To All Appearances A Lady - University of British Columbia

Margaret and Al of being self-conscious in
their letters, of writing for an invisible future
audience. The same accusation was levelled
against the Purdy-Woodcock Letters. And in
a totally creditable sense it is true. A professional
writer does not become unprofessional
toward words just because he or she
has an audience of one, with a mass audience
a remote possibility and no more. A
novelist like Laurence, a largely narrative
poet like Purdy, are inventing characters as
they go along and it would be inconsistent
if they did not to an extent shape their own
images in correspondence. There is always
an eye toward the possible unauthorised
reader. One does not write, even in a letter,
what one would shrink from seeing in print.
Margaret Laurence was, and Al Purdy is,
a self-created professional of high quality,
with little academic stiffening but a natural
kind of erudition, and a remarkable sense
of the colloquial in language: much of their
correspondence is about professional problems,
and especially about Laurence's hesitations
and delays in her work. Especially in
England, she felt that loneliness of writing,
and she needed reassurance from one of
her tribe, yet she was also remarkably secret
about what went on in her imagination or
even her books until the day of publication.
Once she said to me, like a Dutch auntie
(though she was 14 years younger) "George,
always play your cards close to your chest.
Don't let anybody see it until you're ready."
I have played my cards that way ever since.
The opposite is true of Purdy—that he is
not so much concerned with the difficulties
of creation, which are quite different in the
short form of the poem from those in the
long form of the novel. He is more concerned
with achievement, and he is always sending
to Laurence, as he has sent to me, copies of
recent poems which he likes to try out on
his friends first. It is on the whole the annoyances
of life rather than the agonies of creation
that concern him, but he is immensely
supportive of Laurence in fier agonies.
They joke and jostle with each other, like
unruly mental siblings, they admit—as
friends should—the deeper hurts life
imposes on them, and they together defy
the puritan world from which both of
them, in their various ways, came and
which still inflicts its hurts on them, as in
the attempted banning of Laurence's books.
There is no doubt that Purdy's friendship
was of great importance to Laurence during
the unhappy period when she was writing
her last—and perhaps Canada's greatest—
novel, The Diviners.
As for Purdy, there is something Protean
about him. His poems contain passages of
great vulnerability, and he grouses like the
rest of us in his letters, and yet there is also
that easy self-containedness that helped him
remake himself from a conventional and
traditional poet in his early years into a fine,
free-flowing, colloquial writer, deeply conscious
of time and place, in his maturity.
Certainly his mutability comes up in his
friendships, which are not like each other,
so that the Purdy-Woodcock Letters are
quite different from those with Laurence.
Purdy and I seem superficially dissimilar—
far more so than Purdy and Laurence—and
many people have wondered how we can be
such firm friends. This rowdy poet, this
withdrawn critic—what can they have in
common? Yet the sparks of friendship
strike strangely, and in fact Purdy and I
have a great deal in common. If he and
Laurence were like siblings, he and I have
been in our formative experiences, like the
boys next door. He in Canada, I in
England, went through childhood poverty,
never went to a university and taught ourselves
almost all we know (and Al is a far
more erudite man than he lays claim to),
endured and denounced the puritanism of
our backgrounds, which still haunts us, and
once we shook off circumstances became
great and committed travellers.
The relationship is different from that
between Purdy and Laurence and the corre-
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