House of Dreams

by Liz Rosenberg

  With Ewan on the mend, Maud could at last turn her attention elsewhere. Trouble was brewing on the publishing front. Now that the Great War was over, she found herself embroiled in a private war with her old publisher, L. C. Page & Company. Her adversary was wealthy and ruthless. She needed all her resources, stubbornness, and courage for the battles ahead.

  In 1918, Maud had received an unexpected Christmas present. It was an expensive travel book, inscribed to her by her old publisher, Louis C. Page: “Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. L. C. P.” The gift was all the more surprising because Maud was in the midst of a lawsuit against the Page publishing company — a legal struggle that, as it turned out, would drag on for more than a decade.

  Maud had earlier brought suit against a poet who had plagiarized her work in a magazine. Maud had also sued the Page company over a missing chapter from Kilmeny of the Orchard. She had won both of these cases, and now she steeled herself to go to court again.

  This took grit. The Page Company — and Louis Page, in particular — was a formidable foe. Many authors, especially women authors, simply backed down in the face of his ferocious opposition. Page was a force to contend with, personally and financially, and Maud admitted that she was afraid of him. Louis Page was used to controlling his female authors, by turns courting, soothing, and threatening them. But as Maud wrote, she was one woman the Page Company would discover “they cannot bluff, bully, or cajole.”

  Louis Page was a graduate of Harvard University. Early on, Maud described him as “one of the most fascinating men I have ever met.” He seems to have been the magnetic type, to whom she was most susceptible. Louis Page had green eyes and long, dark lashes that he used to good effect. Maud was initially taken by his “distinguished appearance and charming manner,” and she also recorded in her journal that he came from a “fine old family.” The young author was dazzled by her publisher’s credentials. Yet she had also written, “The fact is that I do not trust him.” As it turned out, her instincts were wise.

  The terms of Maud’s first contracts with Page were poor even by the day’s standards. She received only a 10 percent royalty instead of the usual 15 percent, and that was based on the wholesale price of the book instead of the full retail price. Again and again, Maud failed to raise her royalty rate. But in 1915 she managed to omit the clause that guaranteed Page the right to all of her future books — freeing herself from them, or so she believed. With the publication of Anne of the Island, Maud’s contract with Page expired. But Maud foresaw trouble ahead and joined the newly formed Authors League of America as an extra precaution.

  Meanwhile, she had sold the rights to her next book — The Watchman and Other Poems — to the Canadian firm of McClelland, Goodchild & Stewart. McClelland also agreed to act as Maud’s literary agent in the United States. The Page Company angrily threatened suit over these arrangements, even though they themselves had turned down the book of poems.

  There was some talk of the Page Company working together with McClelland. But the Pages proved impossible to deal with. First, Louis Page declared that he would have nothing to do with McClelland. Then he wrote to McClelland on the sly to reopen negotiations. But Page was too late. Maud had already signed a contract with the American publisher Frederick A. Stokes Company. Their terms were generous. The Stokes Company agreed to pay Maud 20 percent royalties and a $5,000 advance.

  When the Page Company caught wind of this, they withheld $1,000 from Maud’s next royalty check, claiming they had made a mistake in an earlier royalty report. They also began selling reprint rights without her permission. If McClelland had become Maud’s agent in America, then Page would become her reprint agent — whether she liked it or not.

  Maud did not like it. She also knew that Page was withholding the $1,000 unfairly. In January 1919, just days before Frede’s final illness, Maud traveled to Boston to prepare for her first day in court. She was surprised how much Louis Page had aged — he looked dissipated and old; his way of life, she declared, had finally caught up with him. But she found it hard to pity the man who had run her around in circles for so long. In 1917, she had confided to her journal, “If Page is not honourable I am no match for him.” Now, two years later, she was determined to prove herself wrong.

  Maud was a good witness. While Louis Page kept licking his lips and playing with his watch, Maud remained calm and collected. In private, she would go up to her hotel room and cry after the hours in court — but no one would have known it from her coolness on the stand. Nor would they know that she always left feeling she had “made an incredible ass of myself.” The clear, eloquent voice recorded in the transcripts surprised Maud each time she heard it. Even the opposing lawyer complimented her on her composure, though, she noted wryly, that wouldn’t prevent him from “grilling me in his best style in the witness box.”

  The Page Company was anxious enough to offer Maud a settlement. They proposed $10,000, but Maud demanded $18,000. Page countered with $17,000. Maud held firm. She won her $18,000, but in the midst of her celebration came the devastating news about Frede. Maud left directly from Boston to Montreal. For a time, Frede’s death pushed every other thought aside.

  Maud’s settlement proved less victorious than it first appeared. She settled with Page for $17,880 for all of the rights to her first seven works. What she didn’t know was that Page already was in the midst of negotiating film rights to Anne of Green Gables — for $40,000.

  Had Maud held out a little longer, she would have earned $20,000 on that first movie deal alone. As it turned out, she never saw a penny of that money, or indeed of any film or dramatic rights to Anne of Green Gables.

  The first Hollywood film version of Anne, a silent movie, was released that same year. Maud resented the loss of income, she thought the film badly cast, and last but not least, Hollywood had added some offensive Americanisms. They added scenes that never appeared in the book, including one adventure featuring a skunk — an animal unknown to Prince Edward Island. In another scene, Maud spotted an American flag flying over Anne’s schoolhouse. “Crass, blatant Yankeeism!” she fumed.

  If the Page brothers, Louis and George, had underestimated Maud, she had underestimated them as well. Back in 1912, Maud had submitted stories to the Pages for her book Chronicles of Avonlea. The Pages chose the stories they liked best and threw out the rest — or so Maud had believed. Now it turned out that they had made copies of all the rejected stories, kept them, and were planning to publish them without her permission as Further Chronicles of Avonlea.

  Maud had already used selections of those rejected stories in other works. If they reappeared now, it would look as if she had run out of material and was recycling old work. Worse, many of these old stories were about Anne Shirley. Her new contract with the American publisher specified that she couldn’t print anything new about Anne with any other company.

  The Pages chose a red-haired heroine for the cover of Further Chronicles of Avonlea, taking advantage of the popularity of red-haired Anne Shirley. In court, lawyers and witnesses spent hours debating the exact shade of red in that cover girl’s hair, trying to decide if it suggested Anne. Was it carroty? Or a shade more auburn?

  This first suit was followed by more suits and countersuits. The Pages filed a suit against Maud for “malicious litigation.” Next they sued for libel, first in the Massachusetts Supreme Court, and then, when that was struck down, in the United States Supreme Court. The legal expenses on both sides were horrendous — and so was the cost to Maud’s nerves. One summer, Maud spent more than a month away from home dealing with the lawsuits — missing even Chester’s birthday.

  By 1919, Maud was sick to death of writing about Anne. In 1921 she published the last chronological book in the Anne series, Rilla of Ingleside, about Anne’s nearly grown-up daughter. Finally, she declared, she was “done with Anne forever.” She wrote to her old friend George MacMillan, “I swear it as a dark and deadly vow.” Maud had long wished to create a “new heroine,” a feat she
accomplished brilliantly with the character of Emily Starr, the aspiring young writer at the center of Emily of New Moon.

  Emily Starr resembles her creator, L. M. Montgomery — and her earlier creation, Anne — in many ways. Like Maud, Emily lives with elderly relatives; she uses letterbills on which to scribble her stories; she is imaginative, beauty loving, and outspoken. But Emily has a sharper edge than did Anne Shirley; she is thornier and less innocent. Readers embraced Emily of New Moon, and critics praised it as Maud’s best work since Anne of Green Gables. Emily was dedicated to Maud’s ever-loyal pen pal, Scotsman George MacMillan, “in recognition of a long and stimulating friendship.”

  It was not till late 1928 that the last of the suits between Maud and Page was resolved. Over that long, litigious decade, Maud managed somehow to keep her head above water. She had made it clear that she was a force to be reckoned with. And through the legal and emotional storms, she kept right on writing and publishing. She published two more Emily books: Emily Climbs and Emily’s Quest, although, as ever, she felt her sequels were weaker than the original. She wished she had the leisure to write her books more slowly and thoughtfully. Still, as Maud confided to MacMillan, “I can’t afford to damn the public. I must cater to it for awhile.”

  The Page Company had cost Maud — and themselves — thousands of dollars in legal expenses, each side believing that they could hold out longest. In the end, Maud triumphed. Public opinion turned slowly but surely against Louis Page and his unfair business dealings. When the renowned Wanamaker’s department store stopped carrying Page’s books, Louis Page had finally reached his limit. Maud had predicted this would happen, though she never dreamed that the court fights would be so ferocious or last so long. “I shall win because I can afford to lose and the Pages can’t,” she had written in her journal.

  She prevailed where other writers would have long ago surrendered. The famous Macneill stubbornness held her in good stead all during those fighting years.

  Ewan, meanwhile, continued his own more private, personal battle with mental illness. He fought against chronic depression and recurring bouts of paralyzing religious terrors. He mixed sleeping pills with bromides, and his already poor memory began to desert him. Sometimes he simply could not perform his duties. He slept from eight at night till noon the next day. Maud covered for him as best she could.

  Chester, the firstborn, much-loved darling, had developed into a problem child. He got into chronic trouble at school, with friends, with the domestic help, and especially with girls. Maud made excuses for him, blaming his troubles on the people around him, but even she began to have her doubts.

  There was disappointment for her on the literary front as well. A new, more “serious” cosmopolitan and realistic fiction was now in vogue. The most influential critics in Canada dismissed Maud’s books. William Arthur Deacon attacked her “series of girls’ sugary stories.” Maud was left out of public events and ousted from committees. She felt less welcome in Toronto’s literary society.

  But there were still rewards and delights to uphold Maud in these years. Stuart, her younger son, succeeded in everything he tried — academics, athletics, friendship. Stuart’s sweet-tempered company compensated for the lack of companionship she felt with her elder son, Chester, or her husband, Ewan.

  In 1923, Maud became the first Canadian woman admitted to the British Royal Society of the Arts. She accumulated thousands of loyal fans with each new book. Maud was invited to meet the Prince of Wales and received a fan letter from British prime minister Stanley Baldwin himself, addressed to her from the famous 10 Downing Street.

  Even when she had a house full of company, part of Maud’s mind was always occupied with whatever she was writing. Visitors witnessed these mysterious internal dialogues. Sometimes she would stand stock-still, laugh aloud as if in surprise, and murmur, “Why, that’s what I’ll do! That’s exactly what I’ll do” — and rush off to jot down a note or scene. She kept a notebook and pen in her apron pocket for these small literary “emergencies.”

  In 1922, Maud also fell in love again, perhaps for the last time — and with a place, not a person. The family took a trip to Muskoka, the beautiful lake district ninety miles north of Toronto. It was a popular, lively vacation spot in summer. At night the town of Bala was illuminated by colored lanterns, and dances were held at the large dance pavilion. Maud found it “more like fairyland than any place I ever saw” — with dozens of tiny islands, lakes, a river, an open bay, deep woods, and handsome summer cottages.

  John Mustard — Maud’s once-upon-a-time nemesis, teacher, and suitor — had built a summer cottage just north of Bala with his sons. Mustard was as youthful, fit, handsome, and capable as Ewan Macdonald was now stodgy, slow, and clumsy. The contrast between the two men must have been painful — but Maud responded as she had all her life, by retreating into her imagination.

  That summer she had some of the “sweet-lipped solitude” she craved, when John Mustard kindly took Ewan and the boys out on his boat, or back at their own boardinghouse while Ewan accompanied the boys on outings by the lake. Maud spent one such evening intensely daydreaming on the veranda.

  She wrote to George MacMillan how she had “dreamed it all out to the end of September.” In her mind she peopled Lake Muskoka with all of her beloveds, the living and the dead. Frede was there, of course, and Aunt Annie, Bertie McIntyre, Ewan and the boys (in her daydream, “Ewan was not a minister!”), and George MacMillan, too, was there. Maud had always possessed a preternatural ability to remove herself from a real situation into a dreamscape more vivid.

  Now, on the veranda of a boardinghouse, she dreamed her way into a lakeside Eden. She cooked and served imaginary meals. In her fantasy, George MacMillan, Ewan, and the boys were caught in a storm on the lake, while she and Frede held a lantern by the shore and awaited the men’s safe return. It may have been “silly and babyish,” or even “crazy,” she admitted, but Maud’s vivid dream life was like a second existence. And it often provided rich material for her writing.

  In 1926, Maud made one other debut — she published her first novel for adults, The Blue Castle. It was set not on Prince Edward Island but in the Muskoka Lake district. The Blue Castle is a wry, tender, unorthodox romance, one of Montgomery’s most fully realized works. It is a testament to her happy summer at Muskoka, and to her undimmed capacity for dreaming. It also served as an apology to another one-time nemesis, the motorcar. Cars had “nothing romantic about them,” Maud once declared, grateful that she had been courted in the era of the horse and buggy. But she came to see the romantic potential in speed and escape — and to learn firsthand about the danger of these newfangled machines.

  In 1918, Prince Edward Island became the last province in Canada to legalize the motorcar, and Maud’s sympathy lay with the stubborn islanders. She loved skimming along snowy and moonlit roads behind a horse and buggy. Maud’s most important courting had happened on carriage rides — those precious stolen moments when Herman Leard had nestled her head on his shoulder, and the evening Ewan proposed.

  But Maud also relished movement and change. When she made a list of everything she liked best in 1920, she included “motoring and driving,” noting that she enjoyed “a systematic life with occasional dashings over the traces.” She and Ewan bought their first motorcar in 1918 — a five-passenger Chevrolet. Only a few years earlier, cars were unheard-of in Leaskdale, and the mere sound of one was enough to set the whole neighborhood running. By 1918, automobiles had become commonplace. Maud earned more than $45,000 in royalties that year.

  Maud was never brave enough to drive herself, and was by all accounts a nervous passenger. One family friend remembered Maud clutching frantically at the insides of the car. Maud described herself as a backseat driver. “I content myself with poking Mr. Mac. in the back with my parasol if I think he is going more than 20 miles, and saying, ‘Beware’ in a sepulchral tone when I see him preparing to turn a corner.”

  Ewan was a remarkably poor
and clumsy driver. According to biographer Mary Rubio, “Ewan was maladroit when it came to anything practical or mechanical.” He had trouble remembering that he was not still driving a horse and buggy, and when he needed to stop the car quickly, he was likely to pull back on the steering wheel and holler “Whoa! Whoa!”

  Early automobiles started by hand with a crank. Ewan had a hard time managing the trick. The Macdonalds regularly burst a tire on the rough road to Zephyr, and it was not uncommon for an axle to fall off. By 1921, Ewan had already gotten into a series of fender benders, and Maud decided that their Chevrolet was not sturdy enough to withstand all the wear and tear. So they bought a new, elegant Canadian Gray-Dort touring car the family nicknamed Lady Jane Grey.

  Unfortunately, Lady Jane Grey provided no guarantee against mishaps. A month after they’d purchased the new car, Ewan came to a blind corner of a crossroads and crashed into an oncoming speeding Chevrolet. Both cars sustained damage, though no one appeared badly hurt. Lady Jane Grey had a bent axle, a crushed fender, and a broken headlamp. The Chevrolet reported eighty-five dollars in damages.

  The Macdonalds were unlucky. The man driving the Chevrolet was the cranky, warlike Marshall Pickering, an elder in the Zephyr Methodist church. Maud thought her own husband to blame for his careless driving but Pickering equally to blame for speeding. The Pickerings insisted all the fault lay with Ewan. The next day, Marshall Pickering went to the hospital due to a “stoppage of urine.” (Pickering had suffered from prostate troubles for many years, and had been treated for this same medical problem previously.)

  Ewan called on Mrs. Pickering to express his sympathy for her husband. She made snappish remarks about Ewan’s poor driving. The minister then visited Marshall Pickering in the hospital. There he met Pickering’s son, who confided that his father had arranged for a prostate operation a month earlier.