces yes but I was willing to write rubbish in order to support myself and my first idea I got this magazine called writer's markets and my first idea was that I was going to write true romances because they paid the most and I did give it a go but I wasn't any good at it you have to have a feel for it and I thought they were too silly So you went to university, you studied English, philosophy and French, and then began your graduate studies at Harvard.

22:04What was life like there in the 60s? Well, I was too old to be a hippie. Our generation were more of the existentialist persuasion. And we were also 50s hard work and overachievers. So hippies seemed to us just really too laid back. but we watched them with interest and we also watched middle-aged men put on love beads and grow their hair and really become quite cringe as apparently we say now. Yeah, so I lived through all of that but you didn't do that kind of behaviour at Harvard Graduate School. That would not have been viewed. So was it still quite buttoned up then? Oh, very buttoned, yes.

22:49Very tweety. I read, Margaret, that female students weren't allowed into the Lamont Library while you were there. What did you make of that at the time? The Lamont Library had all the modern poetry in it. So you couldn't access that? If I knew the names of the books I could, I could get them out, but I couldn't go in there because I might be distracting to hard-studying male students. What did you make of that at the time? Well, everybody just, you know, that's how things were, but we could all go into Widener Library, so instead of going into Lamont and doing modern poetry, we went into Widener and did Witchcraft and Sorcery.

23:25Really much more useful, don't you think? That came in handy for The Handmaid's Tale, I know, later. You repurposed some of the buildings on campus. I had such fun doing that. Tell me about that. Why did I set it at Harvard? Because when I was there, Harvard was the epitome of liberal democracy and free world thinking and experimental thinking and all of these things. but it began in the 17th century as a theological seminary in the New England colonies, which were not democracies. So on the theory that every country has a sort of infrastructure of having to do with its origins and earlier development, there was always this 17th century theocracy lurking underneath the surface and now we see it making an attempt at achieving total power in the United States.

24:28It has had a few outbursts previously. There was something called the Great Awakening in the 19th century. But you get some very, well, as you know, Christianity split off into many different sects and you can get some pretty interesting subsets of Christianity depending where you are in the world. Margaret, we'll return to The Handmaid's Tale later. For now, I want to hear your next disc, if you wouldn't mind. Your fourth choice today. Now we're in the early 60s, and in the book there's a picture of me sitting in something called the Bohemian Embassy, which was a coffeehouse where artistic performances took place.

25:15And I'm listening to a young woman sitting on a stool playing the guitar and singing, and what she was singing would have been a folk song, probably about a girl being murdered, because a lot of them were. And her name was Sylvia Fricker, and she became part of a pretty famous later duo called Ian and Sylvia. and the one I have chosen is one of their most famous songs called Four Strong Winds, which was written by them. Four strong winds that blow lonely Seven seas that run high All those things that don't change Come what may But our good times are all gone And I'm bound for moving on I'll look for you if I...

26:19Ian and Sylvia and Four Strong Winds Margaret Atwood, after college, one of your first jobs was as a market researcher and I think some of those experiences that you had in that role inspired your first novel, The Edible Woman. Tell me about that. It was my first novel to be published. Oh, yes. There was one that you're glad wasn't published, I think. That's right. So I was writing that one that didn't get published while I was working at the Marker Research Company. And my job was on some days not very demanding, so I'd just take my novel to the office and run it through the typewriter. I looked very busy.

27:02Okay, so there was the first pancake, shall we say, and then the edible woman. Then the edible woman, and I certainly used a lot of my market research experiences in it, some of which were quite strange. What kind of thing? Well, let's see now. I think my favourite questionnaire, because it was my job to read the questionnaires, to make sure the questions could be asked and answered quite simply, and then to test them out. And I think my favorite was the 35-page laxative questionnaire. 35 pages. Exactly. That's detailed. I said, very detailed. I said, nobody's going to, because you went around and knocked on doors and asked people these questions.

27:46And because they were so bored, they were quite willing to answer them in those days. I said, people are going to kick you out after the first five pages. And they said, yes, but those who stay for the full 35 pages, that's our target market. Gold dust. It doesn't sound like the most likely crucible for one of the first great modern feminist novels to come out of. When you were writing The Edible Woman, what did you think you had on your hands? Did you think it would connect with people in the way that it did? No, because I never thought any of those things. but I thought I was writing it before second wave feminism hit.

28:26I was writing it in 1964-05 and the publisher then lost the manuscript for a couple of years so it was actually published in 1969 just in time for second wave feminism to hit. So I got two kinds of reviews one by people who hadn't heard of second wave feminism and thought I was an immature person who would grow up later. And the second kind who had heard of it and thought, this is part of the new wave. So yes, that was interesting. And was that gratifying to you? Did you feel part of that wave? I was a little too old, maybe, and possibly a little too Canadian. But I watched it with great interest.

29:13I didn't invent it. I was not part of that crucible of thinkers in New York and Boston that really pushed it to the surface. Do you think that outsider perspective has been useful to you, though, over the years? You know, it's the writer's natural perspective, isn't it, to be on the outside looking in? Well, as a Canadian, you're always on the outside looking in when it comes to the United States. It is a one-way mirror. They are not on the other side looking at you much at all because they don't have to be. When did you realise you could make a living as a writer, Margaret? How long was it? 1972.

29:55I started in 1956. Wow. Lots of different jobs. Now, when we say make a living, We don't mean rolling in the flesh pots and gold lamé dressing gowns. That would all come later. You're a very naughty person. No, I'm a Scroogey type of person. Parents from the Depression. Pinching of pennies. How to get the sugar out of the very bottom of the sugar sack. I understand. Like that. Margaret, it's time for some more music. Your fifth choice today. What are we going to hear next? All right. By this time, I'm living on a farm. By this time, I'm living with Graham Gibson, who is a big record listener. And one of the people that we listened to quite a lot was Stan Rogers.