Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Summer 1999
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 19, No. 3, Summer 1999, pp. 212-13.
Abstract
For various reasons, a great many more of Margaret Laurence's letters to Adele Wiseman survive than those in the opposite direction; consequently this collection gives better insight into Laurence's life and voice and work than Wiseman's. Laurence's is definitely a life and voice and work meriting insights. Wiseman is not entirely lacking, though we learn more about the details of her everyday life than of her writing or inner concerns.
What these letters demonstrate most clearly is how uncertain Laurence was about her own writing and how misjudged both writers were by critics and, at times, even their own editors. Macmillan of Canada, which had published Wiseman's Governor General's Award-winning The Sacrifice, rejected Crackpot as "grotesque & incredible" (304), the editor even suggesting that Wiseman herself no longer had faith in the novel. Laurence wrote back that Wiseman was a prophetic writer, ahead of her time. Both Wiseman and Laurence recognized that Crackpot was, overall, right, but these letters, frustratingly, do not indicate what kind of revision Wiseman finally did undertake before publishing the novel.
The lion's share of the book belongs to Laurence and contains her most personal, most characteristic voice. She talks about her family, about her marriage, about her early need to conceal not only her writing but even the fact that she wrote from almost everyone but her husband, Jack, and Adele herself. She also writes about her separation and later divorce and her sense that she had unfairly hurt a good man simply by not being the kind of woman he needed. Unceasingly she worried about balancing her requirements as a writer with her children's claims on her as mother.
The letters are most revealing, however, of Laurence as a writer. She confides in them not what she intends her work to mean but rather her process-her sense that for her writing is discovery, a series of false starts, then finding the right voice, then pruning back her first draft to discover the story hidden inside. Sometimes she agonizes unsuccessfully for years, as with The Fire-Dwellers, to find a way to get outside herself and inhabit a character who impresses her as real. We also see Laurence's unswerving faith in Wiseman and her large canvases, while she believed her own books to be simpler and, because they focused on a single character, less profound and lasting. She predicted, unfortunately accurately, that The Diviners would be her last novel, though this may have been a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Comments
Copyright 1999 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln