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"I was told that women don't go to university and women don't become writers. Only the rich could be writers." -- Betty Lambert
Betty Lambert was born in Calgary, Alberta on August 23, 1933. "My father died when I was twelve and I was no longer 'working class,' I was 'welfare class' and I was determined to get out of that class. Writing was a way out but soon it became more than that, it became a necessity."; Lambert became a socialist in her teens. She said she used her anger to fuel her art. She moved to Vancouver in 1951 to attend UBC, worked as a copywriter at a local radio station and graduated to writing radio plays for CBC. She published Three Radio Plays (Burnaby: West Coast Review Publishing Society, 1985) containing GRASSHOPPER HILL, FALCONER'S ISLAND, THE BEST ROOM IN THE HOUSE.
Among her plays for children The Riddle Machine (1966) was performed at Montreal's Expo in 1967. In her late 20s, Lambert became embroiled in feminist issues which permeated most of her best work for the stage. In 1965 she became a part-time lecturer of English at Simon Fraser University, where she was later made an Associate Professor (with only a BA in Philosophy and English) teaching modern and Greek drama, Shakespeare and linguistics.
Betty Lambert raised one daughter as a single parent and produced approximately 60 plays for radio, television and stage. Sqrieux-de-dieu (Talonbooks, 1975) gained renown as a witty and outlandish sex comedy about a ménage a trios. Jennie's Story (1983), her most powerful work, was based on a true story from southern Alberta in the 1930s, when a priest had his 15-year-old housekeeper, whom he seduced, taken to a mental institution and sterilized. She is told she has an appendectomy. Later, married and unable to conceive, Jennie learns the truth and commits suicide. Under the Skin (1985) is based upon a true Vancouver story of a man kidnapping and sexually abusing a twelve-year-old girl for six months. Lambert won ACTRA's Nellie award for best radio play in 1980 for Grasshopper Hill, a drama about a Canadian woman who has an affair with a Jewish survivor of Auschwitz.
Crossings, her only novel, is a penetrating study of female masochism. It's called Crossings because the man and the woman repeatedly "cross over" the Burrard Bridge from opposite worlds. Mik O'Brien, a violent and virile ex-con, crosses over to Vicky's rooming house at 2952 West 8th Avenue. Vicky Ferris, a CBC dramatist, crosses over to the coarse but truthful world of Mik and his cronies at the St. Helen's Hotel (later called Theo's) on Granville Street. It is a riveting account of female sufferings, mental and physical, with flashbacks to a failed marriage and an illegal abortion in East Vancouver. Unable to extricate herself from Mik O'Brien's influence, Vicky is raped, gets pregnant, demands marriage, discovers the pregnancy alarm was false, retreats to Berkeley, gets pregnant by a stranger and keeps the baby. The skilful clarity of the writing convincingly evokes the protagonist's passion and restlessness.
"Maybe it's one huge orgasm, this book. Maybe I just want to remember it once more before I go menopausal. Maybe I just want to feel young again and real and alive. The Victorian era. Repressed lust. But to the girdle do the gods inherit. Down from the waist they are centaurs... Perhaps I shall go mad and run naked down the street at night, waving my bum behind me like a flag. Perhaps I shall leap on beautiful young men, a moustache on my lip. Oh god, it's not fair to grow old. It's not fair. I hate it. I really do." The book gained the disapproval of one Vancouver feminist bookstore, but its boldness impressed most critics. It was published in the U.S., with limited success, under the title of Bring Down the Sun.
Betty Lambert fought a six-month battle with cancer in 1983. "In the manner of her death," recalls friend and actor Joy Coghill, "she was absolutely extraordinary. It was one of her greatest gifts to us." Cancer of the lung was spreading through her body. Lambert persevered against the disease and dismissed suicide on rational, philosophical and moral grounds. She continued to write, frustrated by lack of time but also impressed with the urgency that the immediate prospect of death brought to her work. "I have so much to do and no time to die," she wrote to Coghill. She composed her own memorial service, including her favourite Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem, "God's Grandeur," to celebrate life. On August 9th, she completed her final play, Under the Skin. Jenny's Story and Under the Skin were republished (Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 1990).
In her final days, blind and unable to speak, she enjoyed playing Trivial Pursuit with her sister, Dorothy Beavington. Beavington recalls, "On the night she died she indicated she wanted her yellow writing pad and her pen. She wrote, with much effort, 'Dot, one last trivia question.' I asked Betty if she wanted me to ask her a question and she vigorously pointed to her own chest to indicate she was definitely asking me. Then she wrote, 'What is the final demand in life?' I said I didn't know but I was sure that she did. She nodded. Then she slowly wrote her answer, which was, 'More and more and more nostalgia.'"
Lambert was remembered by her colleagues and friends at a Simon Fraser University memorial service on November 21st, 1983, following her death on Novenmber 4, 1983 in Burnaby. SFU subsequently established a playwriting award for SFU students in her honour. Lambert was the subject of an interview conducted by Bonnie Worthington fore a special issue of Room of One's Own devoted women and theatre, edited by Eleanor Wachtel.
[Alan Twigg / BCBW 2003] "Theatre" "Fiction"
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BETTY LAMBERT was a writer and academic until her untimely death at the age of fifty. An English professor at Simon Fraser University (1965-1983), she is the author of one published novel, numerous stories, radio dramas and stage plays. Many theatre practitioners and students of Canadian dramatic literature are familiar with her last plays, Jennie’s Story and Under the Skin. Fortunate to have had the opportunity to read more widely, I was quite taken aback by the sheer volume of her writings when I first visited the Betty Lambert Archives at Simon Fraser University. I was impressed by the quality of the work I discovered and saddened to realize how little is known of this immensely talented, perceptive and vigorous writer, and so I have undertaken the editing of this collection. Readers will find common threads of concern—moral, political, metaphysical, aesthetic—that link these disparate works of fiction, yet each is distinctive and each bespeaks an intense imagination, a philosophical bent, a sophisticated literary orientation, and a professional attention to craft. Her works deserve to be better known.
Betty Lambert’s family history began with a dramatic love story. Her great grandfather, Thomas Jefferson Craven, was a Roman Catholic priest and the wealthy owner of a large estate in Lancashire, England. Her grandfather, also named Thomas, was the eldest son and due to inherit the estate. While in training to become a priest (something he never wanted), he fell in love with a young serving-girl at the nunnery in Drogheda, Ireland. He married her and was swiftly disinherited by his angry parents and excommunicated by the Catholic Church. Although he was highly educated, with degrees from Oxford and Cambridge, Thomas was unable to find work. So, in 1910, the young couple decided to make a new start in Canada. To prevent his parents from interfering any further, Thomas changed his surname to Cooper. He began working on a newspaper in Montreal and then at the Frank mine in southern Alberta. At one point, Thomas bought some poor farmland near Crowley, Alberta having heard that a train line was to pass through the town. When the train plans changed, the land proved worthless. Thomas went to work as a cook at the mines. The Coopers had a hard life and five children. Thomas raised his children to have an intensely religious approach to life. Bessie, the youngest, was Betty’s mother.
After completing high school, Bessie Cooper married handsome, playful Christopher Lee who was a carpenter, like his father. They settled in Calgary. According to the family narrative,
Bessie and Kit…lived with his parents until Betty was six. Then Betty found a house and asked her parents to buy it and move in, which they did. When Betty was eleven, Thomas came and carried her out of her sick bed, claiming that the house was giving her asthma. When Kit died in September 1945, Betty walked [back] home and stayed.i
Kit died in a boating accident a month after the birth of his third daughter, Crissie. With his nephew, he had taken out the sailboat he had built. There was a sudden storm and both men drowned. Death by drowning of a virile young man was to feature in a number of his daughter’s creative fictions. As Betty wrote, “My father died when I was twelve and I was no longer `working class,’ I was `welfare class’ and I was determined to get out of that class. Writing was a way out but it soon became more than that, it became a necessity” (Beavington 1).
Actually, Elizabeth Minnie Lee (called Betty) was a bookish child and had started writing at a young age. During elementary school she was home a great deal, in bed with asthma. Mostly she wrote poetry and a few stories. At thirteen she was allowed to attend school sporadically. Her English teacher advised her to send one of her poems to a magazine. When it was accepted for publication accompanied by a $2 payment, Betty was much encouraged and started writing more and entering more contests. She decided that she would be a writer when she grew up:
Funny about writers…when I was very young…younger than now I mean…I felt that it was something very wonderful and exciting to be a writer…that everyone looked up to you and loved you…because what you wrote was good…and true…and somehow worthwhile. Not like being a store clerk…or washing floors like Mom did before and after she was married….But she couldn’t help it…it was the Depression…and Daddy was out of a job…(18:22, Memoir, 1)
At fifteen she was in the Red Cross Crippled Children’s Hospital with a serious case of polio. This proved to be another critical psychic event, for she was told that she would never walk again.ii While there she wrote quite a few pieces for a church paper called The Canadian Girl. From that time on, she was regularly writing short stories and regularly sending them off in the post: “all that was really important was writing…and saying what I felt like saying…not for Seventeen…or Mademoiselle…but for something here inside me…” (18:22, Memoir: writing). Betty was absolutely determined when it came to her writing, just as she was absolutely determined to get out of that hospital. Ill for much of her early life, her accomplishments are all the more remarkable.
One of the contests, a short story competition, won her six weeks at the Banff School of Fine Arts. She was seventeen. “For the first time in my life,” she wrote, “I had time enough, and health enough to write.” A story written while at Banff won the Alice Hutchison Memorial scholarship, which meant she returned to creative writing at Banff for another precious summer. It was at Banff that she met the graphic designer, Frank Lambert, who she married in 1952 (they would divorce ten years later). Also it was there that she learned, from The Writer’s Handbook, a most important lesson: “The criterion of the writer was not writing, it was selling. Of all the things that I remember about Banff, this hurt the most, and was the most valuable” (18:35, Auto-Biography, 5).
While continuing to finish high school by correspondence, making up for the time missed during her bout with polio, she began to write `for a living.’ She got a job writing commercials for a radio station,
I write commercials every day from nine to five…for $185 a month…and then I come home and write what I really want to write…which takes my hundred and thirty-five a month because stamps and envelopes and paper—that looks good so the editor won’t think I starving or something—costs money… (18:22, Memoir: writing).
By the time she was twenty Betty had saved enough money to go to university. She took an arts degree in English and Philosophy at the University of British Columbia, graduating in 1957. During her university years and immediately after, she had a series of part time jobs: managing a biochemistry lab at UBC; teaching calculus at B.C. Matric School; file clerk; sales clerk at Hudson Bay; teaching assistant for first year UBC English; marker-grader and free-lance writer. While writing commercials for Vancouver’s CFUN Radio, she entered a play contest. One of the judges was Gerald Newman. Although she did not win, Newman called her several years later. He had become a director at CBC Radio and invited her to submit something. That play which he directed, “The Lady Upstairs,” was her first of many for CBC Radio. She was twenty-two. Gerald Newman, who joined the English department at Simon Fraser University in the late sixties, would later produce many of Lambert’s radio scripts. In 1965, shortly after she had her daughter, Ruth Anne, Betty began teaching at Simon Fraser. A charter member of the new university, she would teach courses in Shakespeare, contemporary drama, and linguistics, among others.
By that time, Betty Lambert had established herself comfortably as an unconventional and determined woman. She had experienced what it was like to be a have-not. She was prepared to work and to work hard. Moreover, in 1965 being an unwed mother of a child of mixed blood was in itself, as her daughter says, an “eyebrow raiser.” Betty had wanted a child very much; this yearning for motherhood is a theme repeatedly present in her fiction. Ruth Anne’s father, a doctoral student met on a bus trip to San Francisco, would play no part in his daughter’s life.iii
Drawing attention to these events in Lambert’s life—the death by drowning of her father and the grim family circumstances; frequent childhood illness and polio as a teenager; choosing to be an unwed mother, a single parent and a free-lance writer—is to theoretically privilege the lens of psychology, it is to interpret these events as transformative experiences which shaped both her character and her creative work. In fact, a number of her works begin with an unexpected emergency which leads to transforming consequences for its principal characters, as it does in Once Burned, Twice Shy; The Summer People, Jennie’s Story and Under the Skin (to cite a few). Of course Lambert was also a product of her particular times and situation. The narrative of her life reveals this as well: growing up in a religious household, living through the depression on the prairies, struggling to write and to work at a time when sexist attitudes prevailed and her own feminist consciousness was nascent. Certainly her early writing and her scripts for CBC Radio conformed to mainstream expectations, eager as she was for publication and production (although I will argue below that even here she proved subversive). The many rejection slips she received and the constant revisions required of her supply ample testimony. It was not until the late seventies, especially with her stage writing, that Lambert felt free to write with the audacity and passion of her own voice.
Nonetheless, it seems to me that all of her works, early as well as late, mine aspects of personal experience although, of course, she alters and re-visions to suit her artistic purposes. Her semi-autobiographical novel, Crossings (1979), is an especially strong example. Originally titled Confessions, it is a fragmented narrative which tells the story of Vicky Ferris, a writer currently working on a CBC radio script, and her volatile relationship with Mik O’Brien, macho ex-con and logger.iv Not only are the British Columbia locations and settings ones Lambert knew well—the title Crossings referring to the walk over Burrard Bridge from one side of town to the other—but the explosive, and often violent, sexual relationship at its core is a fictionalized version of one she experienced. As Lambert said of her writing, “I start out from a problem that I’m having. Then I extrapolate this into characters” (Worthington 59). Of Crossings she said, it was “my painful analysis of my own sexual responses” (Letter to Gloria, unfiled document). Crossings concludes with the protagonist liberating herself from this sadomasochistic relationship, successfully reinventing herself. On the last page, years later, she shares a happy dancing moment with her daughter Anna, the child conceived during a casual affair with a black man in San Francisco (278). She has found her own resourcefulness:
For years I was guilty about Ben. About Paul. About my mother and my sisters. I shall probably come to feel guilty about Anna. But I never feel guilty about Mik. I think now, my god, they probably put him away for life. If there’s anyone you really did destroy, it was Mik.
But I know that’s not true….
And now Anna is dancing too. Unable to help herself. And we dance, mother and daughter, in the underwater light… (284).
Similarly, Clouds of Glory (1979) is a barely disguised take-off of Simon Fraser
academic wrangling, replete with all the passion that academics are capable of injecting into academic questions. It is set against the national FLQ crisis on the eve of Trudeau’s announcement of the War Measures Act. Sqrieux-de-Dieu (1975), an outrageous and enormously funny comedy of manners, exaggerates English department shenanigans and includes some withering satirical portraits.v Grasshopper Hill has as its source Lambert’s affair with a Holocaust survivor. Even Jennie’s Story is based on a real event, the story told to her by her mother about a young prairie girl impregnated by a priest who then had her sterilized. Under the Skin is based on an actual kidnapping that took place in 1976, near where Betty lived. Her own daughter was the same age as the victim. In Under the Skin, the desperate mother is an English professor at a nearby university and a single parent. The abductor, a domineering and powerful male presence, bears a striking resemblance to the character Mik O’Brien in Crossings.vi Lambert not only used her own life experiences for plot, setting, characters and central events—reconfiguring to suit her purposes, she also incorporates a myriad of smaller details like names, relationships, whole scenes and even eccentric items like playing aggressive games of chess (in “The Sea Wall,” Crossings and Grasshopper Hill). Frequently she cites books she has read or taught.vii Lambert’s reading was extensive and one would expect such crossovers—issues, ideas, references recycled from lectures or seminars to her writing, and vice versa. Such presences inevitably deepen the work’s significance and resonance, its reach and applicability, as they do with any important writer.
That her writing was intensely personal, that autobiographical material is constantly present, is an important aspect of her work but not the most important, nor a trait that some would consider significantly unique. She took what she needed from her own life, as all writers do. What better characterizes her writing as a whole, and her personality, is her fighting spirit, her radical way of seeing, her moral skepticism, and her audacious, inventive, tackling of unconventional subjects.
The Riddle Machine was Lambert’s first stage play. Written for young audiences, commissioned by Joy Coghill, the artistic director of Vancouver’s Holiday Theatre, it premiered in February 1966 “with a primarily unprofessional (and unpaid) cast of teenagers” (377). A year later, a professional cast toured the play for four months and performed it at the Centennial Celebrations in Montreal. It was a daring play in its time.
In The Riddle Machine a spaceship holds a group of young people sent out from a planet that is dying; it is a kind of twentieth-century Noah’s ark. The five children and a molting old bird, Dove, have been kept in a state of suspended animation for 500 years. It is now time for their awakening. On board the ship is an elaborate computer, a riddle machine which, like the sphinx of classical myth, posits a challenge to the intelligence of the voyageurs. The challenge is a question which must be answered correctly or the spaceship will never reach the new world, “an unknown planet far beyond the stars” (392):
When all of space has yielded to travel
And is as simple as A, B and C,
What will be still to unravel,
The puzzle, the mystery, the final key?
What is the greatest mystery of all? (435)
In command of the ship and the children, is Robot. Robot is “a mechanical human…a pretty highly developed human replica” (379) but, in her movements, as in her thoughts, she is rigid, inflexible.viii She can only respond as programmed. Robot sedates the children through the food she feeds them, which renders them dopey and obedient. Inadvertently, Hap awakens before feeding time and, coming to his senses, figures it out. He joins forces with Cara, who is considered a mistake because she was hatched too soon. They know that the riddle machine’s question can only be answered if the children unite to stop the robot’s spoon-feeding them and then, together, they think hard, creatively. They have to grow up, become independent-minded and free themselves of the robot’s control. Maturity means they must find the answer themselves and, as adult people, they must take control of the robot, the machine, and the ship. When they answer that the greatest riddle of all is “a human being,” the machine says “You-are-ready” (437).
Just prior to their faltering access to the solution, Dove, who had been ejected from the ship by Robot and who the children feared was dead, returns to the ship bearing fruit. The new fruit is more than just a sign of peace, hope and the enduring spirit. It is also sustenance. As the ship approaches land the children join hands. They include Robot, who promises to be useful and good. “Come,” says Hap, “just take one step at a time. (And they greet the children of the new world)” (438)
According to Lambert, “Critical reception was not unmixed. The play was attacked for being too serious…for being too existential…for not having the magic that children demand” (Lecture 11). She might have added that there also were adults who found the play subversive of parental authority. However, the show was exceedingly successful with the children. For Lambert, children are a serious audience:
I am so sick of this attitude, that a play for children is automatically “mild mannered.” Read gutless and boring. You write the best you can, and about the things that get to you, and maybe, when you want to express the problems of sycophancy, you don’t use the word “sycophant,” maybe you use a name like Knuckle-Under-Nogan, but the dilemma is the same, and when Knuckle-Under-Nogan dies from sycophancy, the child doesn’t have to understand the NAME to recognize the ignominy. (On Writing, 29)
And so, while generating the fear and excitement necessary to hold captive her young audience, in The Riddle Machine Lambert raises the spectre of unreflective authoritarianism, dope-taking dropouts and the existential reality of what it means to grow up and take responsibility. In this play, as in Song of the Serpent and Tumult with Indians (both first performed a year later), she raises the bar on suitable subjects for children, even daring to include the taboo topics of sex and death in the later plays. “When I write for children,” she said, “I write out of the same sort of emotional reality, the same sort of conflicts, the same sort of struggle…as I do when I write for adults” (Lecture 2).
Lambert’s willingness to challenge conventional expectations and rigid thinking is especially evident in her treatment of sex. Lambert was deeply interested in the subject of sex: sexual exploitation, brutality, arousal, and possession. Many of her works, as in the experiences registered in her journals, circle around a core problem. It is as if she finds something unsettling in the biological foundation of heterosexual connection. For women’s wish for intense sexual fulfillment requires a surrender of self, a merger with the other that, ultimately, robs them of autonomy. And that `exchange’ can be seen as particularly damaging by conscious feminists. What could be understood as feminist awareness of the `cost’ of fierce sexual energy, or simply as the age-old subjection of women, Lambert portrays as the abiding dark side of the erotic. Her thinking corresponds with that of Susan Sontag (a writer whose work she admired) who, when asked to comment on her essay, “The Pornographic Imagination,” said:
There seems to be something inherently defective or self-frustrating in the way the sexual impulse works in human beings—for instance, an essential (that is, normal), not accidental (that is, neurotic), link between sexual energy and obsession. It appears that the full development of our sexual being does clash with the full development of our consciousness. (Sontag 341)
Lambert’s female protagonists experience an extremely powerful sexual draw and, sometimes, a humiliating sense of sexual dependence. Over and over again she has wounded women make strange choices with calamitous consequences. That is exactly what some feminist critics have been unhappy with, as I will enlarge below. As Sontag puts it, “the humanist `revisionist’ Freudianism that most feminists feel comfortable with…minimizes the intractable powers of unconscious or irrational feeling” (Sontag 341).
As early as the first work in this collection, “The Pony” (1956), Lambert was incorporating this Lawrentian theme. In it the young protagonist, Cyn, comes to the sexual awakening of “her own wild heart” (42). She is both fascinated and repelled by the object of her desire, the swaggering, seductive Jimmy. When Jimmy wants to ride her new pony and reaches up to grab the reins, the horse shies away, afraid of him. He had been killing gophers and the pony, smelling blood on his hands, strains, sweats. Cyn suddenly sees “the whole thing stopped short” (41). Registering the pony’s instinctive response as a `knowing’ one, she kicks Jimmy’s hand away. Cyn rides down the road at full gallop: “Riding it all out, the fear, and the longing, and the loneliness, and the wild thudding of the heart” (42). The pony sensed danger before she did.
Dangerous attractions for naïve or easily victimized women up against manipulative, sexually aggressive men is at the core not only of early works like The Good of the Sun (1960), Falconer’s Island (1966), and Once Burnt, Twice Shy (1965), but of later works as well. Issues around women in relationship, gender power dynamics, women and sex, are always present and present in a manner that provokes, challenges the status quo. I am reminded of an early exchange between Betty Lambert and a CBC television producer regarding the submission of her script, eventually produced as When the Bough Breaks (1971). It was about the birth control pill and the power it gave to women. In the play the protagonist, Victoria, is enraged to discover that her sometime boyfriend, who wants to get her pregnant so she will marry him, had hidden her pills. Apparently the producer called Lambert, as she says in interview, asking if the central character was lesbian because she didn’t want to get pregnant:
I said, “…she doesn’t want to have a baby that way, where’s she’s trapped into pregnancy. See, that’s a different thing. She has a right to decide whether or not she wants to get pregnant.” And [he] said, “Well, they say any woman like that isn’t a real woman.” So we were into it, right? We were into it. (Worthington 59)
The pill gave women sexual freedom, but also took away male prerogative. That was what was upsetting the male crew and the director much more than the unusually frank (for television at that time) depiction of sexual content.
With Crossings the sexual material got Lambert into trouble with some feminists. One local Vancouver feminist bookstore banned the sale of the novel saying it was anti-feminist and promoted male violence. BC writer, Jane Rule, described it as a “hilarious, reprehensible, moving book, brilliantly written” (Messenger, DLB, 4). A Toronto store promoted it as having the central theme of a woman in search of her identity. That is how Lambert herself understood the extreme and often explosive sexual relationship at its core: “What I’ve been writing about is women who are struggling—struggling with their sexuality, with their role and maybe the limitations of their role, but not weakness” (Worthington 58). For her, they are not “co-opted types” or women enthralled by the phallus. Her women—in “The Pony,” “Guilt,” Falconer’s Island, The Best Room in the House, Grasshopper Hill and Crossings—learn the ropes, realign the relationship or free themselves from the dangerous liaison. Like Cyn in “The Pony,” they discover their own strength; they break free. Some others, like Mary in The Good of the Sun, “a paragon of virtue” who is described by the Mexican doctor as “Like the Virgin in the Cathedral. All white and gold” (4), are overwhelmed, broken by the sexist machinations of their men. The passionate sense of outrage in this early radio script (1960; stage version 1970) is released, full blown, in Lambert’s best-known and last works, Grasshopper Hill (1979), Jennie’s Story (1981) and Under the Skin (written in 1983, produced 1985).
Jennie’s Story is set in Southern Alberta during the depression, 1938-1939. This is the time of “Bible Bill” Aberhart and the Social Credit (1935-1943). The McGrane farm has been unusually lucky, prosperous. We first see Jennie languorously rising from bed, putting on her husband’s kimono, with her hair loose and “fiery,” her body language “sensuous”: “She is a woman at one with her body” (15).The couple, married only a year, share an obvious conjugal bliss and “we know how alive each is to the other” (19). However, when Jennie decides to find out why it is she doesn’t get pregnant and goes to Calgary to visit the doctor who had operated on her years before, she learns it was not her appendix that was removed. The truth is that she has been sterilized. The happy domestic scene is ripped apart. In the play, based on a story Betty heard from her mother (mentioned earlier), a transformed and vehement Jennie extracts confessions from her betrayers. Edna, her mother, claims that “I wasn’t in my right mind that year. And then come the winter an’ I couldn’t do for the Father. I couldn’t. I couldn’t.” (64), so she sent fifteen-year-old Jennie to the rectory in her stead. Father Edward Fabrizeau came to Jennie’s bed many times that terrible winter. And one day, swearing her to silence, he took her to Ponoka:
JENNIE: It wasn’t no regular hospital. They sat me down and asked me questions,
only I’d sworn not to say, `n’ they said I wasn’t too bright….They said I was feeble-mined….`n’ it wasn’t just feeble-minded they said.
. . .
See, I was 16, and so they had to get…Ma had to sign the paper….See there’s this law, Harry. Against “the transmission of evil.” And they said I wasn’t too—No, they said I was feeble-minded. `n’ the other.
HARRY: What other?
JENNIE: I was evil. (75-76)
The priest did this to Jennie “to stop…the occasion…of [his] sin” (102). Or rather, it was done to prevent the likely consequences.
Lambert had done her research on “The Sexual Sterilization Act” (Alberta, 1923), and also on the amendment (in 1937) which permitted the operation if consent was given by a relative (see Author’s Notes, 14). It specifically mentions “the transmission of evil” to progeny. The vague definition of “evil” included everything from alcoholism to feeble-mindedness; the Act was not repealed until 1971. The horror of this story, and its basis in fact, stayed with Lambert. As she said in interview, after mentioning that there is a similar concern in her novel, Crossings,
I was obviously really upset by that story as a child, because it meant to me that men could cut you out for being sexual. I mean literally eviscerate you….So I have two fears, a) that my vocal cords are going to be cut so I can’t speak or writeix…and b) that I’m going to be disemboweled, and…men are going to do it to me….Really terrifying. Men or the Church. (Worthington 60-61)
Jennie’s Story moves quickly to tragedy: Jennie’s awful death by suicide. She swallows the domestic cleaner, lye. Even though Jennie was a helpless victim of coercion at the time, a child raised in a culture of sexual ignorance and guilt, and even though she heroically overcomes the pressures to withhold a revelation which involves religious authority, she nonetheless swallows the lye (lie). The scandal Lambert dramatizes is not a sex scandal. It is a dishonesty scandal. In Jennie’s Story, Father Fabrizeau can continue to do his work as long as the faithful hold onto their deep belief in the saving truths of the creed:
HARRY: …You’re a bad priest but you’re our priest. So, bless this place and go (106).
Sexual victimization is also at the heart of her last play, Under the Skin (1985), which was first produced after her death by Vancouver’s New Play Centre at the Waterfront Theatre. Pam Hawthorn, the director, says that the play was initiated by discussions they had had over the telephone because Lambert was already not well. By the time the first draft arrived, Lambert had been diagnosed with inoperable cancer. Her own race against time intensifies the play’s sense of terrible urgency.
A realistic play set in a recognizable middle-class kitchen, Under the Skin takes place in the present. The plot centers on the kidnapping of a young girl, Emma, and the harrowing affects of this on her mother and her mother’s friend and neighbour, Renee. The victim remains offstage but her abductor, Renee’s husband John, is also an important character. The play is based on an actual kidnapping which occurred in Port Moody, B.C. It lasted from the 10th of March to its miraculous conclusion on the 5th of September, 1976, when thirteen-year-old Abby Drover was rescued.x It had been 181 days of hell. Lambert followed the news reports and knew all the details. Soon after Abby was found, she wrote in her journal some details of the case and a number of her own thoughts: “I am putting this all down because somewhere in this is some clue to myself” (Sept.8 [1976]). She was to be haunted by this event for a long time.
What Lambert includes of this horrible story, what she amends and what she imagines provide a fine illustration of the creative process at work. Lambert kept the basics of the event, including the 181 day countdown, but she begins it in the spring in order to conclude in the fall, on Halloween, which allows the timing to resonate with the central theme of dissembling and disguise. Except for one critical scene in the workshop, the entire play takes place in Renee’s kitchen. The fictional Maggie, a professor of literature and a single mother, has clear connections to Lambert herself. The friendship between the two women is pure fiction; their relationship is the focus of the play.
The character Renee Gifford, described as “too consciously feminine” and “wracked with self-doubt” (114), is desperate not to lose her man. The abuse and sexual humiliation she suffers at John’s hands is graphically presented in the play.xi Maggie, rather naïve about what help friends and neighbours ought to be offering her during this ordeal, is alert to Renee’s situation (although unaware of its severity). More than once she encourages Renee to leave John, saying, “If you’re that unhappy, leave him…. I can’t stand seeing you take it from him, I just can’t stand it, it’s horrible, it’s so degrading” (161). The problem is that before she knew that this seductive, sadistic man was also her child’s kidnapper, she was attracted to him herself:
JOHN: You don’t like me much, do you? Truth now, Maggie. Truth time.
MAGGIE: (drinks, looks at him, smokes) No.
JOHN: (laughs) But I turn you on, don’t I?
MAGGIE: Yes. (144)
Maggie says she despises “[his] type,” “The bully” (144), but yet she admits she feels desire. Maggie’s desire turns cold as the plot unravels but here may well be a critical site where these women are indeed sisters, under the skin.xii Does Lambert see some sinister connection between eros and violence?
When Bill Glassco read the manuscript (he had thought he might direct it, but he never did), he picked up the disturbing ambivalence in Maggie immediately. He wrote:
It is right for [Maggie] to intellectually object to the way John treats Renee, but subconsciously that is what she seems to want herself….A lot of it reminded me of what I found so powerful and riveting in Crossings—the relationship with Mik. I think you should further in that direction here if you feel that is right.
“[Under the Skin] is more than a thriller,” Lambert said, “it shows how we try to ignore what is happening beneath the surface of our lives because it is more much comfortable to deny it” (Simon Fraser). The resonances with the title, what resides under the skin’ then, is not simply Emma kept in an underground bunker, or the children wearing Halloween monster masks, nor even the true feelings that the characters cover up Under the skin are also the irrational and intractable workings of desire. Maggie’s impatience, and even anger, at Renee’s passivity is part of the package as well. Initially Maggie may have been trusting, as was her daughter (and as was Jennie), but a failure of nerve is not Maggie’s problem, nor is it a trait belonging to any of Lambert’s central women characters. In fact, the trait of passivity is what infuriated Lambert about Jane Eyre, as she made clear in a lecture to her undergraduates. Thus, while she portrays women whose passivity renders them complicit or worse (like Edna in Jennie’s Story), she does not have much sympathy for their plight. Ultimately even Renee discovers the route to rid her of her sadistic husband. She acquires considerable courage and enacts a clear performance of female empowerment. However, the gap of time between suspicion and action and the banality of the incident which initiated the action, leaves her motives suspect. This play, like Jennie’s Story, decries the power of men and embodies in male character sexuality as a demonic force. It also screams `women beware of women.’
In her dark and complex vision of sexuality and in her depiction of women complicit in unfathomable horror, Lambert challenges a feminism which only welcomes a depiction of the suffering female overwhelmed by forces she cannot control. She also removes herself from the hopeful view encouraged by our liberal culture.xiii “I feel victimized,” she wrote to her friend Gloria, “and not by men, but by my own [cultural’ conditioning” (A/B): “How do you fight when the enemy has outposts in your own mind?” (Beavington).xiv Clearly, if the division among feminists was between the socialists and radicals, Betty Lambert would have been on the socialist side: the problem is with society, with years of cultural conditioning; the problem is not simply the men. Consistently writing of women—their topics, their struggles—Lambert can be considered a feminist writer. But hers is a complex feminism which refuses to discern morality according to gender imperatives. Her deeply felt moral skepticism refuses a simplified moral clarity.
Complicated moral and ethical issues are central to her award-winning and last radio play, Grasshopper Hill (Mar.1979). Here the central character and narrator, Susan, relives in flashbacks the brutal lessons she learns from her lover, the Holocaust survivor, Gustav. He has written a book about his experiences. He tells her deeply upsetting stories about Auschwitz, about what he witnessed and how he survived. She tries to understand him:
Only if you can…imaginatively…enter...into someone like Eichmann, can you understand that there is no frontier…that human beings are capable of anything…that we are not different… (15).
She puts up with his verbal abuse of her, his humiliating her in public, his affairs with other women, even his repeatedly telling her, “I do not love you. You are not my type. And you are not 22” (17). She insists to the end, even after she has rejected him to save herself, that this is a love story (37). The narrator’s opening lines are: “Amor vincent omnia. My mother always said” (5): but does it?
Ultimately Susan learns that although Gustav clearly exhibits survivor guilt, his experiences have left him unable to empathize. Now aggressive, distrustful, paranoid, and apathetic, Gustav “can’t love anyone” (26). The camps, he said, “That was the best time….It was after. After we got out….Hearing the trains go by at night. Hearing them going by, all the trains from Hungary. You don’t understand. Lying there, hearing the trains go by” (17).xv Still, as Susan tells her friend, “This last year with Gustav? Let me tell you something you won’t understand in a million years. It was the best time of my life” (30). He had challenged her, engaged her, tormented her. It will be Susan who will both survive and be able to use the knowledge extracted from pain to offer to others. At the end, Susan embodies the teacherly virtue of doubt.
Written the same year as her novel, Crossings, this profound, disturbing play is little known. Its central themes are huge: guilt, both personal and historical; choice, responsibility and integrity. A play “about betrayal and loyalty, and self-survival” (18:1, Letter to Weaver, 3 July 75), it features a vivid portrayal of a concentration camp survivor struggling now, remembering then. The narrator struggles now imagining then. Brilliantly Lambert interweaves past and present, mundane personal encounters with memories of traumatizing incidents, while poignantly rendering the difficulty in knowing, loving another (especially one so deeply scarred). Gone is any temptation to self-righteousness; Susan has acquired some skepticism about what one `carries’ in oneself. Grasshopper Hill is not simply a wrenching dramatization which showcases what we would rather not hear; it is a philosophical and strenuously moral work on a subject worthy of deep thought. It is another Lambert script which challenges in its refusal to let sleeping dogs lie.
Lambert has also treated sexuality and its unexpected consequences more light-heartedly. Her popular comedy, Sqrieux-de-Dieu (1975), which was her first play to grab media attention and box-office success, was interpreted as a witty comedy of manners. But here too Lambert had more serious intentions, which most audiences and critics seemed to have missed entirely. At its core is the familiar triangle: a man (here a university professor), his wife, and his mistress. The riotously unexpected twist is that George’s wife, Brenda, bored with married life and her hopelessly boring husband, gets hilariously inventive in order to keep their sex life surprising. George, who calls himself a “macaroni and cheese man” (57), is sick of it and would rather watch television with his mistress, a lawyer yearning to be a wife and mother. Ultimately the two women happily change places. It is the two other women in the script who carry the `serious’ content: Gramma, who successfully did an Arsenic and Old Lace trick on her failing husband and Susan, a seductive former student who says she has been “sent” to “rescue” George from his apathy. In a letter to William Davis, artistic director of Festival Lennoxville, Lambert reminds Davis that Susan calls herself an “assassin”:
If the play works properly, one should have a sense that George, when he exits, saying, “We who are about to die, salute you”… is unwittingly placing himself in the hands of the gods, and is about to get properly screwed. (18:1, 13 Feb.76)
Getting “properly screwed” by an agent of fate is one likely interpretation of the title. For Lambert, then, this is not simply a comic play.xvi “George,” says Lambert, “is guilty of more than impotence. His impotence arises out of over-rationality. And it’s a general impotence, not a specific one” (Letter to Davis, 10 Mar. 76). While she is making us laugh at “Trendy psychologizing, upper-middle-class stodginess, fashionable kinkiness, clichés of the counter-culture and the self-expression set” (Messenger 167), her women characters are prepared to fight for liveliness in their lives, for joy. The play concludes with the sense of rejuvenation comedy requires. As the music “Ode to Joy” comes up and the curtain comes down, the playwright hoped the audience would realize that George, who thinks he has managed it all perfectly, with Susan as his new mistress is in for a hell of a time.
Sexuality is only one of the many contemporary issues Lambert engages with a critical eye and a radical spirit. But even within that subject she has delivered an impressively wide range of female characters: larger-than-life social types who verge on caricature (Elsie in “The Dark Corner,” the mother in “The Last Dinner,” Brenda in Sqrieux-de-Dieu): women as repressed and naïve as the hapless Mary in The Good of the Sun; adolescent girls (like Cyn in “The Pony”) and women who struggle to define themselves against their adversaries (Maggie and Renee in Under the Skin, Vicky in Crossings, Susan in Grasshopper Hill), and deeply conflicted, self-destructive women (like Jennie in Jennie’s Story) who seem to have succumbed to sexist stereotypes despite their own intelligence. With Clouds of Glory (1979), she took up local Canadian politics.xvii
The play is set at a new British Columbia university, a hotbed of sixties radicalism, in October 1970, the day that Prime Minister Trudeau imposed the War Measures Act. Hostages James Cross and Pierre Laporte await their fate. Meanwhile, at the university there is a political mini-crisis: student unrest and bitter infighting among the faculty about internal university disputes. The play’s focus is on a young cynical sociology professor who becomes the sacrifice president while the old guard fights against the would-be revolutionaries and the American `faction.’ When promoting the play to Marion Andre, artistic director of Vancouver Playhouse, which only did moderately well when later performed in Vancouver and then at Festival Lennoxville (1979), Lambert wrote that this is not the expected “total denunciation of the ivory towerism of academic life”:
I really believe that Aristophanes [in The Clouds] was wrong. That, yes, there’s a lot of flatulence and self-seeking and hypocrisy…, but at the heart of the life of the university sometimes there exists a real debate, attached to the world, and crucial to the world. (18: l, 11 March 1978)
That debate in the play is between idealism, principles and self-survival, the same debate that surrounded the October Crisis. Lambert was convinced that at the centre of her work was a political dilemma worth staging. Before the play opened in Lennoxville, Lambert wrote to Prime Minister Trudeau:
I am just trying to say, before we open next week, that this is not a personal attack, but rather, I hope, an examination of what happens in a political crisis: the pain of it, the uncertainty, and the waste of death….The week before the play closed [in Vancouver], you said in a speech that the only thing that would save us—Canada—is love. I had just written out, two days before, the same message, trying to explain what I was doing….
I am very afraid that if Quebec opts for secession that we will be faced with civil war and, perhaps, the entry of the American who will do it for our own good, to make us, and our tar sands, safe for democracy. I am afraid. That is why I have written the play. (18: 1, 26 June 1979)
Moral dilemmas and more indignation are at the core of her last works as well.
Many people have found Lambert’s last works deeply pessimistic and bleak in tone as well as subject. All three deal with actual historical crimes. All three draw their plot from the facts in order to imagine the inner world of the characters. The narrator opens Grasshopper Hill saying:
“I accuse you, in the name of myself, of the crime of safety. I accuse you, Canada, in the name of myself, Canadian, of the crime of innocence. I accuse you, Canada, in the name of myself, the biggest Canadian of them all, of smuggery, snuggery, self-righteous skull-duggery. J’accuse (5)
Lambert’s rage at social injustice, religious hypocrisy and bad faith is intensely felt, powerfully realized. However, it seems to me, that even in these dark works there exists an undercurrent of optimism, a hopefulness that, while not exactly tangible, is nonetheless present. Maybe, one could say, Lambert wishes she could believe it were more present.
Crossings, like Grasshopper Hill, ends with the protagonist having liberated herself from a demoralizing and destructive relationship. In Crossings one looks to the hard won dancing victory ritual which concludes the novel. In Grasshopper Hill, just before they separate, Susan tells Gustav about the grasshopper hill:
There was this place. Chapultepec. It’s where Montezuma’s palace was, and then they’ve built up over it and…and it means…hill of grasshoppers. ...once I was there and the grasshoppers came…they darken the sky…and…after the Spaniards came, there were the French, and now the Americans, only, it’s a sort of Mexican joke, you see…because…they say when all the grasshoppers are gone, the hill….but in the end, even the grasshoppers get tired, and they go, and the hill, you see, the hill’s still there. (36)
The hill, repeatedly ravaged, represents continuity and the hope which springs eternal.
It is more difficult to discern an optimistic underpinning in the harrowing play Under the Skin, especially because the play concludes with the future still uncertain for Maggie and her daughter. Maggie runs out into the night and Lambert brings down the curtain at this most theatrical moment. Since in the actual kidnapping case the child was found alive, it is clear that Lambert is deliberately refusing her audience this comfort. It does not seem incidental that while writing this Lambert was living her own darkest hour. However, by this closure Renee has moved to a position of strength. One could focus on her new-found courage, and Maggie’s.
The most important illustration of her search for the upside is in Jennie’s Story, a play Lambert had time and health enough to write and to revise. Dismayed by her husband’s refusal to avenge the crime against her, Jennie takes matters into her own hands: she extracts confessions from her betrayers and then exacts a permanent revenge by taking her own life. But that is not a solution; her way is not the `good’ way. For Lambert, as for me, it is Harry who is the most evolved character (Worthington 62). It is Harry, the farmer who is in love with the poetry of Gerald Manley Hopkins. It is Harry who acts according to his conscience, pays the price (he is twice imprisoned), mourns his losses, and accepts the unalterable facts of nature. For Harry this includes the awful truth that “the best a us got some animal in us somewheres” (27). But Nature promises another harvest, renewal, a re-birth. To express their love of him, both Jennie and her replacement, Molly, will recite from the Hopkins poems he taught them to appreciate. Trying to give some solace to this grieving man, Molly recites a mangled version of the last verse of “God’s Grandeur.” It closes the play. In the “Director’s Notes” for the Ottawa production, Bill Glassco included the complete text of the play plus four lines from another, “Carrion Comfort,” claiming both are “at the very heart” of Jennie’s Story:
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
(from “God’s Grandeur”)
No, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee:
Not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of man
In me or, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.
(from “Carrion Comfort”)
“God’s Grandeur” was Betty Lambert’s favourite poem. It was recited again at her memorial service, as she had requested.
* * *
Betty Lambert was a serious writer who brought to the endeavor both intense activity and intellectual vitality. She was high-minded about her goal, to write and to write well, from a young age until her end. Grinding poverty and her familiarity with illness turned her into a fighter early. Some of her works, like Crossings and Grasshopper Hill, draw more transparently from her own life than others (one of her lovers even accused her of plagiarism). But even when drawing upon her personal life, there is nothing that is self-pitying or self-aggrandizing. Nor does she distort any sense of proportion in guilt or responsibility. In her bold and nuanced treatment of sexuality, in her sensitivity to the world’s mean work, she illuminates the dark forces which always intrigued her, even her own. In her late works especially, the tortured bonds of relationship are laid bare, as are the intricate and lingering aftereffects. Whether her focus is the woman’s experience, the scenes that take place “where a woman’s life takes place, where her life-story is decided,”xviii or the group conflicts in plays such as The Riddle Machine and Clouds of Glory, where she turns her inward gaze on exterior matters, what she evidently admires most is courage. “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage,” said Anäis Nin. Betty Lambert lived and wrote defiantly, subversively; she faced all of her life struggles, including her death, with extraordinary courage.
* * *
Betty Lambert was born in Calgary, Alberta on August 23, 1933. "My father died when I was twelve and I was no longer 'working class,' I was 'welfare class' and I was determined to get out of that class. Writing was a way out but soon it became more than that, it became a necessity."; Lambert became a socialist in her teens. She said she used her anger to fuel her art. She moved to Vancouver in 1951 to attend UBC, worked as a copywriter at a local radio station and graduated to writing radio plays for CBC. She published Three Radio Plays (Burnaby: West Coast Review Publishing Society, 1985) containing GRASSHOPPER HILL, FALCONER'S ISLAND, THE BEST ROOM IN THE HOUSE.
Among her plays for children The Riddle Machine (1966) was performed at Montreal's Expo in 1967. In her late 20s, Lambert became embroiled in feminist issues which permeated most of her best work for the stage. In 1965 she became a part-time lecturer of English at Simon Fraser University, where she was later made an Associate Professor (with only a BA in Philosophy and English) teaching modern and Greek drama, Shakespeare and linguistics.
Betty Lambert raised one daughter as a single parent and produced approximately 60 plays for radio, television and stage. Sqrieux-de-dieu (Talonbooks, 1975) gained renown as a witty and outlandish sex comedy about a ménage a trios. Jennie's Story (1983), her most powerful work, was based on a true story from southern Alberta in the 1930s, when a priest had his 15-year-old housekeeper, whom he seduced, taken to a mental institution and sterilized. She is told she has an appendectomy. Later, married and unable to conceive, Jennie learns the truth and commits suicide. Under the Skin (1985) is based upon a true Vancouver story of a man kidnapping and sexually abusing a twelve-year-old girl for six months. Lambert won ACTRA's Nellie award for best radio play in 1980 for Grasshopper Hill, a drama about a Canadian woman who has an affair with a Jewish survivor of Auschwitz.
Crossings, her only novel, is a penetrating study of female masochism. It's called Crossings because the man and the woman repeatedly "cross over" the Burrard Bridge from opposite worlds. Mik O'Brien, a violent and virile ex-con, crosses over to Vicky's rooming house at 2952 West 8th Avenue. Vicky Ferris, a CBC dramatist, crosses over to the coarse but truthful world of Mik and his cronies at the St. Helen's Hotel (later called Theo's) on Granville Street. It is a riveting account of female sufferings, mental and physical, with flashbacks to a failed marriage and an illegal abortion in East Vancouver. Unable to extricate herself from Mik O'Brien's influence, Vicky is raped, gets pregnant, demands marriage, discovers the pregnancy alarm was false, retreats to Berkeley, gets pregnant by a stranger and keeps the baby. The skilful clarity of the writing convincingly evokes the protagonist's passion and restlessness.
"Maybe it's one huge orgasm, this book. Maybe I just want to remember it once more before I go menopausal. Maybe I just want to feel young again and real and alive. The Victorian era. Repressed lust. But to the girdle do the gods inherit. Down from the waist they are centaurs... Perhaps I shall go mad and run naked down the street at night, waving my bum behind me like a flag. Perhaps I shall leap on beautiful young men, a moustache on my lip. Oh god, it's not fair to grow old. It's not fair. I hate it. I really do." The book gained the disapproval of one Vancouver feminist bookstore, but its boldness impressed most critics. It was published in the U.S., with limited success, under the title of Bring Down the Sun.
Betty Lambert fought a six-month battle with cancer in 1983. "In the manner of her death," recalls friend and actor Joy Coghill, "she was absolutely extraordinary. It was one of her greatest gifts to us." Cancer of the lung was spreading through her body. Lambert persevered against the disease and dismissed suicide on rational, philosophical and moral grounds. She continued to write, frustrated by lack of time but also impressed with the urgency that the immediate prospect of death brought to her work. "I have so much to do and no time to die," she wrote to Coghill. She composed her own memorial service, including her favourite Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem, "God's Grandeur," to celebrate life. On August 9th, she completed her final play, Under the Skin. Jenny's Story and Under the Skin were republished (Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 1990).
In her final days, blind and unable to speak, she enjoyed playing Trivial Pursuit with her sister, Dorothy Beavington. Beavington recalls, "On the night she died she indicated she wanted her yellow writing pad and her pen. She wrote, with much effort, 'Dot, one last trivia question.' I asked Betty if she wanted me to ask her a question and she vigorously pointed to her own chest to indicate she was definitely asking me. Then she wrote, 'What is the final demand in life?' I said I didn't know but I was sure that she did. She nodded. Then she slowly wrote her answer, which was, 'More and more and more nostalgia.'"
Lambert was remembered by her colleagues and friends at a Simon Fraser University memorial service on November 21st, 1983, following her death on Novenmber 4, 1983 in Burnaby. SFU subsequently established a playwriting award for SFU students in her honour. Lambert was the subject of an interview conducted by Bonnie Worthington fore a special issue of Room of One's Own devoted women and theatre, edited by Eleanor Wachtel.
[Alan Twigg / BCBW 2003] "Theatre" "Fiction"
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BETTY LAMBERT:
Writing for Life
Here follows Cynthia Zimerman’s Introduction to The Betty Lambert Reader (Playwrights Canada Press 2007 / ISBN 978-0-88754-862-8), edited by Cynthia Zimmerman
BETTY LAMBERT was a writer and academic until her untimely death at the age of fifty. An English professor at Simon Fraser University (1965-1983), she is the author of one published novel, numerous stories, radio dramas and stage plays. Many theatre practitioners and students of Canadian dramatic literature are familiar with her last plays, Jennie’s Story and Under the Skin. Fortunate to have had the opportunity to read more widely, I was quite taken aback by the sheer volume of her writings when I first visited the Betty Lambert Archives at Simon Fraser University. I was impressed by the quality of the work I discovered and saddened to realize how little is known of this immensely talented, perceptive and vigorous writer, and so I have undertaken the editing of this collection. Readers will find common threads of concern—moral, political, metaphysical, aesthetic—that link these disparate works of fiction, yet each is distinctive and each bespeaks an intense imagination, a philosophical bent, a sophisticated literary orientation, and a professional attention to craft. Her works deserve to be better known.
Betty Lambert’s family history began with a dramatic love story. Her great grandfather, Thomas Jefferson Craven, was a Roman Catholic priest and the wealthy owner of a large estate in Lancashire, England. Her grandfather, also named Thomas, was the eldest son and due to inherit the estate. While in training to become a priest (something he never wanted), he fell in love with a young serving-girl at the nunnery in Drogheda, Ireland. He married her and was swiftly disinherited by his angry parents and excommunicated by the Catholic Church. Although he was highly educated, with degrees from Oxford and Cambridge, Thomas was unable to find work. So, in 1910, the young couple decided to make a new start in Canada. To prevent his parents from interfering any further, Thomas changed his surname to Cooper. He began working on a newspaper in Montreal and then at the Frank mine in southern Alberta. At one point, Thomas bought some poor farmland near Crowley, Alberta having heard that a train line was to pass through the town. When the train plans changed, the land proved worthless. Thomas went to work as a cook at the mines. The Coopers had a hard life and five children. Thomas raised his children to have an intensely religious approach to life. Bessie, the youngest, was Betty’s mother.
After completing high school, Bessie Cooper married handsome, playful Christopher Lee who was a carpenter, like his father. They settled in Calgary. According to the family narrative,
Bessie and Kit…lived with his parents until Betty was six. Then Betty found a house and asked her parents to buy it and move in, which they did. When Betty was eleven, Thomas came and carried her out of her sick bed, claiming that the house was giving her asthma. When Kit died in September 1945, Betty walked [back] home and stayed.i
Kit died in a boating accident a month after the birth of his third daughter, Crissie. With his nephew, he had taken out the sailboat he had built. There was a sudden storm and both men drowned. Death by drowning of a virile young man was to feature in a number of his daughter’s creative fictions. As Betty wrote, “My father died when I was twelve and I was no longer `working class,’ I was `welfare class’ and I was determined to get out of that class. Writing was a way out but it soon became more than that, it became a necessity” (Beavington 1).
Actually, Elizabeth Minnie Lee (called Betty) was a bookish child and had started writing at a young age. During elementary school she was home a great deal, in bed with asthma. Mostly she wrote poetry and a few stories. At thirteen she was allowed to attend school sporadically. Her English teacher advised her to send one of her poems to a magazine. When it was accepted for publication accompanied by a $2 payment, Betty was much encouraged and started writing more and entering more contests. She decided that she would be a writer when she grew up:
Funny about writers…when I was very young…younger than now I mean…I felt that it was something very wonderful and exciting to be a writer…that everyone looked up to you and loved you…because what you wrote was good…and true…and somehow worthwhile. Not like being a store clerk…or washing floors like Mom did before and after she was married….But she couldn’t help it…it was the Depression…and Daddy was out of a job…(18:22, Memoir, 1)
At fifteen she was in the Red Cross Crippled Children’s Hospital with a serious case of polio. This proved to be another critical psychic event, for she was told that she would never walk again.ii While there she wrote quite a few pieces for a church paper called The Canadian Girl. From that time on, she was regularly writing short stories and regularly sending them off in the post: “all that was really important was writing…and saying what I felt like saying…not for Seventeen…or Mademoiselle…but for something here inside me…” (18:22, Memoir: writing). Betty was absolutely determined when it came to her writing, just as she was absolutely determined to get out of that hospital. Ill for much of her early life, her accomplishments are all the more remarkable.
One of the contests, a short story competition, won her six weeks at the Banff School of Fine Arts. She was seventeen. “For the first time in my life,” she wrote, “I had time enough, and health enough to write.” A story written while at Banff won the Alice Hutchison Memorial scholarship, which meant she returned to creative writing at Banff for another precious summer. It was at Banff that she met the graphic designer, Frank Lambert, who she married in 1952 (they would divorce ten years later). Also it was there that she learned, from The Writer’s Handbook, a most important lesson: “The criterion of the writer was not writing, it was selling. Of all the things that I remember about Banff, this hurt the most, and was the most valuable” (18:35, Auto-Biography, 5).
While continuing to finish high school by correspondence, making up for the time missed during her bout with polio, she began to write `for a living.’ She got a job writing commercials for a radio station,
I write commercials every day from nine to five…for $185 a month…and then I come home and write what I really want to write…which takes my hundred and thirty-five a month because stamps and envelopes and paper—that looks good so the editor won’t think I starving or something—costs money… (18:22, Memoir: writing).
By the time she was twenty Betty had saved enough money to go to university. She took an arts degree in English and Philosophy at the University of British Columbia, graduating in 1957. During her university years and immediately after, she had a series of part time jobs: managing a biochemistry lab at UBC; teaching calculus at B.C. Matric School; file clerk; sales clerk at Hudson Bay; teaching assistant for first year UBC English; marker-grader and free-lance writer. While writing commercials for Vancouver’s CFUN Radio, she entered a play contest. One of the judges was Gerald Newman. Although she did not win, Newman called her several years later. He had become a director at CBC Radio and invited her to submit something. That play which he directed, “The Lady Upstairs,” was her first of many for CBC Radio. She was twenty-two. Gerald Newman, who joined the English department at Simon Fraser University in the late sixties, would later produce many of Lambert’s radio scripts. In 1965, shortly after she had her daughter, Ruth Anne, Betty began teaching at Simon Fraser. A charter member of the new university, she would teach courses in Shakespeare, contemporary drama, and linguistics, among others.
By that time, Betty Lambert had established herself comfortably as an unconventional and determined woman. She had experienced what it was like to be a have-not. She was prepared to work and to work hard. Moreover, in 1965 being an unwed mother of a child of mixed blood was in itself, as her daughter says, an “eyebrow raiser.” Betty had wanted a child very much; this yearning for motherhood is a theme repeatedly present in her fiction. Ruth Anne’s father, a doctoral student met on a bus trip to San Francisco, would play no part in his daughter’s life.iii
Drawing attention to these events in Lambert’s life—the death by drowning of her father and the grim family circumstances; frequent childhood illness and polio as a teenager; choosing to be an unwed mother, a single parent and a free-lance writer—is to theoretically privilege the lens of psychology, it is to interpret these events as transformative experiences which shaped both her character and her creative work. In fact, a number of her works begin with an unexpected emergency which leads to transforming consequences for its principal characters, as it does in Once Burned, Twice Shy; The Summer People, Jennie’s Story and Under the Skin (to cite a few). Of course Lambert was also a product of her particular times and situation. The narrative of her life reveals this as well: growing up in a religious household, living through the depression on the prairies, struggling to write and to work at a time when sexist attitudes prevailed and her own feminist consciousness was nascent. Certainly her early writing and her scripts for CBC Radio conformed to mainstream expectations, eager as she was for publication and production (although I will argue below that even here she proved subversive). The many rejection slips she received and the constant revisions required of her supply ample testimony. It was not until the late seventies, especially with her stage writing, that Lambert felt free to write with the audacity and passion of her own voice.
Nonetheless, it seems to me that all of her works, early as well as late, mine aspects of personal experience although, of course, she alters and re-visions to suit her artistic purposes. Her semi-autobiographical novel, Crossings (1979), is an especially strong example. Originally titled Confessions, it is a fragmented narrative which tells the story of Vicky Ferris, a writer currently working on a CBC radio script, and her volatile relationship with Mik O’Brien, macho ex-con and logger.iv Not only are the British Columbia locations and settings ones Lambert knew well—the title Crossings referring to the walk over Burrard Bridge from one side of town to the other—but the explosive, and often violent, sexual relationship at its core is a fictionalized version of one she experienced. As Lambert said of her writing, “I start out from a problem that I’m having. Then I extrapolate this into characters” (Worthington 59). Of Crossings she said, it was “my painful analysis of my own sexual responses” (Letter to Gloria, unfiled document). Crossings concludes with the protagonist liberating herself from this sadomasochistic relationship, successfully reinventing herself. On the last page, years later, she shares a happy dancing moment with her daughter Anna, the child conceived during a casual affair with a black man in San Francisco (278). She has found her own resourcefulness:
For years I was guilty about Ben. About Paul. About my mother and my sisters. I shall probably come to feel guilty about Anna. But I never feel guilty about Mik. I think now, my god, they probably put him away for life. If there’s anyone you really did destroy, it was Mik.
But I know that’s not true….
And now Anna is dancing too. Unable to help herself. And we dance, mother and daughter, in the underwater light… (284).
Similarly, Clouds of Glory (1979) is a barely disguised take-off of Simon Fraser
academic wrangling, replete with all the passion that academics are capable of injecting into academic questions. It is set against the national FLQ crisis on the eve of Trudeau’s announcement of the War Measures Act. Sqrieux-de-Dieu (1975), an outrageous and enormously funny comedy of manners, exaggerates English department shenanigans and includes some withering satirical portraits.v Grasshopper Hill has as its source Lambert’s affair with a Holocaust survivor. Even Jennie’s Story is based on a real event, the story told to her by her mother about a young prairie girl impregnated by a priest who then had her sterilized. Under the Skin is based on an actual kidnapping that took place in 1976, near where Betty lived. Her own daughter was the same age as the victim. In Under the Skin, the desperate mother is an English professor at a nearby university and a single parent. The abductor, a domineering and powerful male presence, bears a striking resemblance to the character Mik O’Brien in Crossings.vi Lambert not only used her own life experiences for plot, setting, characters and central events—reconfiguring to suit her purposes, she also incorporates a myriad of smaller details like names, relationships, whole scenes and even eccentric items like playing aggressive games of chess (in “The Sea Wall,” Crossings and Grasshopper Hill). Frequently she cites books she has read or taught.vii Lambert’s reading was extensive and one would expect such crossovers—issues, ideas, references recycled from lectures or seminars to her writing, and vice versa. Such presences inevitably deepen the work’s significance and resonance, its reach and applicability, as they do with any important writer.
That her writing was intensely personal, that autobiographical material is constantly present, is an important aspect of her work but not the most important, nor a trait that some would consider significantly unique. She took what she needed from her own life, as all writers do. What better characterizes her writing as a whole, and her personality, is her fighting spirit, her radical way of seeing, her moral skepticism, and her audacious, inventive, tackling of unconventional subjects.
The Riddle Machine was Lambert’s first stage play. Written for young audiences, commissioned by Joy Coghill, the artistic director of Vancouver’s Holiday Theatre, it premiered in February 1966 “with a primarily unprofessional (and unpaid) cast of teenagers” (377). A year later, a professional cast toured the play for four months and performed it at the Centennial Celebrations in Montreal. It was a daring play in its time.
In The Riddle Machine a spaceship holds a group of young people sent out from a planet that is dying; it is a kind of twentieth-century Noah’s ark. The five children and a molting old bird, Dove, have been kept in a state of suspended animation for 500 years. It is now time for their awakening. On board the ship is an elaborate computer, a riddle machine which, like the sphinx of classical myth, posits a challenge to the intelligence of the voyageurs. The challenge is a question which must be answered correctly or the spaceship will never reach the new world, “an unknown planet far beyond the stars” (392):
When all of space has yielded to travel
And is as simple as A, B and C,
What will be still to unravel,
The puzzle, the mystery, the final key?
What is the greatest mystery of all? (435)
In command of the ship and the children, is Robot. Robot is “a mechanical human…a pretty highly developed human replica” (379) but, in her movements, as in her thoughts, she is rigid, inflexible.viii She can only respond as programmed. Robot sedates the children through the food she feeds them, which renders them dopey and obedient. Inadvertently, Hap awakens before feeding time and, coming to his senses, figures it out. He joins forces with Cara, who is considered a mistake because she was hatched too soon. They know that the riddle machine’s question can only be answered if the children unite to stop the robot’s spoon-feeding them and then, together, they think hard, creatively. They have to grow up, become independent-minded and free themselves of the robot’s control. Maturity means they must find the answer themselves and, as adult people, they must take control of the robot, the machine, and the ship. When they answer that the greatest riddle of all is “a human being,” the machine says “You-are-ready” (437).
Just prior to their faltering access to the solution, Dove, who had been ejected from the ship by Robot and who the children feared was dead, returns to the ship bearing fruit. The new fruit is more than just a sign of peace, hope and the enduring spirit. It is also sustenance. As the ship approaches land the children join hands. They include Robot, who promises to be useful and good. “Come,” says Hap, “just take one step at a time. (And they greet the children of the new world)” (438)
According to Lambert, “Critical reception was not unmixed. The play was attacked for being too serious…for being too existential…for not having the magic that children demand” (Lecture 11). She might have added that there also were adults who found the play subversive of parental authority. However, the show was exceedingly successful with the children. For Lambert, children are a serious audience:
I am so sick of this attitude, that a play for children is automatically “mild mannered.” Read gutless and boring. You write the best you can, and about the things that get to you, and maybe, when you want to express the problems of sycophancy, you don’t use the word “sycophant,” maybe you use a name like Knuckle-Under-Nogan, but the dilemma is the same, and when Knuckle-Under-Nogan dies from sycophancy, the child doesn’t have to understand the NAME to recognize the ignominy. (On Writing, 29)
And so, while generating the fear and excitement necessary to hold captive her young audience, in The Riddle Machine Lambert raises the spectre of unreflective authoritarianism, dope-taking dropouts and the existential reality of what it means to grow up and take responsibility. In this play, as in Song of the Serpent and Tumult with Indians (both first performed a year later), she raises the bar on suitable subjects for children, even daring to include the taboo topics of sex and death in the later plays. “When I write for children,” she said, “I write out of the same sort of emotional reality, the same sort of conflicts, the same sort of struggle…as I do when I write for adults” (Lecture 2).
Lambert’s willingness to challenge conventional expectations and rigid thinking is especially evident in her treatment of sex. Lambert was deeply interested in the subject of sex: sexual exploitation, brutality, arousal, and possession. Many of her works, as in the experiences registered in her journals, circle around a core problem. It is as if she finds something unsettling in the biological foundation of heterosexual connection. For women’s wish for intense sexual fulfillment requires a surrender of self, a merger with the other that, ultimately, robs them of autonomy. And that `exchange’ can be seen as particularly damaging by conscious feminists. What could be understood as feminist awareness of the `cost’ of fierce sexual energy, or simply as the age-old subjection of women, Lambert portrays as the abiding dark side of the erotic. Her thinking corresponds with that of Susan Sontag (a writer whose work she admired) who, when asked to comment on her essay, “The Pornographic Imagination,” said:
There seems to be something inherently defective or self-frustrating in the way the sexual impulse works in human beings—for instance, an essential (that is, normal), not accidental (that is, neurotic), link between sexual energy and obsession. It appears that the full development of our sexual being does clash with the full development of our consciousness. (Sontag 341)
Lambert’s female protagonists experience an extremely powerful sexual draw and, sometimes, a humiliating sense of sexual dependence. Over and over again she has wounded women make strange choices with calamitous consequences. That is exactly what some feminist critics have been unhappy with, as I will enlarge below. As Sontag puts it, “the humanist `revisionist’ Freudianism that most feminists feel comfortable with…minimizes the intractable powers of unconscious or irrational feeling” (Sontag 341).
As early as the first work in this collection, “The Pony” (1956), Lambert was incorporating this Lawrentian theme. In it the young protagonist, Cyn, comes to the sexual awakening of “her own wild heart” (42). She is both fascinated and repelled by the object of her desire, the swaggering, seductive Jimmy. When Jimmy wants to ride her new pony and reaches up to grab the reins, the horse shies away, afraid of him. He had been killing gophers and the pony, smelling blood on his hands, strains, sweats. Cyn suddenly sees “the whole thing stopped short” (41). Registering the pony’s instinctive response as a `knowing’ one, she kicks Jimmy’s hand away. Cyn rides down the road at full gallop: “Riding it all out, the fear, and the longing, and the loneliness, and the wild thudding of the heart” (42). The pony sensed danger before she did.
Dangerous attractions for naïve or easily victimized women up against manipulative, sexually aggressive men is at the core not only of early works like The Good of the Sun (1960), Falconer’s Island (1966), and Once Burnt, Twice Shy (1965), but of later works as well. Issues around women in relationship, gender power dynamics, women and sex, are always present and present in a manner that provokes, challenges the status quo. I am reminded of an early exchange between Betty Lambert and a CBC television producer regarding the submission of her script, eventually produced as When the Bough Breaks (1971). It was about the birth control pill and the power it gave to women. In the play the protagonist, Victoria, is enraged to discover that her sometime boyfriend, who wants to get her pregnant so she will marry him, had hidden her pills. Apparently the producer called Lambert, as she says in interview, asking if the central character was lesbian because she didn’t want to get pregnant:
I said, “…she doesn’t want to have a baby that way, where’s she’s trapped into pregnancy. See, that’s a different thing. She has a right to decide whether or not she wants to get pregnant.” And [he] said, “Well, they say any woman like that isn’t a real woman.” So we were into it, right? We were into it. (Worthington 59)
The pill gave women sexual freedom, but also took away male prerogative. That was what was upsetting the male crew and the director much more than the unusually frank (for television at that time) depiction of sexual content.
With Crossings the sexual material got Lambert into trouble with some feminists. One local Vancouver feminist bookstore banned the sale of the novel saying it was anti-feminist and promoted male violence. BC writer, Jane Rule, described it as a “hilarious, reprehensible, moving book, brilliantly written” (Messenger, DLB, 4). A Toronto store promoted it as having the central theme of a woman in search of her identity. That is how Lambert herself understood the extreme and often explosive sexual relationship at its core: “What I’ve been writing about is women who are struggling—struggling with their sexuality, with their role and maybe the limitations of their role, but not weakness” (Worthington 58). For her, they are not “co-opted types” or women enthralled by the phallus. Her women—in “The Pony,” “Guilt,” Falconer’s Island, The Best Room in the House, Grasshopper Hill and Crossings—learn the ropes, realign the relationship or free themselves from the dangerous liaison. Like Cyn in “The Pony,” they discover their own strength; they break free. Some others, like Mary in The Good of the Sun, “a paragon of virtue” who is described by the Mexican doctor as “Like the Virgin in the Cathedral. All white and gold” (4), are overwhelmed, broken by the sexist machinations of their men. The passionate sense of outrage in this early radio script (1960; stage version 1970) is released, full blown, in Lambert’s best-known and last works, Grasshopper Hill (1979), Jennie’s Story (1981) and Under the Skin (written in 1983, produced 1985).
Jennie’s Story is set in Southern Alberta during the depression, 1938-1939. This is the time of “Bible Bill” Aberhart and the Social Credit (1935-1943). The McGrane farm has been unusually lucky, prosperous. We first see Jennie languorously rising from bed, putting on her husband’s kimono, with her hair loose and “fiery,” her body language “sensuous”: “She is a woman at one with her body” (15).The couple, married only a year, share an obvious conjugal bliss and “we know how alive each is to the other” (19). However, when Jennie decides to find out why it is she doesn’t get pregnant and goes to Calgary to visit the doctor who had operated on her years before, she learns it was not her appendix that was removed. The truth is that she has been sterilized. The happy domestic scene is ripped apart. In the play, based on a story Betty heard from her mother (mentioned earlier), a transformed and vehement Jennie extracts confessions from her betrayers. Edna, her mother, claims that “I wasn’t in my right mind that year. And then come the winter an’ I couldn’t do for the Father. I couldn’t. I couldn’t.” (64), so she sent fifteen-year-old Jennie to the rectory in her stead. Father Edward Fabrizeau came to Jennie’s bed many times that terrible winter. And one day, swearing her to silence, he took her to Ponoka:
JENNIE: It wasn’t no regular hospital. They sat me down and asked me questions,
only I’d sworn not to say, `n’ they said I wasn’t too bright….They said I was feeble-mined….`n’ it wasn’t just feeble-minded they said.
. . .
See, I was 16, and so they had to get…Ma had to sign the paper….See there’s this law, Harry. Against “the transmission of evil.” And they said I wasn’t too—No, they said I was feeble-minded. `n’ the other.
HARRY: What other?
JENNIE: I was evil. (75-76)
The priest did this to Jennie “to stop…the occasion…of [his] sin” (102). Or rather, it was done to prevent the likely consequences.
Lambert had done her research on “The Sexual Sterilization Act” (Alberta, 1923), and also on the amendment (in 1937) which permitted the operation if consent was given by a relative (see Author’s Notes, 14). It specifically mentions “the transmission of evil” to progeny. The vague definition of “evil” included everything from alcoholism to feeble-mindedness; the Act was not repealed until 1971. The horror of this story, and its basis in fact, stayed with Lambert. As she said in interview, after mentioning that there is a similar concern in her novel, Crossings,
I was obviously really upset by that story as a child, because it meant to me that men could cut you out for being sexual. I mean literally eviscerate you….So I have two fears, a) that my vocal cords are going to be cut so I can’t speak or writeix…and b) that I’m going to be disemboweled, and…men are going to do it to me….Really terrifying. Men or the Church. (Worthington 60-61)
Jennie’s Story moves quickly to tragedy: Jennie’s awful death by suicide. She swallows the domestic cleaner, lye. Even though Jennie was a helpless victim of coercion at the time, a child raised in a culture of sexual ignorance and guilt, and even though she heroically overcomes the pressures to withhold a revelation which involves religious authority, she nonetheless swallows the lye (lie). The scandal Lambert dramatizes is not a sex scandal. It is a dishonesty scandal. In Jennie’s Story, Father Fabrizeau can continue to do his work as long as the faithful hold onto their deep belief in the saving truths of the creed:
HARRY: …You’re a bad priest but you’re our priest. So, bless this place and go (106).
Sexual victimization is also at the heart of her last play, Under the Skin (1985), which was first produced after her death by Vancouver’s New Play Centre at the Waterfront Theatre. Pam Hawthorn, the director, says that the play was initiated by discussions they had had over the telephone because Lambert was already not well. By the time the first draft arrived, Lambert had been diagnosed with inoperable cancer. Her own race against time intensifies the play’s sense of terrible urgency.
A realistic play set in a recognizable middle-class kitchen, Under the Skin takes place in the present. The plot centers on the kidnapping of a young girl, Emma, and the harrowing affects of this on her mother and her mother’s friend and neighbour, Renee. The victim remains offstage but her abductor, Renee’s husband John, is also an important character. The play is based on an actual kidnapping which occurred in Port Moody, B.C. It lasted from the 10th of March to its miraculous conclusion on the 5th of September, 1976, when thirteen-year-old Abby Drover was rescued.x It had been 181 days of hell. Lambert followed the news reports and knew all the details. Soon after Abby was found, she wrote in her journal some details of the case and a number of her own thoughts: “I am putting this all down because somewhere in this is some clue to myself” (Sept.8 [1976]). She was to be haunted by this event for a long time.
What Lambert includes of this horrible story, what she amends and what she imagines provide a fine illustration of the creative process at work. Lambert kept the basics of the event, including the 181 day countdown, but she begins it in the spring in order to conclude in the fall, on Halloween, which allows the timing to resonate with the central theme of dissembling and disguise. Except for one critical scene in the workshop, the entire play takes place in Renee’s kitchen. The fictional Maggie, a professor of literature and a single mother, has clear connections to Lambert herself. The friendship between the two women is pure fiction; their relationship is the focus of the play.
The character Renee Gifford, described as “too consciously feminine” and “wracked with self-doubt” (114), is desperate not to lose her man. The abuse and sexual humiliation she suffers at John’s hands is graphically presented in the play.xi Maggie, rather naïve about what help friends and neighbours ought to be offering her during this ordeal, is alert to Renee’s situation (although unaware of its severity). More than once she encourages Renee to leave John, saying, “If you’re that unhappy, leave him…. I can’t stand seeing you take it from him, I just can’t stand it, it’s horrible, it’s so degrading” (161). The problem is that before she knew that this seductive, sadistic man was also her child’s kidnapper, she was attracted to him herself:
JOHN: You don’t like me much, do you? Truth now, Maggie. Truth time.
MAGGIE: (drinks, looks at him, smokes) No.
JOHN: (laughs) But I turn you on, don’t I?
MAGGIE: Yes. (144)
Maggie says she despises “[his] type,” “The bully” (144), but yet she admits she feels desire. Maggie’s desire turns cold as the plot unravels but here may well be a critical site where these women are indeed sisters, under the skin.xii Does Lambert see some sinister connection between eros and violence?
When Bill Glassco read the manuscript (he had thought he might direct it, but he never did), he picked up the disturbing ambivalence in Maggie immediately. He wrote:
It is right for [Maggie] to intellectually object to the way John treats Renee, but subconsciously that is what she seems to want herself….A lot of it reminded me of what I found so powerful and riveting in Crossings—the relationship with Mik. I think you should further in that direction here if you feel that is right.
“[Under the Skin] is more than a thriller,” Lambert said, “it shows how we try to ignore what is happening beneath the surface of our lives because it is more much comfortable to deny it” (Simon Fraser). The resonances with the title, what resides under the skin’ then, is not simply Emma kept in an underground bunker, or the children wearing Halloween monster masks, nor even the true feelings that the characters cover up Under the skin are also the irrational and intractable workings of desire. Maggie’s impatience, and even anger, at Renee’s passivity is part of the package as well. Initially Maggie may have been trusting, as was her daughter (and as was Jennie), but a failure of nerve is not Maggie’s problem, nor is it a trait belonging to any of Lambert’s central women characters. In fact, the trait of passivity is what infuriated Lambert about Jane Eyre, as she made clear in a lecture to her undergraduates. Thus, while she portrays women whose passivity renders them complicit or worse (like Edna in Jennie’s Story), she does not have much sympathy for their plight. Ultimately even Renee discovers the route to rid her of her sadistic husband. She acquires considerable courage and enacts a clear performance of female empowerment. However, the gap of time between suspicion and action and the banality of the incident which initiated the action, leaves her motives suspect. This play, like Jennie’s Story, decries the power of men and embodies in male character sexuality as a demonic force. It also screams `women beware of women.’
In her dark and complex vision of sexuality and in her depiction of women complicit in unfathomable horror, Lambert challenges a feminism which only welcomes a depiction of the suffering female overwhelmed by forces she cannot control. She also removes herself from the hopeful view encouraged by our liberal culture.xiii “I feel victimized,” she wrote to her friend Gloria, “and not by men, but by my own [cultural’ conditioning” (A/B): “How do you fight when the enemy has outposts in your own mind?” (Beavington).xiv Clearly, if the division among feminists was between the socialists and radicals, Betty Lambert would have been on the socialist side: the problem is with society, with years of cultural conditioning; the problem is not simply the men. Consistently writing of women—their topics, their struggles—Lambert can be considered a feminist writer. But hers is a complex feminism which refuses to discern morality according to gender imperatives. Her deeply felt moral skepticism refuses a simplified moral clarity.
Complicated moral and ethical issues are central to her award-winning and last radio play, Grasshopper Hill (Mar.1979). Here the central character and narrator, Susan, relives in flashbacks the brutal lessons she learns from her lover, the Holocaust survivor, Gustav. He has written a book about his experiences. He tells her deeply upsetting stories about Auschwitz, about what he witnessed and how he survived. She tries to understand him:
Only if you can…imaginatively…enter...into someone like Eichmann, can you understand that there is no frontier…that human beings are capable of anything…that we are not different… (15).
She puts up with his verbal abuse of her, his humiliating her in public, his affairs with other women, even his repeatedly telling her, “I do not love you. You are not my type. And you are not 22” (17). She insists to the end, even after she has rejected him to save herself, that this is a love story (37). The narrator’s opening lines are: “Amor vincent omnia. My mother always said” (5): but does it?
Ultimately Susan learns that although Gustav clearly exhibits survivor guilt, his experiences have left him unable to empathize. Now aggressive, distrustful, paranoid, and apathetic, Gustav “can’t love anyone” (26). The camps, he said, “That was the best time….It was after. After we got out….Hearing the trains go by at night. Hearing them going by, all the trains from Hungary. You don’t understand. Lying there, hearing the trains go by” (17).xv Still, as Susan tells her friend, “This last year with Gustav? Let me tell you something you won’t understand in a million years. It was the best time of my life” (30). He had challenged her, engaged her, tormented her. It will be Susan who will both survive and be able to use the knowledge extracted from pain to offer to others. At the end, Susan embodies the teacherly virtue of doubt.
Written the same year as her novel, Crossings, this profound, disturbing play is little known. Its central themes are huge: guilt, both personal and historical; choice, responsibility and integrity. A play “about betrayal and loyalty, and self-survival” (18:1, Letter to Weaver, 3 July 75), it features a vivid portrayal of a concentration camp survivor struggling now, remembering then. The narrator struggles now imagining then. Brilliantly Lambert interweaves past and present, mundane personal encounters with memories of traumatizing incidents, while poignantly rendering the difficulty in knowing, loving another (especially one so deeply scarred). Gone is any temptation to self-righteousness; Susan has acquired some skepticism about what one `carries’ in oneself. Grasshopper Hill is not simply a wrenching dramatization which showcases what we would rather not hear; it is a philosophical and strenuously moral work on a subject worthy of deep thought. It is another Lambert script which challenges in its refusal to let sleeping dogs lie.
Lambert has also treated sexuality and its unexpected consequences more light-heartedly. Her popular comedy, Sqrieux-de-Dieu (1975), which was her first play to grab media attention and box-office success, was interpreted as a witty comedy of manners. But here too Lambert had more serious intentions, which most audiences and critics seemed to have missed entirely. At its core is the familiar triangle: a man (here a university professor), his wife, and his mistress. The riotously unexpected twist is that George’s wife, Brenda, bored with married life and her hopelessly boring husband, gets hilariously inventive in order to keep their sex life surprising. George, who calls himself a “macaroni and cheese man” (57), is sick of it and would rather watch television with his mistress, a lawyer yearning to be a wife and mother. Ultimately the two women happily change places. It is the two other women in the script who carry the `serious’ content: Gramma, who successfully did an Arsenic and Old Lace trick on her failing husband and Susan, a seductive former student who says she has been “sent” to “rescue” George from his apathy. In a letter to William Davis, artistic director of Festival Lennoxville, Lambert reminds Davis that Susan calls herself an “assassin”:
If the play works properly, one should have a sense that George, when he exits, saying, “We who are about to die, salute you”… is unwittingly placing himself in the hands of the gods, and is about to get properly screwed. (18:1, 13 Feb.76)
Getting “properly screwed” by an agent of fate is one likely interpretation of the title. For Lambert, then, this is not simply a comic play.xvi “George,” says Lambert, “is guilty of more than impotence. His impotence arises out of over-rationality. And it’s a general impotence, not a specific one” (Letter to Davis, 10 Mar. 76). While she is making us laugh at “Trendy psychologizing, upper-middle-class stodginess, fashionable kinkiness, clichés of the counter-culture and the self-expression set” (Messenger 167), her women characters are prepared to fight for liveliness in their lives, for joy. The play concludes with the sense of rejuvenation comedy requires. As the music “Ode to Joy” comes up and the curtain comes down, the playwright hoped the audience would realize that George, who thinks he has managed it all perfectly, with Susan as his new mistress is in for a hell of a time.
Sexuality is only one of the many contemporary issues Lambert engages with a critical eye and a radical spirit. But even within that subject she has delivered an impressively wide range of female characters: larger-than-life social types who verge on caricature (Elsie in “The Dark Corner,” the mother in “The Last Dinner,” Brenda in Sqrieux-de-Dieu): women as repressed and naïve as the hapless Mary in The Good of the Sun; adolescent girls (like Cyn in “The Pony”) and women who struggle to define themselves against their adversaries (Maggie and Renee in Under the Skin, Vicky in Crossings, Susan in Grasshopper Hill), and deeply conflicted, self-destructive women (like Jennie in Jennie’s Story) who seem to have succumbed to sexist stereotypes despite their own intelligence. With Clouds of Glory (1979), she took up local Canadian politics.xvii
The play is set at a new British Columbia university, a hotbed of sixties radicalism, in October 1970, the day that Prime Minister Trudeau imposed the War Measures Act. Hostages James Cross and Pierre Laporte await their fate. Meanwhile, at the university there is a political mini-crisis: student unrest and bitter infighting among the faculty about internal university disputes. The play’s focus is on a young cynical sociology professor who becomes the sacrifice president while the old guard fights against the would-be revolutionaries and the American `faction.’ When promoting the play to Marion Andre, artistic director of Vancouver Playhouse, which only did moderately well when later performed in Vancouver and then at Festival Lennoxville (1979), Lambert wrote that this is not the expected “total denunciation of the ivory towerism of academic life”:
I really believe that Aristophanes [in The Clouds] was wrong. That, yes, there’s a lot of flatulence and self-seeking and hypocrisy…, but at the heart of the life of the university sometimes there exists a real debate, attached to the world, and crucial to the world. (18: l, 11 March 1978)
That debate in the play is between idealism, principles and self-survival, the same debate that surrounded the October Crisis. Lambert was convinced that at the centre of her work was a political dilemma worth staging. Before the play opened in Lennoxville, Lambert wrote to Prime Minister Trudeau:
I am just trying to say, before we open next week, that this is not a personal attack, but rather, I hope, an examination of what happens in a political crisis: the pain of it, the uncertainty, and the waste of death….The week before the play closed [in Vancouver], you said in a speech that the only thing that would save us—Canada—is love. I had just written out, two days before, the same message, trying to explain what I was doing….
I am very afraid that if Quebec opts for secession that we will be faced with civil war and, perhaps, the entry of the American who will do it for our own good, to make us, and our tar sands, safe for democracy. I am afraid. That is why I have written the play. (18: 1, 26 June 1979)
Moral dilemmas and more indignation are at the core of her last works as well.
Many people have found Lambert’s last works deeply pessimistic and bleak in tone as well as subject. All three deal with actual historical crimes. All three draw their plot from the facts in order to imagine the inner world of the characters. The narrator opens Grasshopper Hill saying:
“I accuse you, in the name of myself, of the crime of safety. I accuse you, Canada, in the name of myself, Canadian, of the crime of innocence. I accuse you, Canada, in the name of myself, the biggest Canadian of them all, of smuggery, snuggery, self-righteous skull-duggery. J’accuse (5)
Lambert’s rage at social injustice, religious hypocrisy and bad faith is intensely felt, powerfully realized. However, it seems to me, that even in these dark works there exists an undercurrent of optimism, a hopefulness that, while not exactly tangible, is nonetheless present. Maybe, one could say, Lambert wishes she could believe it were more present.
Crossings, like Grasshopper Hill, ends with the protagonist having liberated herself from a demoralizing and destructive relationship. In Crossings one looks to the hard won dancing victory ritual which concludes the novel. In Grasshopper Hill, just before they separate, Susan tells Gustav about the grasshopper hill:
There was this place. Chapultepec. It’s where Montezuma’s palace was, and then they’ve built up over it and…and it means…hill of grasshoppers. ...once I was there and the grasshoppers came…they darken the sky…and…after the Spaniards came, there were the French, and now the Americans, only, it’s a sort of Mexican joke, you see…because…they say when all the grasshoppers are gone, the hill….but in the end, even the grasshoppers get tired, and they go, and the hill, you see, the hill’s still there. (36)
The hill, repeatedly ravaged, represents continuity and the hope which springs eternal.
It is more difficult to discern an optimistic underpinning in the harrowing play Under the Skin, especially because the play concludes with the future still uncertain for Maggie and her daughter. Maggie runs out into the night and Lambert brings down the curtain at this most theatrical moment. Since in the actual kidnapping case the child was found alive, it is clear that Lambert is deliberately refusing her audience this comfort. It does not seem incidental that while writing this Lambert was living her own darkest hour. However, by this closure Renee has moved to a position of strength. One could focus on her new-found courage, and Maggie’s.
The most important illustration of her search for the upside is in Jennie’s Story, a play Lambert had time and health enough to write and to revise. Dismayed by her husband’s refusal to avenge the crime against her, Jennie takes matters into her own hands: she extracts confessions from her betrayers and then exacts a permanent revenge by taking her own life. But that is not a solution; her way is not the `good’ way. For Lambert, as for me, it is Harry who is the most evolved character (Worthington 62). It is Harry, the farmer who is in love with the poetry of Gerald Manley Hopkins. It is Harry who acts according to his conscience, pays the price (he is twice imprisoned), mourns his losses, and accepts the unalterable facts of nature. For Harry this includes the awful truth that “the best a us got some animal in us somewheres” (27). But Nature promises another harvest, renewal, a re-birth. To express their love of him, both Jennie and her replacement, Molly, will recite from the Hopkins poems he taught them to appreciate. Trying to give some solace to this grieving man, Molly recites a mangled version of the last verse of “God’s Grandeur.” It closes the play. In the “Director’s Notes” for the Ottawa production, Bill Glassco included the complete text of the play plus four lines from another, “Carrion Comfort,” claiming both are “at the very heart” of Jennie’s Story:
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
(from “God’s Grandeur”)
No, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee:
Not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of man
In me or, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.
(from “Carrion Comfort”)
“God’s Grandeur” was Betty Lambert’s favourite poem. It was recited again at her memorial service, as she had requested.
* * *
Betty Lambert was a serious writer who brought to the endeavor both intense activity and intellectual vitality. She was high-minded about her goal, to write and to write well, from a young age until her end. Grinding poverty and her familiarity with illness turned her into a fighter early. Some of her works, like Crossings and Grasshopper Hill, draw more transparently from her own life than others (one of her lovers even accused her of plagiarism). But even when drawing upon her personal life, there is nothing that is self-pitying or self-aggrandizing. Nor does she distort any sense of proportion in guilt or responsibility. In her bold and nuanced treatment of sexuality, in her sensitivity to the world’s mean work, she illuminates the dark forces which always intrigued her, even her own. In her late works especially, the tortured bonds of relationship are laid bare, as are the intricate and lingering aftereffects. Whether her focus is the woman’s experience, the scenes that take place “where a woman’s life takes place, where her life-story is decided,”xviii or the group conflicts in plays such as The Riddle Machine and Clouds of Glory, where she turns her inward gaze on exterior matters, what she evidently admires most is courage. “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage,” said Anäis Nin. Betty Lambert lived and wrote defiantly, subversively; she faced all of her life struggles, including her death, with extraordinary courage.
* * *
Articles: 1 Article for this author
Bibliography
STAGE
PLAYS
Aleola
Clouds of Glory
1979 (production date)
Dressing Up
The Good of the Sun
1975
Jennie's Story
1981
The Pirates and the Gypsies
The Riddle Machine
1974
Song of the Serpent
1973
Sqrieux-de-Dieu
1975
Turtle Beach (The Foolish Virgin)
Under the Skin
1983
The Visitor
1970
World, World, Go Away
1970
RADIO
PLAYS
All in Good Time
And Bacon for Breakfast
And When the Nights are Long
The Annuity
1960
The Best Room in the House
broadcast dec/1959
The Bequest (To Reach an Understanding)
1958?
The Dark Corner
broadcast 7/mar/1960
Death Watch
broadcast 28/sep/1959
The Devil's Disciple (by G.B. Shaw, adapted by BL)
broadcast 25/jun/1966
Dr. MacGregor and the Case of the Abominable Snowman
Dr. MacGregor and the Case of the Constant Suicide
broadcast 14/nov/1960
Dr. MacGregor and the Case of the Curious Bone
broadcast 28/aug/1961
Dr. MacGregor and the Case of the Persistent Poltergeist
broadcast 11/aug/1963
The Doctor's Dilemma (by G.B. Shaw, adapted by BL)
broadcast 25/mar/1962
The Encircling Island
1971
Essentials
Falconer's Island
broadcast 9/mar/1966
Grasshopper Hill
broadcast mar/1979
Hamlet, Revenge! (by Michael Innes, adapted by BL)
broadcast 23/jan/19??
In the Name of Progress
King of the Castle
The Ladies
The Lady Upstairs
1958?
Once Burnt, Twice Shy
broadcast 18/jul/1965
The Portrait of a Lady (by Henry James, adapted by BL)
broadcast 1/mar/1966
The Rebel
The Seagull (by Anton Chekov, adapted by BL)
broadcast 22/may/1960
The Sea Wall
broadcast 29/jan/1961
The Summer People
broadcast 24/may/1961
The Three Sisters (by Anton Chekov, adapted by BL)
broadcast 27/jul/1963
A Time of Rejoicing
The Visitor (radio version of stage play)
1970
Whoever Murdered Good Old Charlie?
TELEVISION
PLAYS
The Apartment "Nobody Knows I'm Here"
telecast 6/Jan/1976
The Closet
The Human Element
The Infinite Worlds of Maybe (by Lester Del Ray, adapted by BL)
Lilacs and Lillies
1961
No Love Lost
Prescription for Love
28/Aug/1962
Return of a Hero
production 8/Dec/1960
Tumult with Indians
When the Bough Breaks
telecast 13/Apr/1971
NOVELS
Crossings
1979
Keep it in the Family
Pointing the Bone (only half-completed)
The Victim
Victorian Era
SHORT
STORIES
Banff School
Bending Sickle
Bingo
Black Gold
Blue Chow
The Black Nightgown
Cinderella Man
Dance of the Moon
1948
Don't Bring Him in the House*
1957
The Dream
French Seams
The Guest Room Curtains
Guilt
1978
The Hen Who Forgot How to Hatch Her Eggs
How We Married Mother
Just a Little Game
Kiss Googie Winthrop
Last Dinner
1975
Lollypalooza and Jim Molockee
No Love Lost
No Yesterdays
1950
Nobody Knows I'm Here
1980
The Personal Column
The Pony
Prairie Fire*
1956
Pronounce it Ay to Ryhme
The Rebel
So Much More
1947
A Story!
The Strange, the Foreign Faces*
Swiss Cottage
Sylvia
Tatiana
That Mrs. Benton (as "C. Thomas")
Them as Has Pride**
1957
This Side of Tomorrow
1962
The University Life*
1956
Tony
The Unloved
1950
The Victory
The Wasted Years
Winter Never Comes
A Woman in Love
1956
*Written for English 401 at UBC, taught by Earle Birney.
**Written for English 409 at UBC, taught by Earle Birney.
www.bettylambert.ca
