The Life of Margaret Laurence

by James King

  In class, she was extremely reserved, never speaking unless addressed by the professor. English classes were different, as Lois Freeman recalled: “Right from the start, it was obvious that she was fascinated with words and ideas, and frequently the class evolved into a dialogue between her and Professor Carl Halstead or Professor Meredith Thompson.” The pursuit of English literature brought out the intrepid, daring side of Peggy. In second year, she asked one of her professors, Arthur Phelps, how to join the English Club. Unbeknownst to her, membership in this group was by invitation only and second-year students were seldom accorded this privilege. He did not inform her of this when he invited her to the next meeting, at which she was received cordially by the members of the club. Only thirty years later did she learn that, prior to her first appearance, Phelps had warned the members: “You are expected to show courtesy and no surprise at her presence in your midst.”

  Phelps—a friend of Frederick Philip Grove and also of Morley Callaghan, who attended a meeting of the Club—encouraged the group to read Canadian fiction. As Peggy recalled, “we couldn’t afford to buy them, and they weren’t even greatly in evidence at the Public Library, but we read Gabrielle Roy, Hugh MacLennan, Morley Callaghan, and others, in the book department of the Hudson’s Bay Company, just across the road from the college, a chapter at a time, hoping the sales clerks wouldn’t notice us standing there, turning pages.”

  The one course she took at the University of Manitoba—in Milton and seventeenth-century thought taught by Malcolm Ross—“profoundly affected” her life. The sometimes gruff but always tenderhearted Ross, a Renaissance specialist who later became one of the first advocates of Canadian literature as a university subject, remembered that Peggy hardly ever spoke in his class, a small one conducted as a seminar. She would make the requisite contributions but otherwise had nothing to say. When he met with her in his office, she was articulate, open and friendly. In the 1980s, Margaret Laurence had very different memories, as can be seen in snippets from two letters to Ross:

  Who would have thought it, when I was a young hesitant student (well, sometimes hesitant and sometime strident in my arguments in classes, I think!) at the U of M?!

  Frankly, I can’t remember whether I ever felt “intimidated” by you, all those years ago at the U of M, or not. I don’t think so. I was so shy personally but so brash and enthusiastic in terms of the courses in English at university, that I think probably my enthusiasm overcame my personal shyness in that kind of situation. What I recall most is sitting around (or along) a huge table and discussing and arguing, and you challenging all of us to support our views.

  Ross saw two sides of Peggy Wemyss, and he was never able to completely reconcile them. In his view, Margaret reinvented herself in Dance—and in letters to him—to the extent she presents herself as far more daring and sophisticated than she in fact was during those years. She had, nevertheless, he recalled, an “eager awareness” of the possibilities life might present to her, particularly the literary life.

  Like many women writers before her, Peggy Wemyss was certain she would receive a fairer reading if she assumed male guise: “… when I first submitted poems to the University of Manitoba student paper, The Manitoban, I sent them in under the name of Steve Lancaster. After the Lancaster bomber, and I had always liked the name Steve. I cringe with shame to recall it now. Later, I dared to use my own name, but it was J. M. Wemyss, I think, not Jean Margaret. In one of my early stories, published in the United College magazine, Vox, I actually used a first-person narrative, but my narrator was a man.”

  Her first efforts were confined to poetry because she did not have the time to tackle prose. Also, as she sagely observed, “As a short, intense form, it often appeals to young writers as being in more accord with youthfully intense, and usually intensely subjective, feelings.” She was thrilled when one of the “Steve Lancaster” poems was published, but she was also apprehensive she might overhear someone trashing it. This never happened and, gradually, her courage increased. Not only did she publish poems under her own name but she also composed a poem, memorized it and then appeared at the Manitoban office where she “proceeded to type out [the] poem from memory.”

  In addition to poems and an essay on Robinson Jeffers’ poetry, she published two short stories in Vox. “Calliope” appeared in 1945, after she had spent part of the summer visiting a friend in Carman, Manitoba, where the two of them had helped to run a hot-dog stand at the town fair. Fascinated by the “carnies” and their strange style of life, she told the story of “German Joe,” a souvenir vendor. At the beginning of the story, he is lost in a reverie about his bleak financial prospects. He is interrupted by rain leaking through a hole in his roof and the plaintive cry of a small lost boy. “German Joe looked at the kid thoughtfully.… A man should have sons.” Far from his homeland, he identifies with the lost boy and experiences a moment of happiness so piercing with its vivid associations of his own past that when he is left alone again, he is plunged into deeper desolation than before. He copes with the reality of his bleak existence through alcohol and the creation of a mythological past. The fairground, a garish place that “screams” colours of purple, red and green like “an aging slut without makeup,” is his world.

  The second story, “Tal des Walde,” had a more complicated genesis. As a child, Peggy had heard of an Austrian nobleman who built a medieval estate near Riding Mountain, Manitoba. At a small dark watchmaker’s shop where time seems to have stood still, a traveller stops to have his watch repaired and, while working, the watchmaker tells the story of an Austrian noble, Count Brueckner. He traces the fortunes of the Count from one of shameless frivolity and financial ruin to his immigration to Canada where he begins a new life as a feudal overlord, whose life is forever altered by the death of his wife and child. The house is never completed, and he abandons his land to settlers. As the story concludes, the traveller realizes the watchmaker is the former Count: “Yes, even after all the humbling years, the bearing, the manner, the very inflection of the voice were unmistakably aristocratic.”

  Years afterwards, Margaret Laurence was harshly self-critical about these two apprentice pieces. The first was “overwhelmingly sentimental” and the other markedly deficient because the traveller is male, as if she herself had not thought a female character of sufficient interest to have a tale told to her. However, she did see connections between “Tal” and her later narratives in that the Count attempts, in an overbearing way, to control life: “The most interesting thing to me now about the story is that it does connect with all my subsequent writing in one way—a basic life-view that could say, even then, ‘…a man is never God, even in his own domain’ and ‘…one should not mould the lives of others.’ ” Even in her earliest stories, she was already subtly criticizing John Simpsons view of the world. And both stories, dealing with displacement and irrevocable loss, have central characters who are outsiders, one German, the other Austrian.

  Often, Peggy Wemyss seemed a very ordinary young woman:

  When I was in third year university, I had a boarding house in the North End, about a mile past the end of the Selkirk Avenue streetcar line. Whenever I had a date that winter, and the guy discovered where I lived and in those days it was considered necessary for a man to pick up the girl and take her home later, I rarely had a date with the same boy twice. Flounder-flounder-flounder through a mile of snowdrifts, and at the end of it, a chilly necking session on the front porch, at 30 below zero. It would have cooled the hottest ardour, believe you me. Finally my girlfriend and I moved from this northerly accommodation and got a small flat on Broadway, after which our social life improved considerably.

  Yet there was always another side to her in her almost instant identification with those who are in any way disbarred from the mainstream. For her, the Canadian experience was one wherein a multiplicity of outsiders were joined together.

  Part of her attraction to Adele Wiseman, who also had literary aspirations and later becam
e Peggy’s closest friend, was rooted in her Jewishness as well as her passionate commitment to the life of writing. According to Adele (who attended the University of Manitoba), their friendship did not begin until about 1947–8: “Margaret was a year or two ahead of me and at United College, so that I didn’t know her during my university years.” This is not correct: the two did not become close friends immediately, but they knew each other as students. Margaret Laurence was vague on this issue, but in The Diviners Morag meets Ella Gerson—“short rather stocky girl with auburn hair”—at the Veritas office, a publication similar to The Manitoban. Both are outsiders to the “in-group” that runs the magazine, both are shy and have concealed their submissions within a book. They decide to forget about Veritas and go off to a coffee shop where they soon are reading—and criticizing—each other’s work. There, Morag realizes, quite simply, that Ella is a “friend for life.” This passage from The Diviners is not literally accurate, but it is close to the truth: three women who became novelists—Margaret Laurence, Adele Wiseman and Patricia Blondal—were members at the same time of Malcolm Ross’s seventeenth-century seminar. Peggy was withdrawn in class, Patricia spoke occasionally, and—as was her wont—Adele was outspoken and argumentative. (The letters from Margaret Laurence to Adele Wiseman are extensive and are the most revealing she ever wrote. In fact, some periods in Margaret’s life—particularly the years in Ghana—can only be reconstructed from that correspondence. Adele kept almost every letter Margaret wrote to her, whereas Margaret was not in the habit of keeping letters she received.)

  Adele Wiseman, 1978. (illustration credit 5.1)

  Adele Wiseman was a life force, a person imbued with a seemingly endless list of questions about existence and with an equal amount of energy to answer those queries. Adele’s own inclination from early childhood was to dedicate herself to writing: “I always knew I was going to write from the time I first knew it was possible to write, from the time I knew what a story was, and certainly from the first moment I started to read. I can remember watching my brother and sister at the kitchen table, sitting there, staring down intently at the table; I couldn’t figure out what it was they were doing and why I couldn’t talk to them, why they kept shushing me. Then my next memory is doing the same thing, when I first realized that these books were teaching me something while I was reading.”

  Adele’s conviction of her destiny as a writer came in large part from her parents, Chaika and Pesach, who had emigrated to Canada from the Ukraine. By the time he was seven, Pesach dreamed of becoming a cantor and was eagerly studying the Torah. Two years later, he was apprenticed to a tailor. This did not impede his ambition, but his father’s death three years later meant he was the sole support of his mother and several younger sisters. Later, his singing voice was ruined in the trenches of World War I. Reading was the great solace of his subsequent existence. Against her parents’ wishes, Chaika became a dressmaker. Her fascination with the textures and colours of fabric remained with her, leading her as an older woman to create dolls, puppets and figurines.

  Adele was convinced she had inherited her love of literature from her parents and that by becoming a writer she was doing something that had been closed off from them. Her destiny was to fulfil theirs. Another legacy from her parents was her sense that life was turbulent, messy and shockingly beautiful. The Wisemans, who had first arrived in Montreal and then went to Winnipeg, were always at the edge of destitution during their time in North End Winnipeg, where Pesach worked as a tailor and Chaika as a dressmaker. They had to take in boarders, but they always had room in their small house in Burrows Avenue for others.

  There was one winter [Adele recalled] when the three-bedroom house had roomers in at least two and sometimes all three of those bedrooms. To sleep, we [Pesach, Chaika, Adele, her two brothers and sister] were moved around in the living room and in the dining room, just wherever we could sort out places. My dad was in Vancouver looking for work, and a down-and-outer came to the door. He was either Ukrainian or Polish—to my mother all people in trouble were the same—and he had been turned away from one of the shelters because he didn’t have the necessary two bits. Mom told him that if he looked after the furnace he could sleep downstairs. He put up some boards on four logs, Mom gave him bedding and he slept down there for a whole winter.

  When Peggy met the Wisemans, she was overwhelmed by their generosity and by their palpable passion for life in spite of their financial difficulties.

  To her, this was in startling contrast to Neepawa, where Marg had been forced to sell the Brick House and move herself, her son and her increasingly difficult father to the Little House, where, Peggy recalled, “my brother inherited my old attic room. It remained his until he, too, grew up and left home. Grandfather had the back bedroom that had once been my brother’s. As the boy grew into young manhood, so the old man relapsed into a sour second childhood. I was spared those years and I was too self-absorbed to want to look closely at what Mum went through when Grandfather, in his last years, would rant and rave, going out into the night streets of the town looking for his long-dead wife.”

  Peggy, who did not feel bound to return to Neepawa, graduated from United College in the spring of 1947. She was twenty-one, imbued with a wonderful optimism, certain, at long last, she was entering her “adult, hopeful” life. She also was in love, “seriously and deeply and, for the first time, realistically.”

  6

  UNCERTAIN FLOWERING

  (1947–1950)

  AT THE BEGINNING of 1947, Peggy and her roommate, Mary Turnbull, moved to a boarding house at 139 Roslyn Avenue. There, Peggy met Jack Laurence, also a lodger. Once, she referred to him as a “handsome devil” in tribute to the fact that he embodied another, closely related set of clichés: tall, dark and handsome. For her, it was love at first sight: “One day I came into the house and on the stairs stood a young man. I thought that his face not only was handsome but also had qualities of understanding. I said to myself, ‘That’s the man I’d like to marry.’ ” Behind the good looks of a leading man was a sensitive person of considerable, genuine charm, someone who shared many of her attributes and interests. Not only was his mother a novelist, he himself was a would-be writer.

  Jack Laurence. c. 1942. (illustration credit 6.1)

  Jack, thirty-one when he met Peggy and thus ten years older, was the eldest child of Elsie Fry Laurence, the youngest child of a Church of England minister from Waterfield, Sussex, and John Laurence, a Highland Scot from the Shetland Islands. Elsie’s adventurous spirit was linked to her writing, a fact that gave her daughter-in-law special pleasure: “When she was eighteen, Elsie went to prerevolutionary Russia and worked in Moscow as a governess for a Jewish family. While she was there, she wrote a novel under the pen name of Christine Field. The novel, titled Half a Gypsy, concerned a young Englishwoman who went to Russia as a rebellious young person … taught as a governess, and ultimately met and married a young man who turned out to be an English titled gentleman.”

  Elsie Fry Laurence. (illustration credit 6.2)

  After she completed the novel in Moscow, Elsie returned to England, at which point the recently widowed Mrs. Fry determined to take herself, Elsie and another daughter to Canada, where her two sons had emigrated. The three women settled in South Fort George, British Columbia. There, Elsie met and married John Laurence in August 1915 and gave birth to John Fergus Laurence a year later. Before the marriage, John Laurence had joined the army, and he was away when Jack was born. In the midst of all the changes in her life, Elsie was amazed to learn in 1917 that the English firm Andrew Melrose Ltd., to whom she had submitted her manuscript, had published the book in 1916, after trying unsuccessfully to contact her. (Her second novel—Bright Wings—did not appear until 1964; her other books are The Band Plays a March and Other Poems [1936], Rearguard and Other Poems [1944], and Affirmations: An Anthology, 1929–1978 [1978].)

  When the war ended in 1918, John Laurence returned to Canada. The experience of war had le
ft an indelible black mark on his soul. Soon after his homecoming, he and his family moved to Edson, Alberta, where he was employed as a CNR linesman. Elsie, whose family grew to seven children, pursued her writing career in the few spare moments that were given to her. She was, as Margaret Laurence proclaimed her, “a woman with a vocation.”

  Like his mother, Jack was filled with wanderlust, combined with a strong sense of responsibility. Very much his mother’s son, he wanted as a young man to become a writer. This aspiration, which lasted well into his forties, was readily evident to all his close friends. Also obvious was his incredible ability to build and mend all manner of mechanical devices. “I remember, as a kid,” he once recalled, “taking an old Model-T apart and putting it together again.” In Edson, he became an apprentice printer. Then, in 1939, at the outset of the war, he bought with his sparse savings a one-way boat trip to England so that he could join the RAF. This was his escape, a way in which his adventurous spirit and sense of duty could find outlets. He was a sergeant and mechanic in the RAF, before being seconded to the RCAF towards the end of the war. As Margaret Laurence recalled: “He served some years in [India], where he was called ‘Driver’ Laurence for the way in which he drove himself—and those under his orders—to extremes of work and perseverance.”

  After he was demobbed, Jack, still in the RAF, lived for a time in Carberry, Manitoba. From there, he would travel into Winnipeg, where, through his mother, he met Watson Thomson, a writer and guru who had formed a group called the Prairie School for Social Advancement. This organization, which was committed to Third World development, was also devoted to communal living and had set up its headquarters at 139 Roslyn Road in such an experimental fashion. Jack began to spend all his weekends there. (He became a bit disillusioned with communal living when someone stole his typewriter.) When Thomson and the Prairie School vacated 139 Roslyn Road it became a boarding house, and Jack, who had left the army and enrolled at the University of Manitoba, moved in.