The Life of Margaret Laurence

by James King

  Lakefield first proved its value as a refuge when, at exactly the same time she took possession of her new home, she had to be involved in some of the events surrounding the publication of The Diviners. Margaret was always resistant to the publicity stunts dreamed up by the “Boss,” but even she could not resist the inspiration of the publicist to hold a launch in the form of a divining contest on the grounds of the Ontario Science Centre.

  Before the event, a diviner found a place where two streams intersected and buried a marker there. Seven diviners showed up, all of whom got reasonably close to the marker, but only one person from the media—willow wands were available—had the gift. The crucial test was met: the reporters enjoyed themselves enormously. To Margaret, “it was just one more piece of magic associated with the novel.”

  Less pleasurable was the book signing at the Longhouse Book Shop in Toronto. She was stunned when she arrived to see people “lined up not only in the store but on the sidewalk for about a block. Many of them were carrying piles of my previous novels in both hardcover and paperback. I wanted to run.” Clara Thomas saved the day when she arrived. “ ‘Here’s an aspirin,’ she said loudly, rummaging in her handbag while muttering into my ear, ‘It’s a tranquillizer.’ I gulped it down and said to her, ‘Talk, just talk to me. I don’t care a hoot what you say, just talk to me and keep on talking until I’m okay.’ ” The distraught author soon calmed down.

  In Lakefield, Margaret’s heavy drinking was known to only a few people. This was not a subject about which she encouraged conversation. In fact, like many heavy drinkers, she did not really like to admit that she was dependent on booze. Once, when Jocelyn and a friend from Toronto stayed overnight, the three drank until late at night. In the morning, the young man lamented his horrible hangover and inquired of Margaret if she was suffering a similar fate. She looked at him uncomprehendingly, as if he were speaking about something of which she had absolutely no knowledge. Some visitors to 8 Regent Street would assume she was drinking water—but she would be refilling her glass from the bottle of gin or Scotch kept in the laundry room near the kitchen. One friend recalled an evening when a drunken Margaret, having consumed all the liquor in her host’s house and smoked all the cigarettes, scrounged the remaining butts and began to drain the contents of nearly empty bottles.

  A good friend, the novelist Budge Wilson, who often went shopping with Margaret, was struck by the pleasure the famous writer took in ordinary things, such as towels from Sears. Margaret did not mind mixing brocaded sofas and chairs next to pine antiques. Tables with scratches were just fine with her because they showed a former owner or owners had used and therefore loved them. Her taste was extremely eclectic. She had a number of carvings and masks from Africa which were placed for the most part in her study. She loved these, but she also took special pleasure, for example, in the homey philosophy of Charles Schultz’s Snoopy and Charlie Brown. Another great source of joy for her were mystery and detective novels, of which she had an enormous collection.

  Another friend, the journalist Stevie Cameron, who was then teaching in the English department at Trent University, once took Margaret on a shopping jaunt to Pleasant Point. On the way there, Margaret was a “white-knuckle passenger” who would not allow the driver to take the highway. She also remembered the delight Margaret took in singing hymns at parties; she was also very proud of the fact that she knew every single verse of “The Maple Leaf Forever,” which she would render with very little encouragement.

  Her eyesight had begun to deteriorate slightly and she had also developed low-grade diabetes. She was no longer as strong as she looked. Many people thought her body matched her powerful intellect, but this was simply not true: “comes,” she observed, “of having a ‘carrying’ voice and a build like a Russian peasant woman.” Appearances were, she assured friends, deceiving. Nevertheless, the “old tobacco voice”—her nickname for the frequently rasping sound she produced—indicated to many that her health was not good.

  Although Margaret no longer wore make-up and could joke about her appearance, she was extremely concerned with what she wore. Much of her clothing was acquired at Addition-Elle, in Peterborough, one of a chain of stores for full-figured women. There, she would buy gowns that hung loose. She also felt that her hair looked its best kept short and simple. Once, when Mona was visiting from British Columbia, she insisted on doing something with Margaret’s coiffure. “You can do better,” she assured Margaret, who nodded her head in assent. Later, somewhat apologetically, she brushed the “improvements” out because they were not her.

  Gradually, Jocelyn and David gravitated back to Canada and to Toronto. Jocelyn became a journalist, David a photographer. Their relationship with their temperamental but loving mother was not always easy. Her drinking was an impediment, so were her easily hurt feelings. Margaret could not tolerate any criticism, for instance, of her ghastly cauliflower soup. The children grew tired of listening to their mother’s laments about her loss of the capacity to write. But Margaret’s fierce and abiding love for them was something they could count on. Jocelyn often mothered Margaret. For instance, she would buy dresses for her that might add a dash of style to her appearance.

  Increasingly, Jocelyn found her mother’s drinking hard to tolerate. She was aware that Margaret had lovingly prepared a bedroom for her at the Lakefield house (one for David also), and at first she enjoyed staying there. Then, Jocelyn’s patience became stretched as her mother’s drinking became heavier. After a while, she stopped staying overnight, although she visited on a regular basis.

  Margaret had fought to survive as a writer at the very same time she was raising her children, and never squarely faced up to the fact that she had not been the mother she would have liked to have been. In their turn, the children were disappointed in the behaviour of their famous mother, feeling that they had paid an unfair price for her creativity. In relationships in which Margaret did not have to match the demands of motherhood with those of the writing life, she could be eminently successful.

  Ken Adachi, the writer, journalist and book reviewer, and his wife, Mary, an editor, were good friends from Elmcot days. Margaret and Mary met at Canada House in London, where Mary was then employed and the friendship between the two women quickly deepened. After Margaret returned to Canada, Mary would frequently drive from Toronto to Lakefield to visit Margaret. Between Mary and Margaret, there were few barriers; they could air their deepest concerns to each other. One measure of the closeness between them was reflected in what Margaret called the “E.S.P. thing”: when one friend was in crisis, the other would instantly be in touch. In Margaret, Mary found a kindred spirit, one who had bottomless reservoirs of compassion. Margaret knew of Mary’s years as a child in an internment camp; she instinctively recognized that Mary’s childhood suffering bore a remarkable similarity to her own. In a poem to commemorate Mary’s birthday, Margaret penned words equally applicable to herself: “You’ve struggled your entire life/Against the once-rejection.” Mary never confronted Margaret about her drinking—people who did so were “harassing” her, Margaret claimed. She was deeply hostile to anyone who criticized her drinking. So Mary did what was the very best for her friend: she accepted her as she was.

  However, Mary did find Margaret’s drinking distressing. Once, Mary and Ken invited Margaret to dinner with others, where she consumed a lot of liquor and became boorish. After that, Mary never invited others in when Margaret was staying with her in Toronto. She felt the writer diminished herself when she imbibed too much, and did not want others to see Margaret in that state. Margaret herself recognized her drinking could be disconcerting, as she told Mary in an aside in a letter of April 21, 1973: “Please let us hope that I don’t get to be too much of a bore for you, in the well known ways.” When she stayed the night in Lakefield, Mary, a non-drinker, would go to bed early, in order to avoid seeing her friend totally inebriated. Sometimes Ken asked her: “Why do you put up with her?” The simple truth was that at the same time
she experienced the “difficult” Margaret, Mary was in touch with an even greater force—the boundless love her friend bestowed upon her.

  There was the Margaret who drank too much, but just as real was the woman who could be exceedingly attentive to the feelings of others. She instinctively knew, for example, that if you gave a birthday present to a small girl you should also buy a present for her even younger sister, whose feelings might otherwise be crushed.

  Another constant in Margaret’s life—and an important reason for being within striking distance of Toronto—was her friendship with Adele: she visited the Stones regularly, and the two families—when Jocelyn and David were back in Canada—often celebrated Thanksgiving, Christmas and Hanukkah together. These occasions—to which she looked forward eagerly—gave great pleasure to all the participants.

  In Lakefield and Peterborough, Margaret had a good friend in Jean Murray Cole, whom she had known from Elmcot days when Jean had visited her there. At the time The Diviners was nearing completion, Jean was researching a book about her great-great-grandfather, Archibald MacDonald, who as a young man had led the first of the Selkirk settlers on the long march from York Factory to Churchill. In writing The Diviners Margaret had given a similar Highland Scots ancestry to Morag and invented Piper Gunn, about whom Christie relates a number of stories. One day, Jean calmly informed an incredulous Margaret that there had been a real piper by the name of Gunn.

  A few months after the publication of The Diviners, Margaret received a phone call from Alice Williams, who “lived at the Curve Lake Reserve near the village. Her mother was an Ojibway and her father a Norwegian. She said she had never called a writer before, but she wanted to let me know that I had got the Métis parts exactly right.” Alice Williams claims that Margaret misunderstood what she said on the phone that day. As a child, Alice’s experiences had been similar to Morag’s, that being the portion of the book she praised during the conversation. It would seem, then, that the friendship began on a false assumption. (During the same call, Alice asked—based on the photo on the dust jacket—if she had native ancestry. She replied that she did not.)

  Margarets writing career may have been in abeyance, but it was a matter she could joke about in a letter to George Bowering of December 24,1974: “My heavens, I’m not working on anything. It’s all I can do to write my name on cheques, when necessary. I bat off the odd article and review, but they’re far from deathless prose, although I sweat blood over the damn things, I must admit. I always tell people that I’m working on a kids’ book, tho. They don’t like to be told you’re not working on anything. They think that’s unbearably lazy, or immoral, or something of the sort.” Many were the hours that she sat at her desk in her second-floor study trying to write; many were the anguished hours when nothing came.

  Nineteen seventy-five became a banner year for the non-writing writer when she won both the Governor General’s Award for fiction for the second time and the Molson Award. The latter gave her fifteen thousand tax-free dollars, but the most wonderful aspect of this largesse was meeting Jules Léger, the ailing Governor General who had suffered a serious stroke. She was moved by his courage in continuing public life. A curious aspect of Margaret’s resettlement in Canada is that it eventually brought her relationship with Al Purdy to an almost complete halt. To a certain extent, theirs was a friendship which found expression in letters crossing the Atlantic. Nevertheless, when they were together, they were perfectly amicable, or so it seemed. On March 9, 1973, she declared:

  I do not personally find myself worrying much over how long my own friendship with you will last; I have a kind of faith that it will, and I think you do, too, really. I imagine I know a fair amount about you, at this point, and you about me. If you can stand to see me drinking too much sometimes and talking rubbish or saying things I’d never say when sober, and still continue this by-now lengthy correspondence, then unless I suddenly decide that I’m pro-fascist or that what I want most in life is to get hitched to a Texas oil-magnate, I can’t think you will feel you’ve been misjudging me all these years. Nor I you.

  These strong sentiments began to be modified in August 1974 when she asked: “You’ve never said what you thought of The Diviners, which leads me to suspect you didn’t like it. That’s okay—you can tell me so. What is one more blow among the many? Seriously, I’d like to know what you thought, even if you hated it.”

  Not receiving any answer to this query, she summoned up the courage in December—in the midst of a night of drinking—to find out what was happening by phoning Purdy. The result was disastrous.

  I’m sorry. I really am. I was drunk when I phoned you, and I haven’t the foggiest notion of what I said, but obviously it was stupid, thoughtless and hurtful. I don’t have any excuse, so I won’t try to make any. I’m not even really apologizing for my awful behaviour—I’m just saying I’m sorry, and I am, I am. It’s awful that some of one’s actions and words can’t be undone or unsaid. I mean, if you put your hand through a windowpane in a spell of fury (as I did once; have also broken dishes), then you get another pane put in and no one is hurt except possibly your own hand and pocketbook. With words, no. There are times when I can bear to know that I sometimes talk like an idiot, but this isn’t one of them. Please forgive me. It shall not happen again. As for that damn novel, in my saner moments, I cannot understand why I seem to need that kind of reassurance from you. God knows I’d feel much worse about it if you told me lies about your responses. You couldn’t, tho, as I couldn’t in that area, either. So—I really am sorry. I hate hurting my friends, but I do sometimes. Especially when my judgement is distorted and I go into my amateur headshrinker act, a truly repellent one.

  She was not usually aggressive when she drank. She felt totally humiliated by her bad behaviour, but in reality she had simply asked Purdy for his reaction—any reaction—to the book. She was anxious for the simplest form of recognition and support. His inability to provide either and her corresponding inability to accept silence would fester, providing for the fuller break to come.

  Another friend with whom Margaret had milder difficulties at about this time was the “Boss,” with whom she disagreed on a number of issues: their differing stands on copyright regulations, her refusal to accept his invitation to write a short book on what it meant to be a Canadian, and his withholding of the Book-of-the-Month Club advance on The Diviners (he was doing so because this sum was being tallied against the advance initially paid by McClelland & Stewart).

  The most serious misunderstanding involved the Canadian paperback rights to The Diviners, which were sold by McClelland & Stewart to Bantam (five years total but only two years exclusive rights). In November 1974, Margaret sought the assurance of Malcolm Ross, the editor of the New Canadian Library (NCL) that her last novel would ultimately join her other Canadian tides in that series. A year later, she became concerned when Dave Godfrey—whose novel The New Ancestors (1970), set in Ghana, she had enthusiastically puffed and reviewed—gave her “a certain amount of flack” about this agreement because another—Canadian—house had approached Jack McClelland to buy the rights.

  The implication of Godfrey’s complaint was that Margaret—through her publisher—was selling out to American interests. She was both annoyed and frightened at this request for information, as she told McClelland: “Then, (thus goes Godfrey’s version), when Bantam said no dice in the USA unless they got the Canadian rights, you said Fine. He said in a rather sharp letter to me that he wanted the facts, because he didn’t like to stab a friend without getting the facts.” A very irritated McClelland explained to her that the offer from the other house must have been overlooked, but in any case he had accepted the Bantam deal only after they had agreed to stringent conditions. In any event, she had been blamed for a business arrangement over which she had no say.

  The Diviners was a book which caused Margaret problems in every conceivable way. In February 1975, she participated on a “panel” at the Women’s Art Association in P
eterborough. The format was really a question and answer session wherein two people asked her questions, the predominant line of enquiry being “WHY HAD I USED ALL THOSE FOUR LETTER WORDS IN THE DIVINERS?” During what Margaret felt was a very assured reply on her part, she nervously fumbled on a cigarette, looked down to see the fringe of the tablecloth near her was on fire, and then heard her own voice yelling: “MY GOD! I’ve just set fire to the tablecloth!” A third of the ladies burst into laughter at this particular Freudian accident, and a friend, by way of assurance, told her: “Never mind, Margaret, at least it was only a 3-letter word.” This was one of the last—and very few—occasions she was able to laugh at the controversy regarding the language in The Diviners, a book in which she attempted to present a complete picture of the interior and exterior worlds of Morag Gunn.

  Two types of passages caused the controversy. There were those which use language deemed graphic, as in this reflective passage:

  Does that say anything about my parents, or only that I was born bloody-minded? I was born bloody-minded. It’s cost me. I’ve paid through the nose. As they say. Also, one might add, through the head, heart and cunt.

  And there were episodes which were considered pornographic because they describe love-making in a detailed way, in the process evoking the tumultuous pleasures of sex:

  “Let’s sleep now,” Jules says, “and after a while we’ll wake up and fuck some more, eh?”

  In an hour or so, Morag wakens, and puts her head between his legs, sweeping her hair across his thighs. She takes his limp cock very gently in her mouth and caresses it with her tongue, and it lengthens and grows hard before he is even awake. Then he wakes and says deeper. After a while, she disentangles and he raises her until she is looking into his face in the grey-light of the room.