Feature
The shadow of wealth
by Guy Somerset
When novelist Margaret Atwood first proposed writing a book about debt, her publisher wasn’t keen. But little did they know that the release of __Payback__ would coincide with the global financial crisis.
Numbered, numbered, weighed, divided. These words from the Bible’s Book of Daniel were the original writing on the wall, foretelling the end of the Babylonian empire: God had numbered the days of King Belshazzar; he had weighed him “in the balance” and found him wanting; Belshazzar’s kingdom was to be divided.
It would have made perfect graffiti for the world headquarters of Lehman Brothers at 745 Seventh Ave, New York, in September – a way for employees to vent their anger as they filed out with their cardboard boxes of belongings after the fourth-largest American investment bank went belly up.
As novelist and poet Margaret Atwood prefaces the Daniel quote in Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth: “Every debt comes with a date on which payment is due.”
But Atwood was not to know quite how soon that date would come for Lehman and all the other banks falling into, or teetering on the brink of, collapse in the wake of sub-prime mortgages and the credit crisis.
Which makes all the more prescient her recollections of growing up in the 1940s and being bemused by the interest paid on her bank account: “Where … had these mysterious sums come from? Surely from the same imaginary place that spawned the nickels left by the Tooth Fairy in exchange for your shucked-off teeth: some realm of pious invention that couldn’t be located anywhere exactly, but that we all had to pretend to believe in or the tooth-for-a-nickel gambit would no longer work … I knew from fairy tales such as Peter Pan that if you ceased to believe in fairies they would drop dead: if I stopped believing in banks, would they too expire?”
It seems they would. In 2008, when asked to clap their hands to show they believe in banks – as Pan asked the children to do to save Tinkerbell – people didn’t do so, says Atwood, on the phone from Toronto.
She started planning her cultural history of debt – both a book and a series of Massey Lectures that is being broadcast this month on Canadian radio – three years ago. “I didn’t anticipate that the publication of it would coincide with the biggest financial meltdown we have seen since 1929.”
And then the book and lectures were brought forward from 2009 after her publisher said she couldn’t release her already written next novel in the American fall of 2008, because the US would be in the midst of a presidential election like no other, which would take up “all the available thinking space and media space”.
So Atwood had to write Payback “in a condensed period of time rather than the leisurely way I had anticipated and I started in February and finished on June 1”.
And, of course, where a novel might have got lost amid the election, a book about debt could not have been more timely or attention-grabbing.
“It has received a lot of attention. It’s not true, however, that I arranged this financial meltdown,” says Atwood, with the same dry humour that pervades her book.
“What did do it was the violation of the fundamental rule of fairness on which the very notion of borrowing and lending has to be made: you can’t sell snake oil forever without expecting blowback.”
When Atwood first proposed Payback, neither her publisher nor the lecture people were keen. “They apparently said, ‘Can’t we talk her out of it?’ They just thought it was too bizarre. A novelist and poet writing about debt. But in fact a lot of novelists and poets write about debt, but usually they call what they write novels and poems.”
Her publisher and the lecture people must be grateful for Payback now.
“Gratitude is hardly the word. Ecstasy is more like the word.”
Novelists writing about debt were, in fact, Atwood’s starting point: the 19th-century greats of which she is such an admirer. “I read a lot of Victorian novels and it occurred to me that so many of them were actually driven by money: who’s got it, who’s had it, for how long, who’s made it, who’s lost it, who is a gentlewoman, who is a jumped-up nouveau-riche. It’s all through the Victorian novel.”
Take Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. “Heathcliff … loves Cathy passionately and hates his rival, Linton, but the weapon with which he is able to act out his love and his hate is money, and the screw he twists is debt: he becomes the owner of the estate called Wuthering Heights by putting its owner in debt to him. And so it goes, through novel after novel. The best 19th-century revenge is not seeing your enemy’s red blood all over the floor, but seeing the red ink all over his balance sheet.”
Meanwhile, William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair demonstrates how bad debts bleed outward – or downward. “The trickle-down theory of economics has it that it’s good for rich people to get even richer because some of their wealth will trickle down, through their no doubt lavish spending, upon those who stand below them on the economic ladder. Notice that the metaphor is not of a gushing waterfall, but of a leaking tap: even the most optimistic endorsers of this concept do not picture very much real flow, as their language reveals.
Page 1 
