The Life of Margaret Laurence

by James King

  Another revelation—one to become of central importance—that came to her during the writing of her fourth novel was a renewed fascination with religious belief, one which was residual although not “in the greybearded gent of our childhood Sunday schools.” When writing she could feel the presence of a “personal god” or guardian angel who oversaw her work. The Ibo, she remembered, called such a deity a “chi”: the “god within, that part of a person’s spirit which directs their destiny.” Throughout her entire life Margaret was a committed Christian, but her sense in the late 1960s of the centrality of the importance of religious belief was heightened by her awareness of the meaningless of so much of contemporary life, meaninglessness she encountered each day in the newspapers, radio and TV.

  During the winter of 1968, she felt more “settled” in her marriage; there was a “kind of renaissance of feeling” between herself and Jack: “I guess,” she reflected, “we always did love one another, despite difficulties, but a lot of things had to be sorted out.” She added: “Think those 5 years taught both of us a hell of a lot.” Despite the breakthrough, Margaret had some lingering doubts which she tried to overcome: “The old anxieties simply take on new masks. I think I was very nervous about returning to the role of wife, probably more than I needed to be. Also, took me some years to think of myself as being absolutely on my own, and now I had to re-shape the self image all over again into something new—married but not dependent.”

  However, the relationship between Jack and Margaret was anything but trouble-free, as can be seen in a letter to Alan Maclean. She had, she realized, been naive to be overly optimistic about reconciling her differences with her husband, even on rather routine domestic matters:

  Got home this morning, however, to discover house in an absolute shambles (J having gone this morning before I got home). I know I am compulsively tidy, and I do deplore this, but my GOD, surely the newspapers didn’t have to be strewn all over the house, and bed left unmade, and a large pile of dirty shirts left conveniently out, presumably for me to launder. This probably sounds mean as hell, but I am so furious at the moment that I had to write to get it all off my chest. Soon I will feel more calm, probably, and will think I’m being pretty trivial. However, I see now that the house rules must be explained, tactfully if possible, but firmly.… it has to be made clear that there is really only one house rule here, and that is that every person looks after themselves. The kids make their own beds, for heaven’s sake, so why shouldn’t he? I guess the trouble is that there has always been either a mother or a wife or a steward-boy to take care of all these unmanly details. I am a proper bitch, possibly, talking this way. But the difficulty is the same old one—how to establish a relationship in which he can come here and see the kids (also me) without strain, and without making this his base, and without my having to take on the extra load of housework, which I am certainly at this point not prepared to do.

  Despite her outburst—and her need to give voice to these strong feelings—she was “not downcast or even especially discouraged, as I seem to be rather more convinced of my own reality than I used to be (hurrah).” She was no longer a victim of the pernicious feminine mystique.

  At the very same time she was trying to come to some sort of understanding about herself and Jack, she completed the first draft of The Fire-Dwellers, although she warned Jack McClelland that even she was not sure what she had accomplished: “First draft of novel is completed, thank God. I do not know at all what it is like—it may be positively lousy. I have to go through and add bits which have been left out, and cut out all excess verbiage, then re-type. It is slightly a mess at the moment, but think it will be done, with luck, in 2 months. The tone is so different from anything I’ve written before that I think that anyone who liked previous novels will probably not care for this one.” Two days later, Margaret tried in a letter to explain her fear of failure to fellow novelist Jane Rule, who, by writing about lesbian experience, was also trying in her own way to extend the frontiers of Canadian fiction: “The odd thing is that the most worrying aspect is the feeling that one may not have done at all well by the characters. I know them, and I know they are there. But I keep feeling that I haven’t put them down as they deserved—I haven’t caught enough of them. I guess every writer feels this way, though. But the tone of this one is so different from anything I’ve ever written. No symbol, no poetic prose, no fancy bits of any kind—just idiomatic speech. Also, the main character is a white, anglo-saxon, middleaged mum—who could pick anyone more unlikely than that?”

  Of course, the “mum” was the closest approximation to herself she had ever offered in her fiction. No wonder her “post-novel depression” was this time of “an unusually bizarre nature” in which she “really out-did herself.” There had been parts of Margaret’s character in Hagar and Rachel, but Stacey was really a version of herself, as she admitted to Al Purdy that June: “It’s not autobiographical, but I share many of the main character’s outlooks, and so I guess I feel I’ve made myself more vulnerable in this novel than I ever did before. I guess in a sense I’ve tried to work out my own acceptance of middle age (I don’t mean that to sound gloomy) through writing this novel.” The dilemma was certainly one faced by women of her own age: “I didn’t pick” the topic of the book, she claimed, because it would have a wide appeal—“I don’t even know if it will, and I don’t care. I wrote it because it was there to be written.”

  During the winter of 1968, Margaret had been discussing the possibility of becoming writer-in-residence at the University of Toronto with Malcolm Ross, who was teaching at Trinity College. Earlier, she had been convinced her husband would mount serious objections to such a scheme, especially given the fact he had recently settled in England. In fact, he was supportive, even offering to arrange his schedule to be in England and thus look after the children when she was away. Margaret was pleasantly astounded: “God, Adele—does that indicate anything to you? To me, it indicates just how much both Jack and I have changed. Five years ago I would have ben scared stiff to contemplate such a job, and if I had, Jack would certainly never have agreed to put himself out in any way to make it possible, as he then believed a woman’s place was etc etc.” Two months later, when Margaret had a “hell of a scare” when Jocelyn’s appendix almost burst before she could be operated on, she reflected again on how her husband was “the only human being upon whom I can really call in crises affecting my children.”

  Contrary to her usual practice, Margaret typed The Fire-Dwellers soon after finishing it. (All of her books were first written in scribblers. Then, she—or someone else—would type the resulting draft or drafts. Drafts of both This Side Jordan and The Stone Angel were typed by Margaret at least a year after being written. In the case of This Side Jordan, Gordon Elliott had prepared the typescript sent to Jack McClelland. Margaret hired a typist to do A Jest of God.) So, she suffered through “the whole damn thing all over again” and thus read her “godforsaken novel ALL OVER AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN.” In a letter towards the end of the year, she drew a personality assessment of herself which is in large part accurate: “I guess I have a real, if despicable, streak of spiritual masochism in me. If there isn’t much to agonize about, I can always invent something.… one part of me is very practical and sensible, the other part is black Celt.”

  Having convinced herself she might have to find new publishers for her new novel, she was relieved when Alan Maclean told her that her new book was better than A Jest of God. In late June, Jack McClelland cabled a ringing endorsement of the book. However, she was not pleased when her editor at Knopf, Judith Jones, wrote. Like her counterparts at Macmillan and McClelland & Stewart, she had some problems with matters of clarity and the then-long description of the science-fiction novel by Luke, Stacey’s lover. Judith really offended Margaret when she told her she did not like the proposed title, The Fire-Dwellers. When she informed McClelland of Jones’s objection, he backed the American editor. At this point, Margaret’s “Celtic
anger” was aroused, but Maclean convinced her the best strategy was diplomacy and stubbornness, a tactic she used effectively. When Jack McClelland later complained about the financial drubbing—an advance of $1,500—he had endured at the hands of her agent, she playfully assured him that when he was on the dole, she and other M&S writers would “chip in” for a few hamburgers.

  Of paramount interest to her as 1968 drew to a close was her future as writer and wife. She told Adele she had said everything she wanted to say in “expressing things through my own generation’s idiom” because “I don’t think I have anything more to say in that genre.” Therefore, her next novel—if there was one—would be “something quite different, and maybe the last one I have to write.” Her use of “have” is interesting, implying as it does that her books were part of a compulsive drive which was coming to an end.

  Of the future of her marriage, she was even more unsure. In August, the Laurences had gone on holiday to Lake Como (Margaret’s choice), whereas Jack had wanted to go to Ireland:

  The main cry of the woman in THE FIRE-DWELLERS is always “Everything’s all right,” but of course she does not believe it, and I guess I don’t, either. In some ways, all is well. We have just returned from a 12 day holiday in Italy—stayed in a super hotel on the shores of Lake Como; gorgeous scenery, marvellous food, good wine, swimming pool, the lot.… Problem was that we went there because I and the kids decided we wanted sunshine, instead of going to Ireland as first planned when Jack came back from Honduras—Ireland would’ve been much cheaper, needless to say, and I paid difference … but—you know, this is very hard on him, really. How to cope? He keeps telling me I’ve made more than he has in the past several years and alas this is true. By a fluke, in my terms, but he doesn’t necessarily see that. Maybe I should just have gone to Ireland. But I didn’t want to go to Ireland. All really quite complex, I guess. He has decided, apparently, to opt out re: theories of kid-rearing, and says he leaves it all to me, which makes me feel about 2000% more responsible than I want to feel, although I know he is doing it with the right feelings, in his terms, as he thinks we disagree so he’s given up, and where does that leave me? He is so terribly tolerant, and sometimes I am really bitchy to him, and I hate myself, and I honestly pray to be able to be more loving and gentle, but then I’m not. I guess I would find him easier if he made more mistakes, but he genuinely doesn’t. He doesn’t ever drink too much or get overly angry—if he’s angry, it is all kept inside. He never wastes money, as I do. He’s physically so fit, unlike me—I get diarrhea on the slightest provocation, when more than 200 yards away from the nearest john, and what an embarrassment this is to me and all, having to desperately seek the nearest facilities. He’s strong and muscular and fit and hard-working and a really good person, doing a job that is worthwhile and needs to be done—and I am speaking truly seriously—and he makes me feel like a slob. He doesn’t mean to—I know that. And I also know it is very very difficult for him to cope with my so-called success—none of this matters a bit to me, except for the money, and in a way he sees this, but in a way what he sees is the money, which confuses and bewilders me but has more meaning for him—how odd. I really do feel quite inadequate as a wife, but the alternative of opting out appears worse for all of us than trying to stay in, so what I really need is for some grace to be given, I guess.

  Some of Margaret’s gloom was relieved when she and Jack attended the London premiere of Rachel, Rachel—the title of the film of A Jest of God. (She was very pleased that the planned title of the film—Now I Lay Me Down—had been dropped. When the title was changed abruptly at the eleventh hour, Panther, the publisher of the paperback released to coincide with the opening of the film, was left with masses of wrongly titled books.) She especially enjoyed meeting Joanne Woodward. Margaret, always shy in any public gathering, was timid about seeing the film, but she found it a more than adequate rendition of her fictional world. “The oddest things to me, apart from seeing Rachel in some kind of flesh, were the signs in the town—MANAWAKA THEATRE, etc … I felt very peculiar, because the town name Manawaka came first to my mind about 20 years ago, when I made my first abortive attempt to write a novel.” That evening, when she beheld her novel transformed into cinematic flesh, she must have had an overwhelming sense of “some grace,” of how she had been able to capture the world of her childhood and young adulthood in terms wide and deep enough to become a story about the struggle of individuals everywhere to define, extend and grasp their own humanities.

  15

  FIRE-DWELLER

  (1969)

  “HERE I AM WITH FIVE CATS, 25 GODDAMN FUSCHIA PLANTS AND NO BOOZE.” Such was Margaret’s New Year 1969 lament to Al Purdy. After the struggle of the previous year in completing two books, she was understandably exhausted. At first, Macmillan had objected to the depiction of London in her children’s novel Jason’s Quest; they had serious reservations about her somewhat satirical send-up of sixties London on the grounds it would date the book too easily. Once Margaret had introduced the necessary revisions, they decided to go ahead with the book, which was published the following year to negative reviews in Canada. The Toronto Daily Star, for instance, labelled the book a “tedious disappointment,” one of those “English whimsical animal books where the characters say things like ‘Do shut up’ and ‘Now, luv.’ ”

  Although she joked to Purdy that she never thought she would be reduced to keeping a cathouse, behind the merriment was a new worry. With a great deal of prescience, she was certain about the future nonexistence of her writing life:

  I’ve only got one more book to write. I know I sound too pessimistic, etc etc, but it is just that I know. It will (if I’m lucky and given the grace to do it at all) not be done for a few years yet. I’ve always known exactly what to tackle next, and I know now. At one time it seemed I would never get them done, but now I can see the end of it. I don’t even feel badly—in some odd way, it is a kind of relief. I can’t really explain. I have a strange feeling that some other kind of work will present itself when the time comes. At one time I felt horrible about all this, and thought it was like becoming middle-aged or old, something I couldn’t accept—but it isn’t that way at all, and actually, becoming middle-aged or old isn’t that way, either—a lot of things have changed recently in my point of view, I guess. I just think I am undergoing some kind of metamorphosis, that’s all, and I’m not sure what’s going to emerge, but I’m curiously optimistic.

  In part, her cautious optimism was fuelled by her certainty that after an agonizingly long spell, her marriage was back on track. On January 26, she wrote in painstaking detail about the accord she and Jack had seemed to reach:

  He is as real to me as I am to myself, which is why in the end we cannot part. Even the husband-wife relationship ceases to be the prime important fact. We are one another’s family now, after 22 years, the only remaining family, in essence, that either of us possesses. We are, as it were, related by blood now. I could never change my name, or marry anyone else. I could live with someone else, possibly, but not as wife. I have borne this name for more than half my life. I understand things about this relationship now which I did now know even a year ago. Which is possibly the reason why I can now feel pretty okay about it, without expecting things from it which it cannot give. I also believe that Jack is possibly one of the bravest people I have ever met, although he does not know that he is brave. He has overcome a tremendously damaging childhood, an inshutting background all around, and it has left him shut in, but he has never ceased to cope with his life in the best possible ways he could. When he went back to university at the age of fifty, and got his Master’s degree, I thought that was one of the most courageous things I had ever heard. He is very different from me. He turns his problems outwards, and copes with life by coping with external circumstances. He builds irrigation setups and deals with the dry lands of the earth, trying to make them fertile. This, I believe, expresses an inner need. I, on the other hand, am inner-directed
and tend to look inside, trying to comprehend the inner geography and this is why I am a novelist. It is just doing the same thing in different terms, that is all.

  This heart-felt tribute to Jack Laurence could only have been penned when Margaret foresaw the end of her career as a writer. She could envision the possibility of resuming married life once again only when she decided the other, more crucial aspect of her life was winding down.

  Up to 1969, The Fire-Dwellers had been Margaret’s most overtly autobiographical fiction. In this year—and perhaps motivated in part by the raw honesty of that novel—she decided to collect her Vanessa MacLeod stories (with one exception, written and published between 1962 and 1967) into a book. These are the most transparently autobiographical writings she ever cast into fiction.

  Later, Margaret was to claim A Bird in the House was not unlike a novel. This observation is particularly true in the author’s handling of multiple first-person narrative voices: Vanessa at various ages during her childhood and Vanessa the adult. Margaret was quite clear on this point: “The narrative is, of course, that of Vanessa herself, but an older Vanessa, herself grown up, remembering how it was when she was ten.… The narrative voice, therefore, had to speak as though from two points in time, simultaneously.”

  The stories that comprise A Bird in the House are connected by the menacing presence of Grandfather Connor, but they are even more unified in their description of how Vanessa becomes an adult and a writer and in what she remembers about both processes. Margaret’s arrangement of the stories serves a symbolic function in the sense that the growing complexity of the stories reflects a corresponding complexity and maturity in Vanessa. Each of the stories culminates in some way with Vanessa’s haunting recognition: “That house in Manawaka is the one which, more than any other, I carry with me.”