The Life of Margaret Laurence

by James King

  Very much in the manner of her heroines, she discovered within herself the resolve to make an end to the body to which she was now unwillingly confined. She wanted—once again—to take charge of her own destiny, not fall victim to the whims of chance. Over the Christmas and New Year holidays, no opportunity presented itself. On January 3, she was by herself: “… today was to be the day I took the pills & got out. I arranged it all perfectly, Lord, & now I can’t do it. I learned how much would be a lethal dose of Nembutol; I got that from one of my docs, by fibbing; I know how to do it, & the schedule, & how to try to prevent throwing up of the pills. I may yet have to try that but I can’t right now” (However, there was a dress rehearsal for the suicide a few days before she died: having heard that the biggest impediment to a successful suicide was the inability to dissolve the capsules, she opened a number of them and disintegrated them in boiling water.)

  On the following day, she telephoned Jocelyn’s new husband, Gary Michael, in Toronto with a message for Soña, who had gone to Toronto the day before and was due back later that day: No need to hurry back; I am feeling fine. Then, she followed the instructions she had read in a publication of the Hemlock Society.

  Later—Have made up my mind. God, please let this work. 6:45 pm—I took the toast & a glass of water an hour ago. Now is time to take the gravol so I won’t throw up.

  Can you believe that I spent a long time searching for the damn tea kettle to get boiling water into which to dissolve the pills? Couldn’t find it. Ever resourceful, I got hot water from the coffee maker by not putting in coffee.

  I spent an hour cracking open those damn capsules, with a knife, to get the powder. I have probably lost about 1/3 of the stuff.

  Clea the cat is racing around. I guess she knows something is going on.

  There is a hiatus in the journal and then she made this final entry while waiting for death to arrive: “Please, my near & dear ones, forgive me & understand. I hope this potion works. My spirit is already in another country, & my body has become a damn nuisance. I have been so fortunate.” This note was found by her body: “To my loved ones—I would like my funeral (open to all) announced in the Globe & Mail, & I would also like a memorial service in the L’field United Church.”

  In Margaret’s existence, there had been a tumultuous struggle between self-imposed loneliness and the comforts of companionship and love. She often wanted to be alone, but she also hungered for the company of others. Nevertheless, she chose to face death by herself. As a close friend put it: “She dealt with herself harshly, with others gently. Also, she sought to serve.” To the end she maintained her ability—in both good and bad times—to live life intensely. She really knew she was alive. She seized the days allotted to her, brief though they were.

  In her writings, she wrote about a magnificent kind of courage, wherein an individual—against all the odds of self and society—attempts to define herself independently and creatively. For Margaret, this was a hard war, with many difficult battles—but she triumphed against the dark forces which beset her. From within herself, she found the power to divine the books and the friendships and the many acts of love and kindness which remain her enduring legacy.

  BOOKS BY

  MARGARET LAURENCE

  A Tree for Poverty: Somali Poetry and Prose (1954)

  This Side Jordan (1960)

  The Prophet’s Camel Bell (1963) published in the United States as New Wind in a Dry Land (Knopf, 1964)

  The Tomorrow-Tamer (1963)

  The Stone Angel (1964)

  A Jest of God (1966)

  Long Drums and Cannons: Nigerian Dramatists and Novelists 1952–1966 (1968)

  The Fire-Dwellers (1969)

  A Bird in the House (1970)

  Jason’s Quest (1970)

  The Diviners (1974)

  Heart of a Stranger (1976)

  Six Darn Cows (1979)

  The Olden Days Coat (1979)

  The Christmas Birthday Story (1980)

  Dance on the Earth: a Memoir (1989)

  APPENDIX:

  DANCE ON THE EARTH

  (THE NOVEL)

  THE FOLLOWING NOTEBOOKS and fragments (now at McMaster University Library) contain the only extant pieces of fiction in Margaret Laurences handwriting, complementing the only extant typescripts of her novels which she sold to the same Library. This recently discovered material (which includes booklets, pamphlets, newspaper cuttings used in her research)—all dating from 1982–83—makes clear what the general themes and story line of this novel, centred on Allie Price Chorniuk, would have been.

  This assortment of holograph material, all that remains of the mother and daughter novel which Margaret had hoped to write but which she abandoned at the time she began work on the book of memoirs that became Dance on the Earth, clearly demonstrates her intent to deal with the themes of other, abandoned novels: the origins and nature of fundamentalism and the historical significance of the Old Left in Winnipeg. In this novel, Margaret would also have been concerned with the Ukrainian immigration to Canada and the central importance of that group in the history of Manitoba; she intended to comment as well on the Scots migration and thus speak—directly and forcefully—of Canada as a blend of various ethnic groups. This narrative would also have highlighted women as shawomen, tribal magicians and healers who have mystical communion with the spirit world.

  YELLOW UNDATED NOTEBOOK: 30 pages have entries

  This notebook contains a detailed chronology of a narrative centring on four characters:

  1. Mairi McDuff, later Mary Price (an orphan born in Glasgow in 1900), emigrates to Canada at the age of fourteen and subsequently marries Albert (Bert) Pryce (Price), who is fifteen years older than she.

  2. Alys (Allie) Price is born to Mairi and Bert in 1922; at the age of twenty, she marries Steve Chorniuk, a communist of Ukrainian descent who is ten years older than she.

  3. Stephan (b. 1947), the son of Allie and Steve, marries Jen O’Brien (age 25) in 1975.

  4. Mairi (b. 1977) is the daughter of Stephan and Jen.

  As the chronology makes clear, this novel would have focused on Allie. Manawaka would be used as a setting for a significant portion of the narrative, although “time present” in the narrative would take place in 1982 and set—in a manner reminiscent of The Diviners—at Allies home in Jordan’s Landing, Ontario, and her cottage near Jordan’s Landing. The lives of the characters would have been placed against key events in world and Canadian history from 1885 to 1982/3.

  LIGHT GREEN FOLDER into which miscellaneous papers have been inserted

  A. Recollections of Mairi: 10 pages long (dated by Margaret Laurence as having been written in 1982)

  [I] When I was a bairn, just a wee mite of a thing, at the Home, and before that, I used to try & try to bring to mind my mam’s face. I never could, though. It seemed she must’ve been kind, & loved me real good, but I suppose most of us kids, them that didn’t actually recall our mothers, must’ve dreamed them same dreams. How did I know? She might’ve been a whore who never gave a damn or a care about me … But I never once believed my mother had been or mean—else, why would she have learned, I mean taught, me to write one name proper & I only four maybe, or five? I seemed, in them days, to recall very cloudy like, a woman, & me & her in a little grotty attic room somewhere in Glasgow.

  B. “One of the drafts of Mairi’s early life in Canada—age 10 to 12”: 66 pages long

  Like Morag, Mairi is an orphan but one placed under the care of the sinister, brutal Sam Hogg. This material is reminiscent of some of the situations described in Jane Eyre and Light in August, e.g., the hair-cutting sequence owes a great deal to the same brutality inflicted upon Helen Burns at Lowood.

  [54] Snick-snick-snick. The scissors snip Mairi’s hair away. All the thick black hair that at the Home she learned to wash & value, her pride, possibly her only one.

  C. “One of the drafts re: Allies Milton Classes”: twenty-six pages

  In this piece of writing
, Allie, who is trying to explain to her Grade XIII English class how Milton could have been partial to Satan as a character without being fully aware of the attraction, is challenged by a young male student who is disgusted with her tolerance of Satan’s behaviour. (A two-page outline inserted into the folder indicates that this incident would mushroom into an attack on Allie by a group of fundamentalists, in a manner not dissimilar to the fate endured by Margaret.)

  D. Reading notes on Milton

  E. Various chronologies and notes

  The form of the novel is indicated in this jotting: “TO ALTERNATE—IN EACH CHAPTER. A. PRESENT—Present tense; third person; Allie’s viewpoint; B. [Allies] Journal for Mairi—(taped; the past histories).”

  DARK GREEN NOTEBOOK dated Aug 3/82 on first page: fourteen-page fragment from a narrative called Dance on the Earth. The time is autumn and Allie, with the assistance of her sister-in-law Stella, is closing her cottage near Jordan’s Landing for the winter. Allie’s difficulty in writing her recollections reflects the identical problems faced by her creator.

  [I] That day, Allie & Stella danced. Two old women, dancing on the earth, dancing their lives, dancing grief and blessings … Allie thought of the Marys. That first Mairi, her mother … the second Mary [Allie’s daughter who drowns at the age of two in the chronology], always four, and the new Mairi.

  [II] They danced on the grass, striking the earth firmly & strongly with their drumming bare feet, linking their hands, then drawing apart, alone, together, swaying & swirling.

  Here, each of them could be a shawoman, foremother, equal to shaman. Sha-womb-an. As it once was, perhaps, in the dawn of all the tribes. The women of the elders, dancing memory, dancing the dance of time, dancing because there were times when they chose to dance.

  [12–13] I don’t know how to divide up these memories so they’ll have some kind of form, Mairi. Form isn’t the same as neatness. You understand. Neatness is optional, perhaps frivolous, even ridiculous, perhaps dangerous. Form is something else. Form is what I try to tell the kids about, in reading a novel or a poem or for God’s sake Paradise Lost. Form is to try to give a shape to things so they’ll be understood & felt.

  BLUE NOTEBOOK dated 20 February 1983 on the first page: ten-page fragment

  The brief episode here depicts Allie thinking about her life and placing it in a book of memoirs for her young granddaughter. Allies putative book, called Dance on the Earth, is giving her a great deal of difficulty, as in the dark green notebook of a year before.

  [I] Mairi, this is for you, my grand-daughter, my only grandchild. Probably you will always be my only grandchild… [2] I’ve tried so often to put all this down, & couldn’t. I’ve started time & time again, in notebooks, scrawling with a pen, or on a typewriter. Useless. Words wouldn’t come.

  Although it is difficult—if not invalid—to explicate a novel that exists only in a series of work notes, chronologies and fragments, there can be little doubt that the novel Dance on the Earth would have been similar to The Diviners in form and in its depiction of the horrendous sense of abandonment felt by an orphan. However, Mairi would not have been the central character, that role being given to Mairi’s daughter, Allie, a high-school teacher, whose remarks on Milton lead to a nasty confrontation with fundamentalist Christians.

  Why did Margaret Laurence abandon a novel into which she placed much time and effort? She was always resistant to writing a “mockup” of a novel, by which she meant that a piece of fiction had to have its own purpose and life—she never wanted to retread old material. That is one reason why she could not bring this project to completion. There may be another important factor at work.

  In many ways, The Diviners is the kind of novel that writers produce at the beginning of their careers, not the end. Margaret Laurence reversed the usual process. The Diviners is Bildungsroman, a novel about the coming into being of a writer; it is also a book about the deprivations endured by Morag and her battle to find her spiritual centre and her writing voice.

  Margaret Laurence barely managed to write The Diviners, so deep and vast were the struggles that went into the making of that book. The novel Dance on the Earth, in its re-creation of the condition of orphanage and the cruel indictment of the fundamentalists, was simply not a book that could be completed because in large part the process of writing it would have been too painful.

  SOURCES

  THIS BIOGRAPHY HAS been largely written from primary sources of two kinds: 1) interviews with Margaret Laurence’s children, relatives, close friends, writer-friends and acquaintances and 2) letters written by Margaret Laurence. In the Acknowledgements, I list all the people I have interviewed; in the endnotes I indicate when a specific person is the source of a piece of information or claim, and I give the month and year when I spoke with that person. In the same endnotes, I cite the archival source for all letters and manuscripts employed. Whether referring to typed or handwritten letters and manuscripts, all such references begin MS.

  In recent years, knowledge of Margaret Laurence’s life has been amplified by two excellent collections of her letters: John Lennox’s Margaret Laurence—Al Purdy, A Friendship in Letters: Selected Correspondence and J. A. Wainwright’s A Very Large Soul: Selected Letters from Margaret Laurence to Canadian Writers. These two books add immeasurably to our knowledge of Margaret Laurence’s life, although there are a number of crucial omissions from both collections. In addition to her correspondence with Purdy, she wrote long and important letters to a number of friends, chief among whom are Adele Wiseman, Jack McClelland, Jane Rule and Gordon Elliott. Each of these four unpublished correspondences is extensive, and each contains crucial, new information. I have also gathered significant bits from other letters in smaller unpublished accumulations.

  References to books, essays and archival material are incorporated into the endnotes. All references to Margaret Laurence’s novels and stories are to the relevant volume in the New Canadian Library published by McClelland & Stewart. The exceptions are A Tree for Poverty (Toronto and Hamilton: ECW and McMaster University Library Press, 1993); Long Drums and Cannons (London: Macmillan, 1968); Jason’s Quest (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1970); and Heart of a Stranger (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1976).

  For ease of reference, short titles are given for the two published collections of letters: Lennox for Margaret Laurence-Al Purdy, A Friendship in Letters: Selected Correspondence (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1993), ed. John Lennox (when a letter or an excerpt from one is not in Lennox, the reference is to the appropriate document at Queen’s University, the repository of the Laurence-Purdy letters); Wainwright for A Very Large Soul: Selected Letters from Margaret Laurence to Canadian Writers, ed. J.A. Wainwright (Dunvegan: Cormorant Books, 1995). In addition, I have shortened Dance on the Earth (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1989) to Dance. Margaret Laurence is abbreviated to ML in all notes.

  Margaret Laurence scholarship: A great deal has been written about Margaret Laurence’s work, including collections of essays edited by Elizabeth Brady and Clara Thomas (1987), Greta Coger (1996), Kristjana Gunnars (1988), William H. New (1977), Colin Nicholson (1990), Michael Peterman (1978), John Sorfleet (1980), Christi Verduyn (1988) and George Woodcock (1983). There are also a number of interviews with her, including those with David Arnason and Dennis Cooley (1986), Viga Boland (1977), Donald Cameron (1973), Michel Fabre (1980, 1981), Graeme Gibson (1973) Hilda Kirkwood (1980), Robert Kroetsch (1970), Harriet Law (1977), Bernice Lever (1975), Rosemary Sullivan (1983), Clara Thomas (1972), Alan Twigg (1981) and Lois Wilson (1980). Full-length works devoted to Margaret Laurence include two books each by Clara Thomas (1969, 1976) and Patricia Morley (1981, 1991); there are also books by Helen Buss and Hildegard Kuester. The latter book—The Crafting of Chaos (Atlanta: Rodopi, 1994)—contains a useful bibliography. Susan J. Warwick’s Margaret Laurence: An Annotated Bibliography (Toronto: ECW, 1979) is extremely helpful.

  In preparing this book, I have read virtually all the critical essays devoted
to Laurence and in many instances have indicated my indebtedness to various scholars in the endnotes. I should caution, however, that my readings of Margaret Laurence’s writings are essentially my own and are influenced by the information I have gathered to write her life history.

  ENDNOTES

  CHAPTER ONE

  1 “My mother”: Dance, 24.

  2 “I walk past”: A Jest of God, 17.

  3 “In summer”: The Stone Angel, 4.

  4 “plain as the winter turnips”: A Bird in the House, 11.

  5 Simpson house: In the registry of land titles, John Simpson is not listed as owner/occupant until 1903; the house may have been built as early as 1895.

  6 “The works of her art”: Dance, 12.

  7 Stuart: He graduated from high school when he was fourteen, attended Wesley College in Winnipeg (later folded into United College) for two years, and then worked in a bank for two years. When he turned eighteen, he assisted his father in his various enterprises.

  8 “I have a picture”: Dance, 28.

  9 “That year”: Dance, 46–7.

  10 “did not feel”: Interview with Olive Pennie, May 1995.

  11 “Verna is”: Dance, 33.

  12 “He was the only person”: Dance, 29.

  13 Scots ancestry: In a letter to Will Ready of 19 August 1979 (MS: McMaster), she provided this account: “I … am a Celt of sorts, being Irish [County Tyrone] on my mother’s side and Scots on my father’s [the Wemyss family were sept of the Clan MacDuff of Burntisland, Fifeshire], with a slight admixture of Sassenach blood, through one of my grandmothers who came of U[nited] E[mpire] L[oyalist] stock.… my grandfather Wemyss, whose family came from Fifeshire in the Lowlands of Scotland, believed firmly that we were directly descended from the Picts, the little people of Scotland, and always said … that the name of Wemyss meant ‘cave-dweller’. I have found in recent years that in the Gaelic the word ‘weem’ does indeed mean a Pictish earth-house.”