A sense of entitlement had taken hold and flowered in Chester during the final years they lived in Norval. He gloried in his mother’s worldwide fame and made sure that everyone knew he was her son. His developing elitist attitude was probably in part the result of his upbringing: his mother’s own sense of having come from two superior clans on the Island, and her glorification of all things Scottish. In the Norval and early Toronto days, Luella recalled how Maud, at the dinner table, often launched into romancing Sir Walter Scott and his works, filled as they were with the glamour of the “auld countree” and with noble characters who had a strong “sense of honour.”
When Maud talked about the old world and its values and romance, Luella, maids, and other visitors remembered how Ewan would look into the middle-distance, with an unhappy expression on his face. As someone who read very little, Ewan was largely excluded; and also, he knew his own family’s life in old Scotland had been very difficult. His tales would have been the stories of peasant Highlander relatives leaving Scotland in order to avoid a miserable life (or death) through near starvation. He had the wrong narrative of the Scottish past, so he kept quiet.
Without a counter-narrative, Chester seems to have bought it all. He had spent much of his life as an unhappy misfit in his own world. It would therefore have been very easy—and appealing—to become drawn into his mother’s idealized world of chivalric old Scotland. Chester’s most-quoted saying from this period was remembered with distaste by many: “There are two kinds of people in the world—those who are Scots, and those who wish they were.” He was not out of sync with many other citizens of Swansea (and other areas): in this era, the Scots did often feel superior to those of other ethnic descent— especially to Poles, Jews, and Chinese, and, to a lesser extent, the Irish and even the English. The social, religious, and ethnic prejudices that held in Swansea, appalling as they may seem today, were typical for that time. However, few would have advertised their perceived sense of superiority as Chester did.
Predictably, the relationship between Ewan and Chester deteriorated even further. The atmosphere between them was heavy and tense, and sometimes the tension sparked sharp words. Ewan had struggled hard for his education and professional standing in the ministry, and he was profoundly upset by Chester’s failure to apply himself when given good opportunities. Ewan continued to brood on the public humiliation that Chester had brought on them. People remembered that after Chester and Luella’s marriage Maud could cover her upset, but Ewan was openly devastated.
Both Ewan and Maud knew that former parishioners in Norval felt that Luella was being treated shabbily. The facts spoke for themselves: Maud had set the young couple up in an apartment in Toronto, in January 1934. After less than six months of living with Chester, Luella packed up and went back to her father, and she stayed there, even after a second baby came. Both Ewan and Maud cared a great deal about how they were regarded and remembered in Norval. If Chester had shown some remorse for the shame he’d brought on his parents, it would have helped, but instead, Chester’s response was to resent his wife and family.
There is no question that Chester had a genuine admiration for his mother. But Chester also knew that she was the one with the car and the money, and that she made all the real decisions. As long as Chester went for one obligatory visit to Luella and his children every month, and drove his mother wherever she wanted to go, he was given unrestricted use of the car. He would claim that he needed it to deliver writs or legal documents for Mr. Bogart’s office, and then simply disappear for long and unaccounted-for periods of time.
Ewan was charitable, not judgmental like Maud. But he was no fool, and he saw an irresponsible and self-indulgent son. Both Maud and Ewan began to suspect—rightly—that the family car was being used to troll for women, among other things. Maud thought ruefully of Mr. Bogart’s earlier comment that it was a good thing he would be living at home so she could “keep an eye” on him. There was nothing she could do. And more sadness was around the bend.
On January 18, 1937, after only a short illness, Maud’s beloved cat “Good Luck” suddenly died, and this temporarily upstaged Chester in his mother’s grief index. Little has been said in this biography of Maud’s loves for her cats, but her journals are full of accounts of them, with their pictures, and in one of her scrapbooks she even saved their fur. Maud’s favourite cat of all time was “Good Luck,” or “Lucky,” as he was fondly called. He had been a fixture in her life since he was shipped from Alec and May Macneill’s Cavendish farm in 1923. He was a connection to the Island, and he had been her most constant companion and comfort over the years.
Maud needed this beloved little pet in her life. He was a loyal and affectionate fellow who sat by his mistress and watched her when she wrote. He purred contentment when she was reading. He curled up with her and slept on her bed. He waited patiently for her when she was out, and greeted her on her return. He was miserable when she went away and remained disconsolate until she returned. When she was distressed, he became even more affectionate. Maud was a woman of many moods, and Lucky responded to all these moods with constant solicitous affection—a trait quite rare for a cat.54
Lucky’s death was sudden, the result of liver cancer. Bereft, Maud laid him out downstairs on a pile of newspapers inside the front door. For almost a day, she was too distraught to arrange any sort of burial. Ewan, Chester, and Stuart, who always expected Maud to sort out problems, were no help. Finally, Maud called on Mr. Fry, the builder, who brought a shovel and dug a grave. Lucky was wrapped in a shroud and buried in the backyard.
Maud’s loving portrait of this affectionate cat in her journals must be a tour de force in the annals of pet obituaries: in her journal entry of January 9, 1938, she writes nearly forty handwritten pages on his endearing qualities. Portions of her description almost eroticize her affection for him:
He lay there, his tiny flanks heaving up and down under my fingers and his little body vibrating with his rapturous purrs.… After Luck came to me I never cared for another cat. Cats before him I loved as cats. I loved Luck as a human being. And few human beings have given me the happiness he gave me.
The loss of this beloved cat was devastating. Maud had gone through life feeling deserted and disappointed. All the men in her life had essentially failed her, whether through failure to love and value her as a child, to help her get an education as a young woman, to take her seriously as a writer when she became a best-selling author, to share her joy in accomplishment, or to offer intellectual companionship. Her two grandfathers had failed her, as had her uncles and father. Deprived of a parent’s unconditional love and support, she had spent her entire life longing for her father’s love (since he seemed more real to her than her mother, whom she could not remember). Her books are all about young people who want a home and loving parents—and who suffer fear and loneliness until they find them. These were her deepest levels of longing. She had hoped for real companionship with Ewan, but despite his well-meaning intent, he could not offer that. She wanted to feel proud of her sons, but Chester was turning out to be a spectacular disappointment. She longed for someone responsive to her moods, as well as someone who could share in the pleasures she felt in her triumphs, her celebrity, success, her enthusiasms. Incredibly, this simple cat had become her most reliable partner in life, giving her more emotional support than the men in her life ever had. Losing a loved pet is hard on most people, but Maud’s psychological state was pitifully rendered in her reaction to his death.
Then, on January 19, the day that Lucky was buried, Maud’s maid, Ethel Dennis, gave notice that she would be leaving in March to marry her fiancé, Gordon Currie. Her youth and naïveté had prevented her from being the intellectual companion that both Mrs. Mason and Mrs. Thompson had been, but she was reliable, honest, and respectable. Her departure meant that Maud would have the trouble of finding and training a new maid. This was another blow.
Maud had heard that her previous maid, Faye Thompson, had not found a
nother permanent job after leaving them; Maud contacted her to ask if she would consider returning. Maud had liked Mrs. Thompson—her sense of humour, her quick wit, her competency in all she did—and she hoped that she would come back. If she did, Maud would not have to train her. Maud had been very fond, too, of Mrs. Thompson’s sweet and well-behaved little daughter, June, now seven. The local schools were good, which would be a drawing card. Mrs. Thompson agreed to return.
The next day Maud’s worst fears came to pass: on January 20, 1937, she found that Chester had failed one law course (Practice) outright and managed only a bare pass—50 percent—in each of the other three. Her frustration was overwhelming. He seemed to be in a period of unfocused emotional upsurge, heading towards self-destruction.
Numb with frustration and disappointment, Maud again needed medication to sleep. The anniversary of Frede’s death, January 25, was always a difficult time for her, but now Maud kept recalling how Frede had adored Chester when he was a baby. When Maud tried to finish the first draft of Jane of Lantern Hill on January 27, she found that she simply could not write. How could she write a happy ending to this little waif’s search for loving parents and a joyous home? On January 28, she went to a Canadian Authors Association meeting. Her escape, as always, refreshed her. But then she writes a heartbroken entry, notable for its evasiveness.
There is no entry in my notebook for Friday, January 29. On that day all happiness departed from my life forever. I was sitting at my breakfast, planning out the day’s work when the blow fell. It cannot be written or told—that unspeakable horror. Oh God, can I ever forget that day? Not in eternity …
The journal gives no further explanation. A little later, she laments that she tried to teach her boys the right values, and she notes that Stuart is a “good boy” (February 8, 1937). We don’t know what she learned on January 29, but it seems to have been about Chester.
On January 30, there is another burst of anguish in the journals. She asks God how he could have “let this happen.” She fears she is going “mad.” She mentions in passing that she takes the drug Medinal to sleep. A few days later she makes a passing reference to taking Veronal to sleep. All these sketchy entries are written from notes and memory much later, hitting only high points of a terrible year. They are not intended as an exact record of events, but should rather be seen as an account of her dominant feelings, thoughts, and emotions at the time.
Maud had begun to feel increasingly anxious over her own mental health. The spectre of mental breakdown sent her to more medications, but there is no indication—in her journals or in other people’s memory—that she (or her doctor) had any idea what a dangerous path she was following. On January 31, she wrote that she wished she could only die. “People talk about the bitterness of death. It is not to be compared to the bitterness of life. Bitterness like some gnawing incurable disease …”
Then, a few days later, on February 2, Maud learned that Nora’s husband, Ned Campbell, had died. Maud, who was only slightly older than Ned, had known him when she taught in the Belmont School. In her distraught state, she went to comfort Nora. Perhaps Nora’s loss helped put her own troubles in perspective. She came home, and steeled herself to finish Jane of Lantern Hill the next day, managing to do so through sheer grit. She would dedicate this book “To the memory of Lucky.”
Jane of Lantern Hill (1937)
This novel depicts Toronto as a miserable place, standing in direct contrast to the magical Prince Edward Island. Jane Stuart is a young girl living with her pretty but weak-willed mother in Toronto; both are under the thumb of a manipulative, controlling, and powerful grandmother, Mrs. Kennedy. The characterization is powerful and the misery palpable.
Jane’s young mother had married her father impulsively during a vacation trip to the Island. Although he was a war veteran, Andrew Stuart did not suit his imperious mother-in-law who wanted her daughter to marry into a wealthy, prominent family. Nor did Mrs. Kennedy like the fact that her new son-in-law was a writer. She meddled, and the marriage disintegrated, and baby Jane and her mother returned to Toronto to live with Mrs. Kennedy. The novel opens with Jane living unhappily in the stately but soulless Toronto mansion, the victim of her grandmother’s hostility and her ineffectual mother’s failure to protect her only child.
One day Jane learns from a mean-spirited schoolmate that the father she had believed to be dead is actually alive, living in Prince Edward Island. Soon a letter arrives from him, demanding that her mother and grandmother send her for a summer with him. Jane does not want to go. But when she is forced to go, she finds that the Island is a magic place full of happiness and soul-healing qualities, in contrast to the soul-pinching Toronto, a place of vicious gossip and empty lives. At the end of the novel, she is instrumental in bringing her parents together again on Island soil.
The parallels with Maud’s own life are obvious. Maud herself believed in the Island’s remarkable restorative powers, particularly with respect to her own complicated life in Toronto. She also knew that she was herself partly trapped in Toronto by her own ambitions. Furthermore, Jane’s grandmother bears uncanny similarities to the woman Maud could sometimes be: a mother who meddled in her children’s romantic affairs, who tried to break up relationships she considered unsuitable, and who had fierce ambitions for her offspring. Maud no doubt saw this same behaviour in Mrs. Cowan and countless other aspiring mothers in her social milieu. At the same time, Mrs. Kennedy provides what a psychiatrist might call an extraordinary hate-portrait of Maud written by herself. The novel is resolved with a happy ending when Jane’s mother and father are reunited on the Island, to live happily ever after. Jane finds the redemption in life that Maud herself had not. Maud had always wanted her father, but Jane finds both father and mother.
Meanwhile, in the real Toronto home on Riverside Drive, Ethel Dennis had given notice in January of her intention to leave, but she stayed on for several months until her replacement came. Maud’s long-time practice was to thoroughly clean one room in the house each month, instead of doing everything in a massive spring cleaning. She always helped her maids with this. Towards the end of Ethel’s tenure in the Macdonald house, she and Maud cleaned Chester’s room together. Chester’s personal diary was lying out, open, where he had left it in his usual sloppy and careless manner. Maud stopped working and read it. Ethel observed that Maud was profoundly upset by what she read.55
Ethel Dennis was the least judgmental of all Maud’s maids, but she had come to detest Chester. In her view, he was a full-blown problem. “He never settled down,” she said, “and he lied.” Ethel was disgusted with the way he treated Luella and his children, and she knew, as Stuart also did, that Chester often claimed to be using the car to go see his family in Norval when he was doing other things. Maud often talked over the problem of Chester with Stuart, and was so preoccupied with Chester that she gave Stuart little positive attention for his own accomplishments—her attention was always on the wayward son.
“She wasn’t the type to tell her troubles,” Ethel observed, and since Ethel had her own life, she hadn’t been interested in what Maud read in Chester’s journal, but she remembered Maud’s reaction. Ethel disliked Chester’s attitude—that since his mother paid her hired help there was no reason for him to show consideration to a servant. Ethel said she worked hard to wash (with a non-electric hand-paddle washer), starch (by dipping in a solution of cooked-up starch), and iron (heating it on the stove) to keep the Macdonalds’ clothes nice—no small feat before permanent-press and wrinkle-resistant fabrics were developed. Chester would throw his clothes on the floor. Ethel would tidy his room, only to find it a dump again. She said that he “didn’t talk much” and “wasn’t sociable.”
Ethel remembered how Chester would lie in the basement recreation room on his back on a sofa, reading novels instead of studying. When he came to the main floor, he upset his father constantly, actively picking fights with him. Stuart simply “ducked out” whenever Chester tried to start argument
s with him. Ethel recalled that towards the end of her stay, the Macdonald household was increasingly tense. She said that the Macdonalds read at the table rather than talking to each other—a sign of increasingly unhappy family dynamics. Ethel left, relieved to move on to a new life, in March 1937.56
Whatever Maud learned from Chester’s diary seems to have forced her to see him in a new light. On that fateful morning when (as she described it later) her world “fell apart,” Maud may have confronted Chester with what she had learned from his diary. Or there might have been a call from someone (like the minister at the church), or she simply may have laid a trap for Chester. On February 11, she wrote, without giving specific information, “And to think that the one who has brought me to this was once the little boy I loved so dearly …”
But, always able to carry on publicly, on February 12 Maud spoke at the Humber Valley Bird Club. Two days later, she travelled by train to speak at Beaverton, Ontario. The Beaverton newspaper described her as “pleasing and unassuming,” giving a talk that was at once “interesting” and “humorous.”
The contrast between her public life and private turmoil throughout these years is remarkable. But the strain took its toll. Confrontation with Chester’s unacceptable behaviour was often followed by descriptions in Maud’s journals of nervous misery, even while her public persona remained witty and gay. On February 21, 1937, she wrote:
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