Margaret Laurence - Margaret Laurence and Jack McClelland, Letters

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Laurence letters copyright 2018 New End, the Estate of Margaret Laurence

McClelland letters copyright 2018 The Estate of Jack McClelland

Introduction and annotations copyright 2018 Laura K. Davis and Linda M. Morra

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Margaret Laurence and Jack McClelland, letters / edited and with an introduction by Laura K. Davis & Linda M. Morra.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 9781772123357 (softcover). ISBN 9781772123944 (EPUB). ISBN 9781772123951 (Kindle). ISBN 9781772123937 (PDF)

1. Laurence, Margaret, 19261987Correspondence. 2. McClelland, Jack, 1922Correspondence. 3. Novelists, Canadian (English)20th centuryCorrespondence. 4. Publishers and publishingCanadaCorrespondence. I. Davis, Laura K., editor II. Morra, Linda M., editor III. Laurence, Margaret, 19261987 . Correspondence. Selections. IV. McClelland, Jack, 1922 . Correspondence. Selections. V. Title.

First edition, rst printing, 2018.

First electronic edition, 2018.

Digital conversion by Transforma Pvt. Ltd.

Copyediting and proofreading by Kirsten Craven.

Indexing by Stephen Ullstrom.

Cover design by Alan Brownoff.

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Lines of Encouragement to J.G. McClelland

Roses are red

Violets are blue

One of your authors

Has faith in McStew.

Violets are blue

Roses are red

I dont believe

Youve got rocks in your head

Violets are blue

Roses are pink

Let nobody say

As a bookman you stink

Violets are mauve

Or purple or worse

In two hundred years

Wholl give you a curse?

Roses are crimson

And green is the chive

Whatever your troubles

I know youll survive

Roses are red

Violets are blue

Be heartened old buddy

Im betting on you

MARGARET LAURENCE

Contents

Preface

IT IS DIFFICULT not to be seduced by Margaret Laurence and Jack McClellands correspondence, as we were when we first started research on this project. We sat in the archives, surrounded by boxes and files, and read through the proliferation of letters exchanged between the writer and her publisher. From this moment onward, we brought our unique but complementary perspectives and sets of scholarly expertise related, respectively, to Laurences life and writing and to womens archives to bear on their discussions about the developments of English-Canadian literature from the 1960s. Laurence and McClelland were committed to the idea of Canadian literature, which was at that time in its formative years as a nationally recognized corpus; they set out to foster it by supporting the writing of Canadian authors through publications, literary dinners, promotions, and collaborations with other writers. They engaged in disagreements, shared frustrations, and planned celebrations. McClelland frequently praised Laurence for her great dedication to Canada and Canadian letters (28 Feb. 1978), and Laurence as frequently commended McClelland for his vast contributions: I hope, she stated, as I have been telling you for years and years, that you accept how much you have done for publishing in Canada and for our writers (30 July 1986).

If we are to consider the correspondence between Laurence and McClelland in the context of the history and rise of Canadian literature, then it is also important to consider them as letters . In other words, we must pay heed to the form they assume as well as their content. As Marlene Kadar, Linda Warley, and Jeanne Perrault explain, the autobiographical can be found in traces of text and unlikely documents (2). Business letters might not appear to represent life stories, but the letters here constitute an evocative form of life writing because they demonstrate how the lives of individuals can have a significant impact on the business of publishing, the importance of literary culture, and understandings of the national imaginary.

To echo Kadar, Warley, and Perraults words, we are tracing the autobiographical in our presentation of these letters. To trace is to draw and make visible by copying or outlining, as in tracing a pattern, or it is to investigate and discover, as in tracing footsteps to find ones whereabouts. For Jacques Derrida, a trace is that which remains but eludes the visible or the enunciated at the moment when meaning is made. It is differentiated from the sign, but it is still related and attached to it. Until now, the letters in this book were left in the archives: they were the remainders of major published works on (or by) Laurence and McClelland. Margaret Laurence and Jack McClelland, Letters frames and makes public these traces of their professional lives by compiling an inventory, contextualizing their letters, bringing them to the fore, and enunciating their meaning.

That Laurences letters were preserved marks a significant shift in the history of the preservation of documents. In Unarrested Archives: Case Studies in Twentieth-Century Canadian Womens Authorship , Linda M. Morra observes how, before the twentieth century, womens papers were often refused a place in official archival repositories, since women were not recognized as full citizens, much less as authors. What is included within a repository, she explains, determines and limits potential enunciations of personhood (4). In her well-known feminist manifesto, A Room of Ones Own , written in 1929, Virginia Woolf had observed how women themselves were excluded from physically entering archival centres in England, unless accompaniedonly to confront the relative absence of womens papers therein.

These practices that occasioned the neglect of womens papers, when contrasted with the voluminous and carefully preserved letters by Laurence, show how much has changed for women writersand how much Laurence strove to make a place not only for her writing but also for that of other women authors. She did benefit from being a best-selling author and living at a time and in a place when women writers could be taken seriously: her papers were valued and solicited by archival centres. Indeed, Laurence was conscious of the value their correspondence would hold for posterity, a fact she acknowledged in several of her missives to McClelland and one that McClelland confirmed in his. So Laurence wrote to say that she had placed one of his letters in her filing system, which resembled the tombs of the pharaohs and which would only be opened by future generations (28 June 1982). At times, both acknowledged they would likely see each other before the said letter would arrive, but, they affirmed, that letter was largely for the record (4 July 1980). Pragmatically, McClelland noted, Our mutual correspondence is saleable at both ends. I sell your letters. You should be selling mine (17 June 1982).