Norval is so beautiful now that it takes my breath. Those pine hills full of shadows—those river reaches—those bluffs of maple and smooth-trunked beech—with drifts of wild white blossom everywhere. I love Norval as I have never loved any place save Cavendish. It is as if I had known it all my life—as if I had dreamed young dreams under those pines and talked with my first love down that long perfumed hill. (May 26, 1927)
In July, Maud travelled back to her beloved Prince Edward Island, her first real vacation there in four years. While there, she received a letter from the Prime Minister of England, Stanley Baldwin:
10 Downing Street
19th June 1927
Dear Mrs. Macdonald:
I do not know whether I shall be so fortunate during a hurried visit to Canada but it would give me keen pleasure to have an opportunity of shaking your hand and thanking you for the pleasure your books have given me. I am hoping that I shall be allowed to go to Prince Edward Island for I must see Green Gables before I return home. Not that I wouldn’t be at home at Green Gables!
I am yours sincerely,
[Signed] Stanley Baldwin
Maud received this letter when she was visiting in Cavendish. Taking a walk into “Lovers’ Lane,” she read it “to the little girl who walked here years ago and dreamed—and wrote her dreams into books that have pleased a statesman of Empire. And the little girl was pleased” (July 14, 1927).
With the happy heart of a young girl, she went to a spot on the shore at Cawnpore to speak to a group of Campfire Girls. With surf pounding in the background, she told them old sea stories, including that of the Marco Polo, wrecked at that very spot. Yet changes were taking place in the Cavendish of 1927, and these changes did not please her. The Cavendish Presbyterian Church that had nurtured her as a little girl was now a United Church. The old manse where she had had so many happy visits with her friend Margaret Stirling was gone. The Macneill clan itself was disappearing—in her youth there had been twelve Macneill families, but now there were only six, and four of these had no children. The old community hall was in disrepair, and the books of the old library were unattended and mouldering. Carloads of tourists now descended on Cavendish, crawling about the haunts made famous by Anne of Green Gables. The inhabitants of 1927 Cavendish were losing the quiet rural quality of their village—as a result of her books.
Her Uncle John F. Macneill was now seventy-six, and the bad feeling between him and his famous niece still rankled. But she liked her Uncle John’s son, Ernest—a much gentler and kinder man—and she secretly hoped that the farm would stay in the family. (That wish was eventually fulfilled. Ernest’s son, John Macneill, born in 1930, inherited the farm, which remains in the family.)
During the summer of 1927, a Toronto writer, Florence Livesay, spent her summer holidays in Cavendish, largely as a result of Anne’s popularity. Maud knew her from the Toronto Press Club. Mrs. Livesay (wife of J. F. B. Livesay, general manager for the Canadian Press for Canada, and the mother of future poet Dorothy Livesay) was preparing an article on Maud, and queried how she got a start in such a remote and quaint place as Cavendish. Incensed, Maud snapped in her journals that she thought “the ‘literary atmosphere’ of the old Macneills and Simpsons would not have been too rarified for even Mrs. Livesay to breathe” (July 17, 1927).
The newspapers of late-nineteenth-century PEI demonstrate that the literacy level of Maud’s childhood culture was indeed impressive. It is to Mrs. Livesay’s credit that she saw the importance of the oral tradition in Maud’s writing. The Island newspapers crowed that “Mrs. Macdonald and Mr. and Mrs. Livesay are intimately acquainted, and there have been great ‘foregatherings’ at the shore during their present visit—nights of story-telling which will long be remembered by those privileged to be present.”21
When Maud returned to Ontario after this three-week visit in July 1927, Marion Webb came back with her. All of Ernest and Myrtle Webb’s children were growing up, and one farm could not support them all. Like so many other young Islanders, many of them would have to look elsewhere for a livelihood. Marion was a very pretty girl, with a sweet disposition and a good sense of humour. Both Marion’s mother and Maud wanted to enlarge her horizons by having her visit in Ontario.
Very soon after her return to Ontario, Maud attended the formal garden party in honour of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and the two princes, the Prince of Wales and his youngest brother, Prince George, held on August 6, 1927, at Chorley Park in Toronto. She bought a new dress of lace and georgette in a light cocoa-brown colour, with trimmings of brown and a brownish salmon pink. She wore a hat of leghorn straw, trimmed with a feather of burnt orange, and had a professional photographic portrait made of herself in this dress.
Ewan did not accompany his wife. He had gone for his own holiday on the Island, with his people. Maud went to the reception, met the royal party, and observed that the Prince of Wales (who would later abdicate the throne) looked “tired, bored, blasé, as no doubt he was and small blame to him,” considering that he had to greet four thousand people. She noted that of the two princes, Prince George was “far more chipper looking and seemed to be enjoying himself hugely.”22
Maud did not have to wait in the receiving lines; she was sought out by an attaché and was taken to the Honourable Stanley Baldwin and his wife for a chat of nearly half an hour. Another newspaper account called the length of the visit “a significant tribute at any time but the more notable under the exacting circumstances and one to stir the pride of the most unself-conscious.”23When Maud arrived home, she put away for her grandchildren the gloves she wore when she shook hands with the prince.24
When Ewan returned from Prince Edward Island, the Macdonalds bought a new “closed” car, a Willys-Knight, for $2,000. During September Ewan drove them around, showing Marion the sights of Ontario, such as Niagara Falls. Later in the fall, Marion returned to the Island. She was the kind of daughter Maud would have liked. Maud would miss her so much that she would encourage her to return later, changing the course of Marion’s life.
In early October 1927 Maud had another welcome visitor, her beloved old teacher Hattie Gordon, who was on her way to visit her married daughter in Philadelphia. Sadly, the talented Hattie was now a tired, impoverished old woman, divorced from an abusive husband, with children grown and dispersed. Maud noted that the entire world had changed in the thirty-five years since they had parted. “The girl of 1892 and the woman of 1892 have not met again. They do not exist. And in that realization lies my loss,” Maud wrote on October 14, 1927.
In mid-October 1927, Maud had learned that The Delineator, which had commissioned her to write four stories for them in January 1927, had changed editors, and the new editor, a man, had pronounced Maud’s stories about a child named Marigold “too old-fashioned.” They paid her the promised $1,500, but only as a kill-fee. She was deeply hurt and offended. This was one of the first indications that her writing was falling out of favour with more people than Deacon. It was one thing for critical tastes to change, but was the reading public going to change, too?
It was that November that the Countryman magazine came out with the error citing Barney Snaith as “Smith.” By her birthday on November 30, 1927, feeling battered on several fronts, Maud began obsessing about the past. Her work with the young people’s group had been extraordinarily successful for the past year, and she knew her depressed feelings were abnormal, but she could not shake them. When her Sunday School Bible class gave her a basket of roses at Christmas, she noted that Ewan turned away without a word.
In mid-December, she wrote in her journals that she thought we “are just entering … the age of Science—an age of wonderful discoveries and development.…” (December 17, 1927). Science did not yet understand affective mood disorder, or know how to treat it. When Maud felt depressed, she reread old favourites that suited her mood, like Nora Holland’s sentimental poem “The Little Dog Angel,” and Undine, the novel about a sea-sprite who is adopted by humans. Feeling
estranged from her own world, she mused about the book, wondering what in it kept it from going “stale.” It was, she noted, a fairy tale, the sort of story at which the modern world may sneer, but without which people cannot live.
She looked at her son Stuart and saw a tender boy in a brutal world, and brooded that a future world might attack him, as she saw it attacking her (December 23, 1927). He had her personality—and her heightened sensitivity. Early in January 1928, Maud began to worry seriously about her own emotional fragility and the effect that a complete breakdown would have on her writing and her earning capacity. She tried unsuccessfully to call in some of her outstanding debts.
Maud had remained an active member in the Canadian Authors Association, which continued its fight to establish copyright laws that would better protect Canadian authors. Her feeling of Canadian nationalism had increased now that she lived in Ontario. (The Maritimes had always had closer ties with the New England seaboard than it did with Ontario or the rest of Canada.)
The extent of her growing financial insecurity after Deacon’s attack and the rejection of her stories by the new editor of The Delineator is evident in a letter she wrote to the Toronto novelist Katherine Hale on January 9, 1928. Maud told Katherine that she was rereading her husband John Garvin’s Canadian Poets and had come across a poem of Katherine’s there. Maud thanked her for its beauty and poignancy.25 This letter was a well-calculated piece of flattery: John Garvin was an aging but still influential fixture in the CAA. He was an anthologizer of Canadian literature, and he was exceedingly proud of his wife. He was also the chief organizer for the CAA’s fifth annual Canadian Book Week.
In February 1928, Maud spoke at the CAA meeting in Toronto. (She was amused when Garvin, a good-natured windbag, told her that he was responsible for the publication of the Canadian edition of Anne of Green Gables—at that time, there had not yet been a Canadian edition of Anne.) But in her journals, Maud compares John Garvin, who had such pride in his wife, with Ewan:
Ewan secretly hates my work—and openly ignores it. He never refers to it in any way or shows a particle of interest in it. I certainly wouldn’t want him to go about boring people publicly with his appreciation. But I would like him to feel a little. I have never, since I was married, neglected any duty of wife or mother because of my writing. I have done it at odd hours that were squeezed out of something else by giving up some of my own possible pleasure and all my leisure. So he has no justification for this attitude.
However, let me be just. Would I want Ewan to be like old John Garvin in other respects? I certainly would not. Therefore let me not howl with indignation because he is not like him in this. (February 12, 1928)
Maud was resentful. In the previous year, her income had been six times that of Ewan’s. With money made by the plays she had put on, the drama group had re-covered the cushions on the pews of the church auditorium, brought its Sunday School room a piano, and paid for the installation of electric fixtures. These were substantial achievements. But she knew that reason did not control human emotions.
Since coming to Norval, Maud had put forty pounds on her tiny frame. Women then did not mind a matronly, well-fed look. When they carried themselves well and dressed elegantly, it could make them look substantial and imposing, as was the case with Mrs. Barraclough. But the extra weight sapped Maud’s energy. She tripped and hurt herself and took a number of weeks to recover in spring 1928, just when her young people were going to other towns to put on the play she had directed.
There was a bright spot in her spring—Chester had led his class at St. Andrew’s. This allayed immediate fears about his behaviour and development. Soon another worry arose, however: the Barracloughs wanted to move to Toronto, so tried to sell the woollen mill Ernest owned. In the end, Ernest could not find a buyer, so they stayed. The Barraclough house had always been a sanctuary for the Macdonalds. They could count on Ernest and Ida to respect confidences when they talked over personal problems with them, especially their concerns about Chester.
Maud’s spirits always rose with the first signs of spring. By June 1928, she was out in her garden again, feeling better. Ewan took off for the Presbyterian General Assembly in Winnipeg that year—a measure showing that he, too, was doing well. In the last three weeks of June, Maud spent three days in Toronto, again at the Triennial of the Canadian Women’s Press Club. Back in Norval, she entertained Alf Simpson of PEI, Ed’s more likeable brother.
Chester came home for the summer, proud of his academic achievement at school, but still clearly not well adjusted socially. The students at St. Andrew’s had nicknamed him “Rat” (for stealing and eating). All the Norval young folk laughed about the nickname. Maud’s maids over the years had all found his compulsive overeating frustrating: a maid was supposed to keep the cookie jar filled at all times, but Chester would eat an entire platter of cooling cookies at a sitting. He would smell the baking, sneak into the kitchen, steal the cookies, and then deny the theft. One incensed maid grabbed him and turned the pockets of his pants out to demonstrate through the crumbs that he was lying to her. But none of the maids over the years felt comfortable complaining directly to Maud about him, and if they had, it would have done little good. No one could control Chester.
In the summer of 1928, trouble began brewing between him and Ewan. A cryptic comment about Chester spilled into her diary: “something nasty and worrying that embittered life for many days and filled us with deep-seated fear of his future.” She could not bring herself to give details: “There is no use to write much about it—no use tearing open a wound that has begun to skin over. But I have been very wretched over it and I cannot think about it without agony” (July 22, 1928).
The maids reported that his behaviour was unpredictable. When greeted in the morning, or whenever he came into a room, he might answer; but other times he rudely ignored their existence. When he was caught lying or smoking, he alternated between pretending to be extremely contrite and being angry and rebellious. Apologies and promises came easily, but Chester was caught again and again in lies. Most impulsive children (as Maud herself had been) reached an age at which they began to think about consequences and modify their behaviour, but he did not.
Chester’s sexuality continued to be a concern. Although self-gratification and self-exploration is common with adolescents, in his case masturbation caused increasing distress. A maid or anyone else was in danger of accidentally stumbling in on an embarrassing sight. Stuart quit sleeping in the room he shared with Chester and moved outside to sleep in a tent, except in the winter.
Chester’s behaviour around local girls was also causing alarm. According to his contemporaries (interviewed in the 1980s), young women in the community of Norval were very wary of him. Maud watched, paralyzed with mortification, unable to write or talk about it. When she was growing up on the Island, one of the behaviours for which people were placed in Falconwood, the mental institution, was public masturbation.26 Ewan’s increasing anger over Chester’s behaviour may have reflected his memory of his own past—of his own sexual development, including his alleged window-peeping in Cavendish. Ewan was all too aware of the Bible’s pronouncement: the sins of the fathers will be visited on the sons for many generations. Ewan saw this son as re-enacting the sins of his father, either imagined or real. It was an increasingly tense household.
In the athletic culture at St. Andrew’s, Chester had remained an outsider, given his stiff and corpulent physique, lethargic disposition, general untidiness, and surly nature. He was also lazy about studying, but could do well academically in spite of a lack of motivation. Good grades did not endear a teen to a peer group that had already excluded him on other grounds. An outsider at school and an irritant at home, he was growing up an isolated and lonely young man.
At home, he constantly annoyed the maids, but he aggravated his father even more. Ewan had never spent much time with his sons, either talking or playing with them, and he had not built up a fund of goodwill and trust. Frustrated b
y Chester’s behaviour, Ewan closeted himself more and more in his darkened study and brooded. In private, he complained to Maud about Chester—as if she could do something about this difficult son.
Friendless, Chester mostly stayed in his room and read. By 1928, when he was sixteen, he had solidified into a churlish loner who carried a lot of resentment—resentment towards a world that seemed to shun or dislike him; resentment towards the father he resembled; resentment towards a mother who was consumed by her own busy world of reading, writing, and church and social activities, whose interaction with him was full of frustration; and resentment towards a younger brother with a sunny disposition who was surrounded by friends.
Stuart played well with other children and had never been a problem; in Norval, he loved the river and spent most of his time there with the village youngsters. Stuart, unlike his father and brother, was very sensitive to his mother’s moods. She noted in her journals that when she felt “down,” Stuart would attempt to cheer her, for example by making her a cup of cocoa (February 14, 1928). Stuart loved sports and the outdoor life, and, left to his own devices, he was always busy, happy, and interacting with friends. The sedentary Chester’s jealousy of Stuart increased.
A new kind of narrative began reasserting itself in Maud’s consciousness, and in her journal. She began to obsess that fate had put a curse on her and those she loved. She had lost both her parents; she had lost her cousin and best friend, Frede, to premature death; she had married a man who became afflicted with intermittent mental problems; and now her older son seemed seriously troubled. In depressed moods, she revisited her negative thoughts. Why, she would ask herself, must everything she loved be cursed? The depth of her worry about her older son shows in the fact that she started to bring another theme into her journals, recounting in detail how others’ children had disappointed them.
Lucy Maud Montgomery Page 47