Lucy Maud Montgomery

by Mary Henley Rubio

  Changes in the literary climate

  The founding of the CAA was one more sign of the changing times. There was much talk again (as there had been in the 1880s) of an evolving “national literature.” The CAA, initially dominated by older men, had expanded to contain many supporting members whose approach to literature was more enthusiastic than discriminating. For all its good work on copyright law and promoting the writing of Canadian authors, the CAA still struck some ambitious younger writers as a social club where the stuffy old guard mingled and schmoozed, proud of a handful of unimaginative poems they might have published in newspapers and magazines.

  The young poet Frank R. Scott—later to be one of Canada’s most impressive legal minds and a professor whose thinking influenced, among others, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau—emerged as a key member of the new school of young Montreal poets in the early 1920s. This group began an attack on what came to be dubbed the “Maple Leaf School”—poets who “warbled” over themes like Canada’s beautiful scenery and its patriotic affiliation to the “motherland.” (In 1927, F. R. Scott wrote a brilliantly satiric poem about the CAA entitled “The Canadian Authors Meet.” It skewered those he saw as literary wannabes who wrote sweetly sentimental and patriotic verse imitating Romantic and Victorian poetry.)

  Maud had published many poems that were fairly romantic in tone. In this new climate, even Anne of Green Gables seemed a bit too positive and sentimental, too much like Pollyanna the insufferable “Glad Girl,” who resolved to be “glad” even after the worst catastrophes. At the conclusion of Anne of Green Gables, Anne believes that “God’s in His Heaven, all’s right with the world,” a view very different from the post-war outlook. After the devastation of a war that had killed millions, how could anyone believe that except sentimental, foolish young girls? Even Maud saw Anne as belonging to a time before the war.

  As 1922 opened, literary styles had already begun to change. Modernism exploded in literature, as well as in visual art, architecture, music, and many other cultural fields. It signalled the dying gasp of all things Victorian and the evolution of a new fiction in Europe and North America. Young writers described the emptiness of the “modern” world. T. S. Eliot wrote his famous poem The Waste Land, a vision of a sterile, suffocating world, in 1922. Experimental writers like Virginia Woolf and James Joyce challenged traditional literary styles with their “stream of consciousness” technique. In the United States, young novelists like Ernest Hemingway pared down their style to a “virile” tautness. Antiheroes replaced conventional protagonists. Skepticism and cynicism, alienation and isolation, were frequent tones in literature.

  Maud did not like this new cynical view, or the style of writing. Ironically, after she had worked so hard to give support to other younger writers in her speeches and in the executive of the CAA, she herself became the target of younger professional critics, who saw her style of writing as both outdated and banal. It was no longer trendy to write “regional romances,” sentimental “idylls,” or humorous novels—all tags attached to her books by various of the “new” critics. She defended her books against the charge that they were sentimental by arguing that there was a huge difference between “sentimentality” (which she loathed) and “sentiment” (which she saw as the impulse that held societies together). She praised Charlotte Brontë, one of her favourite authors, for her “absolute clear-sightedness regarding shams and sentimentalities” (September 22, 1925). Later, she would be pleased with the reviewer who wrote that her first Emily book was full of “sentiment that never gets over the line into sentimentality” (March 1, 1930).

  Her trademarks as a writer were still “local colour,” with a good frosting of “purple prose” to describe beautiful natural landscapes; girl heroines who were full of passionate emotional responses to life; humorous treatment of the vagaries of human nature; an affectionate view of humanity shown in the characters’ zest for life and concern for each other; and tidy happy endings— which were labelled “sentimental” by the critics. Unfortunately, all these features were on the Modernists’ scorn list.

  Maud clung resolutely to the idea that a writer should be uplifting, rather than mired in the world’s “pigstyes.” She loathed the depravity, defeat, and destruction in modernist writing. She determined that she would never show the “shadows” of her own life in her fiction, but would hide it away in her private diary. She believed that the best way to reform people was with humour, not cynicism. While Maud had increasing doubts about God’s omnipotence, she still believed that He would reward His faithful servants. With desperation, she clung to that weakening conviction.

  No one in the middle of this seismic shift fully understood what was evolving. But as the early 1920s wore on, Maud saw that her style of narrative was coming under attack. She had not been disturbed over the occasionally churlish reviewer, but this was a systemic attack on the foundations of her fiction. If the disappointments in her personal life were not enough, she now faced the diminution of her celebrity in the literary world—the respect that she had laboured so hard to achieve, and which had given her such pleasure.69 As soon as Emily of New Moon was finished in 1922, Maud worked ever harder recopying her diaries into her journals, while continuing to record current events in her ongoing diaries.

  Her journalizing kept her living in several time frames at once: the past was being reconfigured in her “journals” (and being relived while being transcribed on the page); the present was being lived (and being recorded in daily notes in her diary for future transfer into the journals); and the future was being anticipated in her imagination (as she worried about her husband and Chester).

  Her ability to both remember and imagine were so powerful that the past and the future could fuse, squeezing out the present. Her son Stuart, in fact, commented in the 1980s that his mother lived too much of her life in the past and the future, and not enough in the present. Chester’s first wife put it another way in the 1980s: she said that Maud lived too much in fictional worlds and not enough in the real one. Both were reflecting on Maud in her last decade, not on the young or middle-aged Maud. In retrospect, others might say that because Maud was not one to live complainingly or disreputably in her real life, her imaginative world was her only safe alternative. She did not just live to write, she wrote to live. By her ability to live in several different time frames all at once, she could divert herself from discomfort in her present. Her friend Captain Smith might have been an adventurer in life, but she could be one only in her imagination.

  At the end of December 1921, Maud wrote some curious passages about “dream lives” in her journals. She had just returned from a busy evening of hosting the church Women’s Guild executive, and she reports that Ewan attended and was unsociable, rather than trying to “slip away and indulge his broodings.” They had spent considerable time with the Edwin Smiths through the summer and fall, listening to Smith describe his adventures.

  In the entry for December 29, 1921, Maud muses over the “dream lives” she had in her childhood. She confesses that she lives them still. She describes one from her childhood in which she imagined herself a female member of the British Parliament named “Lady Trevanion.” When someone made a “contemptuous reference” to her “as a woman,” little Maud always leapt to her feet as Lady Trevanion and, adapting “Pitt’s Reply to Walpole,” she “hurled” back:

  Sir, the atrocious crime of being a woman which the honourable gentleman has, with such spirit and decency charged upon me, I shall attempt neither to palliate nor deny but shall content myself with wishing that I may be one of those whose follies cease with their sex and not one of that number who are ignorant in spite of manhood and experience. (December 29, 1921)

  She describes another dream life in South Africa during the Boer War, one shared with Cecil Rhodes, a man her generation greatly admired. These “dream lives” were imagined so vividly that she claimed that she could live in them completely. She describes a current one:

  It is a curio
us thing that all through my life when some great strain or crisis came and all my old dream lives, lived so often that they had at last grown stale and flavourless, failed to give these escapes, some new, vivid, and exhilarating dreamlife would come into being. For months I have been a member of a party seeking in the mountain deserts of South America the jewels hung on a stone god in a great underground cavern. I have gone through the most amazing adventures, risks, terrors, hardship, have found the jewels, outwitted foes and traitors and returned in triumph. How silly it all seems written down. Yet it has been a wonderful, breathless, exciting existence as lived, and seems now in retrospect as real as life I have actually lived … (August 13, 1925)

  She goes on to explain that these dream lives are completely different from “stories I ‘think out.’ When thinking out a story I am outside of it—merely recording what I see others do. But in a dream life I am inside—I am living it, not recording it.”

  In Maud’s journals, there is far less evidence of these “dream lives” than the above passage would suggest. Although the word “dream” appears with enormous frequency in the journals, and is used in various capacities, it is rarely used in relation to “dream lives.” More often she refers to “day-dreams.”

  These references to dreaming “day-dreams” numerically cluster in three spots in her journals: during the “affair” with Herman Leard; during her romance with Ewan; and during the period when Captain Smith was living nearby and visiting often.

  When Ewan was courting Maud in 1905, for instance, she says she went out for a walk and “wandered happily along.… Later on I began simply to dream. One can dream into one’s life everything that isn’t in it, so fully and vividly that for the moment the dream seems real …” (March 16, 1905). The period of their courtship is filled with references to dreams and waking dreams. These kinds of vivid nighttime dreams, “waking dreams,” and more especially “dream lives” re-emerge in the period when Smith’s visits and conversation give her a lift. But of course she never links them to him, nor the earlier ones to Herman or Ewan.

  With the exception of Cecil Rhodes (1853–1902), whose picture is visible in a photograph of her room in Cavendish before her marriage, Maud is quiet about her accomplices on these “dream-life adventures,” but one can assume she was not a solitary explorer. Nor is it likely that the stodgy, depressed Ewan metamorphosed into an adventurer. It is far more plausible that Smith, an adventurer she did know, was the type of companion she found for her imaginary dream lives in this period.

  Gossip

  The flip side to Maud’s ability to dream and imagine is represented by her often tense interactions in the real world. Here, public opinion, and particularly gossip, was a constant threat. As noted, Maud rages in her journals about her housemaid, Lily—her messiness, her foolishness, her general incompetence. Rather than dwell on Lily’s gossip, Maud deflects attention to the swirl of community gossip. Of her gossipy neighbours, she writes: “They know the exact moment our washing is hung out, the number of pieces, and everything else that is done in our back yard. As to what goes on indoors, where they can’t see, I fear their agony of curiosity about it will shorten their lives” (entry dated October 18, 1921, but written later). The underlying suggestion is that Lily, who was privy to all that happened inside the manse, enjoyed satisfying their curiosity. Of course, the Macdonalds enjoyed the gossip that Lily brought back from Zephyr and were curious to hear the details. They had a good laugh when Lily informed them that some of Marshall Pickering’s Bible class students had dropped out because they didn’t want to be taught “by a perjurer.” But it is also likely that Pickering had found out the names of the Macdonald’s witnesses from Lily.

  Once she starts on the subject of gossip, Maud explains that idle gossip does not necessarily start with enemies. One of the Macdonalds’ close neighbours in Leaskdale, Mrs. Alec Leask, a good friend, invented stories about the Macdonald family based on snippets of information she had picked up, including conversations overheard on the telephone party lines. On one occasion she put out the word that Maud was writing a book on “stepmothers” to be published after she died. Since Maud’s stepmother had originally lived in this area of Ontario, this idea drew much attention. (Lily may also have been involved in this tale, after hearing Maud tell funny stories about her stepmother in Prince Albert. Possibly Lily took a quick peep in Maud’s diaries when she was recopying the part about her stepmother, and assumed it was for a book.)

  In another entry (June 8, 1922) Maud recounts more local gossip. Supposedly Mrs. Leask had heard in Toronto that an unnamed Canadian author had just inherited a lot of money. She decided it must be Maud, and spread the word through the community that Maud was now an heiress. Maud worried that this gossip, if believed, would suggest to the parishioners that they did not really need to pay Ewan. Such stories take their own narrative life in Maud’s journals because she is so maddened by gossip in this period. Gossip was entertainment in a small community, but it was also the means to carry out family feuds. There was no better way to “get even.” She also knew that in a rural community, a time-honoured way for adults to test the truthfulness of gossip was to repeat the stories directly to a person, and then to watch for his or her reaction.

  In Zephyr, Mrs. Will Lockie continued to prick Maud with various thorns. Maud had long chafed over Mrs. Lockie’s remark that Maud kept a maid so she could “live without working,” unlike the rest of the farmers’ wives who had to work. In 1922, Mrs. Lockie further angered Maud by referring to a nurse Maud had hired for the births of Chester and Stuart: “We country women can’t get a trained nurse. We have to die,” she said on November 16, 1922. Maud says that she itched to retort, but did not dare say: “You have three children. Yet you are alive.” Maud’s only retaliation was to repeat gossip about Mrs. Lockie in her journal—that when she was younger and working as “a servant girl” she stole jam and preserves (very valuable commodities then) from her employer’s pantry. Maud took some comfort that her journals would give the last word in the Lockie-Macdonald feud.

  Gossip was often indirect, and Maud reacted sharply to innuendos like this, from a friend: “Nobody ever need say anything against you or Mr. Macdonald to me.… They don’t say anything—they don’t dare to.” This, she noted, suggested that people had indeed been saying things (June 12, 1922). In better times, Maud would have laughed off these remarks. But she was raw from many other problems, including Lily’s gossip, and she was finding it harder to laugh.

  By March 1922, Lily had been with Maud for four years. When she had first come in 1918, Maud’s home had been a cheerful house with little children; by now, Lily was bored with her job and generally unhappy.

  To Maud, the most trying thing about Lily was her indiscretion, not her other faults. Maud demanded loyalty from employees and friends, but Lily, feeling sour, used gossip as revenge. On several occasions, Maud heard that she had told bold untruths about inconsequential matters, saying, for instance, that Maud slept in while she, Lily, did the work. Maud was livid: an outright lie, it reinforced the opinions of women who were jealous that Maud had a maid. Furious, and unable to write in her journal about the real source of her anger—Lily’s gossiping about Maud’s close friendship with Smith—Maud tells all the other stories about Lily, and gossip in general, to neutralize any stories that might linger in future years. Maud wanted to prove that where there was smoke there was not always fire—sometimes it was just the burning underbrush of gossip.

  Gossip had always been a component of Maud’s books. In fact, some of her books have little plot, they just move forward through talk (which is largely gossip). Now, gossip became a major subject in the Emily trilogy, reflecting Maud’s own sense of victimization. Chapter 21 (“Thicker than water”) of Emily Climbs—written in less than five months between August 29, 1923, and January 17, 1924—shows Maud’s full fury at the power of gossip to destroy reputations. Raised in the small, closely knit community of Cavendish, where gossip regulated soc
ial behaviour, Maud would be pursued to her dying day by her grandmother’s question: “What will people say?”

  After May 1923, the Smiths departed from both Maud’s journals and the Macdonalds’ lives.

  Amid all the pettiness over gossip, Maud was delighted with an unexpected professional honour. At the end of January 1923, she received a letter from the Secretary of the Royal Society of Great Britain, inviting her to become a Fellow of the Royal Society—the first Canadian woman ever to be offered the honour of putting “F.R.S.A.” after her name. Now that literary tastes were changing and in some quarters her books seemed to be falling out of fashion, public recognition was especially important to her. She was proud of her long climb up “the Alpine Path.”

  Spring 1923 brought a Canadian Authors Association convention celebrating a new copyright law. Maud was so pleased when Professor John Daniel of Acadia University greeted her with, “Hail, Queen of Canadian novelists!” that she recorded this in her journals. Logan, with co-author Donald French, was preparing a new study entitled Highways of Canadian Literature, to be published in 1924, and they treated her with respect. Maud’s springtime public speeches included a trip to Stratford and Mitchell, this time to speak to an audience of 150 that included many men, a new experience for her. In March, she would have another perk: The Toronto Star published a survey they had done, asking people: “Who Are the Twelve Greatest Women in Canada?” She was chosen as one, and recorded that in her journals.