by James King
Personally, I’ve always gone a long way with Women’s Lib, having discovered many of the now common theories for myself many years ago. However, there is one thing that I can’t go along with—the parallel between women and blacks simply is not an accurate one, because in (let us say) colonial Africa, the Africans began to know quite clearly that the colonialists were the enemy, an enemy whom they needed to expel from their country in order to repossess their own lands. With women, although our culture has indeed tended to make them 2nd class citizens, men are not the enemy—that is, men are our brothers, lovers, the fathers of our children. This makes it much more subtle and difficult, in some ways, because the efforts of women to respect and free themselves must be done without damaging men—to deball men is not the object of the exercise; in doing that, women will only damage themselves as well, and also their children. However, I think that in some cases, if women have been dreadfully unsure of their own selves, this can cause a kind of desperate reaction, which is mostly, in my experience, not really the fault of the individual man with whom they are related, but comes from the inside. Freedom, in the profoundest sense even in colonial situations, must ultimately be an inner thing. I think this theme has been an obsessive one, in my writing, and maybe in doing the writing I’ve discovered a lot about my own dilemmas. One is lucky to be a writer, I think sometimes. Whatever strength one finds, ultimately, must come from inside oneself, and in a literal sense, no one can save anyone else, although you can reach out to touch others.
The distinction between personal and political issues is not maintained in The Diviners, but Margaret’s insistence that freedom—if it existed—was within the self was a crucial part of her system of values. She was deeply reluctant to blame others for her own failings as a woman and as a person.
As work on The Diviners progressed at a steady rate towards the end of 1972, she even wrote songs for some of the characters, including “Song for Piquette.” According to her, that character’s death “has to be the most repeated death in fiction—it is told in The Fire-Dwellers, A Bird in the House, and again in this novel.” To Al Purdy, she mused: “I wonder why [this death] haunts my imagination so much?”
Piquette makes her first appearance in the story “Crying of the Loons,” the version of “The Loons” first published in the Atlantic Advocate of March 1966. Most of the stories which comprise A Bird in the House have an originating point in Margaret’s own life history. Although it is more difficult to document, this is also true of this narrative. The best evidence comes from an interview with Wes McAmmond, one of her primary-school teachers: “Neepawa didn’t have any French or Métis. [However] there was a little girl … who came from Sandy Bar Reserve up on the lake [Lake Manitoba, north of Langruth] and was brought there with tuberculosis of the bone or something. I remember the child used to come to school from the hospital. She was in the charge of the nurses. They looked after her and sent her to school. I think Margaret probably befriended her.” In “The Loons” it is Vanessa’s father, the doctor, who befriends the little girl. Fearing that Piquette will not have the opportunity to rest her leg if she is returned to her family, he asks his wife to allow Piquette to vacation with their family. That summer, Vanessa makes many unsuccessful overtures to a sullen, silently resistant Piquette. Years later, the two encounter each other at the Regal Café, where Piquette informs Vanessa she is engaged to an “ ‘English fella … got blond wavy hair.’ … As I mouthed the conventional phrases [of congratulation], I could only guess how great her need must have been, that she had been forced to seek the very things that she so bitterly rejected.”
Earlier in the story, Piquette had been disdainful of Vanessa’s fascination with the loons. “ ‘Who gives a good goddamn?’ she said. It became increasingly obvious that, as an Indian, Piquette was a dead loss.” Instead of listening to the mysterious sounds of the birds in the dead of night with Piquette, Vanessa does so with her father. As the story comes to a conclusion, Vanessa recalls: “I remember how Piquette had scorned to come along, when my father and I sat there and listened to the lake birds. It seemed to me now that in some unconscious and totally unrecognised way, Piquette might have been the only one, after all, who had heard the crying of the loons.” On the surface, Piquette might have wanted to assimilate but in another, more profound way she knew the sound of the birds was a lament for a world from which they were being ruthlessly eliminated in the name of progress, just as her ancestors, the Métis, had been exterminated years before.
In between these events are two deaths. In the title story in A Bird in the House Ewen MacLeod dies shortly after befriending Piquette. Years later when Piquette meets Vanessa MacLeod, she says: “ ‘Listen, you wanna know something, Vanessa?… Your dad was the only person in Manawaka that ever done anything good to me.’ ” When she turns eighteen, Vanessa leaves town. Upon her return, her mother asks if she ever wrote her about the death of Piquette Tonnere.
“Either her husband left her, or she left him,” my mother said. “I don’t know which. Anyway, she came back here with two youngsters, both only babies—they must have been born very close together. She kept house, I guess, for Lazarus [her father] and her brothers, down in the valley there, in the old Tonnere place. I used to see her on the street sometimes, but she never spoke to me. She’d put on an awful lot of weight, and she looked a mess, to tell you the truth, a real slattern, dressed any old how. She was up in court a couple of times—drunk and disorderly, of course. One Saturday night last winter, during the coldest weather, Piquette was alone in the shack with the children. The Tonneres made home brew ail the time, so I’ve heard, and Lazarus said later she’d been drinking most of the day when he and the boys went out in the evening. They had an old woodstove there—you know the kind, with exposed pipes. The shack caught fire. Piquette didn’t get out, and neither did the children.”
In an extremely distorted way, some elements of Margaret’s own life are reflected here, particularly her reliance on alcohol, her concern middle-age had left her no longer attractive, her loss of her husband and her worry she neglected her children. But the passage is also—and more significantly and chillingly—about the death of a mother. The horrific, painful end of Piquette’s life might have been emblematic of the author’s fears about herself, but she might also be connecting it to the deep wound inflicted on her as a young child. As a girl, Piquette had an external sign—the limp—of her psychological ailment; Peggy the girl had carried the interior mark of the orphan.
There is another force at work. All her life, Margaret empathized with outsiders, persons who in some ways had been deprived of their birthrights. In Africa, she had identified with the Somalis and the Ghanaians. During the writing of The Diviners, she transferred those concerns to the Métis, her use of that group offering her a way to Canadianize some of the themes of her early work. (Despite her claim to the contrary, she did link the plight of the orphaned Morag to the deprivations suffered by the Métis.)
But much more than Piquette, Morag Gunn is the Margaret Laurence figure in The Diviners. As her work progressed on that book, she came to the realization that making Morag a writer was really her “means of getting at the ways in which our ancestors stalk through our lives, the ways we make myths of our parental figures and even of our own lives, the ways in which we see ourselves turning into ancestors and myths.” Such a methodology had a psychic angle: an attempt to reach back, touch and thus reconstitute her own lost “parental figures.”
17
AMBIGUITY EVERYWHERE
(1972–1974)
BY THE END of 1972, Margaret was planning to leave Elmcot, “Project Canada” now being the focus of much of her attention. This resolve took hold at the very same time she was desperately trying to make her “mess” of a novel into some sort of coherent form. It was almost as if she had to throw herself into chaos in order to rescue her new book from the same forces. When she returned to Elmcot that autumn, she saw her home in a new way:
Goo
d … to see Elmcot again, although strangely sad this time, in a way, because I know I am going to have to leave it—I always knew this, but it’s different when the time is nearer, and the strange thing is that I want to leave it; I want to be in Canada, not England, now. And yet the damn place is so beautiful and there is so much of myself here, and so much of the kids, over 10 years. I sometimes find myself feeling I can’t part with it, and yet I know, I mean I really know, that to keep it on when both kids [will be] away from home and when I myself would much rather be living in Canada, with friends within reachable distance, would be a disaster, living in the past, and that one cannot do. I guess I look at the place with new eyes, wanting to see it really clearly so I will never forget it—as if I would, anyway. An odd experience.
The sentiment is especially “odd” because it seems at one level to be willed and, since it is being induced at a moment of crisis, self-defeating.
With the exception of The Stone Angel and The Diviners, Margaret Laurence’s Manawaka novels had been created away from Canada; since she sensed her writing life was drawing to a close, she no longer required the strength the writer can draw from being absent from the landscape that inspires her and which can be the source of art only when one is removed from it. Moreover, in The Diviners, Morag lives in a cottage with just more than a passing resemblance to Margaret’s cottage. In the secluded landscape of retreat, Morag recalls her past life, some of which is spent outside Canada. In this way, The Diviners mirrors some key events in Margaret’s in the early 1970s. The new book ends in Canada, and in this instance life had to follow art. In a profound sense, writing about an exile’s return aroused in Margaret the need to do the same.
The messiness of her new book worried her, but she also took great pleasure in the possibility it might turn out, “longer than War and Peace, although not to say, of comparable quality.” She was afraid her publishers would reject the book because of its length, but she took great pleasure in yet again being a female Jacob wrestling a book into shape.
Despite a choking cough, bronchitis and a sore throat, Margaret—by the autumn of 1972—was confident she could whip her “hell of a mess” of a novel into shape. She sometimes felt bloodied, but she was unbowed. She told her friend Mary Adachi: “Do you know what I really need?… (a) a Secretary to handle all correspondence; (b) Cook-housekeeper; (c) Gardener; (d) Daily woman 2 times weekly to clean massive fortress; and (e) as in Lady Chatterley, a Gamekeeper.” Since these needs could not be met, “we plod on, kid. Life may be Hell but Death is nothing; Onward is our motto.”
Ultimately, fear of being rejected did not bother her, so great was her sense of her own prowess as a writer, one who could fuse seemingly disparate elements together: “narrative present; narrative past in form of refilming of events; old tales and legends told to the main character when she was young and invented by her stepfather; bits of history; plot summaries of novel; and—wait for it—Songs! Yep. I have just composed 2 long ballads, and have even got the tune for one. A dear friend [Ian Cameron] who composes songs brought his guitar over the other evening and I told him the tune, and he sang the thing, making it sound like a Real Song! I was ecstatic!” Part of Margaret’s joy came from the fact she was liberated from some of her sense of the loneliness of the writer’s life through her collaboration with Ian on the songs.
By January 1973, she felt she might have gone over the top in her new book, but she took pleasure in the sense of community that had been engendered: “I have, I think, got absolutely out of my head in my middle age. The damn novel is now in 2nd draft, i.e. I have finished the typescript from the 28 scribblers full of bezazz, and this was finished only 2 days ago, so tomorrow we are all (Elmcot Commune, my kids and various Can friends) going to open a bottle of champagne. However. It still needs a lot of work, general cutting of corny bits and putting things into reasonable shape and so on.” By February 3, she was triumphant: “MY NOVEL IS FINISHED. NOT JUST THE SECOND DRAFT. I HAVE NOW GONE OVER IT AND DONE AS MUCH FURTHER REWRITE AS I CAN AT THE MOMENT. IT IS DONE!! … I am really exhausted, but damn glad to have it done, at least for now.” “But now,” she reminded Al, “I enter the worst stage—waiting until I hear what the publishers think of it. In my head I write terrible reviews of it.”
She was also sad. Her “withdrawal symptoms” were especially awful this time since, she realized, “this is the end of a 12-year involvement with Manawaka and its inhabitants, and as the wheel comes full circle in this novel, it will be the last of those.… So I feel a bit odd, and empty, as though part of my inner dwelling place has now been removed from me.” If an “inner dwelling place” has been removed, it might be necessary to find a new physical space in which to exist. Of course, a sense of community—perhaps more accurately, the hope that she would become part of a group of writers—was an added inducement to return to Canada.
Margaret’s sense of community had broadened to include many more Canadian writers than ever before. For example, she confessed to Margaret Atwood her reservations about The Diviners, a novel still very much in progress. She had, as she put it, doubts—but not basic doubts. She knew The Diviners would not be the book which had been in her head, but she could be satisfied with the fact that this kind of shortfall was a dilemma faced by all writers. She realized she would be accused of being topical because she had dealt with issues such as Women, the Métis, New Pioneers, Legend, Myth, History, Fiction as History, History as Fiction. Such a charge would be rubbish: “I’m dealing with things close to my own psyche and heart, that is all.”
She was also content with the fact that her novel—more than any other—showed the rich complexities of life: “Ambiguity is everywhere. But mainly, I get this sense of continuum—even in our chaos, there still seems to me to be a very real way in which the past is always the present, and the present is always both the past and the future.” This book also dealt “not only with survival but freedom. By freedom, I do not mean any Garden of Eden, of course, which we must learn to relinquish along with our damaging innocence. My only regret (and it’s an unreal one, I know, because all we can do is the best we can with what we have) is that I did not have more talent to convey the characters, to do justice them, to get them across in as real and living a way as I know them.” To Jane Rule, she confessed it would be “ALL RIGHT” if The Diviners turned out to be her last book: “If it proves so, it won’t be a tragic event; I really feel a kind of gladness at having brought that particular wheel full circle, and I am not in the least worried about what to do next.” The sense of urgency had been vanquished. For a person as intense as Margaret, there was genuine relief in not feeling she had to “get it all down before I expire.”
Her habitual sense of urgency was transferred to “Project Canada,” an undertaking which presented a number of hurdles. The first was practical: her dubious, punishing tax status if she sold Elmcot and then left for Canada. That would make her subject to English taxes: Capital Gains (30% of sale price of house) and Emigrant (25% of all her assets). Her situation was complicated by the fact she planned to spend the 1973–1974 academic year as writer-in-residence in Canada, the first term at the University of Western Ontario, the second at Trent University.
The tax law also interfered with a cherished scheme: at the end 1973, having accrued much-needed additional cash from her job at the University of Western Ontario, she would purchase a house in or near Peterborough, not far from her cottage on the Otonabee; she would then sell Elmcot, and return permanently to Canada in 1974. In order, as she told Jane Rule, “to avoid handing over to the British government most of all I possess,” she would have to modify her plans by selling Elmcot and moving to Canada in a single year, 1973.
A lucky break suddenly resolved this problem, as she excitedly told Adele the “GREAT NEWS” a little more than a month later on April 21, 1973:
I have already sold ELMCOT. Wow. Never was a house sold so fast in this country. Adele, you won’t believe it (yes, you will) because it is like A MIRAC
LE. I wrote a short note to the squire, my neighbour across the way in the great house, The Beacon, who actually is quite a good guy, telling him I had to sell this year, etc. Reason was—I thought he had a right to know, because he and I and various others here have been steadfastly against one neighbour who sold his 3-acre land to a developer who is trying to get building permission for 12 neo-Georgian houses (not, I may say, for the poor and needy, but for commuters and the like)…. I wrote Mr. Wilson, just to inform him, as he and I had had some talks about the property next to mine and how to not have 12 neo-Georgian houses there, and I told him I planned to hold out (quite true) until end of June, and would try to sell to a private purchaser who would (a) want to occupy the house; and (b) would not cut down all the trees and sell the land to a developer. He responded thusly—would I be willing to sell it to him? He is quite wealthy, and would like this land simply so that the area does not become suburbia. I said YES.
As she revealed to Al, Margaret was quite pleased with the price of £25,000, although a developer would have paid £5,000 more: “Well, that is 3 times what I paid for the house; even reckoning the money I’ve put into it, it is twice the total amount of my investment in the place. Who needs more? More than that, and one is really getting greedy. I’ll have had 10 good years here, very productive re: writing and a very good place for the kids to have grown up.”
In making her plans to resettle in Canada, Margaret did not have to be particularly concerned about Jocelyn, who was to marry Peter Banks in May 1973. (The marriage lasted five months, although Peter and Jocelyn did not divorce until three years later.) In Dance on the Earth, she outlined her first plan regarding David: “I realized that once David graduated from secondary school the following spring [1973], I wanted to move back to Canada. I knew I’d have to sell Elm Cottage eventually, but I didn’t want David to have to move out of his home the moment he left school. I arranged to rent the house to Ian and Sandy Cameron for a year, on the condition that David could live there, too, while I took up a one-term job at the University of Western Ontario and a spring term appointment at Trent.” This scheme had to be abandoned when she became aware of her vulnerability to the two heavy taxes. However, Mr. Wilson wanted—having agreed to purchase Elmcot—to rent the house to a young married couple and asked if she knew anyone suitable. Thus, the Camerons rented from Mr. Wilson, and David retained his home at Elmcot.