The Life of Margaret Laurence

by James King

  During her brief visit to Montreal, Adele introduced Margaret to Sinclair (“Jim”) Ross, then in his forty-third year of service with the Royal Bank. She sensed he felt that he had outlived his creative gifts. “Who can reassure him? Because actually it is true.” Confronted with the presence of a writer who had inspired her own work and, at the same time, realizing that his creative gifts had indeed deserted him, she pondered her own uncertain future: “I’ve felt for some time that I’ve got maybe ten more years, if lucky, and maybe three more novels, and then time to start running a boarding-house or something. This is not an unbearable thought—more unbearable is the thought of going on writing after one hasn’t got any more to say, in a language which isn’t spoken any more.” This is an important reflection, heralding her sense that her writing career might not outlive her. Margaret’s unflinching honesty can also be glimpsed here: she would never write just for the sake of writing—she had to have something to say.

  Margaret Atwood. (illustration credit 14.2)

  At the Governor General’s residence, Margaret Laurence met tiny, intense and witty Margaret Atwood, who had won the prize for poetry for The Circle Game. Jane Rule, a teacher of Atwood’s, had told Margaret Laurence of the younger woman’s fondness for fortune-telling with the Tarot pack. This sent a “twinge of fear” through the sometimes superstitious Laurence, who felt such occult activities smacked of psychological warfare. “She was, I thought, very serious, slightly (to me) intimidating because so brainy, and then the next day she phoned me and said she’d been glad to find I wasn’t as intimidating as she thought I was going to be, from my picture. How strange we all are, and how vulnerable. Naturally, I warmed to her enormously after that. The thought that anyone might think me formidable is bizarre in the extreme.” The ceremony at Rideau Hall “was much better than I had thought it would be” she told Adele. Claire Martin, who won the fiction award in French, was “an absolute honey.” Just before Roland Michener entered the room, she got out her compact and dabbed her face. Finally, she shrugged and announced: “Oh well, it’s not a beauty contest.” Then she whispered: “Do you intend to make a reverence?” Margaret assured her that she herself did not know how to curtsy and that, in any event, she had been told that this bit of protocol had been abolished.

  Al Purdy put in an appearance at the pre-dinner drinks session at the Country Club. When this “enormous man shambled in, I thought ‘My God, he looks like a cowboy.’ ” Later that evening—when both of them had a great deal to drink—they attempted to have sex, but they were both so drunk the effort proved futile. (Margaret told a number of female friends about this incident. When I asked Purdy about it, he told me that he had “absolutely no recollection” of this event but he then assured me that this did not mean that it did not take place.)

  During her one-week stay in Canada, Margaret was brought into touch with the past, present and future of Canadian literature. In a wonderful aside to Jack McClelland, she observed: “I was surprised at how little strain there was in the Government House ceremony—the great thing was that the writers didn’t have to do anything except keep their mouths shut and look (if possible) decorative and not too dim-witted.” Margaret had been glad to go away and “equally glad” to come home, even though Jocelyn and David were now old enough to voice their displeasure at a mother who lived with them but almost always seemed unavailable: “My kids hate it when I’m writing, as I’m often rather absent in every way that matters and then the little brutes tell me I’m neglecting them, thus loading me with guilt which they don’t mean to do at all.”

  Upon her return to Elm Cottage, Margaret envisioned herself as “some female Jacob wrestling with an angel who is mighty difficult.” The angel was Stacey and the novel, The Fire-Dwellers, devoted to her. “A lot of” the book was, she informed Adele, “sheer crap, but in the places where I wasn’t being too evasive or too strained, the voice of the character does break through.” She was trying to salvage the useful parts of her old typescript, but she realized all too well that the reason she had—years before—set this book aside was because:

  The character was beginning to talk too much in my voice. I recognize now that of course she is talking in my voice—but only in 1 of my voices, and baby, I’ve got DOZENS of voices!! So what does it matter? The only good bits of what I wrote before are the bits where I let her talk the way she wanted, and these are the parts I’m trying to save. The thing is, they contain genuine aspects of her, and it’s a violation of some kind to throw them away. So I can’t begin from the beginning, as I had hoped, but have to patiently sort out the wheat (?) from the chaff, pausing only to complain mournfully to such people as you. Also, I see now that the character’s dilemma, although related in some undercurrent way to my own, is actually very far from my own—and indeed, my own dilemma is now utterly different anyway, so perhaps I had to gain this distance to be able to write it.

  A week later, Margaret had become, as she put it, “a pyromaniac … a firebug.” She went out to the garden and burned the hundreds of pages of the early drafts of The Fire-Dwellers which she had written three years before and had been attempting to resuscitate. “How can I have ever thought I could sort out the good bits? It is the character who is there, not the individual words. And she is still there, but I can’t seem to reach her, or not yet.… I’ve also destroyed all the plans for the novel—ie. the intricate setting-down of plot, etc etc, which was another evasion I’ve indulged in with this one for some six years now. All gone. Consumed in flames. I don’t need a bloody plan—either it will come by itself or it won’t, and I certainly ought to know the people, as I’ve lived with them trampling around inside my skull for so many years.” Such precipitous behaviour was an aspect of her character the children found unsettling. When she was uncertain, Margaret would often steamroll over an issue, as if being noisily aggressive was a substitute for considered action.

  Her difficulties with the novel led her to wonder about her mental stability: “But do you think it is possible to crack up without knowing it? I feel very strange, Adele. I think that if I can’t write this one, I can’t write. But sometimes I feel I just won’t ever be able to get through to it. So help me, it isn’t for lack of trying. I think it was at one time lack of comprehension. Now it is lack of faith. It isn’t any hell of a great expedition, in external terms—just another novel. But for me, crucial.”

  Could this new novel rise from its own ashes? That was the question she was forced to ask herself. She had not been able to write the book three years before because the voice of Stacey was so much like her own during the Vancouver years. In 1967, she thought she had obtained the necessary distance. Yet, her new “understanding” with her husband had returned her squarely to many of the dilemmas she had faced in British Columbia. Despite the new direction her marriage was taking, her two trips back to Canada had kindled in her a desire to return home, a suggestion to which Jocelyn was indifferent but which frightened David, who, only twelve at the time, loved Elmcot and the stability it bestowed on him. Of course, Jack had recently found work in England in an attempt to make his needs and his wife’s congruent.

  As she had been several years before, Margaret was loath to discuss troublesome issues with her husband, describing herself as a daughter afraid of confronting a harsh father: “I am petrified about a face-to-face encounter with him over this basic problem. I really do not think I can face him, or bring it up. My tendency, in his presence, is to smooth everything over, because I am too damn cowardly to do otherwise.… I am still so bloody scared to encounter him, and feel I will be bulldozed and will not be able to maintain myself before him.… what is hard is to assail an authority which one subconsciously feels to be unassailable, at the same time consciously knowing it is as broken a reed as oneself.”

  By September, she had reached Chapter Two but was deeply uncertain of her future as a writer, a woman and a person: “Actually, I feel like hell. I feel as though I have been battling for 5 years, only to find
myself now back in the same situation exactly, personally and in writing, as I was 5 years ago. Except then I had the nearly completed manuscript of The Stone Angel. Now what have I got?”

  The Fire-Dwellers is an even more ambitious book than The Stone Angel, perhaps because in 1967, Margaret was trying, as she told Al Purdy, “to get across the multiplicity of everything.” By that, she meant the deep conflicts and irresolutions which seem to be at the core of the human situation. As she got older, she saw the task of reconciling opposites as impossible and thus redundant. But, she also realized, society does not like to think of itself as possessing unsolvable problems. Nevertheless, this was the real task that faced mid-twentieth century authors: “The attempt to deal with the shifting and ambiguous nature of reality” seemed to her “the only important thing that’s happened in the novel in the past decade.” She also knew all of the problems with her new book but none of the solutions.

  That October, she discovered a new way of writing, a complete “breakaway” from the old narrative style. Her theory was good, but the resulting prose was at first unfortunately unreadable: “Visualized the outer and inner taking place simultaneously, in two columns, rather like a newspaper—would have been a nice contrast, the relation between the two being nil. It would work fine if you had a two-foot wide page and a reader with four eyes.”

  She was doing something else equally arduous in the same book: challenging the prevalent, stereotypical views of women who worked as homemakers. Hagar is no one’s idea of “a sweet old lady,” and in Rachel’s rejection of the confined and confining world of Manawaka Margaret had disputed conventional views of the “single woman.” In her new book, she was taking even more on board because any questioning of the role of women as mothers, wives and homemakers challenges all of the assumptions upon which patriarchy is based. Before, she had examined isolated portions of the women-in-the-world question; in her new book, she was looking at—and ultimately attacking—many of the assumptions society ignores but upon which its precarious foundations rest.

  Both The Stone Angel and A Jest of God are written in the voices of their protagonists. In order to demonstrate Stacey’s attempts to connect to the madness of the world and, in the process, to feel insane, Margaret uses a combination of first- and third-person narration in The Fire-Dwellers, an apocalyptic metaphor for all human beings, all victims of a media-driven, violence-prone world.

  The buildings at the heart of the city are brash, flashing with colors, solid and self-confident. Stacey is reassured by them, until she looks again and sees them charred, open to the impersonal winds, glass and steel broken like vulnerable live bones, shadows of people frog-splayed on the stone.

  Life is hell, the title suggests—or, at the very least, a purgatory.

  In the above passage, Stacey first sees the city as “brash” and “confident,” but on second glance she sees it as “charred” and “vulnerable.” Depending on your point of view, both perceptions are accurate. The trouble, Margaret argues, is that people are programmed to think that what is “normal” is necessarily good. Stacey—who has the gift of second-sight—is incapable of seeing things this way and, as a result, constantly suspects herself of being some sort of deviant or misfit, which, of course, she is from the prevailing male-dominated vision of the world:

  Stacey looks at her underwear on the chair but makes no move towards it. Her eyes are drawn back to the mirror.

  —Everything would be all right if only I was better educated. I mean, if I were. Or if I were beautiful. Okay, that’s asking too much. Let’s say if I took off ten or so pounds. Listen, Stacey, at thirty-nine, after four kids, you can’t expect to look like a sylph. Maybe not, but for hips like mine there’s no excuse. I wished I lived in some country where broad-beamed women were fashionable. Everything will be all right when the kids are older. I’ll be more free. Free for what? What in hell is the matter with you, anyway? Everything is all right. Everything is all right. Come on, flat slob, get up off your ass and get going. There’s a sale on downtown, remember?

  In the first paragraph, the omniscient narrator tells us that Stacey looks in the mirror whereas the second allows us to enter Stacey’s mind. In rapid turn, Stacey wishes and then fantasizes; she then questions and admonishes herself. Finally, she offers self-assurance before insulting herself.

  The use of voice in The Fire-Dwellers is the work of a masterful writer, but while writing the book—which is in every way a high-wire act—Margaret obviously did not see it this way. She could not validate her own technical brilliance because she was evoking the sense of loneliness and despair she had experienced in Vancouver, that side of herself only Nadine Jones had been allowed to witness.

  Many of the ideas in The Fire-Dwellers anticipate or reflect the ground-breaking work of Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique (1963), a book which sought to explain how a certain gestalt—not in the best interest of any woman—had come into being in the postwar world, a mind-set that suggested fulfillment for women was only to be found in marriage and child-bearing. Friedan argued that society had bound women by subtly forcing them to internalize such mistaken notions. She asked: “How can any woman see the whole truth within the bounds of her own life? How can she believe that voice inside herself, when it denies the conventional, accepted truths by which she has been living?” As housewives began voicing their unease, society came up with ridiculous explanations, from over-education to insufficient training in washing-machine repair, without confronting the basic problem, which was that children, a husband and a home did not necessarily satisfy women’s needs to grow and fully explore their potentials.

  Another non-fiction writer who may have influenced Margaret’s new book was the prairie-born Marshall McLuhan, whose seminal books The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and Understanding Media (1964) showed how television had become so much a part of North American existence that it was sometimes impossible to separate the two. This is a condition of life Stacey is painfully aware of:

  Come on, you kids. Aren’t you ever coming for breakfast?

  THIS IS THE EIGHT-O’CLOCK NEWS BOMBING RAIDS

  LAST NIGHT DESTROYED FOUR VILLAGES IN

  Mum! Where’s my social studies scribbler?

  I don’t know, Ian. Have you looked for it? …

  WORD FROM OUR SPONSOR IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN TOOLEY’S NEW SHOWROOM YOU’RE IN FOR A REAL COOL SURPRISE

  Chatter buzz wail

  Okay, Jen, I’ll be up in a sec. Are you finished? Don’t try to get off by yourself—I’m coming.

  You going to get your hair done, Stacey?

  Yes, of course, whaddya think?

  I only asked, for heaven’s sake. No need to

  I’m sorry, Mac…

  ROAD DEATHS UP TEN PER CENT MAKING THIS MONTH THE WORST IN

  I got to take fifty cents, Mum.

  Duncan! What for?

  Cripples or something.…

  WHEN QUESTIONED THE BOY SAID HE HAD SEEN THE GIRL TAKING THE PILLS BUT HE HAD NOT KNOWN THEY WERE

  For Margaret—and The Fire-Dwellers displays this—the “novel must be moving closer to the film, as a means of catching the human dilemma.” Another aspect of the book is her overwhelming fear that the fire next time would be worldwide destruction by nuclear war. At the end of the book, Stacey asks herself: “Will the fires go on, inside and out? Until the moment when they go out for me, the end of the world. And then I’ll never know what may happen in the next episode.” She cannot answer that—or any of the questions which overwhelm her perceptive, incredibly fine-tuned mind, and the narrative concludes on a deliberately indeterminate note: “She feels the city receding as she slides into sleep. Will it return tomorrow?” There is a lack of closure because in Margaret Laurence’s view uncertainty is a hallmark of twentieth-century man’s experience.

  At the very same time she was dealing with the various dilemmas of bringing Stacey forcefully to life, Margaret—as a respite—wrote her first children’s book, a book which had an irritatin
g autobiographical point of origin:

  Our lawn had been inhabited by moles for a long time. Each day in spring and summer molehills would appear, about two feet high. David would scoop up the earth and throw it into the bushes.… The next morning there would be more mole mountains. One day I felt the grass actually springing under my feet. I was convinced there was an entire city of moles there, but I wasn’t about to sacrifice my entire lawn to them. I put up a sign in our local post office: “Are there no mole catchers left in England?” My sign was answered. A mole catcher, complete with explosives and gas, went to work and cleared our lawn of moles. I felt like a murderer. I had already begun writing the first draft of Jason’s Quest, in which one of the heroes is a mole. Nevertheless, it was a relief to be rid of them.

  In the tragi-comic world of her first children’s book, not only are heroes and villains easily distinguished from each other but also goodness confronts and vanquishes evil. Jason, a young mole searching for a cure to the sickness destroying Molanium, travels to Londinium to discover a cure. On his way, he is joined by Oliver, a tawny owl, and two cats, Calico and Topaz. As in many quest stories, the hero learns that the real discoveries are internal ones: “wisdom must be learned from life itself.” Margaret—despite her earlier claim of being no Northrop Frye—gave a reading of this text worthy of the categories established in The Anatomy of Criticism: “a frivolous retelling of … the ‘heroic monomyth’: Departure—Initiation—Return.”

  The children’s novel provided only a momentary distraction from the issues raised by The Fire-Dwellers. Each scene had to be lived through from the inside, and she found “this process of going inside the thing harder and harder to bear” as she got older. With this new book, she had to confront a potentially hazardous truth: “I don’t write directly out of personal experience, but all the same I often wonder how much of myself I’m revealing in novels and stories—in fact, I’m revealing the whole thing, but I always fondly hope that this isn’t obvious to everyone.”