The Life of Margaret Laurence

by James King

  Nadine Jones, had similar views, although she encountered Jack only on a few occasions and had a positive impression of him. She met Margaret in a Vancouver bookstore, the Book Nook, where she was signing copies of This Side Jordan. Shortly thereafter, she phoned to ask for advice. She was on the verge of marrying a Ghanaian and needed her acquaintance’s advice on embarking on such a venture. Margaret agreed, and this was the beginning of their friendship. (The Tomorrow-Tamer carries this dedication: “For Nadine and Kwadwo” [Assante].) Outspoken, headstrong and flamboyant, Nadine was the polar opposite of Margaret’s other women friends. The hidden portions of Margaret—her increasing dissatisfaction with her marriage and the plight of women in general—could be voiced openly to Nadine, who did not think women should be silent about the oppressions they faced. For a long time, Nadine was Margaret’s safety valve, the person to whom she could express the explosive feelings that were beginning to overwhelm her.

  To Nadine, whom Margaret saw without Jack, she confided many of the conflicts and doubts which can also be seen in the letters to Adele, but these ruminations were more personal: she could not live up to her own image of herself and, she was certain, she could not measure up to Jack’s expectations. Nadine observed a basic dichotomy in Margaret’s nature: she wanted to be the opposite of what she seemed to be. Always very much on edge when they were together, Margaret once accompanied Nadine to a Unitarian Church, where, in the midst of the service, she burst into hysterical tears.

  Increasingly, as she confessed to Nadine, she felt confined by her marriage in every conceivable way. Later, she would claim that Jack, during the years of their marriage, had placed his hands uncomfortably close to her face and neck when they were going to sleep. Her fantasy was that he might strangle or suffocate her. (In The Fire-Dwellers Mac, Stacey’s husband, pretends to strangle her while demanding she say it doesn’t hurt.)

  Certainly, the tension level at the Laurence household heated up considerably in 1961. Margaret had a fierce temper and, when she became very angry, hurled things at Jack. In his turn, Jack would smoulder in a rage. Jocelyn, now nine, would act as the family peacemaker, a particularly thankless task for a young girl. She was her father’s favourite child and when Jack became overwhelmed, he often found fault with David. As a result, Margaret often interceded on behalf of her son. Nevertheless, she could be harsh with him. Years afterward, Peggy still regretted “the fact that I once … hit my son on the face so hard that his nose bled.” She once washed Jocelyn’s mouth out with soap and if she became angry at her daughter when brushing her hair, she sometimes tugged too hard. To the children, their mother often seemed in a fury; they saw her perform many routine domestic actions hurriedly and haphazardly. She could be both brusque and impatient. The children would see their parents drive out in the car some evenings in order to quarrel away from them. One major source of bickering was money. Margaret was not a spendthrift, but she was not as careful with money as her husband would have liked. Whatever their arguments were about was secondary to their underlying differences: Jacked wanted a traditional wife and Margaret no longer fitted—or wanted to fit—such a mould. Jack expected Margaret to be a homemaker and a writer, whereas she increasingly felt that she needed time away from him and the responsibilities of running a house in order to write.

  From outsiders and even some close friends, the strains within the Laurence household were hidden. The two seemed to make an ideal couple, but they now had obviously vastly different notions of what constituted a good marriage. A few years later, in 1965, Margaret told Gordon of the high level of conflict between her private and public selves during the Vancouver years:

  You said that it seemed terrible to you that two people, both of whom you liked and had felt close to, could have been having internal stress without their friends knowing about it. But really, how could anyone else know about it? Wherever we went, we went together—to whom were either of us going to talk, as everyone we knew was a friend of both? I was on the verge of speaking to you, many times, probably many more times than you ever realized, but I did not, and I am glad I did not, as you were a friend of us both, and I think that to speak of one’s difficulties would be some kind of disloyalty much worse than any definite and open separation, which must in the end be a private decision, done without explanation, and accepted by one’s friends as such. I needed terribly to be able to speak with someone, but until I met Nadine I never could, and this holding-in, which was a matter of 15 years, was not a very good thing, I now see.

  In an awful twist of fate, Margaret’s success as a writer likely made things worse between herself and Jack. In June 1961, she was in Toronto to collect the Beta Sigma Phi award for This Side Jordan, which was named the best first novel published in Canada in the previous year. She also received the President’s Medal from the University of Western Ontario for “A Gourdful of Glory,” published the previous year in The Tamarack Review.

  A casual witness to the Laurence marriage was Alice Munro, who also lived in Vancouver. The two women talked about children and the particular problems besetting married women writers with children and other domestic responsibilities. Alice recalled: “I remember her telling me she ironed all her husband’s shirts. And I said, ‘You mustn’t do that. You must find some other way.’ I have the impression of someone who was trying terribly hard to do everything.”

  Margaret tried to keep the appearance of normality. The Laurences spent part of the summer at their recently built cottage at Point Roberts. She wrote book reviews (for Canadian Literature, founded in 1959 by George Woodcock), marked essays and even taught Sunday school at the local Unitarian church. She was justifiably angry when she found out that a writer by the name of Jack Buchholzer had lifted paragraphs directly out of A Tree for Poverty, even presenting her insights and conclusions as his own, in a book called The Horn of Africa: “I didn’t so much mind,” she told Adele, “that he had taken my translations of poems and stories, because folk literature belongs to everyone, although I rather resented the fact that he implied he had simply gone out into the desert and sat around campfires and then taken down all these glorious songs and stories directly from the Somali.” In 1962, in a letter to Rache Lovat Dickson, her publisher at Macmillan, she added: “I wrote to Mr. Buchholzer’s publishers, pointing out that I did not in any sense attach any blame either to them or to the translator, but that I was somewhat disturbed by Mr. Buchholzer’s unacknowledged borrowing of numerous paragraphs, because I intended to use portions of A Tree for Poverty in a book of my own [The Prophet’s Camel Bell] and would not care to be suspected of plagiarism when in fact I was quoting myself. I received very courteous letters both from the publishers and from Mr. Buchholzer’s agent, who apologized on his behalf and said my letter had been forwarded to Mr. Buchholzer, who might take some considerable time to reply as he was now residing in the wilds of Tierra del Fuego.”

  Work on The Stone Angel brought her to extremes of joy and frustration. She feared she might yet become manic-depressive. Adele pressed her to believe in herself and to trust to the unconscious processes which were always a part of creating a work of art. Margaret was not so sure.

  I wrote it in a kind of single-minded burst of activities, letting the thing go where it seemed to want to go and at the time I was (and still am, basically) completely convinced by the main character. But I’m beginning to anticipate the pitfalls—for one thing, it is written very simply and directly, for the simple reason that I am not clever enough to write it any other way, and in any event I still have a strong feeling for direct and simple writing; even though this style is perhaps almost archaic now. For another thing, it is by no means a new theme—but what is?

  Hagar drained her creator’s energy, leaving her completely unsure of her judgment. So, she “simply put down the story of the old lady as the old lady told it to me.” Would another person find any meaning in the resulting story or see it as only as an “excessively simple and far-fetched tale?” She could not an
swer the question: “I can’t know but I’m trying very hard to follow your example in this way, and take the thing on faith; for the moment, anyway I am terrified at the thought of submitting the manuscript, ultimately, somewhere. I never felt so hesitant about the first novel. Strange, isn’t it?”

  An odd combination of factors came together for Margaret during the writing of The Stone Angel. For one thing, even her stay in hospital became fodder for her imagination, as she told her journal in 1986: “I wrote The Stone Angel in the first draft in 1961. Twenty-five years ago.… It drew on some experience in hospital then, when I had my gallbladder out, & there was indeed a very old woman (not Hagar) in the 4-bed ward where I was.”

  The original impetus for The Stone Angel came at the time Marg Wemyss was dying. The actual character of Hagar bears more likeness to Ruby than to Marg, however. Years later, Margaret admitted to Budge Wilson that Grandfather Simpson was the real model for Hagar, although it seems obvious that many of Hagar’s external qualities are also derived from Margaret’s almost equally abrasive Grandmother Wemyss. The courage to write about a small prairie town owes a great deal to Sinclair Ross’s As for Me and My House, but Margaret was also inspired in part by Patricia Blondal’s A Candle to Light the Sun and Ernest Buckler’s The Mountain and the Valley. Another curious factor found expression and crystallization in Margaret’s new book.

  In Margaret’s childhood and young adulthood, she had been subjected to the harsh cruelty of her grandfather, who was nevertheless a genuinely powerful person. She began to associate power with oppression and, obviously, distanced herself from negative displays of power. But, as she grew older and knew herself better, she correctly perceived herself as a strong person. As she got in touch with this very real side of her character, she no longer saw the assumption or use of power in a negative light (and something essentially male), even though she was well aware it could be a destructive force. By creating in Hagar a powerful but tormented woman, she was allowing herself to look at central issues that haunted her. Was she in fact very much like Grandfather Simpson? If she was temperamentally his offspring, how as a woman could she deal with that? What kind of role model had her grandfather been to her? Being a powerful person and a woman was not necessarily a bad mix, even though she had obviously feared they might be. Could she survive as an independent person? Do women have the right to seize personal power?

  Margaret was attempting to find her writing self while fighting the conventional mores of the time. For her, the underlying fear was that she did not have a right to do this. These kinds of questions were especially tormenting because they led her to question the assumptions on which her marriage was based. This was particularly painful because she craved her husbands support and understanding in order to become an independent person and yet realized he was both uncomprehending of and hostile to those needs. So their bitter quarrels continued and so did the work on the book that vexed her deeply.

  A person such as Hagar is not only born but made: deprived of her mother at birth and subjected to her father’s harshness, she imitates his behaviour. From an early age, Hagar’s identity is shaped by her father, not her dead mother who exists only as a portrait in a frame. She can only conceive of her mother as the antithesis of herself. Since her mother died while giving birth to her, Hagar has no real knowledge of her or her personality: “I used to wonder,” she reflects, “what she’d been like, that docile woman and wonder at her weakness and my awful strength.” When her brother Matt is dying, Hagar, who is well aware that he is like their mother and not their father, cannot bring herself to “mother” him: “I can’t. Oh Matt, I’m sorry, but I can’t, I can’t. I’m not a bit like her.” Children whose parents die sometimes unconsciously assume guilt for something which is obviously out of their control; at some level, Hagar feels guilt because her mother died giving her life, and her understandable aversion to such an uncomfortable feeling might explain her revulsion towards Matt, who is so much like the dead mother. Of course, Margaret Laurence herself may have also have felt responsible at an unconscious level for the deaths of her parents.

  Despite many drawbacks, Hagar has many admirable qualities, which eventually prepare her for self-redemption towards the end of the novel. That salvation begins when she tells the story of her life to Murray Lees and bursts into tears. At that moment, she allows her thwarted femininity egress and in the process rescues herself from the constraints that have dominated her life.

  Years later, when asked about the genesis of The Stone Angel, Margaret Laurence provided this explanation:

  My feeling about it was that I had written three books out of Africa, out of those experiences, and I really knew that I didn’t want to go on writing about Africa, because otherwise my writing would become that of a tourist. I had written everything I could out of that particular experience, and I very much wanted to return home in a kind of spiritual way. I think that my experience when I wrote The Stone Angel was remarkable, because I kept feeling that I knew I was getting the speech exactly right! It was mine! It was the speech of my grandparents’, my parents’ generation, and so on. Whereas when I had been writing about Africa I could never be sure. It was not my culture, and of course we know things about our own culture, and about our own people that we don’t even know we know. When I wrote The Stone Angel, it was really rather marvellous, because phrases, bits of idiom, would come back to me that I had forgotten, that I didn’t know I even remembered, from my grandparents’ speech.… And also that I do have, both in my own life and in my life view, a sense of the wheel coming full circle, that kind of journey, where we end up in the place where we began, but with a different perspective.

  In her reply, Margaret Laurence recalls in vivid detail certain aspects of the joy that filled her as she worked on her first novel set in Canada, but she does not communicate the sense of unease which she also faced.

  In March 1962, the book was a “terrible mess.” It will have to be completely re-written.” Three months later, she resumed work on “the old-lady novel” but in August she abandoned work on it, feeling the book was boring. Also, she was certain that writing a novel about an old woman was a form of evasion:

  I often feel that anything I write about people here will be naive or perhaps merely corny, and for this reason I have gone to any lengths to avoid writing about the situations which really concerned and moved me. I have the feeling that the novel about the old lady represented such an evasion. Perhaps in the long run there is no way other than to look inwardly and personally, and take the risk. I think the important thing is to go on doing something, and not to be paralysed by one’s doubts and uncertainties, but of course this is easier said than done.

  Her entire writing career, she became certain, was a “kind of screen … so that one need never make oneself vulnerable.”

  The Stone Angel is many things, but it is not a work of art which is evasive. Margaret could not work on the book in any consistent fashion because she was getting in touch with painful memories and conflicted feelings. Like Hagar, she had suffered cruel losses at an early age, losses which were difficult for her to come to terms with except in writing. But the process of writing made her vulnerable because she was opening herself up to those forces which had earlier torn her apart.

  As a respite from work on her second novel, she turned her attention to converting her Somaliland diaries into a travel book. Even this proved to be a more difficult task than she had at first envisioned: “I always had the feeling that all I would need to do would be to put together large chunks of my diaries, and that would be that. But no. I have changed so much, and I failed to see so much at the time, that the whole thing has to be done from scratch.” Honesty was another issue that haunted her in the writing of The Prophet’s Camel Bell: “How much of yourself do you reveal? in revealing this or that, are you being honest or merely showing off?” Despite such obstacles, the Somaliland typescript was completed by the middle of April 1962 and on its way to Willis Wing in
New York. Three months later arrived the joyful news that Macmillan in London had accepted the book.

  As Margaret was well aware, The Prophet’s Camel Bell was a memento to her younger self and to the early days of her marriage. It was written at a time the Laurence marriage had reached a deep state of crisis. The full extent of the conflicts cannot be gauged in any extant letter from Margaret, but it can be seen in Adele’s letter to her of April 20, 1962. Adele, just as fiery as her close friend—and perhaps even more committed to the writing life—was still single and could offer a detached, non-judgmental view of a fraught situation.

  I have far too much respect and fondness for both you and Jack to mistake this for anything but the kind of readjustment that takes place periodically between intelligent, loving people who need to be honest with each other. I guess you’ve let this pile up for a long time, Peg, so that now that it’s come into the open it’s done so with the force of a lot of repression released behind it,—what I’m trying to say is that you’re still probably awash with various waves of emotion, guilt, relief, love, etc., etc., which haven’t relaxed to their proper proportions yet … I know how much you’ve always dreaded Jack’s disapproval, and what this rebellion must have cost you,—at least I imagine it must seem like a rebellion in terms of what you’ve conceived your relationship with Jack to be. And yet, who knows, maybe complete submission isn’t what Jack’s wanted from you all along? Perhaps asking him to pass judgment on your “private area”—in this case your writing, is a kind of imposition on him too? It shifts your own responsibility for your private self onto him too, something which, ultimately, you’ve found impossible to bear because it reduces yourself to less than a whole person in your own mind, and something which I’m sure Jack doesn’t need. Jack is far too big a guy and too capable in his own right to need the reassurance that you’re not competing with him. So what has happened is a kind of habit pattern’s been set up in which you both have been trapped. You rebel against what you’ve invited, Jack’s views on work which you haven’t allowed yourself to develop completely in what should be airtight—the crucible of your own imagination—and Jack, since he does have a marked literary turn of mind, [is] allowing himself to do what you seem to demand. What you really want is reassurance from him. What he gives you is what you say you want,—critical appraisal, at a time when you’re too unsure of the thread to be able really to bear it.