Smith continued to come to supply frequently when Ewan was going elsewhere to preach for a call, and time after time, the call went to someone else. The congregation surmised in time that Ewan had not gotten the appointment he was likely seeking. Maud grew increasingly angry with Lily’s prattles, and complained vigorously about her in her journals. But she did not identify the real cause for her anger at Lily for feeding the gossip upon which people like Mrs. Will Lockie dined.
The next time Smith came to preach for Ewan when Ewan was away, Mrs. Smith came also. Perhaps Maud had urged it, hoping to lay to rest Lily’s gossip. For this visit, Lily had been sent home. Maud writes in her diary with an airy nonchalance that obscures the underlying nuances:
For a wonder this was a fine Sunday and Mrs. Smith came up with the Captain. We had a pleasant day, for Lily went home last night. In spite of the extra work this entails I am always heartily glad when she is out of the house, when I have my own friends here. We are free then to talk as we please with no outsider to hear, tattle, and pervert. [Italics added] (May 27, 1923)
Maud and Mrs. Smith went over to Zephyr together for the service on May 27. Afterwards, Maud greeted Mrs. William Lockie as people filed out, and she took the magisterial high road, saying, “as usual … most graciously, ‘How do you do, Mrs. Lockie?’ “Maud reports that the surprised Mrs. Lockie stammered out, “I’m glad to meet you,” as if they had just met for the first time in their lives.
Maud’s method of letting certain people know they displeased her was to treat them with extremely courteous formality. Mrs. Lockie’s inappropriate reply shows that Maud accomplished exactly what she had intended with her frosty civility: she rattled Mrs. Lockie, making her feel foolish. Maud chuckles with satisfaction that Mrs. Lockie in her awkward reply “surpassed herself.”
Many years later, in 1986, when Lily was an old woman, but still very lively, I interviewed her about her time with “Mrs. Macdonald.” When asked if she remembered “Captain Smith,” she certainly did. Looking quite smug, Lily lowered her voice, and leaned forward so that another woman who was present (Mrs. Wilda Clark, a strong admirer of Mrs. Macdonald) could not hear her words. Lily then whispered in a salacious and conspiratorial tone: “He was her boyfriend.” She added a smutty and dismissive, “Hmmmph.” Her tone was that of someone in possession of gossip she intended to withhold, knowing that suggestive innuendoes are more damning than specific allegations.
For Maud to dabble in an extramarital affair would have been impossible in a fishbowl like the Presbyterian manse, with a gossipy and inquisitive maid constantly eavesdropping. And people who remembered Smith said that, for all his charm, he was not a “ladies’ man.” He was “a man’s man”—one who liked adventure, new technologies, and the kind of intellectual discussions few women were educated enough to participate in. He had his faults, too, and Maud could see them, summing him up as lacking “steadiness of purpose,” thus being “surpassed in his professional career by men who were far his inferiors in mental capacity.” (Her assessment seems accurate in light of Smith’s subsequent career, but this would not have been immediately apparent in 1919. Her comment would have been interpolated later when she had more idea how to shape her story, and after she wanted to reduce Smith’s significance in her journals.)54
This is not to say that Maud didn’t dream about other men making more exciting husbands than the one she had married, or that she didn’t appreciate Smith’s company. Her life would obviously have been very different if Ewan had been a vigorous man, sharing her range of interests. But Maud knew that as a minister’s wife she must be an impeccable role model. She also had a will of steel, however volatile her emotions might be, and she knew from painful childhood experiences that nothing escaped community eyes very long. Gossip had been the strongest force of social control during her youth, and whatever other monumental changes had occurred in the world since the war, this was not among them. She had lost her unquestioning belief in all the tenets of her ancestors’ stern Presbyterian religion, but she had not lost her sense of propriety and dignity.
Even in her nineties, Lily was a pretty woman with much vitality, a quick eye, and a decidedly down-to-earth orientation. She had been brought up in a Victorian world where men and women lived in different and unequal spheres, and she could not have understood how a man and a woman could have a friendship based on mutual intellectual interests. She would not have understood the appeal of intellectual companionship for someone like Maud, especially when Smith admired her professional accomplishments— admiration she craved but had received from no other close acquaintance except Frede. Lily lacked intellectual depth and experience of life outside her small rural community, and it was much later in the twentieth century that non-sexualized friendships became possible for men and women.
However, as limited as Lily was in understanding, she understood that everyone in the community had an insatiable interest in what went on inside their minister’s household, with his famous wife. If Lily, who was the type of person who traded in gossip and would therefore have made an effort to listen to Maud and Captain Smith conversing, heard Maud and Smith discussing any aspect of sexuality, she would have drawn damaging conclusions. She would have been very willing, as Maud puts it, “to tattle and pervert,” especially after Maud had “dressed her down” (October 24, 1922), which must have rankled for a long time. Lily’s vacuous prattles, no doubt given salacious embellishment, did enormous damage to Maud’s peace of mind in the Leaskdale community and made her willing in the end to leave it, even if she attributed their move to other factors. Gossip that Maud had been a high-spirited and flirtatious teenager had hurt her when she was young. Gossip about the Herman Leard affair had embarrassed her when she was a young woman. Now idle and untrue gossip infuriated her in her married years.
Had Maud been less sensitive, and less beset in other areas of her life, she might have ignored it, rather than letting it rankle. But it was a problem to deal with in her journal, since stories might linger long after her death, as indeed they did in the case of Herman. Hence, Maud wrote a great deal about Lily’s moral failures in her journals so that if any of Lily’s damaging gossip lingered years later, people would understand that Lily was just a speculative and low-minded maid with a prurient curiosity and tongue.
After 1923, the Smiths moved to Williamsburg, below Ottawa on the St. Lawrence River, and they are not mentioned again. Why? We do not know, but it is surprising since Maud normally kept up with good friends all her life. She was a dedicated letter-writer, and distance did not normally affect her friendships. Ewan and Smith were on different sides of the “Church Union” debate, but this is not likely to have caused a rupture, since the Macdonalds did not let disagreement over Union break up their other long-standing friendships, with John and Margaret Stirling, for example.
It is more likely that Maud herself cut off the relationship with Smith, once Lily’s gossip was abroad in the community and Mrs. Smith had made her appearance to shut it down. It is also plausible that Ewan heard some gossip from malicious parishioners and complained to Maud that people were getting the wrong idea. Gossip could also have come home through Chester. His classmates made vicious sport at school by saying hurtful things to upset and rile him. Maud would have terminated her friendship if she felt it was hurting her family. Whatever the cause, there is a profound silence around the Smiths’ departure, and “Captain Smith” vanishes from the journals after 1923.55
We do not know when Maud gave Captain Smith the typewriter on which she had written Anne of Green Gables, but it was an extraordinary gift, considering that she kept every object associated with her own fame. This old typewriter was one of her most sentimental possessions. In this symbolic gift to Captain Smith, Maud recognized their joint professional beginnings in Prince Edward Island, their individual roles in making it a tourist destination, and their shared emotional experiences through the power of words. He was a valued “kindred spirit” of hers, at least for awhil
e.56
When the Smiths moved out of the Macdonalds’ lives so suddenly and apparently permanently, it was a serious blow to Maud. She lost a friend who provided friendship, good conversation, and admiration of her talents, and who had much in common with her. First she had lost Frede, then Smith. While his presence is briefly glossed in Maud’s journals, his force in the Macdonalds’ lives is erased, and he remains a mysteriously silent topic.
CHAPTER 12
Maud and her journals
Maud was fourteen years old in 1889, when she started keeping little “diaries” in assorted notebooks. Thirty years later, she decided to copy these diaries into uniform legal-size ledgers, pasting in pictures, making a record of her life. These journals would become an essential part of her life—as joyful companions, as therapy, and finally as compulsion.
By the end of 1919, Maud had become a very lonely woman. Although she had her children, Frede’s death and Ewan’s illness had left her feeling isolated, and again mourning the early loss of her own parents. Her journal gave her a fellow traveller in an increasingly troubled terrain. She wrote in her journals that, “It is the lonely people who keep diaries.… When I have anybody to ‘talk it over with’ I don’t feel the need of a diary so strongly. When I haven’t I must have a journal to overflow in. It is a companion—and a relief.” Her journals were “the other side of a conversation that began in reading” (an observation coined by historian Nick Whistler). She could record what she was reading and add her mental musings about it, as well as jotting down phrases and aphorisms she especially liked. Finding comfort in her journal brought dignity to a life disturbed by personal loss and crushing loneliness.
As a minister’s wife—and as a very judgmental person—her more frank private thoughts had to be carefully hidden from view. Her tendency to sarcasm and irony needed management. She wrote, “Temperaments such as mine must have some outlet, else they become morbid and poisoned by ‘consuming their own smoke,’ and the only safe outlet is in some record as this” (February 11, 1910). The journal kept the two sides of her persona—the public and the private—well enough connected that she did not implode.
She also wanted her journal to be a social record of an era that was undergoing rapid transformation. After World War I, Maud realized that massive social changes were underway, and she realized that her own life was straddling this divide. As an amateur historian, she wanted to preserve the memory of the old, and record her life’s trajectory into the new.
As she created these journals, she found another use for them—she could once again visit her childhood through the mere act of recopying and rethinking the story of her life. She used her early journals to spin her early memories of rural community life into new novels and stories.
Her novels required happy endings—that was expected by her publishers and readers—but there were deeper soundings in her own life, and her journals provided the counterpoint for her sunny novels. When Maud began the project of writing out her own life’s record, she did it partly to bring sanity and control back into her life, but she also wanted a record of what her life had really been like—the darker side that was largely kept private. The journals became her space for self-display and self-examination.
By 1919, when she started recopying her journals, Maud’s books were famous all over the English-speaking world.57 She knew that she was an author whose life would be scrutinized by later biographers. If she wrote her own life in her journals, she hoped to have some control over how her story would eventually be told. There were grievances she wanted to air, and other things she wanted to conceal (or reshape). She had succeeded against enormous odds in her professional and personal life, and she wanted the world to see how admirably she had negotiated her way through innumerable minefields.
When the massive re-copying project started in 1919 progressed, Maud saw that there were minefields of another kind in the actual process of writing up a journal. When diaries become the place to express the repressed side of a personality, they are likely become an unbalanced repository. Maud noticed this when she reread what she had written in periods of sadness and gloom, saying that her journals gave:
… the impression of a morbid temperament, generally in the throes of nervousness and gloom. Yet this, too, is false. It arises from the fact that of late years I have made my journal the refuge of my sick spirit in its unbearable agonies. The record of pain seems thus almost unbroken; yet in reality these spasms came at long intervals.… Between these times I was quite tolerably happy, hopeful and interested in life. (February 11, 1910)
Maud was, however, a person of many moods, and the mood she was in when she recopied an old diary entry into her journal could affect its retelling. She often looked back on things recorded long ago and saw them in a different light. Sometimes she would even change her take on certain events already recorded in her finished journals—for instance, the pages that tell of her courtship with Ewan are razored out and replaced so neatly that the alteration is hard to spot in the handwritten volumes.
She began her recopying with the month of September 1889, when she was not quite fifteen. In other words, all the journal entries (which are the reconstruction of material from her earlier notebooks and notes) are written in retrospect, by a woman in her mid-forties. Her journals may appear to be a seamless, continuous narrative of a life, written easily in dated entries, as her life itself unfolds, but her process is far more subtle than one of making artless jottings that miraculously transform themselves into an engrossing narrative. Still, while she may shape her narrative, she tells us that she intended “as far as in me lies, to paint my life and deeds—ay, and my thoughts— truthfully, no matter how unflattering such truth may be to me. No life document has any real value otherwise.” She added that “the worst as well as the best must be written out— and the best as well as the worst, since we are, every one of us, whether we own to it sincerely or not, angel and devil mixed up together …” But shaping, pruning, shading, and amplifying would be any writer’s prerogative.
On April 16, 1922, she finished copying her childhood diaries into the formal journal ledgers, and from that point on she made daily jottings on pads or pieces of scrap paper, dating these and giving enough information to remind her of the events once she was ready to expand them into a journal entry. At several particularly troubled periods in her life, she stopped writing altogether, but she always resumed when she found her footing again in a few years. There was usually enough time-lag that she could select what was worth recording and shape things in her mind. Because her entries were written from notes, and because her memory was so good, her journal entries always have great immediacy. But it is always important to consider how the time-lag affects their reliability, and adds to the overall complexity of her journals.
Real life is untidy, unshaped, with loose ends. Her journals have no loose ends, no pointless stories, no catalogues of the boring effluvia of life, no people of importance to her narrative who have not been introduced. Each descriptive or narrative unit always becomes part of a unified whole.
As an artist, Maud had a strong instinct for literary shaping operating at both an unconscious and a conscious level. Each of the ten early recopied journal ledgers took on a shape of its own. For instance, her second volume gives a fierce resumé of her distresses in childhood, which shifts the reality of the relatively happy childhood of the first volume into a myth of symbolic orphanhood. But the myth would remain an important fixture in her own self-image. Anne of Green Gables was the glorious result of her mostly happy childhood, as described in Volume One, but Emily of New Moon grew out of the later myth of the orphaned, unloved child, fighting obstacles the whole way to success.
When she began recopying Volume Three of her journal sometime between 1920 and 1921, she was finishing the retrospective of her life in Cavendish. She began this third volume as if it were a book in its own right, not a continuous narrative of a life. The shape of her journal, with its blank pages from o
ne to five hundred, had already begun to interact with—and perhaps mediate—the way she was shaping the story of her own life. She described a “curious feeling of reluctance” as she began the new volume. With the benefit of hindsight, she comments on Volumes One and Two of her earlier journals.
The first volume seems … to have been written by a rather shallow girl, whose sole aim was to “have a good time” and who thought of little else than the surface play of life. Yet nothing could be falser to the reality. As a child and young girl I had a strange, deep, hidden inner life of dreams and aspirations, of which hardly a hint appears in the written record. This was partly because I had not then learned the art of self-analysis … and partly because I did not then feel the need of a confidant in my journal. I looked upon it merely as a record of my doings which might be of interest to me in after years … (February 11, 1910)
She vows to achieve a better balance in Volume Three.
As Maud, now in her forties, wrote up her childhood, a new character, “Maudie,” began to emerge. Maudie resembled aspects of all her heroines, but was far more complex than either Anne, Emily, Valancy, or Marigold. Maud’s writerly instincts told her that emphasizing early hardships would make adult achievement more impressive. This is an autobiographical technique long used by writers, politicians, and other successful professionals. But this involved a certain amount of refiguring the actual facts.
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