A Bird in the House (23 page)

Laurence investigates, in a highly personal way, the eternally fascinating question of whether an artist is born or made by creating Vanessa MacLeod, whose life mirrors her own. From the opening story, we see that Vanessa has the “gift” of imagination and a genuine love of language; at the same time we see that her character is being shaped by people and events outside her control. The interdependence of personality and coincidence is not only a philosophic notion in
A Bird in the
House
– it is an essential tension, holding the weave of the stories taut.

It is old news that a lonely and introspective childhood is a prerequisite for the writer’s career; cleverly, Laurence makes the choice to examine this truth through the medium of fiction itself, which proves far more useful than a factual account. For here, every time we read these stories, we experience the life of Vanessa through her senses and thus with our own; we begin, ourselves, to feel how her loneliness turns in on itself and, instead of withering, blooms. As the stories progress, as her perceptions sharpen and her self-reliance deepens, we understand her resolve to flee Manawaka and all it represents. The very place that has helped make her who she is can no longer nourish the quickened spirit within her, and by the end she must escape the sterile cage of convention in order to be truly free to write. The creative struggle becomes one that we have entered with Vanessa and now know in a specific, intimate way. Only fiction could have given us this emotional access.

By choosing the short story, Laurence shows a profound knowledge of how childhood works, for the very nature of growing up is fragmentary, fractional, segmented. “Childhood’s learning is made up of moments,” Eudora Welty states in
One Writer’s Beginnings
. “It isn’t steady. It’s a pulse.” By focusing on those moments – piling them up, arranging them, setting them side by side the way one might bits of fabric for a quilt – Laurence captures the random and fateful rhythms of that essential, formative decade between eight and eighteen.

Unlike her novels, which use several devices to explore the inner and outer lives of their adult women narrators, these stories use a straightforward voice of reminiscence. We are required to bring our own knowledge of the complexities of human nature to supplement the child’s version of the world,
and in doing so, we connect with her entirely. The adult remembering voice of Vanessa never obscures the child’s – and we are able to become that child as we bring forward our own memories of attics and basements, as we fuse ourselves within the houses of Vanessa’s childhood.

Vanessa’s isolation in Manawaka is not that of outsider or misfit, but simply the result of a life spent in the house of one tyrannical grandparent or another; her loneliness is a misfortune of setting. That, and her early exposure to grief and loss (the deaths of her gentle grandmother and father), help to make her a solemn child, not much given to merriment. Her brother is so much younger that he is never able to serve as a real companion, and even when she eventually finds a friend, Mavis is clearly no “soul mate.” These factors accentuate that sombre side of Vanessa, which takes life very seriously, which pays close attention to the life around her.
Paying attention
– the writer’s first requirement.

Unlike the women of the Manawaka novels who often converse with God as a means of sorting out their thoughts, young Vanessa is steadfastly self-reliant, having given up early on God. She does not seek to understand the events around her in religious terms; in fact, she does not seek even to explain life in a scientific way. Her nearly clinical observation of what she sees and hears still allows her to settle for the mystery of human behaviour – the mystery, and the consequent coexisting possibilities for grace.

What Vanessa is learning throughout these stories is part of the mental equipment she must carry as a writer: the certainty that things are not always what they seem. “Do you think we are teaching the child deception?” her mother, Beth, worries, as Vanessa sits listening to her and her sister Edna exchanging confidences as they secretly smoke cigarettes in an
upstairs bedroom. Edna replies that what is being learned is self-preservation. But even more than that protective skill, the child is learning the levels and layers of truth. Listening to adults talking, not always making sense of it but
paying attention
nevertheless, she is taking in far more than the words she overhears (deliberately overhears, listening at doors, at holes in the floor, learning the fine art of disappearing into the woodwork so that she will not be noticed and the conversations will continue over her head). She is learning to catch the drift, to sense the ebb and flow of silence and speech, to guess the meanings hidden under and between the words themselves. She is learning the poignant, fearful limits of language. She is learning, as Eudora Welty observes, “to listen
for
the stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening
to
them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are
there
.”

Yet the first stories Vanessa chooses to write bear no relation to the life around her – in fact, when she realizes that her “epic”
Pillars of the Nation
about pioneer life might well incorporate her Grandfather Connor (a real pioneer), she sets it aside, distressed by the connection of that hateful, hated man to her glorious fiction. Her scribblers are not meant to reflect reality, but to deflect it. Art is the method she has devised for escaping the dreary hardships of her depression childhood. Rich with biblical allusions and romantic borrowings, the florid stories of the scribblers are the first step towards original creation. Vanessa’s sensitivity to the power of language is apparent here, and also her deep, instinctive need to augment her life with “something else.” The heart of the writer, it seems, always yearns for more than there
is
.

Writers do not necessarily spring from literary or even literate families, although there are usually relatives who can
be identified as “having the tendency,” whether or not they are articulate themselves. In Vanessa’s case there are two from whom she can trace the line – old Uncle Dan and her cousin Chris. Ironically, since she loves them both, these men represent the negative aspects of her nature against which she, as an adult, must be on guard. (Even more ironic is her eventual acknowledgement that it is the fortitude and steely will inherited from her hard-hearted grandfather that keeps her straight and prevents her from wasting her creative forces.) Uncle Dan, awash in sentimental, boozy dreams, cares less for the relevance of the Irish songs than for the heroic colour the music brings to his sense of himself; even inappropriate legend is better than none at all. Chris, on the other hand, makes his own myths, and in his running from the cruel realities of poverty, failure, and violence, he eventually slides into silent, useless madness. Fools and saints, these two are part of her, and Vanessa the storyteller attests to this, first, by showing herself following the sound of Uncle Dan’s singing off into the night, and later, by her heartfelt compassion for Chris when she grasps the truth about his horses. In her relationships with them, Vanessa encounters and absorbs the unholy and undisciplined energy vital for the creative act.

If these male relatives are representative of the dangers she faces as an artist, her female relatives do not serve as models. The choices she makes are very different than her compliant mother’s (although it is important to note that Beth supports and encourages her daughter’s flight from Manawaka) or her Aunt Edna’s (who, for all her spunk, settles for the good and dull). By drawing these two women close to Vanessa, Laurence prefigures what will be a conflict for her as an adult – balancing the conventional feminine role against her needs as a writer. In
A Bird in the House
Laurence follows
a pattern all too familiar in writings about artistic growth: a turning away from the life chosen by the mother, and attributing individuality or self-determination to qualities inherited from male members of the family. Happily, both in her own life and in her fictional character of Morag Gunn in
The Diviners
, Laurence has given us a new and better alternative – the mother/writer figure – to inspire the next generation.

For those of us who are writers, Margaret Laurence tells our story in hers, expresses for us – and celebrates – the pain of our becoming. She explains a little of what it is to be that child who knows she is, somehow, different, who
feels
she has something to say about the world. Who wants to make something of her life, and to make a difference. And who wants to tell truths about the world, in her own words.

BY MARGARET LAURENCE

AUTOBIOGRAPHY
The Prophet’s Camel Bell (1963)
Dance on the Earth (1989)

ESSAYS
Long Drums and Cannons: Nigerian Dramatists and Novelists
1952–1966 (1968)
Heart of a Stranger (1976)

FICTION
This Side Jordan (1960)
The Tomorrow-Tamer (1963)
The Stone Angel (1964)
A Jest of God (1966)
The Fire-Dwellers (1969)
A Bird in the House (1970)
The Diviners (1974)

FICTION FOR YOUNG ADULTS
Jason’s Quest (1970)
Six Darn Cows (1979)
The Olden Days Coat (1979)
The Christmas Birthday Story (1980)

LETTERS
Margaret Laurence – Al Purdy: A Friendship in Letters
[ed. John Lennox] (1993)
Selected Letters of Margaret Laurence and Adele Wiseman
[ed. John Lennox and Ruth Panofsky] (1997)

TRANSLATIONS
A Tree for Poverty: Somali Poetry and Prose (1954)