The Stone Angel (35 page)

And then—

I must have been just on eighteen. I had not yet met Margaret Laurence. Our first meeting was to take place some two years later, when she was already graduated from United College, now the University of Winnipeg, and about to be married. It was summer, and a friend and I were hitchhiking from Winnipeg to Clear Lake, Manitoba. Hitchhiking seemed safer in those days of sparser traffic and even sparser common sense. For me that trip was high adventure. Not only did we get a lift, in glorious weather, in the open back of a half-ton truck, but I sat boldly on one of the outer rims of the truck, while it was moving, too, up and down those unbelievable hills. Born and raised in the prairie city, I had never seen real, natural hills before. I particularly remember passing the town of Neepawa, birthplace of Margaret Wemyss Laurence-to-be, because not only was there a hill rearing up untidily just outside the town, but there was a cemetery on the hill, and in the cemetery there was this big angel statue; well, it had wings, anyway, that we could see from the road as we passed.

Years later I told Margaret that I had actually seen and remembered the stone angel. She replied firmly, no, that was not her angel. She even pointed out some differences, which I cannot quite recall now. I think she was anxious to steer me away from the biographical fallacy which plagues fiction writers, the concrete
roman-à-clef
mentality
of some part of every readership which yearns to simplify and perhaps to evade the meaning of a work of fiction by reducing it to origins in fact. She was also anxious, I suspect, since her story really did have nothing to do with that particular statue, that irrelevant guessing games should not interfere with the power of her sightless stone angel as metaphor, since the story is, on a profound level, the account of how her stone angel gains sight, the inner sight towards which Hagar has been blindly groping. It is a kind of Pygmalion tale, without the external Pygmalion figure, in which the old lady, in her continuous monologue, discovers herself, carves out and completes the shape of her own life, comes fully alive at last before she dies. Of course, Margaret Laurence was herself the Pygmalion at work behind this narrative, but it is a measure of the integrity with which she adhered to her inspiration that we believe so absolutely that it is Hagar who is speaking throughout.

The confidence with which an artist adheres, or perhaps the word should be
submits
, to her vision is not, however, so easily won. In Margaret’s letters from that time, I can trace a painful and difficult process, the simultaneous evolution of writer, protagonist, and novel.

The first specifically identifiable reference to the old woman who was to become Hagar occurs in a letter that Margaret wrote to me from Victoria, British Columbia, when I was living in Bethnal Green, London. It is dated 17 March, 1957.

“And someday I would like to write a novel about an old woman. Old age is something which interests me more and more – the myriad ways people meet it, some pretending it doesn’t exist, some terrified by every physical deterioration because that final appointment is something they cannot face, some trying to balance the demands and routine of this life with an increasing need to gather together the threads of the spirit so that when the thing comes they will be ready-whether it turns out to be a death or only another birth. I
think birth is the greatest experience of life, right until the end, and then death is the greatest experience. There are times when I can believe that the revelation of death will be something so vast we are incapable of imagining it.… I picture a very old woman who knows she is dying, and who despises her family’s sympathy and solicitude and also pities it, because she knows they think her mind has partly gone – and they will never realize that she is moving with tremendous excitement – part fear and part eagerness – towards a great and inevitable happening, just as years before she experienced birth.”

It was some time before Margaret was ready to set to work on this project, but by the latter half of 1961 she had a draft ready for revision. Like many relatively inexperienced writers, myself included, she submitted her work, still in the excitement of its unfolding, for what we mistakenly call criticism, and should really call encouragement. What I had learned from much painful experience, and had tried to pass on to her, is that when it comes to a genuinely imagined work, you are going where others have not gone before. What standpoint do they have from which to be authoritative? At this stage, only when a reader is sensitive enough to what is being said to see the work in its own terms, is he or she in a position to make some tentative comment without endangering the fragile faith of the artist in her own vision.

In several letters Margaret expresses the shock of having her created world, seen negatively through other eyes, threaten to come apart before her own. On 5 August, 1961, I am again in Winnipeg. She writes to me from her Vancouver home:

“I have abandoned the old lady novel. I may return to it one day, if I can see how to do it properly, but right now I can see only that it is boring. This is the one thing that is not permitted. The whole thing really is very poor, and right now I feel I can only cut my losses and put it away. I feel intensely depressed about it, needless to say, especially as I
wonder if I can write anything about this country. I can see now why I found it easier to write stories etc set in Africa-it is a kind of screen, an evasion, so that one need never make oneself vulnerable. Also, when I write about people here, my old inhibitions come up all over again!”

On 5 September, 1961, she ponders, argues, and questions, expressing in her characteristically forthright way, both her shaken confidence and her persistent conviction that her intuitions are accurate. She counters depression with the remembered exhilaration of her surrender to the invasion of her protagonist and the deep excitement of discovery. The artist may pray for it to happen, but when her characters actually do begin to talk and go their own way in her head, there is a strangeness attendant on finding herself in their service. “It is the the work of a lunatic, I think.” But it is a necessary lunacy she knows, though still too shaken to resume work on the novel.

“I made two false starts on 2 separate novels that I’d had in mind for some time and found I could not write either one. Very nicely plotted they were, but dead as doornails. Then this daft old lady came along, and I will say about her that she is one hell of an old lady, a real tartar. She’s crabby, snobbish, difficult, proud as lucifer for no reason, a trial to her family, etc. She’s also – I forgot to mention – dying. The outcome is known from the first page. The whole thing is nuts – I should have my head examined. Who wants to read about an old lady who is
not
the common public concept of what an old lady should be? Obviously no one. Sometimes I feel so depressed about this.… But I can’t help it, Adele. I have to go on and write it. It’s necessary, and I cannot do it in any other way than the way it comes. It, too, is a tragicomedy – isn’t life, generally? I can’t get away from this sense of the ludicrous – how many people at the moment of death speak immortal words? Most of us will be gasping for a kidney basin to throw up in. If I were old, I would not be philosophical – I would be furious at being pushed around. This is not a popular thought. So what do I do? Write about
a lavender-and-lace character, full of wisdom and religion? A grand old pioneer, beloved by all? In my experience, pioneers are pig-headed old egotists who can’t relinquish the reins. If there’s one thing that gives me a pain in the neck, it is certainly pioneers. This is not an acceptable point of view. And yet every last one of them is more to be pitied than blamed, but not pitied in a condescending way. This whole novel is something that goes so far back, with me, and is such a wrenching up of my background, that it is difficult for me to be honest enough. The main problem is that if it ever gets published, which is unlikely, considering its nature (which will be called morbid although it is so full of the ludicrous), IF it ever gets published, a lot of people will be mortally wounded and offended, and I feel really sorry about that, but I don’t know what to do about it. However, so many people can never realize that one creates characters – or they are, rather, given to you – and that they are not copied from individual persons etc. I don’t mean to imply that writers always know best – only that no one else always knows best, either. In the long run, what can you do except write what interests you, and hope that someone somewhere will find it interesting also?”

Still wrestling with doubt on 8 October, 1961, she gives a further, fascinating glimpse of the risks an artist takes. No wonder doubt is an occupational hazard.

“… I think that this process (i.e. of getting to trust your own judgment & to attempt
honestly
to write what you feel & not what you’re supposed to feel) – I think you… have come to much the same conclusions, haven’t you?… This book(?) of mine, you see, has been written almost entirely without conscious thought, & although the conscious thought will enter into the re-writing, on the first time through I simply put down the story as the old lady told it to me (so to speak) & let it go where it wanted, & only when I was halfway through did I realize how it all tied together & what the theme was. I didn’t know it had a theme before, nor did I know the purpose or meaning of some of the
events & objects in the story, until gradually it became clear. Now I wonder if one can really trust the subconscious in this way, or if it is all an illusion, which has meaning for me but perhaps to another person will seem only an excessively simple & far-fetched tale? I can’t know, but I’m trying very hard to follow your example in this way, & take the thing on faith, for the moment anyway.”

The fate of “Hagar,” as Margaret was to show quite literally, was still up in the air when she and the children stopped over with us in Winnipeg, on their way to England well into 1962. She was terribly worried about the practical things attendant on the move. Her baggage, for instance, was overweight, and she could not afford to pay a surcharge on the further flight. So she packed a big carton with some of her children’s toys and other gear, including, I recall, her son David’s running shoes, threw in the manuscript of “Hagar,” which I had spent the night reading, and addressed the parcel to her forwarding address in London. Then she invited my mother to go for a walk with her to the post office on Selkirk Avenue, and consigned the only copy of the novel to chance and the postal service. In later years she was to remember that gesture with rueful laughter. Not until she returned from that walk did she even realize what she had done. Luckily for her readers, fate spun the coin in our favour. When the package did finally arrive she was ready for it.

From London, 25 November, 1962:

“… By the way, the parcel from Wpg arrived, with my novel manuscript. I don’t think it reads too badly. It’s kind of an offbeat story, in a way – which really means that I personally find it very interesting but I have grave doubts that many people would share my point of view. But basically, Adele… it is written as I wanted to do it.… I had begun to try to make it into something that it was not intended to be – in order to widen its appeal. I only succeeded in turning it into something bloody awful. I threw away, the other day, all the re-written parts and will stick to the first draft, come hell or high water. The old lady knew what she was doing
when she told me her life story – at least, that is what I feel now, anyway. We will see.”

Margaret’s letters for the next month or so are filled with normal writerly concerns. The crisis of confidence is over. Though her claims for what she is doing are modest still, she states them with a new-found forcefulness and the exuberance of one whose work is going well. Most important, she has taken her stand. She will often again have doubts about her writing, but they will never again be such paralysing doubts imposed from without.

“If one is misled… into following advice, however well meant, which conflicts with the true basic concept of the thing itself, then that is a kind of betrayal of oneself.… I guess, Adele, the whole absurd thing was that for a whole year I was making some kind of lunatic attempt to convince myself that I must be wrong about that novel. This novel means such a hell of a lot to me, simply because it is me. One wants it to be read with comprehension. I don’t mean the characters are me, naturally, although some of them are, in some ways, as must surely always be the case.… I finished the revisions on New Year’s Eve, which I took to be a good omen. I am now in an agony of apprehension about it is it too obvious, or is it not clearly enough stated, etc. But there comes a time when you have to let it go.… You know, Adele, it is written so much in Hagar’s voice that sometimes I think it needs to be read aloud. That was another insane thing I considered doing, months ago when I was in the depths – re-writing it in the 3rd person. Impossible, however she is speaking; that is simply a fact.… Anyway, the way I feel about
Hagar
at the moment is that if Macmillan’s thinks it is unpublishable, I will feel damn disappointed, but I will still disagree with them. ‘Here stand I; God help me, I can do no other.’ I have always been very drawn to those words of Martin Luther’s. Imagine what it must have taken, to say that in the face of the whole Establishment of the western world, when it is so difficult to say it even of issues on an infinitely smaller scale (however, not smaller to me). So – we will see.” [2 January, 1963]

And, on another day of good omen:

“14 February – VALENTINE’S DAY

Dear Adele:

ALAN MACLEAN (MACMILLAN’S) LIKES
HAGAR!
HE LIKES IT! CAN IT BE TRUE? He has just phoned, and I am in something like a state of shock.”

Having myself gone through something similar, I find it interesting that after being unable to touch the book for a full year, when she went back to work on it Margaret took only a little over a month to complete a manuscript that was immediately acceptable to her publishers. One thing they all objected to, however, was her protem title, “Hagar.” She herself wished she could find a title that would more adequately express her theme. “I may have to tackle the entire Old Testament.” [18 February, 1963]