Lucy Maud Montgomery

by Mary Henley Rubio

  While the writing of Emily’s Quest progressed, there were tensions in the manse. Margaret MacKenzie, the new Scottish maid, proved to be eccentric and morose, with few skills in either housekeeping or cooking. Worse, she resented all instruction. But Maud decided to keep her for a short period of time because she was afraid of what people in the new community “might say”—namely, that she herself was “a difficult mistress.” An alien presence like this sullen maid, so different from the cheerful Elsie, had a dampening effect on Maud’s own moods. She fought depression. She worried when Chester was often caught lying. She took both of her sons aside at this time and made them promise never to smoke, but Chester started smoking anyway (and was soon caught). Maud’s overwrought reaction was to weep disconsolately, creating a scene that her younger son remembered vividly to the end of his life.4

  Late summer brought the interruptions of making jams and pickles for winter, painting the floors in the manse, giving the occasional speech, and attending missionary meetings. There was also a stream of guests. Maud’s half-sister Ila came to visit with her three children. Maud liked Ila, who, she thought, was much more like their father, Hugh John Montgomery, than her other step-siblings, who resembled Mary Ann.5

  In September Maud had a very welcome guest from Cavendish, Myrtle Macneill Webb. She was not the special soulmate that Frede had been, but she was discreet and a “kindred spirit”—someone with whom Maud could both laugh and reminisce. They shared a love of gardening, nature walks, cats, and gossiping about family and people in Cavendish. Ewan drove Maud and Myrtle to Aurora so that Myrtle could see St. Andrew’s, Chester’s private school. They visited old friends in Leaskdale, saw the movie Ben Hur in Toronto, made an outing to Niagara Falls, visited Brampton’s Dale Greenhouses near Norval (said to be the largest greenhouse in the world at that time), toured the University of Toronto campus, particularly Knox College, and then drove around the beautiful Caledon Hills north of Norval, coming home through Belfountain, one of the most picturesque little towns on the winding Credit River. It was a restorative visit for Maud, Myrtle, and Ewan, who enjoyed chauffeuring them around.

  The fall of 1926 was busy. The Macdonalds joined in local community fun such as corn roasts, sitting on boxes around the fire by the river, eating candy and roasted corn, telling jokes, singing songs, and generally having a good time. In October, Maud and Ewan had a happy reunion in Galt, Ontario, with the Reverend James K. Fraser, one of her favourite former elementary teachers in Cavendish. Maud and Ewan restarted Young People’s groups in their new parishes, and she was delighted to find that there were talented “organizers” in this parish who did not rely solely on her for ideas. She had time to catch up on her correspondence.

  To Lorne Pierce, Toronto’s most influential editor and publisher, she sent some items at his request: a picture of herself, of the Norval manse, and of her old home in Cavendish, plus a manuscript he had asked for, her poem “The Choice” (which she said expressed her philosophy of life). She added a short biography which ended with the information that she had married a Presbyterian minister and had “two sons, aged 14 and 17 respectively, two cats and seventeen hens.”6

  Lorne Pierce (1890–1961) was a founding member of the Canadian Authors Association (CAA), the Bibliographical Society of Canada, and the Art Gallery of Ontario. The editor of Ryerson Press from 1920 to 1960, he devoted his career to the development of Canadian literature, culture, and history. Being noticed by Lorne Pierce meant a great deal, and Montgomery desired nothing more than to be recognized for her achievement on both the national and international stages.7

  There were more church activities: for one “Fowl Supper” Maud baked, brewed, made cake, jellies, salads, and “mock chicken,” and then performed as entertainment. After the rain took the fall leaves and the world buckled down for the winter, she still had her beautiful pine trees. She could lie in bed looking at them standing guard at the top of Russells’ Hill, in a “delicate, unreal, moonlit world,” or wake and see them talking “to the sky against the fires of sunrise” (November 1, 1926). Maud’s dreams always reflected her state of mind. She started re-imagining an old dream of discovering, in a house that she had been living in for years, a new and unexpected suite of beautiful rooms. A dour Presbyterian might have predicted that happiness would soon give way to trouble.

  Between fall 1926 and 1927, two items were published that Maud does not mention in her journals. The first was a high-profile study of Canadian writers that denigrated her books as the worst writing Canada had produced— an attack that had enough influence that it inflicted a long-festering wound. The second was a small typographical error that opened the old wound of gossip from her childhood and her Leaskdale years.

  The first assault, in 1926, on Maud’s reputation was totally unexpected. An ambitious young lawyer named William Arthur Deacon had moved to Toronto from Winnipeg and had the goal of establishing himself in the powerful newspaper and magazine worlds as Canada’s pre-eminent literary journalist. There were already several established literary journalists (such as Stanley Morgan-Powell of Montreal), but Deacon aimed to become the first full-time book reviewer in Canada. (Newspaper journalists had dominated the field of book reviewing and criticism before World War I, and they still had the most influential voice through the 1920s. Academic criticism began to develop only after the war, and became much more important in the 1930s.)

  After World War I ended, Canada saw itself as a young country ready to develop a national literature. William Arthur Deacon, a man of huge ambitions, was “infused with a sense of mission for the establishment of an entire, self-contained, dynamic Canadian cultural milieu—a Canadian authorship, a Canadian readership, a Canadian literature—and sometimes he called himself its prophet,” according to Clara Thomas and John Lennox in William Arthur Deacon: A Literary Life. Deacon wanted to develop the literary consciousness of Canadian readers, educating the Canadian public into more “sophisticated tastes.” Like so many other literary nationalists (including Maud), he wanted Canada to develop world-class writers and its own literature.

  Deacon regarded as hopelessly old-fashioned the writers who appealed only to “lowbrow” unsophisticates; among these he listed popular novelists like Montgomery and Ralph Connor, both widely read beyond Canadian shores. He described these writers as a national embarrassment. In particular, he regarded Maud’s books as shallow sentimentalism and the “nadir” of Canadian writing. Literary styles were indeed changing: “Victorianism” and “Realism” were going out of style, and “Modernism” was coming in. Deacon saw himself as the critical voice who would sweep out the old and bring in a new, modern criticism and literature.8 (At the same time, a young generation of academic critics were establishing themselves in a parallel role in the universities, and articulating a more intellectualized approach called “Modernism.”)9

  A man of prodigious energy, Deacon worked hard writing reviews, promoting writers, engaging in political activism, and keeping in touch with everyone in the book world. He was literary editor of the influential Canadian magazine Saturday Night from 1922 to 1928. And in the autumn of 1926 he published Poteen, a book of essays on Canadian culture, politics, and literature, intended to provide “a concise literary history of Canada” and to demonstrate “justifiable pride … in an emerging literature that already has such worth and distinctiveness.”10 This book (which Maud read) helped establish his reputation as a growing power in the Canadian literary world.11

  In Poteen, William Arthur Deacon did not damn with faint praise. Instead, he ended a major chapter with an open attack on Maud’s popularity and reputation:

  Lucy M. Montgomery of Prince Edward Island shared the quick popularity of [Ralph] Connor in a series of girls’ sugary stories begun with Anne of Green Gables (1908). Canadian fiction was to go no lower; and she is only mentioned to show the dearth of mature novels at the time (p. 169).

  Maud is dismissed on other counts, too. Deacon provides two lists of noteworthy Canadian
writers, first of adult fiction and then of children’s literature. Poteen does not include Maud in the first category, although he does include other women writers like Mazo de la Roche, Mabel B. Dunham, Gilbert Knox (pseudonym for Madge MacBeth), Martha Ostenso, Marjorie Pickthall, and Laura Salverson. Nor does he include Montgomery among the Canadian writers who write for children, like (Margaret) Marshall Saunders (Beautiful Joe) and Catharine Parr Traill.

  Poteen also includes a survey of the academics who had recently written surveys of Canadian literature. Deacon criticizes Professor Archibald MacMechan of Dalhousie (Maud’s former teacher) for giving attention to Anne of Green Gables in his Head-Waters of Canadian Literature (1924), and he slams MacMechan’s summary chapter as “valueless” because he writes “on the ‘best-sellers’ of the period instead of on the works of literary merit regardless of commercial success” (p. 211). (Maud’s writing is clearly in his sights here.) Deacon promoted the idea that “best-sellers” were usually inferior to serious works of fiction because the masses liked them. Although he disparaged both Ralph Connor and Montgomery, his greater contempt was for Maud. Later in his life, Deacon read Connor’s autobiographical writing, and revised his opinion of Connor when he had more insight into the issues in his books.12

  Maud was certainly accustomed to the occasional reviewer complaining that her books were too sentimental, or finding other faults with them. The war had undeniably changed public tastes. She saw that women were caught between the old attitude that they should subjugate themselves to their husbands and the new one that they could have independent ambitions for themselves. By the 1920s her books were beginning to reflect this new reality. Rilla, the Emily books, and The Blue Castle, for instance, all deal in subtle ways with the complicated social forces that impede women’s advancement, achievement, autonomy, and authorship.

  Maud’s style was that of a storyteller, with none of the hard edges of Modernism. Her popular best-sellers, “idylls,” and “romances,” made her a ready target for Deacon.

  Up to this time, Maud had had generally good press from newspaper reviewers and academic critics. In 1914, one of the earliest critics, Thomas Guthrie Marquis, wrote of Montgomery in his multi-volume Canada and its Provinces: A History of the Canadian People and Their Institutions:

  Sympathy with child life and humble life, delight in nature, a penetrating, buoyant imagination, unusual power in handling the simple romantic material that lies about every one, and a style direct and pleasing, make these [Montgomery’s] books delightful reading for children, indeed, for readers of all ages.13

  In Head-Waters of Canadian Literature, Archibald MacMechan quotes Mark Twain’s praise for Anne of Green Gables (“In Anne Shirley you will find the dearest and most moving and delightful child of fiction since the immortal Alice …”). Although generally favourable to Anne, and undeniably impressed by its having sold a reputed 300,000 copies in the first eight years, he carefully qualifies his comments, saying the readers of Anne have “a great indifference towards the rulings of the critics” and that “the deftness of touch, is lacking; and that makes the difference between a clever book and a masterpiece.” However, he does judge that “the story is pervaded with a sense of reality; [and] the pitfalls of the sentimental are deftly avoided …”14

  Another more substantial 1924 study, Highways of Canadian Literature: A Synoptic Introduction to the Literary History of Canada (English) from 1760 to 1924, by John Daniel Logan and Donald G. French, makes many references to Maud as a regionalist who shows “the beauty, the humour, and the pathos that lies about our daily paths” (299):

  In Anne we have an entirely new character in fiction, a high-spirited, sensitive girl, with a wonderfully vivid imagination; … so altogether different from the staid, prosaic, general attitude of the neighbourhood … (p. 300).

  The authors praise Maud’s authenticity, and find a psychological depth in her characters that has wide appeal to adults:

  In Emily of New Moon (1923) Miss Montgomery created a new child character.… The chief difference … is that she employs a more analytic psychological method in depicting her heroine— a method that tends to produce an adult’s story of youth … which makes equal appeal to the young in years and the young in heart (pp. 301–302).

  Dr. Logan was a distinguished professor of Canadian Literature at Acadia University in Nova Scotia, with a Ph.D. from Harvard (at a time when most professors held only Bachelor’s or Master’s degrees). Donald French was a Toronto author and critic and honorary president of the Canadian Literature Club of Toronto. (Maud wrote proudly in her entry of March 5, 1921, that Dr. Logan had said in a lecture: “that Canada had produced ‘one woman of genius’—that ‘L. M. Montgomery’ in the opinion of eminent critics ‘equaled or surpassed Dickens in her depictions of child life and character.’ ”)

  Deacon enjoyed flying in the face of the prevailing public opinion (and most critical opinion) with his complete dismissal of Maud’s books. By 1926, at age thirty-six, he was at the beginning of a long and influential career, and attacking a living Canadian literary icon was a useful tactic for a new critic who wanted to be noticed.

  Maud knew Deacon personally. She may not have realized at first how much his negative assessment would affect her ranking in the canon of respected Canadian books, but his words were painful to read, and she said nothing about Poteen in her journals. She mentioned Deacon’s name only twice in her journals, despite the fact that he dominated the literary scene in Toronto during her sixteen years in Norval and Toronto, and they were both active as executives in the Toronto branch of the CAA. Both entries express her dislike for him, but give no specific reasons why.15

  Deacon consolidated his power in the CAA. He became an activist in reforming Canadian copyright law. He promoted books, authors, and cultural events. As Thomas and Lennox observe, “In these days before the CBC there was … no national communication network and Deacon’s enterprise, combining reviews with literary news and gossip, was certainly devised to join together the book lovers of Canada and to give them access to books.”16 A tireless and lively letter-writer, Deacon was skilful at behind-the-scenes networking with others in the book world, mostly within the growing “old boy” network of publishers, periodical editors, anthologizers, and male professors who were starting to establish the “canon” of Canadian literature. He cultivated them, and they respected his growing influence. His ability to promote writers—or attack or ignore them—made him a very powerful figure, especially with writers and publishers. Occasionally he was obsequious in letters, but most often he was forceful and assertive and confident. He was kind to younger writers or to old friends, like Winnipeg’s Judge Emily Murphy, but he could be abrasive. When the best-selling writer Mazo de la Roche sent him factual information about herself to help him in reviewing her new book, he responded: “Doubtless you were right to approach me, though nothing usually makes me quite so hostile as a request for a favorable review—no matter how subtly the appeal may be conveyed.”17

  He worked not through a specific argument so much as by labelling.18Both words (“sentiment” and “sentimentality”) were highly pejorative in modern criticism. “Happy endings” were also a part of this critical discussion, and Deacon linked “happy endings” to sentimental writing. “ ‘Unhappy endings’ are often necessary artistically; and generally fatal commercially,” he wrote in a letter.19 Maud would introduce this discourse on “happy endings” in Emily’s Quest, finished in late 1926 and published in 1927, satirizing “unhappy endings” in the story about the writer “Mark Delage Greaves.”

  The Blue Castle’s secrets

  Maud’s over-sensitivity made it easy for verbal thorns to prick her. Her grandmother’s phrase “What will people say?” remained a lifelong incubus sitting on her shoulder. By the Norval period, she was repeating that line anxiously to her own sons, just as she had heard it in Cavendish during her own childhood when it was used as a powerful agent of social control. In 1927, her incubus found a
nother sharp thorn for its arsenal.

  In August 1927 a magazine called The Canadian Countryman began serializing The Blue Castle. This mass-market magazine would take her novel into rural homes all over Canada, including, of course, those in Leaskdale and Zephyr.

  The magazine apparently typeset the novel from Maud’s own manuscript, which, unfortunately, had a revealing slip in it, one which had been caught and corrected in the published novel. In just one place, she has called the dashing hero of The Blue Castle, Barney Snaith, by the name of “Smith.”

  The last thing in the world Maud would have wanted was for the good folk of Leaskdale and Uxbridge to suspect that the charismatic Reverend “Captain Smith” might have provided the model for the virile Barney Snaith, who roared about in his car rather like Smith did in his, and rescued the frustrated Valancy from her pinched life.

  Maud was extremely skilled at concealing the origin of her novels. She maintained a façade of control which kept the passions in her heart out of everyone’s sight. Her professional reserve ensured that no one saw the relationship between her heroines and her well-camouflaged multiple alter egos. No one around her fathomed how frustrated and bored she often was with the life she found herself in.