Review of \u3ci\u3eDivining Margaret Laurence: A Study of Her Complete Writings\u3c/i\u3e By Nora Foster Stovel

Neil Besner is right to judge Nora Foster Stovel\u27s Divining highly: it ranges across all of Laurence\u27s work ... intelligently and accessibly, as he says on the jacket. Before I augment his praise I must note a couple of blemishes, if Stovel will accept the soft impeachment of an admirer. Malcolm Ross did not teach the future Margaret Laurence or anyone else at United College (now the University of Winnipeg): I was a student with Peggy Wemyss in Ross\u27s stunning Seventeenth-Century Thought on the Fort Garry campus of the University of Manitoba (and in spite of the uncorrected typo of photo #18, following p. 124, of my Alien Heart: The Life and Work of Margaret Laurence [2003]). More serious, Stovel repeats Donez Xiques\u27s misreading (in Margaret Laurence: The Making of a Writer [2005]) of Laurence\u27s early and impressive poem Pagan Point, where one notes the evident opposition of the unearthly paganism of Old Neptune ... and the ancient battle-voice of Thor to what replaced them. Peggy\u27s pagan gods are associated with the cry, / raucous and heathen, of a far-off loon, anticipating the loons heard by Piquette in A Bird in the House. Piquette belongs to the family Tonnerre (some Canadiens recognize that as the family of Thor) and might have been the only one, after all, who had heard the crying of the loons, also heard by Allie Chorniuk in Dance on the Earth who thinks but tonight their voices are silent -Homo sapiens is driving them away from the lakes, or killing them off . .. The thought ... hurts unbearably (quoted in Alien Heart, 449). The opposition here (which Stovel discerns) is also that of Pagan Point : the raucous and heathen loon versus the dim cathedral-full of rest, .... where Man may [sic] find his God. This is like the opposition to Tennyson\u27s meek and mild Lotos Eaters posed by Ulysses, whose aim was echoed in the motto of Peggy Wemyss\u27s high school: To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. The attitude of Blake ( Was Jesus gentle ... ? ), was familiar as well to Hagar\u27s creator. This misreading is almost as regrettable as identifying Henry James\u27s definition of the novel as a loose, baggy monster (Divining, 247), a phrase James used in his preface to The Tragic Muse as a critique of certain novels, not as a definition of the genre