March 31, 2025
A Bird in the House, by Margaret Laurence
My Manawaka journey continues! Except that I picked up A Bird in the House thinking it was the book Laurence published after A Jest of God, but it was not! Not that it matters entirely, because the books themselves aren’t published in chronological order—The Fire Dwellers takes place before A Jest of God, but was published after it. (I would be curious to know what order these books were written in, and one way to get to the bottom of that would be to reread Laurence’s wonderful collection of letters to publisher Jack McClelland.) A Bird in the House is also a story collection and so it was likely written across a wide span of time (with stories first published in magazines like Ladies Home Journal, Chatelaine, Atlantic Monthly, and by the CBC, which makes me nostalgic for such a literary landscape). Anyway, I’d already started reading when I figured out my mistake, and because I’m cool and laidback, I just kept on going, and am not bothered by the mix-up at all. (Note: This is a lie. I am! Alas.)
Okay, so A Bird in the House might be the Manawaka book with which I’ve had the longest and least complicated history. The copy I have, I think, might have been swiped from my mom’s bookshelf, a Seal paperback, which had become entirely unglued and fell apart when I opened it after all these years. So I went to BMV and found a newer secondhand copy, a New Canadian Library edition with a foreword by Isabel Huggan, who I was friends with before the pandemic but we’ve fallen out of touch. And just like a story from Huggan’s collection The Elizabeth Stories, I believe I first encountered one of the stories from this book (either “The Sound of the Singing” or the title story “A Bird in the House”) in The New Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in my Grade 12 English class (which I wrote about here). I must have read the entire collection (which also constitutes a novel, a bildungsroman) at least once, but I don’t think I read it more than once, and the aspects of the story I remember are those I encountered in the short fiction anthology—young Vanessa, and the brick house where her grandfather lived, and the harbinger of death that was the sparrow, and then her father died not long after.
Unlike, say, The Stone Angel, stories from A Bird in the House are well suited for young readers, and Laurence’s narration is more traditional in these stories than her other books are, which are very much interior-focused. Vanessa MacLeod, on the other hand, is looking outward, telling the stories of her parents and grandparents, of the world around her, albeit not connecting any of the dots to understand or explain what those stories mean, and this means that my impression of these stories was that they were simple and straightforward, but it turns out that was just by perspective that was simple and straightforward, and I’m now wise enough to understand what was going on between the lines in these stories, the pains and struggles of these characters’ lives. I really read it and thought was about a house, a girl, and a bird, but there is so much more than that. My own dawning awareness is analogous to that of Vanessa herself:
“For me, the Depression and drought were external and abstract, malevolent gods whose names I secretly learned although they were concealed from me, and whose evil I sensed only superstitiously, knowing they threatened us but not how or why. What I really saw only was what went on in our family.”
And when she gets a little older and writes about the music of her youth: “The music seemed the only music that ever was or ever would be. I had no means of knowing that it was being set into the mosaic of myself and that it would pass away quickly and yet remain always mine.”
About war: “It was then that war took on its meaning for me, a meaning that would never change. It meant only that people without choice in the matter were broken and spilled, and nothing could ever take the place of them.”
