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 Betty Lambert, 1933-1983
Betty Lambert was a Canadian writer with a distinctive voice that
spoke through her seventy-five diverse plays and her only novel,
Crossings,
in a way that once heard could not be easily forgotten. She was
once called by a reviewer the “Margaret Laurence of Vancouver” but
of course she was really the Betty Lambert of Vancouver. Her vision
was her own.
Betty was born in Calgary in 1933. She was from a working-class
prairie family and, growing up during the depression, she became
aware of social injustices early. She decided as a child that she
wanted to be a writer and sold her first poem at thirteen for two
dollars. She 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 soon it became more than that, it became a necessity.”
At sixteen Betty became a committed socialist and much of her work
deals with the social inequities of the time. Through her life
Betty often described herself as an angry woman—and she was. Angry
at the moral and social injustice she saw in the world. She used
her anger to shape her art, to say what she felt she had to say.
When she was eighteen Betty moved to Vancouver to attend
UBC.
She continued to write. By the age of twenty-two she was writing
radio plays for
CBC.
Betty’s early plays for radio are powerful but limited in scope.
They deal with small worlds and people with small lives. As Betty
grew and began to change her plays began to reflect this growth.
She began writing children’s plays, with great success. Her best
known play for children is
The Riddle Machine, which was
performed at Expo in 1967, went on a Canadian tour and was produced in the States.
She soon began writing television plays dealing with larger issues
and more controversial ones such as rape and abortion. She had
always been aware of a chauvinist attitude within the theatre
towards women as writers. When she was in her early twenties she
was told by her male director not to think about the message in her
writing. He told her, “You’re a diamond in the rough, you have
intuition. Don’t worry about the philosophical meanings in your
plays.” Shortly before her death in 1983 Betty said, “I took his
advice and got the dialogue and characterization down but not the
implications. It took me a long time to stand behind not only what
I was saying but also to say it very carefully.”
She worked very hard at learning to say what she had to say very
carefully. Her ear for dialogue was incredible. There is a Chekhovian
element to her dialogue. You are acutely aware not only of what her
characters say to each other but of what they don’t say. You are
also aware of the silences, the spaces between the spoken words.
In her late twenties Betty became involved in feminist issues and
although she never saw herself as a feminist writer she began to
write more of issues concerning women. Her own struggle as a woman
writer in the male-dominated world of theatre she described in
ironic terms on a CBC interview. She said “my own experience has
not been that there is any overt societal problem about being a
woman writer, the problems are rather internal, in how one perceives
one’s self. I remember one TV play I wrote about the miners strike
in the early 1900s in Nanaimo and how pleased I was that
someone said after 'You wrote that? God, that could have been
written by a man.' How do you fight, as someone said, when the
enemy has outposts in your own mind?”
But of course Betty did fight. She had a growing sense of her own
power, her own view of the world, and this becomes evident through
the plays she wrote during her thirties and forties. First came the
stage comedies. Her best known was
Sqrieux-de-Dieu,
which was highly successful and dealt with life, love, sex and human relationships in a devastatingly witty manner. In
Clouds
of Glory, she turned her comic insights to academics. She had
observed the Simon Fraser University scene since she began teaching
there in 1965 and the result was a hilarious but deep-reaching
comedy of the foibles of academia.
In the eighteen years that Betty taught at SFU she was remembered
most as a teacher of incredible wit, knowledge and generosity.
Despite a heavy workload of teaching and writing she always found
time to give to her students something of her own boundless
enthusiasm that went far beyond the confines of the classroom.
In 1979 her only novel,
Crossings,
was published. The book is set in Vancouver and is the story of
Vicky, a young woman growing up in the sixties, searching for
self-recognition as a writer and as a person. It is also the story
of how Vicky, educated, intellectual, comes to love Mik, an
uneducated and sometimes violent logger with a tattoo on his chest
that says Coffee over one nipple and Cream over the other (you’re
supposed to ask, Where’s the sugar?). The novel searches deep into a
woman’s psyche and soul to discover why and how we love the men we
do. The book caused a feminist furor. A prominent feminist
bookstore in Toronto advocated buying it and an equally prominent
feminist bookstore in Vancouver banned it from its shelves.
After the publication of
Crossings
Betty began writing her most powerful and universal plays, such as
Grasshopper Hill, which won the ACTRA Nellie award in 1980
for best radio drama, and
Jennie's Story,
which was nominated for the Governor General’s award in 1983, for
best stage play.
Grasshopper Hill
was the story of a Canadian woman who has an
affair with a Jewish survivor of Auschwitz. Their affair
contrapuntally emerges with the survivor’s memories of Auschwitz and
Betty weaves a powerful and compassionate story of love and evil.
In
Jennie's Story
Betty wrote of an incident she had heard as a child in Southern
Alberta in the 1930s. Jennie is a girl of fifteen who is
housekeeper to the local priest. He becomes her lover and then,
unable to control his desire for her, he takes her to the mental
institution at Ponoka to be sterilized. He tells her to be silent,
to not answer the questions the doctors ask. Jennie, being a good
little girl, does this. They decide she is mentally deficient and
they sterilize her. Jennie is told she has had an appendectomy.
Until 1971 it was legal in Alberta to sterilize both men and women
who were feeble-minded or who were thought capable of transmitting
“evil” to their progeny. Seventy-five percent of those sterilized
were women.
Later, married and unable to conceive, Jennie finds out the truth
and the rest of the play deals with her inability to live with this
terrible truth, her terrifying need for vengeance and her ultimate
suicide. Although Jennie’s suicide seemed the dramatic end of the
play, Betty ended the play with a life-affirming scene. Harry,
Jennie’s husband, has taken a young farm girl as his wife and her
out-of-wedlock child as his. Betty had to fight with her directors
to keep this ending, as they saw it as redundant, but she said it
must stay and stay it did. Although she showed life’s evil in her
plays Betty was determined that the life force she also portrayed
was never to be seen to be destroyed by life’s evil.
In February, 1983, Betty found she had lung cancer. She knew she
didn’t have long to live and she said “I have so much to say, so
much to write about.” She spent many of the last months of her life
writing a final play,
Under the Skin,
which is based on an incident near Vancouver where a man kidnaps a
twelve-year-old girl and keeps her captive for six months while he
sexually abuses her. In the play we never see the little girl, but
only her mother, the kidnapper (a neighbour) and his wife, who is
the mother’s close friend. It is a fascinating study of these three
characters and the slow realization by the wife of what her husband
has done.
Betty’s plays have a strong theme of moral and social injustice.
Her roots as a prairie girl during the depression and her early
dedication to socialism later grew to produce the powerful plays for
which she became known. Her concerns with injustice to men, as well
as women, appear as biting ironic wit in her comedies and as a
profound sense of evil and deep compassion in her tragedies.
Betty never lived to see her final play,
Under the Skin,
produced. She died on November 4th, 1983, writing until
almost the end. Just before her death, blind from three brain
tumours, unable to speak because of pneumonia, she wrote on her
yellow pad, laboriously, letter by letter, “I want to write.”
Before she died Betty wrote her own memorial service. She asked
that it be a celebration, and it was. On November 22nd,
1983, people who loved her gathered together to celebrate her
life—as a remarkable woman and as a remarkable writer.
Written by Dorothy Beavington
August 8th, 1985 |
