Lucy Maud Montgomery

by Mary Henley Rubio

  Mammoth Cave cast an indescribable spell on Maud. Even Ewan was captivated—“and Ewan seldom seems to take much pleasure in the things that please others,” she wrote. Each day they donned “cave costumes” and walked down into the mouth of the chilling cave (fifty-four degrees Fahrenheit), then followed guides with gasoline lanterns through two to three miles of subterranean paths, past underground lakes and rivers, along precipices, down steep steps, and through long, lofty “rooms” with strangely formed grotesque figures looking like birds or animals or people, in a world without sight or sound. Maud mused over the totally white eyeless fish that she had heard about in sermons all her life—an example of what ministers said happened when living creatures didn’t use their powers and descended into a “degenerate state.” When the tourists rose to the earth’s surface again, it seemed unreal for the moment, the ground she stood on an illusion.

  The trip both pleased and “spooked” her. She never wanted to return: this mysterious underworld world, beneath the lush rolling green fields of Kentucky, was too close a reminder of the double life she led herself.

  The profound identification she experienced in the hidden worlds of Mammoth Cave proved to be curiously restorative. She again felt pleasure in the world around her, and her love of sharing that pleasure with others bubbled up again, with its healing powers. After she returned home, she spoke to many groups about the wonders of this experience, including the Hypatia Club and the Guilds of Leaskdale.

  Church Union turmoil

  A new concern had been percolating in the Macdonalds’ lives for a number of years: the subject of “Church Union.” It had been mooted before the Great War, and approved by the General Assembly in 1916, but was not taken up again until after the war. In 1924, a Church Union bill went before the Canadian Parliament for debate. It proposed that the Presbyterian Church, the Methodist Church, and the Congregational Churches (and a few already amalgamated Protestant denominations) join into one church, to be called the “United Church of Canada.” The doctrinal differences between various Protestant churches were compatible. Canada’s population was diverse and scattered, and the increasing use of cars, giving people more mobility, made it unnecessary for there to be so many tiny rural Protestant churches with very small congregations.

  Many farmers were sympathetic to the economic aspect of Church Union. They struggled to support their churches in the depressed times after the war. From a financial point of view, Church Union made sense. There would be a larger congregation supporting a single minister, and only one church building to maintain. There would be social benefits, too—people could see many more of their neighbours in the community every time they worshipped or attended a church function. Churches were still the dominant social organization in every community.

  From other points of view, however, Church Union spelled trouble. Old loyalties to specific denominations and sects would die hard. Although the war had lessened the hold of the Church on people, congregations were still very loyal to the specific churches of their fathers. Both Ewan and Maud knew that if Union went through, amalgamating several denominations into the “United Church,” the weaker ministers would be pushed out. The unspoken truth was that Ewan was likely to be one of these, given his erratic health. Maud knew that if he lost his profession, she could still support them well enough on her income, but she feared that the psychological impact on him would be devastating.

  Church Union was particularly favoured by parishioners in Zephyr. That tiny village not only had Ewan’s Presbyterian church, but the Methodist one as well. (The Methodist church was the one Marshall Pickering attended— although he himself was in hospital now with the diagnosis of diabetes.) The national government planned to ask each congregation in Canada to vote on whether the parishioners wanted to amalgamate churches, either to endorse Church Union or stay out as Continuing Presbyterians. This vote at the community level became an incredibly divisive agent, splitting families, and pitting neighbours against each other.

  In summer, after the Church Union bill passed in Parliament, setting the stage for local votes on whether to go “union” or not, Ewan mobilized himself again to persuade his two churches to remain Presbyterian rather than become a “United Church.” He and his Scottish forebears had all been Presbyterian, and he wanted to stay Presbyterian, rather than go “Union.” For her part, Maud decided that she didn’t much care which way things went, writing in her journals:

  The Spirit of God no longer works through the church for humanity. It did once but it has worn out its instrument and dropped it. Today it is working through Science. That is the real reason for all the “problems” we hear so much of in regard to the “church.” The “leaders” are trying to galvanize into a semblance of life something from which life has departed. (December 14, 1924)

  She said nothing like this in public, however.

  With Church Union boiling up, Ewan could focus his considerable persuasive and negotiating skills. But by the end of the year, the tension over the Union question made everyone feel frayed. There was much politicking, much gossiping about others’ motives, nasty power-wielding within congregations, and in some cases, some real skulduggery in voting procedures, as ministers devised ways to deny the vote to those whose preference they did not like.

  By Christmas, Maud felt exhausted. She was coping with the general anxiety over Union, endless youth dialogue practices for the Christmas concert, letters from people asking her for financial help, mail from her Boston lawyer, the start of a bad cold, and Lily’s claiming to have a dozen illnesses—a “new one every half hour.” Maud felt, she said, “like a cat one jump ahead of a dog” (December 28, 1924). A new physical symptom bothered her: roving and immobilizing muscle spasms.

  When the votes were all counted in January 1925, both of Ewan’s congregations had voted to remain Presbyterian. Leaskdale was solid, voting 63 to 11, but the results in fractious Zephyr had a smaller margin, 23 to 18. Some of the Zephyr people left the church anyway. This placed even greater financial strain on those who remained. Maud was cross with those who left, but the Macdonalds laughed to hear a report of the Methodists complaining that the Presbyterians had sent all their “cranks” over to them.

  All across Canada, the aftermath of the Church Union vote was acrimonious. Many Presbyterian ministers quit speaking to former friends who had taken the other side. The Macdonalds had been very close to John and Margaret Stirling in Prince Edward Island, visiting each other whenever possible. Church Union did not completely destroy this long-time friendship, but it did cause serious strain, because John supported Union. Church topics were off limits when they met. It also caused rifts between many of the Presbyterian ministers in the Ontario circle that Ewan knew. Maud mentions nothing in her journals about Edwin Smith’s thoughts on Union, but church records show that he later became the minister at a United Church some distance away in Ontario.

  Ewan’s position as minister in Leaskdale and Zephyr was now— thankfully—reasonably secure. This cheered him enough that he kept trying for a new “call” to a different congregation. They were still in a moving mode. The bickering and cash-strapped parish of Zephyr, the Pickering affair, the incessant small community gossip over Maud’s personal life and business affairs, and the Church Union fighting had left them both convinced that it was time for a change. It seemed that as soon as Ewan smoothed over one problem in Zephyr, another issue arose. When Maud went to women’s meetings—and there were many of these—she claimed to feel an undercurrent of tension.

  Ewan had received a number of invitations to “preach for the call” in the post-war period—after all, it was widely known that he was married to the famous authoress, L. M. Montgomery, and that she was an excellent “helpmeet” in his church work. Ewan could rise to the challenge of giving fine sermons when he preached elsewhere, but there must have been something subtle in his demeanour or appearance that turned people off. Or, given the speed at which gossip spread, perhaps rumours of his intermi
ttent illnesses preceded him. Again and again, over several years, he lost the call to someone else: at Pinkerton and Priceville, at Columbus and Brooklyn, at Markham, Orangeville, Hillsburg, Whitby. All were rural or small-town parishes—a Toronto charge was beyond him—and even the rural places seemed not to want him after they saw him. One reputedly did not want him because he came with a car: ministers with cars were apt to go gadding off to Toronto. Each rejection laid him lower. Ewan’s continuing failure to get a new call sent him to bed with his old, debilitating depression once again.

  In February 1925, a new maid, Elsie Bushby, came to replace Lily Meyers. Maud had wanted to dismiss Lily for a long time, but she had been afraid of what an angry Lily might say. Even when Lily finally left on her own, Maud still worried that she would “tell all kinds of falsehoods about me and my household all over the country” (February 27, 1925). There were few stories, of course, that Lily had not already told, but Maud makes the comment to emphasize in her journals—for future readers and biographers—that Lily was nothing but an unreliable troublemaking gossip.

  Elsie Bushby, her replacement, was a bright and perky young woman who brought enormous cheer into Maud’s life. By her own account, Elsie came from a very poor farm family and had grown up in a household where there rarely was enough food to go around. Elsie was nevertheless rich in vitality, with an irrepressibly positive attitude towards life. She was a hard worker, a quick learner, and a spunky young woman very glad to get the position.

  As soon as the bouncy, bright Elsie was established in the household after the end of the first week in January, Maud’s spirits soared and her pen started flying again. She went back to writing The Blue Castle with renewed vigour. She could write and enjoy it again, even if Ewan was struggling mentally and taking bromides. In less than a month, she had finished the first draft of the novel, calling it a release from her cares and worries.

  This novel is her most revised novel, perhaps an indication of the stress she was under when she wrote the first part of it. It is also a novel that changes greatly in tone from beginning to end, so much that it almost seems to have been written by two people (an indication, perhaps of Elsie’s effect on the household). In early March, after a whirlwind but immensely detailed revision, Maud pronounced the novel finished.

  The Blue Castle (1926)

  Maud first began to unpack her emotions from the 1922 trip to Bala into fiction in April 1924, immediately following Ewan’s worst mental attack since 1919. Bala remained in her mind as the terrain for private dreams. She could imagine trysts with a lover on one of the distant, misty islands. Their private cottage among the trees would be visible only when its lights twinkled over the water at night. They would be there alone and together, wildly in love, enjoying each other. She began to fashion an imaginary lover—he would be a mysterious man, believably ordinary in some ways, but with the mystique of a fascinating demon-lover in others. She would use elements of the Bluebeard fairy-tale myth to give him a sinister aura. These creative stirrings completely obsessed her, and this was the book that shoved the final Emily novel into the background.

  Anne’s House of Dreams had removed a zombie-like husband from a passionate young woman’s life. Reversing this situation, The Blue Castle produced a romantic lover for its unhappy, lonely heroine. The Blue Castle was drawn from deep in Maud’s reservoir of imaginative wishes. Ewan’s apparent “madness” and murderous dreams certainly heated up her febrile imagination. She could not help wondering what her life would have been like had she married a man who was a confident, intellectually stimulating, responsive partner, a composite of the best qualities of men like Ewan, John Stirling, John Mustard, and Edwin Smith.

  The heroine of The Blue Castle, the plain and depressed Valancy Stirling, is a spinster of twenty-nine who is as desperate for marriage as Maud herself was at the same age. There, on an imaginary island in Lake Muskoka, Maud put her most passionate writing into the story of Valancy Stirling, who “wakened early, in the lifeless, hopeless hour just preceding dawn. She had not slept very well. One does not sleep well, sometimes, when one is twenty-nine on the morrow, and unmarried, in a community and a connection where the unmarried are simply those who have failed to get a man.”

  Valancy’s mother, Mrs. Stirling (an Anglican, by the way, not a Presbyterian), is the kind of overbearing and pinched mother who would “sulk for days” when crossed. Living with them is “Cousin Stickles,” a whining widow with a “mole right on the end of her dumpy nose, bristling hairs on her chin,” and “protruding eyes.” Cousin Stickles never tires of bragging to Valancy that she was married at seventeen. And Valancy’s mother—a woman who can make her anger felt in every room of a house, and who feels daily embarrassment over the fact that her daughter has failed to marry—never tires of telling Valancy, who wants nothing more in life than to get married and have “fat little” babies, that it is “not maidenly to think about men.” Mrs. Stirling does not know that Valancy, “so cowed and subdued and overridden and snubbed in real life, was wont to let herself go rather splendidly in her day-dreams.”

  Valancy’s escape is to her “blue castle” in Spain. In it she keeps many lovers, though “only one at a time.” She had one at age twelve, another at fifteen, and another at twenty-five. By age twenty-nine, Valancy often feels a pain around her heart. She would like to see a doctor about it, but is afraid to—afraid her mother will find out she has gone without permission, afraid of what the doctor might tell her.

  Valancy’s only escape from the dreariness of her life is to read books by John Foster, a popular writer who mixes nature description with philosophy. Her life is changed the day she comes across the line in his Magic of Wings that says: “Fear is the original sin. Almost all the evil in the world has its origin in the fact that someone is afraid of something” (Chapter 5).

  Mrs. Stirling has instilled in Valancy the terrible fear of “what people will say” about her. Valancy’s mother, as well as her aunts and uncles and cousins, all say cruel things to her. If Valancy ever speaks back to anyone, her mother chides her that it is “unladylike to have feelings.” Her mother polices her every moment; she is not allowed solitude and privacy even in her own bedroom, lest she do unmentionable things there.

  After reading Foster’s statement about “fear,” and articulating to herself that “Despair is a free man—hope is a slave” (Chapter 8), Valancy begins to free herself. She goes to see a doctor. Through a mistake, the doctor tells her that she has only one year to live. She is seized with a new attitude to life, and decides to move out of the family home. To the shock of her clan, and as an act of compassion, Valancy moves in with a young woman who is dying of consumption, the daughter of the disreputable town handyman, “Roaring Abel.” “Cissy” Gay has had a baby out of wedlock, and the baby has died. To make the Gays even worse social pariahs, Roaring Abel Gay, though Presbyterian, is a profane inebriate who always manages to reduce to shambles the theological arguments of every minister who tries to reform him. Valancy has always liked Abel, “a jolly, picturesque, unashamed reprobate” who “stood out against the drab respectability of Deerwood and its customs like a flame-red flag of revolt and protest” (Chapter 9).

  While living at the Gays’, Valancy meets their friend Barney Snaith, who roars around town in his Grey Slosson car (named “Lady Jane Grey,” like the Macdonalds’ own car). Cissy dies (the predictable fate in Victorian literature for any woman who has sinned sexually). With a shocking lack of propriety, Valancy herself proposes to Barney Snaith, the dashing mystery man whom the town believes to be a criminal on the run, explaining to him that she does not have long to live. They marry hurriedly and move to his small cottage on a secluded Muskoka island. They have a year of more bliss than she has known in her entire life. Maud concludes with a surprise ending that is, of course, happy for everyone. Barney Snaith is, of course, the famous John Foster, a millionaire from the sales of his popular books. Her family, who have been so ashamed of Valancy’s behaviour that
they disowned her, rush to reclaim her.

  This book is wonderfully implausible, but readers willingly suspend their disbelief. The hard-hitting but hilarious verbal exchanges between well-sketched characters expose all of Maud’s disdain for social sham and hypocrisy, and must have left many of the readers of her time gasping for air—some in shock, others in laughter. The book defies classification, even as a “romance,” because it is so full of wisdom about life, laughter at human foibles, and powerful emotions. A 1926 review in Great Britain’s famous journal Punch notes that the plot of the book is like “sentimental fiction,” but hastens to add that although the “plot is as threadbare as could well be imagined … [,] the odd thing is that in the telling it acquires a surprising semblance of freshness.”77

  At the end, we find that John Foster has become a writer because he experienced emotional deprivation in childhood due to his mother’s early death. Both he (and Maud) offset the feelings of isolation and loneliness by finding an alternate world where they write novels in order to create their own happiness. Foster is slightly embarrassed by his books, which are full of purple prose (like Maud’s own). Maud structures the book in a way that consciously exposes the psychological necessities behind her imaginary writer’s actions and his stratagems for coping in life. The imaginary heroine is given the same treatment. The book provides genuine insights about how personalities are moulded. It also captures and defuses the corrosive and explosive rebellion in its author’s soul.

  Once again, Maud had caught the spirit of her era in creating characters who challenge religion and give human hypocrisy a rough ride. Maud gave away nothing personal, however, when talking about her novels and her own life. Later, in 1929, she said about the setting for The Blue Castle, the only novel she ever set in Ontario: “The Blue Castle is in Muskoka. Muskoka is the only place I’ve ever been in that could be my Island’s rival in my heart. So I wanted to write a story about it.”78 No one would have guessed that she gave her own subterranean emotions a life in her imaginary places—in this case, her “Blue Castle,” the island where she escaped her own prison, and lived through her heroine the fantasy of being married to a man she was wildly in love with. He might tell her that “There is no such thing as freedom on earth … Only different kinds of bondages,” but she would counter, as Maud herself might have, that the “prison unto which we doom ourselves no prison is” (Chapter 29). And, when Maud closed off this book, she resolutely returned, with dignity, to her own personal prison.