Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (144 page)

The personality that comes through the story is repulsive. At sixteen, David proposes marriage to the only girl he has ever dated. By way of reply she screams, claws his face and runs away, her hair flying. The novel ends with much blood and some spectacular violence against mothers, all of it filtered through David’s anaesthetised gaze and precocious schoolboy prose. The power of
The Neon Bible
resides in its descriptions of the small town where David’s childhood is unspent. But, as the reader admires Toole’s writing, questions form. Was he really only sixteen when he wrote it? Did he perhaps revise or wholly rewrite the text at a later time? There are tantalising gaps in the record – about, for example, the mysterious writing competition in 1953.

The Neon Bible
begins and ends with a train journey which strongly recalls
Chapter Eight
of
The Catcher in the Rye
. Salinger’s novel came out in 1951. Was the fourteen-year-old Toole one of the original readers of the hardback or did he – like most of his generation – encounter Holden Caulfield in paperback later in the
decade? Thelma Toole was fanatical on the subject of her son’s genius. As the work of a young man,
The Neon Bible
is interesting but nothing very wonderful. As the work of a boy, it is prodigious. One would, however, like clinching proof that it is a boy’s novel. No one is now going to forget John Kennedy Toole; his mother can rest in peace on that score. He is a legendary figure – a Louisiana Rimbaud.

They [Americans] had a vague idea that such a place existed – it was that blank area north of the map where the bad weather came from.

Atwood was born in Ottawa, the middle child of three. Her father, Carl, was a forest entomologist and his field work meant a nomadic childhood for Margaret, much of it spent ‘roughing it’ in the Canadian wilderness. She was largely (and efficiently) home-schooled by her mother, a former dietician. Both parents came from Nova Scotia, ‘a province from which they felt themselves in exile all their lives’. Atwood’s life settled somewhat when her father took a university job in Toronto – but not happily. ‘I was now faced with real life,’ she recalled, ‘in the form of other little girls – their prudery and snobbery, their Byzantine social life based on whispering and vicious gossip.’ As novelists do, she took her revenge cold – but razor-sharp – in her seventh novel,
Cat’s Eye
(1988). The most autobiographical of her works, the novel ponders girl-on-girl sadism. The mid-career painter, Elaine, returns to Toronto and finds herself in ‘two places at once’: her schooldays and her current artistic success. How are they connected?

A remarkably clever pupil (something that may have made her even less loved by schoolmates), Atwood went on to read English at Toronto University – then, under the domination of proto-theorist Northrop Frye, one of the most distinguished departments in North America. Throughout her growing up, there was ‘the sub-layer of fear’. Canada, being where it was on the USSR doorstep, would be the first to go in the coming Armageddon. She graduated in 1961 and progressed, via Radcliffe College, to Harvard. An academic career was in prospect, but Atwood decided to discontinue her research. She felt, she later said, like ‘a little wart or wen on the great academic skin’, and she wanted more than wartiness. Writing about
writing was futile.’ Writing itself wasn’t futile – she was already a prize-winning poet. None the less, for the next few years she supported herself by teaching jobs. Lacking the necessary Ph.D., they were necessarily ‘low on the totem pole’. Women had more difficulty scaling that pole even with a doctorate. In her own time she was writing – principally poetry, although some of her later fiction was drafted in this turbulent decade.

Her first novel,
The Edible Woman
, was published in 1969. It partook of the sixties’ turbulence. Its connection with the emergent woman’s movement, and the doctrinal text, Betty Friedan’s
The Feminine Mystique
, is readily observed. In the UK, she was taken up by Carmen Callil for her combative Virago imprint.
The Edible Woman
pivots on a symbolic moment – the serving and consumption of a wife-baked cake, in the shape of the baking wife. Atwood’s own marital life was in transitional change at the time. In 1968 she had married Jim Polk, a fellow postgraduate at Harvard. They drifted apart after a year (1970) in Europe and divorced in 1973. Atwood had for some time been associated with the Anansi Press in Toronto, set up in 1967 on a policy of ‘Canada First’. After her divorce she set up home with fellow Anansi novelist Graeme Gibson, whom she has not married. The couple farmed for a few years and had a daughter in 1976. In 1980, partly for the sake of her daughter’s education, partly for a career which was taking off, Atwood and Gibson returned to Toronto.

Now a committed writer of fiction, Atwood was feeling her way through a variety of genres.
Lady Oracle
(1976) explored high Gothic, which Atwood sees as ‘very much a woman’s form’, adding the savage parenthesis: ‘Why is there such a wide readership for books that essentially say “your husband is trying to kill you”?’ Gothic was not, however, the genre in which she would find international celebrity. That, paradoxically, was the traditionally masculinist preserve of science fiction (which, like Robert Heinlein, Atwood prefers to call ‘speculative fiction’).
The Handmaid’s Tale
(1985) swept the board of science fiction prizes. More significantly, it became a hugely prescribed text (replacing Huxley’s
Brave New World
) in schools across the English-speaking world, which wanted to sugar-coat class discussions of feminism.

She had been inspired to write
The Handmaid’s Tale
by a newspaper story that pollution in drinking water was radically diminishing male sperm count and by the rise of evangelism in the US. The novel fantasises a male-totalitarian tyranny in which the US, now the Republic of Gilead, has reverted to neo-Puritan oppression of women (and, to a lesser extent, Blacks and Jews). In the face of calamitously declining fertility, those few women who can reproduce (‘Handmaids’) are kept like brood mares, for the use of powerful men and their infertile mates. The story, framed in
a historically distant academic conference on Gilead, follows the fortunes of Offred (i.e. ‘property of Fred’), a rebellious Handmaid. In the novel, her final fate is uncertain. In the film made of the novel, scripted by Harold Pinter, she finds refuge in the North American wilderness. For all its narrative brilliance,
The Handmaid’s Tale
faces the inevitable criticism of such apocalyptic prophecy – it didn’t happen, and probably won’t. Put another way, 1984 wasn’t, as it turned out, at all like
Nineteen Eighty-four
. A quarter of a century on, under-population and Christian radicalism are not our direst threats, although they may have been so conceived when she wrote the novel. In her dystopian follow-up,
Oryx and Crake
(2003), Atwood switched her Cassandraism to genetic engineering and the scientific violation of nature.

Living up to a work as successful as
The Handmaid’s Tale
was tricky, but the artistically restless Atwood declined to stay in any one groove, finding multiple generic outlets for her underlying ideological commitments. Her Canadian historical novel,
Alias Grace
(1996) – see the entry on Moodie below – won the Booker, for which she has had a record number of nominations. In
The Penelopiad
(2005) she rewrites the Odyssey from the point of view of Penelope and the handmaidens that Ulysses and Telemachus slaughter as part of the cleaning up of the court at Ithaca. Atwood has said on many occasions that fiction must matter. She is that nineteenth-century thing, a ‘novelist with a purpose’. Her great achievement is to have balanced what would seem irreconcilable purposes. In her early fiction it was the nationalism of ‘Canadian Writing’ against the supranational woman’s movement (put as a conundrum, does Atwood have more in common with her fellow Canadian novelist, Graeme Gibson, than with Homer’s Penelope?). In her manifesto non-fiction work,
Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature
(1972), she identifies the prime ingredient of Canadianness to be ‘wilderness’ – a property of the world as much as of a country.

In her later career, a third, essentially international, commitment became prominent: namely environmentalism. Both Gibson and Atwood are active ‘greens’. It is easy to see how this connects with wilderness, and with Atwood’s own childhood when, as she says, the northern forests ‘were my hometown’. It is less easy to find the connection with third-age feminism. Atwood’s 2009 novel, produced after a tantalisingly long interval,
The Year of the Flood
, engages head-on with what she prophesies as planet-wide ecological catastrophe. A mysterious epidemic has wiped out most of the human race and multinational companies are destroying what is left. Hope resides in an Edenic sect, ‘God’s Gardeners’, and their messiah, Adam One. The novel is said to have so infuriated the chair of the Man Booker judges that year that he threw it across his bedroom, denting the wall. It is, probably, a response that Atwood would have relished almost as much as the prize itself.

Your place is empty.

Margaret Atwood’s
Alias Grace
(shortlisted for the 1996 Booker Prize) fictionalised an actual murder case she read about in Susanna Moodie’s memoir,
Life in the Clearings versus the Bush
(1853). In it, Moodie records encountering the murderess, judged insane by the court, in her asylum:

Among these raving maniacs I recognised the singular face of Grace Marks – no longer sad and despairing, but lighted up with the fire of insanity, and glowing with a hideous and fiend-like merriment. On perceiving that strangers were observing her, she fled shrieking away like a phantom into one of the side rooms. It appears that even in the wildest bursts of her terrible malady, she is continually haunted by a memory of the past. Unhappy girl! when will the long horror of her punishment and remorse be over? When will she sit at the feet of Jesus, clothed with the unsullied garments of his righteousness, the stain of blood washed from her hand, and her soul redeemed, and pardoned, and in her right mind?

It is hard to think that echoes of Bertha Mason, in
Jane Eyre
, are not reverberating in Moodie’s mind. In line with the revisionary readings of Brontë’s novel, following Susan Gubar and Sandra Gilbert’s 1979 polemic,
The Madwoman in the Attic
, Atwood probes Marks’s ‘guilt’ sceptically. Her more general interest in Moodie had been longstanding: one of her earliest published works was
The Journals of Susanna Moodie
(1970), poems written in the assumed voice and character of the Canadian pioneer. The poems follow the process by which Moodie became ‘the spirit of the land she once hated’.

Susanna Strickland was not born Canadian. She was brought up in Suffolk, England, one of the five genteel daughters of a famous writing family – her sister, Agnes, published the bestselling
Lives of the Queens of England
(1840–48). The Stricklands suffered serious economic setbacks when Susanna was fifteen. She published her first novel,
Spartacus
(1822), before she was twenty (and wrote it, she
claimed, aged thirteen). In 1831 she married Lieutenant John Wedderburn Dunbar Moodie (1797–1869), the traveller and adventurer. In a spirit of adventure, the newly married couple voyaged to Canada in 1832. Like others, they were seduced by immigrant pamphlets published by interested parties, which prominently set forth all the good to be derived from a settlement in the backwoods of Canada, ‘while they carefully concealed the toil and hardship to be endured in order to secure these advantages … They talked of log houses to be raised in a single day, by the generous exertions of friends and neighbours, but they never ventured upon a picture of the disgusting scenes of riot and low debauchery exhibited during the raising, or upon a description of the dwellings when raised – dens of dirt and misery, which would, in many instances, be shamed by an English pig-sty.’

For a while the Moodies farmed. John later served in the Niagara militia and eventually became a sheriff in Ontario. But in 1852 the family fell on hard times, and to earn money, Susanna began publishing books, the most interesting of which recall her bleak pioneer experiences. The first of these,
Roughing it in the Bush
(1852), is now regarded as an early classic of Canadian literature. She also wrote some fifteen novels, of which the most interesting,
Mark Hurdlestone
(1853), is the story of a Jewish ‘gold-worshipper’ or miser, in which Moodie seems to be paying back the moneylenders who ruined her husband a few months earlier:

There was not a drop of the milk of human kindness in his composition. Regardless of his own physical wants, he despised the same wants in others. Charity sued to him in vain, and the tear of sorrow made no impression on his stony heart. Passion he had felt – cruel, ungovernable passion. Tenderness was foreign to his nature – the sweet influences of the social virtues he had never known.