Maud snaps that Pelham Edgar would have praised Dr. Edwin Austin Hardy, a widely respected educationalist, as much as the others, but he would then have had to praise her. But Edgar “would have died any death you could mention rather than admit I represented Canadian literature. So,” she steams in her journal, “the good Edgar selected the horn of the dilemma and impaled himself thereon,” by slighting both her and Hardy together in this huge public forum.
A lengthy and unsigned piece in the Globe of November 11, 1935, describes the situation exactly as Maud did, showing that she reported it accurately. Although it could seem she is over-sensitive (because a knighthood is a higher honour than an O.B.E.), all five being toasted were asked to respond to their toasts. Deacon’s piece in The Mail and Empire describing the event omits the information that Dr. Hardy and she made replies to their toasts. Maud felt humiliated by this public snub. A special reception at the home of Dr. Herbert A. Bruce, the Lieutenant-Governor of Ontario, on November 26, 1935, fêted her shortly after.13
Slowly, over the next two years, Maud would find herself increasingly irritated in the CAA executive by the behind-the-scenes machinations of Deacon. After Deacon was hired as literary editor of the Globe and Mail he had enormous influence over who was given favourable review attention and who obtained positions of influence in the CAA. Many in the literary and academic world, wanting favourable press and not wanting to incur his ill will, tended to follow wherever he led.14
Deacon continued to subtly disparage Maud’s books. It was in May 1934 that he wrote a long column in The Mail and Empire tracing the development of Canadian literature. He implied that Canadian literature was initially very poor in quality.
However much Maud was hurt by Deacon’s condescension, she also knew that he exerted admirable effort for public causes, like improving Canadian copyright legislation, and he was an indefatigable organizer of literary events that benefited writers, booksellers, and readers. For Maud, the most irritating aspect of feeling sidelined by Deacon’s narrow vision of Canadian literature was that she thought him a mean-minded man who was motivated largely by personal ambition. He was trained as a lawyer, not in arts and letters, and lacked the judiciousness of wide, discriminate reading.
Once her critical descent started, Maud’s loss of status would continue steadily until her death. Not until near the end of the twentieth century, long after she was dead, would literary critics dismantle and discredit the norms that the entire generation of academic critics had worked so hard to establish in the 1930s, norms that pushed popular fiction—and almost all women’s writing—completely out of the canon and off the map of literary culture.
After the move to Toronto, Maud suffered periodically from acute homesickness for the manse and the beautiful Credit River setting of Norval. In retrospect, her Norval life seemed idyllic.
Ethel Dennis, the maid who moved from Norval to Toronto with the Macdonalds, remembered how unhappy Maud sometimes looked after the move. Maud’s mental distress caused specific symptoms: she complained variously of a “queer feeling” in her head, of her eyes “pulling,” of “old-time headaches” which resulted in vomiting before she had relief. Ironically, Ewan now gave his wife the same futile advice that she had initially given him in his depressive states, telling her to “cast it off” or “don’t think of it.”
Maud worked at organizing her house after their move, but she suffered periodically from what she called “neurasthenia,” a catch-all term for a host of conditions believed to come from “exhaustion of the nervous system.” She described the peculiar “waves” that would rush over her, flooding her mind with memories of times past, but selectively choosing and colouring these memories to turn them into painful humiliations. At first, she was afraid to go to church for fear that one of her “waves” of nervous anxiety would wash over her, forcing her to get up and flee in the middle of a service. Ewan often went alone, and she stayed home.
She did not write in her journals about what these flooding memories consisted of—that most likely would have been too revealing—but we can speculate that she was dredging up the ways she had felt unimportant, unworthy, and unloved as a child and young woman. As an over-sensitive child, Maud had internalized real and imagined slurs that attacked her developing sense of self. When she became a best-selling author at age thirty-three, she believed that she could move beyond this pain. Now, late in life, with her work and celebrity under attack at the precise time she had hoped to begin engaging productively in the Canadian cultural scene, she fell into the old, hurtful thought patterns. She was sensitive, and any snubs she felt or imagined acted like salt being rubbed in old wounds. New worries over her finances and her sons only added to her emotional instability.
When Ewan had developed mental problems, she remembered her earlier fears that she would never be able to attract a desirable mate, a fear that seemed perversely fulfilled after his illnesses surfaced. As her son Stuart later quipped, “My mother wanted an escape [from spinsterhood in PEI], but she did not know that the ship she chose had a faulty boiler.” When her sons grew into sexual maturity, she remembered her grandmother’s disapproval of her own behaviour, accusing her of “stealing out” to “see some fellow” (December 20, 1904). Having grown up in a culture that taught that sexual urgings must be repressed, she came to her adult life with a great residue of shame over what had been normal feelings for a flirtatious, high-spirited girl. When Chester and Stuart were attracted to the opposite sex, this stirred up feelings from her childhood. Maud was a person given to reliving everything in the past over and over—in her journals, in her writing, and in her imagination.
Maud knew by this time that her mind was its own place, and as John Milton had put it, it could “make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.” Her extraordinary memory, her heightened sensitivity to the emotions that washed over her, her clairvoyant vision into the heart of human muddle—these gifts could paralyze her in the process of living, but they could also inspire and release her into creative work, giving her the “gift of wings.” She could see what was happening to herself emotionally, but she was less able to cope with her mood fluctuations as she aged. When her “nerves” were in bad shape, her intellectual understanding of her state and its causes did nothing to reorient her to what should have been, and could have been—a feeling of having made a remarkable success of her life, despite many trials along the way, trials that would have destroyed a person with less personal discipline. Because she lacked an unshakeable sense of self-worth, her fluctuating self-image made her especially sensitive to external slurs and this made her increasingly vulnerable to depression. It could be a self-perpetuating downward spiral.
When “waves” of depression came during those first months in Toronto, Maud would often leave the house for fresh air and a walk in the garden or along the street to infuse her senses with a wholesome present again. She was unable to compose when severely depressed; she could rewrite, revise, adapt, but creative work was not possible. What would happen to her family’s income, she worried, if she could not settle her mind enough to write? For years, her happiest moments had always been when she was writing: what if she lost this pleasure? She lived when she wrote. Because she always built her writing around her own feelings, it allowed her to gain distance and see things with greater perspective—and to exorcise (or make light of) painful memories.
In Toronto, Maud’s symptoms were not all psychological, however. She was writing for much longer stretches than she ever had before, but she was getting far less varied physical exercise without her parish duties and other activities, which had kept her moving. In Toronto, she subjected herself to the strain of long periods at a desk in her urgent need to support her family and a new house.
Oddly, Maud had never purchased a desk that was the proper height for writing. In both Norval and Toronto, she wrote in the bedroom she shared with Ewan, either on a high square table (with an uncomfortable raised decorative braid around the edge) or in a chair w
ith a portfolio on her knees, with her feet propped up on a stool and her back hunched down. She sometimes revised manuscripts by cutting up sections and laying them out on her bed, then bending over as she reassembled them. When Maud typed her book manuscripts, the ergonomics were equally bad. She either put the typewriter on the braided table desk—which was entirely too high for it—or she placed it on a low footstool in front of her and sat, tipped forward with her back rounded, on her rocking chair. Long stints of work in such a position gave her severe muscle strain in her back, shoulders, and neck—something that her aging and overweight body tolerated less well. Muscle spasms caused a vice-like tightness in her head and the pain around her eyes that she complained of in this period. Her headaches sometimes responded to aspirin, but only if she lay down and relaxed directly after taking medication. Chester’s wife, Luella, described how in the latter Toronto years something that looked like a “cord” in Maud’s neck began to pull out under the skin. Maud would hunch up her shoulders or tip her head to one side, as if this reduced her pain.15 Maud’s increasing fear of this physical pain, without knowing its cause or how to find permanent relief, greatly increased her anxiety. Her old standby to reduce pain and depression—relaxing walks and concentration on the beauty of nature—was more difficult in Swansea because the walking areas were along the street, not on private paths, and the ravine was too steep to really walk in. In varying proportions, Maud was suffering from the tangled effects of real physical pain and from a generalized anxiety over many aspects of her life.
Maud knew that she was too anxious. Her son Stuart later characterized her as someone who worried about every bridge she had to cross long before she reached it. The line her grandmother had drilled into her—“What will people say?” made her into a person whose self-evaluation was filtered too much through others’ eyes, rather than determined by her own internal moral compass. Then, when she reread her journals, she read a skewed account of her own life, one that gave support to her growing conviction that there was a curse on her and everyone she cared about. That idea lodged itself in her brain as one of the increasingly pernicious fixed ideas that would surface during depressive episodes.16
The disconnect between the public record of Maud’s busy, productive life and her own distressed inner feelings, as found in her journals in the 1935 to 1936 period, is staggering. Although there is much joy recorded in Maud’s early journals (particularly before her boys were teens), the later journals became the primary repository for her thoughtful or morbid moods. In public, she concealed her depressed feelings, even from friends and relatives. Her self-containment was also a function of what might be called pride: she was determined to maintain others’ view of her as a successful celebrity. When her journals were first published, revealing so many of her depressions and doubts, older relatives and close friends who had known her were astonished and confused. Most relatives said that this was not the woman they knew. They remembered only a joyous person whose infrequent visits were characterized by joke-telling, high spirits, and good times.
The public record of Maud’s activities in 1935 shows that she was a dynamo of activity right after the move to Toronto, giving speeches and readings, attending formal teas and literary functions, tending to her business affairs, writing and adapting stories to send to her New York agent, and continuing to produce longer fiction. As expected by her publisher, she kept up a rigorous speaking schedule, not only in Toronto but also in locations around Ontario. She spoke about her own books, but she also urged people to buy books by other Canadian writers. She begged her audiences to preserve their local culture, as she had in her books, rather than to think a writer had to employ exotic topics and settings. With subtlety and humour, her speeches defended her books against disparagement by the new critical norms of Modernism, which held that regional novels like hers showed only “idyllic life,” not real-life hardships.
Maud was caught in the difficult position of being damned if she did and damned if she didn’t—she had an audience that expected a certain type of fiction from her, and if she put in any explicit “modern” material describing such things as girls’ sexual fantasies, she would be pilloried and her books banned. Yet when she wrote the light, humorous fiction expected by her publisher and audience, the critics like A. L. Phelps condemned her as “ignorant of life.” When she introduced a pitiful, dying, unmarried mother into one book (The Blue Castle), some libraries banned it and she lost sales. Yet when writers like Morley Callaghan wrote about the underbelly of civilization, and got banned for salacious subject matter, Deacon talked this up in the papers, and it translated into publicity (and presumably increased sales). Maud’s speeches began to show her preoccupation and frustration with the prevailing critical attitudes.17
Mistress Pat was released in August 1935 (and Anne of Windy Poplars was underway), and Maud kept up a rigorous schedule of speeches throughout the autumn. The Globe announced on September 24 that she would speak at the annual banquet of the Progressive Business Girls’ Club. Two days later, she attended a tea given by Lady Willison (Marjory MacMurchy). In October 1935, she spoke to a capacity audience at the Royal York Hotel for the opening meeting of the English-Speaking Union. At least three newspapers—The Mail and Empire, the Globe, and the Telegram—described this talk in some detail. She began with a light account of how Anne of Green Gables was written (“I did not create Anne—she just popped into my mind with her red hair and the ‘e’ at the end of her name …”), and described how it was written on a typewriter which wouldn’t print “m” at all and had a crooked “y.” Then she described how it was sent to several publishers and was returned each time. She made the point that while writing came easily to her, getting published required persistence—good writing was not always immediately recognized. Her speech also included sketches of Island life, “proving that it is not necessary for the author to seek big cities for material or for ‘something to happen.’ ”18(This was a gentle attack on the critics’ implicit claims that modern literature should depict a broad canvas of cultural dislocation and loss, treating “universal” themes in “cosmopolitan” localities.) She stuck to her belief that her “local” subject matter was universally relevant.
Maud told her audiences about listening as a child to all the old stories and local folklore. She advised people to write down sketches of their early years, and the stories they had heard from their parents and grandparents, even if they were without literary ability themselves. She insisted that these stories should be preserved to “give colour to our native Canadian history and literature.” She tried hard to defend the “regional” and “provincial”—those qualities that modern critics now saw as old-fashioned in a fragmented and increasingly “cosmopolitan” world.
Maud’s speaking was always full of humour, but it was also designed to set certain views forth. After the Progressive Business Girls’ Club banquet in October, four Toronto newspapers covered her talk: the Globe, The Mail and Empire, the Telegram, and The Toronto Star.19 (Deacon’s account was the shortest.) In this era when young women worked only until they could “catch a man,” Maud took the contrary position that young businesswomen should not “marry as long as they could help it,” but added that “when the right man came along they couldn’t help it.”20 She linked this to “writing,” saying that you should not try to write unless you couldn’t help doing so, for it was a hard way to earn a living. On the current trend in fiction, she told them that “beauty and happiness were ‘just as real’ as the sordid side of life which was so often stressed in the ‘modern insistence on realism.’ ”21
On October 28, she spoke at the Humbercrest United Church. The following day she attended another formal tea given by her neighbour, Mrs. Cowan. A week later, Maud spoke in Owen Sound to the local Business and Professional Women’s Club. Although this club had only fifty members, another hundred women appeared to hear her, driving in from locations as far away as Guelph, nearly one hundred miles away. It was a capacity audienc
e. Again, she encouraged her audience to write down their youthful memories because the old ways were passing away. Her speech was shaped to recast “nostalgia” as valuable social history.
The Owen Sound Daily Times gave a full account of her talk, which followed a fairly standard format of personal and general, varied only in particulars. She began with an “intimate picture of the little island of ‘ruby, emerald and sapphire.’ It is a land, she said, where there are still old maids and grandmothers, where a family is still proud to claim a minister in its number, a land where the Ten Commandments are still considered reasonably up-to-date.” Then she told of clan life on the Island and the result: her father had “157 first cousins, all living on the island at one time within a radius of a few miles.” Next came the tale of the three Montgomery brothers emigrating to Canada, and the life of the pioneer women like her great aunt “who had 17 children without medical attention and in one day five of those children died and were buried.” She sketched her own career, particularly her earliest writing—“biographies of her cats”—and her early reading, declaring the Bible the most important of books she had access to, and a valuable literary guide to any would-be writer. She told about the shortage of paper and her youthful debt to government bills and to “Dr. Pearce’s little yellow note-books,” which advertised his various remedies. She said that the best reward for being a writer was the pleasure of the actual writing. She amused her listeners with accounts of her fan mail, which, she made very clear, came from all over the world. She concluded by reading three of her poems about ordinary life.22
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