The Life of Margaret Laurence

by James King

  Eight days later, she sent an equally detailed description of the same trip to Adele, emphasizing, however, the ever-widening gulfs between her and her husband.

  It was strange to be called “Memsahib” again. I did not realize I had changed so much. I managed to act reasonably well, I think, although of course did become involved with arguments with other Europeans, as usual.… when all the old jazz about the useless natives comes up again, I react in all the expected ways.… I swore not to open my mouth, but of course I did, and this is embarrassing to Jack, as it always was. However, I must say he was very good about it, perhaps because I was less apologetic and maybe even less aggressive than before.… Anyway, domestically we got a lot of things settled, although for how long I would not like to say, as basically we simply do not want the same things. Jack, quite rightly, wants to go on working abroad and naturally needs a woman who will go with him, no questions asked. I can’t do that, both for myself and on account of the kids, as I do not think they will get a good education if I teach them and even if he is in places where there are schools,I do not want to move them every year.… As it is my choice to stay here, however, it is also incumbent upon me to support myself, at least by 2/3, which is what it will be. J and I are in complete agreement upon this aspect. Let us only hope I can continue to make the odd shilling—I never believe that I will ever again earn anything, but we will be okay for about 2 years if I am very careful, I think … Jack will be coming on leave in April, and will stay 2 months at that time.… Sometimes I feel so stricken with panic, Adele, when I think what I have done, which is to alter the whole course of my life.

  During her first year in England, Margaret discovered—almost anew and in very painful ways—that all the “necessary conditions” of her writing life and of life itself often had to be paid for in exceedingly hard currency: emotional instability and recurring anxiety.

  12

  HAPPY, UNHAPPY OR

  IN-BETWEEN?

  (1964–1965)

  “THE DAY THAT changed my life and the lives of my children immeasurably for the better,” Margaret recalled, “came in the late fall of 1963. Alan Maclean invited us to go along with him to Buckinghamshire, to see his family’s old country house in Penn.” Her first visit to Elm Cottage (often referred to by her by the nickname, Elmcot) was by luck rather than design. Convinced that Margaret and David would profit from a day in the country (Jocelyn was away on a school trip), Alan took them on an outing to Beaconsfield with the intention of looking over Elm Cottage in nearby Penn, which he and his brother in New Zealand had inherited when their mother, Lady Maclean, died in 1962. As the three of them walked through the house—somewhat messy and tattered because it had had a variety of tenants—Margaret was inspired to ask if she might rent the property. Alan suggested she think the matter over, but, after a sleepless night, Margaret called a startled Alan at the crack of dawn the next morning to confirm the arrangement.

  In a letter to Jack McClelland, she mentioned her great joy in moving on December 30 to the cottage at Penn, a small village near High Wycombe. In fact “cottage” was not the right word: “It has five bedrooms, which is certainly not my idea of a cottage. It is furnished, and is old and rambling, just the kind of house I have always wanted. I can’t afford to live in Hampstead, as rents are too high, and I think it will be better for my kids to be in the country, anyway, where they will have their own yard and can keep dogs, cats and goldfish, etc. The house will probably be cold as charity during the winter, but we are greatly looking forward to having our own house.” Margaret needed a refuge to escape to after the fiery turbulence into which she had been thrown even while living in relatively pastoral Hampstead. Her stay in the East had had its traumatic side, as she confessed to Ethel Wilson: “Calcutta itself is bad enough, with more human suffering and despair than I had believed possible—crowds of maimed beggars, and countless people sleeping in the streets because they had no homes. Added to this, the shock of the news about [the] Kennedy [assassination]—that morning I felt as though everything were hopeless.”

  Elm Cottage. (illustration credit 12.1)

  Two weeks after moving to the house, Margaret was in state of euphoria at the bold, decisive step she had taken in removing herself and the children from London.

  Margaret Laurence walking on Beacon Hill in Penn, with Ringo, the family dog. (illustration credit 12.2)

  What I appear to have taken on is this: an old and certainly uneconomical house, which I think is going to cost the earth to heat … It is a house which people have loved and cared about.… It was rented to American service families for some time, and has been very much neglected, and now it really needs attention and work. The living room has lovely red tile floors, a bay window overlooking the garden, and a beautiful fireplace. There are 5 bedrooms, one of which I hope ultimately to be able to rent.… At the moment I am in the last stages of sheer physical exhaustion, having been working harder than I have ever done in my entire life, turfing out old junk, scrubbing floors and walls, painting woodwork and furniture, making curtains, re-finishing old oak tables etc.… The kids love the house, and are very pleased to be here, as they each have their own quite large room, and also a playroom downstairs … and a large garden which promises to be a good thing in the warmer weather.

  The three Laurences enjoyed the “moving parties” whereby they heaved furniture from one room to another. The children, desperate to escape the confines of their London flat, felt they had been given a wonderful gift. Nevertheless, they were uprooted yet again. Jocelyn, who was eleven when the move was announced, had formed a close friendship with a girl at school. David, three years younger, looked forward more eagerly to the move.

  The house, which stood on two-thirds of an acre, had a huge lawn in the front, where there were two giant beech trees and the elm tree after which the house was named. “At one side there was a mulberry tree that produced quantities of red-purple berries, almost impossible to pick, for they were on the high and somewhat fragile branches, and all we could do was to shake the boughs and gather up the semi-squashed fruit from the grass. At the front of the house was a wisteria, so old and gnarled it was virtually a tree, and its vine branches climbed up as high as the children’s bedrooms. The back garden had once grown vegetables, and for the most of our time there, it was a wild garden of nettles and dock-leaves.” Margaret was not quite so rhapsodic about the various boarders she took in to make ends meet during her first three years at Elmcot. Her workspace at Elmcot was a dramatic improvement over her bedroom in London. She would write in longhand on the table in the living room with the bay window; her desk—where she typed—was in a small alcove off the living room.

  Although Margaret spoke warmly of the house, its grounds and Alan’s generosity in making the house available, she regarded her neighbours as merely an accumulation of snotty Tories. But her view of her new neighbours was a little misguided. Penn, she claimed, was a place inhabited by tradespeople, by wealthy families who had been there for generations and by the newly wealthy who wanted to be within easy commuting distance of London. This is true. In addition, the local MP may have been renowned as a caricature of extremely right-wing views, but the town was famous for its musical life. In Margaret’s time, the inhabitants included Gerald Moore, the pianoforte accompanist and Myra Hess, the pianist.

  The villagers of Penn tended to have negative views of Americans, but Margaret was quick to insist she was Canadian and thus infinitely different. For her, part of the charm of Penn was that there she could be a totally private person: “no one in this area knows me from a hole in the ground, and in fact among my County neighbours I am thought to be a pretty low-class North American gypsy or something, which is just great.” In her own way, she tended to practise reverse snobbery about the landed gentry, but she had a deep affection for Lady Maclean, whose portrait (lent by Alan) hung in the downstairs hall. The young, longhaired woman, who wore a white dress which gave her the look of a pensive Alice in Wond
erland, became the spirit of the house. Sometimes, a weary, discouraged Margaret would converse with “The Lady” whose benign presence provided her with comfort and inspiration.

  For Margaret, the shops surrounding the village green were the centre of her new neighbourhood. Woodbridge’s, a small family business, supplied most of her provisions. The nearby post office also housed a sweet shop and sold women’s clothing. There were also a second-hand furniture shop, a second-hand bookshop, the butcher’s shop and the Red Lion pub. Two cats—Calico and, later, Topaz—joined the household on a permanent basis. Babysitting was provided by Mr. and Mrs. Charlett who lived in the small brick and flint cottage on the grounds of The Beacon, on Beacon Hill opposite Elm Cottage. From Mr. Charlett, who was the head gardener at The Beacon, and Mrs. Charlett, Margaret acquired all kinds of lore about the countryside.

  When describing her departure from London in Dance, Margaret does not mention she rented a pied-à-terre in Bayswater. This allowed her a spot in London she could call her own. Although loneliness was an inevitable part of her life, she escaped to London to keep in touch with Canadian friends and to keep her sex life segregated from her children:

  The presence of my children meant that, in the deepest sense, loneliness could never be a real threat. I severely missed having a mate, however, someone to talk things over with and to share worries with, but there were also times when I would have settled merely for a sexual relationship. I had one or two sexual liaisons, of such a brief span that they really don’t deserve the term affairs, and I quickly realized that casual sex was not for me. It was a foregone conclusion, in my mind, that I would never take a man to Elm Cottage.… Anyway, living out in the wilds of Buckinghamshire, where was I going to meet anyone? I used to wonder if I had deliberately isolated myself so that a relationship with a man would be all but impossible.

  A few years later, in a letter to Nadine Jones, she recalled an event from this time: “I feel somehow lonely for the sound of my own speech, and even for the puritanical responses which make a Canadian man long for passionate sex while at the same time worrying like mad about what the landlady will think (this actually happened to me once, in London, with a Canadian actor, and I was so delighted to find someone who worried more about the trivialities than I did!).” To Al Purdy, she made a facetious reference to an incident which may have involved the same man: “Once got laid on Hampstead Heath, but that was long ago and never again. (That was a Canadian, come to think of it—I seem to have some strange penchant for Canadians—how odd).”

  According to Margaret, she had two careers at Elm Cottage: writing and parenting. “I would stop writing a few hours before the children arrived home from school, not only to make dinner and do the domestic stuff but also to be mentally and emotionally out of the fictional world and back in the world of my life. Heaven knows I was not Supermum. There were many times when I felt frazzled and worried by domestic crises.…” In the children’s memories, the demarcation in their mothers existence was not as clear-cut as she later claimed. A flicker of disappointment would cross her face if they arrived home early for lunch or if they announced a school holiday she had forgotten. In Vancouver and London, Margaret had often been short-tempered. On a day-to-day basis, the children now found that their mother’s emotional outbursts occurred less frequently. But the children also had to deal with their mother on the nights when she had nightmares. She would moan so loudly, they would be awakened and rush into her bedroom. In such a state, since she was impossible to rouse, they would have to resort to squeezing a wet washcloth over her face. When awake, she could not recall the nightmares.

  Margaret—the children found—could be implacable. The children were angry with her when she peremptorily had the family dog Ringo put to sleep: Margaret insisted that she could not manage him (Ringo would run away, dig up the gardens of various neighbours, and be returned by policemen), but Jocelyn and David were convinced that their mother could have salvaged the situation more effectively.

  By the middle of March 1964, she had reached some semblance of tranquillity, although one tinged with melancholia: “Are you happy, unhappy or in-between?” she asked Adele. “Actually, I have come to the conclusion that it doesn’t matter so much whether one is happy or not, as long as you aren’t in despair. I am not in despair, but I seem to live in a state of more or less constant panic, and maybe I just have to accept that it won’t ever be any different.”

  Margaret was certain she lacked one essential ingredient in her make-up: guts. However, she retained a semblance of faith in herself, even though her financial prospects looked grim. The advance of five thousand dollars from Knopf would last a year and then she would be “practically broke. When I realize this, I start feeling horrible, so I am trying not to think of it.” She could not bear to apply once again to the Canada Council. Still, she could not prevent herself from feeling “absurdly optimistic, partly because I have now stopped keeping liquor in the house and I find I can get along without it after all.”

  In early June, Margaret met Jack in Greece, one of the many trips on which they attempted to resume conjugal life. They went on a four-day coach trip from Athens to Delphi, then to Patras, Olympia and Mycenae; they wound up their holiday by spending a few days at a beach near Athens. Their tour was the “Ultra Classical.” “Why,” Jack asked her, “be half-classical when the chance may never come again to be ultra-classical?” When she wrote of this trip in a travel piece for Holiday (published as “Sayonara, Agamemnon” in January 1966), she provided a humorous, probably fictionalized account of the hazards of international tourism. However, in a letter to Adele Wiseman, she emphasized the incompatibilities between herself and Jack:

  We decided we would have to compromise, as I prefer to go to one spot and stay there and look around rather slowly, and Jack likes to zoom around like lightning and see a million places in a week. So we spent half our time in going on a bus tour around various parts of Greece, and the other half in sun-bathing and swimming at a beach near Athens. It worked out very well, and we both enjoyed both halves of the trip, to our mutual surprise.

  Jack, who was on long leave, spent a great deal of time at Elm Cottage that spring. Before he arrived, Margaret confided in Adele: “I don’t want him to see [a copy of The Stone Angel], or say anything about it. There must be something very hard in my nature, and it has been a shock to find this out.” At Penn, she felt saner and calmer than she had in a long time. By July, the Laurences had reached an understanding of sorts—regarding their house in Vancouver, which had been rented to a friend. According to Margaret, the decision to part with the house was Jack’s—not hers: “He decided to sell the house. I would not ever live in it under any circumstances, but it was up to him to decide what to do with it, as it is his house, not mine, at least that was my feeling. I always hated it anyway, but was too much of a coward to say so for a long time.”

  Her view of her career in 1964 is best encapsulated in a letter to Jane Rule. In her letter to Margaret, Jane had obviously spoken of the high price she might have to pay for her honesty in describing lesbian experience. Jane’s reflections prompted a similar burst of honesty in Margaret: “I was interested in what you said about not knowing yet, yourself, what special price you might have to pay for the particular kind of book you have written. My own feeling is that whatever kind of book, there is always some quite unexpected price and that one can never afford it, but you can pay it all the same, because what else can you do except pack up and die? I think the surprising thing is to find you can pay it, whatever it is, and that you are in some ways tougher than you ever imagined.” By the middle of 1964, her “special price” included her marriage and her native land and, what is more, she was having an incredibly difficult time in trying to write a new novel.

  Part of the problem was Jack, who having returned from Vancouver, was again staying with his family at Elm Cottage that August.

  Things are going along reasonably well, I guess. What I feel chiefly at t
he moment, I think, is that I may be doing my best (or am I? how does one know?) but my best is none too damned good. We are back now in the old groove of me trying to split myself three ways, and sometimes feeling that I’m doing a pretty rotten job on all three fronts as it were. I do not seem to have sufficient reserves of calm and affection and gentleness and I frequently feel like a mean old bitch who must be nearly impossible for anyone to get along with. However, I also feel that I must not begin basically doubting my own reality again, as if I do, I’m really lost. I have to keep to my own course, even if this often seems selfish or unjustified in some way, in terms of other people.

  How, Margaret was asking herself, could she preserve her writing self when everything seemed to conspire to rob of her of that essential part of her being? She was upset when Fred Schulhof wrote to Jack, suggesting how various compromises might save the Laurence marriage. Gordon Elliott was another friend who, from his vantage point, thought the Laurence marriage should be made to work. Margaret was polite but firm: “We were fortunate in Vancouver to have good friends, but apart from that, many things were not going well—if it had been otherwise, we would have stayed [together], but it was not otherwise. I hope you can accept all this, because it is really all I feel I can say.”