these days
Herewith: an orderly post about publishing, spewing forth from my lovely shiny new laptop which was gotten at a discount.
When I say ‘these days’, I’m not talking about publishing being in the sinkhole; I’m talking, rather, about our particular Gen X-Y group of writers, and what our legacy will be in fifty years’ time, and further on. (Yes, this does qualify as Muttering About Destiny, so feel free to smack me.)
I’m writing to you from Glen Cove, New York, as I’ve been reined in by the family to spend some quality time with the Best Brother Ever while my mother and stepfather are out of state. Hanging out at my mom’s house is, now I’m an adult, a constant exercise in comparing my household to hers (what a horridly anti-feminist sentiment, but we’re still there, girls, we really are), and, this time, comparing my book collection to hers. Looking over my shoulder, a cursory glance at her bookcases gives me Carol Shields, Alice Munro, Anne Tyler, Margaret Atwood, Margaret Laurence, Miriam Toews. Also a copy of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes that I left the last time I was here.
As those of you who are regular readers - or have spoken with me for half an hour at a stretch - will know, I have a complex about Margaret Atwood. I have no idea what it’s about. It is, at least in part, about the number of interesting photos taken of her over the years: she’s got this small-titted writerliness about her, a crackling tininess that I find terrifying. There’s also the voice. People have made fun of her voice for its deadpan, monotone quality, but in that tone I hear confidence, an I-don’t-write-for-you-ness. I want that, and she seems to have had it from the beginning.
I have confessed here, after all, that I write to be read.
The problem I have with The Divine Ms A, though - the principal problem - is that I can’t get next to most of her novels. I was raised to believe that reading Margaret Atwood was not an option, but an imperative. I shall likely feed the same codswallop to my own children about John Irving, when the time comes. (My Atwood indoctrination began when I was about four.) I know, objectively, that the novels are very good, very worthy, but I can’t sink in to them. There: I said it (again).
Still, I can’t just dismiss her and move on.
Every night here in Glen Cove, I devote the fifteen minutes before attempting sleep to reading a few pages of a book called The Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood Starting Out by Rosemary Sullivan, a professor at the University of Toronto and a serial literary biographer. It is masochism; I am very good at this. From this book I learn what I already knew: that in the 1960s, Canadian publishing was a vast wilderness, occupied by about four white men. From this decade, this generation, rose Margaret Atwood and her various consoeurs, and by the end of the 1970s, Canadian publishing was a teeming, pulsating culture all its own. In other words, Margaret Atwood had a job to do. She had to change the landscape, and she did that.
Listen:
In my mind’s eye I see Margaret Atwood standing on a bridge: the woods are at her back, the city is before her, and she commands both worlds. There are bodies under the water, trolls under the bridge. This is, of course, an absurd image I have invented, but it conjures up a vision of a woman who, out of years of training and willed attention, has claimed deep mythological roots for her writing. She speaks with an incisiveness in which the pleasure of provocation is implicit. She takes herself very straightforwardly. She is a writer.
This from a book whose subject asserts that writing is a state of doing, not a state of being. From this one paragraph, I glean that in Canadiana, the women’s market has been cornered. Finished. Nothing left to see here. You see why I’m frightened.
As difficult as it is to get published today (when I imagine the 1960s in Canada I imagine poor-quality Xeroxes bound with paperclips - perhaps hemp twine - crisscrossing the country by rail), there are more books now than there ever have been. What it must take to get noticed in such a sea!
The challenge to be a voice that stands out is not only an artistic one - although that is the primary challenge, despite the whining of the many-headed. I might be the only person alive who feels sorry for JK Rowling, even for someone like Stephenie Meyer, because what could they write now that would be taken seriously, that would be bought and read for more than morbid, fingertip curiosity?
Even if you find your voice, even if it stands out, even if people love it, there are quagmires.
What haunts me about Margaret Atwood is that now that she’s been read, loved, respected these past forty years and more, it is all the more difficult to find a corner of writing that hasn’t yet been claimed. Another terrifying sentence from The Red Shoes:
… I am fascinated by the mystery of artistic confidence. Where does the strength come from to believe in yourself as a writer?
Wait, for the sake of fuck: you have to believe in yourself? You have to have ‘artistic confidence’? I’ve finished a novel: does that mean I believe in myself? Well, I suppose it does. I believe that my seven-year-old self wanted to write novels for grown-ups. In my early adulthood, I believed I held tremendous insight into the human condition. Now, I’ve written what I most feared in my Atwood-driven childhood: a plot-driven novel. No successful, slightly-too-thin, middle-aged women falling back on their beds in a blouse and garters to contemplate the ceiling, unhappy marriages, and The State of Things. My mantra used to be I’m not old enough, I don’t know enough, but I can’t hide behind that now.
The problem is that I haven’t created a mythology for myself yet. That’s next. Or another novel.
What does it take to be an individual in this flood? What does it take to be both worthy and noticed? I suppose I ought to concentrate on the worthy and leave the noticed for later. Still.
This dovetails nicely with my next post, which will be existential and will involve knitting. So much for orderly.
Till next time, &c &c.
