The Life of Margaret Laurence

by James King

  Shortly after Peggy made this resolve, events conspired against her. Jack McClelland—as a first step in the professionalization of Margaret Laurence the writer—undertook the task of obtaining an agent to represent her. On October 18, 1960, he approached Willis Wing, a New York agent who represented, among others, Brian Moore and Pierre Berton. “I presume you do handle women (don’t we all?) even though yours seems to be a predominantly male list.” Having insinuated Wing might be a bit of a chauvinist, he told him:

  This particular writer, if considerably less spectacular, may be even more promising than Jack Ludwig. I suspect that she could turn into the bread-and-butter type of client. I will give you a brief account of our association with her.… Her name is Margaret Laurence. She is a housewife. I would guess she is in her late thirties.… I heard about her through a mutual acquaintance and received a copy of her script hot off the typewriter. We thought it extremely good. She has a somewhat unique style, powerful, virile, vigorous—when I read it I found it hard to believe that the novel had been written by a woman. I’m not suggesting that she is the greatest literary discovery of the last ten years, but she is a serious writer, a writer of quality, and she tells a very good story.… She is, Willis, a gal who is serious about her writing and intends to continue.

  Promptly, Wing accepted Peggy as a client. McClelland’s acumen always worked overtime. He knew full well that, eventually, he would have to pay higher advances to an agented author, but he also realized Wing could help him to promote Margaret Laurence and thus provide the kind of broad base necessary to gain her recognition internationally.

  In November 1960, she met Jack McClelland at a launch party held in Vancouver to celebrate the publication of This Side Jordan. As he told a fellow publisher, Jack was more impressed than he had anticipated:

  I have just returned from a trip to Western Canada, during which I had the opportunity to meet Margaret Laurence for the first time. I thought you might like to know that I found her to be a thoroughly charming woman, much younger and much less severe than her pictures make her out to be. She is determined to have a full writing career, will have another novel under way shortly, and I think we can both be confident that we have on our hands a writer who will produce many good books for us in the years to come.

  Peggy, transported with joy that her writing career had begun in earnest, did not even mind mixed or bad reviews, she herself having come to the conclusion her first published novel was “amateurish,” as she informed Adele:

  I’ve had quite a number of reviews now, mostly from England, and on the whole they are kind. The London Times [Times Literary Supplement] pans the book, saying that the relationships of white and black are of limited psychological interest, but they do certainly pick out the novel’s weakest points very neatly which none of the other reviews have done—it is the only review to point out the flaws of construction which seem so glaring to me that I thought every review would mention them. I remember your saying how you wished that someone would read your book as carefully as you wrote it—few do, it seems. The Statesman gave it a very good review (hallelujah!) but said the ending was “suspiciously sunny”. Richard Church, in the Bookman, on the other hand also gave it a very good review but said the ending was despairing and showed the impossibility of understanding between blacks and whites. This disparity of opinion can only be regarded as encouraging and at least so far no one has called the book “dull”—the only really damning word in my vocabulary. I thought I would be a nervous wreck when the reviews came out, but I do not find that I am really much affected one way or another.

  Later, in September 1961, she was similarly unfazed by Kildare Dobbs’s characterization of her book as boring: “I enclose Kildare Dobbs’s review [in the Spring 1961 issue of Canadian Literature] of my novel. At first I wondered why it was so relatively loaded with smart cracks, but I learned that he spent a year or so in East Africa, so I guess he knows all about the soul of Africa. He had a poem in Tamarack Review a short time ago called African Poem’, which was quite good poetry, I think, but its general outlook was that of the European who dislikes much of his own civilization and who finds in so-called primitive cultures the bloody splendour lacking in ours, almost the ‘noble savage’ outlook.”

  When Jack McClelland met Peggy that first time in Vancouver, he had glimpsed at firsthand the extremely ambitious person who was determined to carve out a career as a writer. She herself realized she had merely taken one more step in a ever widening gyre: “I always felt that if I could ever get this novel published, that would be all I would expect out of life, but of course it is not the end but the beginning.”

  Earlier, McClelland’s enlightened self-interest had extended in another direction, when in July 1960 he sent Peggy A Candle to Light the Sun, by the recently deceased Patricia Blondal, who died of breast cancer. This was probably not a serendipitous move. In all likelihood, he was nudging her towards Canadian subject matter. However, he may not have realized she had never really liked the glamorous Blondal, when they were students together in Winnipeg. In fact, Peggy had been jealous of her classmate’s magnetic sex appeal. Nevertheless, McClelland’s ploy was to pay enormous dividends, as can be gleaned in Peggy’s letter to Adele of July 21, 1960:

  Jack McC (obviously totally unaware that I had known Pat) asked me to read it & said he would like my opinion of it.… It would have been better to have been cut in places, but even as it stands, it is quite an achievement. She attempts such a lot—an over-all picture of a small prairie town & all its people; an historical picture of the late 30s & the war & the post-war years & our generation, a wonderfully complex analysis & picture of a man’s search for his own identity & meaning.… Am I being influenced too much by her death?… I think her novel is really one of the best things on a prairie town that I’ve ever read, & it is much more as well.… if she had lived to work more on it, it would have been truly excellent, but even as it stands it is a remarkable job. I wish I could have told her so.

  Three months later, Peggy was working up the courage to begin a new novel. In her mind’s eye, it was “planned in rough, but what I fear more than anything else is that the theme will be too explicit and will overshadow the characters.” Three months after that, she was able to focus in a much more precise way on her new project:

  Right now I think I’d like to come back home. This, of course, coincides with my own state of mind. I feel I’m here to stay, for better or worse, and that I don’t need to go away any more, in fact can’t go away. It’s here, and in me, and I can’t run forever to countries (real or imaginary) which I like because they didn’t know me when I was young. If that makes any sense to you. I hated being here, for several years, you know. But now, for the first time, I feel the urge to write about the only people I can possibly know about from the inside. I don’t want to write a “Canadian novel”. It’s just that I feel I might at last be able to look at people here without blinking. Having hated my own country most of my life, I am now beginning to see why. It’s the mirror in which one’s own face appears, and like Queen Elizabeth the First, you smash the mirrors but that doesn’t change yourself after all. Very strange. I am glad I did not write anything out of this country, before, because it would have been done untruthfully, with bitterness, but perhaps not any more.

  Realizing she was contemplating a completely new step, she relinquished her African writings and expectantly looked forward to what the future might bring: the past was “over, and I have a strange sense of release and relief.”

  She felt transformed, leading her to a new, heightened sense of identity, one which can be clearly seen in the postscript of her letter to Adele of January 22, 1961: “I’ve changed my name to Margaret … it was Peggy I hated, so I have killed her off.” In parenthesis, she added wistfully: “I hope.”

  PART TWO

  MARGARET

  “I will be different. I will remain the same.… I will be afraid. Sometimes I will feel light-hearted, sometimes light-head
ed. I may sing aloud, even in the dark. I will ask myself if I am going mad, but if I do, I won’t know it.”

  A Jest of God

  10

  TERRIBLE COMPLEXITIES

  (1961–1962)

  WHY DID MARGARET “kill off” Peggy? In part, because Peggy was her young, idealistic self, a person with whom she could no longer identify. By using the name Margaret, she also signified that she had changed from a person with a passionate interest in writing into someone who was a professional writer—and thus did not wish to be known by a nickname from childhood. But other psychic forces were at work. Peggy was the girl she had been, whereas Margaret was the woman she aspired to be. This transition was sudden and violent, almost as if a change in personality would follow a change in name. The metamorphosis had its positive side—her creativity was unleashed in a remarkable, new way. But dark forces were also at work. She became restless, discontented, filled with anguish over the direction her life should take—and whether she wished to be part of a family or live alone. The question could be rephrased: what had to be killed off for the new Margaret Laurence to survive?

  Her future as a writer was not as clear-cut as she would have liked it to be. Nevertheless, she had a strong inkling her writing career was moving in a new direction, perhaps towards Canada. Although she was “sick of Africa,” she had written—by January 1961—ten short stories set in the Gold Coast, and she did not yet “know enough” to write her Canadian novel. When she first met Jack McClelland in the autumn of 1960, she had pressed him to publish a collection of her African short stories. Correctly, he pointed out such books were hard to sell and suggested such a collection be released only after she had published her second novel. Margaret, who always had a keen sense of when others were stalling or putting her off, pressed McClelland again in January 1961: “Re: your suggestion that the sale of short stories might discourage me from attempting another book, might I suggest a solution? I have ten short stories on Africa done now, and by spring I will have perhaps fifteen … You will recognize this as one of my long-standing hopes, and will probably think I have a one-track mind, which is perfectly true.” Margaret may have been stubborn but so was McClelland: “My view hasn’t changed—and Willis Wing concurs on this one—that it would be far better from the standpoint of your total career to leave the short story volume until after you have published at least one more novel.”

  That February she was filled with a pervading sense of emptiness. A month later, she informed Adele that she had torn up two previous letters to her because they “were so permeated with pessimism of a personal nature that it did not seem well-omened to send them.” Her sense of malaise was owing in part “to my persistent feelings of doubt about the novel which I had begun.” That novel, set in Africa, did not trigger her imagination, as she later recalled: “After I finished writing the stories later collected as The Tomorrow-Tamer, I had an entire novel planned, set in Africa. A beautiful plan it was, too. But I could not write it. I had really said everything about Africa that I had to say.” In fact, another set of characters had begun to hover at the edge of her imagination: “They kept creeping in, as it were, to disturb my thoughts, and they were (and are) all people here, in this country. God knows I have no desire to write a ‘Canadian’ novel in that horrible nationalistic stilted sense, but if they happen to live here, that’s another thing. One of these days something may take shape in that direction.” The transition from Africa to Canada was arduous, in part because she usually wrote best about places she had left.

  Further discouragement ensued when the Vancouver Sun abruptly discontinued its book page, and that outlet for reviewing disappeared. Her lack of self-confidence led her to consider the possibility of “spontaneous writing” in the manner of Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation. But Jack McClelland’s attitudes towards publishing provided a beacon of hope: “he is one of the very few who believe a Canadian book has to be judged like any other book—in other words, it doesn’t automatically stink because it is Canadian, nor is it automatically marvellous.”

  Six months later, the characters gathered on the horizon of her imagination had, somewhat spontaneously, come to life in a book, the working title of which was Hagar:

  Probably the publishers won’t like it. And even worse, if it ever gets published, a great many old ladies of whom I am extremely fond will never speak to me again. It is not a sensational novel. No seductions. No rapes. No murders. It’s not “timely”—i.e. it is not about Africa or any other “newsworthy” place. It is not the novel I intended to write. It is the work of a lunatic, I think. It has hardly anything to recommend it to the general public.

  I made two false starts on 2 separate novels that I’d had in mind for some time and found I could not write either one. Very nicely plotted, they were, but dead as doornails. Then this daft old lady came along, and [all] I will say about her is that she is one hell of an old lady, a real tartar. She’s crabby, snobbish, difficult, proud as Lucifer for no reason, a trial to her family, etc. She’s also—I forgot to mention—dying.

  Hagar came into being during an increasingly difficult time for Margaret. Her previous dislike of Canada had largely been in response to John Simpson’s Neepawa. She had eagerly abandoned her country for England and then Africa. Vancouver in the late fifties and early sixties may have had a certain California look in lifestyle—one quite different from both Neepawa and Winnipeg—but it certainly was not a sufficiently literary city for her. In fact, she found the local cultural scene deeply wanting: “What amuses me is how many people in Vancouver now claim to have been bosom buddies with [the reclusive, alcoholic English-born writer] Malcolm Lowry—you can bet your bottom dollar they didn’t feel that way when he was a drunk at [his shack at] Dollarton, but now he’s been discovered by the literary reviews in Paris, and so the picture has changed, and also he is safely dead, which is such a comfort, as he can now be translated into whatever legend is most pleasing.” In addition to Ethel Wilson, Margaret knew the poet Earle Birney and the novelist and short-story writer Jane Rule on a casual basis. (Later, Margaret wrote a series of important letters to Jane Rule, but Rule explains that she and Margaret met only a few times and that they never became close friends.)

  Margaret also found it difficult to make friends on the west coast, at least that is what she implied in a letter to Adele of October 1960: “We don’t seem to know very many congenial people, but in general, quite enough for the limited time we have to spend with friends.” This claim belies the evidence of her good friends, Gordon Elliott, June and Fred Schulhof, and Eva and René Temple. In her, these people found a close, warm companion.

  The Schulhofs lived a block away from the Laurences on West 20th Street, but the couples met when they were enrolled in Living Room Learning. June, Fred, Jack, Gordon and Margaret often had stirring, heated arguments on a wide variety of topics. The two women became close enough for Margaret to exclaim one day: “You’re the first woman I ever trusted!” She also told June she hated housework (although the house was always spotless when June visited), particularly ironing. Her new friend also observed Margaret’s hunger to write, which led her to rise at five in the morning several days a week. Although she was very conscious of the women’s liberation movement, she told June she was certain Jack’s intellect was superior to her own. Margaret also observed that Vancouver was a wretched, isolated place for a would-be writer to be stranded. June did have a significant influence on Margaret, for it was she who told her that her name was a beautiful one and urged her to discard “Peg” and “Peggy.”

  Margaret Hutchinson, Jocelyn’s teacher and herself a writer, introduced the Temples to the Laurences. Eva was particularly struck by the fact that Margaret seemed to be more interested in being admired than being loved. She also remembered going to see La dolce vita (1960) with Margaret, who was deeply upset by the film’s intimation of the coming of nuclear war. The Cold War gave her a pervasive sense of uneasiness. She was certain it would eventually unlea
sh a terrible holocaust. Margaret was not politically active in Vancouver, but she retained the left-wing allegiances which had been a part of her since United College days in Winnipeg.

  One image from the time recalled by all her friends in Vancouver was of an exceedingly slim Margaret pacing a room, cigarette in hand, and offering her thoughts on a variety of subjects in a staccato manner. Gordon Elliott recalled her temper. Once, he refused to buy Girl Guide cookies when Jocelyn proffered them on the phone. A few minutes later, an irate mother was on the line, telling him what a lousy bastard he was to upset her little girl. The next time he saw Margaret, she acted as if she had not made the call.

  Another witness, albeit from a different perspective, to Margaret’s life in Vancouver was a young man, Lino Magagna, a student in Gordon Elliott’s English for Engineers class for which she acted as a marker. She took great pains over Lino’s assignments and provided him with many encouraging remarks at the end of his essays; in particular, she made useful suggestions regarding the structure of his papers and the development of his arguments. From his perspective, Lino remembered Margaret as warm, whereas, when he met Jack, the young man felt Jack was cold and that the age difference between husband and wife seemed much greater than ten years. His accompanying impression—that Jack was very stiff and excessively strait-laced—was not one shared by Gordon, the Schulhofs and the Temples, who were equally fond of husband and wife.

  Mona Spratt, now Mona Meredith, never liked Jack. From her perspective, a profound change in the Laurence marriage took place when they settled in Vancouver: Margaret was on the way up, whereas Jack, who had been in a position of great authority in Africa, was on the way down. There is obviously some truth in this observation. Jack had trouble finding work and the jobs he obtained did not carry the same level of responsibility as those in Somaliland and the Gold Coast. With the publication of This Side Jordan, she had made a real breakthrough in her career as a writer.