The Four Points of Margaret’s Compass: An Appreciation of Novelist Margaret Laurence

Abstract

Margaret Laurence was above all else an explorer of the human condition, and I would like to use the compass as a metaphor to explain the directions in which her art takes us. But first I should sketch the nature of my relationship with Margaret and her contribution to Canadian life and letters. The Manawaka novels and short stories are Margaret's greatest literary achievement. The series of four novels published between 1964 and 1974 (The Stone Angel, A Jest of God, The Fire - Dwellers, and The Diviners) and the collection of eight short stories entitled A Bird in the House (1970), together explore the lives of several generations who came to build and settle the town of Manawaka, Manitoba, and the surrounding countryside. It is well known that the fictional town of Manawaka is very closely patterned after Margaret's hometown of Neepawa, Manitoba, a small agricultural centre situated approximately halfway between the metropolitan centre of Winnipeg to the east and the city of Brandon to the west. In Manawaka, we meet the Gunns and the Logans, Scottish settlers who came to settle the region during the opening decades of the nineteenth century; the Tonnerres, Metis descendants of the French fur traders and their Native trading partners who by then had also peopled the region; and the later immigrants from eastern Canada, the British Isles, and continental Europe, among them the Shipleys, the Camerons, and the MacLeods. Few artists have expressed the rhythms and mysteries of life in Canada as magnificently as Margaret did in her Manawaka books. Margaret was well into her creation of the Manawaka series when, in 1969, she became a friend of my family. That year she returned to Canada from Britain to become writer - in - residence at the University of Toronto for the academic year 1969 - 70. My mother, Clara Thomas, a Canadian literature specialist at York University, had first read Margaret's work in the mid 1960s, and the two had struck up an acquaintanceship that became a friendship with Margaret's arrival in Toronto. During the years to follow, until her death in 1987, she was a frequent house guest of my parents when she visited Toronto. Both of her children lived in Toronto for much of this period, she had many friends in the city, and her Canadian publisher, McClelland and Stewart, was located there, so she visited often. Frequently she and I would end up in Toronto together - particularly in the 1970s - me home from university for Christmas or the summer holidays, and she in the city to share the holiday seasons with friends and family. They were exciting times. The phone was always ringing, Margaret and my parents always seemed to be returning from some splendid event - a reading here, an honorary degree ceremony there - and always the conversation was stimulating, sometimes tension - filled when Margaret warmed emotionally to an issue, but more often laced with humour. Pathos was important to Margaret, but so also was comedy. The atmosphere was rarely salon - like, although I do remember the night that one of us wondered aloud how the panel choosing the Governor General's Award for 1969 had been so misguided as to ignore Margaret's Fire - Dwellers, only to have novelist Dave Godfrey, a dinner guest that evening, remind us that his novel, The New Ancestors, had been chosen that year. More often, when the topics of discussion were the craft of writing or the politics of publishing, the atmosphere was akin to a publisher's neighbourhood pub, or when the subjects were the life experiences of friends and family, an evening at the cottage. Margaret was an intellectual: she was obsessed with the question of the role of the writer in society, and she was passionately engaged in the life of the mind, but she was most decidedly not an academic, and she was uninterested in, even hostile to, many conventions of the academy. Thus the kinds of literary discussions that Woody Allen delights in capturing in his many movies were as alien to Margaret as men on the moon. …