I’m talking about Canada as a state of mind, as the space you inhabit not just with your body but with your head.
—Margaret Atwood, Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972)
CanLit might not exert the fascination of—say—a venereal wart.
—Margaret Atwood, in conversation (2014)
In spite of the triple handicap of being a token “feminist” author, a Canadian, and a poet, Margaret Atwood manages to be a true novelist. She opens our eyes to ways in which we think and behave, irrespective of sex and nationality.
—Philip Howard, review in the London Times (1980)
In the mid-twentieth century, Marshall McLuhan, our best-known intellectual, observed, “Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity.”1 As the psychic distance between Canada and Britain yawned, a tsunami of American pop culture swept north. How could this country resist being I Love Lucy-ed to death? A new uneasiness arose: a fear that Canada was doomed to become a decaffeinated annex to the United States. In the words of our best-known writer, Margaret Atwood, “The beginning of Canadian cultural nationalism was not ‘Am I really that oppressed?’ but ‘Am I really that boring?’ ”
I’m in a Toronto café, talking to Atwood about Canadian culture. Her shock of frizzled grey hair is wild against the intensity of her gaze from those fierce blue eyes. In her mesmerizing drawl, she tells me one of her favourite stories, set in Toronto in the early 1970s. It is a story she has frequently told before, and to which she enjoys adding a cheeky twist. “I was on the board of the House of Anansi,” she explains, “and we all knew we needed to publish books other than poetry in order to support the poetry. Anansi had done quite well with VD, which was the first guide to venereal disease for the general reader. We thought about other books that might sell as well. I pointed out that there was no popular, accessible book about Canadian books. There was a bunch of academic articles, but nobody had pulled them together for the ordinary reader. I said, ‘Why don’t we do a handbook . . . a sort of VD of Canadian Literature?’ ”
Her colleagues on the Anansi board agreed. Dennis Lee and Dave Godfrey, two University of Toronto academics, had founded the House of Anansi in 1967 to publish and promote Canadian literature. But it was a thankless task, and the pioneering basement publishing company was hurtling toward bankruptcy. Then aged thirty-three, Atwood quickly mapped out a literary handbook as “a sort of grown-up version of Girl Guide cookies”—a stopgap solution to help Anansi pay the rent. “We thought it might sell three thousand copies, which would have been sufficient for our needs. We were so excited when Mr. Britnell ordered two copies for his bookstore: he usually ordered only one of anything, so around the office we called him One-Book Britnell. I remember somebody saying, ‘It’s going to be a hit!’ ”
Margaret Atwood sips her coffee (regular, with cream and milk) and gives a high-pitched giggle. The book she is talking about is Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, her first non-fiction prose publication. It asked the question “What have been the central preoccupations of Canadian poetry, fiction, and non-fiction?” This was an important question, according to Atwood, because “literature is not only a mirror; it is also a map, a geography of the mind. Our literature is one such map, if we can learn to read it as the product of who and where we have been.” For far too long, Canadian readers had looked at other nations’ maps while treating their own authors as inconsequential. But Atwood helped change all that when she declared boldly that Canadian authors should be treated seriously because they “are also transmitters of their culture.”
When the book appeared in 1972, it was an instant bestseller, and it remains the ur-text of CanLit, with sales to date of 150,000 copies.2 Survival secured Anansi’s survival, and it also sparked controversy. While one reviewer hailed it as “a fine example of what happens when a first-rate intelligence takes on a task usually carried out by literary morons,”3 another took umbrage at Atwood’s focus on “the negative aspects of the Canadian imagination.”4
Meanwhile, more than four decades later, Atwood has become the world’s best-known Canadian writer. Alice Munro may have won the Nobel Prize for Literature, but type “Queen of CanLit” into a Google search, and Atwood’s name dominates the first page. She has been an icon, a brand, a pundit within Canada for as long as most of us can remember, and in the past two decades she has taken that public persona global. The author of more than seventy volumes of fiction, essays, poetry, reviews, lectures, and plays, she tweets regularly to over half a million followers. Her name and her books crop up in works by other bestselling novelists, including the Americans Carl Hiaasen and Mark Jarman. Several of her books are required reading in schools as far afield as Germany and Japan. To mark Atwood’s seventy-fifth birthday in 2014, CBC Radio devoted a lot of its books website to her, including “75 Surprising Facts about Margaret Atwood.” Atwood’s steely humour was visible in the entry: “She has no problem eating bugs, especially giant locusts.”
Atwood’s fearless footprint is so large that sometimes it feels as though she invented Canadian literature. However, because she studied literature, she knows better than most of us that there were significant authors and books in this country long before Survival appeared. Atwood has written about the elusive Canadian literary tradition, which predates Confederation, and she has also used it in her own work. Why did Survival sell so well from the moment it appeared? “Because people were finally ready for it. You cannot create a [public appetite for new ideas] out of nothing, but you can channel it.” Cocking her head to one side, she resorts to one of her favourite teaching stratagems—a scientific metaphor—to explain why in 1972, after decades of indifference, Canadians finally began to celebrate our distinct literary imagination. “If you think of mushrooms . . . that mushroom you see as you’re walking along is merely the fruiting body. The real mushroom is under the ground.”
Survival’s thematic approach helped a generation of Canadians look at our culture with new eyes. Atwood examined various patterns that recur in Canadian novels and poetry and suggested that they were woven into the national DNA. She announced that the dominant obsession was with survival. She contrasted this with the ideas that she suggested drove other literary traditions: the frontier as the dominant symbol of American literature, for example, and the island for much British literature. Suddenly, English Canada’s literati were chattering about what made Canadian writing different from that of other countries—and, more fundamentally, how it reflected the national character.
Atwood herself, unshackled by academic inhibitions, told us who we were. “Our stories,” she wrote, “are likely to be tales not of those who made it but of those who made it back, from the awful experience—the North, the snowstorm, the sinking ship—that killed everyone else. The survivor has no triumph or victory but the fact of his survival; he has little after his ordeal that he did not have before, except gratitude for having escaped with his life.” She linked the survival theme with the enduring anxiety of her fellow citizens. “Canadians are forever taking the national pulse like doctors at a sickbed: the aim is not to see whether the patient will live well but simply whether he will live at all.”
Atwood is in enormous demand as a speaker and travels incessantly; although she graciously agreed to give me an interview, her assistant could only schedule our conversation three months after my request. In 2014, at age seventy-five, she published her short story collection Stone Mattress and then went on the road for six weeks, to promote it in Italy, France, Greece, and Britain. When I arrived at the Bloor Street café, she was already seated with a friend in the busiest, most crowded section, with her back to the window. I found myself part blinded by the wintery sun behind her, and I worried that the surrounding noise would drown her voice on my recording (it didn’t). From the start, she was in control of our conversation; transcribing it later, I realized that previous interviewers had heard most of her answers during the previous fifty years (she has an excellent memory, for her own words and others’).
Nevertheless, the wait was worth it: she was generous with time and insights. Erudite and witty, she chatted about the years leading up to the CanLit explosion of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. She held me in her gimlet gaze, sometimes pressing her lips together—with suppressed humour or exasperation, I was never entirely sure. But I did not see the frosty, perhaps sarcastic side of her public persona that I’ve heard about. (One Atwood anecdote concerns the man who said to her, “You’re Margaret Atwood, aren’t you? My wife reads your books.” Atwood is said to have replied, “And what are you reading, Big Boy?”) Perhaps she has mellowed. At one point, I commented that she had been kind to a young scientist with whom she had appeared onstage. “Why not, at my age?” she said, smiling.
Atwood was still in her teens when she decided to be a writer. In Toronto’s Leaside High School yearbook for 1956–57, her fellow students wrote, “Peggy’s not-so-secret ambition is to write THE Canadian novel—and with those English marks, who doubts that she will.”5 I ask if she had ever felt any tension back in the 1960s and 1970s between that career ambition and the role she played in getting CanLit off the ground. Her eyebrows lift incredulously. “Back then, nobody thought in terms of a ‘career.’ You thought in terms of writing,” she admonishes. “We didn’t feel entitled. You needed a job, and then you were going to do the writing in the spare time.”
But then the CanLit explosion happened, and Margaret Atwood was at the centre of it both as an author and as an activist. The success of CanLit encouraged Canadians to feel that perhaps, even as this northern land entered its second century, there was a unique, post-colonial national identity. Margaret Atwood’s books have given us maps of who we are, where we have been, where we live—and where we may be going.
Before there was Atwood, there was Susanna Moodie. Both these CanLit matriarchs are stars in my own universe: I read Atwood’s fiction as soon as it is published, and I have written about Susanna Moodie in Sisters in the Wilderness (1999). There is a tight link between them.
Moodie, a well-educated Englishwoman who arrived in Upper Canada in 1832, is the author of one of Canada’s earliest classics: Roughing It in the Bush. Published in 1852, fifteen years before Confederation, this memoir described Moodie’s painful experiences as a pioneer in the Canadian backwoods and her sense of geographical, cultural, and social dislocation. Sharp-tongued Moodie was an established writer in Georgian London before she crossed the Atlantic. Once here, she was never one to minimize her misery:
Oh! land of waters, how my spirit tires,
In the dark prison of thy boundless woods;
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Though vast the features that compose thy frame,
Turn where we will, the landscape’s still the same.6
Roughing It sold so well that Moodie’s publisher urged her to rush out a sequel. A year later, Life in the Clearings versus the Bush appeared. Partly because Moodie’s revelations about the squalor of pioneer life (pigs! skunks! Yankees!) had scandalized her well-to-do family in the Old World, she now insisted that she had come to terms with the New World—although her protests reek of dutiful resignation. “The homesickness that constantly preyed upon me in the Backwoods has long yielded to the deepest and most heartfelt interest in the rapidly increasing prosperity and greatness of the country of my adoption.”
Moodie deserves our sympathy: she was homesick and she made little money from her literary efforts. When the Dominion of Canada was launched in 1867, there were still no copyright protections for works published here, and the publishing industry consisted largely of fly-by-night printers who made their money from scurrilous newspapers and handbills. The population was too small to offer any hope of profit from less populist fodder, and the few Dominion citizens who boasted bookshelves filled them with the likes of Shakespeare and Molière, Charles Dickens, and Alexandre Dumas. Canadians with literary ambitions had to find publishers in New York, Boston, London, or Paris. Moodie’s two books were both published in London, then reprinted (without permission or any payment to Moodie) in the United States.
Yet there were always a handful of men and women like Moodie scribbling away in the backwoods and the mountains, or on the prairies or along the shore. In the 1830s, Thomas Chandler Haliburton of Nova Scotia achieved international fame with his humorous bestsellers about a wisecracking character called Sam Slick. But most authors enjoyed only local success. Nevertheless, as newcomers flooded into the Dominion, the number of publications grew and a national consciousness began to stir. A group of young poets, born in the 1860s and including two New Brunswickers, Charles G. D. Roberts and Bliss Carman, earned themselves the label of the “Confederation poets” with their verses about classic Canadian themes: water, winter, and woods. Quebec authors writing in both French and English romanticized New France’s history. Pauline Johnson, with her mixed English and Mohawk ancestry, recited bloodthirsty ballads about Indian warriors and patriotic chest-thumpers like “Canadian Born” (1903), celebrating her country’s British links:
We first saw light in Canada, the land beloved of God;
We are the pulse of Canada, its marrow and its blood;
And we, the men of Canada, can face the world and brag
That we were born in Canada beneath the British flag.
By the early twentieth century, some Canadians were winning huge readerships in Britain and the United States. Ralph Connor would sell over five million copies of his first three books, including The Sky Pilot (1899), during his lifetime; altogether he would publish three dozen stirring tales of life in western Canada. Little girls all over the world would fall in love with a plucky orphan in rural Prince Edward Island in Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908) and its sequels. After the First World War, Stephen Leacock (author of Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, 1912) became the most popular humorist in the English-speaking world, thanks to his ironic treatment of pretensions in Ontario’s small towns and among Montreal’s plutocrats. The animal stories of Ernest Thompson Seton, often told from the animal’s point of view, sparked an interest in the natural world throughout North America. I recall coming across in my English school library several dog-eared volumes from Mazo de la Roche’s sixteen-volume saga of the Whiteoaks family, beginning with Jalna (1927)—although I always assumed the author was male and the Lake Ontario landscape was American.
So there were successful Canadian authors, writing books with Canadian themes and settings. But fiction was regarded as a frill of dubious value, and distances were so vast that writers rarely met. As Atwood remarks, “There was plenty going on, but nobody knew each other.” Most Canadian writers of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry continued to be published outside the country, by publishers such as Macmillan, Thomas Nelson, or Oxford University Press, and then distributed in Canada by a subsidiary of the parent company alongside the latest British or American bestsellers. No publisher could survive by publishing Canadian books alone.
However, there are a few silver linings to the dark cloud of colonial gloom. Lorne Pierce was one Toronto publisher determined to nourish a distinctly Canadian culture, despite the country’s vast size and modest population. Dapper and earnest (quintessentially Canadian characteristics at the time!), Pierce was editor from 1920 to 1960 of the Ryerson Press, a division of the United Church Publishing House.7 Like the ordained Methodist minister he was, Pierce felt a calling—a mission to foster Canada’s “development of an inward life [and] the evolution of a collective spirit.”8 Pierce nearly killed himself with exhaustion as he criss-crossed the country, selling books and spotting talent. In 1922 alone, he travelled close to eighteen thousand kilometres by train, in trips to the Maritimes and western Canada, all the while editing manuscripts in jolting railcars.9 Among the poets and novelists whom he discovered and promoted were E. J. Pratt, Dorothy Livesay, Louis Dudek, Frederick Philip Grove, and Laura Goodman Salverson. The authors drew on major Canadian themes: the Newfoundlander Pratt, for instance, wrote narrative verse about the Last Spike. How many Canadians today know these names? Not many, I’m sure, but they, and Pierce, were slowly building a Canadian literary tradition.
The key to profitability for a Toronto publisher was the school textbook market. Thanks to Pierce’s efforts, Ryerson and Macmillan Canada joined forces to co-publish textbooks for elementary and high schools that covered Canadian history, prose, and verse. Designed as “the cement to bind us [as] a people to one another,” they sold well.10 The intention was overtly nationalist: in 1942, Pierce wrote, “It is my belief that only by a deep immersion in . . . the political, social, scientific, and literary history of the country can an ‘education for citizenship’ be achieved.”11
The readers gradually introduced Canadian students to the existence of Canadian texts, although until the 1950s, British books continued to dominate schools in English Canada, and Quebec educators stuck to French classics. Most English-Canadian and French-Canadian schoolchildren grew up assuming that real history and real literature happened elsewhere. Atwood herself recalls an overload of English Romantic poets, plus Hamlet and Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, in high school reading lists. (“I don’t think it did us any harm. And we did get a poem by E. J. Pratt in grade thirteen.”) National indifference to Canadian writers pushed English-Canadian publishers into dire straits; in 1948 they issued a mere fourteen books of fiction and thirty-five works of poetry and drama.12 The same year, eighteen hundred works of fiction were published in Great Britain and over eleven hundred in the United States. Meanwhile, a tidal wave of American movies, music, and magazines washed north.
Another glint of silver within the philistine gloom was the Montreal author Hugh MacLennan, who declared his determination to “hammer out a literary pattern for Canadian life.” The McGill professor was appalled that Canada was “apathetic about herself, neither a colony nor a nation, and in the literary world she was a little better than a dumping-ground for foreign books.”13 MacLennan incorporated Canadian preoccupations and settings in Barometer Rising (a novel about the 1917 Halifax Explosion, published in 1941) and Two Solitudes (the 1945 bestseller inspired by English-French tensions in Quebec). Still, when Canada emerged from the Second World War with a new self-confidence and a strong economy, the question remained: why was this country’s artistic life so stunted?
The bleakness of the situation drove several writers in the pre-Atwood generation to leave the country. Mavis Gallant turned her back on Montreal in the 1950s: she was living in Paris when she wrote the brilliant short stories that were frequently published in the New Yorker. She rarely came home. Margaret Laurence, born in Manitoba, chose to live in England during the 1960s; there she wrote most of her greatest work, The Stone Angel. Mordecai Richler, a Montreal native, spent much of his twenties and thirties in Paris and London because “Canada was a big and lonely place . . . at the end of the world.”14 He published his first seven novels in England, including his breakthrough bestseller, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz.
Yet apathy about Canadian literature was slowly evaporating. In 1949, alarmed at the anemic state of Canadian culture, the Liberal government in Ottawa appointed the Royal Commission on the Development of the Arts, Letters and Sciences, with a future governor general, Vincent Massey, as chair. The Massey Commission was a turning point for this country’s writers and artists, as well as for Canadian citizens generally. The five commissioners went on a hand-wringing cross-country tour. They heard that the arts were starved, and that the country was “hostile or at least indifferent to the writer.” The commission’s report argued that if Canada was to fully mature as an independent country, it needed state support for the arts in both English and French. “It is in the national interest to give encouragement to institutions which express national feeling, promote common understanding and add to the variety and richness of Canadian life, rural as well as urban.”
It was a eureka moment in our history. Action took a little longer. (Louis St. Laurent, Liberal prime minister at the time, is said to have responded in shock: “Fund ballet dancers?!”15) However, in the postwar fizz of national self-discovery, support for cultural distinctiveness had gained enough momentum to persuade even potential critics that government patronage was a public good. The most important initiative was the establishment in 1957 of the Canada Council for the Arts, with a mandate to “foster and promote the study and enjoyment of, and the production of works in, the arts.” Canada Council dollars were directed toward education, travel, commissions, awards, and grants for artists. The long-term effect was to build support not just for artists but also for the idea of the arts as an important element in national identity. Finally, it seemed that the “Great Canadian Novel” might be a worthy purpose for an aspiring writer—such as Margaret Atwood, whose ambition had just been noted in her high school yearbook.
So what is the direct link between Moodie and Atwood?
In the Bloor Street café, Atwood is in instruction mode. She stonewalls any probe into her private life in interviews, preferring thoughtful analysis conducted through rhetorical questions. I soon learn to let the pauses after these questions drag on: I am not expected to answer, because she will likely answer them herself. Right now, she is explaining how women have played a major role in Canadian literature from the earliest years.
In any examination of North American literature, she tells me, “a curious thing emerges. It’s possible to cover American literature from, say, 1625 to 1900 without spending much time at all on women writers. . . . Attention focuses on the ‘great’ and overwhelmingly male American writers of the period: Melville, Poe . . .”16 But what happens when you look at early English-Canadian literature? “You can’t ignore the women.” This is partly because Canada was settled later than the United States, and “women were literate when they arrived here,” she notes. “Those pioneer women like Moodie, or the nuns who landed in Quebec—they came, they saw, they wrote. Also, in a pioneer society, the arts were a girly thing because the men went out and did the heavy work.”
That’s why, argues Atwood, if Canadian literature could be described as rich in anything, it would be considered rich in women’s novels and memoirs. “The percentage of prominent and accomplished women writers, in both prose and poetry, is higher in Canada than it is in any of the other English-speaking countries.” Atwood observes that women writers also dominate Quebec’s early literature. The hurdle that Canadian women had to overcome if they were going to be published, as Moodie and her successors including Atwood had discovered, was not their gender but their nationality—the same hurdle that men faced too. The battle in the literary arena was not between the sexes but against stifling indifference. For metropolitan critics elsewhere, all Canadian writers were second-rate.
Margaret Atwood had been aware of Susanna Moodie’s work from childhood; a copy of Roughing It in the Bush was in the family bookcase, and an extract from it had appeared in her grade 6 reader. At the time, she could not have been less interested: the label “Canadian classic” was repellent to a child in love with medieval castles, ray guns, and (later) Jane Austen novels.17 But while she was a graduate student at Harvard, she had a vivid dream that she had written an opera about Susanna Moodie. “I could barely read music, but I was not one to ignore portents.” At Harvard’s Widener Library, Canadiana was shelved close to another of Atwood’s favourite haunts: the shelves devoted to witchcraft and demonology. Atwood, who had already impressed classmates with her originality, immersed herself in the Moodie memoirs.
Susanna Moodie fuelled Margaret Atwood’s insight into Canadians’ ambivalence toward their own country. In 1970, two years before the groundbreaking Survival, she published a sequence of poems entitled The Journals of Susanna Moodie. A further edition of The Journals would appear in 1980 with extraordinary hand-printed illustrations by Atwood’s close friend the artist Charlie Pachter.
In these poems, Atwood describes Moodie’s profound alienation from the unfamiliar North American landscape. “I am a word / in a foreign language,” states the wretched narrator in Atwood’s opening poem, “Disembarking in Quebec.” Elsewhere, Atwood’s Moodie describes how
We left behind one by one
the cities rotting with cholera,
one by one our civilized
distinctions
and entered a larger darkness.
It was our own
ignorance we entered.
Atwood explored in an afterword how Moodie “claims to be an ardent Canadian patriot while all the time she is standing back from the country and criticizing it as though she were a detached observer, a stranger.” Perhaps, continued Atwood, contemporary Canadians were like Moodie: they failed to embrace this country as their own.
How was Atwood able to plumb a nineteenth-century immigrant’s terror of the wilderness? Because she knew this landscape so well herself—and, unlike Susanna Moodie, she revelled in it. As a child, she had learned to love the bush that Moodie had hated; it was life outside the backwoods that was alien. As Atwood writes in a 2014 edition of The Journals, “She was appalled by the wilderness: I by the city. . . . Both of us were uprooted. Both of us were far from home, both anxious, both scrabbling for cash, both under pressure. . . . I said for her what she couldn’t say, and she for me.”18 In the words of Atwood’s biographer Rosemary Sullivan, “As she worked on the poems, Margaret discovered that Moodie and she were each other’s obverse. Moodie was a kind of anti-self.”19
Margaret Atwood’s own childhood has become almost as mythologized as Susanna Moodie’s pioneer hardships. Born in Ottawa in 1939, she was only a few months old when she was tucked into a backpack and, along with her older brother, Harold, taken north for the first of many summers in the backwoods. Until she was a teenager, her default existence was life in the bush.
Her father, Carl Atwood, was a forest entomologist who was never happier than when building cabins and tracking bugs kilometres from the closest settlement. Her mother, Dorothy, was a university-educated nutritionist who adapted easily to constant change. Between 1936 and 1948 the Atwoods moved twenty times—sometimes between fixed points (city in winter, forest in summer), sometimes from one city (Ottawa, Sault Ste. Marie) to another (Toronto). “Home,” for both of them, was Nova Scotia, but after their marriage they never lived there. “My mother was from a small town,” says Atwood, “and though she was homesick for it all her life, she couldn’t wait to get out of it.” Instead of a cozy community where everybody knew each other’s business, the typical features of Margaret’s childhood homes were “a chunk of pink granite sticking out of the ground, a kettle bog, a horizon line of ragged black spruce: ah! There you are! Home . . . Not a place but a trajectory.”20 A trail through the trees was home from late April until early November: both Carl and Dorothy Atwood were nomads who liked to be as far as possible from “civilization.” The smells of Margaret Atwood’s childhood were not of kitchen cleaners, bubble gum, and roast beef dinners but of campfires and fish guts.
“We did not have television, electricity, radio, libraries, or other people,” Atwood told a standing-room-only audience at a 2014 conference, “Women as Public Intellectuals,” at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick. “But I had an older brother and we grew up with edged tools and outboard motors. When we took our high school aptitude test, I did well in garage mechanics.”
Atwood did not complete an entire school year until she was in grade 8. Instead, she learned self-sufficiency and wilderness skills from her parents. Dorothy Atwood home-schooled her children; Carl Atwood taught them how to identify the genus and species of birds and insects. The children (a second daughter, Ruth, was born in 1951) kept frogs, snakes, crayfish, and jays as pets; they later built a birchbark tepee and mapped the surrounding woods.21 Atwood became a voracious reader: animal stories, comic books, girls’ adventure stories, mysteries, and (her favourite) Grimm’s fairy tales. Her first novel, written when she was six, featured an ant floating down a river on a raft.
Sullivan writes, “The young girl who surfaced from those months spent in the forest was an outsider to female conventions.” Atwood never assumed that the way boys and girls behaved in 1940s Toronto was the only way people would ever behave. Nor did she ever sentimentalize nature: “I hate to break it to you,” she tells me, one eyebrow raised, “but toads don’t wear waistcoats.” Mr. Toad of The Wind in the Willows, an old friend from my bourgeois British childhood, is instantly banished to never-never land.
When Atwood was seven, her father was appointed a professor in the University of Toronto’s Department of Zoology. The family moved into a modest home in the Leaside district, close to one of the city’s wooded ravines. Many of Atwood’s most vivid childhood memories—memories reworked in her fiction—are of adventures in the overgrown, damp ravines dense with wildlife, or among the cluttered, dusty showcases of the Royal Ontario Museum, with its diorama of sabre-toothed tigers. Atwood explored a handful of conventional rituals: she attended Sunday school, although her parents were not churchgoers, and she joined the Brownies, where she aced the wood-lore tests. But she remained that detached observer.22
Every spring it was back to the woods for the tight-knit Atwood clan. Far from suburban expectations, Margaret was free to think for herself and read what she liked. Twenty-five years after those idyllic summers in the bush, the Canadian filmmaker Michael Rubbo would make a documentary about the Atwood family at its northern Ontario cottage. He intercut interviews with Dorothy and Carl Atwood with shots of Atwood herself paddling across the lake with her partner, Graeme Gibson, or reading to their daughter, Jess, by lamplight. Rubbo is obviously frustrated that there appears to be no trauma in the now-famous novelist’s childhood—no dark secret of repression, guilt, or family dysfunction. Instead, the Atwoods display humour and good sense as they quietly mock the man behind the camera.23
At Leaside High School, Peggy shocked her friends by announcing she was going to be a writer. In addition to penning passion-filled Brontë-esque verses, she also used her obvious talents to satirical effect—including in an operetta for her home economics class about synthetic fabrics, starring King Coal’s daughters, Princesses Orlon, Nylon, and Dacron. Aged eighteen, she enrolled at Victoria College, in the University of Toronto, and immediately began to publish poems and articles in the college literary journal.
The impact of Northrop Frye—Vic’s éminence grise, author of The Bush Garden (which would be published in 1971) and one of Canada’s greatest literary critics—was immense. In Sullivan’s words, “Margaret made the astonishing discovery that Frye took Canadian literature and young writers seriously.” She absorbed his theories about the importance of stories, as a way that humans understand themselves and others, and his argument that all stories, whether Shakespearean or comic book, are hewn from the same plot lines. His idea that Canadians shared a “garrison mentality”—a sense of isolation from cultural centres, besieged within a hostile landscape—would inform her Survival argument. And she saw how he remained in Canada, despite his global stature and offers from other, more “important” universities, because he found both Toronto and its academic community congenial. Atwood too would decide that, as an artist, she preferred to remain in her own city.
By now there was a bumptious group of long-haired Canadian poets, which included Al Purdy, Irving Layton, and Earle Birney. Atwood made her mark among them as a sharp-witted and talented regular at one of Toronto’s scruffier and more subversive hangouts, the Bohemian Embassy in Gerrard Street Village—an area that, as Atwood herself would write, was “morphing from whitebread quasi-slum to cool pre-hippie hang-out.”24 The Embassy, serving no alcohol and run as a private club, was established in reaction to Toronto’s stifling conformity; poets, folk and jazz musicians, playwrights, and actors congregated here. Atwood gave her first reading in the Embassy’s black-walled second-floor space in November 1960. Her low-pitched monotone had to compete with the whoosh of the espresso machine and the flush of the toilet.
Despite the sexism of the surrounding culture, Atwood discovered a sense of solidarity among the poets. “The coffee-house stuff was all self-generated, people just did it. Nobody said, ‘You can’t do this because you’re a girl’—except a few people like Irving Layton when he was being naughty in public. The rest of them, including those that you might think would be Mr. Macho like Al Purdy or Earle Birney, treated you as a poet. They were genuinely interested in your work.” That was the significance of the Bohemian Embassy: “We knew there was a community. You went there and read your poetry, under the auspices of John Robert Colombo.”
It was the energetic impresario and poet Colombo who told the young Atwood, “You’ve got to change your name! Nobody will take you seriously if you call yourself Peggy.” Fifty years later Atwood still thinks he was right. “Peggy is a frivolous name, you’ve got to admit. You can get away with being an actress or a folk singer . . . but to be a poet . . . You can see his point.” First she went to gender-free initials—M. E. Atwood (“Why do you think J. K. Rowling is J.K.?”)—and then to Margaret.
The network of poets developed. They learned of each other’s work in the Bohemian Embassy and on CBC Radio, where Robert Weaver had Canada’s first literary program, Anthology. “That’s where many of us, including Alice Munro, Gwendolyn MacEwen, and I were first heard. It was the first time anybody actually paid us for our work. Weaver knew everybody in the country so he gave us the sense that there was a continuum out there.”
Atwood decided to follow the example of many of her fellow poets who, faced with publishers’ disregard for Canadian poetry, had started to hand-print and promote their own work (a slim volume of poetry being more manageable than a lengthy novel). She designed and printed her first book of poetry, Double Persephone, on a friend’s press: seven pages long, with a lino-block cover and a print run of 250, it sold through local bookstores for fifty cents. Her friend the poet Gwendolyn MacEwen wrote admiringly of Atwood’s “clean-cut, uncompromising slant on things.”25 In 1964 her second poetry collection, The Circle Game, would be published by Contact, one of the small Canadian presses that had begun to spring up. It was printed in such a small edition that when it won the 1966 Governor General’s Award for Poetry, it was already out of print. It would be reprinted by the House of Anansi.
When she graduated from the University of Toronto, Atwood radiated a confidence rare among women and Canadians in that era. She also impressed contemporaries because, “in a world of impractical poets and artists, she was worldly-wise in the extreme.”26 She told Frye that she intended “to run off to France and live in a garret and work as a waitress and write masterpieces,” she recalls today. “He said I might get more writing done if I got a Woodrow Wilson [scholarship] and went to Harvard.”
Atwood would spend two years in Cambridge, Massachusetts, studying early American literature and Victorian novelists, drafting poetry, and playing with ideas for future novels. From the intellectual historian Perry Miller, she absorbed the idea that books needed to be seen within their historical context: writers write out of their physical and cultural circumstances. It was a new experience for Atwood to look at literature through a political lens. She began to ponder whether Canadian writers had not yet found a way to reconcile their aesthetic sensibilities with the northern landscapes.
Most important, Atwood glimpsed Canada from the outside as a country with a shape and a culture of its own. In the United States, she discovered, Canadians were invisible, and as a result, many Canadian expatriates became flamboyantly nationalist, trying to assert their difference by bragging about (usually fictional) encounters with bears, Indigenous people, or frostbite. “It wasn’t the American national identity that was bothering us; nor was it our absence of one. We knew perfectly well we had one, we just didn’t know what it was.”27 But Atwood was never going to adopt a knee-jerk defence of her country. Instead she was more interested in unmasking the hypocrisies of both countries. The young and sardonic Atwood noted that the Canadian national animal is the beaver, an animal that spends its time constructing earthworks and is said to chew off its own testicles when attacked. (This defensive tactic is actually a myth, but it served her purposes.) In contrast, the American eagle is a bird of prey.
Atwood returned to Canada in 1963. (She would spend more time at Harvard in the mid-1960s.) By now, she had begun to brood about both Susanna Moodie and the issue of Canadian identity. Moreover, she had absorbed the idea that literature is always political.
The noise level in the Bloor Street café has subsided, as the pre-office espresso clientele gives way to mid-morning hipsters looking for lattes. Many of the café’s clients have recognized Atwood. With characteristic Canadian deference, they show no interest in asking for selfies with the star. However, breaking all the self-service rules, a server comes over to ask if we would like more coffee. Atwood, in black pants, sweater, and long brightly coloured silk scarf (a uniform, I’ve noticed, favoured by senior poets), seems surprised by this special attention.
We return to the narrative of her writing life and how it unfolded within the context of the growing Canadian self-consciousness. We are firmly in the turbulent 1960s now—the decade not just of anti-war flower children and feminism but also of a surge of nationalism. Canadians began to fall in love with their own country, as governments led by the Liberals Lester Pearson and Pierre Elliott Trudeau introduced new national programs and symbols: a national health insurance system, the Maple Leaf flag, and, most exhilarating of all, Expo 67. The massive celebration for the one-hundredth anniversary of Confederation drew millions of foreign visitors to Montreal.
Not every Canadian embraced the new symbols: this was also the era of the Quiet Revolution in Quebec. Under the slogan “Maîtres Chez Nous,” Quebecers demanded more control of the province’s resources. By the end of the decade the Parti Québécois, under the charismatic leadership of René Lévesque, would begin to push for sovereignty. The shiny new national pride seemed on the brink of being punctured.
Meanwhile, the United States was tearing itself apart over its war in Vietnam. Hundreds of draft dodgers streamed across the U.S.-Canadian border, including musicians and writers who swelled the crowds in the coffee houses of Toronto’s Yorkville district. There were many reasons for Canadians to start differentiating their country from its macho southern neighbour.
When Atwood arrived back in Canada in the summer of 1963, she took a job with a market research company called Canadian Facts. The job suited her because her duties took little time or mental energy; by noon most days, she had completed her reports on clients’ products and was quietly thinking about her own work. Yet the company’s questionnaires elicited answers from Canadians that fascinated her. One of the questions was “Is Canada different from the United States?” The majority answered no. The next question was “Do you think that Canada should join the United States?” And the majority answered no.
Atwood smiles as she describes this conundrum. “So what that meant was that [Canadians] knew there was a difference between the two countries, but they didn’t know what it was. The disjunct between the two responses fitted in with a lot of other disjuncts that I knew about.” She had already learned that publishers insisted that they could not publish a Canadian author unless they had a British or American partner: publication in Canada alone was too expensive, and the audience here too small. But this usually meant changes. “On the one hand, we were told that Canada doesn’t have an identity. But on the other hand, when we submitted those manuscripts, those British or American partners would say, ‘It’s too Canadian.’ ”
By the mid-1960s, with a Governor General’s Award to her name, Atwood was acknowledged as a rising talent. After a year teaching grammar to engineers at the University of British Columbia, she spent the summer writing a novel in UBC exam booklets and sent it to the Canadian publisher McClelland & Stewart. Unknown to her, it lay forgotten for some time in a desk drawer, but it was finally published in 1969 with the title The Edible Woman.
The Edible Woman had secured an American publisher because it conformed to the unwritten rules about Canadian literature; it was set in a city that is rarely named (although its mysterious ravines and snowy weather are familiar to most Canadians). The novel is a dark comedy about Marian McAlpin, a young woman working in a market research company who develops an eating disorder. It is biting social satire—I laughed out loud as I read about the “coast-to-coast sanitary napkin survey” that had gone terribly wrong. One questionnaire was returned “with ‘Tee Hee’ written on it, from a Mr. Leslie Andrewes.” Another respondent claimed to have been pregnant for seven years. “ ‘Oh no, poor thing,’ gasped McAlpin’s colleague. . . . ‘Why, she’ll ruin her health.’ ” In the final chapter, McAlpin finally asserts herself.
Surfacing, Atwood’s next novel, was written before Atwood’s non-fiction analysis of Canadian literature, Survival, but it was published the same year, 1972. In this novel, the narrator and a group of friends travel to a wilderness cabin in northern Quebec to search for her father, who has disappeared. The book is full of details that resonate with Canadians who head north each summer: rutted roads, pink fireweed, logjams, herons, hokey ornaments at remote gas stations. But there is also a layer of menace, plus acknowledgement of a vanished Indigenous people. Atwood brazenly outed herself as a Canadian this time, and the Toronto Star reviewer described Surfacing as “a Canadian fable in which the current obsessions of Canadians become symbols in a drama of personal survival: nationalism, feminism, death, culture, art, nature, pollution.”28 It is vintage Atwood in more ways than one. Although this narrator, like Marian McAlpin, is nearly submerged by her neuroses, like McAlpin she regains control. The final chapter begins: “This above all, to refuse to be a victim. Unless I can do that I can do nothing. I have to recant, give up the old belief that I am powerless and because of it nothing I can do will ever hurt anyone.” Not a bad metaphor for Canada’s literary tradition finally rejecting its colonial status.
Despite its Canuck character, Surfacing also found an American publisher. Atwood recalls how the New York publisher asked her if there were any good quotes he could put on the back cover. “I said, ‘Well, I’ve got all these wonderful ones from Canada.’ He said, ‘Oh no, that won’t do. Canada is death down here.’ ” Her head tilts to one side as she grins at me: “It’s not anymore, but that’s the way it was back then. Same in England. Total dismissal.” However, the novel was not dismissed—in fact, it attracted continent-wide attention. The New York Times described it as “thoroughly brilliant” and the newspaper’s reviewer concluded, “Atwood shows the depths that must be explored if one attempts to live an examined life today.”29 The Quebec director Claude Jutra turned the book into a film, released in 1981.
It was a short step from Surfacing to the provocative statements about Canadian literature in Survival, in which Atwood wrote that “Canada as a whole is a victim, or an ‘oppressed minority’ or ‘exploited.’ . . . In short, Canada is a colony.” Canadian gloom, she suggested, might be because “Canadians have a will to lose which is as strong and pervasive as the Americans’ will to win.” She illustrated her argument with a crisp catalogue of recurrent themes in Canadian novels and poetry, including the idea that nature is menacing rather than romantic, that Indigenous people are persecuted rather than savage, that families are claustrophobic (“ingrown-toenail family-as-trap”). But the thirty-three-year-old author was determined that Canadian writers, like her own heroines, did not have to remain trapped in colonial passivity. She offered a bracing alternative: “A tradition doesn’t necessarily exist to bury you: it can also be used as material for new departures.”
From now on, Atwood’s writing career went from strength to strength. Between 1976 and 1983, she would publish six books of fiction, two of non-fiction, three of poetry, and two for children. While at Harvard University she had begun a relationship with her fellow student Jim Polk, an anti-war American who was also an aspiring novelist. They married in 1968, but the marriage did not survive Atwood’s short-term contracts at various universities (University of Alberta in Edmonton, Sir George Williams University in Montreal, York University in north Toronto). They divorced in 1973 and she formed a relationship with Graeme Gibson, a Canadian writer.
Gibson and Atwood moved to a classic old Ontario farmhouse in Mulmur Township, north of Toronto; their daughter, Jess, was born in 1976. Atwood had achieved the balance in her life that for years had seemed unobtainable: total commitment to her writing, and a partnership with “a large man who likes kids and cats, and has an ego so solid it isn’t threatened by mine.”30 Such an egalitarian relationship was still an anomaly in those days: despite the inroads of feminism, wives deferred to husbands within most marriages.
Equally important, Atwood had demonstrated that it was possible to be a self-supporting professional writer in Canada. By the mid-seventies she was making a comfortable income, and in 1976 she incorporated herself under the name “O. W. Toad” (an anagram for “Atwood”). She also acquired a New York agent. Until then, she recalls, “there wasn’t enough of a literary culture here to think about having a literary agent. They wouldn’t have made enough money out of it.” She hired an assistant to handle correspondence and all the requests that had begun to fill her mail slot: the “Atwood-criticism industry,” as Sullivan describes it, was taking off.31 Today articles about Atwood’s work fill scholarly journals, while the Margaret Atwood Society, an international association of scholars, teachers, and students, holds well-attended annual conferences and publishes a journal called Margaret Atwood Studies.32
It wasn’t only Atwood’s career that was flourishing. Thanks in part to the Canada Council, the performing arts (ballet companies, theatre festivals) and art galleries blossomed. But it was creators like Atwood who were massaging the Canadian identity into shape. “The Canada Council fed the activity, but the poets had provided the yeast,” she tells me. With The Journals of Susanna Moodie, she herself had helped launch the career of Charlie Pachter—Canada’s Andy Warhol, whose tongue-in-cheek paintings of subjects like the Maple Leaf flag and the Queen on a moose have reinforced these national symbols over the past half century.
Demand for Canadian books rose, and a Canadian publishing industry steadily took root. After co-founding the House of Anansi, Dave Godfrey had joined forces with his fellow writers Roy MacSkimming and James Bacque to start New Press. By the 1970s, there was an explosion of new small publishers right across the country: besides Anansi and New Press, there was Coach House, Oberon, Hurtig Publishers, Tundra, Talonbooks, blewointment Press, Fiddlehead, Breakwater, and others. Established publishers like Oxford University Press and Macmillan Canada also took a keen interest in the literary turmoil. The West was bursting with new talent: Patrick Lane, George Bowering, Pat Lowther, John Newlove, bill bissett, Eli Mandel. In Montreal, Irving Layton and Leonard Cohen read their poetry to crowds of adoring young women. In Edmonton, the passionate nationalist Mel Hurtig founded Hurtig Publishers, which released another provocative examination of Canadian identity, The New Romans: Candid Opinions of the United States, by the poet Al Purdy. More overtly anti-American than Survival, it was also less successful, but it still sold more than twenty thousand copies because, as Atwood explained to me, the appetite was there. Writers boarded Greyhound buses for cross-Canada book tours and got to know each other. There were plenty of power struggles and romantic intrigues (the couch at Anansi was particularly well used). Meanwhile, readership for Canadian books blossomed.
The great impresario of the CanLit explosion was the publisher Jack McClelland, who published almost everybody and decided that Canada’s literary scene needed pizzazz. McClelland was “a swashbuckler,” recalls Atwood. “He returned from the war and put so much energy into Canadian publishing.” McClelland decided that McClelland & Stewart, the publishing house founded by his father, should stop depending on imports from its American partners and should make money from its own impressive list. “He looked for a niche that wasn’t filled,” Atwood explains admiringly, and he realized (as Lorne Pierce had done before him) that schools needed Canadian texts. A few universities had created a new market by finally launching some courses in Canadian literature. In 1957 McClelland founded the New Canadian Library series, classics in inexpensive paperback format that became the yardstick of quality writing for generations of students. Oxford University Press jumped on the same bandwagon and commissioned a Canadian poetry anthology for students from the editors Dennis Lee and Roberta Charlesworth.
Next McClelland invented the book tour. Thanks to lavish book launches and publicity stunts right across Canada, he won media coverage and sales for his stable of homegrown authors, which included Atwood, Mordecai Richler, Farley Mowat, Pierre Berton, Irving Layton, Leonard Cohen, and Margaret Laurence. In 1972, for example, a swag bag for reviewers and booksellers accompanied the publication of Berton’s book The Great Railway: Illustrated. It contained cut plug tobacco, a cigar, pemmican, and moustache wax. Another stunt, on the ides of March in 1980, involved McClelland, clad in a toga, driving down Toronto’s Yonge Street in a chariot with Sylvia Fraser, to publicize Fraser’s novel The Emperor’s Virgin. Even a late snowstorm could not smother the chariot’s progress or McClelland’s bravado.33 In the words of the writer Matt Cohen, McClelland was “a man who gave Canada a unique and priceless gift: a series of visions of itself and the words through which . . . Canada defined itself as a nation.”34
McClelland’s showmanship paid off in sales. But his success caused international publishing conglomerates to look north, where they saw, as Atwood puts it, “there’s gold in them thar hills.” They began to acquire Canadian publishers and to establish their own subsidiaries that developed publishing lists in both English and French. Canadian ownership shrank, and McClelland & Stewart lurched from crisis to crisis. A debate about foreign ownership of Canada’s cultural industries erupted, as writers and readers realized they had something of value that they didn’t want to lose to Yankee carpetbaggers.
Atwood had never embraced the Romantic notion that a true artiste should be aloof from grubby reality, and she now emerged as a formidable leader within the writing community. In Survival, she had noted that “the same people who would not dream of asking a musician or actor to perform without a fee often expect a writer to do just that. Writers have to eat too, and at the moment there is no union to protect their interests.”35 She and Graeme Gibson pushed for a union of authors from across Canada to win some control over the way writers were seen and treated.
The result was the Writers’ Union of Canada, which lobbied aggressively on behalf of authors. Its first chair was Margaret Laurence, newly returned from England. “Writers are a tribe,” she announced at TWUC’s founding meeting in 1973, and from then on, the tribe had a collective presence in the English-Canadian consciousness. Four years later, Quebec writers launched UNEQ, the Union des Écrivains Québécois. As TWUC’s historian, Christopher Moore, has noted, “Formed to promote the very idea that cultural policy was necessary to Canada, the Writers’ Union [has] become one of many institutions participating in the making of cultural policy.” Public lending rights, copyright law reform, tax changes, digital rights—the Writers’ Union relentlessly went to bat for its members in these long-running debates.
Atwood herself wrote the entry on the Writers’ Union for The Canadian Encyclopedia. It concluded, “One of the most important achievements of the union is to have fostered a spirit of professionalism and self-respect among writers. . . . Since the 1960s the public’s image of the Canadian writer has changed . . . from defective freak to acceptable member of society, and the union has reflected and fostered that change.”
TWUC was just the beginning. Together, Atwood and Gibson invested time and money in causes that would strengthen ties within the literary community. In 1976 they were among the founders (along with Pierre Berton, Margaret Laurence, and the playwright David Young) of the Writers’ Development Trust (now the Writers’ Trust of Canada) to advance interest in Canadian literature and to support Canadian writing. In 1984 the first meeting of the English-Canadian centre of PEN International, the organization that fights on behalf of writers whose right to freedom of expression has been violated, was launched in their dining room. Atwood served as its first president from 1984 to 1986 and also came up with the idea for the first PEN fund-raising project: a CanLit cookbook. It made enough money for PEN to hire an executive director.36 Far from “defective freaks,” as Atwood had put it, Canadian writers were now flexing muscles and earning decent livings. British and American publishers and critics paid attention to Canada’s emerging literary stars.
By the end of the twentieth century, CanLit’s big names had their own glitzy recognition system: a series of prizes and awards that boosted both sales and image. There had been literary awards since 1937, when Lord Tweedsmuir (better known as the bestselling British novelist John Buchan) inaugurated the Governor General’s Literary Awards. But the GGs, as they are known, were always a dowdy affair: there was no flashy ceremony, and not until 1951 did they include an honorarium of $250.
However, in 1994 the businessman Jack Rabinovitch decided the writing world needed a bit more glamour. On the advice of his old school friend Mordecai Richler, Rabinovitch founded the Giller Prize, initially with a purse of $25,000. According to David Staines, editor of McClelland & Stewart’s New Canadian Library series and an adviser to Rabinovitch, “It was a great time to launch a prize because there was now a critical mass of good writers. Yes, Atwood was a blazing star, but it was a full firmament.” Awarded at an exuberant extravaganza in Toronto each November, the Giller lifted sales of the winning novels by up to four or five times, while boosting interest in CanLit. Today the award is sponsored by Scotiabank, the purse is $100,000, and the gala is televised. As Staines notes, “The Giller’s impact has been huge. For the first time, Canadian writers were not looking elsewhere for approval.” Atwood won the award in 1996 and has been on the jury four times, more than anyone else other than Staines.
Other glamorous awards for Canadian fiction and non-fiction followed the Giller, including the RBC Taylor Prize for literary non-fiction, the Writers’ Trust of Canada Awards, and the Griffin Poetry Prize. Each helped create excitement around books. In the meantime, Canadian authors were also picking up international prizes: Margaret Atwood won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1987 and the Booker Prize (now called the Man Booker) in 2000; Jane Urquhart became the first Canadian winner of France’s prestigious Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger in 1992; Michael Ondaatje won the Booker Prize in 1992 and Yann Martel won it ten years later; Carol Shields won the Pulitzer Prize in 1995; Timothy Findley was named Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1996; Lawrence Hill won the Commonwealth Prize in 2008; Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013. Canadian culture was celebrated outside Canada.
The business side of CanLit is not such a happy story. Publishers grapple with the same challenges that faced their predecessors a century ago: the audience is too small, the distances too vast, the market too flooded with foreign books. Canada’s bookstores wilt under the pressure of online sales, and global pressures on the industry rock publishing companies. Nevertheless, the literary community is firmly established. On average, about 1,500 new trade titles are published each year, including nearly 200 novels.37 These days, anybody who agrees to be a juror for one of the big awards finds herself facing an avalanche of new publications to speed-read before the deadline for the long-list and short-list announcements.
So what characterizes CanLit today? Is survival as strong a theme as it was when Atwood described it in 1972? Or do different literary themes reflect the Canadian identity in the twenty-first century?
Today’s literary culture reflects a different country. As Canadian writers and readers relinquished the colonial mentality, and as the population evolved from bicultural to multicultural, says Staines, “all directions are open to us.” Indigenous writers, including Richard Wagamese, Joseph Boyden, and Thomas King, are major prizewinners. Many of today’s literary stars were born elsewhere and set their fictions in their childhood homes: Vietnam for Kim Thúy, Germany for Dan Vyleta, Lebanon for Rawi Hage. In Staines’s opinion, “Writers here have the freedom to write about whatever, and wherever, they want.” Yann Martel, author of Life of Pi, has described Canada as “the greatest hotel on earth.” He meant it as a compliment: that this country “welcomes people from everywhere” and has no problem if immigrant writers prefer to reside here while their imaginations roam across landscapes they left behind.
Thanks to the sturdy foundation of the 1960s CanLit explosion, David Staines suggests, our literary culture today “has solidity without shape. There is no single umbrella idea.” Yet contemporary Canadian bestsellers often share particular characteristics. Atwood comments, “If you’re writing in Canada, you can’t avoid the weather.” Multigenerational families continue to loom large, although now they may be Indigenous or immigrant. Raw nature continues to be an important motif, although fragility rather than menace is the angle. At the same time, certain genres remain largely absent from our bookshelves. Unlike Britain, Canada has no creamy layer of middle-class social realism (“Maybe there isn’t a big enough readership for it,” suggests Atwood). And when Canadian crime writers set their novels within Canada, there may be a tinge of gentility to the murders (think Louise Penny or Maureen Jennings). “Mean streets” is not a cliché with so much salience here, so grittier writers such as Ian Hamilton or Peter Robinson set their stories offshore.
Atwood once described herself as “a curious, often bemused, sometimes disheartened observer of society.”38 Introduced relatively late to social conventions, she became an expert at deadpan observation. She is not alone. Her predecessor Susanna Moodie was an astute observer of a country and population to which she never felt she belonged. And the novelists based in Canada who are now snapping at Atwood’s heels continue to be “great observers,” says Staines, although their gaze may be directed beyond our borders.
In the introduction to Moving Targets, a collection of pieces written between 1982 and 2004, Margaret Atwood divides her own career into stages. Until the mid-1980s she was “world-famous in Canada.” Then she published the chilling novel The Handmaid’s Tale, about a bleak near-future after a fundamentalist takeover. Set in a Puritan New England, it depicts a totalitarian society where pollution has caused widespread infertility, and young women are enslaved and turned into breeding machines. Like any Atwood novel, it is filled with stiletto insights, but these are darker. “A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze.”
This chilling vision catapulted her into stage two of her career, with an international readership.
The Handmaid’s Tale continues to haunt imaginations worldwide; it has been made into both a movie and an opera, and it regularly appears on university reading lists. Atwood calls it “speculative fiction” rather than science fiction, since it is a nightmare version of our world rather than a fantasy of spaceships and extraterrestrial beings. She enjoys describing international reaction when The Handmaid’s Tale was published in 1985: “In Britain they thought it was a jolly good yarn, in Canada they asked, ‘Could it happen here?’ but in America, I heard, ‘How long have we got?’ ” The novel played on public anxiety about the right-wing backlash to feminism and the impact of chemical contaminants.
Atwood herself now lives in Toronto, but her fingertips remain on the pulse of a larger world. From the start, all her novels have focused on contemporary social and political issues, although often in the guise of particular genres. After The Handmaid’s Tale, alongside poetry and short stories, she published a Gothic romance, a feminized fairy tale, a ghost story, and a piece of historical fiction, in each of which she scrutinized relations between men and women, and the way that women construct their identities. These universal themes were set firmly within Canada: Toronto’s postwar growth, for example, is charted in both Cat’s Eye and The Blind Assassin. Readers beyond Canadian borders were immersed in the sociology of Canadian girls’ friendships or the geography of nineteenth-century Ontario. When Atwood did book promotion tours outside this country, she championed other writers, “sprinkling,” as she puts it, “Canadian authors hither and thither—you should read this and that person, and you should publish this and that person.”
Given the diversity of twenty-first-century Canada, it is perhaps inevitable that such a brilliant, productive, and commercial novelist has now moved beyond her own Canadian context. In 2003 Atwood returned to speculative fiction, laced with satire, with Oryx and Crake. For years she had been clipping items from newspapers and popular science magazines; now she wove them into a warning: don’t trust scientists and big corporations to run the world. Oryx and Crake is the first in the MaddAddam trilogy of novels that takes readers on a wild ride through a post-human landscape. National boundaries blur again as she paints a grim picture of climate change, pollution, and the risks of biotechnology—a picture that warns her widening international readership about its complicity in the problems. A mysterious worldwide plague has destroyed human civilization and all but a handful of humans. Mutant monsters like wolvogs (wolves crossed with hogs), liobams (lions crossed with lambs), and pigoons (pigs with partly human brains) roam around, threatening the few human survivors. There is also a mysterious tribe of bio-engineered humanoids called Crakers, which smell like citrus fruits and wave blue penises when they want to mate.
The MaddAddam trilogy is, to put it mildly, pessimistic—which means it catches the public mood perfectly. As a character in Oryx and Crake, the first volume in the trilogy, says, “Anyway, maybe there weren’t any solutions. Human society, corpses and rubble. It never learned, it made the same cretinous mistakes over and over, trading short-term gain for long-term pain.” So it is no surprise that an HBO series of the MaddAddam books is already in the works; Atwood has tweeted about her interest in how they will portray those penises. She has also published another “speculative fiction” novel, The Heart Goes Last, in which she turns her fierce wit on where organ retrieval schemes and privatized prisons might take us.
By my reckoning, Atwood is now in stage three of her career. She is one of Canada’s most important cultural exports. (Who else is in that rather small category? My list includes Alice Munro, Drake, Cirque du Soleil, Jim Carrey, Céline Dion, Mike Myers, Justin Bieber, Robert Lepage, The Weeknd, and various hockey heroes.) In 2016 her version of The Tempest appears as part of a prestigious British series of books marking the four-hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, with other contributions by some of the best-known writers in the English-speaking world. She is part of Canada’s international image. Does she still feel embedded in the Canadian literary tradition?
The eyebrow goes up: the drawl becomes more pronounced. “You can say of the author: short, female, curly-haired, old, Canadian, Ontarian, Torontonian. . . . You can say all those things, but just one of [those words] is not going to do it. It’s just one descriptor.” And by now there are so many more descriptors for Atwood, the wildly successful writer whose sensibility has been shaped by the cultural traditions within which she grew up, who played a vital role in nurturing our literary tribe, and who herself is now helping to shape the Canadian imagination.
Margaret Atwood did not achieve all that alone. But she certainly gave us confidence in our collective imagination, and—like Emily Carr and Harold Innis before her—helped us understand the space we inhabit. Without her, Canadian literature would be a more fragile plant on our boreal landscape.
