The Life of Margaret Laurence

by James King

  For Peggy, her childhood “could be said,” she claimed, to have ended that summer and autumn. Her account of the events leading up to that turning point is cryptic:

  That summer I visited a much loved-cousin and his family on their farm, north of Riding Mountain. It was a sad visit in many ways. I was dreadfully homesick. I knew my cousin well because he had gone to high school in Neepawa, but I didn’t know his brothers and sisters or his mother. Although they were all very kind, I felt shy and lonely except when Bud and I went to the hayfields beside the vast lake. He would talk to me there when his work was finished, and tell me of his dreams for the future. He had originally wanted to go to university, but this was the Depression and he’d been forced to return to the farm. He still hoped, somehow, sometime, to get out of his present situation. I didn’t know what to say. We both knew there was no money and no likelihood of any. I felt inadequate, too young to say anything to help or even comfort him, yet old enough to understand his tragedy … His eventual release was only another enslavement. He joined the army.

  Lorne “Bud” Bailey. c. 1935–36. (illustration credit 3.2)

  Lome—always known as Bud—was the son of William Bailey, the brother of Jane Bailey Simpson, Peggy’s grandmother, and Frances, née Porter, who had emigrated to Canada from the United States. Bud (b. 1915), one of seven children, wanted, as a young man, to find his destiny away from Bluff Creek, the family farm north of Riding Mountain.

  In her story “Horses of the Night” Margaret Laurence provided a harrowing depiction of Bud’s stay at the Big House, where his ambition to make something of himself was cruelly undermined by John Simpson, who had reluctantly taken his wife’s nephew into his house. When Chris, as he is called in the story, first arrives, Mrs. Connor prepares a special meal. An incensed Grandfather Connor says, within Chris’s hearing, “Potato salad would’ve been plenty good enough. He’d have been lucky to get it.… Wilf’s family hasn’t got two cents to rub together. It’s me that’s paying for the boy’s keep.” During subsequent encounters with Grandfather Connor, Chris is determined not to hear, and thus react, to his insulting behaviour.

  The method proved to be the one Chris always used in any dealings with my grandfather. When the bludgeoning words came, which was often, Chris never seemed, like myself, to be holding back with a terrible strained force for fear of letting go and speaking out and having the known world unimaginably fall to pieces. He would not argue or defend himself, but he did not apologise, either. He simply appeared to be absent, elsewhere. Fortunately there was very little need for response, for when Grandfather Connor pointed out your shortcomings, you were not expected to reply.

  Behind his angular, thin, handsome face Chris never betrays anger. Not only is Vanessa taken with his cheerful stoicism in the wake of Grandfather Connor’s bad manners, she also responds to her cousin’s imagination when he tells her of the wonders of his childhood home at Shallow Creek.

  Chris’s ambitions do not lead him very far in Manawaka. He abruptly leaves the town but drops in occasionally over the following years. At various times, before returning home, he peddles vacuum cleaners and magazines. After her father’s death, Vanessa visits Shallow Creek, where the reality of the farm is far different from Chris’s lyrical descriptions of years before. Vanessa, who wants to form a close bond of some sort with Chris, realizes the ten-year difference in their ages has created an insuperable barrier: “I could not speak even the things I knew. As for the other things, the things I did not know, I resented Chris’s facing me with them.” Later, in the concluding portion of the narrative, Vanessa learns that Chris, who has joined the army and been stationed in England, had been discharged because of a mental breakdown and, later, ensconced in a provincial mental hospital: “He had been violent, before, but now he was not violent. He was, the doctors had told his mother, passive.”

  Vanessa cherishes Chris’s hopefulness, and his genuinely creative imagination in which he transforms the dross of his life into something enchanting and magical. His desire to become an engineer reflects his wish to escape from desperate circumstances: “Have you ever seen a really big bridge, Vanessa? Well, I haven’t either, but I’ve seen pictures. You take the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, now. Terrifically high—all those thin ribs of steel, joined together to go across this very wide stretch of water. It doesn’t seem possible, but it’s there. That’s what engineers do. Imagine doing something like that, eh?” Chris’s old nags at the farm are transformed by him into sleek race horses, but, as the story concludes, Vanessa’s mind dwells on another image, that of the horses of the night, wild beings whose irrational wills lead them to self-destruction.

  Vanessa MacLeod does not state that she is physically drawn to her cousin, but the story is suffused with her ripening sensuality. Her cousin’s kindness and goodness, in marked contrast to Grandfather Connor, remind her of her gentle father, who is dead when the story comes to a conclusion. In 1976, Margaret Laurence, at the age of fifty, wrote an elegiac poem, “For Lorne,” included in the small collection of verse at the end of Dance on the Earth. Here, where she was much more direct about the passionate side of her attraction to her second cousin, she also revealed her awareness of his tragic life.

  After Grade 12, Bud, always known as a “snappy” dresser, was apprenticed to a jeweller, but he could not make a go of it. As early as 1936—when Peggy was ten—he had shown signs of schizophrenia. He would be taking part in an ordinary conversation and would then start speaking of something else. Sometimes, he became violent. At Bluff Creek, there were several episodes—at least one involving pitchforks—when he “scared everybody.” He, like the fictional Chris, joined the army, was discharged and confined to a mental institution in Brandon. Later, he took up farming, but his subsequent life was one spent in various mental institutions. He died in 1996.

  As a young woman, Peggy was a hapless witness to Bud’s fate; as an older woman she imagined the possibility of helping Bud. She romantically envisioned that the two of them “could have loved/wed” almost as if she could have enabled Bud to put aside his mental afflictions. He was the first man to whom she was sexually attracted, but, in the process, she learned of love’s complexities. He was a gentle, optimistic person, but there was also within him a psychic wildness which could not be tamed. Through him, she became aware of the soft, compassionate side of love, but, she became gradually aware that his imagination and his escape were part of his mental illness. She would have liked to have had within herself the power to cure and redeem him, but, as girl and woman, she sadly knew this was not possible. In 1939, at the age of thirteen, her innocence slipped away when she came to the realization she could not destroy the barriers between herself and Bud, when it first dawned on her that the redeeming power of love is limited.

  4

  A PRAIRIE FLOWER

  (1939–1944)

  Once upon a time, long ago in 1940, there was a prairie flower named Peggy Wemyss. She was fourteen years old and she had just acquired two things—her first boyfriend and a knowledge of touch-typing at the Neepawa College Institute. The first proved not to be of lasting value in her young life. The second proved to be one of the smartest things she ever did. Why? Because she was a writer.

  WITH SOME CONSIDERABLE affection, Peggy is commenting on her young, somewhat gauche self. The boyfriend was Donald Strath, who like Bud Bailey, was an outsider to Neepawa. His family lived some distance away on a farm, and he stayed—six miles from the town—with his aunt and uncle while attending Neepawa Collegiate. Peggy thought he was “heroic because he had a black stallion that he used to ride to school, day after day, month after month, in all seasons. He was a couple of years older than I was.” According to her friends, she was fascinated by Donald because he was an outsider.

  A year later, in 1941, she was attracted to “young Johnnie” Simpson, born and raised in California, who came to Neepawa determined to join the RCAF, for which he was technically not qualified since he was an Amer
ican citizen. Captivated, Peggy cherished him as “My American Cousin.” Marg was flustered by Peggy’s interest, “Johnnie being the son of her charming & much loved & sort of black-sheep brother. Grandfather was churlish, as usual.”

  Outwardly, Peggy had changed a great deal. Although more serious about schoolwork and more concerned about the war in Europe than most of her girlfriends, she wanted to “fit in” and she did. Her close friendship with Mona remained constant, but her group of friends expanded to include Louise Alguire, Margery Crawford, Alice Dahlquist and Anna Rowe, Donald’s cousin. She joined the Babushka Club, named for the headgear worn by the Ukrainian women in town, but their babushkas were brightly coloured, not the traditional black. At Margery’s home, Peggy and her friends would drink freely from Mr. Crawford’s booze and then fill up the missing portions with water. At the ages of sixteen and seventeen, Peggy was known for her placid exterior, although one night, when she was playing bridge at Mona’s, she suddenly—for apparently no reason—threw her cards on the table and left.

  Like many of her friends, Peggy felt stymied by Neepawa, especially by the rituals of small-town prairie life in the forties—rituals that had changed little over the decades. Every Saturday night, inhabitants of the town and surrounding farms congregated on Hamilton Street. Men would drop into public houses to drink, teenagers would fill the soda parlours, and a wide assortment of people attended the movie at the Roxy. Along the street, Peggy and her friends would sit in Mona’s father’s darkened car, watching the various processions—illuminated by the lights emanating from the various establishments—come and go on their appointed rounds. The trouble with this was the relentless sameness in these sightings week after week. These young women feared their lives would never begin, that they would be stuck forever in Neepawa.

  At the very same time Peggy assimilated herself comfortably into a circle of friends, her desire to write became more focused and determined. Her first typewriter, a small Remington portable nicknamed Victoria, was purchased for fourteen dollars. Peggy had saved seven dollars from her Saturday afternoon job at Leckie’s Ladies’ Wear, Marg had provided the rest. At this time, Peggy submitted a piece called “The Land of Our Fathers” to a Winnipeg Free Press competition—in which the name “Manawaka” makes its first appearance. Years later, she retained a sketchy memory of this piece of juvenilia: “The only part of the story I recall was a sensational scene in which the young pioneer wife delicately communicates to her husband that she is pregnant by the tactful device of allowing him to arrive home and witness her making a birch-bark cradle.” Her typing skills were not yet up to par: “My aunt’s secretary very kindly performed this service for me and only once, when I entered the office unexpectedly, did I catch her and my aunt mildly chortling.”

  A few months later, a story of hers called “The Case of the Blond Butcher” was printed in the young people’s section of the Saturday edition of the Winnipeg Free Press. It was a murder story in which it turned out that no murder had been committed. She also received her first fan letter. “It was written in purple ink and it was from a boy in Winnipeg. I was so embarrassed I didn’t know what to do, so I threw it in the kitchen woodstove before Mum could see it and I never told a living soul.”

  The aspiring writer was not always so modest, but she was often silent. In class, she hardly ever spoke, although Mildred Musgrove’s memory contradicts the impressions of the other teachers. In Mildred’s English and typing classes, Peggy was outspoken, determinedly so. Alice Dahlquist—Peggy’s only serious rival for top grades (Peggy was the superior student in English, history and French, whereas Alice topped her in mathematics and science)—recalled the strong glimmer in her rival’s eyes when she raised her hand to speak in English class.

  Mildred Musgrove was renowned for her no-nonsense approach to teaching (Alice Dahlquist never saw her smile in class and was once flabbergasted to see her laugh at a tea party), but her enthusiasm for English literature—especially poetry—was contagious. Peggy felt “as though a whole series of doors were opening in my mind.” The two became close, “fighting the old Gestetner together” to put out the school newspaper, The Black and Gold. They would get covered “with pungent and gooey black ink in the process.” Peggy recalled: “For the last couple of years of high school, I edited that paper. I don’t think anyone else wanted to and I certainly needed no urging. Mildred Musgrove was the guiding spirit.”

  Peggy was never put off by the acerbic persona Mildred assumed for teaching purposes. For one thing, her manner bore a superficial resemblance to character traits of Aunt Ruby and Grandfather Simpson. However, Peggy could see beyond this to a woman who had a passionate love of writing, someone who felt women had the right to be ambitious. In addition, Mildred assured Peggy that the literary calling was not only a wonderful way to enact ambition but also a suitable profession for a woman, sentiments shared by Marg Wemyss who was actively involved with the Neepawa Library, particularly the selection of titles.

  English literature and the school newspaper were the chief joys of Peggy’s high-school experience. “I remember practically nothing that I learned in other courses. Mathematics, geometry, algebra were my nemeses and I barely scraped through.” Later, she resented how history was taught only from the anglophone point of view, one that presented Louis Riel, Gabriel Dumont and Big Bear as villainous outsiders.

  I studied the Manitoba School Act of the late 1800s without having the faintest idea of what it actually meant, namely that in my own native province, some of my ancestors had been responsible, directly or indirectly, for depriving the quite large French-speaking populace, both whites and Métis, of their language rights, not only in provincially supported schools but also in the provincial legislature and the courts.

  Margaret Laurence became aware of the serious flaws in her early education in history; Peggy Wemyss did not know of these deprivations. Yet, even as a teenager, she felt an instinctive identity with history’s outcasts.

  She also became aware—almost at a subliminal level—of her own destiny as a writer, when she read Sinclair Ross’s novel of prairie desolation, As For Me and My House (1941): “I would have been 16 years old. I saw, reading it, that a writer could write out of a background similar to my own. You didn’t need to live in London or New York.”

  Her column for The Black and Gold was called “I am Nosy” and there is no question that her journalistic inclinations meant she was, to a degree, the outsider looking on and judging the activities of others. She was also aware of the fact she dressed and looked like the other girls but somehow incorporated different standards. “I was,” she recalled, “excruciatingly shy and tried to conceal it under a somewhat loudmouthed exterior. I had a thirty-two inch bust at a time when Betty Grable had made it a shame, if not a downright disgrace, for girls not to have breasts like overripe cantaloupes.” Peggy also resented the so-called rules that governed female existence: “Girls were supposed to flirt, to play hard to get, while all the time wangling the chosen male into their perfumed clutches.”

  From Marg and Mildred, she had learnt a different system of female values, but, nevertheless, she was a teenager caught up in the need for the approval of her peers. “All of us girls who didn’t look exactly like one of the glamorous Hollywood movie stars (and who ever truly did?) would try desperately to fix our hair in fashionable, stiff, sausage-roll curls, getting sore scalps in the process from the nightly application of tightly rolled tin curlers.” Conformity extended to the skating rink, one of the principal arenas of social activity.

  If you were a girl, and lucky, boys would ask you to skate with them and hold hands. If a boy liked you a lot, or even some, he might ask you to go for coffee or a Coke afterwards … and then walk you home. After the second or third time, unless he was fresh and tried the first time, he might kiss you. After the fifth or sixth time, you would stand on the doorstep, the pair of you, doing such necking as was physically possible, given a temperature of 30 to 40 below, Fahrenheit, an
d the vast amounts of heavy clothing you both wore. No one’s virginity was seriously threatened on those winter evenings, but we were a hardy lot and managed slightly more proximity than anyone hailing from softer climes would have believed possible.

  Peggy was an adept skater, but found ballroom dancing, which she was taught by a refined lady who offered classes to the children of the genteel—if impoverished—middle class, an impossible skill to master. She also resented the gowns, borrowed via Aunt Ruby from a wealthy Neepawa family, that she was forced to wear to dances when she was fourteen and fifteen. Her first high-school dance was a particularly “grim experience” at which only the president of the school council—out of a sense of duty—asked her to dance. Before going to that event, she and Marg had a tiff when the teenager wanted to wear powder and lipstick. “My mother thought otherwise. Her daughter was going to succeed socially, was going to look like a million bucks, but by heaven, she sure wasn’t going to look cheap.”

  Temperamentally, Peggy was different from even her closest friends. Her loss of her birth parents marked her apart from most of them. Her growing awareness of herself as a writer—as an observer of the lives of others and thus as someone who searches those lives for fodder—(an occupation she never tried to conceal) was a further demarcation. Much of the dissatisfaction she felt at the time had to do with her grandfather. She never really stood up to him—perhaps did not know how to do so—and was later angry at herself for never having openly confronted him regarding his atrocious behaviour. For her—rightly or wrongly—strait-laced John Simpson epitomized Neepawa and so, naturally, she vented much of her anger on the town. Sometimes, she ignored the influence of the town; for example, in Dance, she downplayed the valuable journalistic experience she gained at the Neepawa Press during the summer of 1943, when she was seventeen years old.