The Life of Margaret Laurence

by James King

  After Jack left on November 2, she was very depressed, having almost convinced herself she should have returned to his new post in Somaliland with him. She had a great affection for Jack; their relationship had been successful sexually; she may have had a lingering guilty feeling that a wife had a duty to accompany her husband. The simple truth was mat she and Jack had been very good for each other. She was still in love with him. But she did not wish to go backwards. Her way of purging herself of such turbulent feelings was to write a short story. She so submerged herself in this task that she could imagine “the real world [was] fictional, and the inner world the real one.” She described herself as inert, but she was preoccupied with a number of tasks. She did book reviews for the BBC, two articles for the Women’s Mirror, three articles for Holiday and worked on a number of short stories.

  If 1963 had been a landmark year in Margaret’s career in terms of the sheer number of books accepted for publication, 1964 was the year that began her ascent to star status. Late in 1963, the historical novelist Mary Renault, a great admirer of This Side Jordan, was even more welcoming of The Tomorrow-Tamer: “Margaret Laurences stature increases with each new book. She is now without equal as the novelist of Africa in transition.… These short stories with their compassion, dignity and humour, their brilliant evocations of character and scene, show her impressive gifts at their best.” Notices the next year in The Globe and Mail, The Tamarack Review, and The Canadian Forum were enthusiastic; The Prophet’s Camel Bell also received strong reviews. But it was The Stone Angel (published in England c. March 8, 1964, in Canada on May 23, and in the United States on June 15) that unveiled a major writer, even though the good notices were not enough to make it, as Jack McClelland told Margaret, “a major best-seller here, but it’s had a truly fine reception and we are well satisfied with the sale at least.”

  The Stone Angel is now recognized as one of the greatest novels written by a Canadian. The reviewers in Canada—and elsewhere—did not sense they were reading a masterpiece, although most were polite in recognizing the technical brilliance Margaret Laurence had achieved. In fact, Hagar took a while to become an iconic figure in the history of Canadian literature, perhaps because Margaret’s powerful old lady is far more crusty than she is endearing.

  A year earlier, in January 1963, she confided to Adele that the character in The Stone Angel whose dilemma was closest to her own was John, Hagar’s second and favourite son: “He is the person whom I feel the most for.” Hagar—despite strong, rebellious feelings, a person who lives her entire life by convention—abandons Manawaka and her husband, Bram, and takes John with her to the coast. She perceives John to be temperamentally her child (as opposed to her first-born, Marvin). As John later points out to her, she has reversed the truth of the situation. Like his father, John despises conventionality and is very much an outsider in his father’s mould. Unlike his mother, John is not the kind of person who can repress turbulent emotions. John’s death—caused by his heavy drinking—is attributable in part to Hagar’s meddling.

  During the writing of The Stone Angel, Margaret may have come to a knowledge of the Hagar-like side of her nature, but she also came to the realization that, like John, she had been the victim of a powerful parental figure not unlike Hagar. Part of the inner turbulence she was experiencing in the early sixties came from an increased awareness that her own nature was divided between such extremes of power and weakness.

  The Hagar-like portion of Margaret’s character is best captured in a portrait photograph of 1964. On the back of the copy she inserted in her own album, she wrote: “M—England—1964—photo used on A Jest of God 1966—I look like the Dragon Lady—I really love this pic—it doesn’t look at all like me, but it looks good.” She liked this image because it captured the ruthless streak in her character, that part of the self that could be both ambitious and, if necessary, selfish. The softer side of Margaret can be discerned in a snapshot from the same time in which she poses in front of Woodbridge’s in the heart of Penn. She looks a bit expectantly at the camera, trying to assume a benign, motherly smile. The two photographs show vastly different but real sides of the sitter.

  In the spring of 1964, Margaret’s habitual shyness was in place when she was summoned to London to lunch with the formidable Blanche Knopf, who regularly visited England and Europe to meet authors. Knopf ordered a lunch comprised of vodka, olives and an egg dish. “Man, what sophistication it must take to do that! (I ordered steak),” a very impressed author informed Adele.

  Margaret Laurence. 1964. (illustration credit 12.3)

  Margaret Laurence in Penn. c. 1964. (illustration credit 12.4)

  As 1964 drew to a close, Margaret, unable to work effectively on her next novel, was “as relaxed as a power drill.” That week, she saw her modus operandi as futile: “I’ve been going in to London about once a week, and this takes up an effective 2 days, so I am quitting it, because it is too unsettling.” Three weeks later, she could feel Rachel coming into being: “I know the character is there—I don’t have any doubt at all about that—I’ve known her for too long to feel any doubt about her existence—but the problem of method continues to bug me.”

  God damn it. I cannot stop attempting this novel, because I know it is there, but I have not yet found the way to it. This gives me the feeling that I am somehow choking. I have recently come to the conclusion that this one will have to be written with my head, I mean with me directing operations, and this is a responsibility which I can hardly bear, as previously I felt that the character was in charge and all I had to do was put it down. But this time the person is very evasive, and this is part of her, and very understandable, but she is damn well making life impossible for me. I think that the grace for which one hopes will not come, perhaps, this time. Lacking it, I don’t see any way except to put down as simply and directly as possible the things that happen, and to try not to tell lies. I don’t believe this is enough, but it appears to be all I have to handle at the moment. Perhaps it will change. I’ve made so many bad beginnings on this one that anyone in their right mind would give it up and do something else. But I can’t.

  Rachel had been haunting Margaret for six years, she claimed. But this did not seem to matter very much: “Now I know so much about her that the whole thing seems impossible … and I do not have enough resources to do it. Well, never mind. We are not dead yet.”

  At times, Margaret the writer had the “kind of feeling a Catholic might have when excommunicated.” At the very same time Rachel was resistant to her creator’s wishes, the creator was unsure of form. In a letter to Robert Hallstead, a former teacher at United College, she claimed that the crux of the situation which confronted her had been summed up in a recent issue of The Observer: the problem with the traditional novel was that its forms no longer corresponded to the ways in which contemporary man perceived life, whereas most experimental novels were unreadable. The other problem that invaded Margaret was a sense of her own non-existence.

  I suppose I have a very shaky sense of my own reality and can only be certain (or reasonably so) when I’ve taken on another cloak or temporarily become someone else. I said to someone a long time ago that The Stone Angel was written in a way similar to the Stanislavsky Method—naturally, I was not speaking seriously, but now I wonder if maybe this wasn’t true after all. I have this feeling which I’ve had for many years that I tell lies all the time except when I am speaking with the few members of my tribe whom I trust absolutely, and that in general I can’t speak truthfully except through someone else’s mouth.

  In this extraordinary passage, she reveals the necessity of the writing life for her. If she cannot write, she has no identity.

  At the same time she struggled with a resistant book, Margaret claimed that she had no guts, but it is a special kind of bravery that propels a writer to write a novel about a ninety-year-old woman and then to turn her attention to one centred on a virgin spinster. Later that year, the immensity of what she had done woul
d overcome her:

  What scares the hell out of me with this present novel is that when I read it over, it seems to me that it might appear as though parts of it were written when I was stoned, and in fact they weren’t—this makes me wonder if I am more crazy than I want to believe?… If anything, it is too far-in, being about (I honestly hate to say it) an unmarried schoolteacher in a prairie town. How corny can you get? She is, however, real, and although she is an anachronism, she knows it, which is the whole thing. I have the feeling that it will be awful if it turns out to be no good, because the people (her, especially) are there, and I really wanted to say to her, “I’m sorry, baby, maybe I haven’t done so well by you.”

  Have personal dilemmas any meaning any more? My most strong faith is that they have, and must. What, in a world sense, could matter less than the unhappiness of an unmarried woman teacher in a small town? But viewed in another way, what could matter more? I suppose it is a kind of study in ironies, and the ironies are those dealt by fate, but they can be liberating in the long run.

  In The Stone Angel, Hagar finds a measure of redemption when she is able to talk frankly of John’s death—and her hand in it; she also becomes more open and thus vulnerable to others. Margaret’s new book was also dealing with redemption but in a fundamentally different way: how can Rachel—against tremendous odds—discover and, in the process, transform herself? In a way, Margaret was trying to redeem herself from her own troubled past, but the process was arduous and, of course, fraught-filled.

  Margaret was still trying to recover from Jack’s stay at Elm Cottage. For her—despite some good times—this had been an “absolute nightmare.” A year later, she told Nadine: “Last year at this time, I was almost ready to put my head in the oven. But I recovered …” The awful truth was that having Jack around re-created the conditions on which they had parted and the horrible dilemmas that had confronted her at that time. After he returned to Africa, she realized that “the pendulum-swings of feeling about my writing simply reflected a similar state of mind re: him—I fluctuated between feeling I must keep the marriage going somehow … and feeling that I simply could not return to that relationship.” Therefore, she was enormously relieved when Jack wrote to tell her he had fallen in love with a twenty-one-year-old Peace Corps volunteer: “I could not help feeling the (to me) irony of it—the old patterns repeat themselves. He does in fact need someone who is similar to what I was at 21, but I am not that way any longer, and at last he does realize I am not, but what can he do about it? He can’t change, and I can’t, either.” (Jack’s affair with this young woman was short-lived.)

  At about the same time she tried to look realistically at her marriage, she was able to discard her previously rather conventional refusal to admit she sometimes drank too much: “Do you know that it is only within the last couple of years that I could ever openly admit that I ever got drunk? Strange. Especially as I had been doing so with monotonous regularity for many years. I am not keeping liquor in the house at the moment, and do not find this as difficult as I had anticipated, so maybe this will last for awhile too. I haven’t gone on the wagon … I buy a bottle or two of wine, one night a week, when I do not plan to do any work. It is ridiculous not to be able to keep it around, but if it is here, I just drink it, so I might as well face the realities of my character.” Yet, Margaret was never really able to face such “realities.” Like many alcoholics, she refused to admit to herself—or anyone—that she drank too much. She also did not like to confront another truth: alcohol provided her—on a daily basis—with liberation from many of the anxieties of daily life.

  In the winter of 1965, however, Margaret was relieved when she discovered the right way to convey the flux of reality in her new novel and was thus able to be more realistic about herself, almost in proportion to her ability to speak truthfully through Rachel. She was never open about a possible “real-life” source for Rachel, but Catherine Simpson Milne—the cousin who looked after Margaret when Verna died—was convinced (and furious) that Margaret had plundered the plot line of her life for material. For many years as a young and middle-aged woman, Catherine—whose father, Stuart, had been an undertaker—was a schoolteacher in Neepawa, where she lived with her widowed, hypochondriacal mother, Bertha. Then, suddenly, she moved herself and her mother to British Columbia, where she married soon after.

  Shaky feelings about her marriage still barraged Margaret. She was quite prepared to be extremely open to Gordon Elliott about her strong feelings for him as a friend, but, at the same time, she outlined her requirements for their relationship to endure: “I care a very great deal about you, and I hope that you do about me, I mean really myself, not Jack’s wife. But when Jack returned here last summer, he told me that you had said you tended, emotionally, always to take the man’s side of the situation. If that is so, then it cannot really be helped, can it? although this hurt me very much—I don’t mean you hurt me very much, as this is obviously not your intention, but only that it is a kind of sad irony, and if it exists, then there is no point trying to alter it, because one can’t.”

  Realizing she had not accomplished what she had intended by way of writing in the past two years, she informed Jack McClelland in March: “After about three years of agonizing indecision, my husband and I are finally going to separate, and this has been pretty unsettling all around, needless to say. It has been in the offing for some considerable time, but I guess it is always rather difficult to take the final step, inevitable though it may be.” Her uncertainties in this instance were countered by McClelland’s decisiveness:

  I don’t really know what one wants to hear when they have just recently decided to separate. Probably they don’t want to hear anything, but for what it is worth, let me say to you that you have something that is more important than any marriage I’ve ever heard about. By which I mean your career, which I say in all humility should make you one of the great international writers in the next decade or so. I don’t think you can afford to concern yourself about the dissolution of a marriage no matter how serious a jolt it may seem at the time. So forget it. It’s of relatively no importance.

  McClelland’s response—meant to be supportive—would have been helpful if it had been written to another man, one used to compartmentalizing his life. Margaret Laurence was not able to do this: “All the men I know are either married, homosexual, or in another country. Well, we can’t force the wheel of fate, I feel bloody awful sometimes when I think that my dancing (etc) days are more than likely over, but what the hell?” In her bedroom, she had a paper rooster, and on more than one occasion quipped that this was the “only cock” who would henceforth grace that room.

  She provided a clear description of the bleak emotional future that awaited her in a letter to Gordon of April 1965:

  Interesting that you should say the woman never seems to you to be quite so alone as the man. I, of course, would have said the opposite! The fact that a woman does have children to think of, and to consider, whatever move he makes, means that she is often unable to make any move at all because she has not got the financial means and the psychological ability to gamble, in case it endangers them. Once she has moved out of her previous life pattern, she is more hampered in making new friends because she is not very free to move about, on account of the children. Re-marriage is never very likely for a woman with children, as few men would want to take on anyone else’s kids. Therefore she has to accept the fact that she is on her own, permanently, and I don’t think this is so very easy to accept, at least not for me. However, one does not really act in this way unless one has to, so it can be borne. I don’t think it would be possible for any man-type person to feel more alone than I have in the past 3 years.

  Margaret disagreed with Gordon on the state of her marriage, but was infuriated by her journalist friend Marjory Whitelaw, who spent an evening telling Margaret, “she didn’t see how I could want to separate from a man as handsome and intelligent as J., also how mad I was to be burying mysel
f out here in the country where I would never meet anyone, etc. I felt I could have done without all this good advice. I got glummer and glummer, and drank more and more of her gin. Nuts to all that. It simply is a waste of time. I will not go to her place any more.”

  In the spring of 1965, her mother-in-law was very confused as to the status of the on-again, off-again Laurence marriage, as can be gleaned from Margaret’s letter to her old friend Nadine Jones: “It has been a rather difficult period, as I’ve begun getting letters from my family and also from Jack’s mother, and this is hard to deal with, as I can’t really explain anything. J’s mother, however, is apparently under the impression that I have never explained anything to him, either—that I’ve more or less just said all is over without ever giving him an inkling about why. I suppose he believes this is the case. But after all these years (literally 2-1/2) of detailed analysis, I do not intend to say any more.”

  There were a few light moments in 1965. When she chose her music for the CBC radio programme, “Hermit’s Choice,” Margaret selected bagpipe music and Beethoven’s Ninth. That summer, she made it to Scotland, where she stayed with the novelist and children’s writer Jane Duncan, who ran a teashop in Cromarty during the summer: “When I was in Scotland, I spent the greater part of my time either drinking whisky or eating hot buttered scones, and I now have to go on a diet.… Quite a few people come mainly to see Jane Duncan, novelist, and Jane simply cannot sit down and talk to them for hours, so while I was there, she sort of threw me into the situation as a substitute writer (what a letdown for the clients!) and I sat and talked and drank tea and ate one scone after another. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and returned feeling that I could grapple with life once more. But now it is lettuce, lettuce all the way.”