The Life of Margaret Laurence

by James King

  A few days later, she assured Gordon Elliott of the delights inherent in her new situation and of her satisfaction in having fulfilled Virginia Woolf’s essential recipe for success for a woman writer: “Right now, I am so glad to be here that all I can do in the evenings is walk around the flat and gloat about it. A room of one’s own. Am I selfish? Yes. But I needed this place so badly, and I found it—a kind of divine dispensation. We are going to be okay.” The bravado has a touch of desperation in it. In Vancouver, she had shared her writing space with a television set in the den; in London, she wrote in her small cramped bedroom.

  The “initial elation” had begun to disappear a month later and was followed by the “inevitable letdown.” She now felt the “only kind of home” she valued was one associated with other writers, “members of my tribe.” However, she soon realized, “I had had a kind of fantasy about taking part in the literary scene.… this did not happen.” She did become friends with the novelist Alexander Baron and his wife, Delores, as well as the writer Jean Stubbs. Mordecai Richler, who had already published Son of a Smaller Hero and The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, was also living in London; he and his wife, Florence, were friendly. Although Margaret pointed out that Mordecai could act in the “brusque, understated style” for which he was well known, she also found in him a kindred spirit, a person of considerable warmth.

  When her typescript arrived towards the end of November, she decided it did not read badly. “It may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it is what I want to say about these particular people.” Despite rapid fluctuations between optimism and despair, she discovered, to her surprise, that she was at heart a survivor. “I do not despair. Also, I can’t afford to drink a great deal, which is a good thing. I can’t afford to smoke, but I do, anyway. I’m down to 25 Weights a day (they are those puny little half-size cigarettes) so I’m improving.” At this time, “deep inhibitions” prevented her from going into pubs by herself.

  A little more than two weeks later, her drinking almost got her into trouble at a party hosted by the Andrzejewskis:

  Yours truly quaffed too deeply and became overly friendly with a handsome Somali boy—I say “boy” advisedly, as when I thought of it afterwards I felt like his grandmother, to tell you the truth. Well, luckily before I had completely shattered my reputation, a sudden inner voice said very distinctly to me “Lady, what the hell do you think this is—the Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone?” When you find you’re drinking, or etc, to drown your sorrows, it is time you quit. I quit. So it is tea for me, friend, just one gay round of tea and coffee after another. After a week of this strictly non-alcoholic regime, I can’t say I feel any better, but I feel more reliable, as it were.… The day after that ill-starred party I was immersed in deep Celtic gloom and went around all day thinking “I am an old bitch, dying of dyspepsia and remorse”. However, all these things pass. It hurts not to be able to have what you want, and it hurts perhaps even more not to be able to want wholeheartedly what you do have. But no doubt the fog will lift in time, and the way will become clear. At least, this is what I keep telling myself.

  The path did not become clearer, however. Despite her earlier claim that she was inhibited from pub hopping, she went out many nights by herself to various places in search of George Lamming. In fact, one of the reasons she had been eager to settle in that section of London was because it was also the area where Lamming lived. When Margaret went out at night, she left Jocelyn (age ten) and David (age seven) by themselves with the assumption that Mrs. Levene or her daughter Rhoda would be nearby if the children needed help. She felt compelled to search out the person who, unbeknownst to himself, had become the focus of her existence.

  Only five years later was she able to reflect on her attitude towards sex in that first year apart from her husband: “Sex … is one aspect of my life which I have never experienced any guilt about, even including the really nutty series of brief encounters my first hellishly lonely year in London—I don’t regret one minute of any of that. I had no sense of guilt at the time and I don’t now—only gladness that I wasn’t too affected by my Presbyterian background to take and give whatever warmth was there.”

  Nevertheless, by February 1963, she felt “lower than a snake’s belly” and was filled with the “recurring anxiety” that she was “slightly insane.”

  I think this is because I am at the moment trying to face up to, and assimilate, and do something about what I really think and feel, not what I am supposed to think and feel, and this is therefore a process which I have wanted and needed to undertake for some years, but it is also so much at variance with my “normal” life, in which one sought to do what everyone expected and thus not to alarm aunts, mother-in-law, etc. I keep getting letters from relatives, saying they hope the children are all right—clearly believing they are not all right at all.

  Sometimes Margaret was so unconvinced of her own reality as a person that she took comfort in the existence of other Londoners, in the illusion “everything must be all right if it is moving along so normally on the surface.” She took renewed encouragement from Elsie Laurence’s letters of support but was disturbed by her mother-in-law’s remark, “it is always easier to do what people expect of you, even in trivial things.” The following sentence chilled her: “Also, as with suicide, one is afraid of failure.”

  In Dance on the Earth, Margaret refers to Sylvia Plath’s suicide that same February 1963 in London. Like Plath, Margaret was an emigré woman writer separated from her husband, but there, she claimed, the resemblance ended: “But I knew in that instant, looking at the newspaper, that I was not within a million country miles of taking my own life. No thanks to me, and no blame to Sylvia Plath. I had been given, as a child, as a teenager, so much strength by my mothers.” However, she was more intimidated by Plath’s fate than she admitted in her autobiography. In April 1967, she told a friend:

  I don’t think I ever felt that there would be some sudden revelation, or that everything would change, but I think I used to feel that one day I would achieve a kind of calm and would at last possess wisdom and would stop being afraid. As you say, it doesn’t happen, and after a while you see that you’ve got the only self you’re ever going to have, for life. I suppose if you realize that, and it really isn’t bearable to you, then you do what Sylvia Plath did. I don’t think I hate my own failings quite as much as I used to.

  In August 1974, she returned to the topic of Plath’s suicide in a letter to Ernest Buckler in which she tells him the parallels between herself and the American poet were obvious to her in 1963: “I mourned her as though it had been myself who died.” In the winter of 1963, Margaret reached one of the lowest points of despair—a time when she indeed hated her own feelings—she was ever to experience. She seriously flirted with the idea of suicide but then turned her back resolutely against any such step. She felt driven, but she was not sure by what. Her search for Lamming took on the appearance of a quest for some sort of romantic hero to rescue her, but she had in some ways rejected the chivalrous side of her husband. Was her writing worth preserving at such enormous cost? Did she have the right to seek an independent existence? Why was she so driven? She could not sort out these burning issues and was left with a pervading sense of emptiness.

  Soon after she arrived in London, she had a great deal of difficulty in coping with the amount of support money Jack had agreed to provide. Although she was desperate for Canada Council funding for which she had applied before she left Vancouver, she was not sanguine about her chances for success: “Probably they won’t give me anything, as married women aren’t supposed to need any money of their own, or something like that.” Without such a subvention, she had to contemplate the possibility of taking on some sort of part-time work to make ends meet. Aunt Ruby, in particular, was opposed to any such course of action, feeling the children had been subjected to a great deal and would be further traumatized. The horrible paradox was that Aunt Ruby—the closest to an evil stepmother there was in Marga
ret’s life—was also a professional woman, but one without dependents. Now, she was quite willing to criticize her niece for her pursuit of a career. The message seemed to be: women can only have careers if they completely sacrifice their personal lives. Otherwise, they should not even try.

  That March, Margaret was not completely surprised when her request was turned down: “I am sure they did not really think I needed the money and of course in their terms I didn’t, so I was not stunned or anything.” A month later, rage had replaced resignation: “I do not feel brazenly brave about the Canada Council any longer. I hate the bastards. I have come to this feeling—I need that dough; they have it; they will not part with it, to me; so to hell with them. All I sincerely hope is this—that one of these years they will offer some of their cash to me, and that I will then be in a position to refuse, haughtily. What satisfaction! Well, almost the only times they give people money is when it is not really needed any longer. Nuts to them.”

  Much needed help and support came to the beleaguered author from her English publishers, Macmillan, and in particular from Rache Lovat Dickson, a transplanted Canadian who was the publisher of the trade list. For her, he was a “man in a million.” One night when his wife was away in Yugoslavia, he invited her over to dinner. As Margaret recalled, “I got stoned and wept on his shoulder—how could I? I don’t think he minded, in fact I think he was quite pleased in some odd way, so I don’t feel too badly (is this an improvement? Yes, I really think it must be, as a few short months ago I would have spent days and days in guilty remorse over this kind of thing).” She was sufficiently trusting of Rache that she agreed at his insistence—despite her lifelong phobia about speaking in public or making public appearances—to be one of the speakers at the Canadian Universities Society Literary Supper in June 1963. She “sweated blood” but was otherwise okay. Earlier, on Valentine’s Day, she accompanied him to the same group’s Annual Ball, where she was afraid of “skidding on the floor and falling flat on my fanny, but God’s grace was with me.”

  When Rache retired in 1964, Alan Maclean, who had been hired away from Collins by Maurice Macmillan in 1954, assumed his responsibilities. However, he had become actively engaged with Margaret’s work well before that. John Gray at Macmillan in Toronto had recommended her as a short-story writer, and he published “The Rain Child” in the 1962 edition of Winter’s Tales. In Alan—the son of Sir Donald Maclean, a Liberal cabinet minister knighted during the Great War, and the younger brother of Donald the spy—Margaret found a publisher who was, if anything, more keen on her work than Jack McClelland. She also made close friends of Alan and, later, his wife, Robin (they married in 1967). A reformed alcoholic two years older than Margaret, Alan possessed a warmth and wit that provided Margaret with much entertainment. Once, she accompanied the Dicksons to a wedding which Alan attended in the company of Muriel Spark, another of his authors. (Rebecca West and Lillian Hellman were also on his list.) Spark turned out to be “unexpectedly appealing—rather vixen, as you might expect, but not having in personal life (at least, to a casual view) the biting wit of her writing.” The best part of the event was when the group from Macmillan was accused by an usher of not being guests but the singers paid to perform. “Later, Alan said what a fool he’d been—he ought to have said, ‘Yes, we’re the singers, and what’s more, we haven’t been paid yet.’ ”

  Unlike many other publishers, he had a strong belief in the short story, even though he realized that this genre often presented serious financial risks in the market-place. For a number of years, he edited the annual collection of short stories, Winter’s Tales. Although a great supporter of Margaret’s, he was quite capable of rejecting work by her. On December 2, 1964, she wrote to him: “Re: my story, ‘Horses of the Night,’ I think it would be better, after all, if you returned it to me. Obviously, if I didn’t get across the point to you, I didn’t get it across, so never mind showing it to anyone else. In time, maybe, I’ll see where it went wrong.”

  Right from the start of their relationship as publisher and author, Maclean—in stark contrast to Jack McClelland—told her he welcomed the idea of a collection of her West African stories. Knowing of her financial problems, he agreed immediately—soon after her arrival in England—to send her £100, the advance for The Prophet’s Camel Bell; later, he also sent her manuscripts to evaluate and paid her as a reader. (She also wrote scripts for the Hausa Section of the BBC African Service.) So trusting of Maclean did she become that she sent the typescript of Hagar to him in January 1963. She did this even though she was extremely unsure of the quality of the book; earlier, that autumn, she had even considered the radical step of changing the narrative from first to third person.

  Meanwhile, later that January, she brought Jack McClelland up to date (without telling him the typescript was at Macmillan): “At the moment, I am typing out the novel which I told you about when I was in Toronto a year or so ago. I had put it away for a long time, as I was filled with terrible doubts about anything written with a Canadian setting. However, I got it out again when I arrived here, and I do not know why I was so fearful about it before. I’ve re-written parts of it, but the bones remain the same. For better or worse, this is the way I want to say it.”

  In his response, Jack told her he had reconsidered the short-story collection in light of Maclean’s enthusiasm. This was welcome news, but nothing compared to the surprise phone call she received on February 14 from Maclean: “This book is going to make a difference to you, probably for the rest of your life.” His words were prophetic, but in 1963 an ecstatic Margaret was more aware of the benefits she would receive in the short term.

  ALAN MACLEAN (MACMILLAN’S) LIKES HAGAR! HE LIKES IT! CAN IT BE TRUE? He has just phoned, and I am in something like a state of shock. He thinks it needs to be cut, somewhat, as it moves rather slowly in the beginning … He also wonders about the title, thinking it makes it sound like an Old Testament tale, so I will give thought to that also … He says he knows this kind of old lady very well, and that he finds her entire predicament and her death very moving. Adele, I feel as though my faith in life, in myself, in everything, has been miraculously restored to me. Of course, this novel meant a lot more than it should have done, to me, as in way it was (or became) a whole test of my own judgement—and luckily, I had got to the point where I knew that although it might not say anything to anyone else, it did say a lot to me, so perhaps really that was the true restoration of faith.… Nevertheless, in terms of novels, it meant the transition from writing about Africa to writing about my own people, the only ones I know from the inside, so on that level also it had almost too much significance for me.

  In this wonderful, triumphant moment, she also realized she must in the end be her own judge and jury in assessing her literary career: “The real crux of the matter is that one must not be too dependent upon anyone else’s point of view, and therefore I ought not to be moved too much either by acceptance or rejection.” But her uncertainties about herself had been so great that she was filled with “enormous relief.”

  Four days later, to the elation of success was added a bittersweet note when Jack wrote from Pakistan, telling her how much he admired her bravery in carving out a career as a writer in isolation.

  Then I feel like bawling my eyes out, wondering about the irony of life, and how it can be possible that for so many years I wanted to communicate my feelings about many things to him, and now that he is finally interested in listening, I no longer care, and this seems so brutal on my part that I can’t bear to think about it, but I can’t deny it, either. One hopes, naturally, for some kind of change of heart which will make it possible for things to be resumed although on a different basis from before, as I can no longer live with too much of a disparity between the outer expression and the inner belief. I no longer think that I handled the whole business—coming here, etc—badly, however. I think now I did what was basically the right thing, out of pure instinct.… Jack … still suffers from the same old feel
ing of purposelessness, or rather, lack of compelling purpose.

  But Jack’s sense of “compelling purpose” had been centred on his marriage, and it had been shattered, to a large degree, because of his wife’s sense of a radically different “compelling purpose.” No longer could she be the child-bride completely dependent on a “father-type husband”; no longer could she “go on being what amounted to some kind of projection of” Jack. Of one thing, Margaret was very sure: her name. In April, she reminded a recalcitrant Gordon: “P.S. I apologize, but only lightly, for the ‘Margaret’ … do you think you could bring yourself to call me that? It is my name, actually, and I have to persevere with it.” Even Adele had to toe the line: “Can you bear to refer to me as Margaret? This is becoming compulsive with me.”

  A mere two months after Macmillan had accepted the novel still provisionally entitled Hagar, the book was in page proofs, although Margaret had not heard from Jack McClelland about his reaction to the “old lady” novel. On June 29, 1963, she inquired if her agent in New York—John Cushman at the Willis Wing agency—had sent him the book. She could no longer figure out why she had had so many doubts about it: