Margaret Atwood

I met Margaret Atwood only once, a number of years ago, before The Handmaid’s Tale, widely considered her best and certainly most talked about work. Out meeting was at the Art Gallery of Ontario, the opening of the Gauguin to Matisse exhibition. I’d heard through various grapevines that Atwood can be tough and cold, but I found that nothing could be further from the truth — even as I persisted in following her around as ‘we’ viewed the art. She humoured me by posing with an oil she particularly admired, titled Large Pine near Aix-en-Provence. “I’m pretty fond of Cézanne,” she explained, “because for nine years I lived in the region where he was painting”. More to the point, she’s also fond of a book in which she had a hand. It’s Ground Works, published by Anansi Press, the amazing Canadian house where she cut her literary teeth way back when, and edited by Toronto poet Christian Bok. A collection of experimental fiction, written between 1965 and 1985, the book includes work by such luminaries (now they’re luminaries, then they were just getting started) as Michael Ondaatje, Leonard Cohen, Graeme Gibson and Matt Cohen). In her introduction, Atwood wonders why ’60s Canada was such a fertile ground for interesting writing, then offers her theory: “Partly because it was a stranger place in many ways than is often supposed — who remembers the LSD that flowed so freely in London, Ont., in the 1950s — well before the age of Timothy Leary — not to mention the orgies in the cathedral? It was strange in a literary way as well. What other country would have produced a set of Spenserian eclogues spoken in a farmyard by a flock of geese?” (That appeared in A Suit of Nettles, written by James Reaney in 1958.) “I was never a radical,” Atwood told me, “and now I’m too old to be a hippie. The book is not about radicalism,” she added. “It’s about conservatism gone astray.”

Before leaving Atwood that day, she took on the task of trying to find me a husband, even coming up with a name. I accused her of wanting the man for herself and she just smiled. As we said our goodby’s, I mentioned that her book, Bear, had a big impact on me many years ago. “Actually, I didn’t write that, Marian Engel did”, she laughed. I blushed. But my horrendous gaffe didn’t offend her one bit. That’s what it’s like when you’re the best in the world; unflappable. As for me, well, that’s another story… I wonder if she can come up with another name for my current ‘husband material’ pursuit….humm.

by Sharon Dunn