Rosemary Sullivan - The Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood Starting Out

I n my memory, it was a Thursday evening at Harbourfront, Torontos arts centre at the edge of Lake Ontario. Greg Gatenby, artistic director of Harbourfronts literary events, had organized a reading in support of Abbey Bookstore, a bilingual Canadian bookstore in Paris. Many of the well-known Toronto writers had been invited to read.

The writers sat at the front of the Brigantine Room at small tables with checkered tablecloths and candles meant to conjure a Parisian cabaret. Margaret Atwood was on the programme.

For someone of such prominence, she has a way of slipping into a room quietly. She is tiny, with a taut, electric intensity. There is something birdlike about her. Magpieish, as she sometimes describes herself.

Rumours were in the air that night about her new book, Alias Grace. There had been a cool review in The Globe and Mail.

Her blue eyes are large, almost transparent, and as she greeted people I noted the anxiety in them. That may have been my projection. I was thinking about what it means to be a famous writer. Writing is the most personal and the most exposing of the arts. There is no buffer zone between the writer and her audience. If the writer fails, she fails alone.

Margaret Atwood is famous. That night she already knew that Alias Grace would be published in many countries. It would metamorphose into an alien text in numerous languages she couldnt read, and would enter into the minds of hundreds of thousands of people she would never meet. And yet, to me she seemed worried about what the literary world would do with her creation. But why should I be surprised by this?

Greg Gatenby had instructed us to read from a book we felt deserved more attention, one we would like to see translated into French and sold at Abbey Bookstore. Margaret Atwood read from Green Grass, Running Water, a novel by the Native writer Thomas King. She was hilarious, and almost seemed to become the Trickster figure in Kings book. And I thought, yes, she is a Trickster. Mischievous, a shape-shifter, challenging assumptions and conventions. How could one ever get a fix on her?

For that is what I intended to do. I was writing a book about Margaret Atwood. Though I didnt quite know what to call it. A not-biography was the closest Id come.

I wanted to write about her creative life. And yet I needed a phrase to describe my position. I had come up with the middle distance. I would write from the middle distance, interfacing between the culture that had formed her and the mind of the writer. It wouldnt be a gossipy book. Who would tell me anything anyway? And besides, the little gossip that I already knew didnt interest me. Gossip is the surface story, usually meant to puncture and deflate another life.

A not-biography then. I knew that a real biography can only be crafted in retrospect. It is a nostalgic exercise, a synthesis of perspectives about the subject after the memoirs, letters, and anecdotes have been collected.

Instead, I wanted a book about the writing life. There is so much confusion about what makes a writing life possible. My book would be about what drives Margaret Atwood, about the doubts and confusions and triumphs on the way. It would put her in her time, the generation she was part of that helped to change the shape of Canadian writing. It would, I hoped, show that the mind and the imagination are central to the real pleasure of living, something almost lost on our literal-minded age in which stories about individuals seem to be told only at the level of lifestyles and bedroom gossip.

Still, I had a deeper motive. I wanted to write a third book to complete the narratives of two I had already written. Those had been real biographies. They were both about women writers. Though I hadnt expected it, they turned out to be stories about frustration, indeed agony, and, finally, about silence. The subject of my first biography, Elizabeth Smart, had written a masterpiece at the age of twenty-seven and then had fallen silent for thirty years. She claimed it was a problem of self-confidence. She always felt there was a shadowy hand on her shoulder, which she called the maestro of the masculine. This phantom told her she could never be good enough. The second writer, Gwendolyn MacEwen, had died tragically, convinced, at least for long moments, that art was not worth the price of loneliness. My books had celebrated them as remarkable writers, but secretly I felt a kind of guilt. Had I not, inadvertently, perpetuated the stereotype of the tragic female artist? Surely, I felt, there are other narratives. I wanted a third version. I felt compelled to write about a woman who had managed to take control of her artistry and her life.

When I explained to Margaret Atwood what I wanted to do, she initially misunderstood my intention. Im not dead, she said. When I described my theory of not-biography, she was only a little mollified. What seemed to bother her most was the idea that I might turn her into a role model; being a role model was never what she intended. Or that I might create an artificial order out of the myriad details of her life simply by the act of turning it into a narrative. She had already had years of people inventing someone called Margaret Atwood that had little to do with the woman alone in her room writing a book. Would I not just be perpetuating that?

Why would I presume to write a book about Margaret Atwood? Because, privately, I am fascinated by the mystery of artistic confidence. Where does the strength come from to believe in yourself as a writer? Is it merely personal? Why do many talented people never take the gamble and set out on the costly journey to become artists? Why are others, like Elizabeth Smart, derailed? Does one need cultural support?

When I think of Margaret Atwood, I am haunted by an anecdote:

The year is 1948 or 1949. A little girl sits in a movie theatre. Seeing a film is a rare treat. This time, the occasion is someones birthday. The film they are all watching is The Red Shoes, about a young woman called Victoria Page who becomes a world-famous ballerina. Victoria is beautiful, dressed like a princess in diamond tiara and gossamer tutu, dancing her way through elegant ballrooms and exotic European cities. The little girl is entranced and wants to be like that, but she begins to sink despondently into her seat. Victorias life is turning into a tragedy. The maestro is angry with her, her young husband leaves her. In the end, she commits suicide by jumping in front of a train. The little girl understands the message and is devastated: if you are a girl, you cannot be an artist and a wife. If you try to be both, you will end up jumping in front of a train.

Margaret Atwood was the young girl in that movie theatre. She was born into an era when girls were still slapped down for creative ambition, and yet she went on to become a remarkable writer. How did that happen?

When Margaret Atwood tells the story of being devastated as a young girl watching The Red Shoes, the question that fascinates me is: although she was upset by it, why was she not derailed? If this was the vision she was offered, why and how did she escape? Many young girls born in 1939 still took that message into their bones. How did this young girl, in pre-feminist days, evolve the instinctive capacity to believe, unequivocally, in herself?