Alien Heart: The Life and Work of Margaret Laurence (review)

Lyall Powers first met Margaret Laurence at United College in Winnipeg in the autumn of 1945, both of them part of a small student group with shared interests in English literature and socialist politics. Two years her senior, he went off to pursue graduate studies in the United States, where he became professor of English at the University of Michigan. Through more than forty years, their friendship continued until Laurence's death in 1987.

'The justification of a biography must be that it illuminates the achievements of its subject,' Powers states at the beginning of his biography, Alien Heart: The Life and Work of Margaret Laurence. And then he sets out to illuminate all aspects of her rich life and her fictional and non-fictional writings.

Distinctly a loner, though a student leader respected and popular in her high school and university years, Laurence was an 'alien heart,' the champion of the underdog, the downtrodden, victims of correctible social and economic problems. In his detailed treatment of her early life - she lost both her parents by the age of nine - Powers uncovers important material that offers new insights into her formative years. He is especially resourceful in the Neepawa and Winnipeg years, where he found many friends and teachers of Laurence to help him draw a full portrait of the novelist-to-be.

Her marriage and her subsequent time in Africa receive a complete presentation, as do her constant battles with self-doubt. Throughout this period as well as in her later years, her many honest letters to Adele Wiseman, her best friend, offer solid support to the biography, supplemented later by her extensive correspondence with Al Purdy. And Powers himself makes a few unobtrusive appearances as a presence in the story he narrates. The result is a multidimensional portrait of a generous and deeply serious chronicler of Manawaka.

Complementing this biography and fulfilling the subtitle of the book are extended discussions of Laurence's writings. They vary in quality, some of them extended synopses of the books, others offering new and significant insights into her fictional universe. Powers is a distinguished literary critic who offers, as in the case of The Diviners for example, important new readings that repay further examination. Home, he concludes, is 'where the distant past and the personal visitable past join with the present to achieve a kind of simultaneity, and where ancestors and progenitors - wherever they are - cohabit in the present with one's parents and friends.' And his long discussion of Pique and her crucial role in the novel brings his chapters to a fitting conclusion.

Although Alien Heart would have profited from a more diligent editor who could have reduced some of the repetitions and extended lapses in the biography, the book does merit a wide audience who will appreciate this major study of Laurence and return again to her fiction.

Alien Heart is now the best book on Laurence and her achievements.