The Life of Margaret Laurence

by James King

  It was High Noon in Victoria when I ran into a lamp post. How is that for an opener? It is also true. I guess hardly anyone would believe how I got the gorgeous black eye which I am now sporting, but I swear that the following story is God’s truth. My mother-in-law was having some people in for lunch, to meet me, and of course the atmosphere being what it was, namely polite and careful but somewhat sorrowful (she just having had Jack’s explanatory letter—what terrible timing, me in the bosom of his family at that moment in history!), I felt I had to be home at the right time that morn. I had promised to be back by 12.30. It was then 12.30. David and I had been to see the Undersea Gardens and got so interested we stayed too long. There was the bus—right in front of Woolworth’s. The next one would be along in 20 minutes’ time. I CANNOT CREATE ANY DIFFICULTIES WITH MY MAW-IN-LAW AT THIS POINT—such was my thought. I zoomed across the street, looking all of the time at the bus. There was a metal box which housed the controls of the traffic lights, and it was attached to a lamp post. When I saw it looming in front of my eyes, it was too late. KAPOWIE! There I was, my life’s blood gently fountaining all over the sidewalk outside Woolworth’s. A sharp blow to the eyebrow and side of the head. Within seconds, a police car drew up and hustled David and myself to St. Joseph’s Emergency Ward, where a nice young doctor did a lot of fancy embroidery in black thread on my right eyebrow, while David waited in the waiting room wondering if his mum was on her way to the morgue.

  The incident is recounted with real zest but missing is the sadness of the situation, in which a very distracted, nervous Margaret hurt herself quite badly. There is a haunting irony in the visit to Victoria because Margaret conducted herself as if she was Elsie’s child. A touch of sibling rivalry can be seen in this action, as if she wishes to prove she is a better child to her mother-in-law than her own son is. In this situation, she wanted to retain the affection of her third mother while letting go of that woman’s son.

  Margaret was not looking forward to her stay in the Vile Metropolis, and she was beside herself with anguish when she said goodbye to Jocelyn and David at the airport in Montreal (Ian and Sandy Cameron, young, hippyish friends of Margaret’s friend Professor Clara Thomas of York University, had agreed to look after Elm Cottage and the children in her absence). The one-hour wait for her flight to Toronto was one of the most gruesome episodes in all her remembrances, so intensely alone did she feel.

  What Margaret did not speak or write about to her friends—but what was obvious to them—was the change her divorce introduced into her drinking pattern. Previously, she had been a binge drinker, one who would consume alcohol under stress and then have the wherewithal to stop. For years, she had used alcohol to escape under moments of great stress. Writing was the consistent way in which she had coped creatively with the losses she had endured as a young child—it allowed her to mother herself. She could not deal with the loss of her husband in the same way and, at this time in her life, when she was on the verge of becoming Margaret Laurence, one of the greatest and most beloved of Canadian writers, she sought the comforts of alcoholic oblivion on a daily basis. When drunk, in addition to speaking of John Simpson, she lamented her failures as a parent, her difficulties with writing, her loss of Jack, “the only man I ever loved” (the last now becoming the predominant refrain). For her, time had to have a stop, and alcohol became an increasingly necessary potion.

  Margaret Laurence. 1984. (illustration credit 15.1)

  Her appearance began to change markedly. She gained a lot of weight and, as she began to fill out, she became the Margaret Laurence recognizable to most Canadians. Her beauty may have faded, but the intensity of the eyes always held the spectators attention.

  That autumn she drank heavily, and her life had a particularly eerie quality to it. She was trying to adjust to Canada whereas she had to prepare to return to England in December for the divorce. “Yes,” she told Purdy, “I’ll recover from the divorce bit—it is just that it hits sudden and unexpected.… Goddamn it, if only I did not react in the flesh to everything.”

  Later, Margaret would speak very reluctantly of the actual proceedings, which were held in Guildford. Alan Maclean telephoned a few days before and in his typically friendly and warm way informed her: “Macmillan, your publishers, do not wish you to take 15 buses and 4 trains.” So a car picked up Margaret and Sandy Cameron—who had to be prepared to testify in the event the judge wanted to be reassured the children were being properly cared for—and they were driven, chauffeur and all, to Surrey. Margaret’s account to Purdy of the proceedings themselves is a bit woolly:

  —so when chips are down, no way of doing it painlessly. We both know this is only way. We both want it. We both also care terribly about the other—how does one cope with that? I had to take the witness stand (and they mean stand; you don’t sit; you stand there shaking like proverbial aspen leaf, at least I did.) Questions all meaningless, dreadful, without relation to people’s lives. I have one advantage, Al. It has always stood me in good stead. I shake in my flesh, but my voice never shakes. I was so goddamn scared when J took the stand, because he has not had the practise I have had, public-wise, and also is not a believer in being emotional—here is this prairie man, forced to stand up and speak, and no one, not even GOD has the right to ask him to do that. But he has to do it. Maybe I’ve been more prepared by having to be a public person in ways I knew to be phoney. Even so, I shook like the small winds through the poplars. And yet it was tougher for him, even tho he had his woman to go to, to hold his hand, to marry (odd word) as soon as possible, and so on. I did not see her—she was there, but I did not see her. I will, I guess, but not just yet.

  To Adele, she added an important detail: “focussed my mind on Hagar.”

  As she left the chambers, Sandy overheard Margaret’s solicitor offering comfort: “Well, Mrs. Laurence, that wasn’t so bad, was it?” She shot back: “Yes, it was!” Margaret was referring to the fact that the magistrate had called her an “unnatural mother,” who had neglected her children by returning to the wilds of Canada. Jack had had to defend his about-to-be-ex-wife of the charge of being an unfit parent.

  If Margaret was cryptic about the court proceedings, she was forever silent about another matter. To Adele, she confessed: “I took I don’t know (I really don’t know—that is probably frightening) how many tranquillizers and slept for 2 days almost unbroken. Then rose and resumed life.” She omitted to tell Adele that on the very evening of that black day, she took the pills in a locked bathroom at Elmcot and then yelled out she was going to kill herself. Ian, Sandy and the children all gathered outside the locked room, not knowing what Margaret had ingested. They pleaded with her to unlock the door, which she was at first unwilling to do. Finally, she listened to their pleas when they threatened to either call the police or break the door down. When she emerged and they questioned her about what she had taken, it was obvious she had taken an unusually large number of tranquillizers. At that point, she retired to her room and the long sleep of two days.

  PART THREE

  MARGARET LAURENCE

  “How far could anyone see into the river? Not far. Near shore, in the shallows, the water was clear, and there were the clean and broken clamshells of creatures now dead, and the wavering of the underwater weed-forests, and the flicker of small live fishes, and the undulating lines of gold as the sand ripples received the sun. Only slightly further out, the water deepened and kept its light from sight.”

  The Diviners

  16

  THE UNCHARTED SEA

  (1969–1972)

  BY 1969, MARGARET LAURENCE was a celebrity in Canada. In retrospect, this is surprising. She was a serious woman writer who had lived in England for almost a decade, returning to her native land only on brief visits. Five circumstances help to explain her fame. There was the extraordinary teamwork of her three publishers (McClelland & Stewart, Macmillan and Knopf) in promoting her work throughout the entire English-speaking world. In this regard, Jack McClelland
’s relentless, creative gift for publicity was the most vital element holding this consortium together. Second, there was a great deal of interest in her within the Canadian academy, exemplified in Clara Thomas’s ground-breaking work on Margaret—the first full-length book devoted to her—published by McClelland & Stewart in 1969. Third, readers in Canada, their interest in her aroused by McClelland & Stewart, responded with great enthusiasm and devotion. They were the real judges of her standing in the marketplace, since, throughout her entire writing career, she was not taken up in any great way by reviewers in Canada (William French of The Globe and Mail was the exception), who often treated her dismissively. Although Canada had produced major women writers before her—Sara Jeannette Duncan, Lucy Maud Montgomery and Ethel Wilson—Margaret was the first “big-time” professional woman writer and, in some ways, an affront to the then predominantly male literary establishment. Fourth, other Canadian writers not only recognized her extraordinary gifts but also realized that her success might lead them in similar directions. Her winning of the Governor General’s Award obviously contributed to her “star” status in the eyes of other writers. Fifth, although she was an exceedingly shy person, her warmth and kindness were evident in any encounters she had with the public.

  There was also something about her that was “ordinary” in the most positive sense of that word. Although much of her existence was consumed by the desire to write, she had an incredible sense of the fabric of daily life and this facility was evident in any conversation with her. In Margaret Laurence the writer and the person, readers saw many of their own deepest concerns mirrored. She was much beloved because she reflected and expressed the hopes and fears of Canadians from all strata of society.

  Universality is often used as a criterion in talking about great writers. Of all Canadian writers, Margaret Laurence understood most intuitively the dilemmas of being Canadian—of being torn apart by language issues, of being part of a band of old and recent immigrants uneasily assimilated together, of being attached to a nation that wanted its own identity apart from the United States and Europe, of being connected to a culture which wanted to be part of the North American continent and yet had to be distinctly different.

  Margaret Laurence was also a fundamentally decent person, a writer who challenged Canadians to think the best of each other and to conduct themselves likewise. For women readers, especially, she showed how the appropriation of power by women could be conducted according to principles of enlightened self-interest.

  Her kindness, generosity and good heart are legendary. When Ken Roberts, a young writer she had encouraged, was leaving Ontario to take up a post in Alberta, he came to say goodbye to Margaret, who burst into copious tears. He asked her why she was so emotional. She told him that, although she recognized twentieth-century man was a creature trained not to form close attachments, she had never been able to get used to losing close friends, even though death and separation had been part of her life since childhood. This side of her can be seen in the letter of condolence she sent to Michelle Tisseyre, the translator of her novels into French, when her two-year-old daughter died.

  You will understand and forgive the clumsiness of my words. In the face of the deepest tragedy that can befall a human being, the loss of a child, there are no words. It is that possibility of loss that every loving parent dwells with, from the moment of a child’s birth, right through until a child becomes an adult and even after that, for always. There is a profound sense in which nobody can understand your pain unless they have felt it in their own flesh and heart. And yet, because I have feared so often for my two children, and have so very often rejoiced simply in their being, and have prayed for them only that they may survive … there is also a way in which I know your pain. I know also the terrible and almost, at the time, unbelievable finality of loss, for my mother died when I was four years old and my father when I was ten. Pain is not qualitative, and yet I know in the deepest parts of my spirit that the loss of a child is the worst.

  This letter is profoundly moving. Margaret fully understands her words cannot remedy the grief felt by a grieving parent, but knowing, as deeply as she did, her own worst fears and tragic losses, she reaches out to connect to Michelle’s sorrow.

  Margaret Laurence the celebrity also had a wonderful sense of fun and could even be mischievous. In 1978, when she attended the Canadian Studies conference in Calgary, she was thrilled to meet Manitoba-born writer Gabrielle Roy for the first time. During a dinner at which the two women were seated together, a young man burst into the restaurant and strode determinedly towards their table, managing, in the process, to bump into Roy. Seeing how agitated the young man was, Margaret suggested he and she have a brief conversation away from the table. During their těte-à-těte, the young man assured her that she and Gabrielle Roy were the greatest writers Canada had ever produced. With a malicious gleam in her eye, she interrupted him: “That was Gabrielle you just crashed into.”

  There is another crucial aspect to the legendary Margaret Laurence: her chronic shyness at public events. She was not merely nervous. Her hands would shake badly; later, she would find it difficult to control the quaver in her voice. Her close friend, Malcolm Ross—who knew her both as Peggy Wemyss and Margaret Laurence—felt that not only her habitual fear of being seen in public but also her inability to say no and her corresponding generosity to all manner of causes and writers might have come in part from her sense she was undeserving or unworthy of the success she had obtained. In particular, he felt, her celebrated generosity might have been an act of penance, a way of making up for the fame (she felt) she had somehow unworthily garnered. There is a great deal of truth in this observation. She was a powerful person, but she was a powerful person who was often out of touch with—or suspicious of—her own remarkable strengths. Margaret never tried to create a public image, but she was quite content to appear to be what she was not: an ordinary middle-class woman who just happened to have created Hagar, Rachel and Stacey.

  A word that came into Margaret’s vocabulary with increasing frequency was “tribe,” a term she uses to describe fellow writers, especially Canadian writers. The word’s obvious communal import was significant to her—writers had to stick together—but so was the word’s association with primitive groups: writers were tribal in that they did not conform to society’s regimented expectations and were therefore “wild.” In her dealings with young writers, her generosity of soul was evident, but she received much in return: the companionship and love of people whose talents she very much valued.

  In the autumn of 1969, when she returned to Canada, many of the elements in the making of Margaret Laurence the celebrity had jelled into place. Ironically, all this happened at one of the greatest crisis points in her personal life, at the time her own pursuit of personal power had backfired. Also, she was in the very uneasy position of being an outsider in the essentially male domain of the University of Toronto’s prestigious graduate residence, Massey College, founded six years before in 1963 by Robertson Davies. That September, she considered it “humorous that I am the first woman ever to ever have an office there. Robertson Davies, the Master (!) of Massey, said, ‘Don’t believe the myths you hear about this college—you are WELCOME.’ ” Soon, she was taking great enjoyment in a perk provided by her new job: “I did one SENSATIONAL thing the other day—I dictated letters to a secretary! A new experience, and one which I took to immediately. What luxury!”

  In 1969, The University of Toronto, like many North American campuses, was a hotbed of student protest. In response, Margaret thought of barricading herself in her office or putting up a large sign: “LEAVE ME ALONE: I WALK TO A DIFFERENT DRUM.” She was delighted to learn from Phyllis Grosskurth, a member of the writer-in-residence committee, that she was not expected to do too much. And then there was the student, one Mr. Parker, who showed up at her door. When she started to quiz him about his writing, he informed her he was an engineering student. “Well, why did you come to see me?” H
e explained that he lived at Devonshire Place—just opposite Massey—and wondered if she would treat them to a “talk session” one night. Confused, Margaret responded: “Why, sure … that is … well … urn … er … I guess so … I mean, are they interested in talking about writing?” It was the turn of Mr. Parker to be surprised and confused: “Oh, no, there’s lots of women in your books, and the guys want to talk about women.” Another male visitor, this one middle-aged, spooked her when, in response to her advice to “Listen to how people talk if you’re going to write fiction,” he replied: “I don’t very often hear people talking.” She then arranged for her next-door neighbour, Phil, to come to her office if summoned by a certain code-phrase on the phone. “This cloak-and-dagger stuff was silly, no doubt, but it was a reassurance I needed.”

  Although Margaret had asked a number of people about the seemingly mysterious duties of a writer-in-residence before she arrived at the University of Toronto, she soon settled into a routine of reading the work of would-be writers and commenting on it. As she told Al Purdy, “the kids who will be real writers don’t need me or you or any bloody person; they will survive.” However, with the really promising young writers—those who wanted and could cope with real criticism, she was “hard as nails and [tore] their work apart.” One of her most promising students was twenty-seven-year-old Don Bailey, who had recently been released from Warkworth Penitentiary where he had served nine years for armed robbery. To a mutual friend—Jane Rule—she spoke not only of the work she was doing with him but also of her own vantage point as a writer of fiction: “He has begun to make himself more vulnerable in the writing, and that is necessary, as you know. I don’t think it matters a damn whether the fiction is partly autobiographical or not—it is still necessary to lay one’s life on the line more than one really feels inclined to do.” Once, in the event the young man was tempted to falter in his vocation, she repeated some words of wisdom: “as Jack McClelland always says to me—‘Back to your typewriter, slob!’ ”