The Life of Margaret Laurence

by James King

  Late in 1972, Margaret Atwood had written to her about an issue of vital importance to them both: “We had a gathering of 18 people all the way from Alice Munro in the West to John Metcalf in New Brunswick and it went enormously better than anyone had any right to expect. No ranting and raving, no tantrums, sweet reason prevailed.” Earlier, that spring, the first meeting Margaret could recall of the group that would become The Writers’ Union of Canada had taken place in Atwood’s office at Massey College: “No refreshments were served—we simply talked business.” She was sarcastic because Barbara Amiel—a writer she loathed—had spoken in Maclean’s of a meeting predating the Massey College one at which a “small group of Canada’s literateurs, including Margaret Atwood and June Callwood, got together over beer and hot dogs at Toronto’s Embassy tavern, and the Writers’ Union of Canada was informally launched. This may well be so,” Margaret told June, “[but] I was in England at the time.”

  The 1972 meeting was the prelude to the official formation of TWUC on November 3, 1973 at its first convention in Ottawa. Farley Mowat had been one of the first proponents of such an organization, which he felt should be formed to protect writers at a time when the Canadian book trade was expanding rapidly. Such an organization could have some clout because it represented a wide spectrum of authors, and it could offer professional advice on matters such as contracts.

  Margaret, at a meeting in Toronto in the spring of 1973 (subsequent to the Massey College one), agreed to serve as interim president before the official founding of the group, but she told Jack McClelland—obviously not a great proponent of this banding together of writers—on October 7 that she had decided not to seek election to the presidency: “I’ve liked being interim President, but don’t think my psychic energy will run to being President for the next year. I operate better in private situations, as you know, and am not very good at politicking—the strain is too great, and I absolutely hate hassles. I think it is all I can do to make myself do battle in my own life, when it has become necessary.… I’ve had another Freudian accident—this time I think I’ve busted a toe bone, opening a door sharply, right onto a foot. Those things [she had also sprained her back] are warnings to me to cut down on the areas of strain. I like it here at Western, but it’s a psychic drain in odd ways that writing a novel is not—it is because I don’t like being a public person, of course.”

  Quite eager to serve on committees and thus to be involved behind the scenes, she was willing to be a figurehead but not a “front person” who undertook a large number of public tasks. Early on, there was fighting between Pierre Berton and Farley Mowat, but this seemed to evaporate quickly. In his reply of October 12, Jack told her that, in his opinion, the objectives of the Writers’ Union were confused and ultimately without purpose. He informed her she had much better ways of spending her time. A month later, a very stubborn Margaret wrote to McClelland again, outlining the splendid possibilities of the new organization: “The conference of the Writers’ Union of Canada went really well over the weekend. I was there nearly 4 days, as I went in advance to help get things in order. We had 2 extremely intensive days, vetting the constitution, electing officers, setting up areas of action. I thought it was really great. Also, there was a very strong sense of solidarity …—it was good to see everyone again. I’m on the Membership committee, which is okay, but otherwise no office. I feel optimistic about the union—I think it can really do some things.” The “Boss” never changed his mind on this issue. For her, the sense of community engendered by the WU was crucial: “The thing that one must accept—or must agree to learn—is that we are all very lonely, isolated, etc, etc, and you cannot be a writer without being that, but you are also a human being, who wants most terribly to make contact.” Among the writers Margaret met through TWUC—and formed friendships with—were: George Bowering, Graeme Gibson, Robert Kroetsch, Andreas Schroeder, Glen Sorestad, David Watmough and David Williams.

  From the beginning, Margaret was aware standards of selection might prove a thorny issue since there was a general understanding among the fiction writers that membership was for those in their ranks who had published at least one book. The creative writers also felt that the union should exist for them and not for journalists. Later, that would become part of a major quandary.

  The spring of 1974—just as she completed her tours of duty at the University of Western Ontario and Trent University—provided Margaret with a new source of anxiety: reviews of The Diviners. This time, she was particularly stung by two notices, one by Phyllis Grosskurth in The Globe and Mail, the other by Robert Fulford in The Toronto Star.

  The headline in the Globe of May 4, 1974 read: “A Looser, More Complex, More Sexually Uninhibited Laurence: and Never an Atwood Victim.” For Margaret, this was dubious praise, as if she were being lauded for writing a sex manual. She poked a bit of fun at the reviewer in a letter to Purdy: “… said nothing about novel—talked about my other books, then said what a hell of a fine tiling it was that I used so many 4-letter words in the novel, and how great I described sex.” With Fulford, she was even angrier because he had interviewed her on the CBC on May 17, the day before his review was published and not voiced any of the objections which made their way into print: “He does not seem to understand or grasp the form of the damn thing at all. Well, the hell with it. Screw him. I like (liked?) the guy, too. I don’t blame a person for giving a rotten review, but I do think it is dishonest to interview the writer on radio and not bring up a single criticism which will then appear in the written review.… Oh—he also quotes a bit re: Morag and sex, which is plainly romantic, and which in his context is awfully corny, but what he misses is that the interpretation of sex was for her when she was very young, with her newly married husband, and of course it was romantic.”

  The sexuality depicted in the book would be Margaret’s nemesis for the remainder of her life; Fulford’s criticism of the book’s form made her blood boil—especially his claim, “no good editor had looked at it”—but the simple truth is that although Judith Jones had assisted her in reining in a great deal of extraneous material, the narrative is extraordinarily diffuse. However, it is no wonder Margaret could not combine all the elements that make up The Diviners because in that book she spoke of the deep contradictions in her own life—in any life—and of her inability to ever make a satisfactory resolution of them. The impossibilities of the book’s form mirror the impossibilities of life.

  The Diviners is Margaret Laurence’s most ambitious book, the one into which she tried to squeeze her complex vision of life. It is also—in a profound way—her most autobiographical book. She explained it to Adele this way: “a character like Morag, just as with Stacey and even Rachel, is both me and not me … but NOT me in the external sense at all. She is herself, of course.… (There are dozens of bits which are in some complex way based on your own experience).” In her writing career up to and including A Jest of God, Margaret had injected parts of herself into her heroines. In the second part of her career, she used her own life much more directly and openly. Stacey is Margaret’s version of herself as a mad Vancouver housewife. Many of the episodes in A Bird in the House can be traced to real-life events. The Diviners—also a book about the growth and development of a writer—is a sequel to A Bird in the House but one whose stylistic experimentations (the Memorybank Movies, the interpolated tales, the deliberate grotesqueries, the Snapshots, the conversations between Morag and Catharine Parr Traill) owe much to The Fire-Dwellers. Interestingly, Margaret deleted several telling self-reflections from the extant typescript: “I’ve been inventing myself all my life” and “Morag, looking in mirrors to see if she was really there (or here, as the case might be).” Like a mirror reflecting other mirrors, The Diviners reflects multiple images of the creator creating.

  As autobiographical fiction, The Diviners is an extremely revealing work because it plunges its reader into Morag’s—and Margaret’s—inner world. It is also a novel that continually challenges the reader
because it goes as far as it can in exploring the dark recesses of the protagonist’s sensibility. In A Bird in the House, Vanessa loses only her father, not her mother. In The Diviners, Morag’s parents die when she is five—

  They remain shadows. Two sepia shadows on an old snapshot, two barely moving shadows in my head, shadows whose few remaining words and acts I have invented. Perhaps I only want their forgiveness for having forgotten them.

  I remember their deaths, but not their lives. Yet they’re inside me, flowing unknown in my blood and moving unrecognized in my skull.

  —and she goes to live with Christie and Prin Logan, Manawaka’s most celebrated eccentrics and outcasts.

  Christie is short, skinny, but actually quite strong. He looks peculiar. His head sort of comes forward when he walks, like he is in a hurry, but he isn’t ever in a hurry. His hair, what’s left of it, is sandy.… His teeth are bad and one is missing at the front but he never tries to hide it by putting his hand over or smiling with his mouth closed, oh no, not him. He always wears a blue heavy shirt, and overalls too big so they fall around him and make him look silly.

  That is the worst. How silly he looks. No. The worst is that he smells. He does wash. But he never gets rid of the smell. How much do other people notice? Plenty. You bet. Horseshit and garbage, putrid stuff, vegetables and that, rotten eggs and mouldy old clothes.

  In giving Morag an outlandish childhood, Margaret finds an effective way to dramatize the incredible level of ostracization and loss endured by the young Morag—no such level of suffering is evoked in the more conventionally realistic storytelling of A Bird in the House.

  The psychic level of autobiography captured in The Diviners can be glimpsed in a letter Margaret wrote to Adele Wiseman in 1980: “Although one does not keep on mourning for the rest of one’s life, the real grief never ceases, and it is right that this should be so, I think. At least, this has been my own experience. As you know, my own mother died 50 years ago, when I was only 4, and yet there are times when I still grieve for her, as I do for my stepmother who died 22 years ago. I don’t even think of them that often, but when I do, it is still with a sharp sense of loss.” That “sharp sense of loss” was the emotional underpinning of her new book.

  In The Diviners, she also looks at other elements in her life with a keenly focused eye. Jack Laurence was a civil engineer, not a Professor of English. Yet there can be no doubt that Brooke’s condescending attitude towards his wife is meant to be a depiction of the Laurence marriage. Pique, the daughter of Morag and Jules Tonnere, is not based on Jocelyn Laurence, but in Morag’s distanced relationship from her daughter, Margaret is evoking her sense of the loss of the childhood of her own children.

  Margaret’s last novel is a spiritual autobiography in which symbols and tropes are pushed to their farthest limits in order to recapture some very key, powerful experiences in the creator’s life. In an important letter of January 13,1972 to Adele, Margaret—in the midst of writing the book—provided an excellent guide to her methodology in mixing “real life” with fiction in the construction of the book; she is commenting on the similarities between Morag’s friend Ella and the “real” Adele Wiseman:

  The thing is, people are going to call this novel highly autobiographical, and in some ways it is, although the main character’s background is pretty different from my own (although Scots and in the same bloody town for heaven’s sake!) But odd things are happening. The main character’s best friend … talks awfully like you, I regret to say. I mean, she does and she doesn’t. She isn’t you, I need hardly say—but any fool who knows both of us would never believe I didn’t base the character on you. ADELE, I’M SORRY!!! I NEVER MEANT TO! It happened. What do I do?… Also has 2 sisters. And a great mama, ho ho.… The portrait of the friend isn’t done in great depth, and is loving, of course, but … some of the wisecrack talk between her and Morag could be you and me, when about 21, or even now for that matter. What shall I do? I didn’t mean it to happen. No beastly secrets are revealed, I need hardly say. But it all bothers me, all the same. Also, it bothers me about the guy Morag married—I swear to God he is not Jack; he really is much different in every way, but of course some of the underneath emotional things are the same. I quite often think that although I have to write it, I may not want it published. On the other hand, how many people know me? I mean, would say—Aha! Not that many. Also, the main character, Morag, is not me, but alas is a writer about my age and certainly talks in one of my voices. Of course, I haven’t had an illegitimate daughter by a Manitoba Métis whom I’d known since childhood, but let it pass.

  In asserting that the “underneath emotional things are the same,” she gives the essential clue to understanding that The Diviners is both a highly charged and a highly distilled portrait of the artist as girl and woman.

  However, the distillation was far from perfect. Judith Jones may have assisted Margaret to rid The Diviners of extraneous material, but the book remains unfocused, teeming with too many digressive elements. These result in glaring faults, but the book has a compensating gloriousness of affect, in which the harmonious confusion of life is reflected. Put another way, The Diviners may be a failed masterpiece, but it could only have been written by a great writer.

  Margaret Laurence, who knew at firsthand all the pains and pleasures of the writing-life, was well aware of the precarious but often very real connections between life and art. At the outset, Morag, worried about her daughter, reflects: “I’ve got my work to take my mind off my life. At forty-seven that’s not such a terrible state of affairs. If I hadn’t been a writer, I might’ve been a first-rate mess at this point.” At the end of the novel, Morag, assessing her career as a writer, sees herself as a pseudo-diviner, a magician who pulls words out of hats. She has not come to a resolution to the complexities of her own existence, but she has a renewed sense of what is vital to her—her vocation.

  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 life from sight.

  Morag returned to the house, to write the remaining private and fictional words, and to set down her title.

  In Margaret’s own life, these were the last words she would put into print as a novelist. Even before she wrote The Diviners, she was aware her career as a writer of fiction was winding down. Rachel, Stacey and Vanessa wander in and out of Morag’s story, giving The Diviners a finality lacking in the other Manawaka narratives. The suggestion is that the story of Morag is the summation of all that has gone before, the final instalment in a cycle concerned in large part with the various kinds of empowerment possible for women.

  The Diviners is also the most socially relevant of the Manawaka books, returning the reader to many of the issues about racial differences in the African narratives. This is the portion of The Diviners that is most forced. The love story of Morag and Skinner—Piquette’s brother—may be in part a fictional re-creation of Margaret’s affair with George Lamming, but it is much more than that in its attempt to show the possibility of some sort of communication within the racial mix that is Canada. The writer’s reach exceeds her grasp when she tries to link Morag’s dispossession by virtue of being an orphan to the racially motivated dispossession suffered by the Métis. On the other hand, she was convinced a writer had an obligation “to grapple with prime matters, good and evil” even though she might fail. After all, she recognized, no writer ever completely realized her vision. “Even Milton,” she assured the novelist Timothy Findley, “didn’t entirely succeed.”

  In her last novel, Margaret fused together the elements in her African and Manawakan narratives. The Diviners is also the most self-reflexive of her narratives: it is a novel about writing a novel, one which celebrates the extrem
es of joy and sorrow of the writing life. In The Diviners, she tells how—despite incredible emotional odds—she has survived to proclaim the truths of her heart and vibrantly relates the story of that broken and divided heart. In a sense, having completed The Diviners, she had had her say and had nothing more she desperately needed to say. She herself recognized this in August 1974 when she told Ernest Buckler: “I won’t quit writing, but I won’t, I think, enter another novel—not because I don’t want to, but because it isn’t there to be written. The ending of The Diviners pretty well sums up how I feel now, and I guess I worked out a lot of the inner terrors through that novel.”

  18

  CHRISTIAN RADICAL

  (1974–1976)

  FOR MARGARET, Lakefield provided a much-needed respite from places such as the Vile Metropolis, although she could get there easily in two and a half hours by bus. Throughout her life as a non-driver, she liked to be within striking distances of cities without actually having to put up with the inconvenience of living in them. In England, she had resided in a village with a rail station four to five miles away in High Wycombe.