Lucy Maud Montgomery

by Mary Henley Rubio

  Maud wrote in her journals of eccentrics like “Mad Mr. MacKinley” and “Peg Bowen” who roamed around the countryside. They were harmless “crazy people,” present in some form in every community. It is no surprise, then, that Maud’s novels make many references to mentally ill people: recall “Mad Mr. Morrison” who chases “Emily of New Moon” inside a church. This scene was written in the 1920s, following Ewan’s mental breakdown, and is highly symbolic and eroticized. Emily (a heroine based on Maud herself) is accidentally locked together in the darkening church with Mr. Morrison, a hoary old man, who has in his insanity gone seeking his long-deceased young wife. Maud builds up the terror and revulsion that the fictional Emily feels as she flees through the maze of pews in the darkened church, taking flight from the clutches of this crazed but agile madman. Maud registers her revulsion to this old man’s attempt to grasp Emily’s young body. Maud comes perilously close to suggesting the subject of sexual violation by a man who is insane.

  Generally, eccentrics and people with mental illness were kept in their communities and tolerated, like “Mad Mr. MacKinley” in Maud’s childhood. Sometimes, if they became too much of a problem or danger, they were sent off to Falconwood. In 1892, when Maud was eighteen, the provincial insane asylum had 137 inmates, committed under the grouping of either “Moral” or “Physical” categories of insanity. “Moral” causes or symptoms included domestic trouble, adverse circumstances, religious excitement, or love affairs. “Physical” causes or symptoms were intemperance (either with alcohol or sex), sexual self-abuse, sunstroke, uterine or ovarian disorders, hereditary or other diseases, and congenital problems like epilepsy. By 1908, with so many astonishing categories to draw from, Falconwood had 223 inmates, ranging from people who had tried to kill themselves (or others) to those who indulged in public masturbation and needed to be put out of sight.

  Because Maud had been raised in a print culture of “yellow journalism” that sensationalized and pathologized mental illness, Ewan’s breakdown was particularly distressing to her. Giving front-page coverage to the Harry Thaw trial in Prince Edward Island, the Examiner of February 19, 1907, editorialized: “The vivity with which the American and Canadian People scan the reports of the Thaw trial—loaded with pruriency as they are—is not creditable to the moral tone of the North American continent …” The paper then proceeded to detail all the salacious matter that it so haughtily condemned people for reading, and other local newspapers for reporting.

  In the Island society—where most people were born, lived, and died in one place, and everyone knew the family history of everyone else—mental illness simply could not be concealed, and people observed that it did tend to run in certain families. They also noted that while it might be a fleeting occurrence, aroused by passion or despair, and shed with equal swiftness, often the illness recurred. Maud always commented with disapproval when her relatives or friends married into a family that might potentially pass on the “taint” of mental illness.

  She began to watch her boys for signs of their father’s instability. Chester and Stuart, who had been her great joy, now became an ongoing source of anxiety. Maud had always puzzled over Ewan’s lack of strong feeling for anything: people, places, things, and especially beauty. His flat response to the physical world now appeared to suggest something missing in his makeup. She noticed how much Chester favoured his father: she described him as “reserved” and “harder to understand than Stuart.” Stuart, however, was frank and open: “Stuart gives the impression of beauty and charm. Physically he is a very lovely child, so clear and rosy his skin, so brilliant his large blue eyes” (February 24, 1919). But she had worries about Stuart, too. “Alas, I fear he has inherited from me something besides my love of beauty—my passionate intensity of feeling and my tendency to concentrate it all on a few objects or persons unspeakably dear to me” (February 24, 1919). The boys were indeed very dissimilar. This was apparent from their earliest childhood.

  Maud often lived at the edge of stability herself, but at no point did she lose her hold on reality. In her Prince Edward Island years, she suffered serious depressive states, often quite debilitating. However, she recognized them as abnormal. When she shut herself in a room to pace the floor, or suffered “white nights” of sleeplessness and anxiety, she had perspective on herself. She knew her depressions always coincided with too much solitude and externally depressing circumstances. She also knew what helped her recover: vigorous exercise, good company, and laughter.

  Ewan, however, had no perspective on what was happening to him and little memory of his state of mind afterwards. When he had delusions, he believed them. Sometimes he heard voices telling him he would go to Hell and that he should destroy himself. Ewan’s symptoms varied in intensity but usually started with severe headaches accompanied by an expression of profound gloom. He began “pawing at his head” or tying a handkerchief around it. He became very lethargic, taking pleasure in nothing. He would look vacantly into space in absolute silence, or chant doleful hymns, unaware of those around him. If spoken to, he became hostile, refusing to do “his duties as the man of the house” (stoking the fire, carrying out ashes, caring for the horse, and cleaning the stable). His memory became badly impaired, a frequent symptom of depression, and his speech became puerile. Usually, depressed people lose their appetite for food and sex, but Maud states ambiguously that Ewan did not lose his interest in eating, avoiding a comment on his interest in sex. His malady, Maud recorded, cut him off from the “intimacies” of normal life and left him imprisoned by his delusions.

  Maud knew that one telltale sign of mental imbalance was self-obsession. Maud characterized her cousin Stella Campbell, on March 12, 1921, as a borderline mental case: “Like all mentally unbalanced people she is completely centred on self.” Maud also remembered with revulsion her cousin Edwin Simpson. He, too, had been totally self-absorbed, despite his intellectual brilliance. When ill, Ewan was completely indifferent to Maud and to his children.

  Even Ewan’s appearance changed when he was ill. His facial features developed a “repulsive expression.” His eyes became “shiny,” “wild,” and “haunted.” Maud says she couldn’t “bear to look at him” (January 6, 1923) when he had a “horrible imbecile expression on his face” (March 16, 1924). Sometimes his face turned livid, and he raved obsessively over the idea that he was dying without anyone caring. In other phases of his illness, he would sleep continuously, refusing to get up for several days except to eat. When insomnia overtook him, he fled the house in the early hours, pacing up and down the roads. This alarmed Maud even more: farm folk were early risers and likely to see him, and suspect something was amiss with their minister. When he had visions or heard voices, he muttered out loud to himself, a sure giveaway of his problems. Maud wrote in her diary that aspects of his illness seemed “so unnatural that it fills me with such horror and repulsion that … it turns me against Ewan for the time, as if he were possessed by or transformed into a demoniacal creature of evil—something I must get away from as I would rush from a snake. It is terrible—but it is the truth” (August 31, 1919).

  Maud worked hard to keep his mental condition secret, lest her children become social pariahs. Publicly, she attributed his illness to headaches and indigestion. In an era when much of what went on inside the body was largely a mystery, people accepted her explanations. At his worst, she kept him out of sight. When he was only slightly affected, he could keep up a minimal conversation, and they carried out some pastoral visits together, with her carrying the visit through cheerful banter. His malady had one very strange aspect, which was quite atypical of a clinically depressed person: his problems seemed to come and go, quickly and unpredictably. In the space of a half hour, he could change from normal to unbalanced and vice versa. This suggests a more complicated medical issue than mere depression.

  Ewan’s first attack, in May 1919, lasted throughout the entire summer. He took medications as prescribed. In desperation, Maud sent him to Boston in Jun
e, to the home of his half-sister and her husband, Flora and Amos Eagles. Maud joined him as soon as she could. Boston then had the most advanced North American treatment centre for mental illness, and Maud arranged for Ewan to consult a famous specialist, Dr. Nathan Garrick. Garrick puzzled over the diagnosis: was it, he wondered, “simple melancholia” (a reactive depressive episode largely precipitated by external circumstances), or was it “manic-depressive-insanity” (a serious mental illness that was inherent and would recur again and again)?

  There was at that time no effective treatment for either, and Dr. Garrick intensified Maud’s concerns by telling her never to let Ewan out of her sight, lest he attempt suicide—something that he had already spoken of on occasion. Dr. Garrick gave Maud sleeping pills (chloral) for Ewan and told her to make him drink lots of water as his kidneys were not functioning properly. (Slowed body functions often accompany depression.) After a two-month absence from Leaskdale, with their children under the care of the young maid, Ewan inexplicably and spontaneously got better and they returned home. Maud told everyone that Ewan had had “kidney poisoning.” People believed this rather vague diagnosis because she had consulted the best doctors in Boston.

  From 1919 onward, Ewan was a new anxiety in Maud’s dark closet of worries. He would recover, and then relapse. He would be treated with sedatives. His changes were unpredictable and dramatic. During some attacks Ewan could function, even if he was dull and miserable. But many other times, he was so mentally disoriented that it was necessary for substitute ministers to fill in. She never knew what a day or week or month would bring.

  The Leaskdale congregation remained patient and solicitous throughout Ewan’s recurring illnesses and periods of absence from the pulpit. They had always liked him as a minister, and did not see him in his worst states, so they assumed he had a physical problem. Maud worked so hard for them, and for a long time she placated those who might otherwise have complained. However, the sixty-six parishioners in Zephyr, who paid Ewan $360 a year in 1919, eventually began grumbling that their minister was not worth his salary.29

  After the Macdonalds returned from Boston in 1919, Maud hauled out her writing and began working up a plot for a new book, Rilla of Ingleside. Her emotional reserve was depleted, and it would take her nearly nine months just to figure out a plot. “I am the mouse in the claws of the cat,” she wrote in August 1919, after hosting an editor of Maclean’s magazine who had come to interview her for a story. “I talked brightly and amusingly—and watched Ewan out of the corner of my eye.… That is my existence now.”30

  Marriages often fall apart when there is serious depression in one partner. Maud says in her diary that she thinks “incurable insanity” is justification for divorce, but that divorces are not part of her family tradition (October 18, 1923). Maud and Ewan had grown up in a culture and time where divorce was considered a scandal. In the 1890s, Queen Victoria’s vigorous condemnation of divorce was reported in the Prince Edward Island newspapers. Other newspaper articles lamented that divorce was becoming a scourge in the United States. On March 6, 1901, The Daily Patriot had crowed that Prince Edward Island had “not [had] a single decree of divorce granted … in … 33 years,” adding proudly that it “is extremely doubtful if any other province or state in the English-speaking world can furnish such a record as this.” The paper noted that in this same period there were 268 divorces in the rest of the Dominion of Canada, with its population of 6 million people. In 1911, the year of Maud’s marriage, Prince Edward Island still held its head high as a province unsullied by divorce, crediting the low divorce rate to good education and a morally upright population.31 They did not comment on the fact that in this same period various murders, poisonings, and spousal abuse cases on the Island, resulted in one of the marriage partners being tossed into Falconwood or jail.

  On May 16, 1918, the Uxbridge Journal noted that the Canadian Parliament was debating whether the Senate or the courts should grant divorces. Although attitudes were changing, Maud could not have coped with either the emotional upheaval or the scandal of a divorce, even if she had wanted one—which, apparently, she did not.

  As Maud came to contemplate the troubled life stretching endlessly in front of her, she could see that she had shown enormous strength thus far. She had fashioned herself into a very respectable woman by marrying, and in particular by marrying a minister. She had, in her maturity, a will of steel, a genuine affection for the man she had married, and a determination to live her life with dignity. She had become famous, and was widely admired and revered, and she enjoyed her fame and reputation. To abandon a sick husband would have been unthinkable to her, no matter how she might have wished to be freed of his problems. She knew her marriage had its tragic dimensions. So, it appears, did Ewan. He suffered under the additional pressure of fearing that he was a leaden weight in the soaring heart of his exceptionally gifted wife.

  Ewan and Maud on their honeymoon in Scotland, in the summer of 1911.

  The Leaskdale, Ontario, manse, circa 1911 (Maud’s first home after her marriage).

  Leaskdale Presbyterian Church (Ewan’s primary charge).

  Zephyr Presbyterian Church (Ewan’s other charge).

  Maud and Stella Campbell at Niagara Falls.

  “Gog and Magog,” Maud’s china dogs, in Leaskdale.

  Dining room in the Leaskdale manse, with Maud, cousin Frede Campbell, and Ewan, holding Chester.

  Marjory MacMurchy, a Toronto writer and journalist.

  Maud and her first son, Chester Cameron Macdonald, circa 1914.

  Ewan in the Leaskdale garden circa 1914.

  Marshall Pickering, who sued Ewan after a 1921 car accident.

  Justice William Renwick Riddell (1852–1945), who presided over the Pickering-Macdonald decision.

  The Reverend Edwin Smith.

  Picture from Maud’s PEI scrapbook, showing the young Edwin Smith.

  Ewan and Edwin Smith.

  The Rev. and Mrs. John A. Mustard and son Gordon.

  CHAPTER 10

  More troubles with L. C. Page

  Though the Great War had ended with the signing of the Armistice on November 11, 1918, Maud was engaged in an epic battle of her own.

  In 1917, she had gathered the courage to bring her first lawsuit against the L. C. Page Company of Boston. She was now positive that Page had been cheating her. For nearly a decade, she would fight him through five separate suits and countersuits, until the final decision in 1928.

  “If Page is not honourable I am no match for him,” Maud had written nervously in her journal on July 26, 1915. She had been hearing troubling tales about his business practices ever since 1911, the year after her visit to his home in Boston. By April 12, 1916, Maud had confided in her journal, “I am afraid of Page.”

  She had very good reason to fear this Boston Brahmin. She had already seen that he was a cunning manipulator. She would learn that Page was also a man of astonishing arrogance, able to crush others through mere intimidation. He was a bully with very deep pockets, not to mention a love for litigation. Maud’s instincts warned her that he was also vindictive. Had she known beforehand just how spiteful he could be, her courage to take him on might have failed.

  There were many tales about Page from those who had done business with him. Gossip travelled fast and far: he was both a colourful personality and a high-profile publisher. Maud had asked her cousin Bertie McIntyre in Vancouver to check out his reputation with some booksellers in 1916, and she later reported that the tales that came back were so “ghastly” that she could not confide specific details even to her journals. Another of Page’s best-selling authors confided Page had cheated her, and she had left him, unfortunately leaving her best copyrights behind. Marshall Saunders had more to say. Clippings and gossip about Page’s private life were circulated throughout Canada and the United States among the author-publisher-bookseller community, with details supplied by the many salesmen and office staff who had worked for him and left, often in disgust o
r following unfair treatment. Mr. McClelland, who had angled to become Maud’s Canadian publisher, eagerly passed along every tidbit to Maud.32

  Lewis Page was the first-born son in one of Boston’s most privileged families. His father, Charles A. Page, chief war correspondent for the New York Tribune under Horace Greeley, later became U.S. Consul-General in Switzerland. Lewis’s mother, Grace Darling Coues, was descended from Elliott Coues, the famous ornithologist who had founded the American Ornithological Society. Lewis Coues Page was born in Switzerland in 1869. His father died, leaving his widow and several children: Lewis, Charles F., Charlotte, and George.

  In 1884, Grace married again, this time to widower Dana Estes, co-owner of a prominent publishing firm in Boston. Estes had been instrumental in founding the International Copyright Association in 1887, and counted Lord Tennyson among his acquaintances. With Estes as a stepfather, Lewis Page learned at an early age about high society, books, business, and power.

  Lewis Page attended private schools and graduated from Harvard in 1891, where he was a track letterman. Tall, athletic, handsome, and suave, he was considered one of Boston’s most eligible bachelors. He would marry three times. His first wife died. He then married the beautiful and charming Kate (“Kitty”) Stearns, daughter of James P. Stearns, a prominent fixture in Boston financial circles. After several years of marriage, Kitty hired a private detective to shadow her philandering husband. She divorced him in 1904 and won a rich settlement. Kitty was a much respected and admired Boston society woman, and public sympathy went to her. The other party in the divorce was one of Page’s employees, Mildred Parker—the wife Maud met in 1911. Lewis married Mildred in May 1904, soon after his divorce, and built the elegant “Page Court” home. (When Maud stayed at “Page Court” in Boston, she did not know Page’s marital history. She was given to understand that Mildred Page was his second wife, not his third.)