Nora’s son Ebbie remembered vividly when he first met Maud during the summer of 1928, and his recollections give us quite another view of the world-famous author:
She was seated in the sofa, Mother diagonally in front of her in a big armchair. I, ten years old, on the floor, small, skinny, fascinated at last to meet this woman of whom I had heard so much. To me she was a massive woman, formidable, with a strong voice which expressed her feeling of self-importance and superiority. My mother was ecstatic at seeing her old friend again but slightly hostile at Maud’s air of superiority. I cannot remember what they talked about—all I remember is a feeling of relief when Maud at last left. I had my mother back.33
Young Ebbie saw another part of Maud’s personality here, the woman who knew her books had made her a “household name” all over the English-speaking world. Justifiably proud of her attainments and honours, she wanted her hard-won achievement recognized, even by friends. She was, as the precocious Ebbie noted, very good at conveying her sense of dignity to others. Her carriage and nuanced use of language spoke her attitudes. A powerful presence was a real element in her person, a “persona,” as real as her buried sense of inferiority—or, perhaps, just another expression of it.
Nora apparently could see both Mauds—especially the Maud who was insecure, who carried damaging psychological baggage from childhood, and who needed approval and respect. Nora gave that willingly.
In November 1928, Maud was a busy participant in the Canadian Book Week. The opening lineup of speakers in the fifth annual event were the big names of the day: Sir Charles G. D. Roberts, novelist Arthur Stringer, essayist and editor (of Saturday Night) B. K. Sandwell, and “L. M. Montgomery.” In the public’s eye, Maud was the biggest celebrity. Over two thousand people flocked to hear her in the program at the University of Toronto’s Convocation Hall, with another thousand reputedly turned away. In a newspaper account of the gathering, “L. M. Montgomery (Mrs. McDonald), author of Anne of Green Gables, declared she could not speak, the only thing she could do was to tell her stories. To her, she asserted, amid laughter, the four most wonderful words in the language were ‘once upon a time.’ She then told a story of a Prince Edward Island shipwreck, and recited two poems …”34 Montgomery’s speech drew a standing ovation, with a call for an encore.
After the speech she was mobbed by young people wanting autographs, except for one who merely wanted a “handclasp” and “to touch” her. “Poor kiddy!” she wrote, “humanity can’t get along without some god or goddess to worship. It is well that my young worshippers don’t know what a very clay-footed creature their divinity is. Their lives would be poorer if they lost their illusion” (November 7, 1928). Maud’s spirits improved greatly after Book Week—her success there offset the bruises to her professional ego elsewhere.
During this week, Maud spoke again, this time on a platform with Dr. Charles G. D. Roberts and (Margaret) Marshall Saunders, through the auspices of the Maritime Provinces Association of Toronto and McMaster University. The newspaper account says that Roberts “deplored his ‘propinquity with modernism.’ ” Saunders kept the audience of over five hundred people in a state of laughter with her amusing reminiscences of the Maritimes. Mrs. Macdonald also related stories of famous characters living down by the sea.35 After she arrived home from the conference, she had more letters from her lawyer and Lewis Page. Her lawyer had mailed her the typed trial evidence. Then, incredibly, she had a letter from Page asking if he could “now” publish Further Chronicles of Avonlea, the book that she had waged the entire lawsuit to suppress. She was again bedevilled by his weird request.
The year 1928 ended much better for Maud than it had begun. The Macdonalds decorated their Christmas tree and enjoyed a turkey sent them by friends. Maud spent Christmas afternoon reading Morley Callaghan’s first novel, Strange Fugitive, a Christmas gift from Nora. The book made her huffy. “Some ‘sex’ novels are interesting and stimulating, whatever may be thought of their wisdom or unwisdom,” she wrote in her journal. But Callaghan dismayed her.
Callaghan’s idea of “Literature” seems to be to photograph a latrine or pigstye meticulously and have nothing else in the picture. Now, latrines and pigstyes are not only malodorous but very uninteresting. We have a latrine in our backyard. I see it when I look that way—and I also see before it a garden.…—over it a blue sky—behind it a velvety pine.… These things are as “real” as the latrine and can all be seen at the same time. Callaghan sees nothing but the latrine and insists blatantly that you see nothing else also. If you insist on seeing sky and river and pine you are a ‘sentimentalist’ and the truth is not in you. (December 30, 1928)
She added another paragraph dismissing Callaghan, who was then twenty-five years old:
Callaghan is no newly risen star. He is not even a meteor. Merely a Roman Candle shooting up sparkiously and then sputtering out into darkness. He has neither wit, imagination nor insight. And he is deadly dull … (December 30, 1928)
Frustrated by what was happening to her own reputation through the latter 1920s, she began to grumble privately about being demoted to “only a children’s author.” She had written The Blue Castle in 1926, intending it to be a story for adults. Instead, it was often treated as a children’s book and, as a result, its mature content got it banned for children in a number of places. While she was censored for mentioning an unwed mother (who dies, no less), young writers like Callaghan were earning praise for sympathetic treatment of down-and-outers and prostitutes. It did seem unfair. The only consolation was that, despite the fact that it shocked her Sunday School readers, The Blue Castle sold well, and her publishers wanted more of the same.
Maud had long been contemplating a novel about the tangled clan structure of the Scottish population in Prince Edward Island, and she saw a way to build this story around one of her own most prized family heirlooms, the old Woolner jug. The result, A Tangled Web, is probably her most intricate and complicated novel, and clearly intended for adults, not children. She took her title from Sir Walter Scott’s Marmion, Canto xvii: “O, what a tangled web we weave / When first we practice to deceive!”
Maud had grown up hearing Grandfather Macneill tell how this jug had been brought by his wife’s family, the Woolners, from England to Canada. Maud had given it a place of pride both in her Leaskdale home and in the Norval manse. In a subtle way, making the jug the centre of a new novel for adults would help solidify her credentials as belonging to one of Canada’s “old families,” a family with “traditions” and stability behind it. In Prince Edward Island, everyone knew her family’s standing and pedigree. In Ontario, where it now mattered to her, they did not.
Maud knew much about the “tangled web” of family intermarriage in the small communities of Cavendish, and later Zephyr, Leaskdale, and Norval. During the Pickering trial and the Church Union fracas, the intricate patterns of kinship and marriage had caused a constant shifting of allegiances and realignment of loyalties. Now, with some perspective—and having Nora Lefurgey Campbell nearby, always ready for an exchange of funny stories—she could see the comic potential in this clan material. In May 1929, she began a new and very ambitious novel. She had already been planning the plot structure for nearly a year. It would take two more years to complete it.
In one interval between the recurrent bouts of flu and ulcerating teeth that plagued her throughout the winter of 1928–29, Maud travelled to Toronto and spent a January night with Nora. Together they read over the “comic” diaries they had kept together back in Cavendish, laughing over their social life with the limited lot of available young men. This helped Maud immerse herself in the memory of the ups and downs of young love relationships, all of which fed into A Tangled Web.
In the Old Tyme Concert that she organized for January 1929, Maud stole the show in her performance as Mary, Queen of Scots. She had rented a theatrical costume from Toronto. The long, full dress was crimson velvet decorated with braid, ermine, lace, and pearls, topped with a ruff of lac
e. She wore her hair high, with a crown on it, and recited a poem about Mary, Queen of Scots. She got such an ovation that she gave an encore, “The curfew must not ring tonight.”36
Maud kept up her speaking engagements, too, while she worked on her novels, directed plays, and organized women’s church affairs. In May 1929 she addressed an audience of nearly five hundred young women at a banquet given during Girls’ Conference Week in the Ontario Agricultural College Dining Hall in Guelph. It was the “final session of one of the most successful Girls’ Conferences in the history of the Junior Women’s Institute Movement.”37She enjoyed her position as a role model for young women—she had combined professional success with marriage and motherhood—and her talks were both funny and inspirational.
Chester, now seventeen, and Stuart, fourteen, came home for the summer in June 1929. Chester had already had driving lessons, but she wanted him to learn how a car actually worked, so she persuaded the local garage to employ him for a month. Both Chester and Ewan objected to his doing any “manual labour,” but her will prevailed. Ewan had been raised on a farm, but he felt he had risen above doing manual labour, and he also apparently felt that his sons were too good for it. Chester, by nature indolent, assumed easily the mantle of entitlement. But Maud did not want Chester sitting idle lest he get into trouble: he continued to “chase” girls.
That same summer, Nora Lefurgey Campbell went with her two boys to a cottage on Lake Temagami. In July, her older son, David, the one crippled by polio, accidentally turned over his canoe, and the heavy iron braces he wore pulled him down; he was drowned. They dragged the lake for four days before recovering his body. Three of the four children that Nora had given birth to were now dead. To distance herself from the heartbreak, Nora took a trip out west to see friends, and Maud did not see her again until December 1929.38
In September 1929, Maud took a long-awaited trip to the Island. She had been working on A Tangled Web since May and needed a break. A highlight of her trip to the Island this time was a reunion with Mary Campbell, Nell Dingwall, and Ida MacEachern, her old friends from the Prince of Wales College. The four women took a picture that matched one taken thirty-five years earlier. Maud could not resist remarking in her journals that Mary Campbell Beaton, who had been a “fine-looking girl” in 1894, had gone “to seed.” Maud, who was still stylishly plump, was secretly pleased that she looked successful and well kept, no matter how ragged she felt at times.
Maud also spent time with Ewan’s sister Christie, her favourite of Ewan’s siblings. Of Christie’s family of eight children, only one son was now left at home. Like the Campbells of Park Corner, Christie’s family had been a financial drain on Maud. Christie had not repaid the $2,000 “lent” to the family by Maud to cover her son’s embezzlement five years earlier (in addition to the $600 given to her by Ewan out of his $1,500 yearly salary).
Maud also made a visit to Angie Doiron’s stylish dress and hat shop. Angie’s buying trips to the States ensured that her Prince Edward Island customers were as well dressed as the best Boston ladies. Maud bought a dignified dress of brown lace, with a long tail—quite different from the above-the-knee dresses the young flappers were wearing. Maud had always admired Angie—who was beautiful, charming, and educated—and disparaged the English prejudice against the French. She noted that men of English ancestry would look down on Angie’s French parentage, limiting her marriage choices. Maud was as inconsistent as others of her generation: she could feel prejudice against an entire ethnic group but admire a talented individual within it.
On this trip, Maud noted the change in the Island roads. Cars were everywhere, the roads were being widened, and the trees that lined the roads were being cut down. But inside the houses she visited, she reminisced, life was the same: in rooms lighted by kerosene lamps and warmed by wood stoves, they sat and did women’s fancy-work, talked over family and friends, played with the ever-present kittens, and read. A good night’s sleep had become a precious thing to Maud by this time, and here she slept peacefully again.
On this same trip, Maud went to visit Helen Leard MacFarlane, the sister of Herman Leard. Herman had been dead for many years, but he was very much alive in Maud’s memory. When Helen’s son drove them past the cemetery where Herman lay, Maud later recounted in her journal that she was gripped by the gruesome sensation that Herman was “reaching out to me from his grave—catching hold of me—drawing me to him” (October 13, 1929).
Maud’s vivid memory of intense emotions was both a blessing and a curse. When she was home in Norval, her worries over the future roiled in her mind in the middle of the night. In Prince Edward Island, her memories of the past tormented her in the daytime.
Soon after Maud returned home from the Island in October 1929, women became “persons” in Canadian law, giving them the right to hold public office. The milestone “Persons Case” had been brought forward by five women, including Judge Emily Murphy and Nellie McClung, and was finally settled with the Canadian Privy Council’s declaration that women would have the same legal status as men did. The status of women had been changing rapidly ever since they had taken on traditionally male roles during the war. Women were entering the professions. Big newspapers had instituted “women’s sections” and gave extensive coverage to women’s activities.
Women had been becoming more assertive of their rights in marriage, and in general. Maud had been asked to speak on this change to the Junior Women’s Institute. She gave a talk that said that the “modern girl was in no respect worse, and in many respects better, than the girl of former generations” in wanting her rights and respect. She approved this advance.
But she would soon be thrust into a future that would test every strategy she had for survival. By November 25, 1933, she would write in her journals: “Not even a cat would care to haunt so changed a world.”
CHAPTER 17
For much of her life, Maud had endured the feeling that she lived in a house of cards, apt to blow down at any time. After a series of homes in which she had felt like a temporary resident, in 1929 she finally reported feeling more secure.
Ewan was now settled. He had smoothed the lingering divisions from Church Union in Norval, the more troubled of his two parishes. His good nature and kind manner dispelled the inevitable small frictions that arise in any church. He worked up his own sermons instead of using a book of prepared sermons, as some ministers did, and he delivered them extemporaneously from memory. He used his knowledge of Greek and Roman history to make them appeal to young people, who still remembered and praised his “interesting” sermons in the 1980s. Finally, he was doing well. By 1929, Maud began to hope that they could remain in Norval or Glen Williams after Ewan’s retirement. He was now fifty-nine. She was fifty-five.
Chester, age seventeen, was in his last year at St. Andrew’s in 1929, and would start university in the autumn of 1930. Stuart, fourteen and in his second year at St. Andrew’s, was leading his class. There were ongoing concerns with Chester, but Maud continued to hope that he would mature. Stuart, by contrast, was in every way a parent’s dream. He fit in with people of all ages, earned top marks, did well in sports, and was always “joyous” and a loving, sensitive son. With the settlement of the Page lawsuit, Maud had enough money to give her boys the best possible education, no matter what ill winds of chance might blow.
Her feeling of financial security now allowed her to do something mundane that she had needed to do for years: have all her teeth pulled. People still died occasionally because of the gas anaesthetic given by dentists, so few rushed blithely into such operations. Since childhood, Maud had suffered repeatedly from cavities, toothaches, and painful abscesses that burst and drained. Her infected teeth had made her prey to other kinds of health problems—her teeth were irregular, piled on top of each other in her very small mouth and jaw, and she had never been able to clean them properly.39She had known that the removal of her infected teeth would improve her general health, but the fear that she might die from t
he anaesthetic before she had provided for her sons’ education had kept her away from the dentist’s chair. The surgery proceeded smoothly. She stayed briefly to recuperate with Nora in Toronto, but soon returned home. A doctor in Georgetown made her a set of false teeth, and now she could smile in photographs, something she had never done before.
The Great Depression
Maud wrote no entries in her journal on October 29, 1929, the “Black Tuesday” that led off the great stock market crash. In communities like Norval it was just another ordinary day—as ordinary as the June day in 1914 when Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo. Maud spent it as usual, with her morning stint of writing on A Tangled Web. It is likely, in fact, that she did not even hear, at least for a time, about the pandemonium that erupted in the New York Stock Exchange on that day, and of the suicides of ruined speculators, said to have jumped out of windows. Even if she had, she would hardly have expected it to affect anyone’s life in the country villages of Ontario.
She was not a foolish speculator—the money she had just received from the Page settlement was hers. She was not investing money borrowed on the margin. When she invested it, she assumed that it would be safe. In November 1928, Maud had invested the $15,000 in the most promising place she knew, in the stock market. She did not know, of course, that the American economic guru, Roger Babson, a friend and neighbour of the Page and Coues families of Boston, had been predicting for some time that a stock market crash was coming, and when it came, it would be huge. Babson had advised his clients, his friends, and the subscribers to his “Babson’s Reports” to take their money out of speculative investments and put it in secure places. Those who heeded his advice weathered the crash of 1929 much better than others, and Page appears to have been one of them. Maud had no such advice: she invested her entire settlement in stocks right before the crash of 1929.
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