IN THE FIRST PART of 2001 I was still on book tour for The Blind Assassin. I’d got as far as New Zealand and Australia and was taking a break in Queensland to do some birdwatching with friends when I unaccountably found myself beginning another novel — a process described in the short piece, “Writing Oryx and Crake.”
I continued with this novel back in Canada. I wrote part of it on an island in Lake Erie, where my novel-writing was sadly interrupted by the untimely death of Mordecai Richler. Several other friends and fellow writers also died during this period, and I wrote about some of them. “The Wrong Box” was written for a collection dedicated to the work of Matt Cohen, who died of cancer in 1999. The tribute given at Timothy Findley’s memorial and my celebration of Carol Shields are also reprinted here.
I wrote some of Oryx and Crake on a boat in the Arctic. On September 11, 2001, I was in the Toronto airport waiting for a plane to New York for the paperback launch of The Blind Assassin when the catastrophe took place. One of the pieces in this section is connected with that event. At that period I was working on an introduction to H. Rider Haggard’s peculiar novel She; the editor on this quixotic project was a young man called Benjamin Dreyer, and it was from him that I was able to learn — via e-mail, during that time of blocked phone lines — that my friends and colleagues in New York were safe.
In times of crisis, the temptation is to throw everything into defence mode, to believe that the best defence is offence — which can lead, in the human body, to death from your own immune response — and to jettison the very values you thought you were defending in the first place. Too often, the operation can be a success, but the patient dies. Urgers of moderation and multilateralism are seen as wimps, and chest-thumping becomes the order of the day. My “Letter to America” was written because back in the summer of 2002 I made a promise to Victor Navasky, the editor of The Nation, to write such a thing, before the invasion of Iraq was even mentioned. It appeared just before that invasion began, was widely reprinted, and generated a great deal of response from around the world. The essay on Napoleon’s mistakes came from my reading of history and my sense of caution.
This section might well be called “A Fistful of Editors,” in tribute to the many editors I have worked with over the years. In occasional writing, it is usually the editors who come up with the occasions. Then they cajole you into writing about them, hold your hand while you’re doing it, and attempt to save you from your more embarrassing mistakes. There have been magazine editors, newspaper editors, editors of anthologies, editors in charge of introductions and after-words. They’ve all been wonderful. Some new editors came into my life at this period — Erica Wagner of The Times, Robert Silvers of the New York Review of Books. Mr. Silvers is the only editor I know who seems to be at his most elegant and charming — at least on the subject of semicolons — over the phone and in the middle of the night. That is probably why he always gets his way.
Whenever I think I’m coming to resemble Melmoth the Ponderer, or The Restless Unread, prowling by night and pouncing on unwary readers, or one of the Scribes of Dracula, chained in a cellar, eating flies, and doomed to scribble endlessly — whenever I resolve to write less and do something healthful instead, like ice dancing — some honey-tongued editor is sure to call me up and make me an offer I can’t refuse.
The last piece in this collection was written for yet another editor, Robin Robertson, a poet and fellow trustee of the Griffin Poetry Prizes. The piece, called “Mortification,” was written for a collection of anecdotes by writers about the gruesome things that have happened to them in public. Most of these gruesome things have been connected with the publication of one or another of their books, but despite the gruesome things — which can go well beyond a joke in countries that discourage free public speech — the writers are not deterred.
What is it, this compulsion? Why this boundless outflowing of words? What drives them to it? Is writing some sort of disease, or — being speech in visual form — is it simply a manifestation of being human?