by James King
Craft displays, hot dog stands on main street, which is closed to cars, people wandering around in genuine and pseudo Victorian costumes! I have a long printed dress, slightly Victorian in appearance, on which last year, for the same event, I sewed a bunch of lace I once bought from an English gypsy, plus a long black cape lined with scarlet—a girl in England once made it for me, and I hardly ever wear it, but it’s dandy for such an occasion as this.… Last evening I was one of the five judges in a Queen Victoria Look-Alike Contest. There were three contestants!!
At the same event, she was moved by the sight of a little boy in a fiddling contest: “I could hardly look at him, with his pants slipping a trifle and revealing his undershirt, and his face with snub nose and a small frown of total concentration—I thought I’d start weeping, as I remember always doing when my kids were little, at the Sunday school Christmas concerts.”
Her lively sense of fun about her life in the village extended to this mock press release, written for Adele’s delectation, concerning her Canadian answer to Paul Newman’s Own salad dressings. Her riposte was called “Margaret of Blue Gables Own.”
Margaret Laurence fans, most of whom have already joined her for dinner or lunch in her quaint and picturesque village here, can now taste in the privacy of their own homes one of her mouth-watering delicacies.
For years, the bleary-eyed writer and fanatical non-athlete has made a cauliflower soup from incredibly cheap ingredients, and has served it to her helpless family and such of her friends as could be unwittingly trapped into tasting the tasty repast. For years, her family and friends have suggested to her that the cheap concoction could be a way to beat inflation and relieve the ailment, from which she periodically suffers, known as Writers’ Panic, believed by medical authorities to be caused by financial doubts.
After 1983, when Joan Johnston retired, she and Margaret were often together. Almost every day, Joan would pick up the phone to the announcement, “C’est moi.” The two would go on shopping expeditions together, with the last “obligatory stop” (Margaret’s phrase) at the LCBO at the edge of town to buy gin and whisky (usually Johnnie Walker Red but Glenfiddich when Margaret felt rich). They often went out for lunch, where Margaret would order a martini straight up.
There were more formal occasions in the early eighties. In March 1982, she was given an honorary degree (Doctor of Sacred Letters) from Emmanuel College, a part of Victoria University at the University of Toronto. This tribute, as Margaret knew, had been arranged specifically as a vote of confidence in the morality inherent in all her writings, especially The Diviners. Before the ceremony, she was at table with the slightly intimidating literary critic Northrop Frye (“many people,” she asserted, “jovially refer to him as Norrie, but I am not one of them.”). She thanked Frye: “This degree means a very great deal to me because it seems a vote of confidence from some of my own people.” He replied, very gently: “I believe that was the intention.”
Once Margaret caught the glimmer of a book she could actually write—her mothers and daughters project—she withdrew as much as possible from public life. In April 1983, she decided not to let her name stand for a further term as Chancellor of Trent. What she needed, she claimed, was a two-year sabbatical from public life, although she was willing to remain on the various boards of which she was a member. Another problem was one of “cash flow.” She had to dip into her savings at a much faster clip than with which she was comfortable. For example, she had also been taking the bus to Toronto on an average of once a week: that too would have to cease.
In January 1985, Margaret wrote a letter of consolation to a friend: “Death is so strange. I aspire to be a Christian, yet I cannot say I feel certain of a life-after-death, or even if I think that it matters. I have a sense that something happens, but that it is not given to us to know, until the time. Possibly something so far beyond our present human minds that we cannot conceive of it.” This moving, wistful reflection was in part inspired by a new controversy surrounding her books.
One of her first references to the new assault is in a letter to Budge Wilson: “This idiot lady. Mrs. Helen Trotter of the Burleigh-Anstruther TWP council, decided to go for the jugular. She says, as you have heard, that The Stone Angel shows ‘disrespect for humanity.’ How lunatic can a supposedly sane person get?” In a more reflective mood, she tried to see the matter from the viewpoint of her opponents:
Of course, the opponents like Mrs. Trotter are sincere and well-meaning and mainly born-again fundamentalist Christians, who do not recognize that there are any other kinds of Christians, never mind any other religions. What they want to do is to dictate what all our children may or may not read or be taught in High Schools.… And when they rank me with the pornographers, I become very anguished and angry. They have been saying that my books are “dirty, disgusting and degrading” … they have not read them, except perhaps in a few passages here and there, and they certainly have not read them with any understanding at all.… I can’t tell them that … they can’t hear. They can’t understand that an old garbageman in a little town [Christie in The Diviners] could be, indeed, a kind of Christ-like figure, a scapegoat for the town’s self-righteous people, a man who knew about the importance of the ancestors and tried to give Morag this sense of the importance of the past and of her own people, a man who, really, was, in my view, gifted with God’s grace. How can I explain to those who cannot see? Well, obviously I cannot. But when Mrs. Trotter said that THE STONE ANGEL shows “disrespect for humanity,” I was really upset.… I vowed this time that it would not upset me, but of course it has. How can I explain to the fundamentalists, who would not recognize me as a Christian, how I feel and what things I have put into those books?
This time, Margaret was determined to battle her opponents. The passivity that had overwhelmed her before vanished. In part, this was because of the incredible support she had received during the first banning controversy. There were other factors at work. In the intervening years, Margaret, in redefining her Christianity, knew herself to be a truly moral person. In addition, in the wake of the controversies and in the aftermath of an exceedingly long writers block, she now realized another book was within her grasp, one in which she could proclaim her religious beliefs.
Her self-confidence reasserted itself: “I decided [she informed Budge] to fight back this time, and have had interviews with the press, with radio and TV, phone interviews, you name it. Not only on my own behalf but on behalf of all other contemporary and also Canadian writers. I was on with Gzowski on ‘Morningside’ on December 31, and of course all these things also generate a lot of mail. I am daily getting lots of letters in support of my books. I do reply to as many as I can, but it does tend to swamp me. Anyway, the Peterborough Board of Education meets on Jan 24, so we will see. This time I don’t feel so much hurt as angry and outraged.” The normally shy Margaret was always comfortable with Peter Gzowski, whom she called the “best interviewer in the business” and “a really nice guy,” but she even enjoyed her appearance as the “mystery guest” on “Front Page Challenge” on April 20, 1985 when she stumped the combined expertise of Pierre Berton, Betty Kennedy, Allan Fotheringham and Knowlton Nash.
In the midst of her gruelling schedule, Margaret was having trouble with her right eye, which had a cataract. Later, in the spring of 1985, she was diagnosed as having carpal tunnel syndrome in the right hand and wrist. She had other worries. Although she coped well with the new controversy, she was scared again that some zealot might attack her at home.
Shortly after the school board yet again refused to ban Margaret’s books, she had to put up in June 1984 with a prank in the humour column (“The Mason Line”) in the Lakefield Chronicle, wherein a new novel by her was announced.
The first thing to say about Margaret Laurence’s latest novel, Singing Fire, is that it is brilliant. The author of The Stone Angel and The Diviners is back with a vengeance, and there seems every reason to believe that this new book will swiftly estab
lish itself as a contemporary classic of our young literature. This said, it should also be noted that Fire has a special significance for Lakefield residents. The novel is set in an Ontario village so transparently like her own that Ms. Laurence stuns with her audacity. Not only has she appropriated the geography of Lakefield, she has also borrowed its very streets and public buildings: and additionally—and most daringly—several Lakefield personalities are clearly recognizable among her characters, and two recent local scandals have been skilfully woven into the fabric of a compelling narrative.… Readers who objected to the celebration of Unnatural Sexual Practices in The Diviners will be relieved to learn that Singing Fire has only six, brief steamy passages. They are found on pages 6–9, 22–23, 42–49, 101–11, 152–154 and 206–53, and can be skipped over, if the reader is so inclined, without doing violence to the story’s flow.
An outraged Margaret told Adele: “This bugger took on the wrong adversary! I am going to scare the shit out of him!!! (I hope).” She instructed her lawyer to write a letter informing Paul Mason and the newspaper that the piece was libellous, but she dropped the matter when the young journalist offered her a profuse apology.
Despite this and all other impediments, her social calendar was very full in the early eighties. In the middle of November 1985, she was again in Toronto—as she explained in a circular letter sent to friends at Christmas—“for a meeting with Energy Probe, on whose board I serve, and we had a two-hour meeting and then went to a three-hour meeting with the staff and board of Ontario Hydro. We are trying to persuade Ontario Hydro that it would be a bad thing for them to sell tritium and export it to the USA, because they would not have any control over how it is used and it would undoubtedly be used in the manufacture of yet more nuclear weapons. This is a very complex issue, but we have to keep on trying, our position being that Canada cannot have any credibility as a ‘non-nuclear weapons’ country if we are giving aid and support to such things as testing the cruise missile or making parts for nuclear arms or (Hydros plan) selling tritium for ‘civilian purposes’ when those ‘civilian’ purposes cannot possibly be assured. Who knows what good we do?”
On January 10, 1986, she told Louise Kubik (formerly Louise Alguire) that she had, at long last, reached a firm resolve: “TO SAY A FIRM NO TO EVERYTHING AND TO TAKE AT LEAST ONE YEAR’S SABBATICAL, EVEN FROM THE MANY GOOD CAUSES I SUPPORT, IN ORDER TO CONTINUE WITH WHAT I REALLY WANT TO DO, AND HAVE BEGUN, NAMELY SELECTED MEMOIRS DEALING MAINLY WITH MY THREE MOTHERS.”
Margaret’s decision that January was determined by the realization it “was either IT or ME,” the “IT” being public engagements. For the first time in a long while, she was eager to get at her scribblers. In her new project, Margaret attempted to rewrite and reinvent the past. Although she was not able to write the novel about mothers and daughters she had first envisioned, she used many of her skills as a novelist to imagine the past and in the process produce a non-fiction book about how women can have extremely strong views about all manner of issues and have the power—if they wish to seize it—to impose those views on society.
In many ways, The Diviners, in its depiction of the relationship between Morag and Pique, is a mother-daughter novel. Of course, all of her novels are about various kinds of power. In Dance on the Earth, she shows herself as a person who gained power as a woman through the agency of other women. This, the real agenda of Margaret’s new book, results in a narrative that omits many pertinent biographical facts the reader might expect to find in an autobiography.
All autobiographies—largely because they are by definition subjective—tell lies in some way or other. Dance on the Earth was never intended to be autobiographical in any significant generic sense; it is—as the subtitle declares—a collection of “memoirs,” a carefully selected recollection of the history of Margaret’s womanhood. Some of the claims of the book—such as the assertion she had three mothers—may not be psychologically accurate, but they are the author’s way of attempting to define her coming into being as a professional woman writer who was also a mother. This book contains a bit of wishful thinking in that Margaret asserts that in her life she had given equal emphasis to writing and child-rearing.
There are other problems. The book’s central image is derived from the modern hymn, “Lord of the Dance,” which allows Margaret to place herself in a position of power, as one who controls and ordains. Yet, in the foreword, she speaks at length of the bronze sculpture, “Crucified Woman,” by Almuth Lutkenhaus: “To me, she represents the anguish of the ages, the repression, the injustice, the pain that has been inflicted upon women, both physically and emotionally.” These two images clash. Were women victims or were they survivors? Were they weak or powerful? On one level, that of her writing career, Margaret Laurence knew the answer. She had chosen—as decisively as she could—her life as a writer. On a more personal level, she was not really sure. Since she never resolved this dilemma, the hymn and the sculpture reside uncomfortably side by side, metaphoric of the unease she herself had endured.
She might have asked herself the question: Did I win the battle to become a famous writer against tremendous odds but in the process lose my soul? She may never have been able to forgive herself for leaving her marriage, when a part of her felt that a woman did not have the right to make such a decision. At many turns in Dance, the reader can see the guilt that poisoned her existence.
That year there were major setbacks. A personal attack on her in The Toronto Star for her anti-nuclear stand upset her. She was deeply bothered by the death of Evelyn Robinson, her next-door neighbour for twelve years. Nevertheless, her good spirits remained fairly constant. She was tickled when she had the “enormous honour of having been named by Chatelaine as one of the Worst Dressed Canadians!” Her drinking continued unabated—by 1986, she usually had to go to bed extremely early, often by 7:30.
A mixture of the joys and sorrows of life overwhelmed her that July a week before her sixtieth birthday. She finished the first draft of Dance and four days later learned her brother, Bob, had terminal cancer. At once, she made plans to fly out to Alberta. The birthday celebration, with forty-two people in attendance at Joan and Glen Johnstons home on the Otonabee, was a great success, although friends noticed Margaret was more bothered by the heat than usual. When outside, she gasped for breath and often quickly retreated into the air-conditioned house.
Joan Johnston’s birthday gift to Margaret were large, handsomely bound journals in which Margaret, having finished the first draft of Dance on the Earth in mid-July, confided even more memories. The first entry sets out the agenda for this new project:
July 18, 1986—Today I am sixty years old. I have decided to keep a journal for this year, partly because a decade year seems a special one … and partly because I think a lot of people in Canada might be interested to know how I spend my life in this quaint village.… I have not published an adult novel since 1974, & although I have since published a book of essays & 3 books for children, the worried ones either are not aware of this fact or point out that the last book was published in 1980. What has happened to Margaret Laurence? They tend to speculate, I gather. Has Margaret become a recluse, in the manner of J.D. Salinger? Has she suffered a series of nervous breakdowns? Is she an alcoholic or a drug addict? Well, no, actually. So I thought it might be of some general interest to keep a journal this year, at sixty, and set down some of the details of my daily life.
Although obviously intended as a more personal—and private—record than Dance on the Earth, she saw the resulting narrative as potentially publishable and decided therefore to conceal her drinking problem from the “people in Canada” who might be interested in her life. Much more than Dance on the Earth, the journal constantly veers between public and private reflections. Quite often, she stresses her love for her children and how that love has informed many of her actions. In particular, these statements seem to be made to the children and to any future readers. At other times, she seems to lose her reserve and t
o tell the diary her most intimate—unfiltered—thoughts.
During her visit with Bob, she instantly saw he did not wish to talk about either his illness or approaching death, so she played everything by ear. He enjoyed talking about their early lives together, about how he refused to be called “Bobby” after the age of seven, about John Simpson. In some ways, they recognized, they had had happy childhoods. “I wish Bob had known our Dad. I was 9 when he died, but Bob was only 2. And he had to put up with Grandfather for many more years than I did, of course.” Back from Alberta, Margaret decided to redecorate her house. Because the name appealed to her, she chose a white paint entitled “Free Spirit” for the interior. “My home,” she realized, “is incredibly important to me, & always has been—all of them, throughout the years; I need it to look right, to look warm & calm & uncluttered & attractive … possibly to stave off, or so I have often thought, the inner chaos.”
The journal gave Margaret the opportunity to reflect on a number of issues, some of which had only been raised in passing in Dance on the Earth. “Got a letter from Mona today, my oldest friend. Among many other things she asked if I ever felt, at our age, sometimes totally alone. Yes, is the short answer. What worries me, however, is not the alone-ness (of which I can bear & indeed need a great deal, even though the loneliness is sometimes hard) but the deterioration.” She wondered about her status as a woman writer: had she been in her arduous and yet fulfilling life a “sort of half-assed pioneer” for other women?
She also pondered what the end of her life would bring, hoping especially that her children would not have to take care of her in her final years.
I pray it will never be a task given to my children. I would much rather take my own life than have them saddled with the care of me when I am old &—heaven forbid—senile. I have never expected to live that long, but probably nobody expects it. The taking of one’s own life I do not regard as a sin ever, but as a terrible, unthinkable & unbearable tragedy in the case of young people.… by the time one was either a) senile or b) terminally ill & in great pain, one probably would a) not know it or b) not be able to do anything. Also, what about the wherewithal, the means? How to suddenly get a huge supply of, e.g., barbiturates? Impossible. I’ve given thought to this, over the years, and it just seems too damn complex & difficult even to contemplate. Virginia Woolf drowned herself. I could never never do that. Hemingway shot himself. I’ve handled a gun only once in my life.… Forget suicide even if ever in dire straits. I will just have to shuffle on, & hope that a nifty heart attack seizes me before I become not myself any more. Do other people, still relatively healthy & so on, think about death as much as I do & have done for years? I don’t know. And yet I don’t feel morbid, & I love life very much. I guess it is just that I know it will end, possibly quite capriciously, & have known for really all my life, my mother having died when she was 34 & I was 4.
