Tamarac by Margaret Hutchison ~ 1957. This edition: Macmillan, 1957. Hardcover. 282 pages.
A show of hands, please – who has heard of Margaret Hutchison?
I hadn’t, and it saddens me.
This novel was a pleasant surprise, and it appears to be the writer’s only one, though I found a reference to her working on her “next novel” in a snippet of a Margaret Laurence biography I stumbled on online. Apparently Margaret Hutchison – “Hutch” – was mentoring Margaret Laurence in the writerly sense when they both met in Vancouver back in the 1950s.
Intriguing.
Google draws an utter blank, beyond the secondhand copies of Tamarac for sale. And there aren’t too many of those out there, either.
So was there ever a second novel? I am exceedingly curious, because this first one, rather obviously autobiographical in the way of so many first novels, is beautifully written. Margaret Hutchison is comfortable with her words; it’s a smooth, engaging read, even in the most angst-ridden passages. Which takes some doing, doesn’t it?
Note I mentioned the presence of angst. It’s in there, in spades. Well, expectedly so, regarding the subject and its era.
Sometime between the two world wars, young Janet Cameron grows up with her two sisters in an isolated (and fictional) sawmill town named Tamarac located somewhere in the (real) British Columbia Kootenay region. Her childhood was a golden time; she looks back on it with fond nostalgia and true grief for its passing.
For not only has her childhood vanished, the town itself is disappearing. With the advent of the Second World War and the natural attrition of a resource extraction based industry – the loggers have harvested all the available trees and the most prominent town structures are torn down as the sawmill equipment is removed for installation elsewhere – Tamarac is doubly doomed.
Janet, now grown up and working as a schoolteacher, returns to the area to attend her father’s funeral, and the journey back triggers cascades of memory of her life to date: that golden childhood, and then the harsh reality of working for a living in a career she feels forced into, and eventually a brutally disappointing love affair. The mixture as seen so often, in fact.
Margaret Hutchison handles her saga well; it moves along quite briskly most of the time, with occasional slowings-down to dwell on particularly meaningful episodes.
Tamarac is hard on the heels of novels such as those created by Ethel Wilson; there is a similar concentration on the landscape as a crucial influence on the characters’ psyches. Hutchison approaches Wilson’s style without exactly copying it – the two were in fact writing at much the same time – but falls just the slightest bit short. As a developing writer, what might have been her voice in subsequent works?
Hutchison’s strengths as a more-than-competent writer outweigh her occasional lapses as a plot developer. I liked this novel a lot, and I would be thrilled to find that there is more out there from this thoughtful and articulate author. Sadly, I suspect that she may have been a one-book wonder. I wonder what the rest of her personal story was?
To sum up:
- Not exactly a bildungsroman; our protagonist experiences most of her growing pains as an adult dealing with adult issues – love and loss and all that deep stuff. Her adolescence is challenging in places but is passed over without wallowing in teen sadness; she grows up fast but not because of any particular trauma; much is asked of her early and she steps forward to shoulder her responsibilities.
- Tamarac is a thoughtful and appreciative evocation of a particular place and time; the author makes it very clear that she has a keen eye for natural surroundings, as well as the human places – and people – which encroach upon the wild.
- Much of the melancholy of this novel comes from the time of its setting: Great Depression-era rural Canada, and then the bitter onset of what we all know – characters and readers alike – will be another horrible war.
- The ending is something of an anticlimax, just a little too perfectly rounded. But it works in the greater context of what comes before it in the story, and is on the whole fairly satisfying. We are certain that Janet will calmly find her own way into whatever is coming next for her; she has proven herself tenacious and resilient so far, and we wish her well in her future.
- My rating: 7.5/10. (Not a perfect novel, but well on its way, and I liked it.)
This sounds like a good one, have you tried CBC? I also know a children’s writer originally from Salmon Arm, I will investigate.
I liked it. Yes, tried the CBC archives, also the BC BookWorld archives, the Encyclopedia of Canadian Writers, and even an obituary search. Nada. Except for those snippets in the Margaret Laurence bio.
Tamarac? Margaret Hutchison? This is all new to me! Sadly, a quick search reveals not much more than a positive Globe & Mail review (“evocative and plotless first novel [of] undoubted charm”). Sadly, too see no second novel. What you’ve written makes her seem someone worthy of research. Fascinating.
Well darn, Brian. I had rather hoped you’d see this and say, “Oh, yes. Margaret Hutchison. Here’s the story on her, and here are her other twelve novels written under the pseudonym X…”
All I have been able to find – other than the reasonably positive reviews such as the G&M one you referenced – is the snippet in the Google Books sample of Margaret Laurence: The Making of a Writer by Donez Xiques.
According to the Laurence bio, Margaret Hutchison was working as a teacher in Vancouver when she met/befriended Margaret Laurence, and in the end notes Xiques refers to an interview with Margaret Hutchison in 1992. Somewhere I saw that Laurence shared an agent with Ethel Wilson; I wonder if Hutchison did as well?
Something of a mystery, all round, this episode.
Here’s what I have:
Hutchison, Margaret
Tamarac (New York: St. Martin’s, 1957); Somewhere to the Sea (1962)
Margaret Hutchison first published in the Canadian Poetry Magazine in March 1947. This is her first published work, see CPM 10:03:39.
Young Vancouver school teacher (elementary grades).
Correspondence re: Tamarac (1950s) and Somewhere to the Sea (1962) in Macmillan archive at McMaster
From Donez Xiques, Margaret Laurence: The Making of a Writer (Toronto: Dundurn, 2005): page 241—Ruth May was her and Ethel Wilson’s literary agent, whom Margaret Laurence wrote to at least once for advice re This Side Paradise; Pages 247-9—they were later introduce by Watson and Mary Thomson; Page 264—Hutch introduced Peggy to Alice and Jim Munro
Margaret Hutchison Woodland is NOT the same person as Margaret Woodland Hutchison, from Washington State, who died in 2010, and whose papers are at UofW, Seattle.
Thank you, Karyn! I knew you’d come through for us!
Hello Karyn,
Thank you so much for these pieces of the puzzle. I spent a bit of time today following up some of your leads; I was hoping to perhaps stumble across mention of that 1962 novel you note, but nothing except (fanfare!) I did find a copy of a self-published book, One Woman’s Words, 1995, being a collection of “our” Margaret Hutchison’s newspaper articles and such. I have ordered it, and am looking forward to seeing what it contains.
I also found my way to your blog, and have been having a lovely time poking around in it. I was most pleased to see the review of The Little Broomstick. I too hold Mary Stewart in high regard, and am curious about the anime. My now-grown-up daughter is a longtime manga and anime fan, and her interest in those genres has rubbed off, to the extent that though I do not actively seek these out, I will happily indulge when presented with opportunties for reading/watching. I am hoping I will get a chance to see the movie in question, though it is doubtful that an opportunity will arise way up here in the Interior BC hinterlands. Perhaps when we next head for the Coast; one can hope!
Again, grateful thanks for your contribution to the search for more on Margaret Hutchison. I will share what I discover with the book now travelling through the postal system. It’s coming from the U.S.A. so it may be some time in transit…
So, the second novel was Somewhere to the Sea (1962), but as Brian has discovered, the only reference we have found is in the Macmillan archives at McMaster. Still, it appears to have been published.
I was wondering if it had actually been published. Now that I have a title, next step will be a Canada-wide library search. Maybe in the dusty stacks somewhere?
Do you think Hutchison had read Evah McKowan’s Janet of Kootenay: Life, Love and Laughter in an Arcady of the West (New York: Doran; Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1919)? Seems like there is an affinity between the two.
I am not familiar with that book, but the similarities in the title are interesting, aren’t they?
(Re my previous comment: Margaret Hutchison WoodWARD is our author; Margaret WoodLAND Hutchison is the American author.
Ah! Thank you once again. I had been adding Woodland to this afternoon’s Googling. 🙂
Also of note is that she is recorded as a “clerk” and “bookkeeper” in Vancouver previous to being a teacher. And (per the Laurence bio) she lived for a while in a commune near Winnipeg for a time with other authors who had also then migrated to Vancouver.
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I am sorry to see how little is known about Margaret Hutchinson. Here’s what little I can add. In 1956 or 7 she was teaching Grade 1 at Lord Kitchener, a public school in the Dunbar neighborhood of Vancouver in 1956. I know this because I have in my possession a note that reads: “My name is Grant. I am a boy. I am in Grade One. I go to Lord Kitchener school. My teacher is Miss Hutchinson.” The note is graded, presumably by Miss Hutchison. She gave me a “B.”
Thank you for this, Grant!