The Life of Margaret Laurence

by James King

  One of Don Bailey’s memories was of Margaret’s office at Massey College, where she “created a small fortress area in one corner of the room. She had moved her desk as close to the wall as possible and it was stacked with numerous piles of manuscripts through which she could peek and not be observed. But I knew that she was there because of the cloud of smoke.” In Bailey’s recollections of his conversations with her, one can hear the bravado she sometimes assumed with male friends. (There is a substantial difference in tone between Margaret’s letters to men and women; this distinction is particularly obvious when one compares her letters to Al Purdy to those to Adele Wiseman when she is dealing with an identical topic. With Adele, she is usually brutally frank, but she often adds a dash of swagger when relating the same information to Purdy.) Upon being introduced to her, he somewhat awkwardly began: “I’m … honoured. I can’t tell you …” This declaration was quickly interrupted: “Can the honour bullshit.… We’re just two writers, lucky to meet each other. All day I get these people who parade through my office. They want to be writers … bless their souls, the poor buggers. But they ain’t. And I doubt that any of them’ll even get close.” (Among those who did were Gary Geddes, Dennis Lee and Frank Paci.)

  That autumn, Margaret, who had sprained her ankle, was in no mood for the CBC television crew which arrived to film her in real-life situations. She told the CBC, “I damn well wasn’t going to do much walking.” But she soon got into the swing of things: “and there we were, with some of the Massey fellows casually (about as casual and spontaneous as the Coronation) strolling across the courtyard and greeting me like the old Fellow of Massey which I am, ho, ho.” She gave a talk to the “little old ladies” of the Canadian Literature Society, who thought Canadian poetry began and ended with Bliss Carman and that “novels were nicer fifty years ago.” She chortled when the woman introducing her stated: “Mrs. Laurence has 2 children at present.” Earlier, in September, the sometimes publicity-shy writer agreed to appear on a TV panel show called “Man at the Centre” in the company of two psychologists and an anthropologist: “The talk was mainly about personal relationships in an urban situation—love in the concrete jungle, as it were. Somewhat to my surprise, I quite enjoyed doing it and found I was not nervous in the slightest.”

  In November, however, she shook like a leaf in a storm and felt like a lamb being led to the slaughter when she gave a public lecture as part of her duties as writer-in-residence. Afterwards, she was a nervous wreck, one who consumed a great deal of Scotch. That February, she was moved by Hugh MacLennan’s appearance at a lecture she gave at McGill. She was too shy to say very much but wrote him immediately upon her return to Toronto: “I really wanted to tell you, that day, that I feel very deeply that I owe you a debt of gratitude as a novelist. It was really only through your novels, and those of Ethel Wilson, and Sinclair Ross, and very few others, that I came to an understanding of the simple fact that novels could be written here out of one’s own background, and that in fact this was the only true soil for me to write out of. I would think all novelists of my generation, and those younger than I, must feel the same toward you.”

  The august halls of Massey College provided another amusing interlude when Margaret ran into Earle Birney accompanied by an exceedingly young woman. When living in Vancouver, she had known Earle slightly but thought him a kind and generous person, the very opposite of the stuffy people who comprised most of the literary community there. She was also aware of Earle’s reputation as a womanizer. In an attempt to make appropriate chit-chat with the “young chick,” she complimented her on her fun-fur coat. Then, unthinkingly, she added: “My daughter would love one like that.” Later, she was ashamed of herself: “it occurs to me how awful it must’ve sounded. Like, if the kid is young enough to be my daughter, where does that leave Earle? I could’ve bitten my tongue out, but there—I didn’t mean to be mean, and intentions must count for something.”

  But Margaret had to do some fast talking herself when her appearance caused some questions to be raised by some of the fellows: “Came back today with scarred and bleeding chin and had to say—oh, a skin condition. Thought of saying I grazed it on a bearded man, which, being the truth, nobody would’ve believed, but in the end didn’t have the nerve to try that line. Don’t worry—was an old friend, who mostly lives in Toronto, so this was the New Year surprise. I am vulnerable, sure, at the moment, but not so vulnerable as to go berserk with a stranger on the Earls Court Rd or somewhere.” A few days later, she offered Al Purdy some further observations on the aftermath of this brief liaison: “Learned that the brief encounter with someone who bores the hell out of you in the morn is not for me. Much as I am in favour of sex, I also like to talk and I feel very strange and disoriented with someone I can’t talk to at all. But one has to watch this pattern thing—I think possibly everyone’s tendency is to keep on repeating the patterns of one’s life over and over, and I think this is one reason I’m not really keen about the idea of ever marrying again—would probably end up with someone exactly like J. No, dammit, I wouldn’t!”

  Gradually, she settled into Massey College, although Toronto remained the V.M. She certainly did not enjoy the house she moved into on Westgrove Crescent that autumn: “The owners are tiny little people about 4 feet tall or so it seems, and both of them are excessively nervous and agitated about leaving their priceless 16th-century Italian furniture in the care of someone else, and they keep phoning and pleading with me to come over, so I do, and we have yet another conducted tour through the house, with both of them pouring thousands of little details into my ear, and me nodding and saying yes yes.” One great pleasure during this stay was the availability in Toronto of Adele Wiseman, her husband, Dmitry Stone, and their young daughter, Tamara, born in June 1969. Even though they lived nearby, Margaret and Adele continued their habit of writing letters. In those days, she did not like speaking on the phone (“a deadly instrument”), and Adele did not like to speak about personal matters within earshot of her husband’s two sons from a previous marriage.

  For years, Margaret had been hinting at a permanent return to her native land. Even before the calamity of 1969, she had a very precise idea of why returning to Canada was crucial. There were “2 reasons—a) if I don’t, I can’t go on writing, because I shall have forgotten how the voices sound; b) I feel at this point in life a strong desire to lessen my own isolation and to take some part in the general aspect of Canadian writing.” Her divorce that December may have been the direct impetus behind her decision to purchase some land in Canada. Perhaps the acquisition of land was her way of clearing the slate, of doing something for herself that would give her pleasure and of giving herself her own space separate from everyone else.

  Margaret Laurence knew that she was a writer whose audience was largely Canadian. Despite the best efforts of both Alan Maclean in England and Alfred Knopf in the United States, Margaret Laurence never achieved a substantial international reputation, one on a par with the fame later accorded Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro. Perhaps the time was not ripe for a Canadian writer to achieve international acclaim. Moreover, Margaret Laurence was a writer whose vision was tied to the landscapes of Manitoba, British Columbia and Ontario. Her stories are universal ones, but they do not detach easily from the locales they so evocatively depict. She did gain some excellent notices; for example, in the United States, Granville Hicks in the Saturday Review praised the fine craftsmanship of The Stone Angel and Honor Tracy, in a review in the New Republic, marvelled at the book’s exactitude in giving the reader “a portrait of a remarkable character and at the same time the picture of old age itself.” Similar, favourable reviews can be found in the American press of A Jest of God. Tracy was unstinting in lauding The Fire-Dwellers in the New York Times Book Review, the “excellent writing is an exhilaration in itself: otherwise The Fire-Dwellers would leave many of us in pretty low spirits.” Ultimately, this was a book which created an “Every-woman of today.” Ironically, Margaret�
�s greatest success in being brought to the attention of the large American market was in Paul Newman’s sensitive film adaptation of A Jest of God, Rachel, Rachel, in which Manawaka becomes a New England town.

  In 1969, she was not ready to abandon Elmcot, so she toyed instead with the idea of purchasing a cottage or summer home to which she could return for two or three months each year. Her first impulse was to buy near the Purdys in Ameliasburg. She fell in love with the region but quickly had second thoughts when she realized she would be two hundred miles from Toronto and a long distance away from her friends there. “Maybe,” she told Al, “I am going to have to settle for something not so beautiful but more accessible.” That was on October 14. On November 5, a little more than three weeks later, came the “big news”:

  I have bought a cedar shack and lot on the Otonabee river! Much needs to be done to cottage, but it is liveable about 8 months per year as it stands now. Want to do all sorts of things to it, but will see how finances stand in spring. There are some other cottages, and my lot is only 76 feet of river front, but if I’m there alone, I don’t think I really want no neighbours.… Three small bedrooms (room for my friends and kids); huge front window going up to roof, with view of the river—trees etc; no building likely on other side of river, as it is low-lying ground; permanent farmer living about 300 yards up the hill, and he goes to Peterborough every day with the milk, so charming lady like me might con a lift; only 5 miles from Peterborough, so taxi would cost about four bucks, which would not be at all bad.

  One of the chief joys of her land acquisition—seven miles south of Peterborough—was that it allowed her to buy a slew of items from one of her favourite pieces of reading matter—Eaton’s mail-order catalogue: “Wow! What reading! I have ordered everything for my cottage from it, and get home every night to find lovely parcels to open, like Christmas, and now I’m going to have to rent a small truck to get all the stuff from Toronto to my shack.” Two crucial elements in the cottage’s interior decoration were the posters of two of her great heroes, Louis Riel and Norman Bethune. Many of her friends stayed at the cottage. One of the most wonderful moments was the evening Alice Munro visited. The two played some music, drank a little, and then spontaneously got up to dance, their bodies swaying to the rhythms that filled the room.

  The cottage also inspired Margaret’s last novel. As Margaret sat at her workspace, a large table by the huge window, she could see the Otonabee River “flowing” in two directions. She described this scene in the opening of The Diviners: “The river flowed both ways.” An early glimpse of one of the central elements in the construction of her next novel can be glimpsed in an aside to Jack McClelland that January: “I had long passionate conversations on the phone with the well-digger, as I had been told terrible and alarming tales of other people’s experiences with well-diggers. At this point, my relationship with the well-digger is far from happy—he thinks I’m not going to pay him for the work he does, and I think he’s going to go down 20 feet and charge me for 500 feet.” When he telephoned to tell her that he had found water, she was amazed he did not have to go more than fifty feet down: “Lord, woman,” he shot back, “you got enough water there for haffa Toronto.”

  That year in Canada, Margaret became more and more aware of her place in the Canadian literary community, a place she had once been content to ignore: “So Canada is parochial in some ways,” she told McClelland. “I hate the infighting that goes on in so-called literary circles; it’s too enclosed and all that—but goddamn it, it’s my home and my people. I have lived away too long. And yet when I think of how I felt in Vancouver those years ago—I felt as tho I were totally isolated (I didn’t know any writers there then; how odd that seems now). I went to England partly in order to feel less isolated, and in a sense I did what I wanted to do and I think it was the best possible thing that could’ve happened. But as you know, I have really wanted to come back here for some time now. I’m gradually manipulating myself into the position of being able to come back.” In this context, “coming back” does not mean simply a physical return to a point of origin—it refers to seeing oneself as a part of a community.

  Before, Al Purdy, Adele Wiseman, Jack McClelland and Jane Rule had been Margaret’s principal contacts in the Canadian literary scene. From 1969 onwards, the references to other Canadian writers in her letters increase at a quick pace. This sojourn in Canada—even though she was settling there only on a part-time basis—forced her to relate to her contemporaries in a new way. Nevertheless, for a long time, she was extremely careful not to take sides publicly in any dispute. Indeed, in 1969–70, she could, in large measure, take an almost voyeuristic pleasure in seeing other people expose themselves.

  Margaret Atwood’s opposition to the flamboyantly heterosexual poet Irving Layton’s rampant sexism provided great amusement: too bad she “takes Irving seriously; I don’t blame her, actually, as I’d probably do the same, but I think it’s a mistake, nonetheless. If he ever says to me that women novelists are only good for fucking, I will respond thus … ‘It well may be that some male poets are good only for poetry … shall we adjourn to your hotel room and see?’ Well, no, I guess that would be hitting below the belt, well-aimed … who could fail to be impotent under such circumstances?” When she met Irving at York University, she informed him that when living in Hampstead, she had taken offence at his line: “The orgasmless women of Hampstead.” After they debated this issue for some time, they discovered they were talking at cross purposes: “He had meant Hampstead Montreal and I naturally had thought he meant Hampstead London England.”

  Margaret had known and liked Mordecai Richler socially in England; she also admired his writing “a hell of a lot, except when he begins sounding off about Canada, and then I think he is years out of date and I never agreed with him anyway.” For her, Barry Callaghan remained the incarnate male enemy: “Callaghan Fils, whom, as you know, I love rather less than I would love an attack of bubonic plague. He is oriented to New York, but what the clod doesn’t see is that he is trying to gain acceptance in a Club which will always despise him—too bad he wants it so much, or thinks it valuable.” A few years later, she would become one of Rudy Wiebe’s greatest admirers, but in 1971 she spent a day “in a state of great fragility, reading improving things like Rudy Wiebe’s very Christian novel, First and Vital Candle, and thinking what a much nicer person Rudy is than I am. Not as good a writer, tho.”

  Without doubt, the writer who most intrigued—and frightened—Margaret Laurence was Margaret Atwood, one of the young Canadian writers—others included Myrna Kostash and Silver Donald Cameron—who had made Elmcot the “Unofficial Canada House” and Margaret herself the “Low Commissioner.” When necessary, she could be brutally honest with fledgling writers: “Maybe fiction isn’t for you.”

  In January 1970, she told Purdy: “Did I mention I’d read M. Atwood’s novel THE EDIBLE WOMAN? Quite good, but much more superficial than her poetry, I thought. I think she is a poet.” This brief sentence encapsulates all her feelings about the woman novelist who was—and remained—her biggest rival. The same sentiment is repeated in a letter of November 1971 to Purdy: “I admire her poetry more than I can say. I also love her as a human, and somehow, once we really talked, did not feel her frightening, as I thought I might. Instead, I felt I could level with her. And probably did.” Residual admiration and fear of Atwood can be seen in this aside in a letter to Ernest Buckler of November 1974: “I was talking, in my fiction, about survivors, long before Peggy [Margaret] Atwood said this was one main theme of Canadian fiction.” Her tone in a letter to Margaret Atwood of December 1972 was quite different: “By now you will have had my letter, full of astound, re: SURVIVAL.”

  There was security in keeping Atwood in a niche—one which did not allow her the opportunity to compete with Margaret. But the two Margarets often shared similar sentiments, as can be seen in Margaret Laurence’s letter to Margaret Atwood in April 1973: “I am really fed up with Mordecai’s moani
ng about the awfulness of Canadian writing. Maybe we need a devil’s advocate, but it would be nice if he admitted that a sizeable number of good books do come out in Canada each year now. You know, though, Peggy, I do not believe he reads Canadian books—I really don’t. I would really like to know how many Canadian novels and books of poetry he has read in the past year—I bet it would be about two. Trouble is, at this point, he’s made a side-profession of knocking Canada, and it’s become a habit. Guess it wouldn’t annoy me so much if he weren’t a good writer!” Missing from this account of Mordecai is Margaret’s reliance on him. On a number of occasions during the Elmcot years—“pissed out of her mind”—she would phone him in the middle of the night to talk about her loneliness and sense of desolation.

  Towards the end of her stay at the University of Toronto, Margaret had to have her head measured for the mortarboard required for her to be properly attired to receive her first honorary degree—from McMaster University—in the spring of 1970. This was an event which she treated with great playfulness:

  Guess what? McMaster wants to know my head size, for academic hat. HEAD SIZE? ACADEMIC HAT? Good grief! Can you see me in mortar-board? The audience will be in fits of uncontrollable laughter. I thought of replying that HEAD SIZE sometimes shrunken, sometimes swollen, depending on mood. But contented myself with measuring skull and telling them I wasn’t sure quite where to measure (eyebrows? forehead? etc) so had done it around the place where I would wear a headband if I were an Indian in a western movie. Hope they don’t think I’m being flippant, because I am.