Heart of a Stranger by Margaret Laurence (review)

HUMANITIES 477 author's skill as a story-teUer. We do get little tidbits about Costain and de la Roche and other fellow professionals, but essentially the second half concerns a man spending most of his working days immersed in his own lonely imagination. Raddall's subtitle,'A Memoir' (rather than'An Autobiography '), suggests one central concern which unifies the book - the author's interest in the phenomenon and process of memory. Sometimes this concern leads to over-use of quotations from diaries - always a dangerous indulgence for a memoirist. Mostly, however, the memories offer a successful excursion into an immediate past, from which the author in turn takes flight into history. He speaks of the mystery of historical re-creation: 'I could plunge myself into the eighteenth century and swim freely under its surface.' He prides himself on achieving 'the Parkman approach,' and on having mastered the ability to 'dream deliberately .' As the memoir ends we recognize the slow shift from courageous, rather solemn young man, through the middle years of tremendous literary output, into the present point of perspective. Raddall is retired now, rather irascible, and somewhat resentful still of publishers and publicists. He is also rightly proud of his own achievement. The tag 'free lance' applied to writers has a romantic ring. Raddall speaks of himself without any romance'and yet with a chivalric pride in his own independent achievement. One might quote E.M. Forster on Gibbon as autobiographer: 'Don't look for gaiety here orfor spontaneity, but you will find wit, shrewdness and the pardonable weightiness of a man who knows that he has genius and has used it properly.' Thomas Raddall would be modest enough to substitute 'talent' for 'genius.' The rest fits. (ELIZABETH WATERSTON) Margaret Laurence. Heart of a Stranger. McClelland and Stewart. 221. $8.95 'Home,' as a locus of individual, social, and mythic identity, is both the defining vision at the heart of Laurence's 'stranger' and the unifying focus at the core of this diverse collection of personal anecdotes, travel reports, and reflective essays. It is also central to her fiction, and readers familiar with the Laurentian canon will recognize the 'stranger' in protagonists from Kofi to Hagar, Rachel to Morag, who, despite crucial differences in psychology and culture, share a search for meaning in the timeless human questions: 'Who am I?' 'Where am 17' 'Why am I?' To divine answers is to come home. Laurence becomes herself a kind of protagonist in these occasional pieces, a guiding consciousness exploring the concept of home and the strategies whereby estrangement is overcome. In the first essay, 'A Place To Stand On,' Laurence observes with 478 LETTERS IN CANADA 1976 typical acuity: 'I don't say there is anything wrong in autobiographical novels, but it would not have been the right thing for me.' She needed distance, the perspective of time and travel, to perceive the elements in her hometown of Neepawa that could be selected and ordered into the fictional Manawaka, 'a town of the mind: an amalgam of setting, atmosphere , and characters that transcends the personal and specific to distil reality from actuality. Many of the pieces in this collection demonstrate the validity of her observation: she is least 'at home' when writing directly of herself. The personal anecdotes on her life at Elm Cottage in Buckinghamshire and her 'shack' in Ontario are stylistically indistinguishable from those recounting experiences with taxis, television, and airplanes: all dance cheerfully along the mere surface of events as if written by a partiCularly channing and articulate correspondent to an acquaintance more casual than intimate. Laurence admits that the 'frivolous' surface of the article on Elm Cottage conceals 'deeper feelings' which 'seemed and still seem to be a private matter.' Those 'feelings: products of distance and reflection, not the unmediated events from which they derive, contain the essential meaning of Elm Cottage. Her accounts of travel in Greece, Egypt, and Scotland remedy these deficiencies of anecdote and go well beyond catalogues of accidental experience. In Greece, Laurence captures a moment of unity beyond national differences as a polyglot group of tourists experiences common awe in the felt presence of living myth at Mycenae; in Egypt...