In Other Worlds - Margaret Eleanor Atwood [31]
Our generation did do some writing in school, but it was in the form of essays, or else grammar and composition. We were not encouraged to write fiction and poetry, although we did read a lot of these. Should we be overtaken by the Muse, we could always publish the results in the school yearbook, if we had no shame.
After taking a couple of false turns—luckily, only in my head—I elected to go to university after all. (I had, briefly and madly, decided I would support myself by writing True Romance stories. This seemed easy enough, as they were all basically some variation of Wuthering Heights, in which the girl wrongly falls for the guy with the motorcycle instead of the one with the steady job at the shoe store. But I found I couldn’t do this: as with any kind of writing, you somehow have to believe in it yourself or it isn’t convincing.)
Then I had a short period of thinking I might become a journalist. But a second cousin who was in fact a journalist—he’d been dredged up by my parents in order to discourage me about the newspaper life and herd me in the direction of higher education—told me that women journalists only ever wrote the ladies’ pages and the obituaries, and my—by then—snobby and bohemian self cringed in horror.
Off to university I duly went; but after four years of Honours English, the question of what to do next once more became a pressing one. By this time I was if anything even more bohemian, and was already a coffee-house reader of my still rather terrible poetry, so I thought I should go to London, or possibly to Paris, and live in a cockroach-infested garret, and write masterpieces while gnawing crusts of bread and, if I was really up to it, drinking absinthe. But I was again headed off by my benevolent elders: I was urged to apply for a scholarship to Harvard, where—I was assured—I would probably be able to get more writing done than I would while shivering in the garret and would anyway come out with a job ticket, and therefore be able to write my deathless masterpieces during the long, leisurely summer vacations known to be enjoyed by college professors.
So I decided to postpone the absinthe-drinking, and I did get the scholarship, and I soon found myself in the land of my ancestors, which—in part—is Puritan New England. There, beginning in 1961, I studied Victorian Literature—ask me anything about the Freudian implications of Edward Lear’s poem “The Pobble That Has No Toes” and you will receive a long and pedantic answer. This was a time when Victorian literature was just beginning to recover from the disdain heaped upon it by the modernist likes of Lytton Strachey and T. S. Eliot; when the Pre-Raphaelite paintings that were the vogue in the late 1800s were stacked in the back rooms of the Fogg Museum, having not yet achieved their present-day apotheosis as picture postcards; and when Oscar Wilde’s pronouncement on Dickens—“One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing”—was the general literary opinion. The serious, indeed the orthodox thing to study was the metaphysical poets, like John Donne, or the contemporaries of Shakespeare, like Webster and Marlowe. But I have always had a less than orthodox side.
In addition to the Victorians, I took courses in American Literature and Civilization because I was told it was my “gap”—one I needed to fill in order to write the required comprehensive exams. We hadn’t heard much about Cotton Mather or John Winthrop or “The Day of Doom” by Michael Wigglesworth up in Canada, worse luck. But that gap was soon filled: ask me anything about the Salem Witch Trials and the rules of spectral evidence, and you will