By 1916, Ewan had become largely absent in his wife’s diary. He was rarely mentioned in the first half of 1916, for instance, unless he was ill. In this year, he was sometimes away at recruiting meetings (December 10, 1916; January 5, 1917), and these had begun to depress him. Maud’s diary does not record much joy in her own relationship with Ewan, an absence made all the more noticeable because she does write extensively about her love of her children. In fact, it could be argued that her journal was beginning to substitute for the emotional closeness that might be found in a satisfying marriage. Maud writes on March 16, 1916: “How I love my old journal and what a part of my life it has become. It satisfies some need in my nature. It seems like a personal confidant …”
It is a curious fact that when the Polish army chose one of Maud’s books to issue to their fighting troops in World War II, they chose Anne’s House of Dreams. It was supposed to inspire the young men to fight for the ideal of happy married love, a peaceful hearth, and a safe home. The book implies such pleasures. But its real power comes from Maud’s powerful depiction of the longing for that love and home.
Only Maud’s storytelling ability makes this book compelling. The novel’s plot is as far-fetched as a Gothic romance. Its happy ending strains credulity. But the novel works as a strangely moving read because Montgomery has reached inside herself and externalized her feelings, showing the misery of a lonely soul, and the hope for a better future.
Less than three weeks after finishing Anne’s House of Dreams Maud began writing a version of her life called “The Story of My Career” for publication in Everywoman’s World, a popular magazine for women. Nothing could present a more different view of her life from the depths sounded in Anne’s House of Dreams. Now available as The Alpine Path (Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 1975), it provides a sanitized account of her childhood—retelling many anecdotes from her diaries—and ends with her move to Leaskdale, presumably to be forever happy as the contented wife of a clergyman. However, her journals give a different narrative:
I was never in love with Ewan—never have been in love with him. But I was—have been—and am, very fond of him. He came into my life at its darkest hour when I was utterly lonely and discouraged with no prospects of any kind, and no real friends near me. At first I thought I could never care at all for his type of man; but I did; and I married him—and I have not regretted that I did so.… But I write not of these things for the Editor of Everywoman’s. My grandchildren may include what they like in my biography. But while I live these things are arcana. (January 5, 1917)
In the “Story” of her career, she tells how she always wanted to be a writer, and focuses on the perseverance that allowed her to climb “the Alpine Path” to success and fame. The touch is so light in this version of her life that the public believed that she had lived an uneventful and wholly satisfying life until her personal journals began to be published in 1985.
Memories about the family dynamics in the Leaskdale manse were few by the 1980s, but the succession of maids employed by Maud from 1912 onwards did have some superficial observations.24 Maud treated her maids as members of the family, and they all ate meals together. All the maids liked Ewan very much, although many viewed him as rather “stodgy.” Some commented on his inactive nature and his “fleshiness,” but they thought him very fond of his wife (and her very fond of him!). To them, he was a “typical man,” though unnaturally maladapted to the tasks most men should have been doing in the house. However, the Leaskdale maids all regarded the Macdonald family as a very normal and typical family, with the standard family “devotions” after breakfast (“standard Presbyterian fare” at the time, said one maid). These consisted of Ewan reading a passage from the Bible followed by prayers, the entire ritual lasting from five to ten minutes. Maud they remembered for her unfailing sense of humour and companionable nature.
After Maud received a cheque for $2,500 (half her advance) from the Frederick Stokes Company (who became her American publisher after she left L. C. Page, and to whom she had sold the rights to Anne’s House of Dreams), she began looking in her notebook for ideas for her next novel. The plot of Rainbow Valley began to emerge, with the sound of impending war in the background.
The great Halifax Explosion was in early December 1917. Maud’s first thought, like that of many others, was that it was a German attack. This extraordinary tragedy—2.5 square miles of Halifax levelled and 1,600 people killed by the explosion of a ship carrying munitions—seemed to bring the war onto Canadian shores.
By now, stretched between her duties as a minister’s wife, a mother, and a writer, and her worries about the war, Maud’s physical health began to suffer. She was continuously sick with colds or the flu, or other ailments. People noticed that her hands were never still: they were knitting socks for soldiers, crocheting, or otherwise in perpetual motion, nervously wringing or grasping each other. Maud always lived on the edge with her nerves, and her emotional fragility increased during this time, both because of the war and because of her looming legal dispute with her publisher, which had the potential to ruin her financially.
Rainbow Valley (1919)
In Rainbow Valley, started in early 1917 and finished in December 1918, she found her own memories of an idyllic childhood irrelevant. She had grown up thinking that wars in other countries were as far away as the moon. It seemed beyond comprehension that the world could have shrunk so fast. National boundaries and oceans of space no longer protected people from war in other lands. In this novel, Maud made a transition from the isolated and lovely atmosphere of Avonlea to the horror of war in Europe.
Maud finished Rainbow Valley the day before Christmas, some six weeks after the war had ended. The novel is set before the war, but as she wrote it, she knew the outcome of the war, who would die, and who would return. Her half-brother Carl Montgomery had lost part of a leg at Vimy Ridge; Edwin Smith had been decorated for service by the British Navy and demobilized; and many of the young men she had taught as boys in Sunday School were now lying beneath the poppies in Europe. She dedicated her new book to three of the young men in the Leaskdale and Uxbridge parishes who died in the war: “To the memory of Goldwin Lapp, Robert Brookes [sic], and Morley Shier, who made the supreme sacrifice that the happy valleys of their home land might be kept sacred from the ravage of the invader.”25 The language of the dedication reflects the language of the pulpit, the Bible, and World War I propaganda.
In this book she introduces the Meredith family: a sad, dreamy widowed minister and his neglected, unruly children. Another new character is the orphan Mary Vance, fostered first by the Merediths, and then by Miss Cornelia. Mary Vance, coming from an abusive background, is coarse and must be nurtured into acceptability. A range of personalities interact: dreamy, bossy, or managerial, lovable or not. Anne and her husband, Dr. Gilbert Blythe, are so mature and respectable now that they are dull. Mary Vance, Miss Cornelia, and Susan Baker (the Blythes’ cook) are the most piquant and forthright. Anne’s son Walter is developed as “different,” a sensitive child who prefers aesthetic interests to rough-and-tumble fighting with other boys. He sees “beyond the veil,” glimpsing into a world that others cannot see.
The setting is “Glen St. Mary,” not far from “Avonlea,” but the people of Leaskdale still point to the Ontario valley that they believe was the basis for Rainbow Valley. Like so many of Maud’s novels, Rainbow Valley gives a sense of a tightly knit, repressive-but-lively-and-bustling Presbyterian community. The sylvan glen that the children call “Rainbow Valley” is a woodland haunt where they escape their hidebound and judgmental community. From its secluded and bubbling spring, they drink pure, cool water. The path from “Rainbow Valley” (recalling “Lovers’ Lane” in Cavendish) leads through the adult community to the wider world outside, and in this future world looms “the shadow of the Great Conflict … in the fields of France, Flanders, Gallipoli, and Palestine.”
On one level, the story provides comfort when John Meredith finally marries, givin
g his motherless brood someone sensible and practical to love and guide them. Amiable, good, and level-headed only when called to attention, Mr. Meredith spends much of his time thinking about the imponderables of theology. He is an endearing and wistful version of Ewan, an intelligent, abstracted, and generally ineffectual man.
The war precipitated another event. Frede Campbell, Maud’s cousin and treasured “kindred spirit,” had been dating a young chemistry instructor at the Macdonald College named Cameron MacFarlane, but told Maud several times that nothing would come of her relationship with him. He joined the Princess Patricia’s Light Infantry. Cameron, home on furlough and now a lieutenant, suddenly proposed on May 16, 1917. Six hours later they were married, just before he left for overseas. Maud described her response to the news as: “Dumbfoundered, flabbergasted, knocked out and rendered speechless.”
However impulsive the marriage, Maud was deeply hurt that Frede had married without telling her first—so much so, in fact, that Maud wrote her correspondent, George Boyd MacMillan, that she had been present at Frede’s wedding, when in fact, she had only visited Frede after the wedding.
Frede had been approaching twenty-eight when Maud married at thirty-six. Several of Frede’s romances had not worked out, and by the time the war came along, reducing the pool of men, Frede was in her mid-thirties, beginning to acquire the derogatory designation of “spinster.” Frede was an intelligent, strong-minded, and independent person. Moreover, she appeared to be launched on a brilliant career as a Home Economist at Macdonald College in Montreal. When women married, whether educated or not, they were expected to give up their professions and tend to their families. Frede joked in the summer of 1918, after her wedding, that she wished she “could have both the ‘job’ and the husband.” This meant that Frede’s education, which Maud had paid for, would essentially go to waste. Of course, many marriages were made in haste during wartime. In 1916, Maud’s younger half-brother, Donald Bruce Montgomery, had married quickly and unwisely in Winnipeg, and Maud saw both of these marriages as further casualties of war.
The war that everyone had expected to last only months dragged on for four years until November 11, 1918. The death of so many young men brought a psychic loss to all of Canada. Many of those who did return came back with missing limbs or with lungs damaged by poison-gas warfare, which shortened their lives. Others returned as psychological cripples, from shell shock or “survivor guilt.” The distinguished Colonel Sam Sharpe of Uxbridge was one of these latter: he committed suicide on his way home from the war, jumping out of a two-storey window in the Royal Victoria Veterans’ Hospital in Montreal. His funeral was huge and attended by many government dignitaries. “Survivor guilt” was not a concept at that time, and people could not understand why he had taken his own life, or imagine how he would have felt if he had been forced to resume life in a community where he would see the parents of young men who had died under his leadership. How could he forget those country roads where he had led his marching battalion of young boys, piping and beating their drums, expecting to return in glory? Many of them were now dead in unmarked graves in Europe, while he had survived.26
Maud, with a mind that ran to literary tropes, became consumed by the image of the “Piper,” an ambiguous figure who at first seemed to be a Scottish bagpiper leading men and boys nobly into battle, but who morphed into a trickster figure: the Pied Piper of Hamelin, leading children to their death. Her imagination was tortured by this shape-shifting character, who had had a very real incarnation in their own community of Scott Township, a bagpiper marching right through the centre of Leaskdale.
In these early post-war months, Maud was finding it increasingly difficult to maintain a positive outlook. In her journals, she expressed growing frustration with a world that did not reward noble thoughts and good deeds. She did not fully understand this changed atmosphere. She accepted religion’s loss of authority, but she was unwilling to relinquish her own belief that justice and goodness should prevail.
Back on June 17, 1916, when the war was well underway, she had voiced in her journal what so many in her generation felt, a feeling that intensified for her as time passed: “Our old world is passed away forever—and I fear that those of us who have lived half our span therein will never feel wholly at home in the new.”
For one thing, the war had reshaped the relationship between men and women. Before the war, and especially in Maud’s own younger days, newspapers and magazines had been full of articles and advertisements depicting women as the “weaker sex.” During the war, women had taken over much of men’s work—everything from running farms to working in munitions factories—and had proved themselves highly capable. Moreover, the war had shrunk the world: people would never again feel safe from the turmoil taking place on distant shores. The technology developed for war would itself transform communication and transportation, speeding up the pace of civilian life, demanding another huge adjustment for the population. Maud, already catapulted from rural Prince Edward Island to urbanizing Ontario, felt the change with particular intensity.
The war’s effect on technology was seen locally. In August 1917, the first flying machine ever seen in those parts had been spotted over Uxbridge. In November 1917, a small aircraft came down unexpectedly in a local field. The whole community converged on the plane and pilot to inspect the strange contraption before it took off again for Camp Borden in Ontario. The local paper gave it a long write-up, concluding:
The Great War has revolutionized the manufacture of air craft.… It is predicted that when the war is over they will come into general use for the conveyance of passengers and mail matter … but we doubt that a very large percentage of our population will trust their lives to any machine that flies through the air. (Uxbridge Journal, July 26, 1917)
The development of automobiles had also been facilitated by the war. In 1918, the Macdonalds bought a car with Maud’s income, a five-seater Chevrolet. Many of the parishioners now had automobiles too. Of course, in the days before snowplows, a car could still not be taken out in winter as it could not get through the drifts; nor could it be used in the spring when the dirt roads were “breaking up,” because it would get mired in the mud. So while travel in winter and early spring was still by traditional means (horse and cutter), there was a general recognition that the world had entered a new mechanized age.
But most of all, the war had undercut the very structures of human belief. The old view of the world, ruled by an omnipotent God who took an active and benevolent interest in all human affairs, was for many nearly impossible to maintain. Decimating a generation of young men hardly seemed benevolent. People might pray just as much, but many were no doubt wondering if God was listening—or if He even existed. If not, then ministers were playing a game of charades, and the Church was nothing but a social institution. Maud herself had already come to this view of the Church. Her pagan china dogs, Gog and Magog, must have smirked in the dark, dead hours of night.
When Ewan Macdonald chose the ministry for a profession, he entered one of nineteenth-century society’s most important and prestigious professions. In the twentieth century, he felt a loss in status, in light of the diminished power of and respect for his profession. Ministers in both large and small communities felt the impact of this changing outlook. The fiery rhetoric of war had turned to ashes in their mouth. Some of the contemplative personalities like Ewan, who had preached for sacrificial heroism while standing safely in his pulpit, were vulnerable to as much “survivor guilt” as the soldiers who returned safely.
Maud would later refer to the “spring of 1914” as the “last spring of the old world” (March 18, 1922). After that date, she said, the world changed. Her own intense sense of personal loss and tragedy were to intensify after the war, and her world view would darken.
The 1919 Influenza Pandemic
On September 1, 1919, Maud wrote in her journal that “1919 has been a hellish year.” For most people, the mere fact that the war was over mad
e it a good year. For Maud, it brought more grief. In 1919, death and mental disturbance deprived her of the two people closest to her. Neither tragedy was directly caused by the war, but both were part of what she described poetically as the poisonous red tide that flowed in its wake.
The “hell” of 1919 had actually started in October 1918 for Maud when she contracted the “Spanish flu” that killed seven thousand in Ontario alone. For two months after, she suffered the languor and depression that followed this illness. This particular flu was unusual in that it often killed the young and healthy, not just the old and sick. Maud reported that so many people died in a short time in Ontario that corpses had to be buried in mass graves because there were not enough coffins.
The Campbell family in Park Corner, Prince Edward Island, also came down with this influenza. George Campbell and his young son died, leaving his mother (Maud’s Aunt Annie) and his young and pregnant wife, Ella, to raise six children all under the age of eleven.
In November 1918, before she was herself fully recovered, Maud left Ewan and the boys in Lily’s care and went to Prince Edward Island to help Frede, who was caring for the entire Campbell family. “Frede and I can always laugh, praise be!” Maud once wrote. “I can’t conceive of Frede and I foregathering, even at seventy, and not being able to laugh—not being able to perceive that sly, lurking humour that is forever peeping round the corner of things” (July 22, 1918). Now, even in a time of enormous distress, after disinfecting the Campbell house, when all were in bed, Maud and Frede shut themselves up to “talk and laugh at our pleasure” (November 9, 1918). Maud was still at Park Corner when the November 11 Armistice was signed. She describes walking down the lane with Frede in the darkness, and across the Park Corner pond bridge “on a grim, inky November night.” They had skipped over that bridge in childhood, but the new world they were in was changing and darkening.
Lucy Maud Montgomery Page 26