The Life of Margaret Laurence

by James King

  The straight chronology of the narratives is shattered by the death of Vanessa’s father in the fourth story—the title one. In this way, the reader is actually allowed to feel the disruptive presence of death in the young girl’s life. The final story, “Jericho’s Brick Battlements,” contains the most extended time-frame of the stories, going back to when Vanessa is four years old and moving forward to when she is forty years old. In this story, a note of forgiveness towards Grandfather Connor surfaces when the mature Vanessa proclaims: “I had feared and fought the old man, yet he proclaimed himself in my veins.” Identifying her fictional alter-ego with Grandfather Connor was the closest Margaret could bring herself to forgiving Grandfather Simpson, of perhaps coming to terms with the fact that his acerbic behaviour had masked many insecurities.

  Margaret wrote this story at a time when some of her psychic wounds were on the verge of healing—she had written and published a magnificent novel about the possibility of spiritual transformation and rebirth; she had completed a novel of daring stylistic complexity in which she reflected back upon the years in which her marriage had fallen apart; and she was convinced her broken marriage had at last been mended on terms acceptable to her and her spouse. She had every reason to be generous to her old spiritual nemesis.

  In January 1969, Jack travelled to his next assignment in Swaziland. In a description of their leave-taking, she makes it quite clear they will not see each other for nine months, at which point he will return to England in order to supervise the children while she goes to Canada for the academic year 1969–1970. Despite the extremely unconventional approach to marriage revealed in this arrangement, she had reached some sort of accord with herself about the stability of her relationship with Jack. Missing ingredients in these plans are the children, age sixteen and thirteen, who were expected to fit into the complicated lives of their parents. Moreover, Margaret knew her children should not be apart from her for such a long stretch of time, but her need to get away from Elmcot blinded her to their needs.

  In June 1968, Margaret humorously reflected on how she once again had chosen the wrong subject for The Fire-Dwellers: “Instead of writing a novel about a negro homosexual heroin-addicted dwarf, I had written a novel about a white anglo saxon protestant middle-aged mum—ye gods.” She thought she was as prepared as possible for bad notices.

  The notice in Time, insisting in the real life behind the fiction, irritated her: “They got just about everything all screwed up. The way they try to make out that The Fire-Dwellers is almost bound to be autobiographical seems like a sneaky trick and is also untrue. I wouldn’t have minded if they’d described me as being built similar to a Ukrainian peasant woman, but ‘slightly mannish without being unmotherly’—ye gods! Now I wish I had let my ‘short brown hair’ down to where it really grows, namely my shoulders, and had posed in a black lace nightie.”

  The Canadian reviews were mixed, as Margaret mentioned to Gordon:

  Split right down the middle. Dave Legate in the Montreal Star doesn’t like the book but likes me and The Stone Angel, so is as kind as he can bring himself to be, which is rather nice of him. Two good reviews, Bill French in Globe Magazine and Marian Engel in Saturday Night, both of whom actually saw what I was driving at and could perceive all the themes and knew why the form had to be as it was—so thank God for that.… Two other terrible and passionately hating reviews, one of them of course Barry Callaghan in the Toronto Telegram, who does the best hatchet job which has ever been done on me. Barry has never liked anything I’ve written except The Stone Angel, and maybe it is easier to look at your grandmother than your wife/sister/mother.

  She also commented: “For this and other reasons, I am not in very cheery frame of mind right now, but it will pass. Things were going too good for awhile there. Maybe I needed a spell of adversity. It would just be nice if God didn’t deliver the blows on all fronts simultaneously, but that—to coin a phrase—is life.”

  Although she recognized that some male reviewers (such as William French) were quite capable of appreciating her new book, she sensed a lot of “enormous male hostility” in the notices. “Jesus,” she exclaimed somewhat ingenuously to Adele, “I never meant to threaten anybody!!!” What frightened Margaret was the number of reviewers who hated Stacey: “this is so astonishing. To see these reviews (all by middle-aged males who might have wives like Stacey, I think—I really do believe this) which indicate that whatever a woman like that thinks, they DO NOT WANT TO KNOW.… One cannot help but feel that the novel in some ways is being judged on grounds other than literary.”

  That spring, she had both the pleasure and the pain of having Al and Eurithe Purdy as house guests for a month. While the Purdys were in Greece, Eurithe had become ill. Soon afterwards they travelled to London, where Margaret recommended a doctor. After visiting the couple one day in their small, cramped room in Earl’s Court, she insisted they stay with her at Elmcot, assuring the Purdys her back bedroom was the perfect setting in which Eurithe could recuperate. Al, an inveterate collector of Canadian imprints, found many bargains in the local bookshops and became the wonder of the Penn post office because no one before had ever mailed so many parcels anywhere. Margaret got precious little work done, but she did have the chance to talk books with Al. In particular, she found someone sympathetic to her anger with the reviewers of The Fire-Dwellers. Despite her affection for the Purdys, they exasperated Margaret, who moaned about the heating bills and the large cans of beer with which Al filled her small fridge.

  While the Purdys were with her, Margaret had a new crisis on her hands. In fact, on May 23, six days after writing to Gordon about the hostile notices The Fire-Dwellers had attracted, she wrote him another letter, one which explained the other “blow” which she had suffered:

  Personal troubles. No doubt too soon to begin to mention the subject, but my natural inclination is not to keep things in (which is why I have found past 2 years so hard). Jack (in Swaziland) thinks now he may have found a woman with whom he really can relate—she sounds so goddamn nice and so right for him, that I am really PRAYING it works out. Gordon, I do value him so much and care about him, but cannot be the kind of wife I know he needs. And at this point, I feel it is idiotic for both of us to go on torturing ourselves because we are not different people. I won’t ever cease to care about him or to be concerned about him, nor he about me—that almost goes without saying. But—Gord, I am just not a suitable wife. I really have tried. But it does not work. I really do want him to be happy, but I can’t make him so. I am what I have to be, and I just cannot force myself to be otherwise. I do so very much hope he will go through with it, and have the courage to begin again—it isn’t easy. But he is a courageous person, so I do hope that it will come to pass.

  For Jack, Margaret’s solution to their problems was not his. By his definition of matrimony, he did not have a marriage—and he obviously did not see the prospect of any genuine renewal in his relationship with Margaret. In recently divorced Esther Christiansen, Danish by birth and a cartographer by profession, Jack, at fifty-three, discovered a woman who shared many of his ideals about companionship and intimacy. He informed his wife it was time to part ways.

  In her letter, Margaret completely ignores issues of major significance to her. She tries to see things too much from Jack’s perspective. For the past year, she had been convinced her relationship with Jack was about to be renewed, not killed. She was ready to make a new commitment to her marriage (or imagined she was about to). Completely downplayed in the letter to Gordon is her sense of outrage, betrayal and abandonment. Years later, in her autobiography, when she mentions the attempts on her and Jack’s part to reconcile, the matter is treated with great vagueness, as if it had been a minor issue, one not worthy of spending much time on. Years later, she told a friend that Jack had been so wounded by her leaving him that it was necessary for them to get back together so that he could leave her.

  Even to close friends, she could not talk openly about the
devastation which overwhelmed her that spring. To Adele Wiseman and Al Purdy, she gave the same information. In her letter to Purdy, in an attempt to disguise from him (and herself) her anguish, she glides over and even trivializes the situation:

  I’m in better shape than I was, having now figured out why J’s news affected me so oddly. It took me a long time when I first came to England to build up a self-image of a person who was a professional writer, not a housewife, and who could (wonder of wonders) actually cope with things like getting a mortgage and earning a living etc. Then when we decided to try again, I had to try all over again to return to self-image of housewife, while actually the outer and inner were in considerable conflict (probably not a bad thing at the time, as I was writing the F-D). Then, last week, another psychic change necessary. Back to self-image of professional writer etc etc. Actually, that being, as they say, the Real Me. Which I always knew. All the other bit was suppression suppression all the way, which worked not too well, as you undoubtedly know. I see now that I have to stick with this present concept of myself, as it is simply folly to try to pretend to be something you’re not.… So whether or not he decides to go through with it, as far as I am concerned, I will have to go through with it now. This decision fills me with panic and alarm, but it is 100% necessary.…

  INSTANT ANALYSIS

  CONSULT GYPSY ROSE MARGARET

  MIND-EXPANDING AND HEAD-SHRINKING

  Also, of course, one does feel slight terror at thought of advancing age etc and me without a penny of insurance and no intention of getting any. And can I keep on writing and earning money? Well, one has to have some faith.

  Every claim made by Margaret in this letter is true, but these are rationalizations, attempts to come to terms with an awful emotional impasse by not dealing directly with the accompanying feelings of frustration and rage. In effect, she says the “Real Me” is the writing self which must live alone, any other alternative being a form of repression. One part of Margaret told her that she deserved what happened to her, another urged her to deny a significant portion of her feelings because this was the only way to exert control over a tragic situation.

  That summer, Margaret also had to deal with some serious objections to A Bird in the House raised by Judith Jones, her editor at Knopf since the time of the publication of A Jest of God. Trim, sparrowlike Judith, who had worked for Doubleday and Dutton in Paris, was hired by Blanche Knopf in 1957 to be editor of the translations of French writers such as Camus and Sartre. By the time she took over as Margaret’s editor, her other writers included John Updike and Anne Tyler. She liked “off-the-wall” experimental writers as long as their narratives were coherent. In 1969, she had to deal with the additional fact that Robert Gottlieb, who by now had assumed most of Alfred Knopf’s responsibilities, was not a particularly great admirer of Margaret’s work. Judith was thus in the uncomfortable position of having to plead Margaret’s case and of wishing to do everything in her power to make her work accessible to as large a reading public as possible.

  In her letter to Margaret that May, Judith criticized “the disturbing … overlapping of the material” and the “bits of information given as though not introduced before that get in the way of its being read as a continuous thing, a semi-novel, semi-memoir.” Judith was also of the opinion the “stories” should be converted into “chapters” that would provide “in chronological sequence a series of different views of one thing, centring on different moments and on different people, but all circling in on Vanessa and moving towards that really lovely postscript-view from the vantage point of twenty years later, which ties the whole book together and puts it into perspective.” She did not like the title—she wanted one more suggestive of the Connors and the MacLeods; she also wanted the “rounding-out” of each narrative to be eliminated on the grounds that this was a technique appropriate to individual stories, not collected stories.

  On May 20, Margaret responded in an extremely conciliatory manner: “Upon further reflection, I think you are quite right. It will make a stronger whole, if some of the repetitive material is taken out and we try to unify the stories, or as you say, de-story them to some extent. I am naturally a little nervous about my ability to do this, but I think it will be wise to try.” Three days later, Margaret, having regained her original confidence in her material, wrote Judith a letter rejecting her earlier compromising stand: “I’m terribly sorry about my apparent reversal of opinion—it is just that I could so well see what you meant, but upon further consideration, I don’t feel I can change the basic structure of the collection … it just seems to me that these stories came in the form they did, and I believe this is the only form they can take.… I know volumes of stories don’t sell well. I know all these stories are so connected as to form almost one story … But—I’m afraid the basic fabric has been woven, and I’m not really willing to try to alter its patterns.”

  Alan Maclean fully supported Margaret’s resolve, although he had earlier expressed similar reservations to her. On May 29, Judith wrote a conciliatory letter to Margaret in which, although she reiterated many of her earlier objections, she spoke of the issues from the author’s point of view: “I have an awful feeling that I overstated the case, that I made it seem as if there were much more of an operation to be performed than I intended. The last thing in the world I would ever want to do is to try to force something into something that it is not.”

  After receiving this letter, Margaret complained to her agent, John Cushman, about the changes that were being imposed upon her. In June, Judith wrote again to apologize for having upset her and to state categorically her admiration for the stories: “John Cushman and I have just had a long discussion about your letter to him and although I know he has phoned you to reassure you, let [me] try to put your mind at rest on two points. I don’t think you are hopelessly neurotic in your vacillations about all this. I respect your integrity about it and can understand perfectly well how you can see my argument.… and at the same time have second thoughts about the advisability of altering the stories so that they become something you had not intended them to be.” She did sound a warning, however: “We will not be able to promote the book in quite the same way and, probably, as a result, we won’t get as good an audience for it.” (Judith offered Cushman a $2,500 advance instead of the $4,000 which she and Gottlieb had earlier talked about between themselves.)

  In an internal memorandum to Gottlieb, Judith, who was confused about Margaret’s behaviour, made some crucial points: “So, except for mending repetitions, we’re right back where we started. But she seems to have let herself get very upset about the whole thing, particularly about her own neurotic behavior, and the only thing I could do was to reassure John that of course we’ll publish and to write her a comforting letter. I’m sorry because we won’t have as strong a book, but you can only push someone like Margaret so far without doing real damage.”

  In June 1969, Judith Jones obviously did not know how far Margaret Laurence had been pushed in her personal life. She was particularly annoyed by Margaret’s wavering stand and by the fact she attempted to use her agent in order to win a battle that she, as editor, was quite content to let the writer win. “What Judith called “neurotic” was Margaret’s incredible “indecisiveness,” her inability at times to make firm resolutions about her marriage and even her books.

  Margaret also had a tendency to hear what she wanted to hear. A good example of this can be found in her description of the children’s reaction to the news of the impending divorce: “worked myself into state of semi-collapse, anticipating all kinds of terrible reactions. Joe just grinned when I started my speech to her, and said very gently ‘It’s okay—I know what you’re trying to say’ Dave more uncertain and very hard to know how he is taking it.” Her account sounds plausible, but it is not exactly what Jocelyn and David remember. For a long time, they had been victims of the topsy-turvy state of their parents’ marriage. They wanted a resolution to be imposed on the fraught, confus
ing situation. When Margaret informed them of the impending divorce, a very relieved and yet annoyed Jocelyn told her: “We’re glad you guys have decided to do something at last.” The children wanted their mother’s histrionics about her failed marriage to disappear.

  When discussing this turning point with Adele, she sought to assure her friend everything would turn out all right, but the letter seems also to be a missive to herself, as if offering herself a very tenuous form of encouragement:

  It is quite simple when adultery is the grounds, and I expect Esther will agree to that. It is only just a question of all of us playing out our little roles for the sake of the legal rituals, to satisfy decent middle-class society—I as the injured wife is a pretty funny picture, when you think of it, but that is what the law demands … It’s odd—we will remain friends, and won’t cease to care about one another. The time when the relationship worked best, during these years in England, was really when we were nominally separated and considered that we were friends rather than married. As far as my temporary panic is concerned, I think now it will take a certain period of readjustment before I once again get used to thinking of myself as once and for all on my own. But it’ll be okay, I know, because if there is a real me, it is the writer one, I guess, although I have strong matriarchal leanings as well.

  That summer, en route to Toronto and her post as writer-in-residence at the University of Toronto, Margaret and the children travelled together to British Columbia to visit Jack’s mother, to whom Margaret wanted to break the news of the impending divorce. In a letter to Al Purdy that August, she provided an extensive account of her “Freudian accident”: