Lucy Maud Montgomery
Page 14
Local legend says that when Maud Montgomery arrived in their community, Herman was already seriously courting Ettie Schurman, one of the most beautiful and eligible young women in Prince County. The Schurmans were a very prominent family, with large, prosperous farms, and the match between Ettie and Herman would have been seen as very suitable by both families. Herman often went off to Baptist church events, as described in Maud’s journals, and the reason he did not take Maud with him, as might have been expected, was because he went to see Ettie.
The love affair that Bedeque remembers was not between Herman and Maud, but between Herman and Ettie. (Maud’s romance with Herman was carried on secretly, and under the circumstances, it is highly unlikely that Herman told any stories out of the bedroom.) Herman and Ettie were apparently engaged to be married in 1899, the year that Herman died. With his death, the community experienced the loss of one of its most popular young men. Over one hundred carriages carrying people from the surrounding area came to his funeral. Afterwards, Ettie grieved long and hard, and she is remembered for her sorrowful planting of blue forget-me-nots on his grave.
Much later, Ettie married a dashing war hero named Munsey who had moved from Alberta to Prince Edward Island. They had two little girls, Pril and Doris. Then, tragically, only ten years after Herman Leard’s death, Ettie Schurman Munsey died.57
Constance Carruthers, a family friend of Ettie’s children, said that when Herman took Maud, the incumbent teacher living in the Leard house, to local church socials, he would have done so out of courtesy. Mrs. Carruthers noted that by Maud’s own account in her journals Herman did not take her “with him on his trips to the ‘Corner’ or to Central Bedeque. Nor was she [Maud] invited to drive across the ice to a Summerside church with him on Sunday evenings.” These were his times for Ettie, the girl he was seriously courting and planned to marry. Ettie’s acceptance of such invitations from him, given the customs of that era, indicated that Herman and Ettie were either already engaged at that point or at the least had serious “intentions of matrimony,” both before and during the time when Maud was living with the Leards. It is inconceivable that Maud did not know of his attentions and attachment to Ettie.
As adults, Herman’s younger sisters told stories about how amused they had been to observe “Miss Montgomery,” their teacher, flitting from window to window, watching for Herman to return from events to which she had not been invited. They sensed that Maud was very fond of their brother, and that she was jealous when his attentions went elsewhere. They remembered her as being “pouty” and “moody” when Herman went out on horseback to see Ettie, but lively and fun when he was home.
Maud’s journal account of her romance with Herman mentions no other woman in his life. Maud’s attachment to Ed was known (Ed visited the family at Christmas to see Maud, and Maud did not break the engagement with Ed until spring). If Herman was already attached to Ettie Schurman at the time, then he was trifling with one person while engaged to another, just as Maud herself was doing. Perhaps Herman felt that Maud, being engaged, was behaving immorally, and so he was free to do the same. Or, perhaps he was trying to see, in good faith, which woman he liked better. If Herman was genuinely interested in Maud for awhile, Ettie won out: she was much prettier and welcomed his courtship outright.
As we read her journals, we must keep in mind that Maud was an avid consumer of all kinds of literary romance, and she probably embellished the story of her entanglement with Herman when she recopied her journals after 1919. A convention of nineteenth-century romance is the “two-suitor” plot, in which a young woman must choose between two men who offer totally different prospects.58 Polishing up the Herman “affair” years later, prior to committing it permanently to her journals, Maud may have utilized this structural convention—she is the passionate woman who has to choose between two men: one whom she loves but cannot marry because of his class, and another who is suitable, but whom she does not love. Framing her own situation in these literary terms, Maud wrote, “There was I under the same roof with two men, one of whom I loved and could never marry, the other whom I had promised to marry but could never love!” (April 8, 1898).
In fact, Maud’s account in her journals gives the impression that she rejected Herman. But local history says his heart was elsewhere and that Maud knew it. What is posterity to make of this discrepancy between Maud’s account of her thwarted romance with Herman Leard and local memories? A close reading of Maud’s version—told in a very convoluted way in her journals—reveals that Herman Leard did not actually propose to her. This section of her diaries is one of the most carefully written sections in the entire ten volumes. It is so carefully constructed, in fact, that casual readers will not even notice at first that Maud is still very much engaged to Ed when she nuzzles with Herman. Maud’s pride no doubt motivated her to tell the story as she did, implying that she rejected Herman. She would have believed that no one could gainsay her years later, particularly since she stipulated that her full journals could be published only after her own death.59
A poem written by Maud in February 1921 can be reread in light of the story of Herman Leard and Ettie Schurman. This poem is entitled “The Bride Dreams.” Recall here that Maud was small and dark, and Ettie Schurman was fair and beautiful. In the poem, a young couple has married. The bride, small and dark, records a nightmare in which she has died and been buried in her wedding gown. In the grave, she can see the living folk above. Her husband is being pursued by a wheaten-haired young woman who resembles Ettie.60
IV
Then I felt a thrill the dank earth through
And I knew—Oh, I knew
That it came from your step on our path from the dale;
Almost my heart began to beat!
Proud of her golden ring, at your side—
That slim white girl who lives at the mill,
Who has loved you always and loves you still,
With her hair the colour of harvest wheat
And her lips as red as mine were pale.
How I hated her, so tall and fair
And shining of hair—
Love, I am so little and dark!
My heart, that had once soared up like a lark
At your glance, was as a stone in my breast:
Never once did you look my way,
Only at her you looked and kissed—
My eyes were sunk in cruel decay
And the worms crawled in the silk of my vest—
(Keep me from death, Oh, my lover!)
Maud says that she finished this long poem in February 1921; and she thought it very good. The dream motif was a natural one for Maud: she had vivid dreams all her life that either reworked past experiences or were visionary dreams that she used to read the future. In February 1920—a year before she finished this poem, and at a time when the memory of her passion had been stirred up again—Maud had just finished reworking, polishing, and recopying the story about Herman Leard into her journals (see entry of March 3, 1920). Significantly, another man who appreciated her talents had entered her life by that point, and his admiration fostered another burst of creative energy—not only in the production of fiction, but also making a permanent record of her life by recopying her journals.
CHAPTER 5
The Golden Decade, 1898–1911
Maud’s grandfather’s death closed the book on Bedeque. It ended, in a dignified way, the tortured affair of Herman. In life, Grandfather Macneill had given Maud the love of word and story; in death, he gave her the freedom to write.
Although Alexander Macneill was seventy-eight, his death was unexpected. Maud wrote, “The shock was terrible.” Then she added, “[I]n all truthfulness, I cannot say that I have ever had a very deep affection for Grandfather Macneill.… Nevertheless, one cannot live all one’s life with people and not have a certain love for them” (April 8, 1898). Perhaps a more honest and (and less gracious) version of Maud’s feelings appears in her semi-autobiographical novel, Emily of New Moon
. There Emily’s stern maiden aunt reflects on her father: she “involuntarily remembered the ashamed, smothered feeling of relief when old Archibald Murray died—the handsome, intolerant, autocratic old man who had ruled his family with a rod of iron all his life and had made existence at New Moon miserable with the petty tyranny of invalidism that closed his career” (Chapter 6).
Maud had acknowledged that there was much to admire about her grandfather, citing his “rich, poetic mind, a keen intelligence and a refined perception” (January 7, 1910)—but as she looked at her grandfather in his coffin, her grief was tempered by her many memories of fearing his stinging sarcasm. Seeing her grandfather in his coffin made her recall her youthful mother’s still sadder funeral in that same room.
I was very young at the time—barely twenty months old—but I remember it perfectly. It is almost my earliest recollection, clear cut and distinct. My mother was lying there in her coffin. My father was standing by her and holding me in his arms. I remember that I wore a little white dress of embroidered muslin and that father was crying. Women were seated around the room and I recall two in front of me on the sofa who were whispering to each other and looking pityingly at father and me. Behind them, the window was open and green hop vines were trailing across it, while their shadows danced over the floor in a square of sunshine.
I looked down at the dead face of the mother whose love I was to miss so sorely and so often in after years. It was a sweet face, albeit worn and wasted by months of suffering. My mother had been beautiful and Death, so cruel in all else, had spared the delicate outline of feature, the long silken lashes brushing the hollow cheek, and the smooth masses of golden-brown hair.
I did not feel any sorrow for I realized nothing of what it all meant. I was only vaguely troubled. Why was mother so still? … I reached down and laid my baby hand against mother’s cheek. Even yet I can feel the peculiar coldness of that touch. The memory of it seems to link me with mother, somehow—the only remembrance I have of actual contact with my mother. (April 8, 1898)
Maud’s allusion to “shadows” that “danced … in a square of sunshine” were surely not part of her genuine memory as a small child. They are the writer’s artistic touch, added later. But they catch the life Montgomery would live— a watchful one, with a constant shifting between brilliant sunshine and deep shadows.
Alexander Macneill’s women did not bury their troubles when they buried him. The consequences of his will were a torture to his widow and an outrage to Maud. He had apparently left the writing of his will until he was too infirm to wield a pen. Written by another hand, it misspelled words and names, including his own wife’s, and was signed “Alex M. McNeill [sic]” in a shaky, stiff signature. In the will, he left all his farm real estate to his estranged son, John F. Macneill. To his “beloved wife, Lucyan [sic]” he left only his personal property, “all monies, mortgages[,] household furniture.”61 Nothing was left to his sons Leander or Chester, but he bequeathed one hundred dollars each to his living daughters, Annie and Emily; he left nothing to Maud, even as a token of affection, despite the fact that she was his late daughter Clara’s only child, and despite her lack of other prospects. She would be out of a home to live in as soon her grandmother died—or as soon as John F. claimed the house and Maud’s grandmother was sent to live with another daughter.
Although Alexander Macneill had been executor of his own father’s will—a model in its protection of the widow’s ownership rights and other powers, not surprising given Speaker Macneill’s legal training—he failed to use his father’s will as a guide for his own. His will does not specify who will inherit the actual house where his widow lives; arguably, the house was more in the category of “real estate” than “personal property.” On the basis of this will, John F. could (and did) claim the barn; he could (and did) claim the horses and carriages, leaving his mother and Maud without conveyance. Maud suspected that next he would claim the house (and, in time, he did). The will either manifested Alexander Macneill’s chauvinism, insensitivity, lack of foresight, or his cruelty—or, perhaps as Maud tartly put it, his foolishness. However, at first John F. Macneill made no attempts to oust his mother from her home. For the time being, Maud and her grandmother had a place to live.
Maud’s grandfather’s death was in other ways a blessing. Maud could now return to a home she loved and devote herself full time to writing. She was not like the many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women writers (in Canada and other countries) who had to toil with their pens all night to earn money for their families’ upkeep—women like the nineteenth-century Susanna Moodie. Maud’s mental energy was boundless, but her physical stamina was not: she had always been very susceptible to colds, flu, and other infections whenever she went without sufficient sleep.
Virginia Woolf’s famous 1928 treatise A Room of One’s Own states that women writers were disadvantaged by not having “wives” to take care of practical matters for them. (Like most male writers in history, William Wordsworth had a wife to pamper and feed him—plus, in his case, a gifted sister for companionship.) Maud saw she would now have exactly what she needed: the comforts of home, her quiet grandmother’s non-intrusive companionship, the stabilizing force of her grandmother’s routine, a room to write in where there were no minefields of sarcasm or sexy young men straying into her private space offering chocolates and affection. She would return the “debt of gratitude” to a grandmother who had made sacrifices for her. Maud had found stability, space, and respect—all under the rubric of “doing her duty.”
The village post office had always been in the Macneill kitchen, and this was another benefit. She could submit stories and poems, and any rejection slips sent in return could be kept secret. The post office also offered an ongoing window on life in Cavendish, as well as an opportunity to hear regular gossip from the steady stream of mail-fetchers. In her time away, Maud had learned to see her community in greater perspective, and she was ready to mine it for literary subject matter.
Maud was still only twenty-three years old. Ever her organized grandmother’s child, she planned out routines for writing and stuck with them. Her discipline with her writing would become legendary. Now she had time and space to learn more about the book, magazine, and newspaper markets.
She had more time for reading, too. She helped select books for the Cavendish Lending Library and subjects for discussion at the Cavendish Literary Society. She read biographies of women writers and discovered that many had led lives as circumscribed as her own. She reread the Brontë sisters’ stories about dark and brooding human passions, and Jane Austen’s cool analyses of sexual politics. She admired George Eliot’s novels, which set women within complicated social networks. And she remembered the Mathilde Blind biography, arguing that women should write about women’s preoccupations, their means of getting what they wanted, and their talk about their lives. Blind had said of Eliot’s early years: “Such was the place where the childhood of George Eliot was spent. Here she drew in those impressions of English rural and provincial life, of which one day she was to become the greatest interpreter. Impossible to be in a better position for seeing life …” Maud had only to think of the Macneill kitchen and post office where she had heard so many stories, the natural landscape she knew so intimately, and her affection for her “own people.” She hoped to immortalize Cavendish in literature, as Jane Austen, the Brontës, and George Eliot had all done before her, writing of the areas that they, as women, knew best. She would anchor herself in her community, and create a history for a rural society already in rapid transition; just as Sir Walter Scott, James M. Barrie, and Charles Dickens had done from a male perspective.
In 1890s periodical literature she had read the essays of reformist women and reactionary men who took different sides on “The Woman Question.” She would record the lives of women and children on her beloved Island. “To dwell among my own people” and to write their story became her goal. Later, around 1920, she wrote fondly of them:
After Maud moved back home to Cavendish in May 1898, she literally wrote “with a passion.” She sent out floods of stories and poems, and when many of them came back, she simply sent them to other magazines. Her persistence and diligence paid off, and the acceptances grew steadily.
At this same time, she experienced more turbulence in her personal life. Her sense of isolation from her own age group once again began to trouble her. On January 16, 1900, she received another devastating telegram: “Hugh J. Montgomery died to-day. Pneumonia. Peacefully happy and painless death.”
Maud was paralyzed. She did not write about her father’s death in her diary until May 1, 1900, when sunshine had started to coax life back into the landscape. Then she wrote about her feelings: