CHAPTER 14
Maud and her boys
An early Maclean’s article in 1919, entitled “The Author of Anne,” stated that Maud was “a mother who mothers her children personally; they have always been considered before her books …” This was not quite true.70 An objective observer would probably have seen her actual time allotment otherwise: her writing came first, her church work second, and her boys third. Ewan and her housework would likely have vied for number four. She loved her boys immensely, but with so many demands on her time, she was not able to enjoy them much. Loving children is not the same as enjoying them; children who are enjoyed feel secure in their parents’ love. Her children were left to find their own amusements, something easily done in a small, safe, rural area like Leaskdale. Even when she did things with them, her mind was preoccupied by other matters. Maud puts in small anecdotes about her sons in her journals; while these reflect great affection, the reality is that she spent relatively little time with them due to the heavy load she carried—a rather sad state of affairs for a woman who had wanted children so badly.
Towards the end of his life, Stuart still recalled trying to attract his mother’s attention when he was a child. He told of pushing wildflowers under the door when she was writing in the study. That brought his mother to the door to acknowledge the flowers and thank him, only to disappear behind the closed door again. Another time, when he was older, he memorized a poem she loved, Sir Walter Scott’s The Lady of the Lake (some fifty pages of very small print). This had more of an impact. Oddly, Maud does not mention this feat in her journals, yet for Stuart, it was one of the most vivid memories of his childhood, one of those events that bonded him to his mother in a way nothing else could. He knew how much she liked reciting poems and had often heard her recite long sections from Scott’s poem. Like his mother, he had an exceptional visual and aural memory and could memorize very easily. Years later, he still remembered the look of surprise on her face as he started reciting, and her mounting excitement as he continued, page after page, canto after canto. About halfway through his recitation he forgot a line, and his mother quietly prompted him. He said that he never forgot his astonishment that she knew the poem so well that she could prompt him at any place. He got extra attention for those efforts, for a very long time.71
As the boys were growing up, a pattern had been emerging. Stuart favoured his mother, not only in looks but also in personality and disposition. Chester took after his father. Maud consequently worried a great deal about Chester. Sunny little Stuart charmed the community with his smile and his recitations at church events. He had his mother’s sense of timing and showmanship when reciting on the stage. He created no disturbances at home or school, and he made friends easily. Chester was just the opposite. From the beginning, something seemed amiss.
When Stuart reached his sixth birthday in 1921, Maud wrote assessments of her two sons. Stuart she characterized as smart and lovable, Chester as having some troubling qualities. “There is the same curious little streak of contrariness in him that there is in Ewan … its presence has always made him an exceedingly difficult child to train.… [H]e is a blunt reserved little fellow while Stuart, with his angel face and joyous pervasive smile, is the friend of all the world” (October 7, 1921).
Chester, in his ninth year, was already creating trouble in school. He was undeniably bright, and, like Stuart, he usually led his class. Chester had also inherited his mother’s good memory, and he was an excellent reader, but his failure to socialize well with the other students produced constant mayhem. His mother initially blamed his troubles on inexperienced teachers. She remembered that when she had been teaching, she had been able to keep all the students in line.
However, according to Chester’s former classmates in Leaskdale— interviewed in the early 1980s before the Montgomery journals were published and people’s memories became tainted by what they had read in the journals— Chester was always getting into trouble at school. The students loved “to get him going” because he created such a lively uproar. Children teased and tormented him because he would react angrily to provocations and retaliate by lunging at offenders, and his clumsy attempts to catch his skinny, fast-footed classmates created a comic delight. They all said, independently, as adults looking back, that he was by nature a “loner.” He wanted desperately to be accepted, but he was socially inept and ostracized.
Chester’s classmates also recounted that he began showing precocious interest in girls long before anyone else, but the result was that the girls banded together to tease him. Girls would taunt him at recess, and he would erupt and chase them. Disturbances in class were also common, with kids throwing surreptitious spitballs at him to get a reaction. Failing a provocation, he would act up to become the centre of attention. The teacher would say, without even turning, “Is that you, Chester?” He often “got the strap” (a rubber belt about fifteen inches long, one quarter of an inch wide, with which the palm of the hand would be struck several times). As soon as he was old enough to walk the distance by himself, he was frequently sent home from school by exasperated teachers. Something seemed amiss with this boy.
There were no programs then for identifying and working with children with behavioural problems. A relatively inexperienced young teacher would have found it largely impossible to discuss the difficulties with Chester with Canada’s most famous author of books that featured the trials of childhood. However, Maud did not need to be told about Chester’s problems (e.g., as with impulse control): she saw them, but did not know what to do. She was alarmed and admitted to punishing Chester at home. She complained that Ewan was ineffective for training and discipline. For Ewan, as for many men in his generation, child-rearing was a woman’s job.
Indeed, Ewan was no good with small children, nor did he connect with the older youngsters in his parish. Stuart remembered how his well-meaning father tried to relate to children by carrying hard candies called “humbugs” loose in his pocket. These he offered to children—who popped them in their mouths even if they had grungy pocket lint stuck to them.
Ewan left everything to Maud, including the boys’ sex education. Maud says that she made a point of answering the boys’ questions frankly and openly, and she got Chester a book about sex that explained details to him. She wrote that she was resolved not to turn sex into the “dirty” topic it had been in her youth. Her Victorian training, however, had left her exceptionally anxious over matters associated with sex.
Quite early in his development, Chester developed impulsive habits of sexual self-gratification, and he made no effort to conceal this. Maud was alarmed. She certainly did not want Chester pleasuring himself in the bedroom he shared with his younger brother, nor did she want a maid—or visitor—to see it. “I have had to talk to Chester lately about certain habits to avoid,” she wrote euphemistically on January 11, 1924, expressing irritation that Ewan would not do this. However, her talks did not stop Chester’s behaviour, which continued to cause alarm. Chester was a very impulsive child—and later an impulsive young man—who could not postpone any kind of gratification.
For a woman so given to worry, Maud now had many sources of anxiety. Were Chester’s problems with his peers related to Ewan’s apparent inability to bond strongly with anyone? She remarked in her journals that Ewan had never had a close friend in all his life. Despite the pretext of friendship between Captain Smith and Ewan, she knew that it was really her conversational ability and celebrity that prompted Smith’s frequent visits. His parishioners, and most people in general, had always liked Ewan, and thought him a good and kind man, but there was never a bond of strong friendship. As a minister, Ewan needed to maintain a certain reserve with all parishioners, but it was a fact that he, too, had always been a “loner.” Although he was sensitive and brooding himself, he often seemed to lack the capacity for deep empathy with others. His bouts of depression only increased his self-absorption.
Chester looked like his father, was built like him,
and now was showing signs of being like him in other ways that were poorly understood and poorly defined. Maud fretted over what she believed to be a hereditary taint in Ewan’s family. One of Ewan’s brothers, a well-to-do rancher in Montana, at some point late in his life went missing in a state of melancholy after saying he was going to kill himself. He was never found, according to Maud’s journals.
Ewan and Chester begun to clash early in Chester’s life. Ewan was apparently tormented by the fear that he had replicated himself and all his weakness in Chester. Maud had more than a premonition that there might be future trouble with Chester. She guessed that if Chester were going to inherit his father’s melancholy, it would be manifested at puberty. This was a family whose problems were only beginning.
Ewan had remained anxious over himself since his first serious mental episode in 1919. In October 1921, he had driven himself down to Warsaw, Indiana, to visit his brother, a very successful medical doctor, hoping to get advice about his mental condition. After Ewan’s return from Indiana, he had a particularly bad “melancholy” spell. He fixated on the idea that he was an “outcast from God,” a soul lost to Satan and eternal damnation. In one of these depressions, he told Maud that he contemplated suicide. (When Maud reads Lecky’s History of European Morals, she comments on suicide in her journals, picking up his ideas. Seen in her entry of May 10, 1922.) What little peace of mind Maud still had was lost with that admission: suicide would brand their children with shame for their entire lives. On November 1, 1921, Maud wrote in her journal that when he was ill, Ewan was “a personality which is repulsive and abhorrent to me …” Yet, at Christmas that year, Maud reported that Ewan was perfectly normal for the first time since 1918. These sudden and disorienting ups and downs seemed her new reality.
Finances were also a worry. Maud had been surprised that her October 1921 payment from her U.S. publisher, Stokes, was the smallest she had yet received from them. She blamed it on the financial depression in the United States at that time, and worried that she would have to draw on her capital. She thought ruefully of all the thousands of dollars that she had wasted on Stella Campbell, giving her money to lend to a suitor (Irving Howatt) and later money to buy a farm in California. The pressures on her increased, and with Ewan’s mental health being so unpredictable, she was beginning to worry about whether she could maintain her income sufficiently to support them. She felt vulnerable in almost every aspect of her life now, and that would in turn affect her ability to write.
The vacation in Bala, Ontario
In the summer of 1922, there was no chance for the Macdonalds to drive down to Maud’s beloved Prince Edward Island. (Ewan was busy talking to people, organizing witnesses for the Pickering lawsuit.) Instead, in July they made a shorter trip to the beautiful lake district of northern Ontario, an area Maud remembered from her return train trip from Prince Albert some thirty-one years earlier. On July 24, 1922, they packed their car and motored the eighty-five miles to Bala, Ontario. Maud took her imaginary “dream lives” with her.
In the jazz age, Bala was one of the most popular vacation spots in Ontario. A charming resort town on the lake some 125 miles north of Toronto, it was a favourite destination for Torontonians wanting to escape the summer heat in pre-air-conditioned times. Well-to-do people usually drove up in their own cars, but others came by train. Waiting to see who might spill out of the train (or steamboat from other ports) was the main excitement of the day for the younger folk in Bala.
Bala lay at the edge of Lake Muskoka, where the Musquosh River flowed into Bala Bay. Large American bands came in the summer, playing for all the vacationing city people who congregated there to mix, eat, drink, dance, and have a good time. At night, a part of the town was lighted by lanterns, and the large dance pavilion down by the lake gave Bala the atmosphere of a carnival. In the day, it was a beautiful place with lawns sloping down to the lake water, making it easy to swim or canoe. When the music died down and night fell, the roaring waters cascaded over the jagged rocks with a thunderous roar that sounded much like the surf in Prince Edward Island. Wealthy people built beautiful summer homes on the larger islands, which were reached by stately mahogany launches, some of them so large that their decks were used as dance floors. Bala was a magical place in those years between the end of World War I and the onset of the Great Depression, and both Ewan and Maud needed some magic in their lives.
Ordinary tourists stayed in guest homes near the shore of the lake. The Macdonalds stayed at Roselawn Lodge, located on Bala Bay, right below the waterfalls. Maud fell in love with the area. The twinkling lanterns reminded her of the carnival setting of the canals at the base of the famous conical Tomnahurich Mountain in Scotland.
When fogs arose, Bala had the same otherworld quality of Prince Edward Island and Scotland. Maud particularly liked the evenings, when she could sit on the porch, looking through the mists to the lights at other cottages, with campfires blazing, and escape into imaginings of warm fellowship in these private places. When Ewan took the boys out one afternoon, she described one of her “waking-dream lives”:
I picked out an island that just suited me. I built thereon a summer cottage and furnished it de luxe. I set up a boat-house and a motor launch. I peopled it with summer guests—Frede, Aunt Annie, Stella, Bertie—Mr. MacMillan (to whom I engaged Bertie!). We spent a whole idyllic summer there together. Youth—mystery— delight, were all ours once more. I lived it all out in every detail; we swam and sailed and fished and read and built campfires under the pines—I saw to it that I had an island with pines—and dined gloriously at sunset al fresco, and then sat out on moonlit porches (well-screened from Muskoka mosquitoes!)—and always we talked—the soul-satisfying talk of kindred spirits, asking all the old, unanswered questions, caring not though there were no answers so long as we were all ignorant together. (July 31, 1922)
Maud continues describing their “dream life” adventure. Ewan does not make the first list of names above, but she tucks him into the second paragraph, maybe as an afterthought, adding that in her dream he is “not a minister.” The people she chose for her dream were all people who made excellent company. Of course, the best conversationalist and storyteller she knew in 1922 was Edwin Smith who loved lakes, oceans, and water. His ability at sailing was legendary and his yacht from his Prince Edward Island days would have been a classy companion for the motorized mahogany launches in Bala. Significantly, he is not named in this waking dream. He has been all but erased from the narrative in her journals.
While Maud was in Bala, she checked the English proofs of Emily of New Moon and did restful fancy-work. The family took their meals across the street with a Mrs. Pyke, “a lady cumbered with much serving.”72 In a picture of herself in a canoe, which Maud has entitled “Dreaming,” she looks extremely happy.
On this Muskoka vacation, the Macdonalds made a day-trip to see John Mustard and his wife. For $100, John Mustard had purchased a wilderness spot on Lake Muskoka a few miles north of Bala. John and his teenage son Gordon had recently finished building their own modest wooden cottage, amid mature maples and oaks on a long, sloping bank that ran down to the lake.73 John Mustard’s rural retreat was a paradise, just what Maud might have dreamed of owning herself. With the $10,000 she had wasted on her feckless cousin Stella Campbell, she could have bought the largest and most romantic island in Muskoka.
But what would that have availed her without a soulmate to enjoy it with? Nature—water, trees, flowers—all made Maud feel wholesome, but Ewan did not even notice them. The lake would only have been a place for Ewan to drown himself when a melancholy spell descended on him. Ewan’s figure had thickened with age, inactivity, and too much food. By contrast, the trim and distinguished-looking Reverend John Mustard shed his formal clerical garb and turned into a woodsman when he came to Muskoka. John had nailed up a nice little cottage for his family, but Ewan was so clumsy that he could not have clapped two boards together. In this little cottage in the backwoods, one could go to sleep
to the call of the whippoorwill and wake to the call of the loons. It was a dream spot. Maud must have felt unspeakable envy when she first saw it nestled amid the trees.
Needless to say, John Mustard did not make it into Maud’s waking-dreams. He was too genuinely and irritatingly good to be interesting. But she could not have helped comparing the man she had spurned to the man she had chosen. John Mustard was healthy and optimistic; Ewan was sluggish and gloomy. John Mustard had far less income than they had, but he had far more joy in what he had.
John Mustard was a compassionate man who undoubtedly saw the depressive aura around Ewan. From his brothers, Hugh and James Mustard, mainstays in Ewan’s parish, John would have known that Ewan was well liked but that his health had been troublesome. No doubt he sensed Maud’s inner worries. When Mrs. Mustard took Ewan and the boys out for a little fishing expedition, John Mustard played the good host and stayed behind to keep Maud company. This was not appreciated—Maud would never have discussed her husband with him, or their past encounter in Prince Albert. And she despised pity. Their conversation was stilted. His friendly kindness annoyed her. In her journal, she presents the Reverend John Mustard as the same “tedious man” who had been her teacher in 1890–91, and she says nothing to indicate his sterling qualities. The Reverend John Mustard’s career path had been steady, solid, and upward from the beginning. Maud was well aware of all this, but she does not write anything about it in her journal. Nor does she tell us what she very well knows—that he has become one of the most successful and respected Presbyterian ministers in all of Toronto.74
Maud had asked earlier in her life why people could not always love that which was most worthy. Certainly John Mustard was as worthy as men come, and he was unfailingly kind to the Macdonalds, and genuinely solicitous over Ewan’s health until the end of Maud’s and Ewan’s lives. In a thoughtful frame of mind during this Bala vacation, Maud must have compared Mustard to the other minister of her ken, Edwin Smith. Smith had the personal charisma and dazzling oral skills that left people admiring him, whereas John Mustard exuded sincerity, solidity, and generosity of spirit towards others. But Maud could not bring herself to give John Mustard his due in her journals.75
Lucy Maud Montgomery Page 40