Negotiating with the Dead: a writer on writing, by Margaret Atwood

The splinter of ice in the writer's heart

Last year in Cambridge, Margaret Atwood delivered a series of lectures about writing. She rose with exemplary grace to the Janus task of addressing the academic and the literary world together, and Negotiating with the Dead comes from those lectures. Juggling well-worn subjects which "get murky or pretentious", this is a streetwise, erudite, suggestive enquiry into problems and myths of the writer's role. Her light touch on hard thoughts, her humour and eclectic quotations, lend enchantment to an argument that has as many undulating tentacles as a well-developed sea anemone.

Atwood sets about her theme by applying myths and motifs running through all literature to the self-images of those who create it. Symbols like blood for the dead, or the artist as hollow reed played by God, melt into hard-nosed questions of advances (is your soul on the market; what's the price?), counterpointed by personal anecdotes.

Rendering down (but never oversimplifying) topics such as the artist's moral responsibility to a mosaic of lively examples, mythic associations and no-bullshit commonsense, she focuses on the writer's relationships to his or her readers, society and forerunners. The dead with whom she negotiates are as colourfully spread as the Bayeux Tapestry. Dante, Homer, Shakespeare, Alice Munro, Virgil, Borges and Emily Dickinson, plus living avatars such as Martin Amis and Adrienne Rich.

Atwood is a poet as well as Booker-winning novelist, and her organising metaphor is writing as an entry into darkness. Novelists say that beginning a novel is going into the dark; poets "travel the dark roads"; writing is a descent to the underworld realm of the dead, who have in their keeping what all living writers need: knowledge, stories.

She examines writerly obsessions with doubles (see Jekyll and Hyde), and relates them to the fact that writers have two selves, public and private. Once her books started selling, she "found people running around out there whom I didn't recognise, with my name on them". There is a moral gap between the writer's selves. Writers are carnivores. You may be kind to dogs, a generous cook, but with that splinter of ice in your heart, you ruthlessly exploit your nearest and dearest. Maybe, says Atwood, artists' eyes are cold because they have to be so clear.

Atwood illuminates these issues through ancient myth and many delightful writings, never losing sight of what these questions and emblems mean today in the rag-and-bone shop of the entertainment industry. But she nails her faith to the old-fashioned mast of inspiration. Art is discipline in the religious sense: not just craft but vigil. Whatever makes a book a work of art comes from "the realm of gift".

If you write narrative, Atwood says, you have eventually to go down into the dark, see what the dead offer, what you can wrestle back to light. According to the best authorities, like Virgil, it's easy to get there. But, Atwood warns, it is much, much harder to come back with the goods.

The reviewer is poet in residence at the BBC Proms, which start today