Like so many others, she felt disoriented by the speed of change.
Maud knew she must get hold of herself before she could begin writing again. She began rereading her old favourite novels—the nineteenth-century Scottish “kailyard” novels, like Ian MacLaren’s Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush (1894) and The Days of Auld Lang Syne (1895). She found in them much the “same flavour” as her childhood in Cavendish, “the memory of which is like a silvery moonlight in my recollection” (January 24, 1932). Around this time, she wrote a whimsical short story that dealt in a way with a parent interfering with a young person’s choice of mates—something she was doing herself with both Chester and Stuart.57
Following A Tangled Web, which had been a massive effort, Maud was distracted over her family; finding a good idea for her next novel was not easy. In the May issue of Chatelaine, she published a sentimental story called “The House.” The heroine is a lonely, dreamy, plain child—as Maud envisioned her own childhood self—and this child fixes her love on a house. The story grows out of Maud’s love for places and homes, like the home of the Campbells in Park Corner, where she had felt so welcome in her Aunt Annie’s unconditional love, and where everything always seemed joyously the same. The Campbells might have been on the verge of disaster, but they could always gather round the organ and sing, or entertain each other with funny stories. The more Maud thought about the unhappy state of her own home in Norval, the more she looked back to the homes she had left in Prince Edward Island, even the “old home” with her grandparents. The symbol of a house would become her chief figure in her next book. She started writing Pat of Silver Bush at the beginning of April 1932.
Maud had reread her journals until she could fuse the memories of her own childhood with the anxieties of the fifty-nine-year-old woman she was now. From this grew a new heroine, Pat Gardiner.
Maud finished the book at the beginning of December 1932, and typed it up herself in the following twelve days. She dedicated Pat of Silver Bush to Alec and May Macneill and the “Secret Field,” in memory of a happy walk in October 1932 (November 13, 1932). She was exhausted by the time she finished.
Pat of Silver Bush (1933)
This novel is built on the theme of Pat Gardiner’s extreme attachment to her home. The central events in the novel are the threats to her happy and unchanging life in Silver Bush, including a new baby in the family, starting school, the marriage of an aunt, her father’s thoughts of selling up and going west, and her older siblings’ departures or courtships. Pat’s leitmotif from age eight to eighteen, the time span of the novel, is her hatred of change, particularly as it threatens her beloved old-fashioned family home, “Silver Bush.”
As has been noted, Maud had two sets of mythologies about her own childhood. The first was almost factually accurate—that she had a comparatively happy childhood being raised by her grandparents in Cavendish, a settled rural community, where she had plentiful playmates and extended family. The second, a less true but more compelling myth, is the one recorded in her diaries around 1905—that she was a lonely, solitary, and misunderstood child who was all but orphaned when her mother died and her father left her to be raised by her unsympathetic grandparents. Maud drew on these two mythologies to fashion her two primary child characters in this novel, Pat Gardiner and her friend, Hilary Gordon. Pat Gardiner is the child of the first mythology; Hilary Gordon, a boy whose mother has abandoned him, is heir to the second.
Many of Pat’s characteristics are similar to those of the young Maud Montgomery. For instance, in Chapter One we are told that Pat is a “queer,” emotional child, who loves more deeply than others—and this capacity for deep feeling is accompanied by both intense delight and intense pain. Pat worries unduly over her looks, too, believing that she is ugly. She does not have Maud’s youthful exuberance or her creative gifts, but she draws much else from Maud.
Pat’s best friend, Hilary (“Jingle”) Gordon, is a lonely little boy effectively orphaned when his father died and his mother left him to be raised by relatives, so she could go west and remarry. Hilary idealizes his absent mother for his first fifteen years, and is crushed and disillusioned when they meet. This recalls Maud’s experience at age fifteen, when she was summoned out west to join her father—only to discover that he wanted her there to help his peevish new wife with her housework and babies.
That a parent may not love its child at all is a devastating recognition for a young person, and it is powerfully portrayed in this novel.
As she continued to recopy her journals in the handwritten volumes, Maud had been thinking a great deal of her own father and stepmother. Unlike Maud’s father, Hilary’s self-absorbed mother is sufficiently well-off to arrange for his education, but she does this out of a sense of obligation, not love. (Maud’s father had sent a modest sum of money for her only when her grandmother strong-armed him to do so.) At least Hilary can fulfill his dream of becoming an architect of beautiful houses for the enjoyment of others. He finally realizes that he must develop his career for his own satisfaction, not to satisfy his shallow mother, who takes no interest in his professional success.
For a time, Pat has another good friend, a girl her age named Bets Wilcox. Bets is perfect, beautiful, and shadowy. Such clues suggest that she is marked for death, just like the too-perfect Beth in Little Women. Bets Wilcox dies of flupneumonia, like Frede a decade earlier. Pat asks the very same question in the novel that Maud asked when Frede died: “How was one to begin anew when the heart had gone out of life?” … “Bets seemed to die afresh every time there was something Pat wanted to share with her and could not” (Chapter 31).
Even with its child protagonists, Pat of Silver Bush hardly seems a traditional story for children. Most children want to “grow up,” and they enjoy the excitement that change brings. Pat’s emotional makeup seems highly neurotic, like Barrie’s Peter Pan. Maud’s sense of being disoriented by the ceaseless post-war change was shared by many adults, but when transplanted into the emotions of a small child who is strikingly articulate about her hatred of change, it seems oddly pathological. However, the novel does catch the Zeitgeist of the era, as experienced by many adults.
Although the rather uninteresting Pat lacks Anne’s ginger or Emily’s spunk, Maud compensates by giving the Gardiner family an Irish servant named Judy Plum, who is full of stories, fairy-lore, and smart answers for everything. Judy gives the house most of its personality, and her stage-Irish brogue may be drawn partly from the descendants of Ewan’s “warm” Irish settlers who still attended the Union and Norval churches, and partly from popular plays by Irish writers like Sean O’Casey and W. B. Yeats.
Maud knew how to create atmosphere, and the novel is engaging. The ambience and warmth of the Gardiner home comes through the multiple comforts in Judy’s kitchen, the antics of the many cats, the scenes where extended family and friends sit around on winter evenings spinning tales of family and community. Small frictions and spats maintain narrative interest.
Maud would write to a young fan about Pat the following year: “My characters are all fictitious, as people, but I have met the types to which they belong. I gave Anne my imagination and Emily Starr my knack of scribbling; but the girl who is more myself than any other is ‘Pat of Silver Bush’—my new story which is to be out this fall. Not externally but spiritually, she is ‘I.’ ”58 And Pat was her at this point in her life, (as well as Hilary Gordon) just as Anne, the Story Girl, Emily, and Valancy, had been in turn.
Maud had always dreamed of creating a happy home, like that of her merry Campbell cousins of Park Corner, but her dream was failing to materialize. Too many things in her personal life were under threat in the 1930s: her financial security, her professional status, her husband’s mental health, and her sons’ stability and future. She saw more wars brewing in a world where war had become “a hideous revel of mechanical massacre” (February 25, 1932). She feared more and more for her own state of mind. In Pat of Silver Bush she depicted the happy home she want
ed for her family, and she mapped the ways that people must adjust and move on when life disappoints them. But she was finding it hard to do this herself.
Still, no matter how she felt, Maud kept up her professional obligations— her writing, her speaking engagements, and her reply to every fan letter. She reacted strongly to a letter that came to her in July 1933, from a bright young reader in Saskatchewan named Roberta Mary Sparks. Roberta wrote Maud that she loved her books, but she thought her characters were unrealistic— they were too idealistic and too faultless as people. Already smarting under certain critics’ insinuation that her books were sentimental, Maud wrote sharply to Roberta:
Do you think Anne was happy when her baby died—when her sons went to the war—when one was killed? … Poor Valancy had 29 years of starved existence and Emily had her bitter years of alienation from Teddy.… You are probably much more cynical at nineteen than you will be at forty. I am sure there are plenty of girls and boys just as good and true as any of those in my books. I have known ever so many. Of course there are plenty of the other kind, too—always have been and always will be and just now they are not repressed as they used to be and we hear and see more of them. But the other sort must have always predominated or the world wouldn’t have gone on at all. (Letter of July 4, 1933)
Roberta felt the sting of Maud’s forceful response, and did not answer the letter, feeling that she had said the wrong thing to an author she loved, and doubtful that she could explain what she had meant. Roberta had indeed hit a sore spot: in Chester, Maud had one of the “other kind” of young people who were not “good and true,” and she had no idea how to cope.
On December 2, 1933, Chester and Luella Reid confronted Ewan and Maud with surprising news: Chester claimed that he and Luella had been secretly married the previous year, in November 1932. They were twenty-one and twenty-two, respectively, at the time of the announcement. Chester had many years of schooling ahead before he would be a lawyer and able to provide for a family. Luella Reid was clever but lacked any education beyond high school. Maud and Ewan were devastated. To the alleged marriage date, Ewan’s response was to say, over and over, “I don’t believe a word of it,” and it was, of course, a lie.
The diminutive Luella was too mortified to speak, for she knew, and her new in-laws also knew, that such a marriage could mean only one thing— that a baby was on the way. In that era, pregnancy outside of marriage was the worst shame a respectable girl could bring on her family. It was almost always blamed on the woman—women were supposed to be “purer” and better able to exercise self-control than men. People assumed that a woman who got pregnant outside of wedlock was either of low morals or was determined to catch the man by “hook or by crook.” She would carry a stigma for life, even if marriage followed, and the children born in a “forced marriage” also bore a lingering stigma.
Maud knew the power of sex as a component in the makeup of human beings. She said that she always tried to answer the boys’ questions about sex as honestly and openly as she could. She recalled how sex had been a taboo subject in her childhood, something too “vile and shameful to be spoken of” (January 11, 1924). She recalled a doctor’s book in the Macneill household that explained sexual functions clearly but was kept hidden from her—with the result, of course, that she dipped into it “by stealth.” She gave Chester such a book to read when he reached puberty, and she remarked that the “present generation” had “saner views” on sex than earlier ones. When she was writing the second Emily book she could still not bring any hint of physical love into her novels. She was branded as a wholesome writer for the young, and sex was still a taboo subject in fiction for them.
Maud’s advice to Luella after their marriage reveals the traditional attitudes towards sexuality in that era. In keeping with her promise to Luella’s dying mother to be a “mother” to Luella, Maud took Luella aside to talk about a woman’s proper conduct after marriage. According to Luella, she advised her never to let her husband “see her body naked,” telling her that she should “always undress behind a screen.” Maud explained that this would help keep the “mystery” and “magic” in marriage, and that too much familiarity was a bad thing. Luella, of a different and later generation, found the advice amusing, given that she was married and pregnant.
Luella recalled that Maud herself kept a screen in her own bedroom and dressed and undressed behind it. It was large enough to afford complete privacy. Luella observed that Maud and Ewan were both middle-aged when they married, and she said both were very prudish, Ewan far more so than Maud. Luella said that she could not imagine Ewan “ever trying to get ‘peeks’ ” at his wife’s body when she undressed, and she doubted he had ever actually seen Maud naked. Women’s nightgowns then were voluminous to protect against the cold in badly insulated and poorly heated houses. Even in summer, nightgowns were roomy enough to undress under if a woman did not have a screen. Describing all this later in her life, after she had read many Victorian novels and histories, Luella smiled over Maud’s Victorian views about modesty, but she said they were not unusual for women raised in Maud’s generation.59
Maud made all the decisions after the 1933 marriage was revealed. Chester had to continue his schooling. He would continue to work in the Bogart law office, and then take his law courses. Maud found and furnished an apartment for Chester and Luella on Shaw Street in Toronto where she hoped they could be a normal, young married couple, with their indiscretion kept secret. Maud agreed to support them financially through Chester’s training, but on the condition that there would be no more babies until Chester could provide for them.
Chester’s “forced marriage” was particularly hard for Ewan. For the son of a minister of God to get a young woman pregnant was scandal enough, but that the young woman should be the daughter of one of the church’s elders put it beyond the pale. Maud and Ewan tried to save face by placing an announcement in the Brampton paper that said the secret marriage had taken place in 1932, the previous year, just as Chester and Luella had presented it to them. The paper, however, printed the accurate marriage date of 1933. The community was abuzz. Ewan and Maud were so humiliated that they could hardly bear to appear in public.
Chester’s marriage undoubtedly stirred up Maud’s old memories about her own youthful reputation as a high-spirited girl. Maud was a woman who lived in memories, and whose earlier humiliations were never forgotten. She had learned to control her impulsiveness, but she must have worried that she had bequeathed that trait—some “bad blood,” so to speak—to Chester. Chester’s disgrace opened old wounds, and Maud’s fame only intensified her misery. A child’s indiscretions did reflect on the parents in most people’s minds. Slowly, surely, the pernicious idea that everyone she loved deeply was doomed to failure began to deepen its reach in her mind.
From 1933 to 1936 she put her journals aside, too upset by events to face them and write out her humiliation. She had so much trouble sleeping after December 2, 1933, when she learned of Chester’s marriage, that she turned again to Veronal, a widely used barbiturate prescribed by doctors as a sleep-aid and sedative. (It was one of the medications that she and Ewan had been given in Leaskdale for anxiety.) When she resumed her journalizing again, three years later, she would reconstruct a long retrospective entry from notes she had made.
Ewan fared even worse: for him, Chester’s marriage sparked a major depressive episode. Ewan had been comparatively well for most of the Norval period. He had had some small depressive episodes, but mostly he had been preaching effectively, and was quite fondly regarded by his two congregations, especially after his research into the history of the local Presbyterian churches. His even temper cooled down antagonisms. But after Chester’s marriage, Ewan also began to succumb to his old demons, his own idée fixe.
His demons again told him that the corruption in his own home proved that he was not one of the “Elect,” and that he was doomed to Hell—along with the son who so resembled him. Ewan began to brood once again, telling
his already distraught wife that he was not fit to minister to his flock when he himself was an outcast from God. Why else would God let this disaster happen? Ewan knew his Bible well, especially the many Old Testament references to the “iniquities of the fathers” being visited upon the “sons to the third and fourth generation.”60
Ewan began to change. He had trouble carrying out his regular visitations, and he sat for long, solitary hours in his darkened study, ruminating, and feeling his estrangement from God and everything positive in his life. He would rise in the morning, dress in his heavy, stiff clerical garb, eat his way through a large breakfast, and disappear into his dark study until the midday meal. He would emerge, eat a heavy meal again, and then return to his study for the afternoon. At the evening meal, he re-emerged, looking dishevelled, moody, closed off, and miserable. He would eat a big meal in silence, and return to his study. His sunless study was intrinsically gloomy, with nothing but theological books on the shelves. He became increasingly self-absorbed and spoke little. No doubt Maud’s anxiety and discouragement affected him. Perhaps they fed off each other, locked as they were in their own prisons of unhappiness. Maud gritted her teeth, kept up her public face, and suffered terrible headaches in private. Ewan dissembled less well in public, and he increasingly took sedatives prescribed by his doctor to help him cope.
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