The Life of Margaret Laurence

by James King

  One childhood friend, Phyllis Ralph, recalled happy memories of being with Peggy in the attic in the Wemyss house and, especially, in the backyard playhouse built by Bob. However, she also remembered how fraught her friend could become: “We would play in [the backyard] by the hour. I remember one day … there was a terrible thunderstorm. It was wicked. She started to scream. I can see her screaming yet. She was scared skinny. I can see her dad coming out with his coat over his head to rescue her and carry her in. Me, I walked along behind him. Peggy was very hyper.” Phyllis and some other children took her to the nearby fairgrounds: “We used to take Peggy up there because she’d scream so. Terrible! There were always bats flying around. I don’t think there were electric lights in there. It was dark. We’d tell spook stories.” This was likely the same group that gave her the nickname “Piggy” until “she smacked one of the kids across the face.” At the end of her life, Margaret Laurence, perhaps recalling such incidents of youthful insensitivity—and the fact she was perceived as “different” by her childhood playmates, said: “I really am an aberration. I was always a lonely child.”

  More than anything else, Neepawa was primarily for Peggy a place of death. In January 1935, Robert Wemyss came down with pneumonia. Shortly after the onset of his illness, Marg moved to the guest bedroom: “My father had been sick for only a few days when I asked Mum one evening if I could sleep with her. I was uneasy … She agreed. Dad was in his and Mum’s room, attended by two of our local doctors. When I woke up in the middle of the night, my mother was crying, and I knew my father was dead.” She felt helpless. She also wanted to protect her mother, but she was not sure against what. When Verna had died five years before, Peggy had felt abandoned in the face of death, and this time she responded in a similar way when her father died on January 13.

  I remember being angry at the minister who came to give his condolences and support.… All I knew when I was nine was that my dad had died, my Mum was bereft, and my brother was still just a baby, too young, really, to understand. It was difficult to return to school and be stared at by the other kids, and hard to accept my teacher’s expression of sympathy. I was desperately afraid of crying and so must have seemed merely sullen and withdrawn.… That surly, often angry mask was my only defence. I could not, would not break up. I and Mum had to carry on somehow.

  Here, although the strength of the little girl is plainly visible, her vulnerability is also apparent. She assumed an angry face to greet the world, afraid of letting others know how frightened she really was—and perhaps making herself even more subject to the cruel whims of fate.

  Peggy the child used anger creatively to keep despair at bay. As an adult, Margaret Laurence often kept such feelings in check. She was remarkably similar to her father in her kindness, generosity and warmth, but, like him, she tried to hide her fears from others. Her jovial exterior was genuine, but it concealed the tormented inner little girl who had suffered the trauma of the loss of both birth parents.

  In “A Bird in the House,” Margaret Laurence fused the worlds of fiction and autobiography in these simple, beautiful words, the final snapshot in her childhood album of loss and abandonment: “After a while the first mourning stopped, too, as everything does sooner or later, for when the limits of endurance have been reached, then people must sleep.”

  3

  HORSES OF THE NIGHT

  (1935–1939)

  We didn’t stay in the big red-brick house for long [after the death of Bob Wemyss], but we were still there when the polio epidemic happened. Perhaps I make this sound as though my childhood years were rife with medieval plague, death right, left, and centre. It wasn’t like that at all, of course. I remember a lot of very happy things.

  PEGGY’S YOUNG HEART had been scarred by cruel wounds, her early existence filled with tragedy, but, like many children in similar circumstances, she had to get on with the business of life. “Sometimes,” she realized, as she contemplated her youthful self, “your pain is so great, although possibly unacknowledged, that you have nothing to lose; you are fearless because you don’t care what anyone says or does to you.” At the age of nine, nevertheless, the volatile side of Peggy began to disappear. In part this was because Marg did not like displays of temper. She once told Peggy she had a “carrying voice,” even though, the daughter remembered, “She could summon up a pretty good carrying voice herself. Even deadlier were her quiet sermons when things became so rough that yelling wouldn’t cut any ice.”

  Another memory of this time was of the two menacing boys who lived next door. Her “burning fury” sometimes scared these two off when they attempted to invade her garden, and Marg encouraged her daughter not to act as a victim. Then, one of the boys, Gavin, came down with polio and died: “I had been afraid of those kids and managed to drive them off, but I wouldn’t have wished or imagined either of them dead. Kids like me didn’t die. But they did. They do. I had scared Gavin away and he had died.” One can imagine how Peggy felt, wondering if doing battle with Gavin had somehow led to his death.

  Peggy resented the fact that Marg made her visit the graves of her parents at the Neepawa cemetery, where the Wemyss plot, in spring, was surrounded by peonies. For the remainder of her life, she hated those flowers.

  The little girl was relieved when Marg sold the Wemyss residence and moved her two children back to the Little House, where Peggy was delighted to have her attic room restored to her. She returned her blue desk to the “corner where it had always belonged.” Still, she realized, “[t]hings could never be the same.” A doctor and his family purchased the Wemyss house and covered it with yellow stucco. This angered her, even though she hated the place. “I hadn’t actually loved that house at all.… But I vented my bewilderment and rage at fate by refusing ever to walk down that street in Neepawa again.”

  Although Peggy’s “bewilderment and rage” at the injustices she endured in her young life were driven inward, her resiliency soon surfaced, in large part because she wanted to help and comfort Marg. Sometimes, as she observed, the sleep of oblivion is a much-needed comfort.

  There were happy times, as Margaret Laurence insisted. Radio serials provided much enjoyment to Peggy and her friends. “We all had Little Orphan Annie secret codes and badges and rings and other enchanting junk.” They also had “Big Little Books” in which they inscribed their own secret codes. Of course, there were secret hiding places and buried treasures. A friend of Marg, Gertrude Johnson, the superintendent of the Neepawa hospital, made Peggy a child’s first-aid kit, fitted into a wooden cigar box: “She’d painted the box with a white cross on the top. It held real stuff from the hospital: rolls of bandages, absorbent cotton, scissors, a thermometer, Mercurochrome … Mona and I and our friends made great use of this kit in our games. At this point, my ambition was to be a nurse, and naturally I needed no persuasion to treat the slightest scratch on my young brother or my friends.” Miss Johnson also persuaded a local carpenter to make Peggy a tool bench, complete with a vice. “Girls,” she recalled, “were supposed to be strictly interested in dolls, but I wasn’t alone in my love of carpentry.” She constructed a number of bread boards in the “shape of a portly and simplified pig and made gaily painted scenes from what I imagined to be life in other countries—a Dutch windmill, a Chinese pagoda.” Peggy did not neglect the scribblers she carried everywhere with her: “I was writing, too, all the time. Clumsy, sentimental poetry, funny verses, stories, and once a highly uninformed but jubilantly imaginative journal of Captain John Ball and his voyages to exotic lands, complete with maps made by me of strange, mythical places.”

  At the age of eleven, Peggy bought her first bicycle from Bert Batchelor, the milkman. She walked out the several miles to his farm to pick it up, and he also provided her with her first and only lesson in using it. She wobbled it around the farmyard a few times. Then Bert pointed her in the direction of town and gave her a little shove. “I was off. No one has ever learned to ride a bike more quickly. By the time I had reache
d home, I had pretty well mastered the art. What I had forgotten, though, was how to stop, but a ditch near our house solved the problem.”

  At about the same time, Peggy made her first long train trip to Toronto to visit Aunt Norma, who had moved to Newmarket. Ruby Simpson, who was attending a conference in Quebec, accompanied her niece part way. The little girl was enchanted with the glamour of the event: meals in dining cars, porters, ladders to upper berths. During her stay in Ontario, she was taken with her aunt’s warmth and her funny stories, her uncle Mord’s tales of his exploits as a bush pilot in northern Manitoba and her cousin Terry’s eager friendliness. As before, Grandmother Wemyss’s austere behaviour, very much in the mode of John Simpson, frightened the little girl. So perhaps did the two car accidents she witnessed on the car ride from Toronto to Newmarket. Norma was “terrified” that the blood and bodies on the road would scar Terry and Peggy. The car sped on, and Peggy didn’t think she took it all in. To her, “only deaths in the family seemed real.”

  The deaths of her sister and, later, her husband also left indelible marks on Marg Wemyss, who, in the midst of the Depression, had to cope on her own with two young children. If, as is probable, she had in part become a teacher in order to evade the net of Neepawa, her life from 1930 changed markedly. Before the death of her sister, Marg had spent a great deal of money dressing stylishly. She had also been noted for her keen intellect, which could sometimes wander into a sharp turn of phrase. Marriage and children softened her, bringing to the surface her warm and compassionate side. Independence, once a much cherished ideal, was further removed from her in 1935 by another death, this time her mother’s. Now, she also had to worry about the management of an increasingly pernickety father.

  For three years, Marg maintained a semblance of autonomy at the Little House, but, in 1938, she was forced by financial constraints to move her small family to the Big House. For her, this was a particularly grim and ironical turn of events, as she now had to minister to her father without benefit of the consoling presence of her mother. In turn, Peggy was compelled to live in the house associated with the bitter memory of her mother’s death. Moreover, for the first time, the young girl was exposed on a daily basis to the domestic tyranny of John Simpson.

  Neepawa is in most ways a typical Prairie town. The winters can be desperately cold and long, the summers exceedingly hot and humid. The civic buildings are suitably impressive, the residential streets wide and lined with handsome trees. The very ordinariness of Neepawa is sedate, even comforting. Alice Munro, who visited Neepawa for the first time in the summer of 1996, was astonished not by the physical differences between it and her hometown of Wingham, in southwestern Ontario, but by the sheer luxury of the Simpson house (now the Margaret Laurence Home) as compared to the shabby house in which she grew up. But that is not how Peggy Wemyss saw things. Compared to others, she lived in a relatively spacious home, but to her it was a cage. And the Manawaka she later ripped from the flesh of Neepawa is a hothouse of stifled feelings.

  Even as a child, Peggy was a keen observer of her native town, noting the incredible discrepancies between appearances and realities. She had the eye of the artist, who understands that existence is an uneasy mixture of pleasure and pain. In Neepawa resided a heart of darkness, which the young girl knew intimately.

  In the fiction of Margaret Laurence, there is no greater villain than Grandfather Timothy Connor in A Bird in the House, a portrait based on her grandfather Simpson. In many ways, he is a Canadian King Lear, a man whose weaknesses, transmogrified into vindictive, wilful cruelty against his family, are the stuff of tragedy. He was also a powerful character, a man of steadfast determination and will. In her entire life, the contradictory strains in no other person ever fascinated Margaret Laurence quite as much. From her grandfather came many of her own strengths, both as a person and as a writer. Margaret Laurence, who created so many strong-minded heroines, never really liked to envision herself as similarly empowered, in large part because she would have had to acknowledge she shared some traits with John Simpson. In 1938, she began to be drawn into a relentless war with this demagogue.

  In “The Mask of the Bear,” from A Bird in the House, Vanessa MacLeod sometimes—to herself—called her grandfather, “The Great Bear”: “The name had many associations.… It was the way he would stalk around the Brick House as though it were a cage, on Sundays, impatient for the new week’s beginning that would release him into the only freedom he knew, the acts of work.” The young girl is also repulsed by any sign of affection or need by the old man, as when he tells her that his wife has died: “Then, as I gazed at him, unable to take in the significance of what he had said, he did a horrifying thing. He gathered me into the relentless grip of his arms. He bent low over me, and sobbed against the cold skin of my face.”

  “Suppressed unhappiness.” This was Peggy’s catch-phrase for the first year in the Simpson house. She began to sleepwalk. For the remainder of her life, she never forgot the feeling of panic that invaded her when she awoke from such episodes, accompanied as they were by the feeling she was going mad. The girl, knowing the horrible situation confronting her mother, tried to be stoic, but this was a demanding chore, especially when she overheard Marg, in despair, saying to her friends, “He’ll outlive me.”

  In addition, like many teenagers, Peggy felt awkward. In a photograph taken when she was about fourteen, she clings to her pet dog, her face scowling a bit at the intrusive photographer. She looks slightly apprehensive, as if afraid of any new turn of event.

  Peggy Wemyss, about age fourteen. (illustration credit 3.1)

  In her mind and heart, there was a bitter contrast between her dead young father and her immortal-seeming grandfather. In Dance, she mentions that her beloved, messy playhouse was moved to the back of John Simpson’s property, where it resided near “the huge and lengthy woodpile, Grandfather’s pride, that stood in three straight, military-like ranks.” So invasive was her grandfather that Peggy needed physical and psychic space apart from him. At the age of twelve, she recalled, the Playhouse “changed its function. It became my study, my refuge, my own private place.”

  Under the huge branches of the enormous spruces that bent over the playhouse’s gently sloping roof, she found an ideal retreat, where she could read and write for many uninterrupted hours. She was drawn to adventure stories, which allowed her to imagine herself in a variety of foreign lands and dangerous situations: Conan Doyle’s The White Company, Kipling’s Kim, Stevenson’s Kidnapped and Treasure Island Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. She did not spurn books about girls, even though they were not as plentiful. Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables gave her great pleasure as did Gene Stratton-Porter’s A Girl of the Limberlost and Laddie, a book which reduced her to tears. Nellie McClung’s Pearl Watson novels—set in Manitoba—appealed to her: “The indomitable Pearl, holding the family together against vast difficulties, must have been to me what people now call a role model. Pearlie was young but she was brave and strong. She had humour and wit, and she put up with no nonsense from snobs.” As a youngster, she was also taken with Montgomery’s Emily of New Moon: “Both Anne and Emily were rebels—intelligent, talented girls who were not about to be put down. Emily had the added appeal of wanting to become a writer—no, of actually being a writer, as I myself was.”

  Sometimes, Peggy, the would-be writer, was more compliant than Anne, Emily and Pearl. Under duress, she took music lessons. She declared a preference for the guitar, but Marg considered that instrument vulgar. So she had to suffer the embarrassment of being the only student learning to play the violin in the cavernous Oddfellows’ Hall. She did her best, even to quivering her left wrist to achieve a semblance of vibrato. Her vision was poor, and she had to squint to see the music; the resulting sounds were “ear-boggling.” “I hated that damned violin,” she recalled, “but what kept me from saying so was that my Mum put such stock in my learning how to play.” Marg felt an obligation to expose Verna’s daughter to music
, but she desisted when Peggy—in her first year of high school—finally confessed her desire to quit. “She had done her best by her dead sister. I had shown I was not musically inclined.”

  In order to evade violin practice, she found a new refuge, this time the loft above the garage that housed her grandfather’s Buick. “There was an outside staircase to this loft, and I had discovered that I could hide away better there than in the playhouse. It was more inaccessible to the adult eye.” Inspired by the apothecary in Willa Cather’s Shadows on the Rock, she grew herbs there and, under John Simpson’s watchful, approving eye, marketed them. As Mona Spratt, Peggy’s closest friend, recalled, he was delighted she and Peggy were finding a way to make money; he was not aware that the two girls had also become nefarious thieves of the local crab apples. However, Peggy soon fell afoul of him when she lit candles in the dark, spooky loft. Fearful of a fire in such a potential powder keg, he had cautioned her against doing so. “We naturally ignored this order and regularly lit candles until one day my grandfather invaded the sanctuary and discovered the candle stubs. He raged for days.”

  Peggy’s bedroom in the Big House had once been her grandmother’s, although it had been redecorated for Peggy by Marg. Off this was a small dressing room, where, one day, Mona and Peggy combined firecrackers with the ingredients of a chemistry set. The resulting “Gunpowder Explosion”—as the fracas became known—blew glass all over the small room and brought an enraged John Simpson up the stairs. Peggy was often quick to take revenge, as on the day she was preparing her grandfather’s dinner. She told the friend assisting her: “He likes the meat well done. Burn it!”

  In her little dressing room, there were some old books, including, unbeknownst to the adults, What Every Young Married Man Should Know and What Every Young Married Woman Should Know. From these texts, Peggy gained her first “scientific” knowledge of sex, although she immediately realized—“even at [my] tender age”—that the one sentence she could recall, written by a man, had to be wrong: “Fortunately for the survival of the race and of civilized society, women do not need to feel any physical interest in sex.” At the age of twelve, in 1938, she longed, in the wake of Frank Sinatra’s popularity, to faint and swoon, as did some of her friends, at the mere mention of his name. She was “too proud and shy” to do this and, a bit reluctantly, was captivated by the more childlike romance of Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. She even constructed her own miniature dwarfs’ house out of a wooden apple box.