Maud felt a lingering depression through the fall of 1915 and the winter of 1916. Perhaps it was an aftermath of childbirth; certainly it was accentuated by worry over the war, as well as over her many responsibilities. For a woman who was nursing a new baby, her schedule was very busy. She was president of the local branch of the Canadian Red Cross Society, which met every second Tuesday in Leaskdale Church. She worked hard with the local Presbyterian Women’s Guild, using her performance skills at fundraising events.
The Uxbridge Journal noted: “Nearly every battalion in France has a woman’s club at home working directly for it.” Women were very active in the war effort in rural communities like Leaskdale. They cared—they knew each boy who had gone overseas. They organized patriotic meetings to raise money for supplies for the battalions from their area. Registration was taken for “Women’s Emergency Corps,” recording the names of women ready to do the work at home of men who had enlisted. Maud’s friend Mrs. Norman Beal organized a large benefit for the support of the 116th Battalion. The proceeds purchased supplies. The Women’s Red Cross Society put on fundraising box socials, pie socials, and concerts so they could buy materials to make bandages and yarn for knitting socks. The war effort consumed the community. Maud taught her Sunday School classes, went on pastoral visitations with Ewan, and entertained as necessary.
When Stuart was three months old, his exhausted mother did not have enough breast milk for him. She had been beset by repeated breast inflammations, he was not gaining weight properly, and she feared for his survival. And for weeks Ewan had suffered from bronchitis—a very serious illness before the advent of antibiotics, given that it could develop into pneumonia. He was unable to preach.
It was not until March 1916, when Stuart was six months old and had been put on cow’s milk, that he began to thrive. Then Maud was able to resume the literary activities that she enjoyed. She travelled to Toronto for a string of festivities: an afternoon tea given in her honour by the Canadian Women’s Press Club; a reception and tea hosted for her by Mrs. Norman Beal and her mother-in-law; a reception honouring her by the Salisbury Chapter of the Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire (I.O.D.E.); a special tea for her given by Mrs. Talling, with the Reverend Dr. Marshall Talling doing the “honours of the house.”
Meanwhile, the war was beginning to make a deep impact on Canadians. The German army was rolling across Europe, seemingly unstoppable on its way to world domination. People were frightened that if Germany conquered England, Canada would become a German colony. Older men, as well as boys, now wanted to fight. Frederick George Scott, Canon of the Anglican Church in Quebec, a man well over fifty, was one of the many older men to enlist and serve on the front as a chaplain.21
The Reverend Edwin Smith—Ewan’s acquaintance, who had left the Island shortly before Ewan did—took a leave of absence from the Presbyterian ministry to serve in the British Navy. Other mature, married men of Ewan’s generation also enlisted. Sam Sharpe, the Uxbridge town solicitor, divested himself of his business interests and mobilized a county battalion in the Uxbridge-Scott Township area. Sharpe had been a prominent lawyer and businessman in Uxbridge and a Member of the Provincial Parliament. A graduate of Osgoode Hall Law School and the University of Toronto, Sharpe was married (but without children). By Christmas 1915, Lieutenant-Colonel Sharpe had enjoined 20 young men to enlist in this 116th Battalion, and he trained them for war. He eventually commanded over 250 men.
The example of a prominent man like Sharpe, who gave up a comfortable life and business, inspired others in the community. Canadians wanted to do their bit for the “Old Country”; loyalty to Britain was everywhere. In Zephyr, Robert F. Brooks was one of the most successful farmers in the area, with a hundred-acre farm. He noted that he had no wife or family dependent on him: “They need me ‘over there,’ and I’ve got to go.” Newspaper clippings describe the auction sale of his top-quality farm animals and equipment. Brooks’s sacrifice was the talk of the entire county. Neighbours bid up the prices to show their own patriotic spirit.
Even Stuart Forbes, the lackadaisical missionary supported by Ewan’s parishes in Honan, China, simply vacated his post and headed to Europe to fight. He did not bother to notify Ewan of his departure, and the whole missionary business ended as a defeat and a humiliation for Ewan.
Ewan’s contribution to the war effort thus far had been to organize or to help at recruitment meetings.22 He soon had a new task, however: comforting the heartbroken families when their sons were maimed or killed. The bad news came by telegram, and the telegram’s arrival was normally announced over the telephone. Because all the country homes were on “party lines,” every time a phone rang, everyone on the party line could listen in. The mere ringing of a telephone began to fray already taut nerves. Nearly twenty young men from Scott Township were killed before the war was over.
In the case where a son had been slated to take over his father’s farm and look after his parents, the death was more than emotionally devastating—it was a disaster for the entire family. Maud suffered over the loss of local boys as much as Ewan did: she had taught many of them in Sunday School or directed them in church programs, and every loss was personal. And each time she and Ewan had to comfort families over their loss of a son, she relived her own intense grief at the death of her second baby.
Maud’s faith was increasingly tortured: although she believed in the concept of sacrifice, she found it hard to believe that this was God’s plan for these young men. She knew she would not want her own sons to go and was thankful that they were so young, a sentiment that wracked her with shame. These feelings resulted in considerable internal conflict, which she dealt with by turning her powerful emotions into stories or poems.
Newspapers were full of the war news, and Maud’s vivid imagination was fired by the exaggerated propaganda. Maud’s diary entry of January 1, 1915, states that Frede, who had visited again over Christmas, had returned to Montreal, and Maud would miss talking to her about the war. “Ewan refuses to talk about it. He claims that it unsettles him and he cannot do his work properly.” She follows up this revealing—and totally unexplored—statement about Ewan with, “No doubt this is so; but it is rather hard on me, for I have no one else with whom to discuss it. There is absolutely no one around here who seems to realize the war.” She adds: “… it is well they do not. If all felt as I do over it the work of the country would certainly suffer. But I feel as if I were stranded on a coast where nobody talked my language.” Fortunately, the women with sons dying in the trenches could not read Maud’s private thoughts about their seeming complacency.
Despite her doubts, Maud continued to see the war in dramatic terms, and she believed those who sacrificed their lives were heroes, no matter how much personal pain the war caused. Increasingly, the war was all that she thought of and wanted to talk about. Her journals show that she was absolutely consumed by it, wracked by it, tortured by it, obsessed by it—even addicted to it. All Ewan could do was walk to the local store to fetch her the newspaper every day, and he did this faithfully. But what did Ewan feel? Why did he refuse to talk about it, when he otherwise tried to please his wife? His refusal could not have been just because he was “busy.” Did he feel guilty because he was not one of the older men, including ministers, who had enlisted, like Canon Scott and Edwin Smith? Did he squirm over his complicity in sending young boys to war while he stood safely in his clerical collar in the pulpit, preaching the virtue of giving one’s life to destroy evil? He did believe that the German Kaiser was evil incarnate and that fighting was necessary, but it could not have been easy for a thoughtful man like him to comfort families whose sons were now dead. As a minister who had studied religious wars in history, he could see how religion had been used throughout history, especially in Scotland’s bloody past, to urge people to battle, and justify murder and killing.
Ewan made his own small war effort: in August 1916, he helped found a War Resources Committee, partly to aid bereaved families. He became more sub
dued, obviously troubled deeply about the war, his relation to it, and the impact on those he knew. Whatever the complexities of his marital situation, the husband who had been displaced by a baby was now displaced by the war.
—
In November 1916 that Maud’s first book of poetry, The Watchman, was published. “The Watchman” was the name of the highest sand dune on the Cavendish shore, the local topographical peak, and the title poem presents a “watcher of the world,” looking over the onslaught of war. She finished the poems collected in The Watchman at the end of March 1916, after working on the collection for some time. This was her own personal response to the war—to enfold it in poetic metaphor, which provided a feeling of control over a frightening new world. She was deeply involved with this book on an emotional level.
During the war years, she read and reread many history books, seeking historical perspective on the repeated occurrences of war throughout the ages. Maud’s vivid imagination led her to visualize war’s horrors and feel tormented by these images. She agonized over what appeared to her to be humanity blindly repeating the same mistakes. She was obsessed with the war, but she could not stop herself. She put up a map of Europe and followed each advance of “the Enemy.” Towns in Poland with names she was unable to pronounce became as familiar as Toronto, Uxbridge, and Leaskdale. When she became too overwrought, she locked the door of her bedroom and paced the floor. Once again she was a helpless prisoner of her agitated moods.
Nevertheless, the Macdonalds’ Christmas Day in 1916 was a very happy one. Frede was with them again, as she so often was. The Watchman had been published in November. The church enjoyed its annual Christmas concert. For a week, the Macdonalds had a wonderful time, laughing, eating good food, visiting, and playing with the babies. Again, laughter filled the house. One maid said of Frede, “She was funny as all get-out.” After Frede’s departure, Maud wrote in her journals, “We had a delightful week and I think I can live comfortably on it through the winter” (January 4, 1917).
Her overall mood, however, remained anxious and contemplative. She wrote the next day that “I have been contented in my marriage, and intensely happy in my motherhood. Life has not been—never can be—what I once hoped it would be in my girlhood dreams. But I think, taking one thing with another, that I am as happy as the majority of people in this odd world and happier than a great many of them.”
One suspects that Ewan had many similar feelings—content with his family, but at the same time unconnected to a woman whose intensities were so powerful, and whose broader inquiries into the human heart left little time for worrying about what was in his. And what was there, in his heart? Confusion? Shame? Jealousy? Disappointment? Were there only flat, impoverished emotions, with something truly missing (as Maud had come to believe)? Or was his flatness a function of an underlying depression? Ewan was merely discouraged by the demands that were made on him: writing sermons to make sense of a confusing, changing world; producing erudite sermons that could take him to bigger and better parishes to please Maud; and finding some way to feel heroic himself, since his wife lived in a world where heroism was important. He saw that Maud was a model to many people, and he was just a country parson—a good enough man, certainly; an intelligent man without question; but a man lacking the gifts of self-assurance, the boundless energy, and natural charisma to take him where his wife wanted him to go. He no doubt felt threatened by it all, and yet he stood in awe of the woman he had married.
CHAPTER 9
Maud’s focus was not only on the war abroad. There was also a war brewing in her professional life. A royalty report from her publisher, L. C. Page, in February 1916 was worrisome: he claimed that the sales of Anne of the Island amounted to only 3,200 copies. This was considerably fewer than she had expected, and she suspected Page of dishonest accounting.
Maud had initially offered The Watchman to Page, but Page had brusquely refused it, on the grounds that poetry did not make money. She was furious: he had already made a fortune on her novels, and this book was especially important to her.
By now, Maud had been chafing for several years at Page’s insistence on the initial “binding clause” that held her later books to the same paltry royalty rate of Anne of Green Gables. Her contract to give Page subsequent books had run out with the publication of Anne of the Island in 1915. She could now leave Page with good conscience, and his insensitive refusal of The Watchman was the last straw.
On her literary jaunts in Toronto, she had met John McClelland, of McClelland, Goodchild, and Stewart (soon to be McClelland and Stewart), and she had engaged the company to publish her poems. Page’s refusal to publish The Watchman would prove to be a costly mistake for him. John McClelland’s decision to take on a book of poetry that would itself make no money was undoubtedly the best business decision he ever made. With it, he acquired “L. M. Montgomery” as his author, and the sales of her best-selling books helped his firm become Canada’s pre-eminent publisher of Canadian authors for the rest of the twentieth century.
Maud promised McClelland her next novel, Anne’s House of Dreams. On his advice, she joined the Authors’ League of America, an association that would be able to offer her legal help if her disagreements with Page ever went to court. Lewis Page was well known as a man who used intimidation to get his way—first angry threats, then lawsuits.
In February 1917, while she was reading the proofs for House of Dreams, Maud received a threatening letter from Page: he was furious that she was moving to another publisher, and he had found a pretext to withhold her royalties. In May 1917 she engaged a lawyer through the Authors’ League to deal with Page.
Anne’s House of Dreams (1917)
Anne’s House of Dreams is a story of pre-war Prince Edward Island, but it introduces events and emotions more troubling than ever before. In it, Anne’s first child dies at birth, an experience Maud knew all too well. Anne becomes pregnant again, and another baby is born. The “house of dreams” now has a dream fulfilled. At first, it appears to be a book about happiness in marriage—Anne’s and Gilbert’s—and fulfillment in child-bearing. On the surface, the book reinforces romantic attitudes about marriage. Yet Gilbert is always out of sight, and Anne finds a community of other friends.
The book introduces several new characters: a handsome young journalist with the sophisticated authorial skills to turn traditional Island tales into a sellable work; and Captain Jim, a retired sea captain, whose best stories, Maud wrote in her journals, came from her own grandfather. And there are new women characters, as well: Susan Baker, a funny, warm-hearted helper and friend, the housekeeper that Montgomery must have dreamed of; and Miss Cornelia, sharp-tongued gossip and “man-hater,” able to vent some of Maud’s own less “respectable” feelings. The novel provides another glimpse into the comfort that friendship and shared storytelling can provide.
The real focus of the book, however, is the mysterious woman whom Anne sees in the distance one day. She is beautiful, closed off, and tragic. Her name is Leslie Moore—the initials “L.M.” are Maud’s own, of course. Leslie Moore is tragically yoked to a man who is, literally, an emotional zombie, one of the walking dead. Leslie was forced to marry this man, Dick Moore, by her controlling mother, even though she did not love him. On one of his trips abroad, he had a debilitating accident and was shipped back, a shell of a man. Leslie is held in her marriage by a sense of obligation. Inside the lonely and depressed Leslie—who must be a wife to this dead-in-life man—lies a smouldering vitality and near-explosive frustration.
This ill-advised marriage is a startling new theme for Maud, one undoubtedly drawn from her anxiety about her own marriage. Dick is human only biologically. He is unable to connect emotionally to others. The tragic marriage of Leslie and Dick Moore is ended by medical intervention. When his human side and memory return after an operation, Leslie finds that Dick is not her husband after all. He is simply a cousin of her husband, a man who bears a remarkable resemblance to Dick—and Dick, it turns ou
t, is long dead. The repressed, frustrated Leslie is suddenly free to marry again.23
By then Maud was no longer living with the man she thought she had married. Ewan’s capacity for pleasure seemed somehow crippled: he did not take the kind of joy that she did in nature or in other kinds of beauty. He had been lively in her presence when they were courting and during the early part of their marriage, but increasingly he exhibited a curious emotional flatness in his relationship to the world around him that she could not understand. He fell into abstracted moods, was subdued and lethargic. He looked sad. In this era, husbands and wives often lived in different intellectual spheres, but Maud had hoped for a marriage where there would be at least some companionship.
In the novel, an outsider falls in love with the emotionally starved Leslie’s new lover. This young man is a talented journalist named Owen Ford. He speedily wins the repressed heart of “L.M.” The beautiful Leslie Moore eventually moves into a marriage as happy as that of Anne and Gilbert, after being freed from her husband.
Perhaps Maud remembered one of the ministers at Ewan’s induction, Edwin Smith. Smith was very active as a journalist, and he could easily have provided a partial model for Owen Ford. Edwin Smith had the same kind of easy charm as Owen, the same interest in many things, including a notorious fascination with boats and sailing, and the storytelling ability of Captain Jim. After his war service, he would be known as “Captain Smith.”
Anne’s House of Dreams was dedicated to Laura Pritchard Agnew, Maud’s childhood friend in Prince Albert, “In Memory of the Olden Time”—a puzzling dedication. Laura married her childhood sweetheart, a man who adored her, and she apparently had a happy marriage, at least to Maud’s eyes. But Maud privately thought Laura’s husband a dull, insipid man—nothing quite as bad as Dick Moore, but still not worthy of the lively Laura, except in his devotion to her. Perhaps this novel was dedicated to Laura for no particular reason other than to deflect attention away from its real subject: the pain of Maud’s own emotional loneliness in a marriage.
Lucy Maud Montgomery Page 25