The Life of Margaret Laurence

by James King

  From childhood, Margaret had seen her Scots inheritance as a glamorous, romantic appendage. In preparation for her first trip to Scotland, she read about the breakup of the Highland clans culminating in the battle of Culloden and the Clearances. She now realized that the Highlanders “had been in the deepest possible ways forsaken; in the truest sense their hearts had been broken. This, not the romantic swashbuckling figures in Sir Walter Scott’s novels, was the reality of the Highlanders.” During this trip she visited a landscape in which such fearful struggles had been enacted: “Scotland had become real to me, both in its past and in its present. For myself, however, I still did not feel any sense of connection with its history. The story of the Highland Clearances moved me as much as the story of the slave trade, but no more.”

  This is a strange statement in that Margaret had already written so eloquently of colonialism and the remnants of slavery in Africa. In 1965, although she was of Lowlands stock, she identified with the plight of the Highlanders. Later, in Morag Gunn who is from Highlands ancestry, she would blend her ancestry with that of her fictional heroine. Ultimately, for her, the banished Scots were outsiders, who had been treated in a harsh, punitive manner by their English overlords. From the time of childhood, she had seen herself as an orphan, another form of outsider. As she saw herself more and more as a loner, Margaret came to grips with her Scots ancestry—although she obviously would have preferred to be of Highlands stock—and then incorporated it into her fiction.

  Nineteen sixty-five presented Margaret with many other challenges. Earlier, in June, Aunt Ruby visited. Her first, troubled reaction to the Laurence separation had been to write her niece: “Have you seen a marriage counsellor, dear? Some women in their middle age begin to resent their marital responsibilities.” In a tactfully worded reply, she assured the older woman that sex was not the problem. Margaret also had to cope with a strange Dutch-Canadian woman who wanted her to ghost-write a novel. This person’s “bull-dozing kind of intensity” intimidated even her.

  She kept saying “I must fly over and talk to you—shall we say next week?” And I, petrified, kept saying, “Don’t come—write!” She asked me when I was born, and when I said middle of July, she said with gruesome glee, “CANCER! Splendid!” … After I put the phone down, I knew this answer was absolutely no good, and I paced the floor for about an hour, thinking of all that money, which all at once seemed real to me, and then I phoned her (these trans-Atlantic calls really alarm me—all I can think of is the cost) and said I was sorry but it was no dice.

  On a more sombre note, Margaret was touched by a letter from her old teacher Robert Hallstead in which he commented that he could see an extremely religious person in the author of The Stone Angel. During the writing of her third novel, she herself had been surprised, “as the writing went on, to discover how much of it was about God, without this having been my intention at all.” Although she was not at this time much interested in institutional Christianity, The Stone Angel contains two important, interrelated strands of commentary on it: Margaret was intuitively suspicious of any form of evangelical Christianity, but she was receptive to more orthodox religious systems. Towards the conclusion of the book, Murray Lees describes how his son burnt to death while he and his wife were at an Evangelical service conducted by the Reverend Pulsifer. Earlier, throughout the book, Hagar has had an antagonistic relationship with her minister, Mr. Troy. At the end of the book (Margaret’s favourite scene in the entire novel), Hagar cajoles Mr. Troy into singing and, in the process, sees a different side of him—

  Then he opens his mouth and sings, and I’m the one who’s taken aback now. He should sing always, and never speak. He should chant his sermons. The rumbling of his speech is gone. His voice is firm and sure.…

  —and touches the deep well of love and warmth within herself from which she has been for so long alien.

  This knowing comes upon me so forcefully, so shatteringly, and with such a bitterness as I have never felt before. I must always, always, have wanted that—simply to rejoice. How is it I never could? I know, I know. How long have I known? Or have I always known, in some far crevice of my heart, some cave too deeply buried, too concealed? Every good joy I might have held, in my man or any child of mine or even the plain light of morning, of walking the earth, all were forced to a standstill by some brake of proper appearances—oh, proper to whom? When did I ever speak the heart’s truth?

  As her life draws to a close, Hagar wonders why she was never able to speak the truths of her own heart. In those final moments, she sees the tragedies she has visited upon others and herself, but she is given a wonderful epiphany when she realizes life is a commingling of contrary forces: holiness and terror, tenderness and anger, angel and stone. The spiritual dimension is vital to an understanding of Hagar’s final acceptance of herself as a righteous person; in 1965, Margaret was struggling with the conflicting forces of light and dark in her own soul.

  That summer, Alan Maclean, who had become Margaret’s principal editor as well as her English publisher, instructed her that it would be a good idea for her to send the manuscript of A Jest of God to him, because, as she said to Adele, “otherwise I would only pick at it and worry about it uselessly, as I cannot see it clearly enough now to do anything. So I did, then paced the floor for 5 days, and then he phoned and said he liked it … Alan feels that it gets off to a slow start, and that, as A says, in the first few chapters, I ‘grind the reader,’ which I think is true.”

  Once Maclean had intervened, she was able to return to the typescript buoyed up with his endorsement. In October, Margaret, weary from a steady stream of summer visitors, was delighted to hear Jack McClelland was ecstatic about A Jest of God: “HALLELUJAH!… My difficulty always seems to be that I know quite well what the characters are like, and what they mean to me, but I am in a state of terrible apprehension until I discover how they appear to a few other people whose opinions I trust.”

  At the end of the year, she was apprehensive because Jack was in England for the year, taking a course leading to his master’s degree in civil engineering at Southampton University. Nevertheless, she was certain her marriage was over—and that, in the process, many of her conflicted feelings had abated. Still, as she told Nadine, some contradictions could not be overcome—much less be understood. In this bold passage, she cries from the innermost parts of her divided heart:

  I know what you mean about split personality. I am the same. Sometimes I think only the kids matter to me, and then I get frightfully in need of talking with someone adult who speaks my language. Most of the time I am quite happy here, working and slouching around in slacks and sweaters, and then I get a terrible urge to dress up to the nines and of course to have some man who wants me and whom I want (not at the moment possible, it seems, but I’m not yet reconciled to this state of affairs, unfortunately)…. So—this conflict of desires produces some degree of tension, naturally. But I’m pretty lucky at the moment in being able to have something of both worlds, even though I apparently cannot belong totally to either.

  If only one could be one thing or another—either mother or woman, either woman or writer—but God damn, to be split so many ways is JUST NOT FAIR. Anyway, we stumble on from day to day, and manage to survive.

  More than men—Margaret is implying—women are torn between gender roles and gender identity, between gender identity and professional roles. Those conflicts—which had helped to end her marriage—did not disappear after the separation, so powerful were her feelings of guilt and resentment. Margaret may have made a choice, but she never really forgave herself for making it.

  13

  JESTS OF GOD

  (1966)

  ON SOME DAYS, “managing to survive” was a difficult enterprise for Margaret. In January 1966, she was “trying to lose the same damn ten pounds” in a Sisyphus-like battle with herself. This was part of her new year’s resolution to become a new woman. “I will become very slim, very efficient. I will cut drinking e
ntirely. I will cut down on cigarettes. I will work harder, and soon.” However, she had become lethargic and “limp”: “I don’t even sit and brood any more. I just sit! All I want to think about is NOTHING.” Her somnolent state was partially relieved by a dream of making love with a man on a train: “He turned out to be the son of Gypsy Rose Lee, who in her old age was selling high-class cosmetics. He took me to visit her, and the old beauty queen said she would give me a sample of perfume. She had two—one was called ‘Faithful’ and the other was called ‘Betrayal’. The symbolism is so obvious that I think I must have a pretty unstable mind!”

  In her sleeping and awake existences, cosmetics were a contentious issue. Jocelyn, now a young teenager, informed her she would have to cease wearing extremely bright lipstick because it dated her. “So I got some with-it pale lipstick, and the first time I wore it, I went into the Red Lion to buy some booze, and I was wearing my black slacks and an Italian silk shirt printed with scenes from Dante’s underworld, and one of the old geezers in the pub said ‘Hello, Aubrey,’ and then did a double-take and said ‘Oh—it’s not Aubrey.’ I gave him a frosty but feminine (I hope) smile, and when I saw Jocelyn I said ‘That’s what I get for trying to be with-it—I’m mistaken for a teenage boy!’ ”

  On the surface, many of the domestic problems in the Laurence marriage had reached a comfortable stalemate. Jack would travel up from Southampton to look after the children and Elm Cottage, allowing Margaret the unusual stay of a week at her London “pad”; he even joined her in London one day and took her to two James Bond films and then to dinner. This was “very nice and also kind of a laugh for both of us, as the external interpretation would probably be that we were going to re-join forces but in fact the reverse is true and that is why we both enjoyed it so much.” For Jocelyn and David, Elmcot remained a secure bastion.

  Although her financial prospects were brighter and Jack was providing money for the children, she still needed to look for ways to augment her income. In 1965, she had taken on the “job of editing and re-writing a really awful book on Canada,” but she discarded the project in January 1966. However, she had agreed to do four scripts for the BBC on West African/Nigerian literature. She finished them, only to discover the producer wanted an impression of that part of the continent as seen through the eyes of its contemporary writers. “It would have been helpful,” Margaret told Nadine, “if he had given me some idea of what he wanted four months ago, but he didn’t.” So that January, she was still “slogging along” at a snail’s pace on a project which really did not interest her.

  One way of cutting her losses, she decided, was to write a book on the subject: “After about 4 months reading and thinking about Nigerian writing, traditional and contemporary, I feel I’ve taken a do-it-yourself course in contemporary African writing, and I have so much material it nearly breaks my heart, as there isn’t anything I can do with it, but maybe I’ll write a book, which would be no hell critically as I am no academic critic and don’t even know the jargon, but it might be interesting in an amateur way. I don’t know.”

  The resulting book—Long Drums and Cannons: Nigerian Dramatists and Novelists 1952–1966 (1968)—is the most forced piece of writing in Margaret Laurence’s career. As she was well aware, she did not find the profession of academic critic one which fitted her. Throughout this book, one theme emerges clearly: “Perhaps the most enduringly interesting aspect of Nigerian literature, however, as of literature everywhere, is the insight it gives not only into immediate local dilemmas but, through these, into the human dilemma as a whole.” She then explains how it is possible—if a text is well-written—to capture the human experience and transcend national boundaries: “The best of these Nigerian plays and novels reveals something of ourselves to us, whoever and wherever we are.” It is obvious that in the work of Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Amos Tutuola, Flora Nwapa and their contemporaries Margaret Laurence also saw reflected many of her own themes:

  Much as they are caught up in immediate happenings, however, Nigerian novelists and dramatists have constantly expressed in their work themes which are not confined to one place or one time—the individual’s effort to define himself, his need to come to terms with his ancestors and his gods, his uncertainties in relation to others, his conflicts in the face of his own opposed loyalties, the dichotomy of his longing for both peace and war, his perpetual battle to free himself from the fetters of the past and the compulsions of the present.

  In Dance on the Earth, she referred to Long Drums as “rather amateurish,” but she was much too harsh on herself. Long Drums is a good critical book, especially if it is seen as the work of a professional writer of fiction passing judgment on the works of her peers and, in the process, revealing to herself and her readers some of the controlling ideas in her own writing.

  In the early winter of 1966, Margaret decided—with some trepidation—to give up her London “pad”:

  I’m giving up my bedsitter because it gives me the creeps. I realize now that I am too old for a bedsitter life, and also when I think of entertaining my friends there, I realize I don’t want to.… I’m glad I had this bedsitter experience, though, because it’s made me realize something I had almost forgotten—how many people, living in bedsitters in cities like London, lead lives of almost total withdrawal from others.… There are 2 other women living in rooms in the house where I have my pad, and it seems to me that their lives must be almost unbearably lonely.

  (A year later, she mentioned to Adele: “I’m giving up my bedsitter in Hampstead.” Almost a month later, she informed her: “I decided a week or so ago to give up my bedsitter in Hampstead, much as I hate to. But for me to pay 3 pounds per week for a room is nonsense—I just cannot afford it, especially as I only use it 1 night per week, and in the summer less than that. This kind of room is useful only if one is meeting one’s lover there—and let’s face it, for the few times this kind of thing happens to me, it isn’t bloody well worth three quid a week.” From this, it would seem Margaret gave up the Bayswater bedsitter and then, quite soon after, rented another in Hampstead—which in turn she eventually gave up.)

  During the time she wrote of the heartbreaking loneliness of Rachel’s existence, she was well aware of a similar kind of grim isolation. Having completed that book—which concludes with Rachel’s triumphant emergence from self-confinement—Margaret could no longer bear to continue experiencing such loneliness.

  She was about to turn forty. She now became obsessed with trying to assimilate the idea of death, her “own or someone else’s whom we can’t bear to think of as not being here any more.” She also pondered the mystery of her own existence, of the changes she had wilfully brought into being:

  Of course, with me, the process of having to earn one’s own living came rather late in life, and as I had never really been on my own until I was 35 years old, I guess it is no wonder that I have been rather prone to feelings of horrible anxiety and panic re: money. Now that I’ve been in this house for more than 2 years, I am just beginning to be able to feel that perhaps things may continue for awhile without falling apart. For the first 2 years, every time I walked back along the road and saw the house, I used to think—my God, all that is my responsibility.

  Money problems continued to overwhelm her, but she had become sufficiently confident about her earning power that she decided to extend the horizon of the excursions on which she took the children.

  Since the move to Elm Cottage in 1964, she had confined jaunts with the children to visits to London. “Okay, guys,” she would tell them, “we’re not rich, but today we feel rich.” Each child would be given a pound and had two choices as to what do with it: to put it into a post-office savings account or to spend it on books. Wisely, the children always bought books. “Laden down with our treasure, we would proceed to the second part of the ritual—tea at Fortnum and Mason’s.” In a letter to Jack McClelland, she provided an account of the trip she and the children took that April to Greece. This time, the
itinerary was much more relaxed than her visit there with Jack two years before: “We’ve just returned from Greece where I took my children for a two-week holiday. We spent two days in Athens, then went by boat to Crete, where we stayed at the most beautiful beach I’ve ever seen. We also went to look at the ancient Minoan ruins at Knossos, which I’ve wanted to see for years. We had a marvellous time and came back to find that England had had about a foot of snow in our absence, so I guess we picked the right moment to go away.”

  When Margaret returned that spring, she had to deal with her conflicted feelings about the visit of her beloved mother-in-law, Elsie, to Elm Cottage and the simultaneous nervous breakdown of a friend, Ann, who was also staying with her. Her only respite was her affair with the “old lion,” Jamal, the ambassador from an African nation to the Court of St. James.

  Adele, this week has been pure unadulterated Murder. No—I am wrong—one splendid evening (somewhat to my surprise) with the old lion did much to maintain my sanity and morale. But I’ll come to that later. The chief thing is that the friend who was staying here and who was going to look after the kids in August and September, this week had a serious breakdown and is now in a mental hospital … I now feel that anyone with any brains ought to have seen this coming, and that I oughtn’t to have ever considered her looking after the kids.… Ann is a person whom I met through the house, as it were, because she had kept house here for Alan Maclean’s mother at one time.… (I should add that this week Jack’s mother has been here—you can imagine the degree of tension)…. Next morning, a steady procession of doctors, psychiatrists, area welfare officers, etc etc etc. Finally got her into a mental hospital, where she now is.… So—I must get her out, but without her thinking that I am withdrawing entirely. However much it hurts (and it will) she has to be made to understand that she must make her own home and her own life, and although this seems like hitting a person when they’re down, I know it is now or never, and for my own survival I just have to harden my heart and not be too upset by my damaged self-image!… But all this, plus the inevitable strain of J’s mother (however much I care about her, and I do) has really been something, this past week.