The writer has returned to poetry with a collection, Dearly, dedicated to her late partner. By Bryan Appleyard.
Graeme Gibson, Margaret Atwood's partner for 46 years, died in London in September last year. He was 85. They were in the UK together, where she was promoting The Testaments, her follow-up to The Handmaid's Tale.
"It was a shocker," she says, "but we knew something like that was coming, we just didn't know when. He had vascular dementia and typically you die of a haemorrhagic stroke, which is what happened. But, being the gent that he was, he waited until after we'd launched the book."
Now she is publishing another book, a collection of poems, Dearly, dedicated to Graeme "in absentia". Several are about him, his death and his dementia. I had assumed they had been written after he died. I was wrong.
"They were all written before Graeme died. He was pre-mourned." Pre-mourned, I say, that's beautiful. "There is a word in Inuit, which means roughly missing something that hasn't happened yet. One word! Isn't that great?"
They were both ready for this. Graeme was diagnosed in 2012. "So he had a pretty slow diminuendo up until 2019. Anyway, he had a great time up to that moment." He had specified that he would not be "hooked up to a machine" and kept alive unnecessarily.
"Graeme had figured everything out — I had sworn and promised that I would not do that. But we looked at the brain scan, and there would not have been a point in any case. So he waited until the kids got over, and he was still with us, in the land of being conscious at that time, and after that he faded away at University College Hospital — they were terrific."
Somebody once said: "Every woman writer should be married to Graeme Gibson." Atwood had those words printed on a T-shirt and gave it to him. They were very devoted. In the title poem of her new book she writes:
It's an old word, fading now.
Dearly did I wish.
Dearly did I long for.
I loved him dearly.
Atwood, one of the most celebrated, decorated and admired novelists in the world, started out as a poet. There were five collections — one of them self-made and bound — before her first novel, The Edible Woman, in 1969. She held back from writing fiction because she was a Canadian.
"It was quite hard to get novels published in Canada in the 60s. It was thought there wasn't a large enough reading audience for Canadian novels. We were still in the age of 'real literature comes from somewhere else'. People would say to me, 'If you want to write you'd better leave the country.'" That is exactly what she planned to do.
"You're not supposed to laugh. I thought of doing what any respectable person brought up on existentialism in the late 50s would do, which was going to Paris — living in a garret, working as a waitress, drinking absinthe, smoking Gitanes, getting tuberculosis, writing masterpieces and dying young. Wouldn't that be your plan?"
I laugh and, luckily, so does she. We are laughing a lot, more than I did when I interviewed Bill Bailey or Eddie Izzard. This is a relief. Some have found her distant and severe. But here she is — 81 in a couple of weeks, lively, smooth-skinned, high cheekboned, slender, recently widowed and laughing.
With Graeme, she did go abroad to write — not to Paris, but to Blakeney in Norfolk, three miles from where I am sitting as we talk. The war at that time was still in evidence. Road signs were absent and the couple were mystified by the number of villages that seemed to be called Unbridged Ford.
They went to East Berlin, where she started The Handmaid's Tale, in which America has become the oppressive theocracy of Gilead. In Blakeney she saw the war's aftermath; mines were still emerging from the beaches. In Berlin and on travels round eastern Europe — easy for somebody with a Canadian passport — she saw the paranoia and misery of life under Soviet communism.
That glimpse of totalitarianism fed into the novel, and the collapse of Soviet rule showed her the speed with which systems crumble. That inspired The Testaments. But Trump and his dictator friends also played their part.
"I noticed how things were starting to turn around and we're getting these dictatorships again. We've been through a lot of them in the 20th century. The biggies we know about, but we tend to forget Argentina and Chile and Cambodia. But then we thought we were okay, Cold War over, we'll just go shopping for ever and ever. I think 9/11 was the big visible tipping point. And that of course gave everybody an excuse for a dictatorship because, when people are frightened and angry, they will say, we've got to have somebody in charge of this. So I thought it was time to go back to Gilead and see how things were getting along."
The Handmaid's Tale made her not only a famous writer but also a public figure. The oppressed class of women in the book bore a clear feminist message. Opinions were expected of her. But she was, and remains, too meticulous to give easy answers.
"Look up kinds of feminism and you'll find 75 of them. So when people ask me about feminism, I ask them which type and they never know."
Instead, she explains by naming the organisations she supports. Equality Now tries to change discriminatory laws around the world. AfterMeToo came out of the Canadian film industry as a pressure group against sexual violence. She launches into a history of discrimination, lynch mobs and so on, but then she seems to bore herself. "Anyway, blah-blah-blah blah-blah-blah…"
On the subject of trans rights she is very precise indeed. After our conversation she emails me a video attacking J.K. Rowling's view of the issue. Rowling defends the ultimate biological reality of sexual differences as a feminist cause: "If sex isn't real, the lived reality of women globally is erased." Atwood also emails a Scientific American article stating the opposite case: "Why the new science of sex and gender matters for everyone."
"The most bothersome thing about me," she explains, "is that I'm a strict agnostic. By which I mean there's a difference between belief and fact. And you should not confuse the two. You can believe all you like that trans people aren't people but it happens not to be a fact. It is not true that there are only two [gender] boxes. So the two questions to ask about anything are: is it true? And is it fair? So if it's not true that there are only two gender boxes and that gender is fixed and immutable, is it fair to treat trans people as if they're not who they say they are?"
The other big fact issue is the environment. She is very sensitive about this. Her father was a forest entomologist, and as a child she lived in the backwoods of Quebec. She did not receive any formal schooling until she was 12. This gave her a sense of survival; her childhood fears were forest fires, lightning storms and bears. A kind of fairy tale, I suggest.
"Not really a fairy tale. If it were a fairy tale there would be princes and witches and other stuff like that. I think it was more something about no electricity, no running water — never throw out any water because it might come in handy. That kind of thing. Plus it was right after the Depression and during the war. Material goods were not abundant. But you didn't need them. And I think that's been very useful. I know how little I could actually survive on if I had to do it."
Now there are more forest fires than ever. Her fears come out in the poem Aflame: "The world's burning up. It always did … Only now it's burning faster."
And then there's Trump. We were talking a few days before the election and, like everybody else, she was jumpy. I say I'm sure Biden will win.
"Don't hex it!" she cries. "Biden will win unless there's something so corrupt you can barely imagine it."
Fighting in the streets? Civil war? She puts her faith in the US military.
"Let us remind ourselves that the military in the United States does not vow allegiance to a person. It's not a king, it's not the President. It's the constitution. And when last polled, when last peeked at, which I believe was in about August or so, the rank and file in the military were preferring Biden. And the military brass were not onside with Trump."
And while Trump didn't win, had she expected to see Americans flooding across the border? That is what happens in The Handmaid's Tale — people flee to Canada to escape the oppression of Gilead.
"It's happened before in history," she says and launches into a pithy historical summary of this border — the "underground railroad" taking slaves out of the US; the 200,000 Americans who fled conscription during the Vietnam years; prohibition, when Al Capone and his mobsters found ever more ingenious ways of importing Canadian whiskey via the Detroit River. These migrations continue.
"People have, in the last couple of years, been walking — walking! — through the woods to get across the Canadian border."
And so, winding our way through the laughing woodland of our conversation, we make it to, guess what, Covid. There's a human-created pandemic in her MaddAddam series of novels.
"It was a different kind of plague. Contrary to the conspiracy theories we're having now, Covid is not a humanly created thing. It's a humanly facilitated thing. But in the book they have the capability to do such a thing due to gene splicing, which every high school kid will soon be doing in their garage, I expect.
"With Covid I'm counting on two things. Number one, a vaccine. An easily deployable vaccine that enough people will do. And also the insta-test. So the insta-test, which we're getting pretty close to, would be like — you know how you go to a theatre and they scan your ticket — it would be that instant."
But she's okay. She's a writer, so she is used to being alone, talking to imaginary people. And old age is nothing, an easily conquered problem; as she writes in Dearly:
I make my way along the sidewalk
mindfully, because of my wrecked knees
about which I give less of a s***
than you may imagine
since there are other things, more important —
wait for it, you'll see —
Dearly, by Margaret Atwood (Penguin Random House, $34) is out on November 17.
© The Times of London