WRITERS have an obligation not only to their readers but also to other writers. It's called reviewing, an irksome, ill-paid, no-win job, but someone's got to do it. Few writers do these days though. They prefer to keep silent, even - especially? - when someone they know is involved. "Whenever a friend of mine succeeds, " said Gore Vidal, "a little something in me dies." Vidal's most enthusiastic critical essays were reserved for writers like Dawn Powell and Frederick Prokosch who were safely dead. But at least he felt duty-bound to help resuscitate them. When this newspaper recently asked writers to nominate an author they felt was unjustly neglected the majority felt unable to nominate anyone.
Margaret Atwood is not of that ilk, but she does not really enjoy reviewing. "It's so much like homework, " she says in the introduction to this rag-bag of pieces, "and it forces me to have opinions, instead of the Negative Capability that is so much more soothing to the digestion. I review anyway, because those who are reviewed must review in their turn, or the principle of reciprocity fails."
Some readers may find this a disincentive but at least Atwood is honest and modest, two quintessential Canadian traits. Indeed, throughout the 400 or so pages that follow Atwood's candour and self-effacement are conspicuous, as is her sense of herself as a Canadian. Early in her career, in 1972 when she was beginning to make her name as a novelist, she published Survival, a groundbreaking guide to Canadian literature. In hindsight, it was as if she was creating a context for herself to slot into. She wanted to be part of a tradition, a history, a continuum. In short, she wanted to belong and not be part of someone else's literature.
For Atwood, being Canadian is as important as being a woman or a writer.
Much of what she says about Canada could as easily apply to Scotland. Atwood, who is in her mid-60s, recalls that at high school she was taught no Canadian poetry "and not much of anything else Canadian".
There was an annual visit from an old man who read a poem about a crow. "That was Canadian poetry, " she says. History was either classical or Egyptian or English.
Questions of identity continue to obsess the Canadian media. For Atwood, Canada - "more than most countries" - is a place you must choose to live. It requires a certain decisiveness. "There's been a kind of standing invitation here to refuse authenticity to your actual experiences, " she writes, "to think life can be meaningful or important only in 'real' places like New York or London or Paris."
Atwood is wise enough to appreciate that "by discovering a place you discover yourself". Finding Canada, however, came after she'd travelled abroad. In 1964, "fleeing a personal life of Gordian complexity", she went to Europe and returned transformed, her geekishnesss replaced by Brodie-esque glamour. "My grey-flannel wardrobe . . . definitely had to go, " she writes. Underpinning the self-deprecation is a sense that she knew her own worth, that her talent would eventually out. Charmingly though she writes, with a pleasing informal directness, she comes across as a tough, unsentimental, ambitious cookie. More often than not men get it in the neck, in particular in a speech entitled Writing The Male Character. Think what civilisation would be today without the contributions of men, she says. "No electric floor polishers, no neutron bomb, no Freudian psychology, no heavy metal rock groups,
no pornography, no repatriated Constitution . . . the list could go on and on."
As a man, one winces, not least because the humour is so heavy-handed. Atwood is not the lightest writer on the planet. She is better when she rolls on the blue stockings of Virginia Woolf, for example in the essay The Curse Of Eve - Or, What I Learned In School or hymning fellow female writers such as Angela Carter, her nearest English counterpart; or Ursula K LeGuin or Marina Warner, all of whom share her interest in utopias and dystopias. Her kindliness is conspicuous.
And she warms to people not just because she admires them but because she likes them and especially if they liked Canada. In that respect, she is a repayer of debts.
Curious Pursuits proceeds chronologically through the decades, starting in 1970 and ending in 2005 with an introduction to a new edition of HG Wells's The Island Of Doctor Moreau, demonstrating her taste for sci-fi and crime writing. I confess to not being convinced by her championing of Elmore Leonard and Dashiell Hammett, pieces on whom go on for longer than they deserve. In contrast, brief valedictory essays on Carol Shields and Mordecai Richler, written in haste to meet a deadline, say what needed to be said - give or take a few cliches - with gustiness and a sense of genuine grieving and measured thanksgiving. Both were very different Canadians, as is Atwood. But the sense of community, of shared cause and common concern, is palpable. It is like talking to like.
A favourite word is "luminous", which could apply to Atwood herself. Her "occasional writing" may not be as memorable as her fiction but her fans will find much here which illuminates a singular author with the steeliest of eyes.
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