Margaret Atwood

Presenter0:00

Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast from BBC Radio 4. Every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book and luxury, that they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island. For rights reasons, the music's shorter than on the original broadcast, but you can find a version with longer music tracks on BBC Sounds. Listeners will also get access to episodes 28 days earlier than everyone else. I hope you enjoy listening.

Presenter0:44

My castaway this week is the writer Margaret Atwood, one of the most critically acclaimed authors in the world. She's won the book a prize twice and since 1961 has published poetry, short stories, children's books, essays, the librettita operas and of course her novels including Cat's Eye, Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin and 1985's The Handmaid's Tale, which has gained a new resonance in our politically polarized times. Placards at the Women's March in Washington bore the legend Make Margaret Atwood fiction again, though as she points out, everything that takes place in the dystopian setting of Gilead has in fact already happened in the world we live in.

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She was born just weeks after the outbreak of World War II and says that gave her an interest in totalitarian regimes and their rise and fall. She also had an early appreciation of the natural world and a critical distance on the society she was part of. Her father was an entomologist and the family lived in the Canadian woods for eight months of the year while he pursued his research. Fertile ground for a creative imagination and good practice for life as a castaway too. She says, every writer is at least two beings, the one who lives and the one who writes. Margaret Atwood, welcome to Desert Island Discs. Very pleased to be here. I should say welcome back. Second trip to the island for you, Margaret. Yes, it is. So I'm coming prepared. You know what you're in for. Let's start with that duality, Margaret, the two of you, the one who lives and the one who writes. How different are those two people?

Margaret Atwood1:58

Very

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Well, I think it's a Doctor Jacqueline Mr. Hyde arrangement. So the Mr. Hyde, that would be the writer.

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And I'm kindly Doctor Jackal.

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So that's who's here today? Yes, that's the one who lives here.

Speaker 32:30

The one he led us.

Presenter2:32

And when you are being mizhaid, does that mean you're kind of stepping into another life too? Do you leave your ordinary routines and cares behind? I think every writer does that when they're in mid-right, as it were.

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So, however, there are interruptions. You have to be able to shift back and forth pretty quickly.

Presenter2:51

Oh, especially if you're in the midst of a family. So I did have a sign on my writing door that said Do Not Disturb that nobody ever paid any attention to.

Margaret Atwood2:58

Done.

Presenter3:02

Well Margaret, you are still publishing and still working very hard. Having been asked many times over the years when you were going to write a memoir and always saying you never would, you recently gave in. I wonder how the process was for you. How was it looking back at your life and sharing it with the rest of us? Well what is a memoir? It's not an autobiography. It's not a biography.

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With footnotes, under know lots of historical research and so forth.

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A memoir is what you remember.

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And if you think yourself about what you remember, it's usually stupid things you did, stupid things other people did, you remember those even better.

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And the

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Bad things people did to you, not so much bad things you did, you tend to repress those and high points, unexpected ones.

Margaret Atwood3:48

Goes.

Margaret Atwood3:53

Mm-hmm.

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Surprises

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And um

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Near-death experiences and catastrophes, and then at my age, people dying. You remember that.

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You're sharing your music with us today, Margaret. What role does music play in your life? Are you someone that that writes listening to music or thinks about the music that your characters would enjoy? I listen to a lot of music, but not when I'm writing.

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Because if I hear music, I have to listen to it. So I I can't just have background music. Let's get started with your first disc today then, Margaret Atwood. Disc number one. What are we going to hear and why are you taking it to your desert island? Well, I tried to pick something from each decade, and there are quite a few decades by now.

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So here I am in the nineteen forties. The war is still on.

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My mother sent there weren't any kindergartens at that time, you know, or the war shortage. So she sent me to Miss Pickering's dance class in Sault Ste. Marie, north of Lake Superior. And for this dance recital we learnt two dances, one being one

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involving Dutch outfits. Dutch and Canadians were very close during the war, and their royal family spent their time in Ottawa. So we were dressed up as little Dutch girls and in pairs. We we made windmills.

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Out of our arms. We slanted our arms one way and then we switched like that.

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giving a windmill effect. So I have a picture of that. I don't have a picture of the one you're about to hear because they took one, but my top of my head is cut off. And for that we wore little sailor suit outfits with either blue or red trim. Mine had red.

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And we did a tap dance to the tune you're about to hear, and three of us stood on.

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Round cheese boxes decorated like drums and did our tap dancing out there.

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And the tune is Anchors Away. Sounds adorable, Margaret. You're not averse to a dance these days, though. I mean, you you went viral on TikTok not that long ago for dancing online when you were still in hospital. Let me say that a combination of heroin and fentanyl does gives you a little bit of an upper.

Presenter6:19

Oh yeah, I've been there, I understand. No, you don't.

Presenter6:23

Yes, it was a pacemaker being put in. That's what it was. Just to assure everyone. Yeah, but you we were dancing in recovery.

Presenter6:32

Absolutely. And why not? And why not?

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Very drolly, very wartime. Anchors away the US Navy Band. So, Margaret, let's go back to the beginning. You were born in Ottawa, Canada, 1939, the second of three children to Carl and Margaret. Now, in your memoir, you write that you owe your existence to a large green caterpillar. Tell me more about that.

Presenter7:23

Well, I did include as an appendix at the end of my memoir something that my dad wrote when he was fairly old about how he got started. And he came from very, very, very backwoods, rural, rural, rural Nova Scotia. And he describes walking to school, because they walked miles to school, and seeing a large green caterpillar. And he took it home, he made it a little cage, he fed it leaves, and it turned into a beautiful.

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moth. It was something we call a Cecropia moth, very gorgeous. And then he found another kind and it turned into a luna moth, even more beautiful, and that's what hooked him on entomology.

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So had he not

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Seen that caterpillar?

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He would have taken some other path in life never met my mother.

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And I would not.

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exist. And how did the two of them meet, your mum and dad? Well, if you've read Anne of Green Gables, you know that they in those days they enlisted teenagers to go and teach in one-room schoolhouses. And both of them did this. My mother was from a more upmarket family. Her father was a country doctor rather than a really backwoods shingle maker.

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So

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They met at something called

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The normal school in Truro, Nova Scotia. Normal school had always baffled me. Did you go there to learn to be normal?

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My father saw my mother sliding down the banister of the Truro Normal School.

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and thought to himself, That is the woman I will marry.

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That's the one. And he did. In your earliest years, so the family spent more than half of the year living in the forests of northern Quebec. Tell me more about that, that upbringing under canvas. What was it like?

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No electricity.

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No running water. Do you know what an outhouse is? Yeah, toilets. A little house in the woods with a hole underneath it. And lighting would be kerosene.

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Lamps or candles or flashlights had been invented by then, so you would call those torches.

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And no school, no television, there wasn't any anyway. Radio a bit, though it was hard to really get anything. No theater, no movies, name something else, and there wasn't any of that either. But there were lots of books, and there were always drawing and writing materials. So of course books became the

Presenter10:16

The art of choice. I'm wondering about, you know, your mum sliding down that banister and and what she made of of life in the woods. Basically, she liked riding horses, speed skating, skiing, and the outdoor life generally. Oh, so she must have loved it. She did. You would have had to go.

Margaret Atwood10:32

Oh, so she must have loved it.

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fairly far afield to find somebody willing to go up to the woods with you.

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with two small children.

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But she in fact loved it because there were no hats. You didn't have to wear hats.

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You didn't have to wear white gloves. Housework was minimal.

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And she was a good canoeist and good fisherwoman, although she had a deal with my dad. She would catch them, he could clean them. I think we'd better hear your second disc, Margaret Atwood. What's it going to be?

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We're going to move to the 50s. So here comes rock and roll. Elvis makes his big debut in 1955, but he wasn't the first. So here's an old favorite of mine called Hearts of Stone by the Charms. And we are in the age of jukeboxes. So you could go into a diner and have a jukebox at your little booth and you could put your money in and select your song that you wanted to hear.

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Arts made of stone.

Speaker 211:39

Yeah.

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Why do I

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We'll never break the law Yeah, but it

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I just wanted him. You can ask them please please please please pray

Speaker 211:56

Oh.

Speaker 311:56

Are you a lawyer?

Margaret Atwood12:03

Ah, just

Presenter12:04

The charms and hearts of stone, my guest Margaret Atwood, knowing every word, singing along there, Margaret.

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So you would have been twelve before you spent a whole year, an academic year, at school, is that right? That's correct. So so forest school then, what what was that like, learning at home in the woods? You said, you know, that that books and painting, that was everything. That's how you spent your time. Well, we got the lessons from the school and then did them.

Speaker 312:26

And your time.

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And it made me a very superficial person. In what way? Well, if you could do them really fast, then you could do whatever you liked after that.

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So whizzing through and then going outside and turning over logs to see if there was a newt. You were writing though,'cause you you wrote your first book at the age of seven. Yes, I did. It was about an ant.

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It is a lesson in structure. So the thing about ants is they don't do anything for three quarters of their life. They're an egg, nothing happens. They're a larva, nothing happens. They're a pupa, really nothing happens. And then they get legs and can move around. But you know, that's a long time to wait for any action. It's a challenging protagonist. I don't recommend it.

Margaret Atwood13:15

Yeah.

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Oh, and at the end of the novel.

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The ant does something that no ant has never been known to do. What was that? It's an altruistic act.

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They will do altruistic acts to save other ants, but not usually to save anybody else. And then I stopped writing and took to drawing. And that was a big passion for you. Stil still is something that you enjoy, I think? I s still do a lot of drawing. It's taken different forms throughout my life. I did some of my own book covers. It was cheaper. I'm still very engaged in cover choices for my books.

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And what about your reading material? You know, as a young person, what were you able to access and what did you enjoy? Absolutely everything.

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So anything in the house, and that would include scientific books and a lot of murder mysteries of the kind that had the keyhole on the spine with the eye looking out of it. They were del mysteries. And worked my way through

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The Classics I Was In Love with Sherlock Holmes Speculative Fiction George Orwell

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Whom I read at a very impressionable age. What did you read first? What was the the old?

Margaret Atwood14:36

I read

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younger than twelve and I thought it was gonna be like

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Winnie the Pooh. Wind and the willows. Yeah. It horrified me. Especially the fate of the horse. I was very upset by that.

Margaret Atwood14:51

Yeah.

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Then I read nineteen ninety four when it first came out in a cheesy paperback, and I've been interested in George Orwell ever since, and I just got my picture taken

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beside his statue outside this building.

Margaret Atwood15:06

Yeah.

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I'm thinking about you reading Orwell as a young girl. You said, you know, that.

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Because of the time that you were born, you were fascinated by totalitarian regimes, you know, this idea of the kind of rise and fall. And obviously, we see that in 1984, you know, it ends with a postscript that tells us that this time of Big Brother and Newspeak and all that is over, it's past. What was that backdrop like, and how aware were you of it, having been born at the beginning of the war and kind of growing up throughout it? Oh, I think very aware.

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What

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I mean we lived through Hitler.

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and Mussolini and and the war in the Pacific and um then it was a Cold War and we were very aware of of that.

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So yes, how do these things start? How fast does it take to put them into place?

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Depends how many people you're willing to kill on the night of the long knives.

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How they crumble from within.

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How long it takes them to crumble from within.

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and why people gravitate towards them. So all of great interest to me. Remember, I'm of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights generation that comes along at the end of the forties. But I am an an observer of trends and patterns.

Margaret Atwood16:20

Hmm.

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Margaret, let's go to the music. It's your third choice today. Tell us a little bit about this piece. We're going to do the Barker roll from Offenbach's Tales of Hoffman.

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And this is from the home economics opera that I wrote in high school.

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And performed in. It was about fabrics, wasn't it? It was about fabrics, yes. The teacher, who had no sense of humor, I have to say.

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made a terrible mistake. She she allowed democracy

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into the home economics classroom.

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Always a risk. She said that we could vote on a special project.

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And she thought that we should vote for making stuffed animals.

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I did not wish to make stuffed animals, so I subverted part of the class and got them to vote on on a home economics opera, and she had to permit it because it was a vote.

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And she said, all right, as long as it really was about home economics. So it was about three fabrics called Orlon, Nylon, and Dacron. And their father, Old King Coal, because they were all coal tar derivatives. And the love interest was Sir William Woolley, who turns up he was Wool and had a terrible problem. He shrank from washing. So the dilemma was resolved because a blend was created. And this song.

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It was about laundry day, and it was set to Hoffman's Barkerool. I sang it in an elevator to the director of the Canadian opera company, Richard Bradshaw, who said I had ruined Hoffman's Barkeroll for him forever. Would you be averse to conjure up the spectacle of the opera? Well.

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Fabrics need a swim in the suds It makes them feel just like new Plink, plink, plink

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Whites are whiter, colours are brighter, take on a brilliant hue, Plink, plink, blink.

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When you wash them do, Not slosh them do, Not squeeze or wrink, Plink, blink, blink.

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When you rinse, get all the soap out in the laundry sink.

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Now we're going to hear the real one your first libretto, marvellous.

Margaret Atwood19:13

And a sand is a dream that love my song.

Margaret Atwood19:24

I'll give the soul my sleep.

Presenter20:00

Part of the barcarolle from Offenbach's Tales of Hoffman, sung by Joan Sutherland, Who Get Touring, and Placido Domingo, with the Orchestra de la Suisse Romand, conducted by Richard Bonning. So, Margaret, you started writing poetry first. You're published in the School magazine and then other publications, and actually created your first book when you were just 21. That was published and went on to win the E.J. Pratt Medal, which must have been so exciting. How committed were you to writing back then? Did it feel like a calling? Yes, it was a calling, but I did not expect to be able to support myself doing it. I would have to think of something else. And in terms of the vocational aspect of it, you know, what were you writing for? What was the aim? Did you want to change the world? Did you want to just change how people thought? No, I wanted to write deathless masterpieces.

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We are in the age of

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aesthetic excellence. So the fight between moral purposes for art, which we'd had quite a lot of in the thirties, and aesthetic purposes for art. Let's think about Oscar Wilde and indeed the great Gatsby to a certain extent. So deathless masterpieces versus let's improve the world and that has been a fight for a very long time.

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So I was on the Deathless Masterpieces side at that point. That's a high bar to set yourself at, you know, just out of your teens, isn't it?

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I was still in my teens.

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So from the get-go it was Deathless Masterpieces. Yes, but I I was willing to write rubbish in order to support myself and my first idea I got this magazine called Writers' Markets and my first idea was that I was going to write true romances because they paid the most. And I did give it a go, but I I wasn't any good at it. You have to have a feel for it and I thought they were too silly.

Margaret Atwood21:33

Yeah, but

Presenter21:56

So you went to university, you studied English, philosophy and French, and then began your graduate studies at Harvard. What was life like there in the sixties? Well, I was too old to be a hippie. Our generation were more of the existentialist persuasion, and we were also fifties hard work and overachievers. So hippies seemed to us just really too laid back. But we watched them with interest, and we also watched middle-aged men put on love beads and grow their hair and really become quite cringe, as apparently we say now. Yeah, so I lived through all of that, but you didn't do that kind of behaviour at Harvard Graduate School. That would not have been viewed.

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So was it still quite buttoned up then? Oh, very buttoned. Yes, very tweedy. I read, Margaret, that female students weren't allowed into the Lamont Library while you were there. What did you make of that at the time? The Lamont Library had all the modern poetry in it. So you couldn't access that? If I knew the names of the books I could. I could get them out, but I couldn't go in there because I might be distracting to hard studying male students. What did you make of that at the time? Well, everybody just, you know, that's how things were, but

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Uh we could all go into Widener Library, so instead of going into Lamotte and doing modern poetry, we went into W Widener and did witchcraft and sorcery.

Presenter23:26

Really much more useful, don't you think? That came in handy for the Handmaid's Tale, I know, later. We repurposed some of the buildings on the table. We had such fun doing that.

Margaret Atwood23:28

Uh

Margaret Atwood23:33

Do I can't see?

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We bad.

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Why did I set it at Harvard? Because when I was there Harvard was the epitome of liberal democracy and free world thinking and

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You know, experimental thinking and all of these things, but it began in the seventeenth century as a theological seminary.

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In the New England colonies, which were not democracies. So, on the theory that every country has a sort of infrastructure of having to do with its origins and earlier development, there was always this seventeenth century theocracy lurking underneath the surface, and now we see it.

Presenter24:22

making an attempt at achieving total power in the United States. It has had a few outbursts previously. There was something called the Great Awakening in the nineteenth century. But you get some very well, as you know, Christianity split off into many different sects, and you can get some pretty interesting subsets of Christianity, depending where you are in the

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in the world.

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Margaret, we'll return to the Handmaid's Tale later. For now, I want to hear your next disc if you wouldn't mind. Your fourth choice today. Now we're in the early 60s.

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And in the book there's a picture of me sitting in something called the Bohemian Embassy, which was a coffeehouse where artistic performances took place. And I'm listening to a young woman sitting on a stool playing the guitar and singing. And what she was singing would have been a folk song, probably about a girl being murdered, because a lot of them were. And her name was Sylvia Fricker, and she became part of a pretty famous later duo called Ian and Sylvia. And the one I have chosen is one of their most famous songs called Four Strong Winds, which was written by them.

Margaret Atwood25:48

Uh

Presenter25:48

Uh

Margaret Atwood25:48

Four strong winds that blow lonely

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Heaven seas that run high

Margaret Atwood25:57

Uh

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All those things.

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That don't change.

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Come with me.

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But our good times are all gone.

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And I'm bound for moving on.

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Hallelujah.

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Ian and Sylvia and four strong winds.

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Margaret Atwood, after college, one of your first jobs was as a market researcher. And I think some of those experiences that you had in that role inspired your first novel, The Edible Woman. Tell me about that. It was my first novel to be published. Oh, yes. There was one that you you're glad wasn't published, I think.

Margaret Atwood26:39

Yeah.

Presenter26:42

That's right. So I was writing that one that didn't get published while I was working at the Market Research Company.

Presenter26:49

And my job was on some days not very demanding, so I'd just take my novel to the office and run it through the typewriter. I looked very busy.

Presenter27:02

Okay, so so there was the first pancake, shall we say, and then the edible woman. Then the edible woman, and I certainly used a lot of my market research ex experiences in it, some of which were

Presenter27:14

Quite strange.

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Well, let's see now. I think my favorite questionnaire, because it was my job to read the questionnaires to make sure they could be uh the questions could be asked and answered quite simply.

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and then to test them out.

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And I think my favorite was the thirty five page laxative questionnaire. Thirty five pages. Exactly. That's detailed. I said, very detailed. I said, nobody's gonna because you went around and knocked on doors and

Margaret Atwood27:36

Exactly.

Presenter27:44

and asked people these questions, and because they were so bored, they were quite willing to answer them in those days. I said, people are going to kick you out after the first five pages.

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And they said, yes, but those who stay for the full 35 pages, that's our target market.

Presenter28:02

Gold dust. It doesn't sound like the most likely crucible for one of the first great modern feminist novels to come out of. When you were writing The Edible Woman, what did you think you had on your hands? Did you think it would connect with people in the way that it did? Um, no.

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Because I never thought any of those things.

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But I thought I was writing it before second wave feminism hit. I was writing it in the in 1964 5.

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And

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The publisher then lost the manuscript for a couple of years, so it was actually published in nineteen sixty nine just in time for

Presenter28:41

Second wave feminism to hit.

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So I got two kinds of reviews.

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One, by people who hadn't heard of second-wave feminism and thought I was an immature person who would grow up later.

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And the second kind who had heard of it and thought,

Margaret Atwood28:54

Yeah.

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This is part of the new wave.

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So yes, that was interesting. And was that gratifying to you? Did you feel part of that wave?

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I was a little too old.

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Maybe, and possibly a little too Canadian?

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But I watched it with great interest. I didn't invent it.

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I was not part of that crucible of thinkers in New York and Boston that really pushed it to the surface.

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Do you think that outsider perspective has been useful to you though over the years? You know, it's the writer's natural perspective, isn't it, to be on the outside looking in?

Presenter29:33

Well, as a Canadian, you're always on the outside looking in when it comes to the United States. It it is a one-way mirror.

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They are not on the other side looking at you much at all.

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Because they don't have to be. When did you realize you could make a living as a writer, Margaret? How long was it? 1970.

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2.

Presenter29:54

Um I started in nineteen fifty six, so lots of different jobs. Now when we s say make a living, we don't mean rolling in the flesh pots and gold the May dressing gowns. That would all come later.

Margaret Atwood29:59

Uh

Margaret Atwood30:10

That would all come late.

Presenter30:13

You're a very naughty person. Um no, I'm a I'm a scroogey type of person. Parents from the Depression. Pinching of pennies.

Presenter30:24

How to get the sugar out of the very bottom of the sugar sack like that.

Margaret Atwood30:28

Just like that.

Presenter30:30

Margaret, it's time for some more music. Your fifth choice today. What are we going to hear next? Alright, by this time I'm living on a farm.

Presenter30:38

By this time I'm living with Graham Gibson. He was a big record listener. And one of the people that we listened to quite a lot was Stan Rogers, who was a singer-songwriter with Nova Scotia roots. And we were very fond of him. Unfortunately, he died in a plane crash, but not before he put out a number of different records and was very popular at the time.

Presenter31:08

So this one is called Barrett's Privateers, and it's taking place during the American Revolution, when Britain and America were at war. And you could get this thing called a letter of mark, which gave you the right to be a privateer and go out and raid

Presenter31:27

American ships and give some of the money to the Crown and keep the rest. So it's a very sad song in which the privateering enterprise fails. And since I had an ancestor who was a privateer, I thought I would put this in.

Margaret Atwood31:42

Oh, the year was seventeen seventy eight. How I wish

Presenter31:45

I was in Sherbrooke now. A letter of mark came from the King to the scummiest vessel I've ever seen. God damn them all. I was told we'd cruise the seas for American gold. We'd fire no guns, shed no tears. But I'm a broken man on a Halifax pier. The last of Barrett's private ears. Stan Rogers, Barrett's Privateers, a favourite of your late life partner, Graham Margaret Atwood. So, Margaret, the late 70s and early 80s were a very productive time for you. Your work was doing really well. And in 1984, you spent time in West Berlin writing The Handmaid's Tale, which would become one of the seminal works of modern literature. We've already heard that Orwell was a huge influence on you from your youngest years, and the Orwellian significance of the year must have been part of the picture. But I wonder about where you were writing, you know, the atmosphere of the city and how that fed into the book.

Presenter32:45

So it's 1984.

Presenter32:47

It is West Berlin still encircled by the wall, which was not going to come down until nineteen eighty nine, ninety. And um

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It was a very strange place to be living.

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Every Sunday the East Germans would fly some supersonic jets to make booms just to remind us that they were there.

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We could go across into East.

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Berlin, which we did fairly easily. The Germans had a lot more trouble doing that. And East Berlin was very, very

Margaret Atwood33:21

Mm.

Presenter33:26

Buttoned down. Mm. So people are afraid to talk to you.

Presenter33:30

Taklosabakia, which we also went to, was a little lizard they would talk to you, but only in a field,'cause everything else was bugged.

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and Poland our third stop.

Presenter33:40

What's pretty loosey goosey?

Presenter33:43

How did we know?

Presenter33:44

Taxi drivers would drive up and they would say dollars and we would say zlotties and they would drive off. So they were not interested in Polish money. So I thought it's going to crumble here first, which it did. But the atmosphere

Margaret Atwood34:04

Mm.

Presenter34:04

The atmosphere of people being afraid.

Presenter34:08

people being afraid to talk to you and as it turns out we now know to one another because every fiftieth person or possibly more in East Germany was a spy.

Margaret Atwood34:15

Mm-hmm.

Presenter34:24

The Shtasi had a very, very uh

Presenter34:27

widespread network. You have said in the past that you'd put off writing The Handmaid's Tale because you had the initial idea, but it was too weird even for me. Yes, I thought it was quite bonkers. But remember that at that time

Presenter34:41

America was the beacon of light. It was the democratic ideal. It was the land of freedom, radio free America.

Presenter34:51

And people in Europe just didn't believe that it could ever go like that.

Margaret Atwood34:57

Hmm.

Presenter34:57

People in England had already had their religious war and their Ol Oliver Cromwell dictatorship, and whatever other thing they might do, such as Brexit, it wasn't going to be that.

Presenter35:14

So they thought Jolly Tale.

Presenter35:16

Canadians in their

Presenter35:19

anxious way, because Canadians are always anxious, and you would be too if you had Russia to the north of you and the US to the south, said could it happen here?

Presenter35:30

And in the States it was split. On the one hand, Margaret, don't be silly. That would never happen here. On the other hand, how long have we got? So I've always been somebody who has never believed it can't happen here. It can happen anywhere, given the circumstances.

Presenter35:51

I wonder about the moment when you first had the the manuscript in your hand. You know, your first reader was your friend, the novelist Valerie Martin. What did she make of it?

Margaret Atwood35:59

What did you

Presenter36:02

Oh, yes, she's a writer from New Orleans.

Presenter36:05

And we were both in Alabama, teaching in Tuscaloosa in one of these guest teaching things that lasted for a couple of months. And um we had daughters of the same age, so we we knew each other. And I said, Would you mind reading this and and telling me if it's too

Presenter36:25

Mad.

Presenter36:27

And she read it and I said, I think I'm going to get in a lot of trouble. And she said, I think you're going to make a lot of money.

Presenter36:37

You are both right.

Presenter36:39

Make it so.

Presenter36:41

Did you have any sense of the book's longevity when you were writing it? You know, you you said this is something that could happen anywhere, and it is it's a sort of a perennial threat, I suppose. Well, it's a perennial possibility. Right. And then in twenty sixteen

Margaret Atwood36:50

Well

Presenter36:56

Everything changed again, and we are now in that period where the Handmaid's Tale has become much closer. Not the outfits. I don't think we're going to get the outfits, but the rest of it seems more and more

Presenter37:14

Plausible. And how does that feel to you? You know, when you because readers must get in touch, and young readers must get in touch all the time, they do.

Margaret Atwood37:20

Hey.

Presenter37:22

These kinds of regimes don't last, partly because they become unsustainable, and this particular one seems quite chaotic. Also, let us not count America out. It's first of all a lot more diverse than it might appear from a distance. And second, Americans are quite ornery. They do not like people telling them all to line up and do what they're told. They they really don't like that. But they don't like being bossed around.

Presenter37:55

by anybody, right or left. I know that it was important to you that everything that happens in Gilead had a real world precedent, a historical precedent. Why did that matter so much to you?

Presenter38:08

Well, I wanted to be able to point to the source.

Presenter38:13

of whatever idea they were enacting and said, don't say that I just made this up out of my twisted, weird imagination. Somebody said on Twitter Now X, how does Margaret Etwood come up with this weird shit? And I said, it's not me that comes up with this weird shit, it's the human race, which it has throughout history.

Presenter38:38

So chapter and verse it's all happened.

Presenter38:42

Margaret, I think we should have some more music. Your sixth choice today. What's next for us? My sixth choice is from the opera.

Margaret Atwood38:46

Yeah.

Presenter38:49

Of the Handmaid's Tale.

Presenter38:52

An improbable venture at the outset.

Presenter38:55

I was in Copenhagen, I was in the Hotel d'Angla Terre, and this very, very tall Danish man

Presenter39:04

came over and knelt at my feet. This was bizarre. Well, I think so he could be on the same level as me. And he said

Presenter39:14

I've been given a commission by the Royal Danish Opera Company. It's the first time in 34 years that they've given a new commission.

Presenter39:22

And I must write the handmaid's tale, and if I can't write the handmaid's tale, I don't want to write any opera at all.

Presenter39:31

So what would you do if somebody said that to you? You would think two things. This person is mad, but on the other hand, maybe he isn't mad. And what if he writes an opera and it it isn't any good? Well, then it will just disappear. And what if he writes an opera and it is good? Then that will be a good thing. So that's why I let people play in my sandbox, because you never know. And I was at the premiere.

Presenter40:03

It was in the year 2000. It started with a film role showing the Twin Towers in New York being blown up. We had to remove that later, when they actually were blown up. So I've chosen an aria from the Handmaid's Tale opera, and it's the only aria that you will ever hear in an opera, which is about the menstrual cycle.

Speaker 240:28

Could we just consider

Presenter40:34

Uh

Margaret Atwood40:34

Yeah.

Presenter40:34

Uh

Margaret Atwood40:34

Take your

Presenter40:37

Okay, fantastic.

Margaret Atwood40:40

They are less meaningless.

Presenter40:53

Uh

Margaret Atwood41:00

So twelve first

Margaret Atwood41:17

The bright steel is here.

Presenter41:21

Part of the aria to the menstrual cycle from Act One of the Handmaid's Tale Opera, composed by Paul Ruders, performed by Marianne Roholm and Hannah Fischer with the Royal Danish Orchestra, conducted by Michael Schoenvant. Margaret, you mentioned your partner Graham. The two of you were together for nearly five decades. I know that you cared for him during his final years. He was diagnosed with dementia in 2012 and passed away seven years later. And you wrote poetry about him during that time. Did doing that help you process what you were living through and experiencing? Well, I think so. And he had no intention of sticking around until he didn't know who he was. So it's funny what parts of themselves people lose during this process, but he never lost who people were. He lost something called executive function, like which button on the toaster oven do you push, things like that.

Margaret Atwood42:17

Hmm.

Presenter42:18

But he was always very aware of who everybody was. He was still wise about it. He talked everybody in the family through it, and it wasn't unexpected. He died in London. His family had a habit of dying in London. And I have to say they were terrific at the hospital. They were great. You were actually just a couple of days into the UK lag of a publicity too. I know, it was wild. Yeah, for The Testaments, a sequel to The Handmaid's Tale. You managed to carry on. I mean, how? Well, it was preferable to not.

Presenter42:52

So we did postpone things until he actually died. He he had a massive cerebral hemorrhage and then took about five days to actually die. So we had the family. We the fa the hospital let us stay in the room. He managed to be conscious until the kids got there. Who have you turned to for support, you know, once you got home and had to?

Presenter43:17

Step into the next chapter.

Margaret Atwood43:17

I went to the

Presenter43:19

First of all, I um continued on with the tour.

Presenter43:23

because it meant that I was with people the whole time.

Presenter43:26

And uh that was to me preferable to going straight home and being by myself. And I have a lot of friends.

Margaret Atwood43:32

Mm-hmm.

Presenter43:36

And those are always a help.

Presenter43:39

All right, Margaret. Let's have some more music. Your seventh choice today. Well, this takes us back to 2000 and

Presenter43:48

So 2008 was the big financial meltdown, and my publisher in the States emptied out. It was echoing corridors, and that included a lot of the publicists. So I said to my friend Phoebe the agent, unless we do this ourselves, we are not going to have a book launch.

Presenter44:12

So because her partner Orville Stober

Presenter44:16

A musician

Presenter44:18

Had got hold of the manuscript before the book was even published, he had written all the music. So we had all of this music.

Presenter44:26

And we concocted a plan whereby we would put on a musical and dramatic performance of

Presenter44:35

The first part of the book, combined with a book launch and, in some instances, some environmental fundraising.

Presenter44:43

And we did that. We did it in 23 different cities. It's called Hymns of the Gods Gardeners.

Presenter44:51

So what we are going to hear.

Presenter44:53

is and this is the festival of underground life, which is mostly um small life forms that live underground. And the song is called We Praise the Tiny Perfect Moles.

Presenter45:13

Uh

Speaker 245:13

Yeah.

Presenter45:14

We praise the tiny

Speaker 245:15

Perfect moles that garden underground The antherworm, the namatoad were well

Margaret Atwood45:24

They live their whole lives in the dark, unseen by human side. The earth is like the air to them, the

Speaker 245:35

Today is like morning.

Presenter45:38

Orville Stauber. We praise the tiny perfect moles. Margaret Atwood, you spend a lot of time thinking about how things might work out in future. I wonder if you think about future readers and what you hope they'll take from your books in, say, a hundred years' time.

Presenter45:58

These are people we do not yet know. We did do a project called the Future Library of Norway. Yes, that was in twenty fourteen, I think. Yes, we started it then.

Speaker 346:08

Here

Presenter46:10

So the artist is Katie Patterson from Scotland who dreamed up this thing and talked Oslo into doing it because they were building a new library. And the project is every year for a hundred years a new writer from somewhere in the world in any language will submit a secret manuscript.

Presenter46:33

Only two copies. You can't tell what's in it. It has to be made of words. No good just sticking your photo album in. But it can be anything made of words. So your laundry list, a letter, a novel, a story, a poem, anything at all.

Presenter46:50

And you go over to Norway.

Presenter46:53

You go into the forest that they have planted there as part of the project.

Presenter46:58

and you hand over your manuscript. It gets put in the special room in the new library in Oslo. And in twenty one fourteen the boxes will all be opened.

Presenter47:12

The manuscripts will be revealed, and enough trees will be cut down from the forest which will have grown to make the paper to print the future Library of Norway. What a poetic idea. Isn't it? And it got a lot of press because it's so hopeful. So there will be an Oslo, there will be a Norway, there will be people, there will be people who can read, there will be people who are interested in reading, the trees will grow. Are you hopeful? I'm always hopeful because I think hope is a built-in human thing. Hope is the hope that if you do work at it, you can.

Presenter47:50

Either prevent something terrible from happening or help something better to happen.

Presenter47:55

Margaret, it's almost time to cast you away. What kind of island are you imagining for yourself?

Presenter48:01

One with food on it.

Presenter48:03

I notice in your intro Music you've got a lot of seagulls. They're not indigenous to most desert islands, but we gloss over that. Yes, well let's pretend they lay eggs. This is always good if you want something to eat. So we will have some marine life around. We'll be able to do a bit of fishing. We might do some muscle collecting and clam eating. And we will build a shelter because it might get too hot and sunny. What about the isolation? How would you handle that? Being away from all the people that you know and love? That would be unpleasant, but not unprecedented. All right, Margaret Atwood, we'll let you have one more disc before we cast you away. Your final choice today. What are we going to hear?

Presenter48:50

We are going to hear the first music that I ever heard, because up in the woods there I am as a very small child on a swing.

Presenter48:59

And my father, who is very musical and very keen on Beethoven, his favorite composer, is whistling.

Presenter49:08

And what he is whistling is the shepherd's hymn from the Pastoral Symphony.

Presenter50:15

Part of the Shepherd's Hymn from Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, played by the Philharmonia Orchestra, conducted by Otto Klemperer. So, Margaret Atwood, it's time to cast you away. I'm giving you the books to take with you. You can have the Bible, the complete works of Shakespeare, and one other book of your choice. What have you gone for?

Presenter50:32

Well, I felt I should have something quite useful.

Presenter50:36

So I chose How to Survive on a Desert Island by Samantha Bell. You can also have a luxury item, Margaret. What's that going to be? Well, my luxury item is going to be my hunting knife that I was given instead of a pearl necklace when I turned 13. This is my family, you realize. And along with that goes the metal screw-top waterproof matchbox with some matches in it. Those would be luxuries on a desert island. Well, they are luxuries of a very practical variety, but there is precedent for people taking knives. And as yours has such a sentimental story behind it and has a personal resonance, I'm going to allow those. And finally, which one track of the eight that you've shared with us today would you save from the waves first if you needed to? I think I would probably pick something.

Presenter51:29

Happy to keep me awake.

Presenter51:32

So I'm going to go for Heartsome Stone by the Charms. Oh, I'm so pleased. That's just a wonderful track. Margaret Atwood, thank you very much for letting us hear your Desert Island discs. And thank you. It's been a pleasure.

Presenter51:58

Hello, it was lovely chatting to Margaret and I hope she's very happy on her island with a rather dashing, by the sounds of it, belt. There are more than 2,000 programmes in our archive that you can listen to. We've cast other Booker Prize winners away, including Bernardine Evaristo, Arendati Roy, A.S. Bayette and Howard Jacobson. You can hear their programmes if you search through BBC Sounds or on our own Desert Island Disc's website. The studio manager for today's programme was Sue Mayo. The executive production coordinator was Susie Roylance. The assistant producer was Christine Pavlovsky. The content editor was Mugabe Turia.

Speaker 352:32

And the producer was Sarah Taylor. Join me next time when my guest will be the writer Lee Child.

Speaker 253:02

Hi, I'm Katie Razzell and for BBC Radio 4 from Shadow World, this is Anatomy of a Cancellation.

Margaret Atwood53:10

I'm a symbol of a particular time and a extreme version of cancel culture.

Speaker 253:16

Poet and teacher Kate Clanchy wrote a book about her thirty year teaching career, which was initially praised. It's a wonderful book. But later, others said it was racist and deeply problematic.

Speaker 353:28

The language in this book is so dehumanizing.

Speaker 253:31

Unjustified cancellation? Long overdue reckoning? Subscribe to Shadow World Anatomy of a Cancellation on BBC Sounds.