MARGARET LAURENCE WROTE this about Jack in 1986:
I first met J. G. in 1959, when he had accepted my first novel, This Side Jordan. He visited Vancouver, where I then lived, and I was very young and frightened until I met him, when I knew that here was someone who really knew how to read. Our association has gone on since then. We have differed in viewpoints, and have exchanged many an angry and witty letter and have always somehow made up, because basically we were on the same side. I used to call him, for years, ironically, “Boss,” an irony that we both appreciated.
It’s dated Lakefield, the year she asked if I could bring “the Boss” for a visit. We knew that Margaret was gravely ill and that her health would not improve, so I picked up Jack downtown and headed to Highway 401.
All the way east to Lakefield, Jack drank vodka and talked about Margaret, about Gabrielle Roy, and Farley and Pierre, Margaret Atwood, James Houston, and even Roloff Beny and why he had risked his friendship with Margaret to publish those Iran books. He talked about how impossible the business of book publishing had become, and he talked about what rude awakening Avie would face as the years went on and his funds dwindled.
Margaret was welcoming as always, delighted to see us. We sat at her table, talking and drinking till late into the evening. Wanting to give them privacy, I came and went, looking at framed photographs, some taken by her son David, whose talents she was so keen to extol. It was a clear, shadowless day even with the sad winter trees in the gathering dusk and her small plants by the window that caught what was left of the sun. She talked about how difficult it had always been to write. That The Diviners, she had known from the beginning, was to be her last book because she had said in it all she had ever wanted to say. That she had been fortunate in her friends. She mentioned Adele Wiseman, whom she had known for decades and who had been to Lakefield recently, and Al Purdy, who had been a close friend, though they rarely saw each other.
Neither she nor Al had mentioned to me that they had corresponded since about 1965. The book of their letters reveals a great deal about their thoughts and feelings about the process of writing. In a 1967 letter, for example, she tells him about “trying to transform the ordinary, and I have never yet tried to transform anything quite this ordinary. . . . So many things have got chucked out in the process—the whole thing is a matter of paring down to the bone, of shedding gimmicks, even of shedding many explanations.”I And Al, writing about Rilke and poetry, observed: “Emotion, rationality both must be fused in natural language.”II
I thought, at the time, of her speech four years earlier to the Trent University Philosophy Society on the subject “My Final Hour of Life.” She did not know then that she would be diagnosed with inoperable cancer. I clipped the excerpt from The Globe and Mail and have it still. It is light, funny, and nakedly honest. She spoke of not being a believer in “famous last words,” how she had found King Lear’s words, “Prithee, undo this button” infinitely more moving than highflown rhetoric. I know those words have always made me tearful no matter when or where or how often I have seen King Lear. She spoke of her desire to be a citizen, as well as a writer, a mother, a friend, while learning the profession of writing.
We all embraced and no one cried when we left. I kept my tears in check till we were back in the car. Jack was a long way from sober and keen to stop for another drink to dull his pain—the vodka was finished. He urged me to drive to Port Hope because Farley could always be counted on to have some liquor. The Mowats’ house was dark, as one might expect at 1 a.m. but Jack was not about to give up. He threw stones at Farley’s window, the one in his separate study, facing the garden, until Farley opened it and shouted something obscene to discourage kids. Not being a kid, Jack was delighted.
Jack and Farley stayed up and drank most of the night.
* * *
MARGARET COMMITTED SUICIDE on January 5, 1987. She didn’t want her family and friends to endure the long goodbye. On hearing the news, I thought of the unforgettable Dylan Thomas lines she had put on the frontispiece of Stone Angel. She had decided instead “to go gentle into that good night.”
This is the beginning of Jack’s tribute to Margaret:
Margaret Laurence was probably the greatest gift to the literary community that Canada has ever known—not only through writing, but through her sheer presence—her caring, compassion, support of other writers, her deep love of all things that we value most. She was a friend. I loved her . . .
In his own farewell poem, “For Margaret,” Al Purdy wrote
. . . this silly irrelevance of mine
is a refusal to think of her dead
(only parenthetically DEAD)
remembering how alive
she lit up the rooms she occupied
like flowers do sometimes and the sun always
in a way visible only to friends
and she had nothing else.
The country should have declared a day of national mourning and all flags, wherever they were, should have been lowered to mark her passing.
I. Margaret Laurence–Al Purdy: A Friendship in Letters, edited by John Lennox, McClelland & Stewart, 1993.
II. Ditto. In a June 6, 1974 letter.