The Life of Margaret Laurence

by James King

  When the final stage started, I suddenly could feel the child pushing into life. Ten minutes and there he was. Salome said calmly, “A fine boy.” She placed him on my belly to make up for all the weight that was no longer inside me and to alleviate any cramps from this abrupt change. Because he was still curled up, they placed him with his back towards me, so what I saw was his tiny backside, his shoulders and the back of his head. I saw my son at the moment of his birth, before the cord was severed. I felt as though I were looking over God’s shoulder at the moment of the creation of life.

  Peggy with David, Ghana. c. 1955. (illustration credit 8.4)

  The baby did not cry out at first, so Salome removed him to a nearby table in order to suck out the mucus preventing him from doing so. Then, Salome wanted to take the baby away in order to clean him up. Peggy became distraught: “No, I want to see him right now. What if you get him mixed up with somebody else’s baby? I want to see his face. Bring him over or I’ll get up off this table and go to him myself.”

  Jack finally arrived at the hospital at about four in the afternoon, looking really upset: “What’s happening?” he asked. Then she realized he did not know that David (his given name is Robert David Wemyss) had been born. Jack had been phoning the hospital all day, but had been unable to locate anyone who could give him any information about his wife.

  After another week’s stay in hospital, she was able to go home. “I began writing the first draft of my first completed novel shortly after. I looked after the children myself, but I had a great deal of help with domestic chores. I accepted this with enormous guilt.” In this instance, Margaret Laurence’s memory was faulty. She did not begin the novel which became This Side Jordan until March 1956, eight months later. However, the birth of David did spur her on to work on the draft of her third (never completed) try at a full-length work of fiction set in Somaliland.

  Three months later, in November, the four Laurences went to London, where they were joined by Marg and Ruby. This was not an easy time for Peggy. She and Jack could not find suitable accommodation within their budget, and she had to cope with two young children while he went out in search of a place to live. The Laurences, who were staying with Marg and Ruby in their small, expensive service flat, began to feel stir-crazy. Another complication was that Marg, several days after their arrival in London, slipped and broke her wrist. Finally, the six moved to a “dark, dusty, gloomy” third-floor flat in Knightsbridge. The occupant of the flat below them, a prostitute, did not like the fact Peggy left David’s pram outside her door. There were further problems. David could not adjust to English time, the flat—supposedly centrally heated —was excessively cold and damp, and one day Jocelyn fell out of her chair and hurt herself. A very harassed, guilt-filled Peggy also had to deal with Ruby, who “couldn’t understand why I kept the window slightly open in the children’s room. She frequently told me that if the cold didn’t kill them, the fog certainly would. Mum, who never gave unasked advice on how to raise my children, nevertheless didn’t request that her elder sister refrain from doing so either. She twittered unhappily, torn between us.” Peggy must have felt transplanted back to Neepawa, to the domain of tyrannical John Simpson.

  Marg was thrilled to attend David’s christening. Not surprisingly, however, she and her daughter were not able to talk to each other about anything that really mattered to them. However, Peggy did try to find a way to voice her deep feelings: “Just before the taxi arrived, I gave Mum a long letter I had written to her and asked her not to open it until they got aboard the ship.… I simply wanted to tell her (and for me, this was more possible on the page than in speech) how much I loved her, how much she meant to me, and how much her encouragement of my writing had strengthened me.… I also wanted to tell her that she could not have been more my mother if she had actually borne me.” She may not have been able to tell Marg face to face how much she meant to her, but she could now use her form of communication—the written word—to express it. She was able to do so because as she became more and more aware of her calling as a writer, she realized how vital Marg had been in nurturing and mothering that destiny.

  The Laurences remained in London for two months after Marg and Ruby left. When they returned to Ghana, Peggy was even more determined to become a professional writer. For her, this meant writing from about ten-thirty at night (when Jack went to bed) until two or three in the morning three times a week. In Dance, Margaret Laurence wrote that the writing of the first draft of This Side Jordan was exhilarating: “I scribbled on and on, as though a voice were telling me what to write down. It was the easiest novel I ever wrote because I knew absolutely nothing about writing a novel. The pages poured out.” This is true, but she had worked on and abandoned three novels set in Somaliland before beginning her first published novel, which takes place on the Gold Coast.

  By February 1956, a story [which formed the basis for This Side Jordan] had taken over her imagination: “An odd thing has happened. I’d had an idea for a short story for a long time—over a year, I guess—and I thought I’d take a break from the novel and do this story. That was about a month ago. It is now over 80 pages and not even half finished—quite impossible for a short story, obviously, and I don’t know what to do with the damn thing. It probably won’t be any use for anything, but parts of it are good. It’s mainly about an African schoolteacher who’s lost the old life and not yet firmly grasped the new.”

  Her ability to harness herself enthusiastically to her writing was done at considerable cost. Jack was very supportive, but she felt stranded in the company of the other Europeans working for Halcrow. Her existence was in an “intellectual desert,” where she was afraid of boring her fellow residents. Peggy, who a few years before, had been excessively shy about expressing her feelings in public, now voiced them: “There were times when old colonials walked out of a cocktail party partly on account of remarks I had made. I was tactless. I was tactless, though, because I believed profoundly in what I was saying.”

  Her new sentiments arose in part from her friendship with Ofosu (called “Mensah” in her essay “The Best of Intentions”), a teacher at Achimsta College, later folded into what became the University of Ghana. In part, he was the model for Nathaniel, the African schoolteacher, in This Side Jordan. However, he was a much more resilient, strong-minded person than his fictional counterpart. The Laurences met Ofosu in 1952, shortly after they arrived in the Gold Coast. Since they had London friends in common, the newcomers, anxious to meet Africans, got in touch with him.

  From the outset, Ofosu and Peggy fought. She was in her “militant liberal” phase, anxious to express her sympathy for African nationalism and culture. He rejected her well-meaning efforts. Once, she showed him an ebony head she had bought from a Hausa trader. “Look,” she eagerly proclaimed, “Isn’t this terrific? It’s wonderful to see that carving is still flourishing in West Africa.” His reply—perhaps because he felt she was being in part condescending—was harsh: “That? It’s trash. They grind them out by the thousands. Europeans like that sort of thing, I suppose.” Another time, she extolled African drumming. His response was predictable: “I am not such an admirer of these things as you are. Listen—shall I tell you something? My grandfather decorated his drums with human skulls. You see?” To Ofosu, parts of the past were easily forgotten, other portions of it were so bitter that he did not wish to be reminded of it. “African history?” he once sarcastically questioned her. “Africans have no history.… We are a simple people, you see. We have sprung directly from the loins of earth. History is too complicated a concept for us.”

  In retrospect, Peggy saw her love-hate relationship with Ofosu as part of a historical continuum in which, unfortunately, they were on different sides.

  Our mistrust of one another, and perhaps of ourselves as well, must have gone deep. For a long time I did not trust Mensah enough to disagree with him, for fear of damaging what I hoped was his impression of me—which was actually only my own impression of
myself: sympathetic, humanitarian, enlightened. For his part, he did not trust me enough to permit himself ever to agree with me on any issue at all. Yet the force which made us seek each others company must have been the sense we both had of being somehow out of tune with the respective societies in which we lived.

  Cultural differences of an even more basic sort sometimes got in the way. The Laurences would always arrive promptly when Ofosu invited them to dinner, which put him in a temper because he regarded it as rude to arrive anywhere near the announced time. In her turn, she would be furious when he arrived late, usually by two hours.

  Despite its difficulties, the association with Ofosu helped to unleash her creativity. Her first published West African story, “The Drummer of All the World,” is a re-enactment of the gulfs between them. In that narrative, Matthew, the white ministers son who tells the story, and Kwabena have a close friendship as youths, but cultural discord separates them—despite the best of intentions—as adults. In This Side Jordan, inquisitive Miranda pursues a friendship with Nathaniel, a friendship which Nathaniel neither understands nor wants. There was another change in perspective. In Somaliland, Peggy had thought some sort of assimilation between colonials and colonized could be reached. Her experience in the Gold Coast destroyed that naive assumption.

  Peggy’s ability to vent her feelings publicly was also due in part to the excessive drinking that began to become a part of her daily life. In Somaliland, she had been a social drinker, one whose intake of alcohol was perfectly in accord with the behaviour of most of the whites residing there. Things changed dramatically in the Gold Coast, certainly by her last year there. Cay Munro, who during 1956–7 lived in the same complex as the Laurences, remembered Peggy would drink a whole bottle of sherry at dinner parties; then she would consume lots of wine during a meal. When drunk, she would become very repetitive, talking incessantly about her family, particularly her grandfather’s horrible behaviour.

  A party at the Tema complex, Ghana. c. 1956. (illustration credit 8.5)

  Heavy drinking was an inescapable fact of life in white colonial societies, especially English ones. But even for this hard-drinking group, Peggy drank a lot, certainly more than any other woman in the Halcrow compound. In Somaliland, the Laurences had wandered afield at the drop of a hat. They could no longer do so. She was certainly restricted in whom she met. On the other hand, she had the opportunity—because of servants—to devote her time to two things, her children and her writing. In the process, she liberated the writing self so vital to her; at the very same time, the often indolent life at Tema, where much time was spent at the Halcrow Beach Club, seems to have led to excessive drinking, to a search for oblivion.

  The daily routine was simple and straightforward. She and the children would be at home until lunch-time, when they would be driven by a neighbour to the Club, a thatched ramshackle affair on the ocean.

  Peggy with Jocelyn and David, Tema. 1956. (illustration credit 8.6)

  They would lunch, swim and then be driven home late in the afternoon. In the photographs taken at the Club, she seems extraordinarily happy and carefree, taking special delight in her two beautiful children. But there was a downside to this life. For example, she was not particularly fond of the other women in the complex. She preferred to spend her time writing and was thus seen as “different.”

  Why did she start to drink so much, particularly at a time when her writing career was getting off the ground? At long last, she was exploring the powerful creative urges in her being. If the raw material of one’s early life has been dominated by sadness, a corresponding sorrow is perhaps activated when one begins to use that experience in one’s writing. When she became poignantly aware of childhood’s scars, she sought forgetfulness in alcohol.

  Disagreements between husband and wife occurred more frequently and were more intensely bitter. Although Jack supported his wife’s desire to write, he began to feel writing was the only thing that really mattered to her. It made him both angry and resentful. Peggy defended herself as best she could, often by yelling abuse at him. Jack conceived of marriage as a union of equals in which each partner is the most important person in the other’s life. He was jealous of Peggy’s writing because he felt it was now more central to her existence than he was. He was correct.

  As a young woman, Peggy had been attracted to men significantly older than herself. Later, she herself was well aware that her husband—ten years older—was in part a father figure, someone who guided and protected her. At twenty-one, she found much comfort in that portion of her marriage. Jack was—and remained—a man to whom Peggy was deeply attracted sexually. The Laurence marriage started to unravel when a slightly older Peggy’s sense of self was no longer dependent on Jack’s fatherly approval and when she wanted to be independent of him in a new way, a way which fundamentally contradicted the terms on which their traditional marriage had begun.

  Peggy had become more certain of her vocation as writer—and less reliant on her role as wife. In a photograph of 1956, a new Margaret Laurence poses for the camera. She looks a bit defiant as she allows a slight smile to escape her lips. This slim, beautiful woman imposes her point of view on the viewer—our approval seems quite unnecessary to her. More than ever before, she has come into her own as a person. She looks independent and, furthermore, she is beginning to think she can tolerate the loneliness that accompanies such freedom. This is the first photograph of Margaret Laurence the writer.

  Margaret Laurence, c. 1956–57. (illustration credit 8.7)

  Cay, the Laurences’ neighbour, also remembered Peggy as being “fairly intense” with little or no sense of humour. She also recalled instances when Peggy mentioned to her that a rejected story had just been returned in the post. Elsa, a friend of Cay’s who lived next door to the Laurences, was incensed by the noise of the typewriter which would waft through the hot tropical nights when she was attempting to get to sleep. At the time, Peggy, well aware she was seen as strange and eccentric by the other Europeans, still clung to her husband as a bastion of support: “except for Jack—who is always a very helpful critic—I never talk to anyone about writing—in fact, most people here don’t know how I spend all my time, and probably think I’m lazy as hell.” Although Cay may have been one of the women Peggy felt no deep affinity with, she was sufficiently friendly with her to bake a cake—a pink one—to celebrate her friend’s first wedding anniversary on June 4, 1956.

  Friends of Peggy in Neepawa, Winnipeg and Somaliland had known someone who was sometimes shy and retiring, often overly anxious to please. In Ghana, her public manner changed to a remarkable degree. There, she was unhesitating in voicing opinions that would not meet with popular approval. This unabashed Peggy used cigarettes and alcohol excessively. Without doubt, she was a person who became easily attached to both as social props. Especially, she found relief in liquor from the intense self-scrutiny that accompanied her writing life. The sad irony is that she found her speaking and writing voices at the very same time she became heavily dependent on tobacco and liquor.

  A certain hard edge enters her work when she begins to write a series of short stories and a novel which are deeply pessimistic about the possibility of ever really being able to cross over the river Jordan to the Promised Land. The setting may be the Gold Coast and, later, Ghana, but a change of name does not necessarily mean any kind of real transformation has occurred. “Freedom” is a word repeated numerous times in these narratives, but it has a deeply ambiguous meaning. To some of the Ghanaians, it signifies the possibility of incredible change; to the whites, it is a word replete with irony since it really connotes the switch of one kind of oppression (white colonial power) for another (black power). (All of Margaret Laurence’s writing is about power and the acquisition of it. In her early writings, she concentrates on political power whereas the Manawaka novels are about the procurement of power by women.)

  In July 1956, Peggy knew she had reached some kind of turning point in her life, but the mean
ing of what she experienced not only eluded her but also could not be put into words. She told Adele:

  I can’t talk about it to anyone except Jack, and altho’ he is wonderful about it, and has an excellent critical mind, he hasn’t actually done this kind of work himself. I often feel I am leading a double life—do you? It seems a kind of irony to me that the thing in life which is most important to me, next to my husband and kids, is something I can never talk about, never let anyone know about, even. But it seems sometimes strange to me that [during] this past tour something important has happened to me, and Jack is the only one who knows anything about it. One feels sometimes it must show, but it doesn’t. I am mother and housewife. Full stop. Thank god, at least Jack has followed it every step of the way—it would be unbearable if there wasn’t anyone.

  Her “double life” is the discrepancy between her perceived role as wife and mother on the one hand and writer on the other. She is asking herself all kinds of difficult questions. Do I have a right to pursue my vocation as writer? If I do follow my instinct to become a writer, will I be able to fulfil my other obligations? These are dilemmas men may never have to face, but they are problems confronted by many women writers, often on a daily basis. She was filled with such conflicts. And yet the portrait photograph of 1956–7 does give a glimpse of the new Peggy, the woman who was waging bitter fights with her husband, who—despite his own sense of hurt and frustration—was trying to understand the importance of the writing life in his wife’s existence.

  By the end of 1955, Peggy had accumulated a store of incidents and persons to translate into fiction. Ayehsa, the child prostitute in “The Rain Child,” is obviously based on Asha, whose sorry existence is described in The Prophet’s Camel Bell. The conduct of Sunday, the major-domo in “A Fetish for Love,” is reminiscent of the Laurences’ experience with their cook Mohamed in Somaliland. At the conclusion of This Side Jordan, Nathaniel’s wife, Aya, gives birth to a son at about the same time as Miranda gives birth to her daughter. In “The Very Best Intentions,” she mentions that Mensah’s wife, Honour, gave birth to a son at about the same time David was born.