The Life of Margaret Laurence

by James King

  All in all, this extended visit to Canada made her feel connected to her native land, but ultimately she did not really like the duties of a writer-in-residence, as she realized in February 1970: “I enjoy talking to the kids, although I think it is largely a waste of time. But I am beginning to feel lonely for the inner world, and do want to get back to writing, and there is no way I can, until I leave here. I begin to resent this, and to feel I want to take off NOW.… All this academic life, plus seeing too many people, plus not being alone enough, plus the feeling of pressure of trivial work, is not at all good. I have 2 more months to go, that’s all, praise God.” Nevertheless, once she had returned to England, she missed Canada: “Last weeks … were lovely, out in shack on Otonabee river, but also more filled with events than one would have imagined possible. I always think I am about to lead the quiet country life, which always turns out about as quiet as a three-ring circus. However, I did have some time alone, to sit on my riverside deck and contemplate the wildlife, so that was good. Hope to be back next summer, God willing.”

  Back in England that July, everything was fine, “more or less.” But Elmcot needed many repairs, so Margaret was “immersed in passionate converse with builders, painters and Rising-Damp Specialists.” She asked Jack McClelland: “You don’t know about Rising Damp and Dry Rot? Lucky you. Lots of things now being done to the old dump so we can keep in business awhile longer.”

  There were some difficulties at Elmcot to which she did not like to refer. Principally, she was disgusted by her ex-husband’s dislike of the “scene” there. When Ian and Sandy Cameron allowed an unmarried couple to join them and the children, he called these people “freeloaders” and “hippies.” To Al, Margaret observed: “he knows he ain’t paying the bills, I am.” Nevertheless, Jack did not feel he could visit Elmcot “while those people are there” since he found himself “shaking with rage” at what he observed. To another friend, she lamented: The children “see their dad sometimes, but he has kind of opted out of any relationship with them, out of bewilderment, I think.” She could be dismissive of Jack Laurence, but she also found it difficult to relate to children who were fast becoming adults. When she spent part of the next summer of 1971 at the shack, she confessed she was not looking forward to returning “into the loony bin that Elmcot will be in the autumn when I arrive, the kids with enormous deep problems (Who Am I? Where Am I Going? etc) and me feeling Heavens, it is I who have handed on all those hangups to them, so what should I do?”

  During her stays in Canada, she worried about the children. But a part of her did not wish to be around them—or to have to deal with teenage angst. She could be very fierce, however, when anyone criticized Jocelyn and David—or the babysitting arrangements she made. In 1970, she had reviewed Percy Janes’s novel House of Hate for The Globe and Mail. In its depiction of Saul Stone, the cantankerous father, this book bears a strong resemblance to some of the themes in her own writing. Late in 1971, the peripatetic Newfoundlander boarded at Elmcot, as she told Adele that October: “He will be here until spring, likely, as he is finishing a novel. Nice guy, but has lived very solitary life for many years so there is some adjustment necessary to our somewhat chaotic lifestyle here. However, it seems to be working out okay. He works in the garden, which is a great blessing from my point of view, as I generally don’t.” In August 1972, Margaret, who was at the shack, received “a very disturbing letter from Percy Janes, saying Elmcot is not his scene and never has been, and he is departing mid-October.… I have to say here and now that any attack upon my house and my people makes me react like some kind of tigress. He offered to tell me, a list of things, why Elmcot is not at all his scene and never has been—am I wrong to feel somewhat saddened and hurt? Yeah, likely. I guess he just cannot find his way clear to relating to a whole lot of people who float in and out of a house, as we do. Maybe he disapproves of us for other reasons—I am known to drink too much from time to time; my kids and other young couples come in and out, and the marriage-church vows are not demanded in our house; some of my kids [and other young people at Elmcot] smoke pot—oh heavens, big deal. But I guess it is that, what else? I do feel somewhat sad when I think of Percy, but I also feel pretty angry that he should offer to tell me what is wrong with my house and my household—that, I guess, I don’t need to know, from him or from anyone. I become somewhat like a tigress, when anyone attacks my fortress and my young.” Since she did not really want to know what was going on in her absence, she takes the moral high ground of anger and resentment in dealing with Janes’s complaint. By doing so, she does not have to be too concerned to examine her own reluctance to return to the “loony bin.” (In recounting her outrage, she does not bother to mention that she herself had experimented with smoking marijuana.)

  Margaret did not want to be involved on a daily basis with young people who were trying to discover their own individualities—and, who, in the process, were rebelling against her. She feared day-to-day intimacy, even with her own children. This is one of the darkest—and most oblique—sides of her character. As a child, she had endured the deaths of her birth parents and, in the process, internalized a great many negative feelings about herself. She may have felt responsible for what happened, in the way young children will blame themselves for events in which they have had no hand. She may have learned as a young child that it was better for her to be isolated from others; if she withdrew from others and into a secret world of writing, perhaps she could escape further catastrophes descending upon her.

  The pattern that asserted itself in any close dealings Margaret had with her husband and children was one of retreat. At about this time, she began to lament to Jocelyn and David: “I’ve been a bad mother to you kids.” The children, although they may have agreed in part with this assertion, would, in their turn, have to soothe her: “No, no, you’re a great mother.” The reassurance would then close off any possibility of a genuine discussion of her failings as a mother. Quite often, she would write notes to the children instead of confronting problems face to face—these notes were often apologetic, providing explanations for her often explosive behaviour. But she could not bear to admit, even to herself, that she did not fulfil her role as parent perfectly. In Dance on the Earth, Margaret continually mentions writing and parenting as the twin concerns to which she dedicated her life; she even insists parenting always took pride of place over writing.

  When she returned to England in 1970, she began the process of detaching herself from Elmcot and the children in what would become preparatory steps for returning to Canada on a permanent basis. “I’ve decided,” she told Al, “to pay off the mortgage on Elm Cottage (with my ill-gotten gains) so that in 3 years’ time I can rent the place.… I’m nervous about material for future novels. Don’t care in a sense, because I think something will turn up.” In September 1970, she owed the Halifax Building Society £4,366 on her mortgage, but had £5,367 in investments. Since the interest earned was less than the principal paid down on the mortgage each month and was taxable, she decided, as she told Alan and Robin Maclean, to take the risk entailed in reducing her savings to a mere thousand pounds: “The only thing I stand to gain by keeping the bloody mortgage is that if I get run over by a bus tomorrow, my kids will get not only the house but also the money I have now with the Halifax as investment. So what? If I pay it off, there isn’t any legal hassle if I drop dead tomorrow, and they get £4,350 less. My aim in life is not to leave money to my kids.”

  At the very same time Margaret was paying off the mortgage on Elmcot, she was unsure once again about her career as a writer of fiction. She had recently agreed to do an article for Maclean’s and a series of light essays for the Vancouver Sun. But her real concern was her conviction that her new novel (if she managed to write it) would be her last: “It doesn’t matter, in a sense. If only I could receive from somewhere the grace to do this one. Dunno if I will or not. Feel it is very far away at the moment, and this breaks me up every time I think of it, but maybe it will
come. But I’m buggered if I’ll ever write a mockup of a novel only in order to go on writing. If it isn’t really there any more, at whatever point, may God give me the strength to quit without self-dramatization or malice. It’ll be others’ turn then.”

  Then, in a less heavy mood, her comic and self-ironic side would assert itself: “Feel depressed sometimes when I think this coming novel, if it ever gets written, will be my last. But there. Maybe I’m fated to end my days running some kind of lunatic hostel for young Canadian writers who need a decent meal from time to time. It’s the matriarch in me.” And with the “Boss” she could even turn a fraught situation into the semblance of comedy: “Have had a terrible bloody year here, with many problems re: my young, and have had to throw out 8 months’ work and thought, re: the novel I was trying to do. No dice. But have begun writing again, just last week, something quite different, probably unpublishable but I do not care one damn. I want to write it; I couldn’t care less if no one else is interested. I will earn my living by—ahem—book reviews, publishers’ reading, and I’m a pretty good cook/cum/charlady. If need be.”

  In a letter that was to prove oddly prophetic, she told Jack McClelland what the next decade might offer her: “You know something? I think I want to write one more novel, and maybe 1 more kids’ book (not so important) and then I want to quit being a writer. I really feel that I want to quit being a fighter, Jack, and become a coach. Not that I can teach kids how to write—it isn’t like that. It’s just that maybe I can do reviews, and publishers’ readers’ reports, and the like. But the time is rapidly approaching when I cannot any longer endure the almost impossible stresses of novel writing. Also, I feel that after I’ve done this one more novel, it is now really the turn of the younger writers.”

  The Diviners proved to be a book of “almost impossible stresses,” one that called forth every bit of fighting instinct in its often beleaguered author: “I suppose the greatest thing about writing is that one can say—indeed, must say—what you really feel, not what you are supposed to feel.” That is a good credo, as long as the writer knows what she really feels. Soon after starting her new novel, Margaret knew many things about it but could not really sort out the conflicting emotions that besieged her. This is why the form the book should take evaded her:

  Trouble is, I know in a vague way what I want to do and I know almost too many details about the characters, etc, but I don’t yet see how to do it. I only know many ways how not to do it. Every form and voice I’ve used before are useless now. This has to be quite different, of course, because it wants to attempt something different. Form, naturally, can’t be developed or thought out in the abstract, by itself, but only in connection with the characters and the whole thing, and maybe I’m beginning to see, a little, how it might work. But it is always an uncharted sea.

  For the past seven years, the “fictional situation” had been in her head; her life—and that of several other major characters—had “followed a somewhat parallel line.” This project unleashed her ambitious side, but she did not want to wind up with a novel nine hundred pages long. She had no interest in “detailed social realism, which now seems to me totally unviable in fiction.”

  If she found a solution to the problem of form, she would, she knew, uncover the right tone—and thus get the right feelings into the book. By October 1970, she simply knew she needed a radical solution, one which might be different to that she had employed in The Fire-Dwellers but equally experimental in challenging the conventions of novel writing. “If I don’t get started soon,” she told Al, “I will no doubt end up in a mental hospital.”

  Two months later, Margaret had a strong sense of the novel “existing out there in space somewhere. If only I could pierce through to it.” But she had not “yet learned the new language which I feel will be necessary for this thing. Migawd, if only I could wave my magic wand!” Three months later, she had retained the “main character and dilemma” but had to discard much of the “whole original idea.” That was all well and good, but she felt she had wasted eight crucial months. However, form and feeling slowly started to come together: “The [idea] I want to try is something that scares me, hence my elaborate evasions.” But she was a fighter, even though she had been so low in spirits as to “feel really suicidal.”

  A little more than a month later, the new novel began to emerge from the shadows in which it had dwelt for a long time:

  Things are changing, maybe for the better. I seem to have begun writing again, and am still so bloody scared that it will all go away that I hardly dare mention it.… A quite different novel from the one I so carefully planned and then had to throw out. I dunno where this is going to go, except in a general way, but I don’t want to know yet, either. I would like, if God is good, to find out as I go along. I do not think this is likely to have much appeal to anyone but myself, because the reasons I’m doing it are not valid, I suspect, for very many people. However, that is not important. Even if it is not published, I would like to set it down somehow. The one I threw out, you know, was really great as a theory; as a novel it was dead before it even began. So, who knows? All I know is that I feel better than I have since I finished The Fire-Dwellers, which was in 1968, and for the first time since then, I want to get up in the mornings.

  As the year progressed, things began to go more smoothly, but Margaret could be overly self-critical as on September 3, when she thought what she had written so far was “shit” and asked herself: “why don’t I throw it in the fire?” She was also bothered by the fact that her new heroine, Morag Gunn, was a form of herself, perhaps more so than Stacey and Vanessa had ever been. “You could make some shrewd guesses,” she informed Al, “about the main character … and you would be both right and not right. Well, we will see. The division between fiction and so-called reality in my life seems an awfully uncertain one.”

  By 1972, Margaret had established a routine whereby she spent a portion of each summer in Canada. The Diviners was thus only the second of the Manawaka novels to be composed partly in Canada. During the writing of that book, Margaret, even back in England, felt the tug of Canada, towards which she was drawn in a new, fundamentally different way. This can be seen, for example, in her response to the separatist FLQ crisis in the autumn of 1970: “I am pretty disenchanted with Trudeau, but all the same, I felt very sorry for him having to decide which course to take. When I asked myself what I’d do in his situation, all the old ineffectual liberal in me rose to the surface, as expected. I think I probably would have gone along with the FLQ’s requests and tried to get the 2 men back alive, while at the same time convinced with part of my mind that this was the wrong decision.”

  At a more personal level, she was discouraged by the potential failure of her financially pressed publishing house, McClelland & Stewart. To Al Purdy—never a great admirer of Jack, whose firm he nicknamed “McStew”—she was blunt: “Look, you’re right about him and you know you are—I feel somewhat the same about him: there are many things about him which I don’t like, and God knows I have had my difficulties with him, like every other writer he’s ever published, but the fact remains that he has been until recently the only good publisher in Canada, the only one prepared to take any risks on new or different writers.” She was relieved when Margaret Atwood phoned to tell her Jack McClelland was not pulling out. “Personally,” she told Al, “I think that Jack is fed up with the stresses and strains, and in many ways would like to get out of publishing, and I can see his point.” In the summer of 1971, Jack McClelland, who had received a substantial loan from the government of Ontario, had printed a poster for Margaret, complete “with a comic take-off of the Ontario coat-of-arms.” It stated: “No visitors allowed between Monday and Friday. An important work is going on.”

  When she received word she had been elected to the Order of Canada, some of her ambivalent feelings surfaced. She would accept the honour, but she was not willing to travel to Canada in April 1972 to receive it: “Have had various hassles re
: this whole idiotic bit about Companion, Order of Canada,” she told Adele. Although they did not “post the pretty brooches,” they were willing to arrange a private ceremony. The ceremony was held on June 27. When she called ahead to ask if she could dress informally, she was given a firm no. With considerable relish, she described how before the Governor General entered the reception room on the day of the investiture, “an aide fastened a hook on my dress so that Michener could avoid grappling with my matronly bosom.” Two years later, she confessed the full extent of her mixed feelings to Ernest Buckler—who had just been elected: “it is likely a whole load of b.s.” However, she did “wear the little pin with the snowflake and the maple leaf—I kind of like it, to tell you the truth. So I guess I feel ambiguous. But I feel if Orders are being passed out, a) better they should be Canadian ones, and b) better that a few people in the arts should get them.”

  During the writing of this book in which she had reached the nineteenth scribbler in March 1972, she came to a new understanding of what she considered feminism to be, insights which determined in part its form. When she wrote The Fire-Dwellers, she had constructed a brilliant commentary on the feminine mystique—of the various ways in which women are supposed to fit into a male-dominated society, a critique which complements Betty Friedan. Since she was connecting racial and political issues (through the Métis) to Morag’s life in her new novel, she was attempting to think through for herself the often thorny connections between personal and political issues: