Under the Thumb
(Page 5 of 7)
September/October 1996
Margaret Atwood, This Magazine (www.THISmag.org)
I'll skip over the embarrassingly bad poems I published in the high school yearbook (had I no shame? Well, actually, no), mentioning only briefly the word of encouragement I received from my wonderful grade 12 English teacher, Miss Bessie Billings: 'I can't understand a word of this, dear, so it must be good.' I will not go into the dismay of my parents, who worried--with good reason--over how I would support myself. I will pass over my flirtation with journalism as a way of making a living, an idea I dropped when I discovered that in the fifties, unlike now, female journalists always ended up writing the obituaries and the ladies' page, and nothing but.
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But how was I to make a living? There was not then a roaring market in poetry. I thought of running away and being a waitress, which I later tried but got very tired and thin; there's nothing like clearing away other people's mushed-up dinners to make you lose your appetite. Finally, I went into English literature at university, having decided in a cynical manner that I could always teach to support my writing habit. Once I got past the Anglo-Saxon it was fun, although I did suffer a simulated cardiac arrest the first time I encountered T.S. Eliot and realized that not all poems rhymed anymore. 'I don't understand a word of this,' I thought, 'so it must be good.'
After a year or two of keeping my head down and trying to pass myself off as a normal person, I made contact with the five other people at my university who were interested in writing, and through them, and some of my teachers, I discovered that there was a whole subterranean wonderland of Canadian writing that was going on just out of general earshot and sight. It was not large: In 1960, you were doing well to sell 200 copies of a book of poems by a Canadian, and a thousand novels was a best-seller; there were only five literary magazines, which ran on the lifeblood of their editors. But while the literary scene wasn't big, it was very integrated. Once in--that is, once published in a magazine--it was as if you'd been given a Masonic handshake or a key to the Underground Railroad. All of a sudden you were part of a conspiracy. People writing about Canadian poetry at that time spoke a lot about the necessity of creating a Canadian literature. There was a good deal of excitement, and the feeling that you were in on the ground floor, so to speak.
So poetry was a vital form, and it quickly acquired a public dimension. Above ground, the bourgeoisie reigned supreme, in their two-piece suits and ties and camel-hair coats and pearl earrings (not all of this worn by the same sex). But at night, the bohemian world came alive, in various nooks and crannies of Toronto, sporting black turtlenecks, drinking coffee at little tables with red-checked tablecloths and candles stuck in Chianti bottles, in coffeehouses--well, in the one coffeehouse in town--listening to jazz and folk singing, reading their poems out loud as if they'd never heard it was stupid, and putting swear words into them. For a 20-year-old, this was intoxicating stuff.
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