Moving Targets

Margaret Atwood

• Publisher: House of Anansi Press
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9780887849114
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

The companion volume to the recently reissued Second Words, Moving Targets is an essential collection of critical prose by Margaret Atwood, now available in a handsome new A List edition.

The most precious treasure of this collection is that it gives us the rich back-story and diverse range of influences on Margaret Atwood's work. From the aunts who encouraged her nascent writing career to the influence of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four on The Handmaid's Tale, we trace the movement of Atwood's fertile and curious mind in action over the years.

Atwood's controversial political pieces, "Napoleon's Two Biggest Mistakes" and "Letter to America" — both not-so-veiled warnings about the repercussions of the war in Iraq — also appear, alongside pieces that exhibit her active concern for the environment, the North, and the future of the human race. Atwood also writes about her peers: John Updike, Marina Warner, Italo Calvino, Marian Engel, Toni Morrison, Angela Carter, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mordecai Richler, Elmore Leonard, and Ursula Le Guin.

This is a landmark volume from a major writer whose worldwide readership is in the millions, and whose work has influenced and entertained generations. Moving Targets is also the companion volume to the recently reissued Second Words.

1982–1989

THE EIGHT YEARS between 1982 and 1989 were energetic ones for me, and proved to be momentous for the world. At their beginning, the Soviet Union seemed firmly in place, due to last for a long while yet. But it had already been sucked into a costly and debilitating war in Afghanistan, and in 1989 the Berlin Wall would come tumbling down. It’s amazing how quickly certain kinds of power structures crumble once the cornerstone falls out. But in 1982, nobody foresaw this outcome.

I began the period quietly enough. I was trying, unsuccessfully and for the second time, to write the book that was — much later — to become Cat’s Eye, and I was ruminating about The Handmaid’s Tale, although I was avoiding this second book as much as possible: it seemed too hopeless a task, and too deeply weird a concept.

Our family was living in Toronto’s Chinatown, in a row house that had been modernized by the removal of many of its inner doors. I couldn’t write there because it was too noisy, so I would bicycle westward to the Portuguese district, where I wrote on the third floor of another row house. I’d just finished editing The New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English, which had been spread out all over the same third floor. That had been a retrospective activity, and so was the first piece in Moving Targets. It’s a Festschrift tribute to Dennis Lee, whom I’d first met and collaborated with at the beginning of my writing life.

In the autumn of 1983 I went with my immediate family to England, where we rented a Norfolk manse said to be haunted by nuns in the parlour, a jolly cavalier in the dining room, and a headless woman in the kitchen. None of these was seen by us, though a jolly cavalier did stray in from the neighbouring pub, looking for the washroom. The phone was a pay phone outside the house, in a booth also used for storing potatoes, and I would clamber over and through them to deal with the editing of — for instance — the Updike review that appears here.

I wrote in a separate space — a fisherman’s cottage turned vacation home — where I struggled with the Aga heater as well as with the novel I’d started. I got my first case of chilblains doing this, but had to give up on the novel when I found myself snarled up in the time sequence, with no way out.

Right after that we went to West Berlin, where, in 1984, I began The Handmaid’s Tale. We made some side visits, to Poland, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia, which doubtless contributed to the atmosphere of the book: totalitarian dictatorships, however different the costumes, share the same climate of fear and silence.

I finished the book in the spring of 1985, where I was Visiting Chair at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. It was the last book I wrote on an electric typewriter. I faxed the chapters as they were finished to my typist in Toronto, to be retyped properly, and I recall being amazed by the magic of instant transmission. The book came out in Canada in 1985 and in England and the United States in 1986, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, among other forms of uproar. I bought a black outfit for the dinner.

We spent part of 1987 in Australia, where I was finally able to come to grips with Cat’s Eye. The snowiest scenes in the book were written during balmy spring days in Sydney, with cuckaburras yelling for hamburger on the back porch. The book was published in 1988 in Canada and the United States and in England in 1989, where it too was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. I had to buy another black outfit. Shortly afterwards, the fatwa was proclaimed against Salman Rushdie. Who knew that this was the first straw in what was to become not only a wind, but a hurricane?

All this time The Handmaid’s Tale had been making its progress through the intestinal workings of the film industry. It finally emerged in finished form, scripted by Harold Pinter and directed by Volker Schlöndorff. The film premiered in the two Berlins in 1989, just as the Wall had fallen: you could buy pieces of it, with the coloured ones being more expensive. I attended the film festivities. There were the same kinds of East German border guards who had been so cold in 1984, but now they were grinning and exchanging cigars with tourists. The East Berlin audience was the more receptive to the film. “This was our life,” one woman told me quietly.

How euphoric we felt, for a short time, in 1989. How dazed by the spectacle of the impossible made real. How wrong we were about the brave new world we were about to enter.

1
DENNIS REVISITED

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WHEN I WAS ASKED to write a small piece on Dennis Lee, I began by counting up the number of years I’ve known him. It came as a slight shock to discover that it was over twenty. I first met him, ludicrously enough, at a Freshman Mixer at Victoria College, University of Toronto, in the fall of 1957. I was somewhat in awe of him, since, like everyone else, I knew he’d won the Prince of Wales Scholarship for the highest grade thirteen marks in the province of Ontario; but nevertheless there I was, shuffling around the floor with him, while he explained that he was going to be a United Church minister. I, on the other hand, was already doggedly set on being a writer, though I had scant ideas about how this was to be accomplished. At that time I thought, in my intolerant undergraduate way, that poetry and religion — especially the religion of the United Church — did not mix, which brought us to the end of the dance.

Then there was a gap, as Dennis was in mainstream English and I had digressed into Philosophy and English, foolishly thinking that my mind would thereby be broadened. But logic and poetry did not mix either, and in second year I switched back, having missed Bibliography forever. Some time later, Dennis and I became friends and collaborators. I suppose it was inevitable. Art of any kind, in the late 1950s, in Toronto, at Victoria College, was not exactly a hot topic, and those of us who dared to risk incurring the pejorative label “arty” practised herding and defensive dressing. We worked on Acta Victoriana, the literary magazine; we wrote on, and acted in, the yearly satirical revue. At one point, Dennis and I invented a pseudonym for literary parodies, which combined both our names and which lingered on after our respective departures: Shakesbeat Latweed. “Shakesbeat,” because the first thing we wrote was a poem called “Sprattire,” variations on the first four lines of “Jack Spratt,” as if by various luminaries, from Shakespeare to a Beat poet. According to my mother, we laughed a lot while writing it. Dennis, then as now, had a faintly outrageous sense of humour concealed beneath his habitually worried look.

Dennis took fourth year off and went to Germany, thus enabling me to get a Woodrow Wilson fellowship (if he’d been there, he’d have got it). After that I was away from Toronto for the next ten years. So it must have been by letter, or during one of my infrequent visits back (I seem to remember Hart House theatre, at intermission; but intermission of what?) that he contacted me about the House of Anansi Press. Some people were starting a publishing house, he said, and they wanted to reprint my book of poems, The Circle Game, which had won the Governor General’s Award that year but was out of print. He said they wanted to do two thousand copies. I thought they were crazy. I also thought the idea of a publishing house was a little crazy too; it was still only 1967. But by this time both Dennis and I were cultural nationalists of a sort, though we’d come to it separately. We were both aware that the established publishing houses had been timorous about new writing, particularly in prose fiction, though also to a certain extent in poetry. The dreaded “colonial mentality” was not yet a catchphrase but it was on its way. The first four Anansi authors got small grants from the Canada Council, most of which we bumped back into the company. It amazes me now to realize how little money it took to start Anansi. But it took a lot more blood and guts, much of both Dennis’s.

During the late 1960s — the period of Anansi’s rapid growth and the establishment of Dennis’s reputation as an editor — I was in Boston, then Montreal, then Edmonton, so was in touch only by letter. I worked in various ways on three Anansi books with Dennis: George Bowering’s The Gangs of Kosmos, bill bissett’s nobody owns th earth, and, less intensively, Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. When my own book, Power Politics, was ready to be seen, I felt it was an Anansi book and took it to Dennis. I returned from England in 1971, joined Anansi’s board, and worked with various writers (sometimes with Dennis, sometimes alone), including Paulette Jiles, Eli Mandel, Terrence Heath, P. K. Page, John Thompson, and Patrick Lane; and Dennis himself, with whom I edited the second edition of Civil Elegies. Our most engrossing collaboration at that time, however, was his editing of my critical work Survival. Dennis was indispensable for the book, and in top editorial form: fast, incisive, full of helpful suggestions, and, by the end, just as exhausted as I was.

Small publishing is an energy drainer, as anyone who has done it will testify. By 1973 Dennis was withdrawing more and more from Anansi, and shortly thereafter so was I.

I think it was in the summer of 1974 that Dennis read the first draft of Lady Oracle for me, with the usual helpful results. The editorial conference took place on the top of a rail fence, which was typical of Dennis as an editor. The process was never what you would call formal. Given the choice of a dining-room table or a kitchen full of dirty dishes and chicken carcasses and cat litter boxes, Dennis would go for the kitchen every time.

This is as good a place as any to throw in my two cents’ worth about Dennis-as-editor. The reputation is entirely deserved. When he’s “on,” he can give another writer not only generous moral support but also an insightful, clear view of where a given book is trying to go. This is usually conveyed not in conversation alone but in pages and pages of single-spaced, detailed, and amended notes. I have never worked with an editor who delivers so much in such a condensed mode. His willingness to enter so fully into a book’s sources of energy make him more than usually vulnerable to invasion by the author’s psyche and to the demands of the author’s clamorous ego. At one stage of his life he was acting not only as surrogate midwife but as surrogate shrink and confessor to far too many people. It’s no wonder that he’s fled from the editing process from time to time. It’s no wonder too that he’s sometimes become bored or impatient with the Super-editor uniform. He is also a writer, and both his own time and the attention and acclaim of others has often gone to the editing when it could or should have gone to the writing. It’s his writing that’s of primary importance for Dennis. It’s also, I think, the hardest thing to talk to him about and the hardest thing for him to do.

When I try to picture Dennis to myself, it’s the anxious wrinkles on his forehead that appear first, like the Cheshire Cat’s grin. Next comes the pipe, eternally puffing, or sometimes a cigar. Then the rest of him appears, on the run, rumpled, harassed by invisible demons, replete with subterranean energy, slightly abstracted, sometimes perplexed, in spite of it all well-meaning, kindly in an embarrassed and hesitant way; and, when he’s talking to you about something important, working very hard not only at but towards saying exactly what he wants to say, which is usually complex. Sometimes Dennis is less complex when he’s had a few drinks and is playing the piano, for instance, or when he’s making a terrible pun. This maniacal side of Dennis is most visible in Alligator Pie and its sequels, and probably keeps him sane; but friendly old Uncle Dennis is of course not the whole story.

I don’t have the whole story, and it’s clear to me after twenty-odd years that I’m not likely ever to have it. Dennis isn’t what you’d call an easily accessible person. In any case, the whole story isn’t finished yet. There’s more to come.

2
WONDERING WHAT IT’S LIKE TO BE A WOMAN

THE WITCHES OF EASTWICK
BY JOHN UPDIKE

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THE WITCHES OF EASTWICK is John Updike’s first novel since the much-celebrated Rabbit Is Rich, and a strange and marvellous organism it proves to be. Like his third novel, The Centaur, it is a departure from baroque realism. This time, too, Mr. Updike transposes mythology into the minor keys of small-town America, but this time he pulls it off, possibly because, like Shakespeare and Robert Louis Stevenson before him, he finds wickedness and mischief more engrossing as subjects than goodness and wisdom.

Mr. Updike’s titles are often quite literal, and The Witches of Eastwick is just what it says. It’s indeed about witches, real ones, who can fly through the air, levitate, hex people, and make love charms that work, and they live in a town called Eastwick. It’s Eastwick rather than Westwick, since, as we all know, it’s the east wind that blows no good. Eastwick purports to be in Rhode Island because, as the book itself points out, Rhode Island was the place of exile for Anne Hutchinson, the Puritan foremother who was kicked out of the Massachusetts Bay colony by the forefathers for female insubordination, a quality these witches have in surplus.

These are not 1980s Womanpower witches. They aren’t at all interested in healing the earth, communing with the Great Goddess, or gaining Power-within (as opposed to Power-over). These are bad witches, and Power-within, as far as they are concerned, is no good at all unless you can zap somebody with it. They are spiritual descendants of the seventeenth-century New England strain and go in for sabbats, sticking pins in wax images, kissing the Devil’s backside, and phallus worship; this latter though — since it is Updike — is qualified worship. The Great Goddess is present only in the form of Nature itself, or, in this book, Nature herself, with which they, both as women and as witches, are supposed to have special affinities. Nature, however, is far from Wordsworth’s big motherly breast. She, or it, is red in tooth, claw, and cancer cell, at best lovely and cruel, at worse merely cruel. “Nature kills constantly, and we call her beautiful.”

How did th...

Table of contents

• Also by
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Alist
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: 1982–1989
• Part II: 1990–2000
• Part III: 2001–2004
• Acknowledgements
• Index
• About the Author
• About the Publisher