Neepawa embraces its daughter

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This article was published 17/06/2007 (6930 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

NEEPAWA — OK, you’re a small town and a native daughter goes on to international fame as a writer.

The problem is she writes unflattering portraits of a fictional town that everyone assumes is you.

Worse, people in town start to recognize themselves in her “fiction” and feel ridiculed and betrayed. Some of you are portrayed as drunks, some as emotional “stone angels”, some as hapless ne’er-do-wells, and a good number of you as hypocrites.

How do you respond? Badmouth her? Burn her books? Spread malicious rumours about her?

None of the above, in Neepawa’s case. Instead, people here preserved the house Margaret Laurence grew up in.

A small army of volunteers turned the home into a living museum to honour the author of such novels as The Stone Angel, The Diviners, A Jest of God (made into the movie, Rachel, Rachel) and A Bird in the House.

In so doing, people in Neepawa showed they understood how to read novels, and understood that, of all things, literature is about outing hypocrisy, the kind of hypocrisy that dwells in every town. (Miriam Toews’s award-winning A Complicated Kindness concerns hypocrisy in a fictional town based on Steinbach where she grew up, and Sandra Birdsell’s early writing does much the same in a fictionalized Morris where she grew up.)

It’s 20 years since Margaret Laurence died. It’s 20 years since local volunteers restored and opened to the public the red-bricked Neepawa house she grew up in.

There will be a small ceremony to mark the event this year. But will anybody celebrate the many volunteers who have worked to keep this beacon to Laurence alive?

After all, the relationship between Laurence and Neepawa was complex. Laurence worried terribly what people in Neepawa would think of her novels, said Noelle Boughton, author of Margaret Laurence: A Gift of Grace: A Spiritual Biography.

“She was so afraid everyone in Neepawa would think it was them she was writing about,” said Boughton, at her recent book launch at McNally Robinson Booksellers in Winnipeg.

LAURENCE wrote to her friend, Winnipeg writer Adele Wiseman, saying she hoped people would understand that characters “are given to you and not copied from individual persons” (although at one point she confided that her authoritarian grandfather John Simpson was the model for Hagar Shipley in The Stone Angel.)

“She wasn’t like a lot of writers who are really thick-skinned,” said Ivan Traill, the founding president of the Margaret Laurence Home Committee. “She was a very, very shy person. People don’t understand that. She could hardly stand up to give a speech. Her legs would shake. If she could sit down, she would be happier.”

Laurence left Neepawa at age 18 — she couldn’t get out of town fast enough — to attend United College (now University of Winnipeg). She made only a few brief return visits.

Laurence, who liked her Scotch whiskey, would talk about Neepawa when she drank, said James King, in his biography The Life of Margaret Laurence. King omits to say what Laurence said but leaves the impression her comments were disparaging.

In King’s opinion, Neepawa represented to Laurence her domineering and uptight maternal grandfather Simpson. Simpson helped raise Laurence, along with her aunt (who became her step-mother), after her parents died. Her parents died when Margaret was a child — her father, after her mother, of hypothermia he contracted in the back lane. He was believed to have an alcohol problem.

Ambling through her house today, one can’t help but imagine the fights and silences between the high-spirited Margaret and her stern Scottish Presbyterian grandfather.

“He was a crusty old bugger,” said John Kerr, who is now in his 80s and one of the few residents left who still remembers the family. “He had a demeanor, from my recollection, like Conrad Black.”

Simpson wasn’t sociable either, not like the other side of Margaret’s family, the Wemysses, also Scottish, who were very active in the community. (Laurence’s maiden name was Jean Margaret Wemyss.) Margaret used to make fun of the old man as a way to deal with him, Kerr said. Still, she lived in one of the nicest houses in town, and “those kids (she and her younger brother) had more toys than the rest of us.”

Margaret was pretty and energetic but wasn’t the most popular kid in school. “I think they (the family) considered themselves a bit more intellectual than most people,” said Kerr, adding that Margaret’s aunt was “very well-read.”

Neepawa would became so important in Laurence’s fiction. Fictional town Manawaka, modelled after Neepawa, appears in five novels. “Manawaka is not Neepawa but many of the descriptions are based on my memories of the town,” Laurence once said.

Some place names are hardly disguised. The fictional Galloping Mountain stands in for Riding Mountain. The fictional Wachakwa River is a riff on the nearby Saskatchewan River, although the Whitemud River is closer to Neepawa.

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Her house, built in 1895, is also a running character in her novels. Biographer King considered the red-bricked house so important he led off his biography with a quote from Laurence’s A Bird in the House: “The house in Manawaka is one which, more than any other, I carry with me.”

Laurence lived her final 12 years in the town of Lakefield, near Peterborough in Ontario, and both home and town are remarkably similar to her old home and hometown. It’s the only part of Ontario that looks like Neepawa, said Boughton, who lived for a time in Minnedosa, next door to Neepawa. “She created another Neepawa wherever she went,” said Boughton.

Laurence was well liked in Lakefield, and frequently spoke to students in the school district. Then some residents waged a campaign to have her books banned. Residents complained of the sexual content in her novel The Diviners, and branded her a “pornographer.”

“Margaret was just completely devastated by it,” said Boughton.

When the first campaign failed, residents tried again. They even ran a full slate of pro-ban candidates in a school trustee election.

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It’s hard to see what the fuss was about. The sex scenes “are not very long and not very many,” said Boughton.

The second time around, Laurence was better prepared and fought back against the censorship. The local Lakefield United Church also backed her. “The banners lost both times,” said Boughton.

In 1975, Laurence returned to Neepawa for a Margaret Laurence Day celebration. It was her first time back in decades. She was apprehensive, having heard that people in town were shocked and unhappy with her novels. Traill believes Laurence’s perception that people in Neepawa hated her led to the intemperate remarks she made about Neepawa when she drank, as biographer King described. “She had bad vibes about Neepawa,” Traill said.

There was an element of that. Some people didn’t like the rough language and frank sexuality in the books. It wasn’t common in literature yet. Also, there was the matter of people in town believing she was writing about them.

However, for all the people who believed they saw themselves in her books and were unhappy, others were delighted when they thought they’d been included, said Traill. And still others were disappointed they weren’t in her books.

“Some people thought she was writing about Neepawa but she was really talking about all of us, about people who hide the truth,” said Traill. She was also a very egalitarian, and “hard on people who looked down on other people,” he said.

Laurence received four standing ovations at the Neepawa banquet. It was a very emotional reconciliation for her. She later wrote the Neepawa Press saying it was the greatest honour she’d ever received. “The visit to Neepawa means more to me than any other recognition I have ever had of my work, because it came from my own people,” she wrote.

Ten years later, Neepawa volunteers drew up plans to restore her former home. Dorothy Campbell Henderson was the real push behind the house restoration, and she enlisted Traill, former Neepawa Area Collegiate principal, because she felt he was the organizing-type who could pull it off.

Laurence was delighted but cautious. “She was pretty persnickety. She didn’t want any monument to herself. She wanted a working museum, where scholars could come in and do research,” said Traill.

The Margaret Laurence Home had been a home for the mentally handicapped people when volunteers bought it for $35,000. “It was in pretty bad shape,” said Traill. The hardwood floors were covered with linoleum and the original interior was concealed behind cheap paneling and up to 17 layers of paint.

With a lot of elbow grease, volunteers restored the home to some semblance of what it was. That cost about $40,000.

After five years in operation, the mortgage was killing the house. Someone notified McClelland & Stewart and the publisher donated 500 hard cover copies of Laurence’s Dance on the Earth. But there weren’t enough buyers in Neepawa. Then former CBC Radio host Peter Gzowski promoted Neepawa’s cause on the airways. The books quickly sold out and the house committee paid off the mortgage.

There’s some talk that the house needs another cash infusion. The house interior is impeccable shape but the wraparound porch is starting to fall down and there is some rotting on the outside windows. However, the house doesn’t pull in enough revenue for capital projects.

Traill understands the question — that it might be too much burden for a town Neepawa’s size (3,300 people) to honour a famous son or daughter the way Neepawa has with Laurence — but dismisses it at the same time. The act of honouring is as much as source of pride as the person honoured.

“This is what people know Neepawa for, Margaret Laurence and the Lily Festival,” he said. By comparison, Laurence’s home in Lakefield is just a privately-owned residence.

Joyce Kingdon has been secretary-treasurer of the Margaret Laurence Home since 1992. She spends about an hour a day at the house, although sometimes she spends two or three hours, and other days none at all. It’s an ongoing job. In winter, for example, someone has to drop in every day just to turn the water on so the pipes don’t freeze.

Kingdon suggested I meet her at Margaret Laurence Home in the evening because she had to go there to answer e-mails and do some paperwork. (It so happens that three doors down from the Laurence house is the home where Premier Gary Doer’s mother grew up. Gary frequently visited his grandparents there as a child. It’s a pretty two-story, character house, with gingerbread-type wood designs cut around the gables.)

“All (Laurence’s) books relate to this area. I just think deep in her heart, this is where it was,” said Kingdon.

“She always wanted to be buried here,” she continued. “Just a headstone. She didn’t want any fanciness at all.” Kingdon later showed me where Laurence is buried in the local Riverside Cemetery, not far from the infamous stone angel. (Biographer King broke the story that Laurence committed suicide when she was terminally ill and starting to degenerate. Boughton said Margaret’s decision was based on having witnessed her step-mother’s slow agonizing death.)

The Margaret Laurence Home struggles but has never lost money. About 1,500 people toured it last year.

However, the committee has cut back operations by two hours per day this year. It is now open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. “We run a pretty tight ship,” Kingdon said.

The committee is also without a president. Money raised for the house via an annual antiques and collectibles sale have been slipping, too. It’s hoped revenues may increase this year by holding the sale on July 22 to coincide with the Lily Festival.

A date to celebrate the home’s 20th anniversary hasn’t been set yet but Boughton is expected to do a second book launch, accompanied by readings by some local writers.

The volunteers in Neepawa should also take a bow. “I’m big on volunteering. I work at the Lily Festival. I believe in it. My parents were community-minded people, and I am, too,” said Kingdon.

But she adds, “it’s a big job to run the house and we’re all volunteers and you get burned out after a time.”

She wonders if the next generation of volunteers can keep the house going.

“I sometimes think, why am I doing this? At the end of the year, you feel tired,” said Kingdon. Then spring comes along, she said, and phone calls started coming in from people wanting to see the house. Virtually all the traffic is out-of-town fans and scholars. “Now, at the start of another year, I feel all fired up again,” she said.

The Margaret Laurence Home is open every day. Admission is $3 per adult, $6 for families. A 15-minute cassette tape, put together by Betty Chisholm, is available to accompany tours.