Lucy Maud Montgomery

by Mary Henley Rubio

  When the flu killed George Campbell, his widow and mother lost their breadwinner—a devastating situation. But at least Frede had a good job at Macdonald College in Montreal and could be expected to help them.

  On January 12, 1919, following a dreary Christmas, Maud, still feeling weak and exhausted, went to Boston to appear in court against her publisher, L. C. Page. Relations with Page, who had been such a gracious host in 1911, had turned decidedly sour. Maud was now suing him for the royalties he was withholding out of spite after she moved to a Canadian publisher. He seemed to revel in needling her in every way he could. On Christmas Day 1918, an expensive history book from his firm came to her with a personal note in his own handwriting that read: “Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. L.C.P.” The book was named Sunset Canada.27 “Quite free and easy,” she snapped about the unwanted gift. “Especially for the man I’m suing in the Massachusetts Court of Equity for cheating and defrauding me!”

  When she arrived in Boston that January, she took an undisguised pleasure in seeing that L. C. Page had aged considerably in the eight years since she had seen him. His appearance showed evidence of the dissipated life she had heard that he had been leading—an observation that suited her sense of justice. She gave her testimony, but the trial continued. On the way home, she looked forward to stopping by Montreal, where Frede was teaching at Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue and supervising the Women’s Institutes in Quebec. She was considered a rising star in her profession. But just as Maud was finishing her business in Boston, she got a wire that Frede had contracted the flu and was seriously ill. The war was over, but this virulent flu was still sweeping the western world, and would eventually kill more people than the war itself had killed. Ominously, this was Frede’s third life-threatening illness.

  When Maud arrived at the Macdonald College infirmary, Frede’s condition was desperate: she already had the deadly pneumonia that so often followed this strain of flu. Maud slept in the infirmary, comforting and nursing Frede along with the nursing staff. Frede deteriorated over the next few days. She became too sick to talk, and then to laugh.

  Maud and Frede had always been held together by the bond of laughter. Humour allowed them to share problems, re-energize themselves, and pull themselves out of dark moods. Even the memory of jokes shared with Frede helped to steady Maud’s nerves. Now at her bedside in Montreal, Maud tried to cheer her with a tale of little Stuart’s struggle with a pancake. It had been “crisped” at the edge in frying. After trying to cut it with a spoon, he’d asked in a plaintive tone: “Mother, how do you cut pancake bones?” That was the last time Maud heard Frede laugh. On January 25, 1919, Maud waited beside her bed as Frede’s life ebbed away.

  It would be months later that she described Frede’s death. “She ‘went out as the dawn came in’—like old Captain Jim in my House of Dreams, just as the eastern sky was crimson with sunrise.” When Maud was able to write again in her journals, she anguished over the prospect of a life without Frede.

  How can I go on living when half my life has been wrenched away, leaving me torn and bleeding in heart and soul and mind. I had one friend—one only—in whom I could absolutely trust … and she has been taken from me. (February 7, 1919)

  Maud’s pain was so intense that she did not actually write up Frede’s death in her journals until the following September, entering it as a retrospective entry. She had been so overwrought with emotion at the actual time of the death that she was unable to cry or grieve. To her utter mortification, she instead broke out in uncontrollable and hysterical laughter. A friend of Frede’s, Miss Anita Hill, and the nurse held her tightly and comforted her. For two days Maud paced in nervous agitation in the living room of Frede’s residence. Tears finally came, but brought no relief.

  Frede’s sister-in-law, Margaret MacFarlane, came to help pack her possessions for dispersal. They found in Frede’s drawer a letter that she had written at the beginning of the flu epidemic directing how to divide her affairs in the event of her death—the wedding gifts from her husband’s friends were to go to his people, everything else to hers. Maud took back the silver tea service she had given Frede at her wedding for Chester’s use when he became an adult. Frede had adored little Chester. Maud also took several other items: a bronze statuette called “The Good Fairy” that had special meaning (she remembered Frede’s joy when it was the first wedding present); a pendant; and earrings of peridot and pearl, which an old beau had given Frede. She thought they might eventually go to Stuart’s future bride, or to one of the Park Corner nieces.

  Long before her death, Frede had told Maud that she had a fear of “being buried alive” and a “horror of the slow process of decay in the grave” (January 19, 1919). She had insisted that if she died first, Maud would see that she was cremated. Maud knew that many people, and perhaps even Frede’s own mother, would be upset over cremation, but she followed Frede’s wishes. She put red roses on the casket—Frede’s favourite flowers—for the brief funeral service in the reception area of the “Girls’ Building.” There was another brief ceremony in the crematorium at the top of the mountain in Montreal. Maud wrote:

  To see those doors close between us was far harder than hearing the clods fall on the coffin in the grave. It symbolized so fearfully the truth that the doors had closed between us for all time. I was here—Frede was there—between us the black blank unopening door of death. (September 1, 1919)

  Emotionally depleted, Maud returned to her life in Ontario. The entire community of Leaskdale mourned Frede’s death. Many years later, people still talked of Frede’s joyous laughter, the genuine, hearty kind that comes from within a person at ease with herself and her life. She made an impression on all who met her.

  For weeks after returning home from Montreal, Maud suffered from disturbing dreams and headaches. Well-meaning neighbours sometimes said the wrong things to her. Ewan was unable to comfort her, perhaps because his own demons were depriving him of the ability to empathize. For the rest of her life, Maud would mourn Frede. Every January on the anniversary of her death, memories flooded back. Periodically she would read all Frede’s old letters and feel disbelief that such a vivid personality could be dead. Often when she heard or saw something humorous, she felt a momentary stab of pain because she could not share it with Frede. For a private woman like Maud, one who had been conditioned all her life not to reveal inner worries, the loss of her one trusted best friend was catastrophic.

  She and Frede had developed very strong bonds, partly from kinship, and partly from shared experience. They both felt “different” from the rest of their family, that they were the “cats that walked alone.” Each had been a sensitive child who felt misunderstood. At school, each had been clever, leading to a feeling of exclusion from the circle of other schoolgirls. Frede had been a plain, almost ugly child, but, like Maud, she had been radiant with personality and joie de vivre. Each had suffered unrequited love affairs, despairing together that they might never find a mate. Both were ambitious women who wanted to take full university degrees, but neither had a family who could or would pay for them, despite their exceptional intellectual gifts. (Maud had paid for Frede’s training at Macdonald College in Montreal.) Their volatile temperaments were similar, and Frede understood Maud’s rising and falling moods. They shared everything—and when they did, their fears, insecurities, and anxieties turned into laughter. They were both widely admired for their competence and uniquely refreshing personalities, but each had a deep inner, reflective life. Maud was twenty-eight in 1902, and Frede nineteen, when their friendship began to develop, and they had seventeen years of “beautiful friendship” before Frede’s death. Maud wrote:

  Well, I must make an end now and face life without her. I am forty-four. I shall make no new friends—even if there were other Fredes in the world. I have lived one life in those seemingly far-off years before the war. Now there is another to be lived, in a totally new world where I think I shall never feel quite at home. I shall always feel as if I belong
ed “back there”—back there with Frede and laughter and years of peace. (February 7, 1919)

  Ewan’s illness

  Frede’s death seemed to have a domino effect: next, Ewan began to suffer from a deeper bout of serious depression. Ewan had always basked in Frede’s warm approval, and her death deprived him of someone who boosted his confidence.

  When he was well, Ewan was a smart, cheerful, practical man, with dimples and sparkling dark eyes. His sense of humour was a very different kind from Maud’s dry, wry, razor-sharp wit—he teased, bantered, and enjoyed playing practical jokes. When trying to tell a clever anecdote, he usually got the timing or punchline wrong. But his general affability made him lovable. Most of all, he was a kind man—the “kindest man who ever lived,” his son Stuart Macdonald said to me repeatedly. After years of dodging her Grandfather Macneill’s sarcastic digs, Maud valued kindness.

  In many ways, Maud and Ewan complemented each other. Maud was a driven “hard worker” in every respect, while Ewan “took things easy.” She was “high-strung,” living daily on her nerves; he was phlegmatic. This might have been a good combination, with Ewan able to calm Maud when she was overwrought, and her boosting him when he was too full of lassitude. There were complications, however: Ewan was subject to depression and Maud to wide mood swings. And there was little space in Ewan’s stern Scottish-Presbyterian culture for open discussion of his private feelings. Ewan had been raised in a world where men discussed actions and beliefs, but not their feelings. These he hid under his reserved exterior, brooding darkly. After the war, a major depressive episode washed over Ewan.

  Ministers had to cope with especially hard adjustments after the war ended. Society seemed adrift, and religion no longer acted as a compass. To reorient people to religion, church leaders started a sweeping ecumenical crusade called “The Forward Movement,” the aim of which was to bring congregations back to church, to allow faith to “heal the wounds of humanity.” The most dynamic ministers in various denominations were engaged to travel across the country, giving weeks of inspirational speeches to counter the general drift of society towards secularism.

  Ewan’s first major breakdown started the week that the first of these high-powered ministers descended on his parish to speak to his two congregations: the week between May 25 and May 31, 1919. Each night there was to be a different preacher in the area. Ewan was to meet them at the Uxbridge station, ferry them about, introduce them, and listen as they gave energizing speeches to parishioners. Then he and Maud were to host and entertain them at home before they set off again to speak elsewhere.

  As soon as the series started, Ewan’s first symptoms manifested themselves in a severe headache and insomnia. His behaviour became increasingly erratic. By mid-week he was morose and withdrawn, still complaining of his headache. He only went through the motions of hosting his guests. Once, he rose before dawn to walk the roads in agitation. Later, he wrapped a bandana around his head and lay in the hammock, moaning. After the men left, his symptoms varied from agitation to a catatonic, glassy-eyed state. This was a new and alarming development.

  At the end of that week, Maud insisted that Ewan see the doctor in Uxbridge. Dr. Shier diagnosed his problem as a “nervous breakdown” and prescribed rest, believing that Ewan was overtired from his busy schedule. Ewan was always glad to rest. He sought medical palliatives, such as were available then, to help him relax. Maud gives a spotty anecdotal account in her journals of the drugs that Ewan was taking then and later. However, throughout the rest of the year, Ewan was given various medications: barbiturates like Veronal, and bromides, all central nervous system depressants that doctors of the era prescribed as general sedatives.

  Ewan’s trouble came from a deeper source than Dr. Shier recognized. Although he seemed calm enough on the surface, Ewan was a deeply sensitive man. In addition to the guilt he may have felt over persuading young men to join the war, he felt greater pressures resulting from the Church’s waning influence. Another more threatening movement was afoot—this one supported by the government as well as the Church—to merge a number of the Protestant Churches and consolidate congregations into a “United Church.” Many Presbyterians saw it as the destruction of their Church by the Government of Canada, something that seemed unbelievable.

  This “Church Union” was going to put many ministers out of a job. Ewan had reason to fear for his own future. He knew he was not as dynamic as the Forward Movement preachers, or as many other ministers he knew. Depressed as he was, he felt inadequate to the challenges ahead. His feelings of inadequacy deepened his depression. It was a downward spiral.

  After his visit to Dr. Shier, Maud says that she pried out of Ewan what was really upsetting him. It was, he said, the conviction that he was “eternally lost—that there was no hope for him in the next life. This dread haunted him night and day and he could not banish it” (September 1, 1919). Maud interpreted this as a sign of “religious melancholy,” the term used at that time to indicate a depressive mood disorder that afflicted religious people who would naturally interpret their affliction within their religion’s conceptual framework.

  A long medical history was associated with the specific symptoms of the mental disorder that Ewan now exhibited. “Religious Melancholia” dated back to the Middle Ages, possibly earlier. Nineteenth-century texts about mental illness discuss it. Religious melancholics believed that they were doomed to go to eternal Hell after they died, regardless of their behaviour during life.

  The Presbyterian doctrine of Predestination—which taught that God had “predetermined” who would go to Hell before they were even born—was an outmoded doctrine in Ewan’s time, but old beliefs die slowly. Predestination was firmly lodged in Ewan’s mind: as a boy, he had heard it preached by old-fashioned rural preachers, and preached again in Charlottetown by an evangelist around the time he was leaving Prince Edward Island for Ontario. It provided him with the explanatory concept to understand precisely why he felt so miserable and depressed.

  He linked this to another theological concept: Ewan felt that because he had doubted that he was one of the “Elect” (chosen for Heaven), he had therefore committed the “unpardonable sin” (of doubting God and His power). This idea of the “unpardonable sin” was, like Predestination, an older religious tenet but a powerful one in people’s minds.28 Ewan was caught up in circular reasoning within a complicated theology. Maud railed against the “damnable theology” that had taught him these concepts, but she also believed—probably correctly—that these ideas had taken hold of him so readily because his mind was already disturbed.

  Maud says that she dragged more details out of Ewan—confirmation that this mental disorder had first appeared when he’d reached puberty (at age twelve). It had surfaced again at Prince of Wales College when he was eighteen, and again at Dalhousie College. He had been well until his trip to Glasgow in his mid-thirties, in 1906–07. In Glasgow, however, he had been overwhelmed by fears and a sense of inadequacy.

  Each breakdown in Ewan’s life had taken place at a pressure point in his life, and had grown from the belief that he somehow did not measure up. This “proved” to him that he was an outcast from God: again, that he had committed the “unpardonable sin” of insufficient faith that God had given him the strength and courage he needed for his profession.

  After the war, Ewan’s doubt that religion was the cure to all human woes again proved he was guilty of the “unpardonable sin” and doomed to Hell, where he would burn forever. His saw his fate as having to pretend to his parishioners that he was God’s representative and faithful servant when he inwardly believed he was cursed.

  In his breakdown of 1919, Ewan developed all the secondary symptoms of severe depression: social withdrawal, loss of cognitive functions, insomnia, hesitant speech, low energy, constipation, irritability, loss of interest in family and life in general, and obsession with ideas about worthlessness, guilt, and self-destruction. Maud now suspected that the matter was a recurring problem, a
nd that it was serious mental illness. She wrote in her journal: “I was horror-stricken. I had married, all unknowingly, a man who was subject to recurrent constitutional melancholia, and I had brought children into the world who might inherit the taint. It was a hideous thought …”

  Mental illness had always been a subject of community gossip on the Island, intensified by the local newspapers of her childhood, which detailed frightening stories of people either “going melancholy” or turning “violently insane.” Those in the first category were likely to destroy themselves, while those in the second were a danger to others. William C. Macneill, a prosperous farmer and father of one of Maud’s many cousins (Amanda), went “melancholy” and drowned himself.

  Shortly after 1900, the Island newspapers began expanding their coverage of mental illness, as a result of the new communications technology, the telegraph, which was able to relay news from all over the North American continent. People read, for instance, of cases like that of John E. Sankey, son of the famous revivalist Ira D. Sankey, who was declared insane in New York because he thought he had created the world (covered in April 16, 1908). There was extensive ongoing coverage after 1907 when the New York millionaire Harry Thaw murdered the famous New York architect Stanford White, after White seduced Thaw’s wife, Evelyn Nesbit Thaw, a well-known chorus girl and actress (later immortalized in the movie The Girl in the Red-Velvet Swing). Thaw’s plea was not guilty by reason of “insanity”—a new category of plea in law. For three years the Prince Edward Island newspapers covered his trial and its appeals, and people were riveted to this story. There was wide public disapproval of the fact that Harry Thaw was ultimately acquitted. (Maud pasted a picture of Evelyn Nesbit into her journals, and claimed that she had pinned it up as the visual model for her “Anne of Green Gables.”) Later in that year, a man in Prince Edward Island escaped a murder conviction by pleading insanity and was sent to Falconwood, the province’s insane asylum. After this legal shocker, the province (and Montgomery herself) had an even greater fear of mental illness. Patent medicine firms fanned the flames by advertising in every issue of the paper that they had treatments to “Bring Health to Despondent People.”