He speaks in his own voice. She sat up and said that out loud.
—MARIAN ENGEL, Bear
We’re all wrecks when it comes to it, but some of us have written books and I think we should be given credit for that.
—MARIAN ENGEL, IN A LETTER
She understood that he would never be with her more than at the present moment. The surprise to come was that he wouldn’t be with her less.
—ALICE MUNRO, Who Do You Think You Are?
I FIRST SAW MARIAN on a book, hers. It was called No Clouds of Glory, and on the front there was a coffee-cup ring you thought was real until you tried to wipe it off. The back showed the author, a tomboyish but pretty young woman with a gamine haircut, her top buttons undone, holding a cigarette and caught in the act of inhaling, looking sideways at the viewer with a grin that was amused, mischievous, even, you might say, provocative. Marian didn’t like that picture, for some reason. (Also she didn’t like the title, which wasn’t hers. As soon as she got the chance, with the paperback, she put her own back on: Sarah Bastard’s Notebook.)
I didn’t know that at the time. I thought it was a good picture. I was a young author myself, and conscious of others, especially women. I read the book, looked at the picture, thought: She’d be too much for me. As it turned out, Marian thought the same thing about me; so after we’d gone through that, we could become friends.
The last picture I saw of her she did like. It’s the one on Room of One’s Own, Engel issue, summer of ’84. There was some doubt as to whether she’d be alive to see it but she was. Those were the months when she waxed and waned. (“Very complimentary,” she said. “Probably because of the state I’m in.” She was pleased, but nothing escaped her. However, she did not say dying.)
In the picture, she’s sitting in a chair in her living room, looking good enough. You can’t tell she could hardly walk. She showed me the picture and then turned the magazine over. On the back was the rest of the picture: books piled up and spilling over, a table heaped with objects. “The usual chaos,” she said. She liked having it in the picture, because it was true, not airbrushed, not artist-as-icon. None of her heroines are bodiless wisps, and several are downright sloppy, a condition she was, as a writer, excellent at describing.
Alice Munro, writer: “When I was young, in the 1950s, I used to sit around in kitchens with my married girlfriends; there would be exchanges, revelations, a kind of desperate honesty, a subversive wit. When I first read Marian’s books — particularly The Honeyman Festival — I had the same sense of release and exhilaration. She’d caught something that was like the tone of those early conversations; it wasn’t just an extension, it was a vindication of all that talk. It was the way she wrote. That sort of material wasn’t commonly used; domestic material was either sentimentalized and sugared over, or it was turned back on itself, filled with irony and self-deprecation. She used it as straight literary material, and she made me see that it was possible to use it.”
She thought she was untidier than that mythical beast, “other people.” She had some ideal of perfection she felt others embodied but she fell short of. Maybe this came from her shattering early childhood, maybe it was part of that cleanliness-oriented, small-town, Ontario, Protestant upbringing provided by her adoptive parents. Whatever it was, it was always getting her into trouble with interviewers. She felt a need to be forthright with them, to show herself to them as fully human, dirty dishes, empty bottles, and all; or maybe she was in the grip of that modest self-disparagement small towns require. So she would tell stories on herself, times when she’d done things she regretted or made a fool of herself, and of course the interviewers would print these stories and present them as the whole truth and then she’d get mad, at herself as much as anyone. She was no saint, nor in her opinion was anybody — saintliness irritated her — but this other thing wasn’t the real picture either, and she knew it. She had, among other things, a sense of decorum, and it was hard for her not to let that stifle her as a writer.
Timothy Findley, writer: “She used to pull her head in like a turtle when she laughed, because laughing out loud wasn’t something one did, not according to her upbringing and mine as well. Once when I was chairman of the Writers’ Union I was getting an ovation for something or other, and Marian was sitting in the front row. She pointed her finger at me and said, ‘Look at you!’ Because we both knew this was something that wasn’t done.
“There was always that conflict — the ‘lady’ she’d been taught to be, and the bohemian thing. As a student she was defiant about which boys she’d go out with — she’d choose the offbeat ones on purpose; but the ‘lady,’ the inhibiting background, was never stamped out. Writing Bear nearly killed her; she was astonished by her own daring. ‘I put that word on the page,’ she’d say to me.”
She knew why the dishes were dirty: she was a professional writer, not a professional housekeeper, and few can afford to be both. She thought of writing as an honourable profession. But she felt that Canada didn’t really have a language for that yet. During her years in France, she met a man who asked her what she did. She told him. “C’est un bon métier,” he said. It was one of the stories from her past that she liked, especially the word métier. Such a word released the writer from the ranks of jugglers and personalities, those who made faces for a living, and instead took writing seriously.
Along with this professionalism (for although the dishes may have been undone the deadlines were met) went her obsession with supporting herself, difficult though this habitually was.
“Don’t tell anyone I’ve got cancer,” she said to me early on.
“Why not?” I said. She was nearly broke, as often; I could see some advantages, and anyway it was the truth.
“I might not be able to get another job.”
She didn’t want perks, special treatment. Also she didn’t want deathbed condolences. A dying person can be thought of as dying or as living. Marian thought of herself as living.
She did not deny what was happening to her. She just didn’t want it to interfere with her enjoyment of life, which, at its height, was vast. So when we did talk about her illness, we talked practical arrangements: reclining beds, tilting tables you could screw a typewriter onto. Damned if she’d give up writing. Nor did she.
Two months before she did die, she planned to go to Paris, with her two teenaged children and a wheelchair. By that time she could no longer walk and was living on painkillers, but she wanted to revisit the city where she’d made so many important discoveries for herself, twenty-five years or so before. All her friends cheered her on, aware that she might not make it there, let alone back. But her own stance was jaunty, “full of courage and comedy,” as George Woodcock has put it. Or it appeared to be.
“Even towards the end,” says Jane Rule, the writer, “there was that larkiness and hilarity. She wrote me from Paris: ‘You haven’t lived until you’ve gone over the cobblestones of Paris in a wheel-chair.’ She sent me a postcard. It was a view of a Paris street, taken from inside a basement, looking up through bars. She wrote on it: ‘The Engel view — always looking up.’”
Which was not always entirely true. For us she brought back a more prophetic gift: a scented candle in a glass container that said on the outside: FOIN COUPÉ (CUT HAY).
There are a lot of stories that epitomize her, because she had a lot of friends. One comes from Bob Weaver, the former producer of the CBC radio program Anthology, and patron uncle of many writers. When she could still walk, although on a cane, she met him for lunch. Halfway through lunch, she said, “Oh my God.”
“What?” said Bob, fearing a medical crisis.
“I’ve come here with my dress on inside out.”
“Oh,” said Bob, seeing that it was so.
“Usually my daughter checks me over. But she was out. What’ll I do?”
“You have three choices,” said Bob. “You can change it here, you can go to the washroom, or we can brazen it out.”
“We’ll brazen it out,” said Marian.
When they’d said goodbye on the street, she called after him. He looked back and saw her leaning on her cane, waving.
“You can use this in your memoirs,” she shouted.
She didn’t always give such permission. “Copyright, eh?” she’d say, when telling something from her life that she wanted to save up and use herself. She knew the hazards of having other writers for friends.
Byrna Barclay, writer: “When Marian Engel began publishing I was up to my armpits in diaper pails and the other domestic symbols she wrote about. When I read The Honeyman Festival — in the bathtub, my favourite escape then — I almost drowned myself in the artistic statement she created about all our lives. Years later, after she won the Governor General’s Award and I dared to fulfill my own writing dream, I met Marian at a conference on regional literature in Banff. At the banquet she told me — and the other people at our table — a story about winning the coveted GG. She had fifteen invitations to pass out, but no one to take to the official ceremony. She had bought a red evening gown. On the day of the awards, she was told it was an afternoon garden party, and she had nothing else to wear. She wore the red dress anyway and, flanked by her mother and her analyst, went to the garden party. No one else would talk to her. Except Joe Fafard, the sculptor, who arrived in a blue jean suit. It seems to me that red evening dress should hang in a writers’ hall of fame.”
We often talked about writing. Not the content of it, nor the craft, but about how one managed to do it at all. For her, given the circumstances of her life, which even before her illness were often prohibitively painful and difficult, this was a major subject. I was often astonished that she was able to write as well, as much, and as uncomplainingly as she did. She made me feel lazy, and somewhat spoiled.
Once, during a fragmented period in my own life, she gave me two pieces of advice. “Don’t let other people take advantage of you.” And: “Steal time.”
David Young, writer: “It was difficult for her to take gifts from people or to allow herself things. She was a real string saver, she had a tremendous sense of thrift. But in the last few years that eased up — she made a garden out of what used to be a junk heap, in her backyard. It was a scaled-down version of something quite grand; she got infinite pleasure out of it. If you were over visiting her she’d make you pull out the weeds, at the back, where she couldn’t get to them herself.
“She was stubborn and she had a temper, she’d give you both barrels if necessary. She could be abrasive and undiplomatic, in her official dealings, but she was idealistic and persistent too — in cultural politics, for instance. She served as first chairman of the Writers’ Union of Canada, and she decided that Payment for Public Use — of writers’ books, in libraries — was what she’d go for, and she never gave up on it.
“She phoned me at midnight two weeks before she died. ‘This pain isn’t going to get better,’ she said. And that was it. She’d decided.”
Graeme Gibson, writer: “The time before, in July, when she almost died, I’d just come back from England. I went see her in the hospital; she looked terrible. ‘I wanted so much to be well for your return,’ she said. I sat with her and after a while she apologized for not being entertaining, and I realized I’d better leave, because as long as I was there she was going to exert herself, for me.”
Once, during a bad spell, I was visiting her in hospital, and a medical crisis really did strike. Buzzers were sounded, nurses hurried in, and I had to leave. As I did — as she was being lifted, stuck with needles — in the midst of all that, she winked at me.
This wink demolished me. It was so typical of her, but also so gallant and doomed, bagpipers going into battle, the Polish cavalry charging the tanks on horseback. It was meant, I knew, to cheer me up, but it said other things too: that no matter how gruesome things were, they had a funny side; that there was a conspiracy going on, between us, behind the doctors’ backs. The doctors and her body were engaged in some solemn business or other that was of concern to her, but it wasn’t the whole story.
Despite the alterations made in her by illness and drugs, here was the same expression I’d first caught her at, on that book cover: mischief, fun. Relish was a word she liked; “I’ve been naughty,” she would say, with some pleasure. So there was something to be had, savoured, seen, understood, even at such a moment.
She would not have found this wink of hers courageous. Unless somebody else had done it, of course.