The Life of Margaret Laurence

by James King

  In this extraordinary, passionate letter, Adele, with incredible dexterity, put the Laurence marriage into a perspective that eluded the unhappy couple.

  Adele was pointing out to Margaret her inconsistencies in her dealings with her husband. Perhaps Jack should not be asked to pass judgment on his wife’s “private area,” perhaps to ask him to do so was a kind of set-up. Jack had read a draft of The Stone Angel during the winter or early spring of 1962. In Dance on the Earth, Margaret provided her own analysis of the situation:

  When I wrote the first draft of The Stone Angel, Jack wanted to read it. I didn’t want him to. I think I knew his response would be pivotal in our marriage. I didn’t want anybody except a publisher to read it. I allowed him to read it in the end and he didn’t like it much, but for me it was the most important book I had written, a book on which I had to stake the rest of my life. Strange reason for breaking up a marriage: a novel. I had to go with the old lady, I really did, but at the same time I felt terrible about hurting him.

  Jack obviously disliked the book, but he had been used to offering his wife frank criticism of her work. In addition, she was furious when he informed her she was really a short-story writer—not a novelist. Margaret could not accept his remarks because so much of herself had gone into her new book—the characterization of Miranda in This Side Jordan had been Margaret but in a superficial way, whereas many aspects in her character were nakedly revealed in The Stone Angel. Jack glimpsed the new Margaret in that draft, and he obviously did not like what he saw. His rejection of the book was essentially a rejection of the person she was in the process of becoming.

  During the early part of 1962, Margaret was concerned with another image problem, this one involving her health. She experienced constant, pounding headaches and became convinced she had a brain tumour. This incident was transformed into fiction in The Fire-Dwellers when Stacey—filled with anxiety and unable to communicate with her husband—goes to her doctor halfway convinced and perhaps even hoping she has a brain tumour. Stacey’s thoughts about her frustration at trying to explain herself are probably a reflection of Margaret’s feelings in 1962: “How can I say anything else, without making it sound foolish? I can’t put my finger on it, anyway. Too many threads. I can’t say it, and who would believe me if I did? It’s like being inside a balloon made out of some kind of glue, and when you try to get out, you only get tangled and stuck.” Margaret’s doctor told her she was suffering from hypertension.

  Then, her attention was focused on her inability to control her weight, a new problem. In June, she confided in Adele: “I am taking diet pills, so I am either in a manic or depressive condition.” She had shed fifteen pounds and had set her goal for another ten. In a letter to Gordon of June 1962, she tried to put her conflicts into perspective:

  I am back on my diet pills again, and am hence in either a manic or a depressive state most of the time. In my manic phase, I concentrate on that great Canadian novel which I am writing, convinced that it will ultimately turn out to be deathless prose. In my depressive phase, I know the novel is no good, and cannot feel it is even worthwhile to sit down and write to a friend, as I am suffering from both lung cancer and T.B. and will probably not survive the night. Only another few weeks of this, however, and I hope to have shed the final 10 lbs which is my goal. I went downtown today and was so heartened by the way I looked in a sheath dress that I bought not one but two!

  In January 1962, the Laurences attempted to find a solution to their marriage by escaping Canada once again. They were planning to go “abroad again, if Jack can find the right kind of job,” she informed Adele. Eight months later, when Jack received the offer of a post in East Pakistan, this solution was in the process of being abandoned: “Jack and I have been trying to sort out what it was that each of us really wants to do in this life, and this appears a more complex thing than we thought it might be—he may be going abroad again, and I know that is right for him, but I wonder if I can become a memsahib once more? Anyway, we shall see. I may stay with the kids in England for a year, I don’t know.” Uncertainty had given way to certainty twelve days later:

  It is still not quite certain about Jack’s job, but it appears there will be little doubt that he will get it and will be going to Pakistan. However, we do not want to count any chickens yet. But we have discussed the whole thing, and we now feel that this will be the opportunity I have long needed, to stand on my own feet for awhile and learn to trust my own judgement. If he goes to Pakistan, he may have to go fairly quickly. I will remain here for the moment, and will go to England later this fall, probably November.… The main thing now is that I believe I can do it all right, although it will certainly not be without many qualms when the time comes.… But I feel free, or reasonably so, from the sense of despair that has been with me for some years now, so I don’t really mind the slowness of growth. As far as I am concerned, this will be the opportunity to terminate a kind of delayed adolescence, at the advanced age of 36, and it is really now or never. I feel now that it will work out both to my advantage and Jack’s, if things go as we hope and trust.

  Even to Adele, Margaret was not completely honest for the reasons behind her decision to leave Canada for England and to separate from her husband. However, her letter to Adele of August 5 provides a clue: “I met the other day George Lamming, the West Indian writer … who is here at the moment on a Canada Council something-or-other. He was unfortunately very drunk that night, so was lucid only in spells, but I thought he was terrific. Not only a very talented writer, but the kind of personality that hits you like the spirit of God between the eyes.… If he stops off in Winnipeg and you have the chance to talk with him, try to do so.” The letter carefully avoids revealing she had embarked on an affair with Lamming.

  Only years later was Margaret able to sort out the turmoil into which she was thrown: “When I first found out it was possible to love more than one person at a time, I mean sexually as well as other ways … I was so profoundly shocked it was really traumatic. I went through a lot of torment, but of course at that time I was about to split up with my husband anyway, even tho I did love him.… Life is sure as hell full of terrible complexities.” Shortly before her death, she tried to put this matter into an even fuller perspective: Lamming “was a crucial, if brief, part of my life. He was (is) a writer, too. I was simply one woman among dozens (hundreds probably) to him. But I am glad I made love with him those few times.” Even in this moving passage, however, Margaret does not dwell on the mire of confusion into which she was plunged.

  A year younger than Margaret, Lamming was born and raised in Carrington Village near Bridgetown, Barbados. At the age of nineteen in 1946, he went to live in Trinidad and, four years later, emigrated to England. At the time Margaret met him he had published four novels, including In the Castle of My Skin, and a work of non-fiction, The Pleasures of Exile. During the fifties, he supported himself by working on overseas programming for the BBC, visited the USA in 1955 when he held a Guggenheim Fellowship and was awarded a fellowship by the Canada Council in 1962. Most of that year was spent in Toronto, although his home was in London.

  In addition to being a writer of distinction, Lamming was a fervent critic of the colonial environment into which he had been born in the British West Indies. This would have immediately forged a strong bond with Margaret. So did the fact that he was black. A person who habitually identified with outsiders, she was drawn to someone who because of his race was rendered a member of a visible minority in North American society. Margaret, it must be remembered, hated certain aspects of that society; a love affair with a black man was a way of making a rebellious—if covert—statement in opposition to prevailing norms. Part of Margaret’s fantasy was that Lamming would be sensitive to the needs of a fellow writer.

  George Lamming, c. 1951. (illustration credit 10.1)

  Margaret Laurence, never simply attracted to the exotic, wanted to live and breathe it. For her, the ruggedly handsome Lamming was “very
revolutionary in outlook, and with the strength of his convictions, but not in any sense liable to write merely propaganda.” In the very same letter in which she tells Adele of Lamming’s willingness to listen to her, she reveals that she finds it increasingly difficult to talk about her concerns with anyone in Vancouver, “although Jack, God knows, is sympathetic and would always listen. I feel he is quite patient enough about my writing and the withdrawn times which it involves, without listening to a constant spate of my uncertainties.”

  Five days later, she was on the verge of making the decision to split from Jack; twelve days after that, she had reached that turning point. What she does not reveal in any letter is that she had decided to follow Lamming to London, where she hoped to rekindle their brief affair.

  When Margaret finally decided to make her move, she was painfully aware Jack was convinced—with some justification—she was abandoning him. She also realized she was uprooting Jocelyn and David precipitously, even though the publicly stated reason for her not accompanying Jack to East Pakistan was her concern about the education of the children. Also, Margaret, who sometimes had an inordinate capacity to blind herself to reality, was certain she would find in London a close-knit community of writers into which she could easily fit.

  In many passages in Dance on the Earth, although Margaret tells the truth, she fails to provide the full context of crucial situations and events. This is especially true of the separation from Jack. This is her brief—reluctant—account in Dance on the Earth. “I suppose I should say something about Jack and myself. We both had a strong sense of our own vocations but they led us into different areas. It was hard for him, when I had one novel published and another book, The Prophet’s Camel Bell, accepted, to understand that this was my vocation and I had to do it. It was hard for me, too.” She then mentions the dispute regarding The Stone Angel.

  Margaret may not have been fully aware of her motivations. She was struggling to stay alive as a writer. Slowly but very surely, her marriage seemed to be smothering that ambition, which had become the cornerstone of her identity. In part, Margaret had also become ruthless, very much in the manner of Hagar. As a child, she had lost both birth parents. In 1962, she could not tolerate another major loss, this time of her writing self. She could only create, she now felt, in isolation. In retrospect, she would later question the momentous decision she made in 1962, but “made” might be the wrong word—she was driven by inner forces so intense that she felt powerless to disobey them.

  11

  THE NECESSARY

  CONDITION OF LIFE

  (1962–1963)

  My real concern is if I can write anything worth publishing, also how to get down at least some slight suggestion of the complexities which did not bother me at one time because I did not see they were there. Please write and tell me I am not really going off my rocker, and that this kind of split personality (the public self and the other) is quite normal, really.

  THIS EXCERPT FROM a letter to Adele of August 1962 shows the kind of turmoil into which Margaret was thrown. Since, previously, she had never betrayed any sign of conflict, most of her friends and relatives were astounded by the turn of events in the Laurence marriage. The Schulhofs and the Temples were taken completely by surprise when she told them she and Jack were going separate ways. Fred Schulhof was particularly astonished because he, under the impression that all four Laurences were immigrating to the same place, had been the intermediary who had helped Jack obtain the job in Pakistan with Sandwell. The Laurences were so unsure of what they were doing and what was happening to them that they tended to give varying accounts of their future to their friends and relatives. To some, they claimed the children’s education was the predominant issue: Jack had to work overseas, where Jocelyn and David would be subjected to poor teaching. Overlooked in this scenario were the emotional needs of the children. For a long time, the children had been painfully aware their parents’ marriage was in disarray. Now, they were being uprooted, about to set off to a new place without their father. They were understandably upset and confused.

  Since Jack had not initiated the break, he was especially uncertain of the future. He knew of his wife’s relationship with Lamming, although little was ever said on the subject. To some people, such as Adele, Margaret claimed the separation was a temporary one to assist her in achieving independence as a writer and as a woman; to others, such as Nadine, she intimated that her marriage was over. So uncertain was Margaret of what she was doing that she asked for Mona’s approval of the affair with Lamming.

  On their way to London on October 12, Margaret and the children stayed briefly in Winnipeg. During that short visit, she was able to give Adele details about her somewhat precipitous behaviour. She also stopped over in Toronto—in hopes of meeting up with Lamming. The following, cryptic sentences—in a letter to Adele—refer to her disappointment in not seeing him: “Well, to begin where I left off, kid, the next round went to the Presbyterians, but more by accident than design, at least on my part, the man had already left the country, as I discovered by chance when I had lunch with Bob [Weaver]. Just as well, one might reasonably say. Of course, of course. I do say it but find it harder to believe. However, of all this no more probably need be said, now or ever.” However, she was en route to England, to where Lamming had returned.

  The Laurences had made an arrangement whereby Jack would provide support for the children and an allowance for his wife until she was able to be financially independent. Nevertheless, as she recalled seven years later, she had taken quite a risk: “When I first came to England, I needed help desperately and I had exactly 100 pounds of my own money and I was scared as hell, as I had never been on my own before in my life and was then 36 years old and with 2 kids.”

  So quickly had Margaret resolved her course of action that she had packed the draft of The Stone Angel into a large cardboard box containing, among other things, smelly tennis and running shoes, old books and David’s treasured Meccano set. Since her luggage was over the weight limit, she decided when she arrived in Winnipeg to send the box to friends in England by sea mail, a voyage which took three months. “I almost seemed to be trying to lose it,” she later reflected. “Guilt and fear can do strange things to the mind and the body. I questioned my right to write, even though I knew I had to do it.”

  In Dance, there is not the slightest evidence of Lamming’s importance in Margaret’s existence. But she does emphasize the support she received from her “third mother,” Elsie Laurence, Jack’s mother, who was also a writer. “She told me in a letter that at the end of the First World War, when Jack was two and her husband had just returned from the war, she seriously considered taking her young child and leaving her husband so she could concentrate on her writing. She stayed, of course.” Elsie may not have been as sympathetic to her daughter-in-law, with whom she obviously strongly identified, if she had been told the full circumstances surrounding Margaret’s departure for England that autumn. In a curious way, Margaret, by citing Elsie as an example of a woman who stays put and then has regrets, uses Elsie against her own son.

  A friend, Nancy Collier, helped Margaret find a flat on Heath Hurst Road, close to Keats Grove, in a leafy, ramshackle part of Hampstead. At the end of October, she provided Adele with an account of her new home:

  We have landed on our feet so far in London. It hardly seems possible but I have found a flat for precisely the rent I had in mind (which is not cheap, but rents are so damn high here these days) and it is in the area I wanted, and I am really so pleased with it. I have a living room, my own bedroom, kitchen (rather antiquated equipment, but so what?) and the kids both have a small bedroom. Their rooms are up a small flight of stairs. It is the top 2 floors in an old house. We share bathroom with a business couple on the floor below. We are 5 minutes from Hampstead Heath, 5 minutes from Hampstead High St., 15 minutes from the school where the kids will be going. There is a Public Library just around the corner, and a Launderette only a block away. We c
ouldn’t be better situated. Landlady is orthodox Jewish rather garrulous and a bit schmaltzy, but very warm-hearted, and fond of kids.

  In her autobiography, Margaret mentions that the Scots couple quarrelled constantly and that the smell of their kipper breakfasts filled her living quarters. Nevertheless, there seemed to be a certain romantic glow associated with the flat.

  I have just been interrupted for an hour in the writing of this letter by the fact that my flat was suddenly plunged into total darkness—the shillings had run out in the meter box, and when I put more in, there was a colourful blue flash which seemed to indicate that I’d blown every fuse in the house. I am having to re-learn the state of mind which regards electricity as a priceless treasure which more often than not exercises a stubborn will of its own and refuses to be exploited. Rhoda Levene, the landlady’s daughter, came to the rescue with thousands of fuses and tools and a cheerful commentary … At last, for no apparent reason, a kind of divine dispensation, the lights suddenly came on again, to the accompaniment of glad shouts of “Hallelujah” and “Mazeltov” from Rhoda and myself … Like most flats here, it is an old house, and it is full of rather strange Victorian furniture, hatracks and such, which I prefer to the modern arborite and paper-covered monstrosities found in many rented apartments here. To me, it seems absolutely ideal.… Now all that remains is to put into effect your old slogan—“Back to your typewriter!”