In a letter* to her friend, Al Purdy, Margaret Laurence wrote:
"I don't think you should worry unduly (maybe you aren't ~ hope not) re: the poems ... which you aren't crazy about. There are some good poems in the collection, and others which don't have as much reach as you would like them to have. So what?
"It seems to me we ought not to worry that all our work is not of the same (high) standard. . . for God's sake, whose is? Not even Shakespeare's."
Referring to her own work, Laurence writes, "...there are some okay things in them, but they're not true enough, not penetrating enough, or at least they don't speak as much of my own truth as I have sometimes been able to speak in novels. But I think this is a fact of life, and damn well better than not writing at all if it makes you miserable at that particular time not to be writing. The Nigerian book was a life saver for me ~ saved me from despair and booze, probably. So it's got a few decent parts, and that's all, but that's okay, I think. This doesn't mean a drop in standards ~ it only means that you don't operate at the same pitch or tempo or whatever it is, all the time."
~ MARGARET LAURENCE (1926 - Jan. 5, 1987) Margaret Laurence - Al Purdy: A Friendship in Letters, McClelland & Stewart Inc., 1993.
* September, 1969
No comments:
Post a Comment