Dance on the Earth: A Memoir by Margaret Laurence (review)

160 LETTERS IN CANADA 1989 from this book as a far more sociable creature than popular mythology would have us believe. A graduate of Dalhousie University and the University of Toronto in philosophy and mathematics, Buckler had worked in a summer hotel in the United States and with Manufacturers Life in Toronto before moving back to the Valley in the 1930s to farm. He experienced several rewarding relationships with women, loved the attention of family and friends, and developed satisfying artistic relationships that included actor Arthur Kennedy, Esquire editor Arnold Gingrich , American novelist Harold Brown, photographer Hans Weber, writer 'Silver' Donald Cameron, and novelist Margaret Laurence. It was Laurence who paid Buckler one of his most meaningful compliments when she wrote: 'We, and I mean writers like me and all the young ones as well, owe you so damn much. You made it all possible. You showed us how to be ourselves.' Bissell includes similar accolades from Alice Munro and Marian Engel, and in doing so offsets many of the insights into self-doubt and despair that plagued Buckler's writing moments. The resulting book, strengthened by Bissell's unsentimental critical judgments and enlivened by Buckler's inimitable pointilliste style and wry comments, stands as a tribute to both Buckler the author and Bissell the biographer. (GWENDOLYN DAVIES) Margaret Laurence. Dance on the Earth: A Memoir. Edited by Jocelyn Laurence McClelland and Stewart. xv, 298. $26.95 In spite of her almost incapacitating terror at the mere thought of a public appearance, Margaret Laurence revealed her personal experiences and her convictions with rare clarity and forthrightness in all her fiction, her travel writings and criticism, and several frequently reprinted autobiographical essays. 'My Final Hour' is almost unique as explicit confession. The NFB film Margaret Laurence: First Lady of Manawaka (1978) reveals her more completely and candidly than similar films do her literary contemporaries , and the NFB short A Writer in the Nuclear Age (1985) is unparalleled in the searing directness of its personal emotion. After so much revelation, what new insights could Dance on the Earth provide? The two-and-a-half-year hiatus between its author's death and its publication only intensified the question. The answer is not simple. The me~oir is no match for Laurence's achievement and profound influence. Readers who have not known Laurence personally and who encounter her as a writer for the first time in the selection of mostly unpublished items following the memoir may get little sense of her uniqueness and greatness. Background discussions and interspersed polemics may seem superficial in contrast to her treatment of related matters elsewhere. The autobiographical narrative may contain HUMANITIES 161 few surprises for those who have read published biographies orwho have heard Laurence talk freely, but it may contain many surprises for those who have tried to deduce her personal experience from her fiction and to identify her fictional characters with specific persons she had known. For everyone it gives a coherent, detailed, often vivid narrative of her life, some of her most hilarious anecdotes, and a splendid selection of family photographs. Both Margaret Laurence and Don Bailey, whose Memories ofMargaret was published shortly after Dance on the Earth, agonize over the difficulty of telling the truth. Both try, but Bailey unnecessarily hurts himself and many named individuals by unprofitable invasions of privacy; Laurence may rail against warmongers, profiteers, and polluters, and sometimes against males in general, but without falsification or fudging she avoids belittling or discrediting individuals of either gender - except for her well-known problems with Grandfather Simpson and a hostile reference to Margaret Thatcher. For all his insensitive candour Bailey does not reveal or imply anything ofimportance that Laurence has not expressed honestly, but without harm to anyone. On the other hand, Laurence's tributes to the women she is explicitly honouring- her own mother, her stepmother, and her mother-in-law - and to a sampling of other named individuals who have meant much to her are generous, tactful, and convincing. ' Dance on the Earth frequently lacks the tautness and the precision ofthe works that Laurence had the opportunity to revise and rewrite many times, a treatment that was denied this volume...