How Good A Deal Is That?

In 'Writing While Worried', an old Granta piece I found, Fanny Britt reflects on being a writer staving off worry and existential dread. "Just as it can spur me on, worry is adept at stifling and silencing", she says.

She has a wonderful paragraph about Margaret Atwood, copied below. I have the same question that Britt does about Atwood: "How can one so presciently see and dissect an entire society as she does, and get on with the business of living?"

'Is it you who sees it that way, or is it just there?' asks Margaret Atwood imperiously in a 1984 documentary, Once in August. The film-maker Michael Rubbo, seems convinced that his revered subject must draw on a deep inner well of darkness to write of such toxic personal relationships and a world bereft of hope.

Let's set aside the tired premise that a woman who writes can only ever reveal a reflection of herself, while men hold up a mirror to humanity. Left alone with the camera, Atwood sees what's going on: "He's trying to find out why some of my work is sombre . . . he's trying for some simple explanation of that in me, or in my life." Look elsewhere, she tells us. Her books are dark because the world is a dark place. As for their author's life -- who cares?

Well, me for one. I care.

I don't need to know whether Atwood's writings reflect an inner malaise, but I yearn to understand how one can so presciently see and dissect an entire society as she does, and get on with the business of living. Does the clairvoyance that makes Atwood and Colwin and Dickinson such vital writers beget a perpetual state of weariness and unalloyed tension? And if so, how good a deal is that?"

Later in the same piece, Britt reflects that when she revisits the documentary some 16 years later, as she's pushing 40 herself, a mother and author and repeatedly confronting her own limits, what strikes her is Atwood's agility, her talent for seeing deep into the darkness, but then slipping off to pick watercress in the garden. It seems she has that rare magic of penetrating deeply into the worst of possible worlds (Handmaid's Tale came out the year after the documentary), and then emerging so strong.

A magic we could all use more of, particularly in these last couple years of deepening cognitive dissonance.