The Life of Margaret Laurence

by James King

  “Ride my stallion, Morag.”

  So she mounts him. He holds her shoulders and her long hair, penetrating up into her until she knows he has reached whatever core of being she has.

  For Margaret Laurence, sex was an essential component in understanding any human being; in Morag, she created a heroine whose sexuality is very much a reflection of her own—a sexuality which has a strong mystical component to it, emphasizing as it does how the pleasures of the body can put individuals into contact with their essential humanity—and vulnerability. Another element in The Diviners also aroused a great deal of unspoken controversy: the trans-racial issue. Not only does Morag have a baby out of wedlock, but also Skinner Tonnere, Morag’s lover and Pique’s father, is a Métis. Margaret suspected, no doubt correctly, that objections to the sex in her book were inspired in large part by racist sentiments.

  Because Margaret Laurence had put herself so fully into The Diviners, she made herself sensitive to any reading of the book which overemphasized one aspect of the book at the expense of the other. At the Women’s Art Association, she had been nervous when interrogated about the books “FOUR LETTER WORDS” but had—even though she almost managed to set fire to herself—defended the book and herself. She was not really prepared, however, for the banning controversy which erupted in the late winter of 1976.

  In a letter to Malcolm Ross of February 14, 1976, she outlined the horrible situation which had confronted her:

  We are having a small storm in ye olde village teapot … THE DIVINERS has apparently received some complaints from a few local parents and was then stricken from the Grade 13 course in Lake-field High—but not only did the local paper, the Lakefield Leader, and the Peterborough paper, the Examiner, take it up—it went out on the CP lines and has caused a kind of storm. The local English teachers, at all the county high schools (8) are united, apparently, in support of the novel, and there have been some incredible letters in support of the book, including some from local High School students and one (to the Examiner, a copy of which I received today) from the minister of the Lakefield United Church, so—Malcolm, maybe the Philistines won’t win the day. Let us hope so. I think the local education authorities did not even suspect (because I guess they aren’t readers) that a casual banning of the book might cause a wider uproar, but I’m glad that has happened. I think what probably happens is that the Board of Education gets 2 complaints from parents and then takes a book off course, hoping nobody will notice. Well, this time, they’ve noticed! It’s a bit ironic that it should happen in my own village, eh? But that is Canadian life for you.

  The Board’s decision to remove The Diviners from the Grade 13 curriculum only at Lakefield High School was announced at a professional development day, whereupon the heads of several other English departments announced their revulsion at such an action. The irony was that Robert Buchanan, the head of the English department at Lakefield, was against the banning. A further irony was that the principal of the nearby Kenner High School took it upon himself to ban Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women from the syllabus at his school.

  One of Margaret’s chief opponents was James Telford, a school trustee. In an interview, he claimed only Christians—by which Margaret thought he really meant “Pentecostals”—should be allowed to choose books for the curriculum; in his opinion, the high-school teachers had been infected with liberalism. However, the textbook review committee voted to restore The Diviners to the curriculum. Then the Board itself had to ratify this decision. After an open and extremely heated meeting, the Board voted 10 to 6 in favour of the book.

  But the Committee of Citizens for Decency would not accept this decision, a very agitated Margaret informed Jane Rule: “They got up a petition vs the book, and the Rev Sam Buick opened his Dublin Street Pentecostal Church [in Peterborough] for 1 whole day so people could sign. He passed out handy xerox pages with the page references so people could look up and find the (marked) ‘obscene’ words and the sex scenes.… The novel was considered by his group to be unfit for kids of 18 to read under the guidance of a teacher in Grade 13, but it was quite okay for them to read the sex scenes totally out of context!” At a further meeting, the Board upheld its previous decision, but the book’s enemies vowed to pack the School Board at the next municipal election. If they succeeded, Margaret told Jane, the Grade 13 students would be reading the Bobbsey Twins.

  She tried to distance herself from the fundamentalists, who “damn near made a nervous wreck of me. I find it impossible to laugh at [them]—I think they are dangerous, bordering on fascist. I hope one of them doesn’t hear a voice from God telling him to burn my house down.” Some of their claims were ludicrous but alarming, one of her accusers going so far as to blame her for the existence of VD in Huron County. During this awful time, Adele Wiseman was unstinting in her support of her friend, as was Budge Wilson, who attended one of the open meetings to speak in support of Margaret. Ken and Mary Adachi were also unswerving in boosting their beleaguered friend. Joan Johnston, a colleague of Doug Williams, Alice’s husband, in the probation service, became actively involved in the group that sprung to Margaret’s side. Like Budge, Joan became Margaret’s eyes and ears in the public arenas into which the distressed author did not dare venture. Joan, to use her own words, acted as a spy for her new friend, venturing one day to Sam Buick’s church where she beheld twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls handing out sheets with page references to passages deemed salacious.

  The opposition to her book paralysed Margaret, who always had a great deal of difficulty in any kind of public forum, much less one in which she was being attacked. Sometimes, she could joke about the matter, as in her letter to Jack McClelland, in the midst of a fight with him about her forthcoming collection of essays:

  My first reaction [to his suggested revisions] was one of incredulity and rage. However, my normally calm and indeed incredibly patient personality has once more re-asserted itself, and I am able to look at the situation with my usual tolerance and cool assessment. What a good idea about making the book a “great gift item”! Had you considered the vast possibilities of selling each copy individually wrapped in pink tissue paper, tied about with a wide pink ribbon? Or perhaps a tiny tasteful bunch of plastic forget-me-nots? This village, you know, has numerous gift shops—perhaps I might start one myself, handling only two items … this book plus THE DIVINERS. I would, of course, call the shop … PORN ’N CORN.

  In his response, the “Boss” told her he was going to write the Peterborough Examiner “suggesting that they are on the right track; that all your books should be banned forthwith; that all your awards should be withdrawn because you are corrupting our children.” Jokes aside, she became reluctant to be seen in Lakefield, becoming in the process extremely reclusive.

  The controversy of 1976 helped to put even more nails into the coffin of the Laurence-Purdy friendship. During that time, she telephoned Purdy yet again, having summoned up the courage to do so only when inebriated. In August 1976, she offered yet another apology:

  I have angered and hurt you, and I am sorry.

  I do not recall what I said, as I was somewhat drunk at the time. My intention, as I dimly recall, was to phone to see if I could re-establish what has seemed for some time to me a slightly sagging friendship.

  What I accomplished, of course, was the reverse. I am sorry about this, too.

  Possibly I wanted subconsciously to wound you, as I myself still smart at the memory (I thought I didn’t, but I do) of the way you shafted me re: The Diviners, first by silence and then when I asked your opinion of the book, finally, by saying this only: that I’d had enough feedback on that novel. If I did subconsciously wish to wound you, that is an unworthy thought and not one which I hold consciously.

  What with every fundamentalist in Peterborough County gunning for me (verbally, as yet) those six months, I may possibly be becoming a little paranoid. This is not a neurosis to which I ever laid claim, but who knows. Anyway, such is not an excuse or
even an explanation.

  Margaret was in a great deal of pain, and so unsure was she of herself that she acted as if she were completely at fault in the “sagging” of her friendship with Al.

  The dispute between the two only got settled in a very uneven way during the winter of 1977, as can be glimpsed in this aside in a letter from Margaret: “Why didn’t you tell me before that you had not previously read THE DIVINERS? If I’d known you hadn’t read it before, I would not have taken on so, in bygone times. It’s okay not to read a book, but to read it and not say anything.… well, let’s not go into that again. That is over. But if you have all sorts of thoughts, whether positive or negative, I would like to hear an assortment of them.” In the same letter, she made a heartfelt declaration, a real cry from the heart:

  Re: my writing. I wish people wouldn’t think that I am in a state of despair, or am bowing out of life. Gee. It’s not that way at all, Al. I hope I’ll write another novel, and if I can get all these damn people who keep writing me letters of requests for interviews, etc, etc, off my back, I may even have some time to think. If another novel is given, I’ll be grateful. If not, I won’t be too upset. I don’t think I’m useless in this life unless I’m writing—I would have thought that if I hadn’t done the writing I was compelled to do, against great odds, then I would not have lived my life the way I was meant to live it. But I did my work, and I raised my kids and I kept a roof over the heads of us. If another true real novel comes along, and it may, then that will be a gift, a bonus. If not, then so be it, and I won’t feel goddamn useless at all.

  This letter—in which she talks about issues gnawing at her—has a powerful quality by virtue of its rawness, by the sender’s incredible ability to talk about her feelings in such a naked way. After this, there are a handful of letters each way in the surviving Laurence-Purdy correspondence. The friendship was never terminated although there is a very discernible break. Too much had been requested by Margaret in the relationship and she must have felt not enough was given. In her life, this was a necessary loss, since her definition of friendship encompassed the ability to tell the other person her needs and to have those needs acknowledged. On Purdy’s part, he felt perhaps that she had been too demanding, had asked for a commitment he was unwilling or unable to make.

  At this time, Margaret had a quarrel with Jack McClelland about her forthcoming book—a collection of essays. He wanted to have some items deleted and objected to the various titles she proposed, including, “Where the World Began.” When she suggested Heart of a Stranger, he knew she had at last hit on the right title. The trouble with the book is not its contents—travel essays, journalistic pieces originally published in the Vancouver Sun and Maclean’s, philosophical and autobiographical reflections—but with the expectation of a reading public that did not really want this kind of book from a writer from whom they expected “more.” This situation distressed her: “what worries me is that I’m not supposed to have light words, or so some critics seem to think. When my essays … came out, some reviewers said that it was pretty light stuff and not to be compared with a serious novel.” In a slightly more jovial mood, she complained to Ernest Buckler: “AREN’T SERIOUS WRITERS PERMITTED A CHORTLE OR TWO, AN IRONIC TWIST OR TWO, SOME LIGHT VERSE, SOME LAUGHTER IN THE MIDST OF ALL OF LIFE?”

  One boost of confidence in the autumn of 1976 came from Jack McClelland’s invitation to join the Board of his publishing firm. When she accepted, she informed him that her agenda would be to get more books by young writers published. Earlier, in the summer, she had slipped on the dock at the shack and broken a rib; her condition was complicated by pleurisy, itself aggravated by chain-smoking. So she attempted to reduce her intake of the “filthy weed” from fifty to six a day.

  Her fiftieth birthday party that August was, as she put it, “sensational.” David, Jocelyn, Adele and her family, Don and Anne Bailey, Timothy Findley and Bill Whitehead were among the guests on the front lawn of the shack; another guest, Peter MacLachlan, became a hero when he jumped into the river to save a drowning man who was visiting a neighbour. The day had a bit of a sad ending when a drunken Margaret announced—yet again—that she had written her last novel. She added: “And the last man who will grace my bed has come and gone.” Five years earlier—six months before she turned forty-five—she had told Margaret Atwood, “after I’d had a couple of books published, my relationships with men always fell into 1 of 2 categories … those who saw me as a woman and would rather not know about my writing, and those who accepted me as a writer and equal (mostly writers these guys) but kind of a quasi-male figure or sort of neuter, and who would cringe slightly if I mentioned … my children.” To Donald Cameron, she mentioned the lack of men in her life but quipped that there were “not many men this middle-aged novelist would be interested in!”

  However, if Margaret was celibate during these years, it was not for want of trying. She had a crush on a local undertaker—who had a reputation in the area as a virile lady’s man. Once, when very drunk, she made advances to the husband of a friend. On that evening, she was so out of control that she had to be dragged out to his car in order to be driven home.

  What all Margaret’s friends noticed was the desperate loneliness which enveloped her. They could have the most pleasant and wonderful of conversations with her and share her joy in the ordinary things of life—but she dwelt in a solitary space into which no one else could enter. She now lived alone and—in the last decade of her life—she no longer wanted to live that way. In many ways, her solitude was self-imposed. A part of her hated herself for this state of affairs; another knew it was the price she had extracted from herself to pay for her art.

  The most sustaining event of 1976 was perhaps ironical in view of the fact that the enemies of The Diviners had painted its author a modern day Jezebel: the accusation of irreligiousness forced her to take stock of her stand on that issue and in the process brought about an important change, best reflected in a letter to McMaster University’s Will Ready: “I have begun to go back … to the church of my people, which is the United Church (my folks long ago were of course Presbyterians, but joined church union with those parts of the Methodist church which went along with the concept). I wanted to do this for about two years here, and felt—it sounds odd, but it’s true—shy. I finally did make it, and felt as though I had come back home again.”

  One part of her move back to the United Church comes from a renewed sense of herself as an extremely moral person, a side of herself she had to reaffirm in the light of the scathing attacks on her. She was also moved by the public support given to her by Jack Patterson, the minister of the Lakefield United Church in a letter to the Peterborough Examiner; through conversation with him, she found the path back. Margaret returned to church slowly, at first accompanied by the minister’s wife. Later, although she even gave money for repairs to the church, she always left just before the service concluded—never staying for the lemonade and cookies that were available to members of the congregation directly after the service. Once, she attended church in the company of the Jewish artist Mendelson Joe, who was dressed in a Toronto Maple Leaf sweatshirt and blue jeans; she was deeply touched by the warm reception he was given despite his unconventional attire.

  Her religious beliefs were most clearly stated in a letter to the elderly novelist Hubert Evans—who in his writings wrote with great sympathy of the plight of the natives: “I suppose that is one reason I feel so much connection with you and your writing, because we are both, in our different ways, Christian radicals. Would you agree? To me, it seems that good works without faith isn’t enough, as we all stand so much in need of grace. But ‘faith’ without ‘good works’… ie a sense of social responsibility and the belief that the world around us is our responsibility, seems to me to be … if not an empty faith, then at least a faith lacking in some kind of human dimension, the recognition of the reality of others and of others’ pain.”

  Margaret’s Christ was the social radica
l, the revolutionary who threw the money changers out of the temple and who hungered for social justice. In a letter to Evans of March 1982, she provided further details about her personal theology: “… a sense of grace. Yes. I think that’s partly what I have indeed been writing about, all these years. A sense of the gift of God’s grace, the sense of something given, not because deserved, of course, but because just given. That is how I have felt about my writing. Naturally, that does not mean mystical stuff and no work! God does not pick up the biro and write the words! But as I grow older, Hubert, says the young one of nearly 56 now, I come to feel more and more a sense of true gift and grace, as far as my work is concerned. It is, however, my own responsibility, as a human being with free will, to do with that as I can and as I choose. I think I’ve chosen to try to do whatever that gift of grace has made me think and write. As I grow older, which I seem to do daily (surprise surprise), it seems to me that I have to look at myself as a kind of very unorthodox Christian, but a Christian all the same. The social gospel is what seems to matter to me more and more. Why should any person say, as the fundamentalist born-again (?) Christians do, that saving one’s own soul, by proclaiming Jesus as your spiritual saviour, is ALL that is necessary in this life? Hubert, I am astounded and downcast by those guys, I tell you straight. This seems to me to be a totally blinkered view of a gospel that I feel very greatly drawn to, and responsible to.… it seems to me that what still comes across, throughout those thousands of years of history, is a message by a young Jew who was educated probably by the Essenes, and whose new doctrine was simply another commandment, ‘Thou shall love thy neighbour as thyself.’ ”