Second Words

Margaret Atwood

• Publisher: House of Anansi Press
• Year: 1995
• eBook ISBN: 9780887849107
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Reissued in a handsome A List edition, the largest collection of critical prose to date from world renowned author and poet Margaret Atwood, featuring an introduction by Lennie Goodings.

Originally published in 1982, Second Words brings together fifty of Margaret Atwood's finest essays and reviews spanning two decades, beginning in 1962, with an introduction and commentary by the author.

With her incomparable wit and originality, Atwood discusses the process of writing and the literary life, with insightful looks at the work of such figures as Erica Jong, E. L. Doctorow, Northrop Frye, Roch Carrier, Marie-Claire Blais, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Marge Piercy, Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath, and many more. In several pieces, we see the development of her ideas on Canadian identity and the American dream, as well as her controversial attitudes toward feminism, sexism, and the strange mythologies imposed on men and women in contemporary North America.

Second Words remains the largest collection of Atwood's critical prose to date.

PART I
1960-1971

Part I: 1960-1971

I began reviewing books and writing about writing where many people, do: at college, in my case for Acta Victoriana, the literary magazine of Victoria College, University of Toronto. To say that there wasn’t a long lineup for editorial positions would be an understatement. It was 1960 and cashmere sweaters and pearl-button earrings were still in, except among the few interested in the arts, for whom they were definitely out. Black was in.

So a handful of us, all in black, not only edited the magazine but practically wrote the whole thing, under pseudonyms and otherwise. I’ve spared you my pseudonymous parodies of Layton and Frye….

I notice that I was reviewing Canadian books exclusively, even though, I recall, none of us thought it was really possible to be a genuine writer and remain in Canada. The appearance of books by young writers like Marie-Claire Blais was, for us, a beginning.

Between 1961 and 1971, fate and the need for jobs took me to Harvard, back to Toronto, to Vancouver, back to Harvard, where I was working on material connected with the Superwoman essay here included, to Montreal, to Edmonton, to England, France and Italy, and finally back to Toronto in 1971, where I joined the Board of Directors of Anansi Press and, in 1972, wrote and published Survival. In the meantime I had of course published a number of books, but my reviewing activities were limited; I did some things for people who asked, mainly George Woodcock of Canadian Literature and James Reaney of Alphabet and Daryl Hine of Poetry. By 1967 Coach House Press and House of Anansi had been established, and the rapid growth of Canadian publishing that characterized the late ’60’s and early ’70’s was underway.

My reviewing activities weren’t unconnected with my own writing at this time, which included, for instance, Susanna Moodie and Power Politics, and, in 1970-71, Surfacing, which must have been started (or re-started, since I actually began it in 1965) shortly after I’d written “Nationalism, Limbo and the Canadian Club”; which itself marks a transition, since it was my first piece in anything meant for an audience which was not primarily literary.

1
Some Sun for this Winter

(1961)

Winter Sun is an appropriate title for the first book of collected poems by Margaret Avison, a Canadian poet of already considerable standing. The title, like so many of the poems themselves, is not merely what it seems. One might, at first glance, take it as a hint about the prevailing mood of the contents, and it does indeed evoke the bleak sombre bareness of the Toronto watery-sunlight winters that provide material for much in the book. But although Miss Avison’s light is a winter light, it is still the sun: a particular sun which is capable of rendering immediate appearance transparent as the glass of a lens.

One always runs the danger, when speaking of a poet’s “reality beyond the finite,” of branding the poet as a floaty-footed and cloudy-headed mystic whose vision, although it may be directed upwards, tends to encounter nothing but fog. (In Toronto, of course, the fog has at least some relation to actual experience.) To identify Miss Avison with this cliché would be sticking the label on the wrong bottle. She has her feet firmly on the ground (usually the “cinder mash” or “cool tar” of the city poems); her vision is always focused to, and through, specific concrete reality rather than past it. Again, if one praises a poet’s descriptive powers, one risks conveying the image of a housewife cooking up a poem (of the Oh Beautiful Sunset or Hooray For Autumn variety) by applying adjectives to an object like icing to a cake, with the same result: if one swallows much of it, one feels a little ill. But Miss Avison never slathers her poems. Her use of descriptive words is not only precise and striking, but so precise and striking that the words do not just describe the object but are the object: there are other tennis players in both art and life, but her tennis players, “albinos bonded in their flick and flow,” are the only ones of their kind.

She pares her works to the core, and throws out all extraneous and diluting verbal peelings. The result of this critical cutting and sorting is a highly condensed poetic texture which demands a lot of conscious concentration on the part of the reader. For example:

… The even-bread
Of earth smokes rainbows. Blind stars and swallows parade
the windy sky of streets
and cheering beats
down faintly, to leaves in sticks, insects in pleats
and pouches hidden
and micro-garden….

Winter Sun is not a chocolate-covered poetic pill, guaranteed to taste nice, go down easily, and eliminate all need for effort. Such sweetness would be useless in its universe:

Nobody stuffs the world in at your eyes.
The optic heart must venture: a jail-break
And re-creation.

Miss Avison portrays consciousness as an attempt to encounter and to form a relationship with the external; the ultimate locus of such an encounter is the individual human mind, which makes its ordered cosmos out of a chaos which includes bits of society, scraps of sense perception, snips of science, moments of history, chips of myth, and the elbowings of the insistent self, as well as the phenomena of the natural universe. Her ordered structure is built of various poetic forms, among them simple lyric stanzas, unconventional sonnets, blank verse, and highly disciplined irregular lines which avoid the free and all-too-easy idiom of the contemporary common denominator. Her verbal wit is considerable, but never coy; her humour subtle, sometimes ironic, but always wise; her human warmth (a warmth which is connected with a strong sense of nostalgia) is most evident in the last, longest, and most definitely not least poem, “The Agnes Cleves Papers.”

In the last analysis, the poetic eye sees its own world, a world which both reflects and transcends the formlessness of the finite world outside, and reality becomes internal:

… Gentle and just pleasure
It is, being human, to have won from space
This unchill, habitable interior
Which mirrors quietly the light
Of the snow, and the new year.

Winter Sun is a book not to be read, on any account, just once.

2
Narcissus
Double Entendre

(1961)

Alphabet, a new semi-annual edited by James Reaney, is indicative of a growing tendency to regard the individual piece of writing neither as an isolated phenomenon nor as a part of its author’s total outlook or output but as a work whose real context is provided by literature as a whole. Thus, the structure is thematic rather than haphazard (as it would be in a review); and one is well advised to begin at the beginning and end at the end. (Presumably, the absence of a table of contents is intended to discourage browsing.) Such an arrangement is designed both to relate the various works to each other and to a central figure —Narcissus this issue —and to place them along an axis whose poles are Art and Life. Just about everything fits, from the poetry, (by James Reaney, Jay Macpherson, and Daryl Hine, among others), to Jay Macpherson’s pertinent article “Narcissus: Some Uncertain Reflections,” to Hope Arnott Lee’s autobiographical account of the difficulties of twinship, to John Peter’s book review which presents a “billboard image” of Irving Layton as a phallus-waving self-absorbed mirror-gazer.

There are dangers in this sort of selection: for instance, one feels that some of the pieces have to be stretched a little to fit the bed on which Mr. Reaney would have them lie. Also, in reading Alphabet: A Semiannual Devoted to the Iconography of the Imagination, and Reaney’s editorial, one must be careful not to confuse the terms symbol, myth, and icon, which are tossed around quite freely. One of the main pitfalls of “iconographic” writing is over-stylization, or the development of stereotypes; so far, Alphabet has avoided it successfully.

A word must be said in defence of the format, which should not really need any. There seems to be some feeling that Alphabet, being an experimental magazine, should have printed the titles sideways or indulged in some other pseudoartsy puerility to make itself look experimental, instead of adopting its rather conservative design. Considering that it was handset by Reaney himself (which accounts for the educational spelling mistakes and the wobbly lines) and that the emphasis in any literary magazine should be on content rather than appearance, one feels that the editor was well advised to keep things simple.

In conclusion, it should be made clear that Alphabet is not just another “little” magazine. It is, in a very lively sense, a “way of looking at things.” “Besides which,” (to quote the editor again) “it’s a hell of a lot of fun.”

If Reaney were looking for support of his view that symbolism is “a fact of our cultural life,” he need look no farther than Mad Shadows. This is the English title of La Belle Bête, a novel by the young French-Canadian writer Marie-Claire Blais. It is a book that will perturb the reader who is committed to the doctrine of “realism,” in the sense of “naturalism” or “social realism,” in fiction. If one looks for any but the most fleeting reflections of the contemporary French-Canadian scene, one will be looking for the wrong thing. The most fitting context for Mad Shadows is a mythological one: the most fitting myth, Narcissus.

Practically all the characters in the book are, in some way, Narcissus-figures; practically all are, in addition, either physically or spiritually warped. The central figure, Patrice, is a Beautiful Beast who is in love with his own image. His jealous sister Isabelle-Marie is clever, sadistic, and ugly. Their mother, Louise, dotes on Patrice as the image of herself and refuses to admit that he is an idiot. (She spends so much time mirror-gazing that one keeps expecting, “Mirror mirror on the wall…. ”) Lanz, her lover, is also her double—elegant, sensual and hollow. Both their beauties are deceptive: Louise’s face is eventually destroyed by disease, and Lanz is a paste-up composed of a false beard and wig and a gold cane.

The handling of the characters is direct and forceful. The reader is often told about them rather than left to infer, much as a folk-legend tells that a princess is good and a step-mother wicked. The technique has its drawbacks; for instance, when Isabelle-Marie is rather incongruously described as “a creature of innate purity,” or when Patrice asks, after his sister has disfigured him by pushing his head into boiling water, “Mother, why didn’t you tell me that I was an idiot?” The plot is treated in the same forthright manner. Time goes forward in a straight narrative line (no flashbacks); again, much in the style of the folk-myth. The action is violent, as are all the deaths; and emotions throughout are of the extremest nature.

Mad Shadows might be accused of melodrama, were it not for its saving graces. Because the book is completely self-sustaining and self-contained, small defects may easily be passed over and exaggerations accepted. The world of Miss Blais is not that of so-called “real life.” It is a world of the imagination, of myth, somehow more real for its exclusion of sociological paraphernalia. It possesses almost ritual undertones, and is able to create strangely evocative images out of strangely intense relationships. It gets down to the primal, and sacrifices naturalism and subtlety in the process; but the sacrifice is justified in a work so rewardingly original.

The total effect is overpowering; one almost needs a page of Henry James as an antidote.

3
Apocalyptic Squawk from a Splendid Auk

(1959)

The Cruising Auk, like its namesake, is a member of a rare and all-but-extinct species: the book of humorous verse which somehow manages to be also a book of poetry. George Johnston achieves this hybrid result by refusing to take himself, or any of his other subjects, seriously—but by taking the demands of his form and language seriously enough to do them admirable justice.

Mr Johnston’s subjects are delightfully trivial—and almost always small. His universe is a backyard pond —somewhat puddly and muddy, but teeming with lively bits and pieces of life and half-life. The blithe spirits which Mr Johnston calls from this vasty deep include neighbourhood notables like Boom, the pompous sufferer, who knows

what is and what
In spiritual things is not,

and Goom, who sips at Life, but doesn’t know

Whether it’s really good or bad
Its sweetest moments sour so;

Mr Murple, his “underslung long dog,” and his gindrinking mother; a sprinkling of timorous virgins (virginal with a truly Canadian practicality), and several other youngish ladies whose very abandon has a sort of grim determination. There are also poor nervous Edward:

In the short sharp winter twilight
When the beans are in to cook
Edward under the trilight
Reads a detective book;

various other cowed males, and a formidable caste of wormy aunts and assorted old ladies. All, like the “sweetish aunt, Beleek,” are slightly rotten —and their progeny all empathize with Eliot’s Mrs Porter, either in thought or in deed. The bird’s-eye of Mr Johnston’s Auk focuses on more than the worms, however. His children are exuberantly innocent (for instance, Andrew in “Kind Offices”) or painfully tender:

The wind blows, and with a little broom
She sweeps across the cold clumsy sky.

His sketches of the city are lightly done, but with affection and a train-whistle kind of nostalgia:

One hears a sink
And low voices, rustling feet;
Clocks in the town put by the night,
Hour by hour, ticked and right.

He reveals the small well-meaning suburbanite, living life with a quieter than usual desperation:

I’ve got time in my clocks
And beer in my cellar and spiders in my windows;
I can’t spend time nor drink all the beer
And I feel in the spread web the spider’s small eye.

The really remarkable thing about The Cruising Auk is not, however, the subjects themselves, but the author’s treatment of them. The poems are surprisingly simple in form and image. Their ironic and often hilarious effect comes from the aptness of the choice of words and, above all, from the timing. A simple comic-verse rhythm and a punchline sequence tend to become tedious after the first five minutes (as anyone who has read too much Robert W. Service or Rudyard Kipling at a time will know); but Johnston, because he uses his rather exacting forms with a great deal of variety, never bores. Several poems fail in total effect—surely “A Little Light” and “Yeats’ Ghost” are below the usual standard —but they are interesting failures, at least.

Throughout the book, Mr Johnston preserves an objectivity that allows his verses to be humour rather than invective. Even when jabbing a favourite dusty aunt he is amused and amusing rather than spiteful. Like the splendid Auk, he remains detached:

Surely his eye belittles our despair
Our unheroic mornings, afternoons
Disconsolate in the echo-laden air…

The product of his peripatetic musings is a collection poetic enough to delight even the most literate of the literati, and hilarious enough to soothe the most book-shy quarterback to a charming diffidence.

4
Kangaroo & Beaver
Tradition in Exile
by J. P. Matthews

(1962)

The subtitle of this book, “A Comparative Study of Social Influences on the Development of Australian and Canadian Poetry in the Nineteenth Century,” indicates the highly amorphous nature of the material. Any author who attempts to grapple this subject is threatened by engulfment, as if by a giant amoeba, and Dr Matthews is to be congratulated on the degree to which he imposes form on such a sprawling mass of tenuously related data. It is perhaps not his fault that he has had to snip and stretch a little to fit the past neatly into his Procrustean structure.

Comparative studies have a way of becoming invidious, and this one is no exception. Dr Matthews establishes two opposed sets of categories. “Colonialism” is seen in two aspects: one ignores the indigenous and strives to emulate the mother country, the other reacts against its parent and turns in upon itself. There are two corresponding kinds of poetry: the Academic and the Popular. These contrasts are acceptable, but they are made to imply doubtful value judgements: Popular Na...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part 1: 1960-1971
• Part II: 1972-1976
• Part III: 1977-1982
• Acknowledgements
• Index