THE EIGHT YEARS between 1982 and 1989 were energetic ones for me, and proved to be momentous for the world. At their beginning, the Soviet Union seemed firmly in place, due to last for a long while yet. But it had already been sucked into a costly and debilitating war in Afghanistan, and in 1989 the Berlin Wall would come tumbling down. It’s amazing how quickly certain kinds of power structures crumble once the cornerstone falls out. But in 1982, nobody foresaw this outcome.
I began the period quietly enough. I was trying, unsuccessfully and for the second time, to write the book that was — much later — to become Cat’s Eye, and I was ruminating about The Handmaid’s Tale, although I was avoiding this second book as much as possible: it seemed too hopeless a task, and too deeply weird a concept.
Our family was living in Toronto’s Chinatown, in a row house that had been modernized by the removal of many of its inner doors. I couldn’t write there because it was too noisy, so I would bicycle westward to the Portuguese district, where I wrote on the third floor of another row house. I’d just finished editing The New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English, which had been spread out all over the same third floor. That had been a retrospective activity, and so was the first piece in Moving Targets. It’s a Festschrift tribute to Dennis Lee, whom I’d first met and collaborated with at the beginning of my writing life.
In the autumn of 1983 I went with my immediate family to England, where we rented a Norfolk manse said to be haunted by nuns in the parlour, a jolly cavalier in the dining room, and a headless woman in the kitchen. None of these was seen by us, though a jolly cavalier did stray in from the neighbouring pub, looking for the washroom. The phone was a pay phone outside the house, in a booth also used for storing potatoes, and I would clamber over and through them to deal with the editing of — for instance — the Updike review that appears here.
I wrote in a separate space — a fisherman’s cottage turned vacation home — where I struggled with the Aga heater as well as with the novel I’d started. I got my first case of chilblains doing this, but had to give up on the novel when I found myself snarled up in the time sequence, with no way out.
Right after that we went to West Berlin, where, in 1984, I began The Handmaid’s Tale. We made some side visits, to Poland, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia, which doubtless contributed to the atmosphere of the book: totalitarian dictatorships, however different the costumes, share the same climate of fear and silence.
I finished the book in the spring of 1985, where I was Visiting Chair at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. It was the last book I wrote on an electric typewriter. I faxed the chapters as they were finished to my typist in Toronto, to be retyped properly, and I recall being amazed by the magic of instant transmission. The book came out in Canada in 1985 and in England and the United States in 1986, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, among other forms of uproar. I bought a black outfit for the dinner.
We spent part of 1987 in Australia, where I was finally able to come to grips with Cat’s Eye. The snowiest scenes in the book were written during balmy spring days in Sydney, with cuckaburras yelling for hamburger on the back porch. The book was published in 1988 in Canada and the United States and in England in 1989, where it too was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. I had to buy another black outfit. Shortly afterwards, the fatwa was proclaimed against Salman Rushdie. Who knew that this was the first straw in what was to become not only a wind, but a hurricane?
All this time The Handmaid’s Tale had been making its progress through the intestinal workings of the film industry. It finally emerged in finished form, scripted by Harold Pinter and directed by Volker Schlöndorff. The film premiered in the two Berlins in 1989, just as the Wall had fallen: you could buy pieces of it, with the coloured ones being more expensive. I attended the film festivities. There were the same kinds of East German border guards who had been so cold in 1984, but now they were grinning and exchanging cigars with tourists. The East Berlin audience was the more receptive to the film. “This was our life,” one woman told me quietly.
How euphoric we felt, for a short time, in 1989. How dazed by the spectacle of the impossible made real. How wrong we were about the brave new world we were about to enter.