Old Babes in the Wood by Margaret Atwood

Does genre matter? Not if you’re Margaret Atwood and you have all the awards and accolades in poetry, short stories, novels, essays, children’s literature, and more to your credit. In this protean collection of shorter fiction, her ninth, she includes poems, a symposium, an interview, a speech, and a letter. Old Babes in the Wood sits on a full Atwoodian shelf, virtually a library unto itself. If Atwood apologizes for her “peculiarities of style,” then the reader who wrestles with her inventiveness is well rewarded. Each story is a delight in its painstakingly effortless prose.

The first and last sections of this book, “Tig & Nell,” and “Nell & Tig,” focus autobiographically on the lives of the two characters, while the reversed order indicates not only their mutual love, but the crossover between their lives. (They are bound by chiasmus and ampersand.) The structural crossover in these symmetrical bookends highlights themes of crossing over that recur in various forms in many of the other stories. Atwood’s fearless symmetry is on display in her first story, “First Aid.” A congenial third-person narrator looks over Nell’s shoulder to set the domestic scene: “Nell came home one day just before dinnertime and found the front door open.” Nothing peculiar about that straightforward sentence, but the paragraph soon develops in ominous directions. “The car was gone” – simple monosyllables that set up the next sentence, which prepares for her Toronto, Ontario gothic address: “There was a trail of blood splotches on the steps…. There was a knife on the cutting board.” This is the first of many bloodlines scattered throughout the stories with their traces of ancestry, ageing, anatomy, death, and sanguine outcomes in the face of adversity.

“What were the possible scenarios?” Another “peculiarity” of these stories is the insistent use of question marks and interrogation: with penetrating insights, the interrogator inspects everything, weighs all the possibilities, and probes the prose, while arresting our attention. The narrator’s interior dialogue and irony are two of the strengths in this volume. Domestic drama is another: “Time passed. Suspense built.” Simple sentences stitched together (like Tig’s wound) form a fabric, for Atwood pays close attention to fabrics and the fabrication of fiction, as well as the passage of time: “That was some time ago.” Most of these stories cover time past, present, and future – their moods and modes ranging from nostalgia to laughter and tears, satire and affection. The finger accident occurred in the 1980s, but the rest of the story jumps abruptly to the present: “She switches her attention to the room the two of them are in right at this moment.” From the “Band-Aid” that would have been insufficient decades earlier, we are now with Tig and Nell at a first aid course given by a sturdy Newfoundlander, Mr. Foote, who is “an all-in-one package. In fact, he is a paramedic, but that does not come out until later in the day.”

Atwood is understandably aware of ageing: others in the course are decades younger than Tig and Nell, who are preparing for giving talks on a nature-tour cruise ship where most of the passengers will not be young, but “truly ancient.” If Mr. Foote is “deadpan,” he has met his match in Atwood, the satirist: a feminist Swift, she anatomizes from finger to foot, mouth-to-mouth, and Tig’s knees where the humour is gentler. According to Mr. Foote, “In first aid, timing is everything.” Timing is everything in Atwood’s humour, themes, and prose. Nell recalls all the life-threatening experiences in their lives: the time the metal chimney set fire, the time Tig set off fire alarms in a thirty-storey hotel by smoking a cigar, and the time he brought wood he’d been cutting with his chainsaw, blood pouring down his face. These incidents are remembered with giggles and grins, Atwood filling the pages, as Tig fills up his wood-box. Blood flows and wood forms recurrently in Old Babes in the Wood.

Nostalgic narration summarizes all of these events: “Revisiting all of this – because revisiting sets in, after a time, after many times – Nell is now wondering.” Nell tallies and questions the meaning of “outcome”: “Better to march along through the golden autumn woods.” Autumnal and springlike, seasoned Nell visits Canadian pastorals – in and out of the woods. Old babe and omniscient narrator know that “Obliviousness had served them well” – a punchline and postscript to “First Aid.” Time heals; catharsis comes after the first aid course.

“Two Scorched Men” turns slightly darker. Tig and Nell rent a house in the south of France where they meet John and François, two men who have been scorched by war. John is their landlord, François his friend; for both of them, “Laughter on the one hand, rages on the other,” and ambidextrous Atwood balances both moods. “Here is the clue: they’d both been in the war…. They’re both dead now. A thing that happens increasingly: people die.” Nell takes over as first-person narrator, and her deadpan delivery sets the record straight, without morbidity or sentimentality. Narrating Nell counts backwards, relates their lives, and sets the scene in a Provençal village. John has his rages, François delights in puns. Recalling events amid deaths, Nell is close to tears, but she is able to mix the lachrymose with laughter: “this is a sad ending. Since I can … let me dial time backwards so we can spend a happier moment together.” Not for her the knell, but an eternal spring of fiction to soften reality.

“Morte de Smudgie” continues this blending of grief and mirth, the domestic and heroic, in its account of the death of Nell’s and Tig’s cat, Smudgie. Smudgie’s obituary is written through Tennyson’s “Morte d’Arthur,” attesting to Atwood’s abiding interest in the Victorians. “Grieving takes strange forms”: the opening sentence of this story applies to others in the entire collection where Atwood confronts grief in strange forms to arrive at some kind of catharsis after Tig’s death. Rewriting Tennyson may be frivolous and the results not felicitous, but Nell’s tears drop on the keyboard, the way Victorians “dropped like flies.” Between tears and Tennyson, Nell smudges the page with bittersweet watermarks that also include Browning’s “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium’,” for the cat is “more of a sorcerer, more of a diviner …. clairvoyant.”

This Tennyson rewrite takes place twenty-five years earlier. Nell snaps into the moment: “Now here she is, in the present, revolving many memories.” This ageing process is part of “countdown days,” and she realizes that in writing about Smudgie she is really writing about Tig. Tennyson’s tears are “Sugary woo-woo trash,” Nell’s are saline.

The trauma of “Two Scorched Men” reappears in “A Dusty Lunch,” in the guise of Tig’s ancestors with the main focus on his father: “The Jolly Old Brigadier isn’t very jolly.” J.O.B. for short and for some Job-like suffering, Tig’s Brig is “only half there,” owing to post-traumatic stress disorder after serving in World War II. The other half, in other words, is left behind on the other side of the Atlantic. One half flips pancakes at the cottage, while the other half flips out in domestic Gothic: “It was like being married to a psychopathic murderer who’s using you for window dressing while keeping a dozen severed heads in the freezer.” From that frozen deadpan, Nell brakes to question “When was this?” And answers that it must have been five years after the war – “the blank time.” Mid-century trauma when “they’d want you to be happy,” but that is an “astounding lie.” Nell uncovers that lie and so many others: “But that had been comforting in a minor way: a Band-Aid stuck onto a cut throat.” From first aid to Band-Aid, and from severed head to cut throat, Atwood applies the necessary corrective, a therapeutic blend of life and literature.

After everyone’s deaths, Nell discovers among the Brig’s papers a curious letter from Martha Gellhorn, the famous war correspondent. The period letter is written in “telegraphese”: “It’s very modernist, this kind of writing, Nell thinks. The terse short-story writers.” Hemingwayesque, and Nell feels an electric current as she stumbles over the typescript: “a manual typewriter of course em dash most likely a Remington.” Nell also finds several of Brig’s poems and concludes: “Or I’m trying to hear something. Yes?” She questions, even as she conjures up the past under the accumulation of dust; this, a form of consolation. Victorian, modernist, and postmodernist, Atwood pegs all the periods.

“Widows” picks up the epistolary thread as Nell composes a letter to her friend Stevie. Where “A Dusty Lunch” addresses the modernists, “Widows” returns to the Victorians and Restoration comedy, Atwood’s ventriloquism covering a variety of historical periods, as well as different voices from the highbrow to the vernacular: “What did ‘twenty-three skidoo’ mean?” Etymologist and entomologist, biographer of Tig and biologist of babes in the woods, Atwood folds time in assorted envelopes and sundry containers. “Wooden Box” is another of these containers that hold emotions. In her domestic setting Nell “shambles” around – one of her modes of walking up and down stairs, in and out of rooms. “There are portals in space-time, opening and closing like little frog mouths” – the simile a reminder of the recurrent presence of these creatures, and a reminder that there is no toadying up for Atwood. She looks for a copy of Maigret Sets a Trap, the post-Tig trap she finds herself in at a cottage in a wood. Domestic and rustic rhythms pattern her secluded location. “Nell must dig down through these layers, excavate them” – Pompeii in Ontario. Her mythological quest is “a journey of the soul and its continued existence in the afterlife.” She traps her metaphors: toothpaste hard as wood, a mug with a painting of Gainsborough’s The Wood Gatherers, Maigret’s “ogre” pipe, a wood stove, and an oblong, handmade wooden box that Tig had made in wood shop. Although no casket is mentioned, it is present throughout these poignant stories.

Tig’s presence in absence provides the necessary emotional corrective and balance for domestic “doodads” and pre-Victorian higher meaning: “It is morbid, says Tig silently. But it’s kind of funny too.” Morbid and mordant coexist, for Tig is an unseen trickster with an ironic wink at sentiment. Freudian slips and puns assist with these quests, questions, and questionings. Nell runs, walks, reverses time, observes cultures and optical illusions, darns wool, and crafts fabrics and wood. When Nell asks Tig why he left the wooden box behind, he replies: “Why are you crying? … It’s just a box. Thank you. We had a good long run. You’ll be fine.” Reduced to memory and monosyllables, Nell ends the story, as Atwood’s ampersand immortalizes their relationship. Between first aid and last word, she explores multiple messages. The volume concludes with a question: “What does one ever do with these cryptic messages from the dead?” The question remains rhetorical, but reading palms, tea leaves, and words provides one tentative answer. Atwood asks and answers the call from multiple directions: in the woodworks oxymoronic old babes transcend time and find new growth in stories.

The middle section of the book is as compelling as the more personal stories about Nell and Tig. “My Earth Mother” examines evil eyes, Tarot cards, the Black Arts, now and then, a garden gnome, disguises, eccentricities, witchcraft, and the arbitrariness of endings: “And so I come to the end. But it’s not the end, since ends are arbitrary. I’ll close with one more scene.” Like Alice Munro whose blurb appears on this book’s cover jacket, Atwood upends the short story genre. In “The Dead Interview” Margaret Atwood carries on a dialogue with George Orwell in a clever, sardonic, and prophetic fashion. Similarly, “Impatient Griselda” displays Atwood’s wit and charm.

In “Bad Teeth” Csilla reminds Lynne about the latter’s affair with Newman Small who possesses bad teeth, as well as a name that diminishes him further and contrasts with old babes. Csilla invents the affair, which Lynne denies. Atwood rewinds her feminist timepiece through the mouths of these two women: “Clock up enough years …. You’re off the hook for almost everything.” On the one hand, allusive, oracular Atwood; on the other, a ventriloquist of the vernacular: skedaddle and hightailed. In the midst of her fable and twisting narrative path, and the right buzz words, “Csilla overlooks this reversion to childhood slang; possibly she doesn’t recognize the vernacular.” Csilla invents preposterous narratives, twisting time and truth. She is Scylla who smashes to pieces, as well as Psylla, the sap-sucking insect. The reader goes into the woods and is never quite out of the woods with a mythologist and entomologist.

“Death by Clamshell” presents a speech by Hypatia of Alexandria, which blends philosophy and feminism. “Freeforall” visits the future. Instead of Kafka turning a person into an insect in “The Metamorphosis,” Atwood inserts a snail into a human being in “Metempsychosis: Or, the Journey of the Soul.” The leap from snail to soul is invented and fabricated: “So goes the story. But I’m here to tell you that very little about this fantasy is true.” Atwood’s fables question suffering and the terms of existence. In “Airborne: A Symposium” Myrna and Chrissy turn their attention to feminism. Chrissy’s book, Airborne: Women Aloft, is supposed to be a “cross-disciplinary feminist analysis,” but Myrna thinks otherwise: “Pseudo-piffle, Myrna had glossed. She considered herself more rigorous.” The publisher rejects Chrissy’s cover design: “Cover images need to be crisp.” The cover design for Atwood’s crisp and rigorous Old Babes in the Wood features a bird near the bottom. The bird has a tiny white eye. From another perspective, the brown bird could itself be an eye within a larger white cat’s face. This cat’s eye has two tears instead of feet dropping down. With an ironic wink and wistful twinkle, Atwood’s tears are comic and elegiac. From their nests, wistful and whimsical birds and babes migrate through Dante’s dark wood to cross a planet in the midst of a climate crisis.

MARGARET ATWOOD, whose work has been published in more than forty-five countries, is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry, critical essays, and graphic novels. In 2019, she was made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour for services to literature. She lives in Toronto.

Publisher ‏ : ‎ McClelland & Stewart (March 7 2023)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 272 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0771003722
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0771003721

Michael Greenstein

Poetry Editor

Michael Greenstein is a retired professor of English at the Université de Sherbrooke. He is the author of Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature and has published widely on Victorian, Canadian, and American-Jewish literature.