This book is called Second Words for two reasons. The first is that I am not primarily a critic but a poet and novelist, and therefore my critical activities, such as they are, necessarily come second for me, although for a writer who is essentially a critic they would of course come first. The other reason is based on precedence: that is, a writer has to write something before a critic can criticize it. This is in no way to imply that words spoken first are always better than the critical fabrics raised upon them. It is only to state what seems to be the obvious; that is, you can’t have a thought about a stone without first seeing a stone. (Which leaves us in a curious position vis à vis unicorns.)
So much for introductory doodling. The real truth is that I don’t like writing the kinds of things that are brought together in this volume nearly as much as I like writing other kinds of things. It’s all too much like homework, which I never used to get done on time either, being, as most poets and novelists are, much fonder of looking out the window. Scrabbling through the bottoms of cardboard boxes and the backs of filing cabinets, trying to locate things I suspected I’d written but had carelessly mislaid, finding other things I had no knowledge of but which were unmistakably in my handwriting, raking over, in other words, the sins of the past, both of omission and commission, brought it all back to me: the promises extracted from me, as juice is extracted from lemons, usually over the phone (I’m better at No in letters), the procrastination, the approach-avoidance reactions, the cold sweat at the approach of the inevitable deadline, the late nights up with the typewriter and the cups of half-drunk cold tea and the stapler and the box of Kleenex (for the never-fail psychosomatic cold), and, sometimes, the apologies and guilt when, despite all this, the item in question just didn’t get produced. The memories are not fond.
Why do I find it so painful? And why then do I do it all? The kinds of pain, and the reasons for doing it, vary from genre to genre, but I suppose you could sum up both under the general heading of that old Victorian chestnut, A Sense Of Duty. I still believe, despite the Me Generation, that there can be reasons for doing a thing other than the fact that you may find it pleasurable or self-fulfilling. Book reviews seem to me one of the dues you pay for being a writer, especially in Canada. When I began writing and first discovered that there were other people writing in Canada, it was fairly clear that unless some writers reviewed Canadian books, some of the time, they wouldn’t get reviewed at all. That has changed a great deal, but some of the feeling lingers on. Occasionally I may review a book, still, just to get it reviewed, or, because I feel it’s been badly treated or misunderstood. For instance, my first Canadian review of Adrienne Rich was done because the book review editor I was speaking with didn’t know who she was, and my review of Timothy Findley’s The Wars was done because the book had been very unfairly reviewed in an influential paper. (However, if one devoted one’s life to this kind of rescue operation one would have time for nothing else.) Sometimes I review out of enthusiasm, which is a variation on the above; the same holds true for introductions. I don’t review books I can’t at all respect or like, although people have tried to set me up with things they knew I’d hate. In cases like this, I assume I’m the wrong reader but that a right reader may possibly exist.
Book reviews I think are the most difficult form for me. It’s easy in them to be flip and dismissive, to make jokes at the book’s expense, to sneer at the author; some papers think of this as being “controversial” or “readable.” But if you’re an author yourself you know how much time and effort has gone into a book, even a bad book, and you can’t take it so lightly. A reviewer has a responsibility to the public, but she also has a responsibility to the book; you have to try to see and say what is actually there.
Longer critical essays are less painful. For one thing, you know they aren’t going to damage sales and affect someone’s livelihood, because they are usually post facto and printed in little magazines or academic journals. They also allow more room, for judicious reconsideration, for more complex evaluation than is usually possible in (for instance) The Globe and Mail, and for that luxuriant weed of academe, the footnote. If the book review leans a little towards Consumer Reports, the critical essay is perhaps more like talking to yourself. It’s a way, too, of finding out what you really think.
Then there are speeches, or as they are sometimes in my case euphemistically called, “lectures.” The reasons for giving those are even more Victorian; they go all the way back to John Stuart Mill on the subjugation of women. Even in the 1980’s I am still being approached by groups who say I just have to do it because this or that august body has never had a woman before (as they’re fond of putting it) and if I won’t do it and they can’t get Barbara Frum, whatever will become of them? (Sometimes it isn’t a woman. Sometimes it’s a writer, and sometimes, even and especially in Canada, it’s a Canadian. Sometimes its all three. So there you are, addressing an audience half of which fought tooth and nail to get you there and the other half of which wishes you were at the bottom of Lake Ontario instead. Being an ice-breaker isn’t all that much fun, but as they used to say in those war movies I watched as an adolescent, someone has to do it.) The other reason for making a speech is that there are things that ought to be said, at that time, to that audience; but it often boils down to the same thing. For the speeches, I’ve indicated the audience and the occasion in the source list at the back, so the reader will be able to tell when “here” means Waterloo, Ontario, and when it means Cambridge, Massachusetts. What gets said, when you’re making a speech, depends a lot on whom you’re saying it to.
I’ve divided this book into three parts, which correspond to three periods of my life. The first, or Rooming House, runs from 1960 to 1971, during which I moved about fifteen times, always to places with a lot of stairs to climb and inadequate heat. It was during this time that I was developing some of the ideas set forth in Survival. The second, or Dugout, period runs from 1972 (or publication of Survival) to 1976, and covers a time when I was being attacked a lot; much of what I wrote then was in response to some of these attacks, the more intellectually serious ones, I think. (People who attack me for having curly hair, breast feeding and making public appearances I can’t do much about.) It also corresponds to the peak of cultural nationalism and the popularization of feminism.
The third period, which has no name yet, runs from 1976, in which I published Lady Oracle and had a baby, thus becoming instantly warm and maternal and temporarily less attacked, to the present. It covers my growing involvement with human rights issues, which for me are not separate from writing. When you begin to write, you deal with your immediate surroundings; as you grow, your immediate surroundings become larger. There’s no contradiction.
When you begin to write you’re in love with the language, with the act of creation, with yourself partly; but as you go on, the writing–if you follow it–will take you places you never intended to go and show you things you would never otherwise have seen. I began as a profoundly apolitical writer, but then I began to do what all novelists and some poets do: I began to describe the world around me.
This book is part of that description.
– Margaret Atwood 1982