Helping the reader understand artistry

Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts
by Margaret Atwood  

Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2025
$45 /  9780771096433

Reviewed by Christopher Levenson

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What do you do with a national treasure? Parades, festivals, awards ceremonies, re-packagings as TV drama or film? If it’s an author such as Margaret Atwood, the obvious answer is an even bigger book, ‘the best of,’ something for everyone.

Hence this compendium. And yes, even if you had never heard of its author this book would be worth reading simply as a wide ranging, interesting collection of personal stories and firsthand accounts of public events.

Because of her central role in Can Litt since the 1960s, she can expect a lot of interest here in the tangential details that she provides in vignettes of the poet Jay MacPherson, who was her University of Toronto Victorian Literature prof, the young Dennis Lee, Doug (D.G.) Jones, and Adrienne Clarkson, along with an attractive double portrait of Jane Rule and Helen Sonthoff in Vancouver, though perhaps the most interesting are the four insightful pages about Mrs. Mary Sims in Toronto who offers her an editing job with Canadian Facts, a marketing research company, and whose own life story of early widowhood with three small children adds fuel to Atwood’s later literary fire. 

These would be attractive enough in their own right but they also serve to flesh out the emergence of a consciously Canadian literature, together with those superstructures, such as the Canada Council and the Writers’ Trust, needed to support its growth. She also writes of such informal literary gathering places as Toronto’s Bohemian Embassy cafe and such pivotal events as the founding of House of Anansi Press.

So how much of all this do her readers need to know? Structurally most of the thirty-nine chapters are arranged chronologically by book title, which has obvious benefits in a reference work but lends itself less to speculative generalizations than a more broadly thematic approach would have done.

I was now seeing quite a lot of Jim Polk. A fellow Victorianist, he was a romantic figure: not only was he from Montana, but he had a white rat for a pet. This was Byronic in a minor way, and who was I to talk, what with the iguana? He said that the rat was intelligent and affectionate. I met it and can confirm that this was so.

…to this, drawn from her last years with novelist Graeme Gibson, when he was heavily sedated after an emergency hospital visit:

“Look at that painting on the wall!” he said. “What depth! What meaning!”

The painting was an undistinguished depiction of a dull, brownish country road.

 “What are you on?” I asked.

 “Demerol,” he replied.  “And it’s lovely!¨  I recommend it for art critics.

Altogether, her account of getting to know and love her longtime partner Graeme Gibson provides the most moving and personal parts of the book, especially in those extended passages that deal with his insouciance, courage, and ultimate decline into dementia.

One of the most telling incidents, however – and Atwood is to be commended for acknowledging it – occurs when, as a student, she has a temporary job as a census taker:

Towards the end of this job I was counting another single man in a

            rooming house. I went through the first questions with him then a series 

            of questions aimed at determining the country of ancestry:

Where were you born?

Here.

Where were your parents born?    

Here.

What about your grandparents?

Here.    

We went on this way until he took pity on me. “I’m a Canadian Indian,” he said. …  I was shocked and embarrassed. Having spent so much time up north, I knew there were lots of indigenous people. Why then was there no space for them on the census questionnaire?  Who had overlooked the fact that a person living in Canada didn’t have to have ancestors that came from elsewhere?

Such directness and openness, not just about her abilities but also her shortcomings, puts the reader at ease. As we have had a foretaste of this in the introduction where she writes “in some variants of myself I terrify interviewers; in others I cause pathetic whining in politicians. One glance from my baleful eyes and strong men weep, clutching their groins, lest I freeze their gonads to stone with my Medusa eyes.”  No one should expect warm fuzzies and sentimentality.

Her wit, as here, is usually acerbic and she is well aware that she has a reputation for being brusque and sharp, but for the most part she is understanding and remarkably charitable even towards those, such as Shirley Gibson, who had wrongly accused her of attacking her. So when, regarding her abortive engagement, she asserts, “I wasn’t bent on ensnaring [a potential husband] with my demure feminine wiles and had few inhibitions about expressing my opinions, literary or otherwise” we are better able to accept her occasional settling of scores with, for instance, Margaret Wente, and her harsh but apparently justified dismissal of the former ‘Grande Dame’ of Canadian Literature, Dorothy Livesay.

As well as being refreshingly down to earth and endlessly curious about, and engaged in, the world around her, Atwood has, as befits a poet, a metaphorical cast of mind: 

While I was typing away at The Edible Woman one evening, my doorbell 

            rang. It was my middle-aged landlord and landlady from downstairs. They

            were worried, they said, because they feared their house had termites:

            they could hear them making little clicking sounds in the ceiling. Had I 

            heard them too?

 

“That must have been me typing.”  Pause. ¨I’m writing a novel,” I added.

                      There you have it. Novel-writing = termites in the woodwork. Tunnelling

                      away in the dark, unseen, unsuspected, until one day the whole structure 

                      crumbles and their artistry is revealed. 

 

Since success tends to be less compelling than struggle, once she is well established as an international icon and invited to festivals and interviews across the globe, how does she sustain the reader’s interest? What does she do for an encore?

Part of what this book does, for the most part successfully, is to help the reader understand the artistry, the how and the why of the writer’s life.  She is very clear about her craft as a writer. Her ideal reader would have read or recently re-read all her novels and stories, but even for the uninitiated there is more than enough to engage one’s interest and curiosity, as when she devotes a whole page, for instance, to explaining how she names her characters.

Every writer is at least two beings: the one who lives and the one who writes. Every question and answer session at a book event is an illusion. It’s the one doing the living, not the one doing the writing, who is present on such occasions. How could the writer be there, since no writing is being done at that moment? Like Jekyll and Hyde, the two share a memory and even a wardrobe. Though everything written must have passed through their minds, or mind, they are not the same.

 

If fiction inevitably involves insights and incidents drawn from the writer’s own lived experience, then by the same token, whether deliberately or not, because our memories never have 20/20 hindsight, successful autobiographies and memoirs, being likewise partly fictional, involve deliberate selection and frameworking.

At times the book comes across like one’s favourite untidy secondhand bookstore, full of unexpected treasures but also crammed with fillers. What holds it together is mainly a matter of the tone and the persona that she projects.

As for the business of being a writer, it is fascinating to read of the letters and comments she received from her ever-widening readership (once she got letters of complaint from a pagan goddess group and a wizard for her unauthorized use of their copyrighted images). When in the fourth grade Atwood breaks the spell of being bullied, the real life situation that led to Cat’s Eye, her lack of trust and suspicion of hidden motives is initiated. As she writes, “You will know that there are likely to be at least two stories: the one you are being told and the other one. You might become a detective. You might become a con artist yourself. Or a blend of the two: you might become a novelist.”

Understandably, many of the chapters are named after the novels for which they provide background material, a device that underlines one obvious purpose of the book, and indeed they provide interesting details about the genesis of her groundbreaking poem sequence, The Journals of Suzanna Moodie, and of the novel Alias Grace.  

As well as fluently ṕersonalizing herself to her present and future readers, details of her mostly remote, rural childhood will doubtless provide a trove of academic footnote fodder, although for me, the reconstruction of her early childhood was less convincing and I can’t help feeling that many of the details about her toys and her childhood games only clutter the narrative. On the other hand, I would not want to forgo some of the endearingly funny stories. Growing up among biologists, she became obsessed with rabbits and

…was particularly fascinated by the Easter Bunny. He was male – that

           much was clear – but he had a basketful of coloured eggs that he couldn’t 

           have laid himself. Hens laid eggs, rabbits didn’t, but if they did they would 

           have to be female rabbits. Was there a Mrs. Easter Bunny? Was there a

           concealed hen that nobody had seen fit to mention?

 

Yet her father’s work as an entomologist, while establishing the untypically remote rural base for her earlier poetry along with her hands-on involvement in insects and the natural world, seems more tangential, as does the mini-ethnic history of her parents’ Nova Scotian ancestry or the details of her intended PhD Thesis. This is the kind of information that one would expect more in a formal biography.

As must already be apparent, the book is well served by a narrative style that is immensely quotable – direct and relaxed but sprightly, though at times a little chirpily self-conscious, like a stage manager, especially when she speaks to the reader directly: “But keep your eye on Dennis [Lee]. He has a major role to play.” Throughout Atwood’s engaging hands-on quality ensures the reader’s attention. Speaking of her time at Harvard, she disavows “any of the virtuous feminist emotions that younger people expect us to have had. No, we did not. Second wave feminism hadn’t happened yet. If anything, we felt like poker players. Play it as it lays, and let’s see what comes up next. I myself wasn’t too bothered by my supposed academic future, since I was a secret writer.”

Here, as later in the case of Steven Galloway at UBC, she speaks her mind, for, whatever else, Atwood is unwaveringly her own woman. Nevertheless, and in this case specifically, anyone interested less in her well-documented public life than in her social and political views, would do better to read the more specific, elaborate, and focused essays and articles assembled in Burning Questions: Essays and Occasional Pieces, 2004-2021.

Finally, as someone who has played a minor role in the Canadian literary scene since the late ‘6os, and knew some of Atwood’s friends and contacts, I found much to interest me, to fill in the gaps, to revive past friends now dead, and to rediscover once familiar names and events. I wonder, though, how helpful it would be for that chimera, the general reader.

My only regret regarding contents is that, although six of her first seven books were poetry, she writes so little about her own poetry, which I greatly admire, while the ten poems that she does include appear not for their own sake but simply as illustrations of events. While I can understand her publishers’ reluctance to have her expand on a genre that enjoys great prestige but a small audience, casual readers would have no clue as to of how important her early achievement was for a whole generation of Canadian poets. This was especially true for many gifted Canadian women poets, such as Susan Glickman, Libby Scheier, Diana Brebner, Roo Borson, Elizabeth Harvor and Bronwen Wallace. In the Canadian context, her influence on poetic style, attitudes, and subject matter was comparable to that of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton.

Without wanting to stereotype myself as a defender of rigid genre divisions, all this does make me wonder for whom this book is intended. Or, as she herself asks of a note left by her dead mother: who is the message for?  her extended audience?  herself?  posterity?  Obviously, the book is aimed at an international more than a Canadian audience or she would not need to explain what Molson’s is and what the Governor General does. Likewise, being five years older than Atwood, I did not need to be told about school routines. Overall, there is a lot of exposition of things I would have thought were common knowledge, if indeed that term is not already obsolete.

One clue lies in the subtitle: a memoir of sorts. Because of its length and wide range, simply viewed as source material for students and biographers, this book can not help but be an invaluable addition to her already substantial oeuvre in many different genres. 

However, the book straddles two, possibly three, different modes. memoir, autobiography, and – in the detailed account of her parents’ Nova Scotian background and ancestry – biography.  

Admittedly there are no universally agreed definitions, but as I understand it, autobiography explores the supposedly true account of a person’s moral, emotional, and intellectual growth from childhood into adulthood. It is the non-fiction equivalent of a Bildungsroman, whereas a memoir tends to be a more public recollection of people and events, and is often written by someone who, having already made a mark in the world of say, sports, the arts, or entertainment, can rely on an existing public curiosity. Although there are some passages about her childhood where we do get that sense of self-exploration, what she terms elsewhere “the record of an inner journey,” for me this book mostly doesn’t have autobiography’s profound sense of having understood and come to terms with early experience. So, given Atwood’s international profile, memoir is the more appropriate term. 

Finally, as is implied by the plural in the subtitle, Book of Lives, there are passages, specifically those about her parents and their Nova Scotian background, that have the quasi-objective tone and substance of biography. This hybrid, the literary equivalent of a film star’s Lifetime Achievement Award, is certainly a good read but might have been better as two books, maybe even three.

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Born in London, England, in 1934, Christopher Levenson came to Canada in 1968 and taught at Carleton University till 1999. He has also lived and worked in the Netherlands, Germany, Russia, and India. The most recent of his many books of poetry is Moorings. He co-founded Arc magazine in 1978 and was its editor for a decade; he was Series Editor of the Harbinger imprint of Carleton University Press, which published exclusively first books of poetry. [Editor’s note: Recently we’ve published the initial chapters of Christopher Levenson’s memoir Not One of the Boys, Beginnings & Schools. Hardly the happiest years. Christopher previously contributed the essay on evolution of language On Permanent Loan, and has reviewed books by Kelly Shepherd, Cynthia Woodman Kerkham, Jess Housty, Susan Musgrave, and Katherine Lawrence for The British Columbia Review.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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