Lucy Maud Montgomery

by Mary Henley Rubio

Maud’s dream of a happy home, one filled with laughter, finally seemed attainable. Chester and Stuart would bring home amusing tales from their daily encounters, and the Macdonald household would be filled with stimulating conversation. She prayed that Chester would settle down and study now that he had a family. She also fervently hoped that Stuart would lose interest in Joy Laird, his Norval girlfriend. Now that Ewan was free from the pressure of performing as a minister, Maud expected that his mental health would improve.

  Barely three weeks after the move, Maud embarked on her new social life, attending a Canadian Women’s Press Club dinner at the Royal York Hotel. Over seventy-five women were there. Maud looked forward to putting her organizational skills and her celebrity to use in a new context. She was public-spirited, and as an ardent Canadian nationalist, she wanted to foster the growing field of Canadian literature.

  —

  It was not long after the move that Maud received a registered letter from the Prime Minister of Canada, the Honourable R. B. Bennett:

  May 20, 1935

  Dear Mrs. Macdonald,

  No man born, as I was, in the Maritime Provinces can fail to know of the contribution you have made to Canadian literature. There are few Canadians who have not read at least one of your books.

  His Majesty the King is very anxious that in this Silver Jubilee year of His Reign there should be recognition of the work of men and women who have made real contributions to the cultural life of the Empire in Literature, Art, Music, and Science. It will therefore give me very great pleasure if you will permit me to recommend to the Sovereign that on His approaching Jubilee birthday you be appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (O.B.E.) …

  The notice of this award helped offset a significant failure on the home front. A week after receiving the O.B.E. letter in May, Maud learned that Stuart had failed his second year of Medicine. Stuart had always been an excellent student, and he had passed all his first-year exams, despite his devotion to gymnastics. Perhaps things had come too easily, however, for this young man with such extraordinary intellectual gifts.

  According to a classmate, Dr. Richard Braiden, Stuart failed the second year because he’d spent his time playing cards—and betting on them (regarded as a sinful form of gambling at that time). This card-playing was done in a hidden area of a men’s bathroom where the boys were out of sight of their professors. Stuart was so good at cards—his memory was a great asset here—that other students came to watch him play, a heady encouragement. He began skipping classes and labs. Stuart was accustomed to learning all his texts the night before exams, but the second-year course of study was mostly human anatomy, learned in labs. The final examination consisted of the students being hustled along a table with piles of bones, which they had to identify at lightning speed. Because Stuart hadn’t done the lab work, he was unable to identify the bones quickly enough. Classes were small and professors knew the students. The Anatomy professor, the author of a famous text, had noticed that Stuart was merely coasting along, and failed him. Stuart learned a hard and humiliating lesson.

  Stuart would have to repeat his year: his tuition money for the previous year had been wasted. Maud was shaken. She had come to expect failing grades from Chester, but never from Stuart. She greatly resented the waste of a thousand dollars for a year’s university expenses. Being disappointed in her “one good son” was bad enough, but the public embarrassment was far worse.

  Maud was a high-profile celebrity, and everyone who knew her, from the city of Toronto to the province of Prince Edward Island, would hear about Stuart’s failure, either from the newspaper “pass lists” or from gossip. In a society where well-to-do women did not work, formal afternoon teas became an agony: boasting about children’s success was a staple of conversation and status at these. Unlike Chester, Stuart was genuinely mortified and ashamed of himself. He had never dreamed that this could happen to him, and he made sure it never happened again.

  Stuart’s failure took the edge off her pleasure over the O.B.E., but conversely the O.B.E. made Stuart’s failure easier to bear. Maud’s O.B.E. was granted on June 3, 1935, by King George V, but the formal investiture in Ottawa was not held until early September. Neither Stuart, Chester, nor Ewan attended this ceremony. Determined to earn his own tuition money for his repeat year, Stuart had obtained a job in a Campbell Soup factory and worked there until classes started. Chester seemed busy with his law work in Mr. Bogart’s office. The trip was too far for Ewan, so Maud arranged for Mrs. Cowan’s daughter Margaret to drive her to Ottawa for the ceremony at Rideau Hall. In her journal, Maud wrote of the trip, in which she and Margaret “gabbed away” as if they were both girls (September 8, 1935). Maud saw Margaret as the kind of “nice” young woman she hoped Stuart would start dating.

  For the ceremony, which was conducted by the Governor General, Lord Bessborough, Maud was handsomely decked out in a purplish-navy chiffon and cut-velvet dress with a blue felt hat.6 She received the formal O.B.E. medal, which could be worn only on state occasions, in the presence of a representative of the King. She had a smaller replica of it made to wear with full evening dress. On June 12, 1935, an article in The Family Herald entitled “Specially for Women: King’s Honours for L. M. Montgomery …” described her achievements in great detail. Ewan’s reaction to her honour is never described in her journals—only that he was often “dull” and laid around groaning from pain in his head during this period.

  Maud’s professional life was very busy following the move to Toronto. She was on the executive of the Canadian Authors Association, but the meetings were often tense. William Arthur Deacon was also on the executive, and he put her on edge.

  Canadian literature was still a fledgling field in the 1930s. The Canadian Authors Association (CAA) made it a mission to bring attention to Canadian books. Deacon, like Maud, was eager for Canada to develop its own literature. By the mid-1930s, he had become a very powerful force in the Canadian book-reviewing world. As a newspaper critic, he began to consolidate his power in the CAA. He was determined to sweep out all vestiges of Victorian sentiment and style, hoping that Canadian literature would reflect the new trends. As Maud would learn eventually, there was no place for the famous “L. M. Montgomery” in Deacon’s vision, either as a writer or even as someone working in the CAA.

  On July 21, 1935, when Maud wrote Stuart Kennedy, the national executive secretary of the Canadian Authors Association, thanking him for his letter of congratulation on her O.B.E, she made the subtle point that she, too, was working for Canadian literature:

  Dear Mr. Kennedy,

  .… Thank you so much for your congratulations on the O.B.E. I feel the honour is less for me than for Canadian literature, of which I am an unworthy representative.… It’s time something was recognized as worthy of honours besides huge fortunes and political juggling.

  Yours sincerely,

  L. M. Montgomery [Macdonald]

  When Maud moved to Toronto, she expected to refocus the energy she had spent in church organization towards the promotion of Canadian literature. But she was becoming increasingly aware of the complicated politics in the CAA, and in the Canadian literary scene in general. Deacon was everywhere, involved in everything, and his personal disdain for her was palpable.

  The week after she received the O.B.E. award, Maud attended a CAA executive meeting at the home of A. H. Robson. At this meeting, plans were laid to start a new magazine of Canadian poetry to be edited by Professor E. J. Pratt, the noted Canadian poet, of the University of Toronto. Deacon, as always, was present. Maud writes tersely in her journals of Deacon without naming him, “One of the men on it [the CAA executive] is no friend of mine and has gone out of his way many a time to sneer at my books in the nastiest fashion” (September 16, 1935).

  Deacon’s first public attack on Maud had been in Poteen back in 1926 when he had said that “Canadian fiction was to go no lower” than in “sugary” stories like Anne of Green Gables. Maud was fully accustomed to negati
ve reviews, but Deacon’s ongoing hostility to her and her writing seemed more personal than professional. He sneered at her books, dismissing them, as if any outright discussion of them was beneath his intellect.

  Maud used her own celebrity to promote other new writers, and she knew also that the immense sales of her books allowed McClelland and Stewart to take chances on publishing newer Canadian writers. (In fact, McClelland and Stewart eventually became a major twentieth-century publisher of Canadian fiction and poetry.) She feared that Deacon’s scorn would make people question their own judgment if they enjoyed reading her books. And if his attacks on her damaged her reputation and her sales, this would hurt not only her own income but also her publisher’s.

  In her journals, she remarked without naming anyone that some of the CAA members took themselves very seriously, “especially those who did not amount to a row of beans in any department of authorship” (October 13, 1935). Still, the CAA did important work in organizing and lobbying for better copyright protection. It organized many promotional book-centred activities. According to Eric Gaskell, later the national executive director of the CAA, Maud brought many ideas to these CAA meetings. She knew that many of the people in the CAA had only small talent, but that didn’t mean the group could not accomplish a great deal working together for a common cause. All her life, she had been an organizer who got others to work together, and she was very skilled at coming up with fundraising ideas.

  On September 21, 1935, the Telegram reported a press conference at which Mr. Robson, CAA president, formally announced that they had set up a trust fund to support the publication of the poetry magazine by the CAA, one of their early efforts.7 He also called attention to the CAA’s forthcoming Canadian Book Week in November, another big project to get people “reading Canadian.” The same issue of the Telegram provided a review of Maud’s new book, Mistress Pat. It described the book as being full of “charming romances” which end in “the orthodox chime of wedding bells so beloved of youthful readers”—just the kind of characterization that was sure to invoke Modernist scorn. “Cosmopolitan” was the new catchword for avant-garde literature in an era when the world had shrunk because of the advances in transportation and communication following World War I. Maud’s books had originally been pegged as “regionalism” (once a complimentary term) because they took as their primary subjects unsophisticated people in rural and small towns. In the 1920s, their re-categorization as “children’s books”—or as “girls’ books”—had frustrated her. She wrote to one of her fans that the Honourable Stanley Baldwin, Prime Minister of Great Britain, had come to Canada, and had come to see her, and had asked to shake her hand, saying he wanted to tell her “what delight” her books had given him!8 Just “tell that” to anyone who taunts you, she advised, for liking “girls’ books.” Two years later, she wrote him that her newest book, A Tangled Web, was for adults.9

  Now in the 1930s, her books, even those specifically for adults like A Tangled Web, were being further re-categorized as “provincial”—a highly pejorative catchword that invoked the opposite of all things “cosmopolitan.” Critics now looked for “cosmopolitan” literature that had “universal” themes.10It didn’t matter that all the jealousies, antagonisms, power-grabs, and political manoeuvrings in small rural communities were a microcosm of those same symptoms in the larger world.

  As soon as Maud was re-categorized as “a children’s writer” and “provincial,” most male critics who belittled Maud’s books did not actually read them; they just accepted the labels pinned on them. Accepting the prejudices and opinions of others was apparently almost the case with Professor Arthur L. Phelps (born 1887), an exceptionally influential critic and personality from the 1920s through to the 1950s. He was part of a group of cultured men who spent their summers in cottages at Bobcaygeon, Ontario, where their families socialized and the men themselves talked over their ideas about the state of Canadian literature, world literature, and politics. This group included other academics, journalists (like Deacon), and writers invited to join them (like Frederick Philip Grove).

  Phelps was in the rather ubiquitous category of male critics who judged before they read when dealing with “L. M. Montgomery.” Phelps prepared a book called Canadian Writers, and he devoted a chapter to Montgomery. He starts by panning her work, lumping her with popular writers like Robert Service, Mazo de la Roche, and Ralph Connor, who as “romantic and sentimental writers,” he deems unimportant “by the standards of discriminating literary criticism.” He judges Montgomery’s work “naïve,” and innocent to the point of showing “ignorance of life.” He asserts that her readers are only “the nostalgic and sentimental or … the uncultured and unsophisticated.” Even “modern young girls,” he says, can no longer “tolerate” the “soft well-meaning goodness of Miss Montgomery’s portrayal.” He ends that same paragraph with the rather ironic information that the librarian who lent him the four Montgomery books told him not to keep them too long as they were “out all the time.” After he actually reads her books, his essay changes tack. He acknowledges that Montgomery “should not be dismissed too casually just because she has been popular.” He continues, “Widespread popularity … usually suggests the presence of positive and fundamental qualities,” and decides that Maud is somehow better than the other superficial writers of the era because her stories “have qualities of range and subtlety and fine comprehension which make them relatively worthy even today.” He does not revise the first part of his essay—he just closes with the advice to get her book and read it. This assessment, however, was not published until 1951, after Maud’s death.11

  Various factors worked against Maud in the 1920s and 1930s. Her narrative style, which reflected her grounding in the oral tradition of Scotland, was one of these. The oral tradition had become unfashionable in the late nineteenth century, along with “fairy tales” and “old wives’ tales.” The next generation of writers, who saw a fragmented world, wanted new ways of telling stories. And worse, Maud often lapsed into sensuously evocative and lush “purple prose,” particularly when writing about nature. The Romantic and Victorian poets had been an important early influence on her, with their belief that Nature should be a primary subject for art. Maud used this style to create atmosphere in her books, and such passages seemed cloying and old-fashioned. The new post-war Modernist critics called for a tough, hard-edged, pared-down style, as well as gritty subject matter, including tortured people, war, criminality, and sex. Maud’s writing—humorous, domestic, and localized in a rural region—fell short on all counts.

  Maud probably had not fully realized when she moved to Toronto how very small the Toronto literary circle was and how much infighting there would be. She watched as Deacon solidified his position and grew more influential. After his stint as literary editor for Saturday Night, he worked for The Mail and Empire from 1928 until 1936, and in 1936 began a two-decade position as literary editor for The Globe and Mail. According to his biographers, Clara Thomas and John Lennox, he “loved leadership and the feeling of power to influence events; he also loved to be seen to be leading.”12 He saw no place for Maud in the Canadian garden of literature he was cultivating, and he let her know how he felt. She was coldly furious: she knew that her books were sold, read, and enjoyed around the world. It was only her local reputation that seemed under attack—and by men she worked with in the CAA.

  To make matters worse, in 1935 Maud’s royalty income of $2,770 was the lowest she had seen in years. She was having a hard time covering her new mortgage, the boys’ tuition and upkeep, and all their living expenses. Ewan’s church pension of $237.60 a year (paying a quarterly $59.40) would not kick in until 1936, and when it did, it would not even cover their food bills.

  Canada’s National Book Week, held from November 9 to 16, was the biggest fall literary event in Toronto in 1935. To kick it off, the Toronto branch of the Canadian Authors Association arranged and advertised a special fundraising banquet to honour those who had received
the O.B.E. that year. Maud’s celebrity status with the public made her a huge drawing card for any event. One of its organizers was another prominent male academic critic who scorned her writing: Professor Pelham Edgar, Head of the English and French Departments at the University of Toronto, a man who kept himself in the public eye as much as Deacon.

  Maud rarely recorded anything negative said about her or her books in her journals, probably because she intended them for eventual publication; however, she exploded after this particular CAA banquet. She felt that Deacon and Edgar had deliberately snubbed her in front of everyone who attended. It was a large public event that bore witness to the developing rift—a rift that would trivialize her literary reputation and demolish the status she had worked so hard to acquire over her lifetime.

  The banquet was advertised as “quite the most outstanding event of the season in the literary circles in this city.” The occasion would honour the “three knights and two O.B.E.s” created that year: Sir Ernest MacMillan, Sir Wyly Grier, Sir Charles G. D. Roberts, L. M. Montgomery, O.B.E., and Dr. E. A. Hardy, O.B.E. Everyone who mattered in the literary scene would attend. Nellie McClung came from the west, and, with Marshall Saunders, C.B.E., sat at the head table.

  The event began with A. H. Robson, Toronto branch president, reading several messages, including one from the much esteemed Lord Tweedsmuir, Governor General of Canada and honorary president of the CAA. Then Dr. Pelham Edgar, national president of the CAA at that time, proposed a toast to each of the five members.

  In her journals, Maud recounts how Pelham Edgar began with long and fulsome toasts describing the individual accomplishments of each of the first three honoured guests: Sir Ernest MacMillan, Sir Wyly Grier, and Sir Charles G. D. Roberts. She continues, rather crossly, that Professor Edgar, “who has a high opinion of Prof. Pelham Edgar’s critical acumen,” did not consider that her books had “any literary merit whatever.” After finishing off his flowery toasts to the first three men, Professor Edgar merely nodded to Maud and Hardy, dismissing them together in one bald sentence by saying, “The other two who are included in this toast are Dr. Hardy and Mrs. Macdonald.”