by Anna Porter
I used to go to Margaret’s cottage, the “shack” she called it, near Peterborough on the Otonabee River, to explain what Jack had really meant with his most recent letter to her. I don’t remember what the letters said, but they would have been typical Jack notes about something she had objected to where he thought she had been unreasonable. I still remember the small cottage, piles of paper in organized stacks, and the old typewriter she had to abandon to talk with me. The land—not exactly a lawn—slanted down to the water. There was a wooden bench and table, a dock, and a small rowboat that may not have been hers.
I didn’t know her well then, but I knew Hagar, Rachel, Stacey, and now Morag. She seemed much like them: strong, brave, and already almost a friend. She was, then in her mid-forties, a strong, broad-hipped woman with short, greying hair; a pale, wide, open face with high cheekbones and dark, almond-shaped eyes; black-framed glasses; no makeup, a slight smile. She wore loose, shapeless, comfortable dresses, often beige with some pattern. She smoked so much the ashtrays were always full.
She would make tea and offer cookies. Her hands shook noticeably and her forefinger was tobacco-stained, as was mine, from too many Rothmans. Though I had managed to reduce my smoking while I was pregnant, I was now back to about a pack a day.I
She was interested in how I was doing and whether marriage agreed with my temperament. She had been married for a number of years and had two children, but marriage hadn’t agreed with her. She had wanted to devote herself to writing. On the other hand, had she not married, she would not have been in Africa and would not, then, have been able to write the books she had written there. She felt her African experience had been vital to her as a writer. She said she loved having kids, something I once told her daughter Jocelyn, who gazed at me in disbelief. It is hard to be the child of a serious writer who is often distracted and unavailable when you feel you need her.
Though she tried, Margaret said, to spend time with her children when they came home from school, she found it difficult to stop in the middle of a passage or chapter that was finally coming together. She told me, “Writing for me is torture but I have to do it. And once I start, I don’t slow down.”
When she left her husband and moved to Elm Cottage in Buckinghamshire, north of London, The Stone Angel, she said, had been her most precious possession.
Late in the day, she would open a bottle of whisky or wine. We often talked about books and authors we had been reading. She loved Graham Greene, Sinclair Ross, W. O. Mitchell, Joyce Cary, Al Purdy’s poems and Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe, whose books I had not read until she told me about them. She talked about her time in Pakistan, where she had loved the people.
It was Margaret who first told me the story of the brain surgeon who is seated next to a novelist at a dinner party and says, “You’re a novelist? Strange, when I retire I plan to write a novel.” And the novelist replies, “What a coincidence! When I retire, I plan to take up brain surgery.” I heard different versions of this later, often attributed to Margaret Atwood, but the one I remember best is Margaret Laurence’s and how she laughed even before she finished telling it.
Though they fought and argued, Margaret adored Jack. She was always ready to forgive him. She hated author tours, radio and newspaper interviews, the whole wretched chore Jack had insisted she had to do to make people pick up one of her books. She loathed the limelight, but he had persuaded her to “make an ass of myself” in public. She had no desire to become a household name. Though she was willing to teach students who wanted to be writers, she was so shy she suffered stomach pains, shaking hands, and sweaty palms every time she had to face a class. As she kept telling me, she was “not a performer.”
When The Diviners was published in 1974, M&S’s publicity department organized a divining session, complete with two water diviners, on the grounds of the Ontario Science Centre. Margaret was to be the centrepiece of the event, but she chose, instead, to spend her time hiding behind the bushes and hoping that members of the press would either not find her or not recognize her if they did. I had a mickey of Scotch in my purse to keep her spirits up.
The Diviners won the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, it had long and respectful reviews in Canada, the United States, the UK, and several other countries where it had been translated, but it aroused the ire of fanatics who found it “reeked of sordidness” and tried to have it banned in schools. One religious leader launched a letter-writing campaign. The Huron County School Board managed briefly to have the book banned in its schools.
The newly minted Writers’ Union of Canada, the Canadian Library Association, the Canadian Booksellers Association, and the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation all formed policies to combat censorship. Margaret herself, though she dreaded such occasions, defended her book by reading and speaking to packed halls. She had a strong moral sense. She couldn’t understand how anyone could take her book for an immoral screed, let alone blasphemous and pornographic.
Jack’s approach was to try to make light of the proposed book banning and suggest that the publicity could help sell more books. Though the ban was lifted, it’s astonishing that there are still some school boards who do not list The Diviners on their recommended lists for libraries.
Later, when she was the main speaker at the Harbourfront Author series (started by Greg Gatenby, a graduate of the M&S slush piles), she was so terrified about being on stage—even after several glasses of wine I persuaded her to drink—that she asked my then six-year-old daughter Catherine to stand with her. She even encouraged Catherine to keep her balloon flying through the reading, hoping it would distract the audience from looking at her.
Jack had said he needed her presence on the M&S board after the Ontario government’s 1970 bailout. Margaret thought that the whole thing was a waste and that Jack and I had choreographed each meeting before the board members arrived. She had strenuously objected to M&S’s publishing Roloff Beny’s books about Iran because of the brutality of the Shah’s regime.
A couple of years later Jack cajoled her into attending the 1978 celebration of Canadian literature in Calgary. The pretext was Malcolm Ross’s retirement from the editorship of the New Canadian Library, a big literary event to celebrate Canadian writers, the series, and Ross personally. The 1978 Calgary Conference on the Canadian Novel was to select the one hundred “great works of Canadian fiction,” of which at least ninety were in our New Canadian Library series. Margaret found the whole idea repugnant. She recognized it for what it was: a thinly veiled publicity gimmick designed to sell more books. Jack was, as usual, shameless about anything that would increase sales. In the event, the one hundred “best” were selected through some kind of rigged ballot that even Ross, the supposed hero of the conference, found embarrassing.
Margaret wrote to Jack afterwards that while she enjoyed meeting other writers (Gabrielle Roy, Roger Lemelin), her opposition to anyone using the one hundred books list persisted. Jack was unrepentant. He replied (April 6, 1978) that he was delighted The Stone Angel was number one and that Gabrielle Roy’s The Tin Flute was number two of the hundred. “I don’t understand this bullshit,” Jack wrote about her opposition to the conference. “I push this thing because it is good for the country.” As far as he was concerned, what was good for M&S’s writers was good for Canada.
I don’t know how Jack talked Margaret into attending the 1982 Night of the 100 Authors, a fundraiser for the Writers’ Development Trust.II I stood with her backstage, offering solace and whisky, neither of which succeeded in calming her anxiety about making another public appearance. As far as I recall, the only M&S author who didn’t show up that night was Mordecai.
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I. I had started smoking in New Zealand, when I was trying to shock the Sacred Heart Convent nuns into expelling me. I didn’t stop smoking until after my daughter Julia was born.
II. The Trust was established in 1976 by Margaret Laurence, Margaret Atwood, Pierre Berton, Graeme Gibson, and David Young. I
t became the Writers’ Trust some years later and is still going strong as I write this.
Escaping the City
IN HINDSIGHT, I am not sure whether the CNE or Charles Templeton was responsible for our building a cottage on an island in Georgian Bay.
Both Julian and I loved our work but sometimes it became too much and 1974 was one of those years. Julian was fighting a number of major legal battles; he was still involved with the Canadian Conference of the Arts; he had agreed to be on the board of the Canadian National Exhibition, and would be appointed chairman the next year. The Ex, as it was affectionately called, is an annual affair held at Exhibition Place in Toronto. It lasts eighteen days in August and attracts more than a million visitors. It’s supposed to be all about agriculture and technology, but as far as I could tell, it was about a bunch of thrill rides including a massive roller coaster and a midway where smart operators tried to talk you into contests to win plush toys. That part of the Ex was run by Julian’s client, Jimmy Conklin, and Julian loved to hang out there talking to the carnies, trying out the rides, eating hot dogs and burgers.
I have a photograph of Julian on the chair-swing ride with three-year-old Catherine and another feeding her a huge cream puff at one of the Ex’s formal events. She loved the cream and the occasion but threw up in the men’s room afterwards.
Jimmy had a private railway car on the grounds that he used while the Ex was on. We used to repair there in the evenings for more talk about more carnival events and food offerings. Gina Godfrey, Paul Godfrey’s wife, attempted to teach me how to dress and to wear white gloves while pouring tea for the ladies—a relatively painless task usually performed by the CNE president’s wife. Paul Godfrey, who was Metro Chairman, used to tell me how well he thought of Julian and how brilliant he would be as chairman. I have a hilarious photo of Julian with Paul in a horse-drawn cart, back when Paul had longish hair and a lantern jaw.
Julian hosted the annual opening events with celebrity guests like Bob Hope and the chief of the Clan Macmillan from the Scottish Highlands. Bob Hope failed to be even mildly entertaining, but Julian made up for it by giving one of his rousing luncheon speeches, complete with imitations of George Diefenbaker and Ontario premier Leslie Frost. The Macmillan event was grand, with the bands, the bagpipes, and the men in full regalia marching to salute our guest. The one small problem was that the chief had caught his kilt in the slats of the CNE’s wooden folding chair and couldn’t stand without taking the chair with him.I
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IN 1974 I was overwhelmed by trying to manage M&S’s massive publishing program and feeling guilty about not spending more time with my daughter and almost as much guilt about not paying more attention to the books. I had hired a live-in babysitter but I found myself racing home every few hours, in case she was not the right person. I had fifteen speeding tickets in two years and it was only my good luck and my obvious desperation that saved my driver’s licence.
On one of our frequent visits to Charles Templeton’s very simple wooden cottage near Penetanguishene, I mentioned that what we needed was pretty much what he had, a cheap country getaway. Charles had just finished a book for M&S, a new biography of Jesus, using all four gospels and “rendering” them in modern English. Charles had been an evangelist with Billy Graham’s Youth for Christ movement, exhorting the masses at rallies throughout the United States, Europe, Japan, and Canada to open their hearts to the Christian faith. Though he had left most of his faith behind somewhere, Charles still believed that Jesus had been an extraordinary man.
Now he was writing what he viewed as a “potboiler,” a thriller about the kidnapping of the US president. I used to read his drafts, while Julian listened to music and Catherine played with some wooden figurines Charles had. We would sit at his dining room table with drawings of the places he had used for the setting of the novel and go over the plots and characters. He had examined streets, security response teams, and armoured cars, and had invented the scenario as if he were, personally, in charge of the kidnapping.
Charles was erudite, engaging, witty, charismatic, and self-perceptive. He had intense eyes and a tiny, thin-lipped smile that questioned his own seriousness. He had theories and stories about everything: politicians, businessmen, God, novelists, humourists, inventors. He had invented a system for transporting oil from the Far North—but there were no takers; it was too costly to produce. He invented a coil filter for cigarettes that kept tar away from the smoker. Tobacco companies didn’t see the need for it, then. I think Charles’s best invention was a teddy bear with a self-warming belly that was eventually trademarked and manufactured as TeddyWarm by Mattel. Unfortunately, even that did not become a big hit. Luckily, the potboilers made up for it. The Kidnapping of the President would be a national bestseller in 1975.
He talked of the sense of isolation that Georgian Bay gave him, with its perfect view of the lake through the big picture windows and, stretching behind the house, a large tract of land where you could still see foxes and deer. He offered to look for a place for us, close enough to him that we could come by often, but not so close that we felt hemmed in.
Julian bought a small Hunt, an energetic snub-nosed boat with an inboard motor and a tiny cabin, where we could sleep curled up but not lying flat. Baby Catherine would snooze between us when she felt like snoozing, which was not very often. We scouted for cottages for sale in Georgian Bay, but as we had put all our savings into our Moore Park house, we didn’t have enough money.
Charles came to the rescue when he purchased a piece of land he thought we would like on an island across the bay from his place. It was not expensive and he was in no hurry to be repaid. We bought an inexpensive prefab to put up on what we used to call Charles’s plot. Before the plywood walls went up, we spent nights on the pressed recycled wood platform and heated Catherine’s milk over kerosene. We bathed in the lake. It was heaven.
My mother arrived from New Zealand that year and managed to withhold her initial opinion of our island refuge. She immediately became friends with both Charles and his wife, Madeleine. Her marriage to Alfons was not working once she discovered that he had an affair, but I didn’t think she would be planning to stay with us. We had always had a complicated relationship. She was too young—only nineteen—when I was born, there was a war, a long siege, and my father had vanished. After she clambered out of the cellars of the burned-out Buda castle where the family had taken refuge during the bombardment, there was nothing to eat and nowhere to live. My mother had moved into my grandparents’ still-standing house on the Buda side of the Danube, but they couldn’t keep the house under the Communist government’s rules about what a single family was allowed to have. We moved to an apartment in Pest that everyone hated. My mother found work as a surveyor of roads and railways with the occasional bridge thrown in for variety. I stayed with my grandfather, who had lost everything but seemed to delight in telling me stories. I saw a bit of my mother when she was on vacation, but on those occasions she liked to go on dates. She was very pretty and smart. Everyone loved her company and, as usual, there was little room for me in her life. I had assumed her marriage to Alfons would keep her happy, but it didn’t.
She decided to stay in Canada. Dudley Witney helped move her belongings into an apartment a few blocks south of our home. In short order, she started work as a town planner for a company on Eglinton Avenue.
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I. By strange coincidence, the shooting party where I had decided to root for the pheasants had been at his estate near Perth, in Scotland. My erstwhile date for that day still lived on the estate.
That Great, Always Recognizable Voice
BARBARA FRUM WAS more than a national celebrity; she was a sort of national friend whom everyone recognized. Most people felt as though they knew her personally. It was that familiar, slightly husky, inquisitive, often amused voice most of us cherished. I hesitate to say she was an icon because I know she would have hated that. Once a fellow writer at a conference referr
ed to her as a “national monument” and Barbara collapsed in uncontrollable laughter. “And crumbling,” she said.
When we first met, she had just started as co-host of CBC radio’s broad-ranging current affairs show, As It Happens. We were at the house she shared with her husband, Murray, two young children, a huge collection of African art, and a dog. It was 1971. The topic of conversation was Quebec, particularly Pierre Trudeau’s invocation of the War Measures Act the year before. Shocking as the kidnapping of James Cross and the kidnapping and murder of Quebec cabinet minister Pierre Laporte had been, Trudeau’s suspension of civil liberties and mass arrests in Quebec were an unjustifiably excessive response, a far cry from his “just society” ideals.
There were about a dozen people in the room, including June Callwood, Bill (Trent) Frayne, and, as always, Murray. Both Julian and June were directors of the Civil Liberties Association. Everyone thought the government had overstepped its limits, that the people of Canada had not been consulted on such draconian actions as the summary arrest of hundreds of Quebecers. Trudeau’s facile characterization of his critics as “bleeding hearts” and his warning, “Just watch me,” added fuel to the fire of protests.
Being a lawyer, Julian questioned the legality of the mass arrests. There had been no “apprehended insurrection,” no excuse for Trudeau’s actions. Julian had been in the same history class as Barbara; they knew their Canadian history; they had known each other for twenty years or so. She often called him about upcoming interviews, seeking points of law that would be relevant to her questions.
Barbara asked the tough questions no one else asked and she reached people no one else reached. She used to joke about calling the Pope through the Vatican switchboard and asking him about the latest scandals in Rome. She interviewed Sandra Good, roommate of the woman who tried to assassinate President Ford, an FBI agent who had operated in Canada, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi fresh from his launch of the Age of Enlightenment, and Dr. Alex Comfort, the “love guru.” She covered Watergate (1972) from the beginning. She talked with PLO spokesman Shafiq al-Hout and once reached the British ambassador during a mob attack on his embassy. She remained calm while questioning the abusive Harold Ballard about the fate of his perpetually losing Toronto Maple Leafs, and in one of the show’s light segments, she questioned the Cookie Monster and the spaghetti-eating champion of the world. Famous for breaking news, the show itself frequently became the news.