A Jest of God - Margaret Laurence [88]
I will be different. I will remain the same. I will still go parchment-faced with embarrassment, and clench my pencil between fingers like pencils. I will quite frequently push the doors marked Pull and pull the ones marked Push. I will be lonely, almost certainly. I will get annoyed at my sister. Her children will call me Aunt Rachel, and I will resent it and find then that I’ve grown attached to them after all. I will walk by myself on the shore of the sea and look at the freegulls flying. I will grow too orderly, plumping up the chesterfield cushions just-so before I go to bed. I will rage in my insomnia like a prophetess. I will take care to remember a vitamin pill each morning with my breakfast. I will be afraid. Sometimes I will feel light-hearted, sometimes light-headed. I may sing aloud, even in the dark. I will ask myself if I am going mad, but if I do, I won’t know it.
God’s mercy on reluctant jesters. God’s grace on fools. God’s pity on God.
AFTERWORD
BY MARGARET ATWOOD
I still have my first copy of A Jest of God. It is, in fact, the first edition, with a medium-sized format, not very good quality paper, an unprepossessing jacket, maroon background, formal green border, no illustration. I got it for Christmas in 1966, from my parents, who had learned with some apprehension that I wanted to be a writer, and had done their best by giving me a book by one of the few Canadian writers they (or anyone else) knew about at the time. I was a graduate student in English Literature at Harvard University. I read it in one sitting.
I had already read one other novel by Margaret Laurence, The Stone Angel, dropped into my hands by Jane Rule when I was living in Vancouver. It knocked me out, to put it mildly. So when I seized with eagerness on A Jest of God, it was in part to see if a hard act could be followed.
It could. But more of that shortly.
Four months later, I was notified by phone that I had won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry for my first book, The Circle Game, which had been published in the fall. At first I thought this announcement was an error, or a joke. When it turned out to be true, delight set in – I was very broke, and the money would go a long way – and then panic. My wardrobe at the time consisted of tweed skirts, dark-hued cardigans with woolly balls on them, and grey Hush Puppies, all appropriate for female graduate students but hardly suitable for the proposed formal dinner. What would I wear?
Worse, what would I say to Margaret Laurence, who had won the Governor General’s Award for Fiction that year for A Jest of God? I had studied the handsome, austere photograph of her on the inside jacket flap, and had decided that nobody except Simone de Beauvoir would have such power to reduce me to a quaking jelly. I was in awe of her talent, but also I was afraid of her hairdo. This was a serious person, who would make judgments: unfavourable ones, about me. One zap from that intellect and I would be squashed like a bug.
My two Harvard roommates took me in hand. They did not know what the Governor General’s Award was, but they did not want me to disgrace them. They went at me with big rollers and some hair-set and leant me a dress. I’d been adjusting to new contact lenses, and they were adamant about these: into my eyes they must go on the gala evening, no tortoise-shell hornrims allowed.
The ceremony and then the dinner went on longer than I had expected, and at the end of the first course I began to weep. It was the lenses: I had not yet developed the knack of removing them without a mirror. The two gentlemen from Quebec who flanked me thought I was overcome with emotion, and were solicitous. I sat there in a frenzy of embarrassment, with the tears trickling from my eyes, wondering how soon I could decently make my escape. As soon as the presentation was concluded, I rushed to the washroom like Cinderella fleeing the ball.
Who should be in there but Margaret Laurence? She was in black and gold, but otherwise not at all as anticipated. Instead she was warm, friendly,