The Diviners (56 page)

 

AFTERWORD

BY TIMOTHY FINDLEY

M
aybe it would be best not to read this until
The Diviners
has had a chance to sigh and to settle; until you, yourself, have had a chance to sigh and to settle.

My friend and I have a rule when we go to plays and movies: neither of us is allowed to talk when the play or the movie is over if we perceive the other has been upset or moved by what we've just seen. Surely there's nothing worse than somebody breaking in on your own reflections with: “Wow! What a piece of garbage!” Or even with: “Wasn't that terrific!” It doesn't really matter whether the voice breaking in agrees with you or disagrees. The point is, the only voice that matters when an experience is over is the voice of the experience itself.

A psychologist once remarked that what we experience in dreams can be just as affecting–whether for ill or for good–as what we experience in what we call “reality.” Books can hit us hard–or leave us cold. We can set the book aside and say: “I forget.” Or we can close the covers and know we will always remember what is between them. Books, like dreams, are essentially private realms. Nothing should be allowed to
detract from each person's right to read a book privately and to interpret it freely in the light of what each person has experienced and knows of life. This is why what we receive from critics can be so dangerous. Not that critics are inevitably wrong; only that critics forget, too often, to remind us they speak only for themselves.

The Diviners
, since its publication in 1974, has suffered from a plethora of critics–many of them negative, some of them positive–all of them loud. It has been the eye of a storm that has raged off and on from the moment Margaret Laurence wrote its final sentences up to the moment of her death in 1987 and beyond. To be brief: it has been plagued by the dread fear of honesty.

The sources of this fear have been as influential–and crazy–as school boards and pulpits. “Crazy” because it would seem to be self-evident that school boards and pulpits should have a vested interest in honesty. And yet, they have mounted attacks against
The Diviners
, charging both it and its author with everything from malicious propaganda against the sanctity of the family to undermining the morals of the young; from pornography to blasphemy. Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth. At its worst, the campaign against
The Diviners
took on the colours of riotous comedy, as when its author was accused of being “personally responsible for the current increase in teenage pregnancies.”

As a consequence of the attacks against
The Diviners
, few of its readers since 1974 have been able to retire into a quiet place to read it alone. Now, it is achieving the status of a classic and, while there is an obvious rightness in this, it would be a pity if its classification as “literature” were to prove to be intimidating. Nothing we can read should be less daunting than this book.
Yes, it is difficult–but only difficult because it pulls no punches. Difficult isn't daunting, anyway. Difficult is exhilarating.

The only kind of book that daunts–if such a word exists–is a book that lies: a book that clouds or obscures the truth with sentimental claptrap or mind-easing platitudes. Earth and air and fire and water and all that these imply of reality abound in
The Diviners
. The flesh, too–and all it implies of being alive. The people here are whole and imperfect–rampant, afraid, and terrifying–and they ask of life and one another nothing more and nothing less than we would ask if we were written on these pages. Such things cannot be said of every book. In fact, they can rarely be said of any book. We know such books when we find them in our hands because they breathe. Books as seemingly different as
One Hundred Years of Solitude
and
Madame Bovary
, as
Lady with a Lapdog
and
The Moons of Jupiter
all speak of one condition: of being alive, and of the subtle horror we all experience of being trapped in human flesh when what we want–and long for–is something only the spirit can attain. I know this–and you know this. We all know this, at heart. But it takes a Marquez, a Flaubert, a Chekhov, a Munro, a Laurence to articulate it. Why?

Don't ask.

Be glad.

 

Late one summer afternoon–in August of 1973, to be exact–Margaret Laurence walked out onto the lawn behind her cottage on the banks of the Otonabee River in Ontario. She wore an oversized cotton
mumu
and a pair of untied running shoes, and she carried a pack of cigarettes and a glass of wine. Under her arm there were a few loose pages of her inimitable typing–criss-crossed with penciled notes and amendments.

Inside the cottage, a pot of chili was simmering and a large wooden salad bowl stood ready on the kitchen table. The smell of the food was tantalizing and comforting. One of Margaret Laurence's guests came up out of the water, flopped onto the dock, and grabbed a towel.

“It may look warm,” he said, referring to the river, “but it's really cold. And I wasn't alone in there…”

Margaret Laurence laughed.

“That's the snapping turtles,” she said. “You better count your toes, kid!”

The sun began its long descent beyond the trees on the opposite bank and the swimmer put on his sweater.

Three other guests were sitting down on steps and on the grass.

Two people passed in a rowboat, drifting on the current–one of them fishing, both of them absolutely silent.

Margaret Laurence slipped her pages into her lap and adjusted her glasses. One of the guests lay back and watched the swallows swooping overhead.

Someone lighted a cigarette.

The swimmer poured himself a glass of wine.

Margaret Laurence began to read. It was just as if they had all been having a conversation–and now it was Margaret Laurence's turn to speak.

“Morag,” she said, “is nine, and it is winter. The snow is a good four feet thick outside and you have to walk to school on the roads, where the snowplough has been…”

She read for some time.

She ended with the piece about
Christie's First Tale of Piper Gunn
and the bit about
Morag's First Tale of Piper Gunn's Woman
.

This is how books are made. By trial and error; speaking entirely from the heart–letting the mind cope later with the writing of the words.

Five people out on the lawn beside a river: chairs and grass and water and one of them reading as the dark comes on:

“…and Morag was never afraid of anything in this whole wide world. Never. If they came to a forest, would this Morag there be scared? Not on your christly life. She would only laugh and say,
Forests cannot hurt me because I have the power and the second sight and the good eye and the strength of conviction.

“What means
The Strength of Conviction
?”

“Morag sleeps.”

Not Margaret Laurence.

What means
the strength of conviction
?

Perhaps, when you have let
The Diviners
sigh and let it settle, you will know.

 

THE AUTHOR

MARGARET LAURENCE
was born in Neepawa, Manitoba, in 1926. Upon graduation from Winnipeg's United College in 1947, she took a job as a reporter for the
Winnipeg Citizen
.

From 1950 until 1957 Laurence lived in Africa, the first two years in Somalia, the next five in Ghana, where her husband, a civil engineer, was working. She translated Somali poetry and prose during this time, and began her career as a fiction writer with stories set in Africa.

When Laurence returned to Canada in 1957, she settled in Vancouver, where she devoted herself to fiction with a Ghanaian setting: in her first novel,
This Side Jordan
, and in her first collection of short fiction,
The Tomorrow-Tamer
. Her two years in Somalia were the subject of her memoir,
The Prophet's Camel Bell
.

Separating from her husband in 1962, Laurence moved to England, which became her home for a decade, the time she devoted to the creation of five books about the fictional town of Manawaka, patterned after her birthplace, and its people:
The Stone Angel
,
A Jest of God
,
The Fire-Dwellers
,
A Bird in the House
, and
The Diviners
.

Laurence settled in Lakefield, Ontario, in 1974. She complemented her fiction with essays, book reviews, and four children's books. Her many honours include two Governor General's Awards for Fiction and more than a dozen honorary degrees.

Margaret Laurence died in Lakefield, Ontario, in 1987.

 

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 (1979)

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)

HISTORY

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

 

Copyright © 1974 by Margaret Laurence
Afterword copyright © 1988 by Pebble Productions Inc.

First published in 1974 by McClelland & Stewart.
First New Canadian Library edition 1988.
This New Canadian Library edition 2007.

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher–or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency–is an infringement of the copyright law.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Laurence, Margaret, 1926-1987

The diviners / Margaret Laurence; with an afterword by Timothy Findley.

(New Canadian library)
Originally published: 1974.
e
ISBN
: 978-1-55199-243-3

I. Title. II. Series.
PS
8523.
A
86
D
5 2007   
C
813'.54   
C
2007-903188-9

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation's Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

McClelland & Stewart Ltd.
75 Sherbourne Street
Toronto, Ontario
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5
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