The Life of Margaret Laurence

by James King

  PART ONE

  PEGGY

  “That house in Manawaka is the one which, more than any other, I carry with me.”

  A Bird in the House

  1

  BLOOD CHILD

  (1926–1930)

  THE LITTLE GIRL’S first memory was of the kitchen of her maternal grandparents’ house. Cupboards loomed over her four-year-old head as she struggled to lug her tricycle up the back steps leading off the kitchen. An aunt helped her negotiate the trike along the hall at the landing. The youngster’s goal was to pay a surprise visit to her mother, who was resting in a bedroom. The little girl wheeled her birthday present to her mother’s side and told her how delighted she was with it. For Margaret Laurence, that incident in childhood’s past remained forever bathed in a luminous present: “My mother, lying in the grey-painted double bed, smiled at me. Her face is white and her dark hair is spread out across the white pillowcase. She touches my face, my hair.”

  Verna, Margaret’s mother, was the sixth of seven surviving children —Stuart, Ruby, John (Jack), Rod, Margaret (Marg), Verna and Velma (Vem)—born to John and Jane Simpson (an eighth died in infancy). John was a legendary figure in Neepawa, Manitoba, where he spent most of his life. The epitome of the self-made man, he was shrewd, enterprising and uncompromising. He was usually respected, sometimes admired and almost always disliked. He was not a person to bow to the bad opinion of others, however. His stern demeanour, accentuated by his steely blue eyes, thrived in opposition, due in large part to his sense of having succeeded in life against insuperable odds.

  Sometime in the 1870s, John, who was born in 1853 in Milton, Ontario, where he trained as a cabinet-maker, decided he might better prosper if he settled in Portage la Prairie, Manitoba, where a cousin sold men’s clothing. The young man, virtually destitute, made his way by Red River steamer to Winnipeg but walked the rest of the fifty miles to Portage la Prairie. There, he worked with his cousin and met Jane Bailey. They married in 1886, and two children, Stuart and Ruby were born there. The small family lived in cramped quarters above the clothing store; after four years they decided to move to Neepawa.

  The charter of the town had been granted only seven years before the arrival of the Simpsons in 1890. Six years before that, in July 1877, a group of thirty settlers from Listowel, Ontario, reached Palestine (now Gladstone), Manitoba. About half of the group decided to remain there, but the fourteen members of the Graham family continued on to what is now the town of Neepawa. The first homestead was on a high, well-drained plateau overlooking a valley where two creeks join to form the Whitemud River. Although this locale is relatively flat, the first settlers found the surrounding landscape pleasantly hilly. By 1883, the town was fully settled: it had seven grain elevators and was on the CP-CN line to Edmonton.

  John Simpson. (illustration credit 1.1)

  By the 1920s, the Neepawa John Simpson had helped to make had progressed from a mud-spattered prairie village of lumber buildings to a substantial town of tree-lined streets with magnificent municipal buildings, such as the sandy-coloured brick Beautiful Plains County Court Building—a monument of High Victorian architecture, the two-storey Empire Block, the Opera House and the Land Titles Office. All of these buildings on Hamilton Street, Neepawa’s main street, gave the town an imposing grandeur. In the thirties, the Opera House was renamed the Roxy, and its exterior was stuccoed to give it an Art Decoish appearance. Intersecting Hamilton Street was Mountain Avenue with more office buildings and shops; this street was also home to some magnificent houses as well as St. James Anglican Church and Neepawa United Church.

  Mountain Avenue, Neepawa. 1906. (illustration credit 1.2)

  Mountain Avenue divided the town into north and south and into rival commercial groups, with the possession of the rail line giving a decided edge to the north side. The houses on the north side, the domain of the business and professional classes, were certainly more spacious and bountiful. Surrounding the town were a variety of farms, some bestowing great wealth on their owners, others allowing their inhabitants only a subsistence existence.

  From the start, Margaret was aware of the distinction between the “right” (north) and “wrong” (south) sides of Neepawa: “I … walk past the quiet dark brick houses, too big for their remaining occupants, built by somebody’s grandfathers who did well long ago out of a brickworks.… The timber houses age fast, and even the brick looks worn down after fifty years of blizzard winters and blistering summers.… This is known as the good part of town. Not like the other side of the tracks, where the shacks are and where the weeds are let grow knee-high and not dutifully mown, and where a few bootleggers drive new Chevrolets on the strength of home-made red biddy.”

  The cemetery above the town and its stone angel are Margaret’s most celebrated re-creations of her birthplace, as in this eerily beautiful sentence: “In summer the cemetery was rich and thick as syrup with the funeral-parlour perfume of the planted poppies.” For Margaret Laurence, her childhood world was lushly beautiful, but it was infused with the menacing presence of death.

  “The Brick House,” 312 First Avenue, Neepawa. Now the Margaret Laurence Home. (illustration credit 1.3)

  In Neepawa, John Simpson built and ran both a furniture store and a hardware store. His skills as a carpenter led this enterprising man to establish a third business: casket-maker and, as a consequence, funeral director. When, about ten years later in 1903, his family had increased in size and his various enterprises had flourished, the family moved from a flat above one of the stores to the north side of town: 312 First Avenue, a solid two-and-a-half-storey buff brick house incorporating many of the features of Italian villa architecture. This was the “Big House” or the “Brick House”: “plain as the winter turnips in its root cellar … part dwelling place and part massive monument.” Whether writing about her grandfather in fictional guise or in autobiography, Margaret depicts him as a wounded bully, imprisoned within his own narcissistic vulnerability; and the house as the epitome of its owner: large, imposing, forbidding.

  She was deeply fond of her grandmother Jane, whose Empire Loyalist family had abandoned the United States for Amherstburg, Ontario. Later, a branch of the Baileys moved to Portage la Prairie, where Jane met and married John Simpson. If her grandfather was all sharp edges, Jane was for her granddaughter a gentle, unassuming woman with a distinctly artistic sensibility, which she bestowed on the interior of the Big House: “The works of her art were all around us in the Simpson house, and remained so long after she died.”

  In Margaret’s judgment, John was the harsh, acerbic patriarch who imposed his will upon his wife and family. Another granddaughter, Catherine Simpson Milne (fourteen years older than Margaret), flatly contradicted her cousin’s memories. To her, John had been a courtly, indulgent, only occasionally petulant grandparent. Her grandmother, she also observed, was a far shrewder, more manipulative person than Margaret ever allowed. Jane Simpson, she recalled, developed a number of subterfuges (albeit silent ones) to get around her husband’s grumpy attempts to control her (according to one account, he curbed any tendency for her to purchase on impulse by not allowing her to carry any money on her person when she went shopping alone).

  Margaret’s uncle Stuart, the eldest child, felt obliged to go into business with his father, a decision which caused him great unhappiness, especially when he had to take on the duties of undertaker, a profession he loathed. Catherine Milne, his daughter, recalled that he was an especially sensitive man, very different in temperament from “wicked” Uncle Jack who served in both world wars, moved to Hollywood where he was a horseman in Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1934), and married, according to family lore, three or four times. Another uncle, Rod, the third son, was not rebellious: he served in the Great War, became a pharmacist and eventually settled in Oregon.

  Olive Pennie, Verna’s closest friend, insisted there were two generations of daughters in the Simpson family. Yet, Margaret Laurence in her autobiography never emphasized th
e disparity in age between Ruby (b. 1888) and Margaret (usually called Marg; b. 1890) on the one hand and, on the other, Verna (b. 1896) and Velma (known as Vem; b. 1902). According to Olive, the older two had the sober, haughty temperament of their father, whereas Verna and Vem were fun-loving and playful, more like their mother in personality.

  In fact, Ruby and Marg treated Verna and Vem more like daughters than sisters. Of John Simpson’s seven children, only his two older daughters were prepared to battle him openly. In fact, as very young women, Ruby and Marg had determined to become professionals, and they expected—and received—their father’s (sometimes limited) support in their endeavours. Even a patriarch as unremitting as John Simpson knew when he had met his match. Margaret Laurence, who was subjected to Ruby’s acid tongue on many occasions, truthfully characterized her Aunt Ruby as bossy and interfering, very much her father’s daughter. Once, offended by the sexuality of some of her niece’s characters, Ruby, as her father no doubt would have, asked her niece: “Why do you write such stuff?”

  Once, Verna was forced by Ruby and Marg, who had invited some friends from Winnipeg to lunch, to dress as a maid and to serve the meal to the most exacting standards of etiquette. There was a strong sisterly alliance between Verna and Vem, as Margaret Laurence was well aware: “I have a picture of Verna taken with her younger sister. She must be about ten and Vem was about four. Vem is standing on an upholstered armchair, clad in a frilly ruffled dress. Verna stands beside her, one arm protectively around the youngster.” In photographs, Verna sometimes looks a bit dour, but in this instance the camera is lying. Everyone who knew Verna was entranced by her sprightliness, especially her sparkling laugh.

  John Simpson understood the practicalities of life, and he had no real objection to Ruby leaving home in order to train as a nurse. Although Marg was an outstanding student in high school, her father saw no reason for her to take a general arts course at university. A bit more compliant and silent than Ruby, she settled for teacher training and then took a post in Calgary. Her independent spirit can be seen in her decision, at the age of thirty, to go to Bermuda. This turn of events was later described with gleeful and malicious pleasure by Margaret Laurence: “That year away must have been a great adventure, and an unusual step for a young woman from a small Canadian town. Her father undoubtedly ranted and stormed over her departure. I can just hear my grandmother saying in the placating way that I remember so well, ‘Now, John, now John,’ her hands fluttering in distress.”

  Earlier, in 1914–5, eighteen-year-old Verna enrolled in the Domestic Science course at Manitoba Agricultural College, south of Winnipeg. She could only attend for a year because her father complained he “did not feel like paying good money so that his daughter could learn to cook.” The following year, in opposition to their father’s harsh behaviour, Ruby and Marg insisted on moving their mother, together with Verna and Vem, to Winnipeg so that Verna could pursue her real interest—the piano. There, she took lessons, but Verna, whose health was delicate (she had missed Grade 8 with scarlet fever), had appendicitis at the end of the school year, at which point Jane and her two youngest daughters returned to Neepawa.

  Verna lived at home and taught piano. In 1922, she became engaged to a lawyer, Robert Wemyss, who was a year and a half older than she and was an almost compulsively friendly man, the complete opposite of Verna’s father. Upon their engagement they composed a letter together to his sister. It began: “Verna is sitting on my knee so please excuse the scrawl. I should have told you ‘Nous sommes engagé,’ if you can guess what that means.” Verna is teasingly demure: “You’ve got a nut of a brother, haven’t you? But nevertheless am forced to admit am most awfully keen on him. Am not really sitting where he said I was.” According to Bob, she was telling a white lie: “She is! We are both broke but happy. For the love of pete, don’t show this letter to the neighbours.” Margaret Laurence took great joy in this letter, as it showed the gleeful love that existed between her parents.

  Bob’s grandfather had been a tea merchant in Edinburgh in the 1870s. According to family lore, when his partner cheated him, he headed for Canada, settling in Raeburn, Manitoba, with his wife and all their children except one. The eldest, John, stayed on at Glasgow Academy and was supposed to serve as an apprentice lawyer with his uncle, Sir John Wemyss, in India. When Sir John died unexpectedly, John abandoned Scotland for Canada in 1881, articled in Winnipeg, and then settled in Neepawa, where he became the town’s first lawyer (he incorporated the town in 1883). Although he died two weeks after she was born, Margaret was deeply proud of her paternal grandfather: “He was the only person in Neepawa at that time, and possibly at any other time, who could read the Greek tragedies and comedies in the original ancient Greek.” John’s wife, Margaret, the daughter of a physician, was the great-granddaughter of Dr. David Harrison who came to Manitoba from Ontario by Red River cart. He entered politics, became Manitoba’s minister of agriculture in 1886 and even premier for a few weeks in 1887–8 when his predecessor resigned. Grandmother Wemyss was renowned for her icy, acerbic behaviour.

  Margaret Laurence was deeply proud of her Scots ancestry, to which she attributed her love of life and the accompanying Celtic gloom. However, her sense of being Scots was not a central part of her early consciousness; it was something she came deeply into touch with in early middle age: “No one could ever tell me whether my family had been Lowlanders or Highlanders because no one in the prairie town where I grew up seemed very certain exactly where that important dividing line came on the map of Scotland. I decided, therefore, that my people had come from the Highlands. In fact, they had not, but Highlanders seemed more interesting and more noble to me in every way … I do not remember at what age the disenchantment set in, but gradually I began to perceive that I was no more Scots than I was Siamese. Whatever of the Old Country had filtered down to me could roughly be described as Mock Scots. The Scotland I had envisaged as a child had been a fantasy, appealing because it seemed so much more bold and high-hearted than the prairie town where I really lived.”

  Late in life, Margaret was often said to have the appearance or look of a native person. Although she would have been proud to claim such ancestry, there is no evidence to link her to such a genealogy. In 1980 or thereabouts, Margaret encountered a drunken couple on the bus from Toronto to Lakefield. She cast the encounter in the form of a mini-play which she sent to Adele Wiseman.

  Lady: (scrutinizing me closely; I have high cheekbones and slightly slanted eyes inherited from my long ago Pictish and Celtic ancestors.) I know what you are! You are one of those damn people from Vietnam or Taiwan! That’s what you are. Boat people! One of them. [Margaret explains that she is from Manitoba.]

  Lady: Manitoba! Jeez! Well, now I know what you are. I shoulda’ known. Yer a half-breed, one of those goddamn half-breeds. Admit it! You are!

  Me: Madam, if I were a Métis, I would certainly not deny it. I would be proud.

  In a letter to Adele Wiseman of May 17, 1981, Margaret made this comment when speaking of a white person who had costumed herself as a native: “But I am not an Indian and have this strong feeling that it is a kind of insult to them to be a make-believe one—I have known a number of whites who have tried to become make-believe Indians or Africans. Trying to understand and respect is one thing; trying to change one’s own background is quite another.”

  Bob’s family’s professional background was markedly different from Verna’s. The Wemysses were members of the Senior Bridge Club whereas Simpsons played at the Junior Bridge Club, an important class distinction in a small town such as Neepawa. (The imposing Wemyss house was on the north side of Neepawa, one street away from the Simpson residence.) Bob evidently became a lawyer by default, not choice; he was destined from birth to follow in his father’s footsteps. Other, crucial decisions were apparently made for him. His father had no faith in prairie schooling for his eldest son and enrolled him in St. Andrew’s College, Toronto. However, there is some evidence he was sent to b
oarding school because he was a rebel; his daughter nurtured the fond wish that this piece of gossip had a basis in fact: “One family legend, perhaps apocryphal, had it that Bob was something of a hellion and was sent to St. Andrew’s because the local teachers couldn’t handle him. I always hoped myself that was the real reason.” After St. Andrew’s, Bob became a lawyer, but the Great War intervened while he was articling.

  Wemyss house, 483 Second Avenue, Neepawa. (illustration credit 1.4)

  An exceptionally sensitive person, Bob felt a great deal of shame about a childhood accident when he fired a BB gun which deprived his brother Jack, three years younger, of the sight of one eye. He remained deeply protective of his younger brother, with whom he enlisted in the Canadian Field Artillery in Winnipeg in 1916. In the surviving photograph from that time the brothers, aged twenty-one and eighteen, look like enterprising, slightly bashful young men about to go off on a big adventure. For Margaret Laurence, another photograph of the two, who stayed together during their time in the army, taken two years later in France, told a completely different story: “The only traces of a uniform are the clumsy puttees on their legs and their tin hats.… Around their necks they each carry a small battered bag containing a gas-mask. But it is in their faces and their eyes that the greatest contrast with the other picture is evident. Their expressions are wary, bitter.… Back home in Canada they will regain some of the appearances of youth, but these will be appearances only.” After the war, Bob completed articling with his father, who then took him in as a partner.

  “The Little House,” 265 Vivian Street, Neepawa. (illustration credit 1.5)