Maud’s visit to Bala, and to the Mustard cottage, got only a small write-up in her journals, but her trip gave her new ideas. She tucked away this magical landscape—and the waking dreams she had had there—in her memory bank for a future novel.
The following spring, in 1923, Ewan had bad news from the Island. His sister Christie’s son, Leavitt, had embezzled a large amount of money, and the only way for his family to avoid public shame in the province was to make silent restitution. Ewan’s distracted and heartbroken sister begged for a $5,000 loan on her mortgage. Since Maud had just received profits from Further Chronicles of Avonlea, Ewan wanted her to lend them to Christie. Maud balked. She doubted she would ever get the money back, and she had already lent a great deal of money to other family members that would not be repaid. She wanted Christie to go to Ewan’s two brothers for the money. One brother, Dr. Angus Macdonald, in Indiana, was very well-to-do, and he had no children, so he could well afford to help. Ewan decided to take a quick trip to the Island to see what else he could do for his sister; Maud approved, knowing that Ewan always performed well in negotiating situations where he had a focus.
Ewan came back from the Island with hopeless news: Leavitt had run up a $13,000 debt and embezzled $1,500 from the post office, a federal offence. He had now absconded to the United States, leaving his dying father and distraught mother to cope. Ewan worked it all out, asking for some of Maud’s royalty income. “To get his parents in a mess like that!!” Maud exclaimed in her journal, but then added, “But I must not be too harsh. I don’t know how my own boys will turn out yet” (May 21, 1923). She had plenty of reason to worry about Chester.
A month later she noted another sounding of this theme: a family’s disappointment in a son. John Mustard’s only son had “broken his parents’ hearts,” she wrote, “by suddenly presenting them with a French Canadian Catholic wife whom he picked up in the mining regions up north.” Maud felt, like most of her Presbyterian contemporaries, that marrying a Catholic, especially a French-Canadian one, was a big plunge down the social ladder. Scotland’s history was full of clashes between the Presbyterians and the Catholics, and the enmity ran centuries deep. It had carried across the Atlantic, and Maud had been brought up to believe that Catholics were even worse than “heathens,” who were merely ignorant. This was embedded as deeply within her as the fear of what people would say or think. (Yet, intellectually, Maud rose above her deep prejudice in her Emily novels, portraying a Catholic priest with respect.)
By late summer 1923, Maud herself wanted to travel to Prince Edward Island for some renewal. She was having trouble writing. This time, she left Ewan at home, taking only her two sons, now eleven and seven. But the visit was bittersweet. In spite of the still-strong charms of the sea wind, the hearty meals, the twilights in “Lovers’ Lane,” and the warmth of renewing friendships, Maud realized sadly that the Prince Edward Island she loved was as much a time as a place. The landscape might be the same, but many of the people she loved, like Frede, were gone. In addition, the character of the Island was changing as a result of tourism, for which she was largely responsible. (Once the law against cars had been repealed, American tourists had flooded in again.)
The only thing that had not changed on the Island was the superior quality of its cats. At Park Corner she picked out a wonderful little striped kitten with an “M” on its side to ship back to Ontario. She named him “Good Luck” and called him “Lucky.” Of all the cats that she would have in her life, Lucky was to be her favourite.
As soon as she returned from the Island, in late August, Maud resumed the task of writing Emily Climbs. She felt little interest in it. Her readers would demand that Emily grow up, marry, and live happily ever after. Maud had been in a state of heady excitement when she wrote both Anne of Green Gables and Emily of New Moon, but it was only her personal discipline that got her through the sequels, where her feisty heroines had to be tamed.
The family tension in Maud’s life, combined with the steady writing and revising of her books, compounded by a too-busy round of social obligations, was beginning to take its toll. She had gained forty pounds in the previous two years. She was suffering from muscle spasms in her shoulders and neck, and these were expanding into headaches. She was now forcing herself to write three hours per day instead of two, which aggravated this condition. She revised “Emily 2” during the next two months, and had it ready for a typist by March 8, 1924. She dedicated Emily Climbs to “Pastor Felix,” the pseudonym of a long-time correspondent, the Reverend Arthur John Lockhart (c. 1850–1926), a poet who was the uncle of Nate Lockhart, her first “beau” from schooldays.
The formula for popular fiction required young women to marry. Young men could light out for new territory and adventure (like Huckleberry Finn), but women were usually destined for matrimony. Maud complained in her journals that she could never write of young girls as they really were, very interested in boys and with growing sexual urges: “Love must scarcely be hinted at—yet young girls in their early teens often have some very vivid love affairs. A girl of Emily’s type certainly would …” (January 20, 1924). As Maud watched Emily’s sexuality developing (while remembering her own development, and keeping one eye on the real-life turmoil in Chester’s pubescent life and the other on her aging, troubled husband), she must have wondered where to take her story. Emily had to be taken through her teenage years into marriage without any hint of improper thoughts along the way.
Maud was in her forty-ninth year, still full of vitality, locked into a marriage to a man who, when he was depressed, she found repugnant. Maud’s maids recounted that although Ewan wore relatively formal attire most of the time, he always looked slightly slovenly; his rumpled look was accentuated by his swarthy skin. Some people compared Maud’s impeccable cleanliness and wondered how she could tolerate such an unkempt husband.
Emily Climbs (1925)
In the first Emily book, Dean Priest is an older man, widely travelled, who becomes a friend to Emily. In the second Emily book, he becomes the hunchbacked “Jarback” Priest, who develops a romantic interest in her. An adult reading Emily Climbs feels discomfort with the change: Dean may be a “Priest,” but to adult readers he begins to feel unwholesome, more like a sexual predator than an older friend.
The Emily trilogy had begun in 1921 as a Künstlerroman, a story about the education and development of an artist figure—in this case, a female artist. It loses its direction as Maud negotiates the dark waters of sexuality, unable to depict either the abnormal or normal kind. Dean’s nickname of “Jarback” signals that something is wrong with this man. “Jarback” then slips into the skin of a predator—he is quite willing to destroy Emily’s self-esteem and her writing in order to persuade her to marry him. Ewan had counselled Maud to give up her writing after she had a nervous attack early in their relationship. As we saw earlier, Maud once complains in her journals that the otherwise kindly Ewan has a “medieval” attitude towards women, seeing them as a man’s possession (March 25, 1922). The adult reader hardly knows what to make of this fictional character, Dean Priest, who suddenly shifts from being a father-figure to a lurking menace, interested only in Emily’s body, not her creativity or soul. The fictional world of sexuality has become as unstable as Montgomery’s real one. Maud seems to be writing out of her own emotional turmoil, and although the young reader stays interested in finding out what will happen to Emily, the novel seems to have lost its focus. Maud often said that she intended to keep the “shadows” of her own life out of her fiction, but they appear here in strangely twisted form.
By March 1924, when Maud was finishing Emily Climbs, she had the “tight” feeling in her head again. Her Canadian income was down. Rilla had sold, but only 12,000 copies; and Emily of New Moon only 8,500 in Canada. And there was ongoing aggravation over Ewan’s lawsuit. Ewan could be hauled into court anytime that Pickering thought he might have enough money to pay the judgment. The letters from Lawyer Grieg kept insulting Ewan for his “inabil
ity to pay.” The mere reminder of the lawsuit stirred up one more failure for Ewan—his inability to get justice in a court of law—and seemed once more to prove that God had rejected him.
At one point Greig sent an affidavit, implying that Ewan was hiding his real income so he would have more money “wherewith to enjoy himself and to spend in unnecessary ways.” Both Maud and Ewan thought this statement a howler. The idea of a staid Presbyterian minister, particularly a depressive one, enjoying himself in “necessary” ways was funny enough, but “in unnecessary ways” was beyond imagining, even to Ewan. It is one of the few times in her journals where Maud tells of having a good laugh with Ewan (although maids and relatives said they did have a good time together in the early years).
The whole Pickering affair continued as a strain on the Macdonalds, even if they could laugh over aspects of the case—including the fact that the court required Pickering to pay thirty dollars, then a substantial amount of money, for Ewan’s expenses every time Ewan was summoned for a court examination of his financial state. The procedure wore Ewan down, and he relapsed into melancholy after almost a year of being fairly stable. Maud wanted to pay the debt from her income and be done with Pickering, but Ewan stubbornly refused.
On a Sunday in the first week of March 1924, Maud went into the library to find him, with a bandana tied round his head, suffering another attack: “unshorn, collarless, hair on end, eyes wild and hunted, with a hideous imbecile expression.” He preached a puerile sermon, reducing her to tears of humiliation. Ewan was soon too ill to preach at all. In mid-April, their newspaper, the Northern Ontario Times, carried the Leaskdale note that “Mr. Macdonald is improving after an attack of neuritis. Mr. Edmunds of Uxbridge occupied the pulpit on Sunday.” Maud was using neuritis to explain her husband’s problems at this time; it is a vague term suggesting inflammation of the nerves. Soon Maud was again in pain from a tight feeling around her head, undoubtedly caused by stress, a symptom that would afflict her during tense periods for the rest of her life.
When Ewan did manage to sleep, he found himself frightened by his dreams. Once he woke in a terror, having dreamed of murdering a good friend. This was apparently the second time Ewan had had the dream of killing a friend, and Maud began to be frightened of him, for herself and for the boys. He had begun to hear voices in his attacks telling him “he was going to be lost—God hated him—he was doomed to hell” (March 25, 1924).
Whenever Maud saw Ewan start to “paw” at his head, she knew the malady was starting up again. She could not imagine where things would end. She had been giving Ewan a steady course of chloral or Veronal when he had symptoms or when he could not sleep—drugs that were recommended by Dr. Shier, as well as the Bostonian Dr. Nathan Garrick. (Ewan may have medicated himself on top of what Maud gave him.) In these attacks, Maud reported that Ewan had abnormal physical symptoms: his breath smelled of urea and his skin turned a poor colour.76 This time, his attack intensified as the days wore on, and he paced the floors, shaking, his eyes haunted. One day his illness reached a peak, and he fled the house and strode up the road in mud and slush, in full view of the neighbours, and then returned, muttering that he was dying. Maud took his pulse, which was fine. She brought him to the library so the boys would not see him. After bursting into tears and crying for some time, he improved.
When he was at his worst, she kept him out of sight of the community. When he was only slightly affected, and they had to go visiting, he was able to keep up a minimal conversation, and she would carry it. Once, by “devilish felicity” a lady they were visiting in Zephyr regaled them with tales of the “suicides of the unsound in mind.” A Zephyr neighbour had just tried suicide by Paris Green, but had not taken enough to kill her, only enough to furnish “gruesome details” for gossip (April 20, 1924). Maud watched Ewan’s increasing agitation until he got up and left the room, at which point she managed to change the subject.
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Maud finished Emily Climbs on March 8, 1924. Since the Emily books were to be a trilogy, it would have been natural for her to start the third and final Emily novel next. Instead, she started a novel called The Blue Castle on April 10, and then the third Emily book, Emily’s Quest, on May 26, 1924. This was unprecedented—having two novels going at the same time. The Blue Castle seems to have been a “one-off” novel, demanding to be written, pushing aside the third and final Emily book. The Blue Castle is set in Muskoka.
In late April 1924, Maud took a break from her writing for her “semiannual orgy of household shopping” in Toronto. She brought home a little puppy for her boys, an Airedale they named Dixie, hoping it would be a happy distraction in a troubled household.
She made some speeches, and local newspapers carried accounts. The North Bay Nugget reported: “Mrs. McDonald [sic] paid a glowing tribute to the high character of Canadian writing.” In all her speeches she now routinely made a plea for Canadian support for Canadian writers, books, and magazines. She was carrying the Canadian Authors Association message everywhere she spoke. The Hamilton Spectator found her:
an altogether delightful person—rather above medium height [not accurate], and with thick hair, slightly graying, which she wore waved and coiled becomingly about her well-shaped head. Her face was unlined and she smiled easily, and to the reporter who had once fancied that the lovable Anne of Green Gables was none other than the author, she seemed indeed the embodiment of that wholesome, refreshing type of Prince Edward Island womanhood.… When asked her opinion of the modern “teenage girl”—the ultra modern young person who smoked and went everywhere unchaperoned, and who contrasted rather sadly with Anne of Green Gables, Mrs. McDonald defended the modern young girl.… Speaking of the too popular sex novel of the present day which the young girls read, Mrs. McDonald admitted that it was not until the other day that she had read Flaming Youth, the most flagrant of the fast sexy novels. She had been disgusted by it, for it neither pointed a moral, nor had it any excuse for its existence, like some of the really great sex novels, such as Tolstoy wrote.
Some days later, Maud wrote again in her journals how much she was enjoying writing The Blue Castle. It touched on taboo themes: she gave an unmarried mother a brief but sympathetic treatment in it, depicting her as an innocent, gullible, and psychologically needy young woman who got pregnant out of innocence. The main heroine fantasizes wildly about the perfect lover.
Maud’s life seemed in some sort of choppy turmoil. In May 1924, she inexplicably set The Blue Castle aside and prepared to start “Emily 3.” She finished her annual month-long ritual of spring-cleaning, followed by cleaning layers of manure and straw buildup out of the horse stable with pitchforks in preparation for a new batch of chickens. Maud could not count on Ewan to do work like this, so she did it herself, with help from Lily—who was a hard worker, good at pitching manure, whatever her other faults might have been.
Finances were a problem because of the ongoing Page lawsuit, but Maud’s financial state eased when The Delineator asked her to write four Emily stories, with payment of $1,600. On the first of June, Ewan left for a long vacation in PEI, a relief after three months of gloom.
Sadly, as soon as Ewan returned from PEI, Maud learned that her Aunt Annie had passed away; she went to the Island for the funeral. Maud experienced her beloved Aunt Annie’s death as she would have that of her own mother—she remained deeply attached to the Park Corner farm as a beacon of happiness from her childhood. Her Aunt Annie Campbell’s nonjudgmental love had been a source of great comfort to her when she was young, and now one more person she loved on the Island was gone. She came back with nerves frayed, and decided they all needed a holiday.
Mammoth Cave in Kentucky
Now, Maud planned a different vacation for her family: a car trip to see the unusual underground formations in Kentucky known as Mammoth Cave. Being behind the wheel always cleared Ewan’s mind. Maud’s cousin Bertie McIntyre came from British Columbia to accompany them. Bertie had the Montgomery sense of gaiety and was good
company. The boys, now twelve and nine, were the right age for such a car trip.
There was something symbolic in Maud’s desire to see this cave. She herself lived partly on the surface of life and partly in another world, out of sight, where she walked in the alternate byways of literature, creativity, and imaginative adventures. So, in a sense, she was drawn to the subterranean. She had grown up with Scottish and Irish mythologies, which held that there was an alternate world of fairy folk beneath the earth’s solid surface. To her imagination, this pagan Celtic legacy of subterranean folk was no more fantastical than the Christian belief in a God and singing angels above the earth’s solid surface. She wanted to see, in real time, in real life, a place where there was an alternate world that was out of this world but that nevertheless had physical existence. Powerful emotions that no one could know of were churning in her.
So the Macdonalds packed their bags, loaded their car, and started off on the morning of July 28, 1924, to Kentucky. Ewan drove their new car “Dodgie” without accident for a total of 1,817 miles, over an eleven-day period—a remarkable feat of concentration, considering that most of the roads they travelled over were dirt and gravel, full of ruts and potholes that could knock off the tires or axles of those fragile, early cars. It was an endurance test for all. When a storm came up near Sarnia, the Macdonalds quickly drove their car off the road into a nearby barn until it was over, and they were lucky to encounter no more rain on the trip. Their only other mishap was finding a single bedbug in an Indiana hotel. Maud was amazed to find red roads in Kentucky, just like the ones in Prince Edward Island.
Lucy Maud Montgomery Page 41