I THINK THE Stone Angel has one of the most wonderful opening lines of any novel: “Above the town, on the hill brow, the stone angel used to stand. I wonder if she stands there yet.”
I had fallen in love with Margaret Laurence long before we met. My affection for her grew with the manuscript of what became A Bird in the House, a series of short stories based on her childhood and her family, set in her fictional Manawaka. I remember calling the sales director of her US publisher and going on and on about what a fabulous book it was going to be. The sales director (I don’t remember his name) suggested that it would really help Margaret’s sales to relocate Manawaka in the American Midwest. Not much difference, he had said, between Manitoba and, say, Minnesota or Wisconsin, and since Manawaka didn’t exist, it could be anywhere. It’s a credit to Margaret’s sense of humour that she laughed when I told her.
She hated Toronto: she called it Vile Metropolis, or V.M. for short, though she had agreed to be writer-in-residence at Massey College for the 1969–70 academic year. It was when we first met. I think she may have persuaded herself that the college was not really Toronto. It had been designed by architect Ron Thom to look and feel separate, enclosed, quadrangled, peaceful. Its master then was the redoubtable Robertson Davies, whose novel Fifth Business was published by Macmillan in 1970, the same year that we published A Bird in the House.
During 1972 and ’73 Margaret was deeply involved with her next novel, the one she said would be her last. She was editing and rewriting long before she was ready to show it to anyone else. The Diviners features Morag Gunn, a novelist living in rural Ontario who is trying to discover the meaning of the past, including her own, and thus the meaning of her life. One of the novel’s most deeply felt themes is the possibility of gaining new vision from the terrible, colonial past that had almost destroyed our Indigenous peoples. Morag’s sexual relationship with the Métis songwriter Jules seems to presage some form of understanding, in the same way that water divining relies on the deeply intuitive relationship between humans and the earth:
The river was dark and shining, and the moon traced a wavering path across it. Morag sat cross-legged on the dock, listening to the hoarse prehistoric voices of the bull frogs. Somewhere far-off, thunder.
Incredibly, unreasonably, a lightening of the heart.
I loved that manuscript!
Her editor at Knopf, Judith Jones, wrote a long, detailed set of notes on where she had to take the novel next and how and why. Jack McClelland agreed with most, not all, of her suggestions and added a few of his own.
Contrary to the myths he had spread about his own lack of interest in editorial matters, how he left that for others better qualified than himself, Jack was a very careful reader who managed, despite his improbable working methods, to dictate excellent editorial observations and notes. He worked late into the nights, drinking vodka, reading manuscripts, and dictating memos and letters. As the night wore on, his observations would become more repetitious and less measured. He would then give the tapes to Marge in the morning. “The drinks are the only things that keep me awake,” Jack used to say. He was pleased that Marge could decipher most of what he had said. The fact that he rarely read his own letters (most were signed by Marge or declared themselves to be “dictated but not read”) before they left his office, added to the risk he took in having them sent. His notes to Margaret were a good example of both his method and his editorial skills. But given how the letters were produced, I often had to explain to a befuddled Margaret what Jack had meant.
Margaret was insecure about her own abilities as a writer and, unlike some M&S stalwarts, took criticism very seriously. “I learned something important from Margaret about writers,” Jack wrote in his later tribute to her accomplishments. It was “the anguish, the anxiety, that an author experiences while waiting for a judgment from the publisher—the kind of uncertainty that remained with Margaret long after she had become an established writer.”
I used to go to Margaret’s cottage, the “shack” she called it, near Peterborough on the Otonabee River, to explain what Jack had really meant with his most recent letter to her. I don’t remember what the letters said, but they would have been typical Jack notes about something she had objected to where he thought she had been unreasonable. I still remember the small cottage, piles of paper in organized stacks, and the old typewriter she had to abandon to talk with me. The land—not exactly a lawn—slanted down to the water. There was a wooden bench and table, a dock, and a small rowboat that may not have been hers.
I didn’t know her well then, but I knew Hagar, Rachel, Stacey, and now Morag. She seemed much like them: strong, brave, and already almost a friend. She was, then in her mid-forties, a strong, broad-hipped woman with short, greying hair; a pale, wide, open face with high cheekbones and dark, almond-shaped eyes; black-framed glasses; no makeup, a slight smile. She wore loose, shapeless, comfortable dresses, often beige with some pattern. She smoked so much the ashtrays were always full.
She would make tea and offer cookies. Her hands shook noticeably and her forefinger was tobacco-stained, as was mine, from too many Rothmans. Though I had managed to reduce my smoking while I was pregnant, I was now back to about a pack a day.I
She was interested in how I was doing and whether marriage agreed with my temperament. She had been married for a number of years and had two children, but marriage hadn’t agreed with her. She had wanted to devote herself to writing. On the other hand, had she not married, she would not have been in Africa and would not, then, have been able to write the books she had written there. She felt her African experience had been vital to her as a writer. She said she loved having kids, something I once told her daughter Jocelyn, who gazed at me in disbelief. It is hard to be the child of a serious writer who is often distracted and unavailable when you feel you need her.
Though she tried, Margaret said, to spend time with her children when they came home from school, she found it difficult to stop in the middle of a passage or chapter that was finally coming together. She told me, “Writing for me is torture but I have to do it. And once I start, I don’t slow down.”
When she left her husband and moved to Elm Cottage in Buckinghamshire, north of London, The Stone Angel, she said, had been her most precious possession.
Late in the day, she would open a bottle of whisky or wine. We often talked about books and authors we had been reading. She loved Graham Greene, Sinclair Ross, W. O. Mitchell, Joyce Cary, Al Purdy’s poems and Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe, whose books I had not read until she told me about them. She talked about her time in Pakistan, where she had loved the people.
It was Margaret who first told me the story of the brain surgeon who is seated next to a novelist at a dinner party and says, “You’re a novelist? Strange, when I retire I plan to write a novel.” And the novelist replies, “What a coincidence! When I retire, I plan to take up brain surgery.” I heard different versions of this later, often attributed to Margaret Atwood, but the one I remember best is Margaret Laurence’s and how she laughed even before she finished telling it.
Though they fought and argued, Margaret adored Jack. She was always ready to forgive him. She hated author tours, radio and newspaper interviews, the whole wretched chore Jack had insisted she had to do to make people pick up one of her books. She loathed the limelight, but he had persuaded her to “make an ass of myself” in public. She had no desire to become a household name. Though she was willing to teach students who wanted to be writers, she was so shy she suffered stomach pains, shaking hands, and sweaty palms every time she had to face a class. As she kept telling me, she was “not a performer.”
When The Diviners was published in 1974, M&S’s publicity department organized a divining session, complete with two water diviners, on the grounds of the Ontario Science Centre. Margaret was to be the centrepiece of the event, but she chose, instead, to spend her time hiding behind the bushes and hoping that members of the press would either not find her or not recognize her if they did. I had a mickey of Scotch in my purse to keep her spirits up.
The Diviners won the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, it had long and respectful reviews in Canada, the United States, the UK, and several other countries where it had been translated, but it aroused the ire of fanatics who found it “reeked of sordidness” and tried to have it banned in schools. One religious leader launched a letter-writing campaign. The Huron County School Board managed briefly to have the book banned in its schools.
The newly minted Writers’ Union of Canada, the Canadian Library Association, the Canadian Booksellers Association, and the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation all formed policies to combat censorship. Margaret herself, though she dreaded such occasions, defended her book by reading and speaking to packed halls. She had a strong moral sense. She couldn’t understand how anyone could take her book for an immoral screed, let alone blasphemous and pornographic.
Jack’s approach was to try to make light of the proposed book banning and suggest that the publicity could help sell more books. Though the ban was lifted, it’s astonishing that there are still some school boards who do not list The Diviners on their recommended lists for libraries.
Later, when she was the main speaker at the Harbourfront Author series (started by Greg Gatenby, a graduate of the M&S slush piles), she was so terrified about being on stage—even after several glasses of wine I persuaded her to drink—that she asked my then six-year-old daughter Catherine to stand with her. She even encouraged Catherine to keep her balloon flying through the reading, hoping it would distract the audience from looking at her.
Jack had said he needed her presence on the M&S board after the Ontario government’s 1970 bailout. Margaret thought that the whole thing was a waste and that Jack and I had choreographed each meeting before the board members arrived. She had strenuously objected to M&S’s publishing Roloff Beny’s books about Iran because of the brutality of the Shah’s regime.
A couple of years later Jack cajoled her into attending the 1978 celebration of Canadian literature in Calgary. The pretext was Malcolm Ross’s retirement from the editorship of the New Canadian Library, a big literary event to celebrate Canadian writers, the series, and Ross personally. The 1978 Calgary Conference on the Canadian Novel was to select the one hundred “great works of Canadian fiction,” of which at least ninety were in our New Canadian Library series. Margaret found the whole idea repugnant. She recognized it for what it was: a thinly veiled publicity gimmick designed to sell more books. Jack was, as usual, shameless about anything that would increase sales. In the event, the one hundred “best” were selected through some kind of rigged ballot that even Ross, the supposed hero of the conference, found embarrassing.
Margaret wrote to Jack afterwards that while she enjoyed meeting other writers (Gabrielle Roy, Roger Lemelin), her opposition to anyone using the one hundred books list persisted. Jack was unrepentant. He replied (April 6, 1978) that he was delighted The Stone Angel was number one and that Gabrielle Roy’s The Tin Flute was number two of the hundred. “I don’t understand this bullshit,” Jack wrote about her opposition to the conference. “I push this thing because it is good for the country.” As far as he was concerned, what was good for M&S’s writers was good for Canada.
I don’t know how Jack talked Margaret into attending the 1982 Night of the 100 Authors, a fundraiser for the Writers’ Development Trust.II I stood with her backstage, offering solace and whisky, neither of which succeeded in calming her anxiety about making another public appearance. As far as I recall, the only M&S author who didn’t show up that night was Mordecai.
I. I had started smoking in New Zealand, when I was trying to shock the Sacred Heart Convent nuns into expelling me. I didn’t stop smoking until after my daughter Julia was born.
II. The Trust was established in 1976 by Margaret Laurence, Margaret Atwood, Pierre Berton, Graeme Gibson, and David Young. It became the Writers’ Trust some years later and is still going strong as I write this.