In 1927, Maud had published a spoof on the idea of tragic endings in Chapter 17 of Emily’s Quest: Emily drops into a Charlottetown newspaper office at the moment the editor cannot find the last section of a lugubrious potboiler that he is serializing to boost summer circulation. The paper has to go to press imminently, so she sits down and quickly composes a happy ending for it. Soon after, the book’s enraged author—a pompous, self-admiring fool named Mark Delage Greaves—arrives at her home in a huff and rails against her for having “murdered” his novel.35 But he takes one look at Emily and falls madly in love with her. Calling her a “lyrical creature,” he tells her that if she will marry him he will teach her to write proper tragic endings. The only “artistic” way to end a book is, he opines, with “sorrowful” endings. The scene is pure slapstick comedy, and it shows Maud’s impatience with Modernist critics who made “tragic endings” such an important part of critical discourse on what constituted a “great novel.”36
Maud continued to write Grove congratulatory letters on his new novels, until he went too far in her view with his tragic endings. In 1928, his novel Our Daily Bread concluded rather like Shakespeare’s King Lear. Maud wrote Grove, tactfully asking if such unmitigated disaster was not a bit extreme. Surely at least one of the ill-fated hero’s children would have come to a better end, she said. We do not know if he answered.
However, in 1929, Grove gathered some of his essays into a book called It Needs to Be Said. In it, he writes of his scorn for a best-selling female writer he has met because she writes “happy endings.” He attributes this woman’s best-seller status to the fact that her books pander to the uncritical masses. Maud never mentions reading this essay by Grove; however, she may have, since she had written Grove congratulatory letters about his other books. There is no known further correspondence between them following the publication of this book of his essays.37
Maud continued to be annoyed by the Modernist focus on cultural dislocation and misery. However, from the 1930s onward, she made a conscious effort—seen in the “Pat of Silver Bush” novels, and also in her three final novels—to bring some misery and troubled characters into her fiction. These unpleasant elements were always temporary and felt at a narrative distance. Her readers expected happy endings, and these continued.
Through 1936, Maud continued to adjust her sails to an unpredictable market, while still pleasing her regular readers, not to mention attempting to maintain the family’s lifestyle. She wrote several magazine contributions, including a piece on Mammoth Cave for a Maritime magazine, named The Busy East, and a nostalgic article about change based on her reflections on the diary of the old Cavendish farmer Charles Macneill (father of her special childhood friends Pensie and Alec Macneill). She finished typing up Anne of Windy Poplars, and she wrote Charles Gordonsmith, editor of the Family Herald and Weekly Star in Montreal, that he could start serializing the “Anne” stories linked to Anne of Windy Poplars on May 1, as the book itself would come out in August.
But she could not afford to let the dust settle. In April she started planning her next novel, Jane of Lantern Hill, and by mid-August was deep in composition. In a journal entry for September 2, she describes herself as writing as much as five hours per day in an attempt to finish it.
Jane was not the only fiction Maud was writing. Her New York agent, Ann Elmo, had persuaded her to re-enter the market for short stories, recirculating old ones in light of the great demand for cheerful, upbeat “Shirley Temple”-style material, and writing new, sharper-edged stories for an altered time and market. Their 1936 correspondence reveals much activity. Elmo reported that the editor of Cosmopolitan liked a story, “Here Comes the Bride,” but found the opening confusing. Elmo thanked Maud for another story and hoped to have news soon on yet another story named “The Pot and the Kettle.” Maud’s attempt to squeeze back into the short fiction market was impressive: on May 29, Elmo reported that she had sold a story called “The Use of Her Legs” to the Canadian Home Journal, which would pay $100 for first Canadian rights.
But the literary market demanded a “new” kind of writing which was not Maud’s métier. Elmo informed Maud that “The Use of Her Legs” had made the rounds of American journals without success; moreover, while the American editor of The Country Gentleman liked “The Pot and the Kettle,” he thought it not “robust enough.” Maud had experienced plenty of rejections at the beginning of her career, but few after she became famous. This rebuff was a blow, again underlining the change in literary styles, even in popular magazines. On July 28, Elmo returned “Penelope Struts Her Theories” and “Retribution” with bland hopes they “would find a home” soon.38
But there was some success. The editor of Good Housekeeping asked Elmo to find more stories like “I Know a Secret,” a tale of degraded characters and a thoroughly evil child built on the theme of the terrible damage that can be done to children’s lives by gossip. This was a topic that Maud had found congenial after her sons’ adolescence and her own experiences as mistress of the manse.
Miss Elmo wrote Maud that she hoped a movie company would pick up Anne of Windy Poplars, but the market was becoming increasingly unpredictable. On August 8, Elmo wrote that she had been unable to sell radio dramatization rights for Anne of Windy Poplars because Stokes, the American publisher, had offended the radio agent—not a likely excuse if the agent had really wanted the book, and Maud knew this. She had included several maladjusted characters in the book, but apparently that was not enough to suit the temper of the times.
Fortunately, her longer fiction continued to sell to devoted readers. On August 10, her American publisher, Stokes, sent Maud a royalty of $820.40 for the “sales up to today … less the US tax of 10%” for Anne of Windy Poplars. Maud had signed this contract with Stokes several months earlier, on February 11, so the book’s initial sales were reassuring.
Money still being a big concern, when she answered fan letters, she started asking her fans to write RKO in Hollywood saying that they wanted to see more of her books on the screen. Though she received no royalties of any kind from the earlier Anne books, she did have the copyright to Anne’s House of Dreams (1917), the first book published by McClelland and Stewart (and Stokes) after she parted company with Page. Once Anne of Windy Poplars was released in late summer 1936, she urged fans to write asking that it be made into a movie, too.
Maud had long chafed at how royalty money had bypassed her completely following the sale of film rights to Anne of Green Gables in 1919. Nor did she get any money from the 1934 remake, which she had seen several times in Toronto. She wrote to a correspondent that Anne (played by an actress named Dawn O’Day, who subsequently took the name “Anne Shirley” in her real life) was “good,” Diana a “washout,” Gilbert only “fair,” and Matthew “excellent.” She said Marilla (played by Helen Westley) was much more like her idea of Mrs. Lynde than the slim, stern Marilla of the book. But Maud positively hated the tacked-on “happy ending” of romance.39 Her own ending had focused not on Anne’s finding a man to marry, but on the more ambiguous image of the “bend in the road.” It pointed a way to interesting ventures in the future, not necessarily to marriage.
CHAPTER 20
Maud had been going at a rapid pace professionally ever since the move to Toronto, and in the early fall of 1936 she desperately needed a break. It had been four years since she had been “down home.” She loved the Island for its natural beauty, but she also loved the unqualified admiration she felt there with friends and family.
She travelled by train, arriving at the beginning of October for a month’s stay. She noticed changes there: her Uncle John F. Macneill had cut down her beloved old apple tree before he died. “Lovers’ Lane” trees had also been cut down, and her friends had aged noticeably. She took her O.B.E. medal to show her friends and family, and all shared her pride in it, except her aging Aunt Emily, who looked at it only long enough to note, dismissively, that it was “pretty” (October 26, 1936). Maud wrote in her journal
that Emily should “not grudge me my small morsel of fame and success. God knows I have paid high for it.” She did not know that her Aunt Emily told other relatives that she was “ashamed to know” her niece, Maud.40
To all other Islanders and relatives, a visit from L. M. Montgomery was, as always, major news on the Island. Lieutenant-Governor DeBlois put on a reception at Government House for her, and over two hundred admiring Islanders trouped to the event. The Charlottetown Patriot reported that “Mrs. Macdonald … [is] as charming as she is talented …” The paper also gave a running account of which people Maud visited each week. The Webbs and Alec and May Macneill in Cavendish and her Campbell relatives in Park Corner were standard, but everyone else honoured with a visit from her felt especially important.
On November 7, 1936, the Globe ran a “letter” written while Maud was still in Cavendish. She explained that the farm where Anne of Green Gables was set had been purchased by the government for a National Park, ensuring that Anne’s haunts would remain forever. Her letter made it clear to the newspaper’s readers that even the Government of Canada in Ottawa, as well as the Island’s local government, recognized her celebrity and national significance. (Maud had watched the rising influx of tourists to Cavendish since 1908. In the 1920s, Ernest and Myrtle Webb began operating a tearoom and tourist home in “Green Gables.” Maud felt pride that her books had made the Island a tourist site, but she also felt terrible sorrow that her old haunts, so private and peaceful, were now overrun with tourists.)
After her return from the Island, she spoke in Goderich, Ontario, at a banquet for two hundred people (a combined group of Mission Circles, Evening Auxiliaries, and CGIT groups). The next night she spoke in Guelph, again at Chalmers Church. Her memory of her Grandfather Macneill was softening after her recent trip home, and she acknowledged that she had learned storytelling techniques and many old tales from him, according to the Guelph Mercury.
The Toronto Book Fair started on November 9, 1936, and it ran until the 14th. The Book Fair (which replaced the earlier CAA Book Week) was sponsored by a new organization, the Association of Canadian Bookmen (ACB), founded the previous year by a group of men including William Arthur Deacon. The ACB’s ranks were filled with professional men, unlike the CAA, which had many rather undistinguished “scribbling women” among its members. Dr. Pelham Edgar was the president of the ACB, as well as of the CAA. Hugh S. Eayrs, president of the MacMillan Company of Canada, was treasurer and chairman of the Book Fair Committee. Arthur H. Robson, president of the Toronto Branch of the CAA, was in charge of the speakers’ program. Major speakers of the official program would include Grey Owl, Margaret Lawrence (not the later writer, Margaret Laurence, but a young critic who had written a much-praised book on women’s contributions to literature), novelist Morley Callaghan, activist and novelist Nellie McClung, folklorist Marius Barbeau, Americans Edgar A. Guest and Carl Van Doren, and the Canadian Wilson Macdonald, a flamboyant and self-important poet and performer much touted then but now forgotten.41 William Arthur Deacon, whose hand was everywhere in this fair, was chair of the opening session. At this evening session, at 8:00 p.m., Sir Charles G. D. Roberts, Sir William Mulock, and Professor Pelham Edgar spoke. At 9:00 p.m., Grey Owl gave the keynote speech. The newspapers, especially The Mail and Empire where Deacon was literary editor, carried excited and detailed accounts of the week-long events.
Maud was conspicuous by her absence from the front lineup of speakers, despite her prominence on the CAA executive and her fame as a speaker who drew large crowds. In her journals, she wrote of the 1936 Book Fair as if she were part of it, but in fact she was sidelined into peripheral events, and women’s programs, at that. Grey Owl spoke twice during the Book Fair, as the keynote speaker on opening night, and again at the Canadian Women’s Press Club luncheon in Eaton’s Round Room.
At that luncheon Maud was seated between Grey Owl and William Arthur Deacon. Deacon turned his back on her and spoke only to the woman on his left. Grey Owl turned to his right, and focused only on the woman there, the event’s convener. Isolated between them, Maud quietly ate her lunch. Before dessert, Grey Owl turned to Maud and remarked abruptly: “You are a woman after my own heart.” Surprised, according to her journals, she responded: “How so?” His reply, to Maud’s amusement: “You don’t talk.”
It was Maud’s job to thank him after his speech. She told of hearing an “owl’s laughter” in Leaskdale. Grey Owl sprang up, exclaiming dramatically: “You are the first white person I have ever met who has heard owl’s laughter. I thought nobody but Indians ever heard it. We hear it often because we are a silent race. My full name is Laughing Grey Owl.”42 This anecdote made the papers the next day, even Deacon’s Mail and Empire.
Deacon, like most everyone else, was taken in by Grey Owl’s fictions about his origins. Grey Owl claimed that he had been born in Mexico, had gone to England with the “Buffalo Bill” show, and had then returned to Canada, where he had lived ever since. At the age of thirteen he could speak “fairly good ‘pidgin’ English,” he said. Deacon’s Mail and Empire account of Grey Owl’s appearance is dramatic:
Striding, gaunt and tall in fringed elk-skin tunic and leggings, wrapping around him a vividly red Indian blanket, Grey Owl received an ovation from 2,000 gathered at the Book Fair to hear [him]…. People stood for an hour to hear his oratory, the peculiarly Indian poetry of his delivery, shot through with humour, as he told of giving up hunting and taking to writing for a livelihood, and his early experiences as an author. There was magnificent pride in the great eagle-feather in his hair, and the scalping knife stuck through the wampum belt, and something almost of challenge as those beaded moccasins trod the dais, to and fro, to and fro. He dared his audience, as fellow Canadians, to put his people on a self-respecting basis by making them conservors of wild life, forests and natural resources.… ‘I’m almost frantically loyal to Canada,’ he said, declaring ‘I speak with a straight tongue; I tell you only what is true.’ [italics added] (November 11, 1936, p. 7)
The newspaper account builds to a dramatic end: “Well did Chairman Hugh Eayrs call him ‘A great Canadian, a great gentleman, a great friend, and a great writer.’ ”
Maud’s description of the event in her journals shows her skepticism: “[Grey Owl] was looking quite the Indian of romance, with his long black braids of hair, his feather headdress and a genuine scalping knife—at least he told us it was genuine …” (November 10, 1936).
Two years later, Grey Owl would be dead, at age fifty, and his real identity and name discovered.43 He left an important legacy through his popular books, including The Adventures of Sajo and Her Beaver People (1935), which showed his great love of the Canadian wilderness. His 1936 speech shows him to be a man much ahead of his time:
Canada’s greatest asset today is her forest lands. In my latest book I have attacked the average Canadian’s ignorance of his own country. He is prouder of skyscrapers on Yonge Street.… He can have those any time, but we can’t replace the natural resources we are destroying as fast as we can.… They make us one of the richest countries in the world, and I call on you to let my people help in preserving these riches for us, as the beaver conserve the water. (Mail and Empire, November 10, 1936, p. 7)
Maud had liked his speech—she too loved the natural flora and fauna, and she would remark in 1938, upon hearing of his death, that even though he had taken people in about his identity, his concern for animals and the natural world was real.
The same day that Deacon described Grey Owl’s speech, a fellow journalist gave Deacon a huge puff in the paper. He asserted that Deacon had discovered that Canadians “did not know they had any literature apart from that produced by a handful of minor poets” and that it was Deacon’s “prophetic eye which saw in the germinating kernel hidden in the earth, the full flower, the tall tree that was to be.… [and] his own assiduous tending, hoeing, weeding and trenching, helped create it and now he can with pride invite anyone to come into the Canadian garden.”44 Maud
, addicted to newspaper reading each day, undoubtedly read this mythologizing about Deacon with some annoyance.
A few days later, William Arthur Deacon was officially appointed as literary editor of The Globe and Mail, a post he would hold until his retirement in 1961. He would wield enormous influence on Canadian letters, for better or worse, for almost forty years. He could do much to make or break an author, at least temporarily, until time sorted out who deserved to be remembered.
Maud marched through another round of speeches after the Book Fair. On November 12, she spoke to the Civitans’ Ladies’ Auxiliary in the Eaton’s Round Room.45 The following day, she gave the address at a banquet for the Lampton Mills graduating class, with over 165 in her audience, the largest number recorded there.46 On November 14, she was the guest of honour at a tea held by the L. M. Montgomery Chapter of the I.O.D.E.47 That engagement appears to have been her last for 1936, a very demanding year as far as speeches and public appearances were concerned.
A year after moving in, Maud felt that “Journey’s End” had started to seem like home. She had hired landscapers to make a small rock garden, a new fashion. But all was not well inside her home. Ewan started having his “sinking spells” again. By the second week in January 1936, he was into a “down cycle,” lying around and staring vacantly, “pawing at his head,” and complaining of “burning sensations.”
Maud’s novels show a deep understanding of complicated interpersonal relationships. Yet, within her immediate family, contentious or worrying matters were rarely addressed directly. She had grown up in a family where her grandfather’s explosive nature was to be avoided rather than confronted. She had learned conflict avoidance rather than discussion and negotiation. In her own family, this pattern was replicated. Instead of discussing contentious issues, the Macdonalds by-passed them, all the while watching each other closely. (Maud’s ability to “read” people’s emotions and character through non-verbal clues was legendary, and she often gives tonal quality to characters’ speeches by commenting on something she observes in their demeanour.) There might have been leading questions, but there was little open and serious confrontation of issues.48 Outbursts were rare in this house, which the maids all described as very “civilized,” and when tempers did flare, Maud was terribly upset. She certainly could speak her piece on the rare occasion when she reached the point of explosion, but she would suffer for a long time afterwards. Ewan, on the other hand, having grown up in a less intense house, was an excellent negotiator in his public life.
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