What Atwood Knows

This story was originally published in 2009.

Last Halloween, there was a cele­bratory lunch for Margaret Atwood at Massey College. The former camp counsellor who used to go to the Hadassah bazaar every year to scavenge costumes for her campers rose to the occasion. She was all in black, except for orange collar and cuffs, and a pair of vast monarch butterfly wings, orange veined with black.

Assembled at round tables in the college’s upper library were about 50 people, including Ursula Franklin, Thomas King and John Fraser, Massey’s Master; old Atwood friends Adrienne Clarkson, John Ralston Saul, Anna and Julian Porter; and her partner, Graeme Gibson. Atwood was fighting a cold and saving her voice for the next day’s speech, the final one in the year’s annual Massey Lectures, for which she’d written the book Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth.

Before the carrot soup (the same colour as the monarch wings), guinea hen and polenta, Atwood’s colleagues praised her stamina and prescience. The stamina part explained the butterfly wings. Writing Payback in two and a half months, she told them, was like being trapped in a “chrysalis of punishment.” Her prescience, everybody agreed, was breathtaking. On September 7, exactly one month before her book’s publication date, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, America’s biggest mortgage-finance companies, were placed under government control and the stock market went into free fall. Within days, the Wall Street Journal began petitioning Atwood’s publisher to let them run a sizable excerpt. The Times of London published an excerpt on September 26, “Questions for Margaret Atwood” appeared in The New York Times Magazine on September 28, and an op-ed piece ran in The New York Times on October 22. The book shot to the top of best-seller lists in Canada. By the end of November, it was in its fourth printing and had sold more than any previous Massey Lectures book.

Related: Margaret Atwood on Trump, (not) moving to Hollywood and The Handmaid’s Tale

In the last months of 2008, Atwood seemed omnipresent as well as omniscient—two of the attributes of the divine. But although she has been dazzling us for almost 40 years, she’s too quirky to be mistaken for a goddess. She has more in common with Cassandra, the beautiful mortal to whom Apollo gave the gift of prophecy, more often for bad news than good. Readers first noticed this in 1985, when Atwood anticipated the stranglehold of America’s neo-conservative evangelicalism with the world of religious fundamentalism and female subjugation she created for The Handmaid’s Tale, and again in 2003, when the global pandemic she described in Oryx and Crake collided with the real-life outbreak of SARS.

Of course, Payback is not about the mortgage meltdown or the stock market slide. Written in the conversational, occasionally jokey style Atwood has trademarked for her non-fiction, it is a big-picture look at all kinds of debt—moral, theological, financial, even ecological. Rather than a sustained argument, it’s more like a series of snapshots of a subject, or a brisk walk, taking different routes around an idea. And no doubt that’s what the newspapers liked about the book, that it was a more philosophical way to think about the crumbling economy than yesterday’s stock numbers. To the group gathered at Massey, the book was more proof of Atwood’s unpredictable, many-faceted braininess.

The Massey Lectures have been an annual institution since 1961. It’s a prestigious podium, graced over the decades by Northrop Frye, Martin Luther King Jr. and Jane Jacobs. The series is also the biggest source of income for Anansi, the boutique publisher that releases the book on which the lectures are based. When the lectures are a hit—as were 1993’s pro-humanism talks by John Ralston Saul, The Unconscious Civilization—they become part of the Canadian zeitgeist.

The Massey organizers—CBC Radio, Anansi and Massey College—had approached Atwood repeatedly for 15 years. Finally, she agreed. Why? “They wore me down,” she says simply, and then mimics a girl who doesn’t want to go on a date. “ ‘Can you go out on Friday?’ ‘Sorry, I’m washing my hair that night.’ ‘Saturday?’ ‘No, washing my hair again.’ ‘Sunday?’ ‘No, sorry,’ and so on. I ran out of excuses.”

At first, she chose as her subject “the sociobiology of literary criticism,” especially how a writer’s critical reception is affected by his or her gender and age. It was a topic close to her heart, as male critics had often taken her writing less than seriously. But gradually she lost interest: her Clarendon Lectures at Oxford and her Empson Lectures at Cambridge had treated literary topics, and she wanted a change.

By 2005, she wanted to write about debt. In those innocent days, that seemed a very odd idea. When Lynn Henry joined Anansi as its publisher in 2005, she was told about Atwood’s intended subject. Henry remembers “a little pause while we all pondered this.” Then Sarah Mac­Lachlan, Anansi’s Lauren Bacall-ish president, added, “So…maybe you can talk to her about that?” Henry now realizes that the suggestion was “the equivalent of the practical joke you might play on the new girl in high school.” She widens her candid blue eyes and admits, “I wouldn’t have dared to challenge Atwood on that.” Which, as things turned out, was fortunate.

Atwood was originally scheduled to deliver the lectures in the fall of 2009. All that changed in January 2008, when Atwood’s “gang of girls,” as she calls them—her North American and British agents and editors—met at the Park Hyatt. They were discussing her newly finished novel, her first since 2003’s Oryx and Crake, and planning its publication for the fall of 2008. Nan Talese, the publishing veteran who is Atwood’s US editor at Doubleday, was in New York with the flu, but she called from her sickbed to shatter their calm: on no account, she declared, should they publish during the American election. “Everybody clucked,” Atwood says, who was annoyed at the time but realized it was the right call. The novel’s release was rescheduled for fall 2009.

Atwood neglected to mention the schedule change to the Massey organizers. On the last Saturday of January, MacLachlan was in her Cabbagetown bathroom when her husband, the writer and editor Noah Richler, slid The Globe and Mail’s Review section under the door. The page facing her had a small story announcing the new publication date for Atwood’s novel.

Appearing in the same season, the new novel would overshadow Payback and cut Atwood’s time for publicity in half. “They freaked,” Atwood says laconically, and admits that she should have phoned Anansi and the other Massey partners with the news rather than having them read it in the paper.

MacLachlan and Fraser conferred with Bernie Lucht, the executive producer of CBC’s Ideas and the Massey Lectures, and came up with a solution. They knew Atwood already had an outline and some notes for her lectures, her novel was finished, and she was notoriously self-disciplined and speedy. Why not schedule Atwood in 2008, avoiding a collision of novel and lectures in 2009? They decided to approach Atwood at a Massey College event on Wednesday, January 30. The triumvirate took Atwood and Gibson into Fraser’s office, and she says, “That’s when the kneeling and pleading took place.” Fraser made their case.

Atwood’s first response was, “I think I need a drink.” (Usually abstemious, she enjoys an occasional single malt whiskey.) They brought her a scotch. She asked a few pertinent questions, such as the length of each chapter (10,000 words), and consulted the schedule she carries around in her purse, half a dozen or so sheets of paper peppered with her obligations for the coming weeks and months. The 2008 lectures were due in June, four months away, and in that time she and Gibson were committed to six weeks of events for BirdLife International, as joint honorary presidents of its rare bird club. She would have to accomplish in two and a half months what she had planned to do in a year. Atwood says it was like being told, “Run the marathon. Now.”

All right, she said, but there are conditions: “I won’t do the index, you’ll have to organize the permissions, and you’ll have to get me some research help.” Fraser promised her the best graduate student researchers at Massey College. The stars had realigned, and everybody but Atwood felt relieved.

When you ask Atwood a question, the alpha person in her often responds first by establishing her superiority. When I ask why she wanted to write about debt in 2005, she answers in her impassive monotone, “Well, look around you, as I was already doing.” I have just enough time to feel abashed before Atwood’s basic co-operativeness reasserts itself. She says the relationship between wars and how countries finance them has interested her since she was a child, watching Cana­dians send used clothes to Britain after World War II. In 2003, at the time of the US invasion of Iraq, she wrote “Letter to America,” which appeared in The Globe and Mail (it was later reprinted in The Nation). “You’re running up a record level of debt,” she warned Americans. “Keep spending at this rate and pretty soon you won’t be able to afford any big military adventures. Either that or you’ll go the way of the U.S.S.R.: lots of tanks, but no air conditioning… You’re torching the American economy.”

In addition, her graduate studies in the Victorian novel at Harvard in the 1960s familiarized her with a materialistic society where ruinous debts were common. Several of those stories, from Thackeray’s Vanity Fair to Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, surface in her third lecture, “Debt As Plot.” The issue of responsibility—whether legal, moral, societal or all three—has always preoccupied Atwood, with Alias Grace and Cat’s Eye only two examples out of many. Most fundamentally, she was born to two frugal Nova Scotians who put their Depression earnings in envelopes marked, in order of priority, Rent, Groceries, Other Necessities and Recreation. If there was no money left for the fourth envelope, they went for a walk instead of to a movie.

Even so, those elements wouldn’t necessarily coalesce into her decision to write a book about debt. That’s why “prescient” is the word almost everyone who writes or speaks about Payback uses. “Do I have a crystal ball?” Atwood asks. “No. Do I read tiny bits in the back of the paper? Yes. Do I read popular science? Yes.” She clips articles on things like tubular solar panels or, on a recent plane trip, a USA Today article about some North Dakota farmers who want to grow industrial hemp. Over time, these random clippings form a pattern, often not a soothing one.

Atwood’s biographer Rosemary Sullivan notes that her father, Carl Atwood, an entomologist, took his family to live in the northern Quebec forest every summer, often leaving his children alone with their mother in the woods while he worked elsewhere. In that “fairy tale world,” Sullivan contends, young Margaret developed a highly sensitized intuition about danger. When I mention Sullivan’s theory, Atwood doesn’t disagree, paraphrasing Al Gore’s remark that those long-ago people who didn’t notice the leaves moving in the forest did not live to become our ancestors. As she matured, her instinct for danger expanded beyond concrete things like bears to theocracies, pollution and the sinister interconnectedness that unregulated debt creates.

With breaks for birding in Cuba and the Camargue in France, Atwood wrote Payback. (Scott Griffin, the owner of Anansi, talked her out of her original title, Debt, as too depressing.) As promised, Fraser delivered researchers: a law student, Dylan Cantwell Smith; and a PhD student in English, Claire Battershill. Atwood presented them with an organized list of things she wanted. It ranged from the very specific (check out the book’s opening anecdote, that the writer Ernest Thompson Seton’s father presented him with an account of what it had cost to bring him up) to the open-ended (for the “Debt As Plot” chapter, Battershill was asked to find whatever literary examples she could). Fraser had warned them that Atwood could be difficult, but Battershill found her straight­forward, funny and awesomely efficient. Too shy to tell Atwood that reading Cat’s Eye at 13 had been one of her most exciting literary experiences and that she too writes fiction and poetry (“my role was not to be the gushing fan”), she worked hard to craft e-mail responses to Atwood’s questions that were “not too boring.”

Lynn Henry had been advised by publishing colleagues that one does not edit Atwood, but she says the advice was unnecessary. Atwood has her own circle of first readers: the historian Ramsay Cook and his wife, Eleanor (who would occasionally write “This is silly” in the margins); the novelist Valerie Martin; and Atwood’s 32-year-old daughter, Jess Gibson. With their help, and because Atwood edits herself, Henry and Philip Coulter, the producer of the CBC lectures, say they found themselves more in the role of cheerleaders than editors. There are good writers who flail around messily in a kind of literary sausage factory as they try to refine their ideas, Coulter says, but Atwood has an uncanny ability to access her thoughts cleanly and cogently.

The cross-country lecture tour, a feature of the Masseys for the past seven years, began on October 12 in St. John’s and proceeded to Vancouver, Winnipeg and Mont­real before ending in Toronto. When they set out for St. John’s, Atwood noticed that Payback was nowhere to be seen in the airport bookstores, and she scolded Mac­Lachlan in her subdued foghorn, “I’ve done my job. Now you have to do yours.” But in general she was one of the most clubbable Massey lecturers the organizers can remember, telling stories in the Fairmont bar until closing time. She needed a black skirt in which to accept Spain’s Prince of Asturias prize for letters later that month, and went shopping for it with MacLachlan. (She found one she liked, but it was tight at the waist. Luckily, as she told MacLachlan, she had taken home economics, not typing, and went back to her hotel room to let it out.) MacLachlan relished Atwood’s pre-Massey lecture warm-up; in two-part harmony, they sang “You Are My Sunshine,” “Swing Low Sweet Chariot” and even the old camp chestnut “Oh, They Built the Ship Titanic.”

Atwood loves to give advice, in her books and in person. At the Q&A sessions that follow the lectures, people asked her surprisingly personal questions: how to bring up their children to be fair, how to survive a business that had gone bust. And she told them, smartly and succinctly. Offstage, she gave MacLachlan parenting tips (have clear expectations, make lots of contracts). Bernie Lucht confessed to her that he usually has a mild post-Massey depression, and she ordered, “B-12. Take it in the morning.” When she discovered that he often drank two cans of Diet Coke a day, she was severe: “You’re putting poison into your body.” Thanks to her, he is down from 14 a week to three or four.

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Atwood is slightly dangerous. You don’t know when you’ll feel the rough side of her tongue, or when she’ll misbehave, or when she’ll be willing to make a fool of herself. It’s the same unpredictable element that we savoured in Trudeau

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For our greatest public intellectual, Atwood has a refreshingly girly-girl interest in her wardrobe. At the end of our interview, I ask her if I have neglected anything and she says at once, “Clothes.” OK, what about them? “Think pink, pack black,” she intones. Translated, that means she built upon a ground of black for her lecture wardrobe, always adding a scarf or shawl in a pink or red. Watching her on the stage of the Chan Centre in Vancouver, a reporter for the UBC student paper was struck by the slight figure wrapped in a pink shawl and topped with a mop of white curls. She described her as “a Q-tip on fire.” Atwood loved that.

When the doors of U of T’s Convocation Hall opened at 7 p.m. for the final lecture, a long line of ticket holders snaked around the building. At 8 p.m., the hall, which seats 1,600, was full.

Fraser, wearing a plaid bow tie, welcomed the audience to “this great national exercise in opinion-mongering” and kissed Atwood’s hand when she arrived onstage. Under the hall’s great glass dome, Atwood looked small and even a bit frail—until she began to speak.

At first she seemed subdued, perhaps from fatigue and her cold, perhaps to lull us into the spell she was casting. But the audience was rapt, from beginning to end. Like Dickens, who mesmerized audiences when he read from his novels, she could have done anything with this crowd.

In the last chapter of Payback, she writes a little fiction—or, more accurately, rewrites Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Scrooge, redrawn as Scrooge Nouveau, receives visits from the Spirits of Earth Day Past, Present and Future, and becomes a probable convert to alternative energy and desalination plants. He accepts that he owns nothing, and owes everything to nature. In its high spirits, its inventiveness and its willingness to be absurd, it harks back to the high school girl who wrote an operetta about synthetics for her home economics class (starring the princesses Orlon, Dacron and Nylon), and went on to write and perform in summer camp and university revues. In the midst of generally admiring reviews, it is the part of the book a few British and American critics found wanting. On Salon.com, Louis Bayard judged the conclusion an “embarrassingly inane” revamping of Dickens that transported readers to “the meadowlands of the Canadian Green Party.” More forgiving, William Skidelsky wrote in The Guardian, “It is by no means the highlight of the book, but that doesn’t mean its message has no value.” But if this chapter was not Margaret Atwood’s absolutely finest hour, you would never have known it from the reaction in Convocation Hall.

She responded to the audience like the ham she is, putting her hand over the mike to produce Marley’s sepulchral tones, doing the Spirit of Earth Day Future, a cockroach, in a gravelly voice, and giving the Spirit of Earth Day Present a high-pitched, girlish voice like Disney’s Snow White. As a performer, she breaks one of the cardinal rules by laughing at her own jokes. Her snicker, usually a beat before the joke, cues the audience, and they oblige every time. When, in answer to a question, she said that good resolutions are like a diet—“it doesn’t hold up against doughnuts”—they greeted this mild remark like an irresistible knee-slapper. They roared. It was as if the Queen had made a joke about her underwear. Fraser explains the love-in: “Everyone had bought into the fact that they were there for something major.” Rosemary Sullivan says, “I think we’re thrilled to have an Atwood to adore.”

Why do we adore her? Partly because there are so many of her: the poet, where she shows her most feelingful side; the novelist, coolly ironic and satiric; the non-fiction writer, an analytical magpie; the good citizen and a founding mother of the Writers’ Union, the Writers’ Trust and countless less organized enterprises, generous and tireless. Partly because, in a country that frets about tall poppies, she not only stands tall but doesn’t hesitate to remind you of her stature. Partly because she is slightly dangerous. You don’t know when you’ll feel the rough side of her tongue (on what she calls her “peevish days”), or when she’ll misbehave, or when she’ll be willing to make a fool of herself. It’s the same unpredictable element that we savoured in Trudeau.

She is our Cassandra, but an optimistic one. She points out our follies and perils, often before we’ve realized them ourselves, but insists that we have it in our selfish and often silly power to fix at least some of our mistakes. She is also our Dickens—like him, an acute observer and moral voice in the novels, a political activist, and a public entertainer with a penchant for broad strokes.

The audience in Convocation Hall gave her a standing ovation. She acknowledged them with her familiar closed-mouth smile, lips in a perfect U. She had done it again.

This story appears in the February 2009 issue of Toronto Life magazine. To subscribe for just $39.99 a year, click here. To purchase single issues, click here.