SOURCE: Verduyn, Christl. “Personal Papers: Putting Lives on the Line—Working with the Marian Engel Archive.” In Working in Women's Archives: Researching Women's Private Literature and Archival Documents, edited by Helen M. Buss and Marlene Kadar, pp. 91-101. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2001.

[In the following essay, Verduyn discusses her experience studying Engel's personal archival papers and addresses questions of biographical and psychological issues related to such research.]

If this is my Golden Notebook I am getting into it a bit late. Better late than never.

—Marian Engel, 14/11/74¹

Artists and thinkers, innovators of any kind, put their inner lives on the line.

—Marian Engel, 17/11/84²

Lives. I'm putting lives on paper. It's modern, and very moral.

—Marian Engel³

In an article published in November 1984—only weeks before her untimely death on 16 February 1985—Marian Engel made a “plea” to readers and critics.⁴ This plea was “to stop turning the knobs on writers' closets.” What did Engel mean by this?

The author's entreaty arose out of her reflections on psychological, literary and artistic criticism.⁵ Her thoughts extended to the widespread interest in biography, which she herself shared. They were related to the fact that she had recently sold her own papers to McMaster University Archives. “As a writer who has sold her papers,” Engel remarked, “I hope to be found uninteresting until I've been dead as long as Boswell. I'd rather people read my fiction.”

My reading of Engel's writing began with her fiction: seven novels, two collections of short stories and two books for children. It continued with her non-fiction, which includes numerous essays, articles and columns in reviews, magazines and newspapers, as well as a book on islands in Canada. Then, in carrying out research for a comprehensive literary study of Engel's writing,⁶ I also read her papers, and found them interesting. This brought me headlong into the conundrum Engel addressed in her plea. What to do when the interest of a person's private papers collides with her express wish that any attention directed toward her be placed on her published, public work?

The following represents a brief consideration of this question, and some of the matters and issues that arise in relation to archival research involving personal papers (diaries, letters, recorded thoughts, etc.). In searching for possible approaches to this area of inquiry I am not alone. Beyond the undertakings represented in this collection of working papers, I will mention just one recent example within the Canadian literary framework of my own research. This is Joan Coldwell's work on the autobiographical writings of English-Canadian poet Anne Wilkinson—The Tightrope Walker⁷—about which more later. And then there is Marian Engel herself, who took up the question in the above-mentioned article. I will begin my considerations with this piece, for Engel's comments have remained foremost in my mind as I have contemplated the issue.

Marian Engel made a serious investment reading “what psychologists say about fiction and fiction-writers,” as she phrased it. “Part of it appals me,” the writer reported, “and part of it is very good.” Engel did not advocate sealing off the path that branches into psychological criticism, biography and archival research, but she did urge readers and critics to proceed with caution. “Psychological criticism, badly done, is the fundamental argumentum ad hominem,” she asserted. “Psychiatric criticism can explain a good deal about why a work was created and what its themes and forms mean in terms of its maker's life and attitudes, why it appeals, where material about the author is available. … It does not, however, make artistic judgements of a useful kind and it fails on several important scores.”

Writers and artists, Engel suggested, try to transcend the limits of time, place and personal circumstances to outlast their personal reputations and be rarefied to the pure proposition: “by their works ye shall know them.” “Think what it must mean,” she invited persuasively, “to be pulled by the kite-string back to earth and told that one is pathological, sexist, neurotic, decadent, bad, sad or mad. Such telling, operating only from anecdote and written document, cannot hope to be accurate.”

Hence, Engel's plea that it is simply not possible to know everything about everyone. “You, too,” the author reminded us, “have silly secrets, cravings you have fortunately left unexpressed, obsessions, letters you ought not to have written. You, too, have gone through a batty period after a death or a divorce, made erratic judgements, changed your mind, been unkind. Only fictional characters can satisfy our desire for perfect consistency.”

Engel made the case for fiction, even as she admitted the appeal of psychological and biographical approaches to literature. “Psychoanalytical criticism and psychobiography in good hands are fascinating,” she acknowledged. Moreover, “as biography becomes ever more intimate, it becomes more enjoyable.”

But how intimate is intimate? Or, to paraphrase Nancy K. Miller,⁸ how personal is personal?

Who decides? … Is it personal only if it's embarrassing? If not, is it just a rhetorical ploy? Do I wind up saying that “bad” politics aren't personal? Or am I saying, if I like it, it's personal, it caresses me; otherwise, it's just positional, it aggresses me. Am I being politically correct again? Maybe personal criticism is for women only. Or do women seem better at it because they've been awash in the personal for so long? Is it political? Is it theoretical?

(19)

Miller's musings help to bring out the complex theoretical and political and, yes, ethical and moral nature of the matter before us. Miller is one of several feminist scholars whose (re)considerations of private, personal or life writings,⁹ autobiography and biography may be of use in the inquiry here. A few examples may serve to illustrate.

In her introduction to the autobiographical writings of English Canadian poet Anne Wilkinson, Joan Coldwell puts the question bluntly: “How can one justify the intrusion?” Coldwell finds a first justification in “the service of literature”: “The journals illuminate Anne Wilkinson's poetry, sometimes by showing the specific thought processes or incident that led to particular poems … and more generally by creating an understanding of her mind and its workings” (xv).

A similar claim can be made of Marian Engel's personal papers, particularly her notebooks or cahiers, which have been the focus of much of my attention. As I have noted elsewhere,¹⁰ Engel had “a Gallic passion for the cahier, and early on in her career acquired the habit of recording ideas, notes on books read, drafts of letters never sent, plot outlines and many other things in her notebooks.” Engel's cahiers present a fascinating blend of personal introspection and fiction fragments. Shopping lists and recipes sit alongside elegant prose passages and character sketches in a convincing illustration of what scholars have recently described as life writing.¹¹ In this sense, the notebooks are a precious resource for the literary researcher. In conducting my study of Engel's novels and short stories, I found the notebooks often helped elucidate the fiction. Thus, for example, a notebook embargoed until 1988¹² contains passages related to Engel's novel Bear, which won the Governor General's Award in 1976; valuable notes on the character Marshallene, a feisty woman writer who appears in Lunatic Villas and several short stories; entries pertaining to the novel Monodromos (1973); and an early draft of the intriguing “Bicycle Story.” At the same time, the cahier contains “other things.” Among these are the author's thoughts and comments about her marriage and the elements that ultimately led to its breakdown; notes taken before and after sessions with psychotherapist John Rich; remarks about individuals in Engel's life, including her husband, mother, twin son and daughter and friends. This notebook material renewed my queries about research on private writings and how, in practical terms, to deal with some of the “other things” found therein. It revived that “troublesome sense” Jane Marcus reports in The Private Self,¹³ as we retell women's tales so that they are the told and not the tellers. It posed the possibility of the “curious form of voyeurism” Nancy Walker identifies.¹⁴ As these and other feminist scholars show, it is helpful to turn to the growing body of theoretical work in this area.

In recent years, an increasing number of studies have been devoted to women's autobiographical writing. These studies suggest important differences exist between autobiography and journal or notebook writing. In House by the Sea,¹⁵ May Sarton describes autobiography as the story of experience summoned from the past: “what I remember.” The journal, diary or notebook has to do with “what I am now, at this instance.” The immediacy of the entry contrasts with the reflective gaze on the past, but if there are differences between autobiographical and journal or notebook writing, there are important similarities as well. A major commonality has to do with changing notions of the self in response to increased awareness of the importance of factors of gender, class, race, age, sexual preference and so on. Engel's notebooks demonstrate what Domna Stanton in The Female Autograph¹⁶ identifies as the fundamental deviance of “autogynographies,” which produces conflict in the divided self. This is the act of writing itself. “For a symbolic order that equates the idea(l) of the author with a phallic pen transmitted from father to son places the female writer in contradiction to the dominant definition of woman and casts her as the usurper of male prerogatives” (13). Stanton elaborates:

The graphing of the auto was the act of self-assertion that denied and reversed woman's status. It represented … the conquest of identity through writing. Creating the subject, an autograph gave the female “I” substance through the inscription of an interior and an anterior. And yet, the symbolic specificity of woman as the inessential other also helped explain why the female self was textually constructed through the relation to mother and father, mate and child.

(14)

This corresponds to Mason's “delineation of identity by way of alterity.”¹⁷

Theoretical perspectives such as these may help account for the incisive presence of “others” in Engel's notebooks—mother, children, husband, friends. They provide the possibility of understanding their presence in terms of the argument that women's sense of self exists within a context of deep awareness of others—the concept of women's self as relational. Engel's comments about her mother might be read with a view to Nancy Chodorow's psychoanalytical focus on relational gender identity: the importance of mother-child relationships as the factor that leads to the different sense of self in men and women. Such a framework would allow us to argue that Engel's notebooks, like Anaïs Nin's diaries, embody the “dangers of fluidity and relations for women in patriarchy—the destructiveness of autonomy denied.”¹⁸

It appears helpful to approach Engel's papers within the feminist framework of women's departure from a vision of self as separate, unitary and autonomous. Added to this is the concern for historical context raised by feminist critics and researchers from Sheila Rowbotham to Joan Coldwell.¹⁹ Thus, Coldwell argues that Anne Wilkinson's journals provide a valuable record of social history. “Women's private narratives have not until recently played a prominent part in accounts of social history. Anne Wilkinson's journals add another piece to the steadily growing patchwork which allows us to see what the realities of life have been for all sorts and conditions of women. Through an intimate awareness of one individual in a particular, never-to-be-repeated time and place, we are able to understand more about ourselves and our own world” (xv). As Nancy Walker argues in her essay on the private writings of Emily Dickinson, Alice James and Virginia Woolf, “the diaries, letters, journals, and memoirs of women are properly of increasing interest to scholars” (emphasis added).²⁰ These often are the only kinds of writing women have produced. This is not the case with Marian Engel, who published several novels, but her notebooks, like other women's private writings, “illuminate the lives and concerns of women generally in their recording of small as well as large—‘public’—moments.”²¹ Thus, as Walker argues, “it is less important to know with whom, if anyone, Emily Dickinson [substitute Marian Engel] was [or was not] in love than to know what relationships with men and women meant to women of her time and place, and how these meanings became transformed into art” (300; emphasis added).

Research into private papers may allow us to better understand art and its creation, or a particular individual's art and life and the sociohistoric context in which they unfolded. Marian Engel's private writings may be seen as an illustration of artistic (re)creation and transformation. In their significance to her struggles as a woman writer, these writings acquire significance within the wider picture of women's writing. It is within this frame that one might approach her reflections on her husband's perceived attempt to break into her “treasure box” of writing, her criticism of her mother's attitude in life, her alcohol abuse and so on.

It is, thus, both useful and productive to bring feminist literary theory to bear on archival research. This does not answer all the questions that may arise in exploring writers' personal papers. These questions are many, vary enormously from archive to archive and often cannot be anticipated. Nor does it supersede the material's ability to “stand on its own,” as fruitful and rewarding reading in itself. This point deserves to be stressed, as I bring these brief considerations to an end. For personal writings, such as those in question here, continue to hold their interest and value while new literary, theoretical and moral perspectives are developed. Thus, Marian Engel's personal writings, in particular her notebooks, present a fascinating account of being a woman and a writer, which speaks volumes.

Notes

1. Marian Engel Archive, Box 6, File 28, McMaster University Archives. Box 6 contains the majority of the author's notebooks from the first installment of papers, catalogued and available in the McMaster University Archives. A second installment of papers was made in July 1992 and notebooks contained therein are catalogued in Box 34.

2. “In order to prove their own existence,” Engel added (“A Plea to Stop Turning the Knobs on Writers' Closets,” Globe and Mail [Toronto] 17 Nov. 1984: Literary Supplement—Books).

3. Marian Engel, “Why and How and Why Not and What Is This, about Starting Another Novel …,” Canadian Literature, 25th anniversary issue: Canadian Writers in 1984, ed. W. H. New (Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 1984) 101-102.

4. Engel, “A Plea to Stop Turning the Knobs on Writers' Closets.”

5. Engel's terminology, in the article mentioned.

6. Christl Verduyn, Lifelines: Marian Engel's Writings (Montreal: McGill-Queen's UP, 1995).

7. Joan Coldwell, The Tightrope Walker (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1992).

8. Nancy K. Miller, Getting Personal: Feminist Occasions and Other Autobiographical Acts (New York: Routledge, 1991).

9. See Marlene Kadar, ed., Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1992).

10. Christl Verduyn, “Between the Lines: Marian Engel's Cahiers or Notebooks,” Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice, ed. Marlene Kadar (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1992). In it, here and in Christl Verduyn, ed., Marian Engel's Notebooks: “Ah, mon cahier, écoute” (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 1999), I cite archivist Dr. K. E. Garay, who catalogued Engel's papers.

11. For more on this fascinating genre, see Kadar, ed., Essays on Life Writing.

12. This was the only embargoed notebook. As Mary Rubio, editor of L. M. Montgomery's journals, pointed out during our workshop discussion, this and the fact that the embargo was for only five years would suggest Engel anticipated, possibly even expected, public perusal of her personal writings.

13. Jane Marcus, “Invincible Mediocrity, The Private Selves of Public Women,” The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women's Autobiographical Writings, ed. Shari Benstock (Chapel Hill and London: U of North Carolina P, 1988) 114-46.

14. Nancy Walker, “‘Wider than the Sky’: Public Presence and Private Self in Dickinson, James, and Woolf,” The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women's Autobiographical Writings, ed. Shari Benstock (Chapel Hill and London: U of North Carolina P, 1988) 272-304.

15. May Sarton, House by the Sea (New York: Norton, 1977), quoted by Walker, “‘Wider than the Sky.’”

16. Domna Stanton, “Autogynography: Is the Subject Different?” The Female Autograph: Theory and Practice of Autobiography from the Tenth to the Twentieth Century (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987).

17. Cited by Stanton 14.

18. Susan Stanford Friedman, “Women's Autobiographical Selves: Theory and Practice,” The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women's Autobiographical Writings, ed. Shari Benstock (Chapel Hill and London: U of North Carolina P, 1988) 34-62.

19. See Stanford Friedman 34-62.

20. Walker 300.

21. Walker 300.