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134 W. L. Morton: a personal tribute As the new chancellor of Trent University and also as a friend, I would like to pay tribute to my predecessor, Dr. W. L. Morton, whose recent death has saddened so many of us. It was through the Mortons that my association with Trent began, eleven years ago. Bill was then master of Champlain College. That fine and strong lady, Peg Morton, whom I later grew to value so much as a friend, invited me to address the University Women's Club in Peterborough. I stayed with the Mortons and discovered that Trent was a small and excellent liberal arts university of the type I most admired. This was indeed a factor in my ultimately settling in this area. I will always remember the warm welcome that Bill and Peg Morton gave me on that first visit. I was naturally somewhat in awe of Dr. Morton, one of our most distinguished historians. I soon discovered, however , that he was a true gentleman, a gentle man, proud in the best possible way and yet possessing a quality of humility that is the mark of the genuinely great. · As fellow Manitobans, we had grown up in towns only a few miles apart. This prairie background gave us much in common, but there was something else as well. Throughout the years, I was privileged to discuss with Bill Morton the relationship between history and fiction. We agreed that the two disciplines were closely related. The fiction writer seeks to create a world that has been experienced both as an external 'real' world and as an internal one. The historian selects the facts and interpretations. Both try to arrive at some kind of truth which can never be complete but which will possess its own integrity. For the autumn 1978 issue of the Journal of Canadian Studies, Clara Thomas wrote an article dealing with myth and Manitoba in my novel, The Diviners. In it she discusses my considerable debt to W. L. Morton. She quotes Morton writing about the writing of history: The difficulty was to reconcile a landscape actually seen and realistically experienced with an internal landscape formed by reading. How could these be brought into a single authentic vision in which neither would deny, but rather clarify the other? That statement could serve as my basic perception of my own work, too. The article goes on to quote my own feelings of a common aim: I did in fact read Manitoba: A History the summer that I began writing The Diviners. Morton's history gave me not only a great many facts that I needed...but also a sense of the sweep of history, the overview which I think I share. What I share, most of all, with Morton is the sense of my place, the prairies, and of my people (meaning all prairie peoples), within the context of their many and varied histories, and the desire to make all these things come alive in the reader's mind. I owe a deep debt of gratitude to W. L. Morton. I am honoured to follow him as chancellor of Trent University. He was a great human being, a great historian, a great and beloved Canadian. Margaret Laurence Revue d'etudes canadiennes ...

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