The Life of Margaret Laurence

by James King

  When you have two kids you’ll probably wonder why you didn’t keep a free mind! So much of one’s thought, time and emotions are drained away from work, with a family. However, I guess it amounts to one’s definition of “free”—I know I could never be truly free unless chained (in a manner of speaking) to these people I love, my man and my kids.

  I sometimes think “why can’t I get away from all these screaming brats just for 2 months and finish my story!” No doubt there is much to be said for and against each way of life.

  I constantly lose my temper with the children, mainly out of a frantic desire to get all the housework done so I can get to work and a sort of impotent fury when they create more and yet more domestic work to be done before I can do any writing!

  She was being invaded by guilt that she was not living up to her role as mother and housewife. The resulting conflicts made her difficult to live with. If she could not succeed as a writer, she knew her life was meaningless. Helpless in the wake of her strong wish to write and of her equally strong sense of her responsibilities to husband and children, she sometimes lambasted herself for “lack of guts,” even though the problem, most simply put, was that there were not enough hours in any day to allow her to accomplish what she felt needed doing. In an attempt to distract herself, she even took to finishing furniture as a form of therapy. “Now, Adele, honest to God, I would hate to be thought ‘artsy craftsy’—I simply loathe that kind of woman.” But Peggy was often the model of a dutiful wife and mother, even though adherence to the conventional caused her anguish. In one photograph from 1954 during a visit to Canada, Peggy—dressed in her Sunday finery—poses with her daughter and another child; in another, she is the meticulous mother helping Jocelyn with her hair.

  Peggy with Jocelyn and friend, Victoria. 1954. (illustration credit 9.1)

  Peggy arranging Jocelyn’s hair, Vancouver, c. 1959. (illustration credit 9.2)

  3556 West 21st Avenue, Vancouver. (illustration credit 9.3)

  The tiny Laurence home on West 21st Avenue contrasted drastically to the family car, a white Jaguar with red leather upholstery and walnut dashboard. The second-hand automobile was Jack’s pride and joy. For him, the treasured Jag provided compensation for his new, humdrum life back in Canada. Peggy found no such exotic touch: she was confined to a small house and repetitive, hectic domesticity. Her minute ground-floor writing room—the walls of which were decorated with spears and shields—doubled as the family den. There were some diversions. She and Zella Clark, her neighbour from across the street, attended sessions called “Living Room Learning: Great Religions of the World,” where tapes about various cultures were played, but Peggy seldom partook in the resulting discussions. She never became a part of the wifely culture of the street because—as in Ghana—she used all her spare time to write. She took comfort in visiting another housewife, Jan Bhatti, an immigrant from India. Peggy liked to drop in on this woman because she found in her home a serenity increasingly absent from her own.

  She wanted to be a more than competent suburban housewife, but the mundane chores that constitute domestic life frustrated her. Sometimes, she could be ruthlessly practical. Never much interested in gardening, she turned half of her backyard over to David, who filled the space with canals, dams, roads and bridges. At other times, she used her storytelling gifts to intrigue the neighbourhood children with the tale of the Invisible Cats. This narrative—a serial in many parts—was so gripping that Jocelyn and her friends would race home from school for the next instalment.

  In the summer of 1958, Jack worked as resident engineer on the dismantling of the old Peace River Bridge at Fort St. John. For the first time since returning to Canada, the Laurences felt at peace. Both she and Jack sensed they were “country people at heart,” who did not much care for cities: “Farming, however, is out. We know nothing about it, and I would drop dead if I had to approach a chicken at close quarters.” Nevertheless, the old problems continued to haunt her. She did not like Adele’s suggestion that she spend some time in a writers’ retreat: “I am not much on ‘groups’ of any kind having always preferred to be by myself when it came to work, but perhaps my work suffers from insufficient communication with other writers … Apart from you, I don’t really like writers very well.”

  Peggy also remained deeply sceptical of the state of existence in North America, even wondering if the Beat Generation—especially the fascination Jack Kerouac and his circle had with non-mainstream experience such as Zen Buddhism, progressive jazz and mystical experience—had it right in their rejection of the Western world and its values: “I really don’t care for North America, but if you happen to be born a woman when the empire is falling, where else can you go?… Anyway, one can’t go on being a stranger in a strange land, as we were in Africa … One cannot identify oneself with another culture, because everyone carries his own culture with him, like his blood-group.”

  Not yet ready to write about her own culture, she revised This Side Jordan to the Atlantic Monthly’s specifications, but they refused it again, a decision to which she herself nodded in agreement: “… however you cut it, it’s still salami.… I have begun to sharpen the red pencils and I’m going to go through and edit ruthlessly.” She felt a “veritable babe in the woods” but decided that she would bring her typescript into a publishable state; she also worked on stories set in West Africa. In the midst of her struggles to find her own voice as a writer, she was bowled over by Lolita and Doctor Zhivago:

  Both, in their widely different ways, are tremendous books. “Lolita,” I think for sheer brilliance of style; for subtlety and incredible perception, cannot be beaten. But the odd thing is that “Doctor Zhivago,” with its much simpler style, a style that is almost prosaic in places, still manages to make almost everything else written in this century look like the work of grade school children. I felt that it was possibly the greatest contemporary novel I had ever read. One is led very quietly into its tragedy—there are no fireworks. And yet, by the end of the book, the characters have become more real than most real people one knows.

  Peggy may have been a “babe” in the literary woods, but, in Pasternak’s great novel, she glimpsed, in an even more forceful way than before, the simple truth that one’s own experience must be the basis for any convincing piece of writing.

  Meanwhile, wily Gordon Elliott, who had volunteered to type the latest draft of This Side Jordan and who was well aware of Peggy’s disappointment with the Atlantic Monthly rejection, wrote secretly to Jack McClelland, the energetic, brash head of McClelland and Stewart, with whom he had a passing acquaintance:

  I have been hearing a good deal about an unpublished novel which is being passed around here in certain circles. The novel concerns the independence issue in Ghana and was written by a Mrs. Margaret Laurence, a Canadian, who was with her husband in Africa for six or eight years.

  I have not read the novel myself but others I know have and report that it is good. She has not as yet attempted to have it published, I understand, but I thought that you might be interested.

  I write this letter only to keep something reported to be good out of American hands because I have been told that some of her friends are trying to persuade her to send the manuscript to the States or to England first.

  Gordon’s letter provided the perfect bait for Canada’s greatest publisher, himself a master—when necessary—of setting the perfect trap. His response was immediate: “I very much appreciate the tip re Mrs. Laurence and I have written to her asking her to let us have a look at the manuscript.”

  In 1946, at the age of twenty-four, Jack McClelland had joined the firm co-founded by his father, John, in 1906. Toronto-born and educated, Jack served during World War II as a commissioned officer in the Royal Canadian Navy, volunteering for active duty on torpedo boats in the English channel. Early on, Jack insisted McClelland & Stewart initiate a policy of seeking out and publishing Canadian authors. Before that, the company had concentrated on agency publishing (di
stributing books published by English and American houses). When he became general manager in 1952, he even more actively pursued this tactic, becoming in the process the most important and creative publisher in Canada. McClelland’s manner, always genial and charming, sometimes concealed the enormous drive that fuelled his determination to make a place in the world for Canadian literature.

  Jack McClelland. (illustration credit 9.4)

  Gordon Elliott, understanding McClelland’s competitive spirit, wrote a letter calculated to force Jack to contact Peggy. The scheme worked perfectly, for it began an association between an ambitious publisher and the woman who would become one of Canada’s most successful writers. Jack was an enabler, a publisher perfectly attuned to an author’s needs, certainly to Peggy Laurence’s in 1959—and in the years ahead.

  By May 15, she had submitted the typescript to McClelland, although she was certain he would not take the book. Four months later, he told her he would publish This Side Jordan if he could find an American or English publisher to bring it out simultaneously (and thus make the project financially viable). By the end of November, Macmillan in England had accepted the book. (St. Martin’s Press was the American publisher. Years later, she could look back with a smile at the report of one of that firm’s readers: “The purple prose and overdone oratory of the last chapter left me only reasonably nauseated.”) The nervous author was at last triumphant: “Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah! (They want 10,000 words deleted. A mere bagatelle! And it is too long—they’re right.)”

  Immediately, she telephoned Zella Clark to announce that she was dropping out of the Spanish course in which they were enrolled. Then a note of elation crept into her voice when she added that her African novel had been accepted but she had to work on revisions. New, exciting demands were being made on her time.

  While waiting for word from Toronto on the fate of This Side Jordan, she was filled with apprehension about her future as a writer: “Without periodic encouragement, how can one possibly know if one’s standards are any good or not?” She also did not know if she was placing too much emphasis on her career as a writer: “The main point is—if one is writing and more or less gambling one’s whole existence on it and cheating family of one’s time and care and putting into it very nearly the whole of identity and it turns out to be no good—what will you say then?” This was a frightening prospect, but, she was certain, the private world of the novelist must become public: “If it remains private, it is shrivelled as a stillborn child.” Writing was the only thing in her life, “apart from sex and one’s children,” that gave her pleasure. So divided were her feelings she wished “to heaven I could drop the whole sorry business and become a Good Housekeeping Mom, complete with home-baked bread and glamour, but I can’t.”

  Two days later, she asked Adele to ignore the “puerile outpourings” expressed above: “I am going to turn over a new leaf. This always happens in the Spring—both the discouragement and the new resolutions. I’m going to: a) be cheerful; b) be sensible; c) lose ten pounds; d) stop being obsessed with writing.… Talking of weight, I have been losing this same 10 lbs every spring. Why wasn’t I born the slim sylph-type?” In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Peggy, although she was slim, was obsessed with her weight as another barometer of self-esteem. During these years, her drinking lessened considerably from her final days in the Gold Coast. She was a social drinker, who only occasionally over-indulged. She and Jack took up wine-making as a hobby and even had their own label printed. Throughout 1960, she continued to feel her writing was stolen time, but she came to the realization that perhaps “if we did not have these constant tensions we wouldn’t write at all.”

  The children provided amusing and touching moments. In May 1960, the Laurences watched Princess Margaret’s marriage on television. Peggy “bawled like the Missouri all through the ceremony.” This led David to ask her: “Why on earth are you dripping?” Apologetically, she explained to him she cried at all weddings, whereupon he “asked me if I’d cried at my own.”

  Based on the evidence before his eyes, David had come to a remarkable conclusion. “Whoever heard of a book written by a man?” he incredulously asked his mother one day. As she informed Adele, “He had believed only mothers wrote books, and that writing was something in the same category as cooking or washing dishes.”

  In the summer of 1960, Peggy became ill with severe stomach pains, leading to the removal of her gall bladder. (This experience—although she did not dwell on it—would eventually be of tremendous assistance to her when she began work on her next novel.) A more pleasant distraction was the acquisition of a dilapidated cottage at Point Roberts, Washington, just over the border from British Columbia. Despite their precarious financial position, their summer home was cheap and, what was even more crucial, isolated. “It was fairly primitive, with no plumbing, and only partial dividers between the rooms. I recall many weekends when I scribbled by the light of a candle in the kitchen while the others slept.” In family snapshots from this time, she looks relaxed, almost carefree. Her photograph of Jack and the children has a similar idealized look. Family life held many pleasures for her.

  All in all, Peggy wondered if she groaned too much. In particular, the den on the ground floor was supposedly her room of one’s own—her workspace, but “everybody and his dog tramples through it from morning to night, bringing with them bubble gum, hurt knees, and complaints about the nefarious behaviour of others.” Did she have a right to complain? Like many women of her generation, she was not sure.

  Margaret Laurence, c. 1959. (illustration credit 9.5)

  Margaret Laurence, c. 1959. (illustration credit 9.6)

  Jack, Jocelyn and David, c. 1959. (illustration credit 9.7)

  Throughout 1959 and 1960, Peggy continued “bashing away at short stories.” She was both intensely restless and extremely disciplined. After “The Merchant of Heaven,” which recounts the unsuccessful attempt of Brother Amory Lemon to proselytize his Evangelical Christianity in Accra, appeared in the first issue of the Vancouver-based Prism International, she encountered her first opposition on religious grounds to her writing: “… quite a number of people wrote to the newspapers here, regarding ‘Prism’, and some of them were very concerned about the publication of irreligious material (i.e., my story). Very peculiar. I thought of it as quite religious.” She was correct: the story emphasizes cultural differences between Western and African sensibilities and does not attack religious belief. In any event, she no longer liked the story, which she now felt was too fancy: “my usual style is plainer, but in this case the character of the evangelist was rather flamboyant in a way, so I suppose that is the reason for some of the extravagance of style.”

  She was delighted when “Godman’s Master,” “about a dwarf who was an oracle,” was accepted by the same magazine. In October 1959, she completed “The Perfume Sea”—perhaps the most accomplished of her short stories and the one that is most optimistic about the possibility people from the West can adapt to the new Africa: it is “about an Italian-American hairdresser … Maybe nobody else will be interested in Mr. Archipelago, but I have been.” As she struggled to impose her vision in these stories, she was often discouraged about the discrepancy between what she wanted to say and what she was able to put into words. At such moments, she received consolation from Browning: “ ‘…a man’s reach should exceed his grasp.’ ”

  The most wonderful by-product of her short-story writing was the enthusiastic letter of praise for “The Merchant of Heaven” which she received from Ethel Wilson, Vancouver’s premier writer and one of Canada’s first great woman writers. The ensuing friendship was not a close one, but it gave Peggy a sense of what she herself could accomplish. Two years later, in 1962, she tried to find the right words to describe Mrs. Wilson:

  She is so terrific I don’t know how to describe her. She not only writes like an angel (in my opinion) but is, herself, a truly great lady—again, that probably sounds corny, but I don’t know how else to expres
s it. Her husband is a doctor (retired) and they live in an apartment overlooking English Bay. She is very badly crippled with arthritis, but she never mentions her health. She is poised in the true way—she never makes other people feel gauche. And she is absolutely straight in her speech—she has no pretensions, nor does she ever say anything she doesn’t mean, and yet she has a kind of sympathetic tact.

  Later, when she herself became the grande dame of Canadian letters, Peggy’s generosity to younger writers bears more than a superficial resemblance to the maternal warmth Ethel Wilson bestowed on her.

  During the last six months of 1959, Peggy pruned This Side Jordan. Most of the cuts were made to those portions of the book dealing with Miranda, leaving Peggy open to the (justifiable) complaint that those sections of the book are much weaker than those devoted to Nathaniel. In order to find a way of dealing more effectively with the conflicts between blacks and whites in This Side Jordan and in her West African short stories, she turned to Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson (1939), his humorous novel about a native clerk in Africa: “I could have wept in rage and frustration—and admiration because he had done it. How?”

  If a satisfactory way of dealing with colonial Africa eluded her, she nevertheless pursued her literary career with a vengeance. In addition to her other activities, she agreed to review books for the Vancouver Sun. At home, things seemed finally to be slipping into place. In July 1960, Jack, who had been working on an unsatisfactory job at Revelstoke, obtained the post of Plant Engineer at Wright’s Canadian Ropes, a position he had very much wanted. When she was in hospital with the gall bladder operation, she had a chance to put everything into perspective: “I reviewed my life like a drowning man is said to do, and could see how stupid I’ve been to get myself in the position of having no reserves of energy or calm.”