The Life of Margaret Laurence

by James King

  Despite its author’s trepidations, the first draft of This Side Jordan was written quickly and decisively. By the middle of May 1956, she had reached the halfway point in her novel.

  I’ve finished the first half of my story, in the first draft, and have begun on the second half. It’s not being done in any chronological order as the various parts will have to be inter-leaved in some miraculous fashion, if possible. But the second half deals with the situation from the point of view of a European woman. I’m finding it much more difficult than the part about Africans, mainly, I suppose, because I tend to be rather fed up at this point with the European community here and that is no attitude to have for writing. I don’t want to condemn even them—I only want to understand them.

  Less than two months later, although the end was in sight, she felt a gut-wrenching revulsion at the entire project:

  Did you feel discouraged when you were nearing the end? [she asked Adele]. I feel awful. I think the story is terrible. It is probably the worst piece of prose in history. Also, who am I to write about Africa? I don’t know a damn thing about it, relatively speaking. I’ve had the nerve to write half the thing from an African’s point of view. The Europeans will hate the European parts and the Africans will hate the African parts. Never mind—it has a good title. “This Side Jordan.”

  In the stories and one novel which have a West African setting, careful attention is given to the interior voices of the Africans—usually men. Peggy had a great deal of misgiving about such appropriation but for her it was an exercise similar to the translations in A Tree for Poverty: she was fascinated by the possibility of finding in words the equivalent of the African experience. The tenuous, never really established relationship between Miranda Kestoe, the wife of Johnnie, the chief accountant at Allkirk, Moore & Bright, and Nathaniel Amegbe, a teacher at the ironically named Futura Academy, holds the two plot strands of This Side Jordan together. The Gold Coast is about to become Ghana, and Allkirk reluctantly introduces an Africanization programme in its management division. Through Miranda’s agency, Nathaniel places two unsuitable students in the firm, leading to a fight between Johnny and Nathaniel. At the end of This Side Jordan, differences between Europeans and Africans are pasted over: Johnnie and Miranda will remain in Africa; Nathaniel decides to return to his village. In doing so, he realizes he will never cross the river Jordan and will thus have nothing to do with the formation of the new Africa, that task being reserved for his newborn son.

  —Oh, River, you are not Jordan for me. Not for me. And you, Forest of a thousand gods, a thousand eyes, I am coming back. I will offer red “eto” to the gods, and scatter the sacred “summe” leaves. And some day I may forget this pain.

  There may have been a touch of arrogance in daring to use an African voice. However, there was a corresponding portion of humility on the writer’s part to cast herself as Miranda, the white executive’s wife who asks many questions. She is sympathetic to the blacks, but is eventually shown to be hamfisted and ineffectual.

  The strength of This Side Jordan resides in its use of two voices in the presentation of Nathaniel. Outwardly, he attempts to conform to the new nation and freedom that will be established by the republic of Ghana. Inwardly, he is torn between the claims of his African past and his adopted Christian faith. At the end of the book, he is a person caught in the contradictory webs of history, someone who cannot adapt to present turmoil. A glimmer of hope surrounds the conclusion to that narrative whereas the short stories are much more about the impossibility of any significant understanding between black and white.

  In Dance on the Earth, mention is made of the Laurences’ decision to return to Canada at the end of Jack’s contract in Ghana. In that memoir, she also states: “Just before Christmas in 1956, Jack received a telegram from Aunt Ruby. She had sent it to him so he could give me the message and help me cope with it. Mum was dying of inoperable cancer of the pancreas. The doctors had, I learned later, tried to operate but realized when they did so that it was hopeless. They hadn’t told her the operation hadn’t been a success. It was the wrong strategy. Of course she knew, but she handled the knowledge, as she had always handled her problems, by herself.” Margaret Laurence sometimes had a faulty, unreliable memory. In this instance, her letter to Adele of November 26, 1956, in which she mentions leaving Accra with the children on January 8, is not quite so dramatic: “My aunt wrote several weeks ago to say that my mother had had to have an operation for cancer—which was totally unsuspected up to that time—and that the doctor thought she might not live more than a year at most.”

  When she had left Somaliland five years before, Peggy had written a handful of stories and completed the typescript of A Tree for Poverty (published in 1954). Her five years in the Gold Coast had unleashed her creativity in a remarkable way: she had published two short stories and finally completed the draft of a first novel. Yet, her renewed sense of creativity—and of freedom—was onerous. She had begun to glimpse the heavy personal demands that the writing life would impose on her. In a sense, she did not really wish to comprehend those burdens because she knew at some level such knowledge would irrevocably alter the course of her life.

  9

  PART FEAR,

  PART EAGERNESS

  (1957–1961)

  WHEN PEGGY AND the children left the Gold Coast in January 1957, Jack stayed behind for the few months remaining to complete his tour of duty. The Laurences—principally because they were concerned with the children’s education—had already decided to leave Africa at the end of that tour, but Marg’s illness obviously precipitated Peggy’s early departure. On one of the legs of the twenty-hour flight, a stewardess gave the anxious mother a magazine to read, the lead article in which was tided “Great Air Disasters of the Past Decade.”

  Peggy and the children first flew to London, where they stayed with Adele; then they went to Montreal and then Vancouver, where Mona, with whom Peggy had been reconciled about five years earlier, met their plane. A few days later, the three flew to Victoria. When Ruby met that flight, she was quite straightforward in expressing her relief: “You’re young and strong. You’ll take over. You’ll manage things.”

  Marg was home from hospital but extremely weak, requiring huge doses of painkillers. She spent most of each day on the chesterfield. Quickly, Peggy found herself in a three-way conflict. She tried to keep the children busy and cheerful, obviously not wanting to make them aware of the precarious state of their grandmother’s health. She sought to spend time with Marg but found Ruby’s twitchy behaviour intrusive. “I often felt,” she recalled, “like blowing up at her, but knew I absolutely must not. There was a lot of John Simpson in us all, his impatience, his quick anger, but also endurance and strength.” Soon, niece and aunt were snapping at each other. All of this came to a head over the living arrangements in Ruby’s small, one-storey house with only two bedrooms, hers and Marg’s. The children were to sleep in the basement and Peggy in a folding cot in Ruby’s room.

  Not only the lack of privacy but also Ruby’s insensitivity bothered Peggy. One day, while Ruby and a slightly better Marg were out to tea at a friend’s home, she made a pre-emptive strike: she created her own makeshift bedroom in the basement, next to the children’s (this was Bob Wemyss’s bedroom but he was working in Nanaimo). When Ruby returned home, she became angry at the fait accompli. “She not only couldn’t conceive of a decent bedroom in the basement, she couldn’t understand my need for privacy or my need to be close to my children. Under great strain, she lashed out at me. I became angry myself. ‘You don’t understand, you just don’t. You’ve never had children. I’m not going to have them sleeping away down there if I’m not near them. And I’m not a child! I can’t sleep in your bedroom!’ ” This was how Margaret Laurence remembered it towards the end of her life. A letter to Adele from the time gives a slightly different spin on the turn of events, emphasizing lack of privacy as the predominant issue:

  I have a room fixed for myself in the
basement, here I can type at night and not disturb anyone. There is one bedroom down here, where the kids sleep, and I sleep in my den. The walls are only blankets pinned up, but I have made a wonderful desk from an old door set on two trunks, and I am quite happy down here. My aunt put us in her room, to begin with, and I had no privacy at all—I couldn’t work at all, I couldn’t even read in bed without waking the kids. She was very much against my moving down here—I don’t know why, as it is so much better for everyone. I can’t bear not to have some place I can call my own. I just cannot stand being with people all the time, even my own kids.

  Not unexpectedly, Marg became deeply upset about the quarrelling between her sister and daughter. Years later, Peggy, after relating the bitter fight she had with Ruby, took back some of her negative statements, almost as if she could not tolerate the fact she had felt—and, more importantly, expressed—such enmity: “Every day, despite our occasional disagreements, I marvelled at her determined cheerfulness.”

  As before, Peggy did not have the words with which to speak to Marg. This time, she avoided the topic of death: “I decided at the time that if she wanted to, she herself would bring up the subject. I didn’t feel I could.” The closest the two came to such a conversation occurred on the day Peggy was sitting with Marg in her bedroom. Suddenly, she revealed to her daughter she had long admired a stanza from Walter Savage Landor’s “On His Seventy-Fifth Birthday”:

  I strove with none, for none was worth my strife

  Nature I loved, and next to nature, art

  I warmed both hands before the fire of life

  It sinks, and I am ready to depart.

  These lines reflect a stoic—but isolated—grandeur, a quality admired by and embedded in mother and daughter. Peggy’s eyes welled up with tears, she reached for her mother’s hand, and both sat in a warm silence. Then Marg changed the subject. “I think,” Peggy recalled, “she wanted it that way.” Since they had always shared a love of literature, Peggy felt Marg had chosen this apt way to take her leave.

  Hesitantly but eagerly, Peggy wanted to show Marg the typescript of This Side Jordan. When Ruby learned of the novel, she asked her startled niece if she could read it. Her only comment, not unexpected and very much in the John Simpson mould, was: “Dear, I think it’s rather gross.” Somewhat improbably, Peggy later claimed a surge of affection for Ruby suffused her on that occasion. To complicate matters, Ruby and the children came down with “Asian flu”: “Honestly … for a few weeks I thought I would go out of my mind. I guess I hit the bottle pretty hard, and I swear that’s the only way I got through those weeks.”

  Marg was a sympathetic but discerning reader, one who offered substantial criticisms of the narrative. She understood the energy and sympathy that had gone into the creation of the African characters but felt the Europeans had been slighted in the process: “Despite the fact that by then, she was usually not able to concentrate properly for more than short periods of time, I sat beside her bed and she went through the manuscript, section by section. We were back, suddenly, to her critic-teacher, love-of-literature self, and I, to my young self. It was her final gift to me.” The literary collaboration of mother and daughter had another curious twist when, that March, Peggy had the first intimation of the novel which would evolve into The Stone Angel: “I picture [she told Adele] a very old woman who knows she is dying, and who despises her family’s sympathy and solicitude and also pities it, because she knows they think her mind has partly gone—and they will never realize that she is moving with tremendous excitement—part fear and part eagerness—towards a great and inevitable happening, just as years before she experienced birth.”

  In 1957, a somewhat self-conscious Peggy confessed to Adele this “picture”—so odd did the subject matter seem—might lead her friend to think she was off her rocker. Significantly, she could tell Adele of her vision “because you are the only person, apart from Jack, to whom I can spout these vague and half-formed ideas.” Later, The Stone Angel would play a part in the breakup of the Laurence marriage.

  By the middle of March 1957, Peggy was eager to settle down. She also experienced “an overpowering urge to make up to my family (i.e. husband and kids) for all the neglect they have endured over the past year. Not really neglect, you know, but half my mind was elsewhere. I wonder what I shall want to write about next?” Jack felt neglected, and the children often felt their mother saw them as a nuisance. Under the circumstances, she found it arduous to resume work on her half-finished Somaliland novel.

  During their first six months in Vancouver, the Laurences rented a ground-floor flat at 1540 St. George Avenue in North Vancouver, moving on March 3, 1958 to a small house they purchased at 3556 West 21st Avenue. Jack obtained work dealing with the highway being built between Vancouver and the little fishing town of Squamish. At first, Peggy had been eager to return to Canada, but then the “happiness pill” mentality of North American life began to bug her. This was in startling contrast to Africa: “it was a stinking place I suppose, but I loved it and felt at home there as I never did in my whole life here. I’d still go back like a shot … and live all my life there.”

  That spring, Marg was well enough travel to the mainland to visit with the Laurences, although she was often exhausted and in pain. A few months later, she was confined to a hospital room. The injections of morphine made her mind wander, but she insisted on seeing her two grandchildren.

  The nurses tied her white hair with a blue ribbon, put on her lacy nightgown and a new soft, woolen jacket, installed her in a wheelchair, and brought her down to the lobby in the hospital, where Aunt Ruby and I were waiting with the children. The kids were very quiet, but they both said hello to Granny. By this time I had told them that she was dying, trying to explain it as best I could. After a few moments, the nurses took her back to her room, but not before she had looked carefully at the children, storing up a picture of them in her memory, memory that was soon to be lost.

  Peggy and the children returned to Vancouver. Then, in September, not long after that visit, Ruby called to tell her Marg was in the final stages of her illness. Brother and sister travelled to Victoria, where they stayed with Ruby, Peggy sleeping in Bob’s room and Bob, who worked as a town administrator, on the chesterfield. By this time, Marg’s skin “had turned very dark, almost an olive black … There was even a strange beauty about it.”

  Peggy and Bob, who had grown much closer in their mother’s final days, had to return to their daily lives. Vem and Ruby were with Marg when she died. Peggy later reflected: “I’ve never liked people seeing me off at airports. Mum never liked people seeing her off on trips either. No one can tell about that last voyage—the one truly solitary one, but in a sense, not solitary at all—in which the baggage of an entire lifetime is finally lightened.” What Margaret Laurence did not reveal in Dance was the full extent of her own painful reaction to the dementia that overcame Marg as her life came to an end on September 25, 1957 at the age of sixty-eight. At the time she herself was dying, she scribbled in her journal: “God, please don’t let my mind go until I do. My mums did. It broke my heart.”

  Earlier that autumn, Jack became severely ill with kidney stones, which had to be removed by surgery. At that time, Jack had been supplementing his income by working as a marking assistant to Gordon Elliott of the English department at the University of British Columbia, who taught a compulsory course for engineering students. Peggy took over her husband’s responsibilities. Since the Laurences had been hit badly by lack of money following Jack’s illness, she was glad of the work. More importantly, she became a close friend of the occasionally irascible, usually outspoken but always warm-hearted man who would remain one of her closest friends. Tall, thin and angular Gordon, six years older than Peggy, had attended the University of British Columbia and Harvard. Although he taught in the English departments at UBC and, later, Simon Fraser, he was equally interested in history. At the time he first met the Laurences, he was working as a research assist
ant on two projects, Margaret Ormsby’s British Columbia: A History and R.E. Watters’ British Columbia: A Centennial Anthology.

  Peggy soldiered on with her Somaliland novel, submitted the typescript of This Side Jordan to the Atlantic Monthly contest, continued work on short stories set in West Africa and started to type out her Somaliland diary, an occupation “good for laughs.” She didn’t think she had “a hope in hell” of winning the contest but the reaction of the Atlantic Monthly was not as negative as she had feared: they pinpointed the weakness in the depiction of the European characters. If she rewrote those portions of the book, the editors expressed interest in reconsidering it. In June 1957, Peggy wrote a warm letter of congratulation to Adele when she won the Governor General’s Award for The Sacrifice, her powerful depiction of the hardships of immigrant experience: “When I saw the writeup … I just felt like showing it to everybody and saying ‘I know her!’ ” Although she could be rivalrous with other writers, such sentiments never entered into her friendship with Adele.

  In the midst of financial struggles and resettling in Canada, Peggy was working frantically on a number of literary projects, each requiring a lot of attention. Sometimes, she was at the edge of despair, understanding for the first time why medieval man made it the paramount sin. Her writing touch seemed to be the reverse of Midas’s—everything she touched turned to dust. She also found it impossible to give her writing the attention it needed and to deal with her housework, marriage and children. Often, she was crippled with guilt as well as despair, as she confided to Adele in February 1958: