One document written by Ewan during this time remains. It is a set of jottings about the men in his parish. These notes are the work of a man brooding destructively. He names and characterizes many of his parishioners. For example, of Robert Reid (Luella’s father) he says: “Explosive and flammable temper— hardly ever under control. Offends people and doesn’t see how he does it and when it is pointed out to him says he was only doing his duty. Has a high idea of his own importance, and very intolerant of other people’s ideas.… The good he does is neutralized by his ill-considered utterances and the impression his whole personality makes …” Of George Gollop: “A conceited egotist. Thinks everyone should realize that he is a great man. Selfish and dogmatic. Unforgiving to a great degree.” The younger men in the congregation, those born between 1896 and 1905, fared better. Of Murray Laird: “Fine young man—intelligent— not perhaps as aggressive as he might be but in this respect he will grow. Fair-minded, tolerant, popular. Calm in expression and steadfast in purpose.”
Luella would later recount a memory of having dinner with her new in-laws during this period. Ewan had been sitting in silence at the table but suddenly erupted to say, apropos of nothing that anyone else had said: “Nobody hates me except Garfield McClure.” He repeated it loudly several times in a pressured way, and seemed to be talking only to himself. Garfield was Luella’s uncle, so she was particularly surprised and discomfited. She also observed, however, that Ewan was correct in his assessment, and that her Uncle Garfield was a controlling and egotistical person who stirred up trouble, and he did undermine Ewan.
Despite Maud’s misery over Chester’s marriage, she held her head high, and continued with her public engagements in the community and in Toronto. On January 8, 1934, she was one of several women who spoke on the topic of “Great Books by Canadian Women” at the Canadian Literature Club in Toronto. She had been invited to speak by one of its officials, a gifted young man named Eric Gaskell, who would figure later in her life. She had been asked to speak on Anne of Green Gables. Marshall Saunders spoke on her book Beautiful Joe, and three other women (not the authors) discussed Mazo de la Roche’s The Whiteoaks of Jalna, E. Barrington’s The Divine Lady, and the works of Susanna Moodie. Unlike Ewan, who lost himself in negative brooding, Maud could use language to help manage her frustrations. One poem that expressed her feelings was written in January 1934, after Chester’s revelations, and is entitled “Night.” The last stanza reads:
The world of day, its bitterness and cark
No longer have the power to make me weep,
I welcome this communion of the dark
As toilers welcome sleep.
Maud would not begin Mistress Pat, the sequel to Pat of Silver Bush, until January 15, 1934, some six weeks after the bombshell of Chester’s marriage. It, too, would embody her explosive personal emotions.
The end of the Macdonalds’ happiness in Norval may have started with the great mill fire that destroyed the village’s character and way of life, but it was sealed by Chester’s marriage. The baby, also named Luella, was born on May 17, 1934.
By June 9, Luella had left Chester and returned home to her father. She told Maud that the apartment she and Chester lived in on Shaw Street in Toronto was “too hot” for the baby. Eyebrows were raised and members of the community exchanged knowing looks. No one had expected Chester to be a good husband.
A substantial number of the parishioners in Ewan’s church were related in one way or another to Luella’s parents. Luella was one of their own, even if she had done the unacceptable and become pregnant before marriage. In their eyes, Chester was a “bad egg”: he had seduced the naïve and lonely Luella after the death of her mother, when she was left to cope with her short-fused, grief-stricken father. If she’d returned to her father—who was in everyone’s view a decent but terribly difficult man—then life with Chester must have been unbearable. People knew that Chester had been thrown out of Engineering, and they wondered how he would fare in his law studies. So did Maud and Ewan, and they were in the uncomfortable position of knowing that everyone else in the community was also watching Chester. Ewan began to feel a chill from his Norval parishioners.
When Luella returned home, she said she was frank with her father about Chester’s behaviour towards her. Chester was always explosive. He left her alone, giving no explanations about where he was. She would later say that whatever faults her father had, she would be forever grateful to him for allowing her to return home, and supporting her after she had brought disgrace on her family. (The attitude that equated premarital pregnancy with shame and disgrace continued through much of the twentieth century, only loosening after contraception was developed and the feminist movement began changing views towards sexuality and marriage.)
The week after the baby’s birth, in May 1934, Ewan had a nightmare about suicide. This terrified Maud: only a few years earlier, in Butte, Montana, Ewan’s brother Alec had gone melancholy, threatened to kill himself, then disappeared. (He was never found.) Ewan was in worse mental health than he had ever been before. He was taking sedatives prescribed by his doctor, and possibly self-medicating with some that were not. He was probably also taking alcoholic spirits for his “constitution,” as well. His nighttime sleep was often disturbed, and he sometimes refused to get up during the day. Maud normally wrote in their bedroom, her screen giving her some privacy, but now Ewan lay on their bed groaning with headaches for much of the day.
By now, Maud had a serious cash-flow problem, because of the continuing financial depression and the loss of her investment money. In 1933, her book income was only $1,641, the lowest it had ever been (except for the unusual year 1919, when she got no income from Page, only the settlement). Even in 1908, when Anne of Green Gables was first published, she had received $1,732 in book royalties. The drop in 1933 was truly alarming. She attributed it to general poverty arising from the Depression and little disposable income for books, but there always remained that terrible possibility that her books had seen their day.
To add to this, Maud now suffered a professional insult. On May 11, 1934, William Arthur Deacon once again implied that her novels were poor and unsophisticated in The Mail and Empire, and compared her unfavourably with Mazo de la Roche:
Whatever advance, in art or in substance, lies between L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables at the beginning of the period and Morley Callaghan’s Such is My Beloved, or Alexander Knox’s Bride of Quietness at the close of it, all that is notable in the Canadian novels falls within this quarter-century. No earlier popular novelist had anything like the skill of Mazo de la Roche.
Maud had long thought that Mazo de la Roche’s novels showed little resemblance to any Canadian society she knew. Years ago, she had sent G. B. MacMillan a copy of the first Jalna novel, along with the comment that it was “clever” and “modern” (December 2, 1927) but that it didn’t reflect life on an ordinary Canadian farm. In a letter to a fan named Jack Lewis she wrote that her own books were true representations of the type of life still lived on the Island. She stated that although her characters were imaginary, they always seemed real when she was writing about them. To her, being judged inferior to Mazo de la Roche was a significant insult.
For his part, Ewan was finding it increasingly difficult to stand in the pulpit and pretend that he was God’s chosen representative. He felt himself a fraud. His preaching began to falter. Composing sermons became increasingly difficult, and delivering them even more so. He started reading them instead of delivering them extemporaneously. Then he started having difficulty even reading his own sermons, stumbling over words like a poorly prepared schoolboy. Next he began to balk when it was time to go to church to preach. Maud plied him with drinks of her homemade wine to fortify him enough to get him over to the church. (She, like her grandmother before her, made wine to “help the digestion.” It was not served at the table, and she kept it in the cellar, so much out of sight that the Norval maids did not know about it, and declared in intervi
ews with me that there was never any alcohol in the Macdonalds’ house. However, there are numerous references to this homemade wine in the journals.)61
When Ewan began talking of suicide in May 1934, Maud was already feeling weak with worry. She had presented his ill health everywhere as physical ailments like headaches, dizziness, and vague internal problems. What if people found out that his problems were mental, branding her family with the stigma of mental illness? That would completely destroy her boys’ future careers, particularly Stuart’s. Nobody wanted a doctor with mental instability in his heritage.
Nora continued to bring consolation and good spirits to the disturbed manse. She had been coming out to visit Maud periodically ever since the Campbell family had come to Toronto in 1928. Like Frede, Nora was Maud’s only safe confidante and “kindred spirit.” Maud trusted her enough that she could tell Nora about Ewan’s mental instability, something she had not even told her relatives in Prince Edward Island.
Nora had been coming out to Norval from time to time, bringing her young son Ebbie, then about ten, with her. Many years later, Ebbie (who became a mining executive, like his father) told a story that is not found in Maud’s journals. He said that as a child he had instinctively felt some fear of Mr. Macdonald because of what he considered a “crazy look” in his eyes. His instincts were confirmed one time when they were visiting in Norval. His mother and Maud were laughing and joking at the dinner table, telling “in” jokes. Perhaps something in Ewan snapped, or perhaps he thought that he was joining in the fun with a practical joke. He rose from the table where his wife and Nora were talking, stepped out of the room, and returned with a gun. All laughter stopped. He pointed it directly at Nora’s head, and acted as if he were going to pull the trigger. Maud was too shocked to move or speak. Ebbie thought his mother was going to be killed by a madman. Then, Ewan lowered the gun and declared it had been a joke.
A few miles west of Norval, in Guelph, Ontario, there was a well-known treatment centre for mental illness and other disorders called the Homewood Sanitarium. Dating from the nineteenth century, this beautifully landscaped private facility treated wealthy and famous patients from all over North America. The grounds were stunning, the buildings baronial, and the doctors as good as could be found when there was no effective treatment for nervous disorders, alcoholism, substance abuse, or mental illness. Homewood was very expensive, and money tight in the 1930s. However, by the middle of June 1934 (after the incident with the gun), Maud decided that she would send Ewan there, telling the parishioners that he needed a full assessment and a rest. If Homewood didn’t help Ewan, she knew that it would at least help her to have him out of the house for a short period.
Ewan and Maud had both been taking medicines prescribed by various general practitioners: Dr. J. J. Paul of Georgetown, Dr. William Brydon of Brampton, and various other doctors that Ewan had sought out in Toronto. Ewan was making the rounds of doctors, peddling his physical symptoms and collecting medications. But he did not tell the doctors about his underlying depression, or “weakness,” as he called it. He was convinced that his heart was weak and he imagined problems with other organs. He was greatly troubled with constipation and he had much difficulty sleeping, as depressed people often do. And he now had periods of losing touch with reality.
Maud administered the various medicines doctors had given him for sleeping: bromides, Veronal, Chloral, Seconal, Medinal, Luminal, Nembutal, tonics with strychnine, and arsenic pills, plus medicines with names such as “Chinese pills,” “liver pills,” and strong cough remedies, which were all made up in local doctors’ offices. Ewan carried one of these cough syrups, which had a strong alcohol base, in his pocket, and took drinks from it all day long to subdue his cough.
Chester and Maud drove Ewan to Guelph, and he was admitted on June 24, 1934. He stayed there until August 17. Maud provided the history of his case.62 By her account, his melancholic attacks had begun in his early teens, and had existed in mild form throughout his university years. He had suffered a severe attack lasting three months when studying theology in Glasgow. In 1910 he had experienced another one lasting about two months, brought about by worry. After the worry was removed, he’d been perfectly well until 1919, when he’d had a very severe attack at age forty-eight, leaving him unable to work. During the next six years he’d had attacks on and off, lasting anywhere from a few days to a few months. From 1926 until the beginning of May 1934, he had been completely free of attacks, Maud said. Then, he had became worried over his heart and blood pressure, despite being told they were not serious problems. The spells usually started with a nightmare or something distressing, and were followed by “headaches,” complaints of “weakness,” and fears and phobias that took over his mind. Maud described the fears as ones of “his future destiny.” He then obsessed about his physical maladies. He would slump, saying he was unable to preach, and his memory seemed impaired.
It is worth noting that Maud did not tell the Homewood doctor any of their recent family problems, including Chester’s forced marriage, the baby’s birth, Luella’s return to her father, and their public humiliation. She gave Ewan’s family history, saying his parents were both of “even temperament,” but she did not mention his brother Alec’s depression and probable suicide. Maud described Ewan in this record as easygoing and the “jolliest man alive” when completely well. She alluded to unspecified fears and phobias that he would not admit to anyone (which perhaps cover all of the personal matters and events she did not want to mention). She did not raise the subject of the medications he had been given, or taken. The admitting physician, Dr. Alex L. Mackinnon, noted that Ewan’s wife was an “authoress from PEI who goes by the pen name of L. M. Montgomery.” The charge for residence in Homewood was then seven dollars per day. His stay until mid-August would cost Maud more than a year’s residence in Knox College for Stuart, at six dollars per week for a minister’s son. In 1934, her income from book royalties had risen to $4,403, but she had many expenses ahead, and these included two sons to educate as her husband was nearing the end of his working life.
Maud returned to writing Mistress Pat while Ewan was in Homewood, and she made good progress, despite suffering bouts of asthma which sometimes became so severe that she had to call Dr. Paul from the next town to give her a “hypodermic.” To other medications she added her homemade wine to help her sleep, and she complained of “a nasty tight feeling” in her head.
Another crisis arose at home. In mid-July, Maud’s maid, Mrs. Faye Thompson, suddenly gave notice that she was going to leave. Mrs. Thompson had been a very good maid and this was unexpected. The timing was bad, too, for it occurred right after Luella had left Chester and returned home to her father, and when Chester himself would be spending more of the summer vacation at home, making more work. Mrs. Thompson’s departure seemed strange when she did not have another job to go to. She said she expected to get a secretarial job, but this did not make sense, given the lack of employment during the Depression. As well, she had no way of affording childcare. Her daughter June was now a very sweet and pretty little girl, and she could not be left alone. Maud was fond of June, and she was very confused and upset over Mrs. Thompson’s curiously inexplicable and sudden departure.
Although Maud hated to lose Mrs. Thompson, she was able to replace her with Ethel Dennis, in August 1934. Ethel was young and naïve, but a respectable, placid young local woman. Ethel was not interested in the hidden inner lives of the Macdonalds, nor intensely watchful of the growing tensions in the family, which was a relief to Maud. Ethel was inexperienced and she require much training, but she was dedicated and loyal.
Ewan was discharged from Homewood on August 17. Maud could not afford to keep him there indefinitely, and she could not see that they were doing anything for him—except teaching him to play Solitaire. He would spend hours and hours on this game for the rest of his life—a big improvement, as far as Maud was concerned, over lying and moaning on the bed next to where she wrote.
/> Homewood doctors also told him to change his diet: to eat more vegetables, especially salads, to alleviate his ongoing problem with constipation, instead of dosing himself with laxatives. Ewan did not like vegetables or salads, and he did not follow this advice, and the Macdonalds’ normal diet at home did not change. It remained heavy in meats, potatoes and gravies, and desserts—a diet designed for active farm people, not sedentary ministers.
On the way home from Guelph and Homewood on the day Ewan was discharged, the Macdonalds stopped to get a prescription for “blue pills” filled in Acton. Pharmacists often made up their own medications at that time. By mistake, the careless young pharmacist filled the pills with bug poison. Maud gave Ewan one of these poisonous pills the next morning, right after a dose of mineral oil for his constipation. He complained of a burning sensation and soon vomited. The doctor was summoned immediately; miraculously, Ewan suffered no permanent effects from the deadly poison, largely thanks to the oil. But to Maud’s surprise, even though everyone knew he was now home from Homewood, no Norval parishioners came to welcome Ewan back and wish him well. That tipped the Macdonalds off to the fact that something was quite wrong.
In the next few months, Ewan’s mental state worsened. He cycled rapidly between normality and weepy, “sinking,” or aggressive spells in which he declared God hated him and he could never preach again. Maud wrote in her journals that he had never been abusive or violent in this way before, and this frightened her (October 10, 1934). It is possible that Maud’s reference to Ewan’s erratic and threatening behaviour was her way of acknowledging the earlier gun incident without giving the shocking and embarrassing details.
As Ewan’s situation deteriorated, she came to rely a great deal on Stuart emotionally. The always upbeat Stuart had become a force of normalcy in her overwrought life. But he would be returning to university in the third week of September 1934. “Can I continue to endure this hideous life without him?” she asked her journal. Yet, she was glad for him to leave Norval for another reason: his ongoing relationship with Joy Laird.
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