Lucy Maud Montgomery

by Mary Henley Rubio

  I will not let this crush me. Chester is not worth suffering so for. Old as I am—broken as I am—I shall rise above it and live my own life—live it gallantly. I shall have recurrences of agony … but I must and will conquer them.… I must live a little longer for Ewan’s and Stuart’s sakes. Yet death would be so welcome.

  After the speech in Beaverton on February 23, 1937, she recorded in her journal how she hated to return home; the next night she suffered from one of her “sick headaches” and vomiting. In fact, she described spending an entire month in “dreadful restlessness.”

  Regardless of his mother’s distress, Chester continued to shirk responsibility. He quit visiting his family at all unless Maud pressured him. Sometimes she ensured that he actually went to Norval by going with him, visiting Marion Webb Laird while he went to see Luella.

  When Chester did not come to Norval, Luella’s father insisted that Luella take the children to Riverside Drive for visits. Luella liked Maud and Ewan, but she found these visits humiliating. It was clear that Chester did not want to see them—he left as soon as they arrived and did not return until after they had gone (something that Ethel remembered well). Maud and Ewan pretended to be glad to see Chester’s family but did a poor job of it. Ewan could not relate to children—even if he had been well, he was not someone who would pick up and cuddle a child, or sit down on the floor to play with his grandchildren. Maud did not enjoy the visits either, given her embarrassment over Chester’s behaviour.

  Throughout March 1937 Maud went out at least twice—to speak to the annual banquet of the Withrow Old Girls Association and to be a guest of honour at the Heliconian Club. Her Withrow speech was vintage Montgomery, and the Globe, the Star, and the Telegram all carried detailed accounts. She stated that Australia contributed heavily to her fan mail. On one occasion 87 letters had arrived in one mail following an article in an Antipodean newspaper, and within six months she had 750 letters. The speech was amusing in its detail, and it packed a strong message to detractors about the international and varied nature of her readership. She continued to use anecdotes to show that many of her fans were grown men and women.

  At the Heliconian Club luncheon on March 23, Maud learned that the Montreal Family Herald had run a contest among its readers to see who was their “most read author”: she wrote that she was at the top with Charles Dickens, while Marshall Saunders and Leo Tolstoy were tied for second place.57 The featured speaker at the Heliconian Club luncheon was William Arthur Deacon, and his topic was “the function of a critic.” The critic’s job, he said, was “to give others a basis for discussion, for a clearer understanding of the author.” He asserted that the function of a critic was not to judge whether a book was good, but to answer the question, “Do I like it?” He stated that a critic should address whether a book was capable of “satisfying human wants.”58 No doubt Maud sat in the audience thinking that if she was the most read author in Canada according to The Family Herald, then her books must satisfy some human wants.

  Maud was pleased when Mrs. Thompson returned to work as a maid in March 1937, replacing Ethel. Mrs. Thompson’s sense of humour would help lighten the tone in the house, her intelligence made her an engaging companion for Maud, and her daughter June would add sunshine. June, now seven and a pretty and cheerful little girl, would go to school in their district. This eased considerable domestic stress in Maud’s life, and in turn Maud reduced her use of sedatives.

  On March 27, Maud wrote in her journals that she was “released from one of the most dreadful situations a woman could be placed in.” She does not explain further. Perhaps she had one of the several sessions with Chester that culminated with his promise—never kept—to give up his duplicitous life. Around this time, Maud also received some unexpected income: Simpson’s paid out $4,000 on her investment. This relieved much financial pressure, but of course it did not solve the problem of Chester. By April, Maud was having serious symptoms of stress again: her eyes and head were bothering her, and she again had a bout of vomiting and dysentery. She was obsessing about Chester and his behaviour: his marks for the year would be coming up in June, and she could see that he was not studying. She could not imagine what the future would hold for him if he failed his year.

  Maud distracted herself by turning to thoughts of Frede, and copied out in her journals some “ten-year letters” that she and Frede had written each other in 1907 and 1917. Returning to memories of her Cavendish life always brought happy distraction. But this year was special: it was on April 24, 1937, that the Prince Edward Island National Park was officially opened, with the “Green Gables House” as its centrepiece.

  In the first week of May, Maud attended the annual dinner of the Toronto branch of the Canadian Women’s Press Club. She sat at the head table with Lady Willison (Marjory MacMurchy) and others. During the same week, she attended a big banquet held by the CAA.

  Not mentioned in Maud’s journals is another big social event from the first week in May. The Reverend John Mustard, pastor of the Oakwood Presbyterian Church, retired at age seventy. He was much loved by his congregation, and they gave him a splendid retirement party. He had been every bit as successful and beloved during his eight years at Oakwood as he had been previously at the Dufferin Street Church. At Oakwood, the congregation had risen from 118 to 302, and he’d built a new church seating 350 before he retired. (He was even given a new car by one of his churches.) His service in the Toronto Presbytery over a thirty-year period was so exceptional that the University of Toronto awarded him with an honorary doctorate. He was not one to forget old friends, and he had always maintained contact with Maud and Ewan.59

  Since March, Maud had been trying to plan her next novel, Anne of Ingleside, but it was very hard going. She could not settle her mind enough to concentrate. She took the sedatives prescribed by her doctor to relieve her anxiety. Her symptoms intensified in June: according to her journals, after a vivid “hideous” dream, she thought she could bear the pain in her life no longer and would “break down or go crazy.” She forced herself to do preparatory planning on Anne of Ingleside but complained of feeling “tired,” “queer,” “weak,” “wobbly,” with “shooting pains” in her head behind her eyes. She was frightened: “What on earth is the matter with me?” she asked on June 9, 1937.

  Ewan was feeling stress too, and he consulted various doctors, coming away with prescriptions for various compounds to relieve his symptoms. His night-table was loaded with medications, and there was a further supply in the bathroom cupboards. He was dosing himself with multiple prescription drugs, and by early June he was “hearing voices” again, as he had in his breakdowns between 1919 and 1924—symptoms that mimicked schizophrenia but may also have been drug-induced. On June 6, Maud describes his state: he lay on his bed with “staring eyes, his hair standing straight up and he talked unceasingly about himself and his symptoms.” Maud says she thought she was “hardened to this” but it got on her nerves unbearably.

  Finally, the worst news that Maud could have imagined came—on June 15, 1937, Chester received his grades for his year: he had failed in four separate subjects. His year was lost. He would have to take the entire year all over again. More fees … more delay in his obtaining a paid position. But more frightening, the way things were going, was the possibility that he would be thrown out of law school, just as he had been thrown out of engineering, after the investment of a huge amount of time and money.

  Ewan was so wrapped up in his own symptoms that he seemed unable to comprehend or care that Chester had failed his year.

  The normally pleasant Ewan became irritable at mealtimes, and he began tying his handkerchief around his head as he had in his 1919 breakdown. He was growing more anxious: he had promised long ago to deliver a sermon at ceremonies in Leaskdale and Zephyr in the third week of June. He no longer felt up to the sermon and wanted to cancel, but Maud would not let him. She thought that if he forced himself to go ahead, it might help him focus his mind on something other than
his symptoms. Plus they would both enjoy seeing old friends and remembering their happier years there. She would soon regret this.

  On the advice of various doctors Maud and Ewan had tried different medications to alleviate their ailments, problems ranging from difficulty sleeping to more undefined “nervous disorders.” Neither the doctors nor the patients fully understood the effect of the medications prescribed at that time—or ones available at drug stores. These sedatives, common at that time, fell into two general categories: bromides and barbiturates. In periods of stress after Ewan’s breakdown in 1919, he intensified his use of these medications. And so, increasingly, did Maud.

  Believed to be relatively safe then, the medications they were given in the 1920s and 1930s are now known to have been both dangerous and habit-forming. Taken over time and in unregulated and increasing doses, these have the potential to cause havoc. Barbiturates are addictive, and bromides are poisonous.

  Ewan and Maud’s original problems—depression, in Ewan’s case, and anxiety and mood swings with Maud—were greatly worsened by the very sedatives prescribed to help them. These medications could easily have been what tipped Ewan from his initial “melancholia” (depression) into severe mental disorder, with psychotic episodes. Likewise, when Maud was distressed by Ewan’s symptoms and driven by her own anxieties, the medications she was given created dependencies that brought on new and terrifying symptoms; these symptoms, it now appears, pushed her towards even deeper problems.

  Maud and Ewan were not the only victims of these particular medications; for nearly five decades in the twentieth century they were prescribed to millions of people with “nervous” symptoms. We see many descriptions of the mental problems caused by barbiturates and bromides in literature. Earlier in the century, there are many references in novels to “Veronal,” a substance taken by both Maud and Ewan. Veronal is believed to have been the drug that Virginia Woolf was using before her suicide. Evelyn Waugh’s 1957 novel The Ordeal of Gordon Pinfold details his own bromide psychosis.

  Bromides and barbiturates are completely different classes of medications, but they are both central nervous system depressants. Both were discovered in the nineteenth century, and by the 1930s and 1940s they were widely used as general sedatives, taken for a host of medical and minor nervous problems ranging from headaches, aching muscles, and insomnia to general anxiety. In fact, in 1938, bromide compounds were outsold only by aspirin in North America.60 Bromides became a panacea for almost every ailment that could not be treated in other ways (hence the common expression, which could be anything from a joke to a dismissive statement: “Oh, go take a bromide!”).

  Bromides are not addictive, but they are very dangerous. Substantial doses taken over a period of time build up slowly in the body because the kidneys cannot excrete them fast enough. This results in “bromide poisoning,” later called “bromism.” The symptoms of bromism can be psychiatric, cognitive, neurological, and even dermatological. Common manifestations are mental dullness, memory impairment, inability to concentrate, irritability, emotional instability, uninhibited behaviour, headaches, decreased visual acuity, slurred speech, lack of muscular control (shaking hands, tremors, unusual gaits), skin rashes, and a transitory state resembling paranoid schizophrenia, with auditory and visual hallucinations, phobias, paranoia, and sometimes violent behaviour, particularly at night. The effect of bromide poisoning on people subject to depressive episodes was to increase and intensify the depression—tragically, the very symptom bromides were often prescribed to alleviate. In large enough doses, bromides could even be fatal.

  When Ewan suffered his first sustained depressive episode during the Leaskdale years (1919), he was treated with bromides and Chloral. This was not necessarily the first time he took bromides, but it is the first time Maud records them in her journals. Chloral is a sedative that can create dependency and cause liver damage. Following his treatment, he grew worse and was finally unable to preach. When he became irrational, psychotic, and suicidal, the doctors diagnosed his problem first as a “nervous breakdown” and then as a form of “insanity.” Maud accepted this diagnosis; she regarded all his subsequent episodes of mental instability as mental illness.

  Ewan actually manifested many of the now-identified symptoms of bromide poisoning in 1919, then again in 1934 and 1937, the three dates of his most severe “mental breakdowns,” according to Maud’s journals. A tallying of the references to medications he was given (or took) in these years shows that his breakdowns coincided with his heavy use of medications. Although no firm diagnosis is possible at this remove, it does seem likely that Ewan’s condition started as simple depression, but that he was medicated into something far worse.

  Doctors now believe that many people admitted to psychiatric hospitals between 1930 and 1950 may in fact have been suffering from bromide poisoning rather than real mental illness. Bromide poisoning caused disturbances that mimicked other psychiatric ailments like schizophrenia. And the treatment for these mental problems, unfortunately, was usually more bromides. Tests for bromide poisoning were being devised in the early 1940s, but it took another thirty years for the dangers of bromides to be fully identified and to reach the general medical community and public. Not until the mid-1970s were bromide compounds (like the widely advertised “Bromo-Seltzer” and “Miles Nervine”) that could be obtained without prescription taken off the market.61

  In the days before electronic medical records, people suffering as Ewan did could visit many different doctors in search of an accurate diagnosis and the appropriate treatment. It was not hard to amass, as Ewan did, a collection of these medications, which went by a range of brand names. Patients would combine them, unaware that they were using excessive amounts of the same compound.62

  Barbiturates were the second class of drugs that Ewan was regularly given for his depression. These medications, also a nineteenth-century discovery, were prescribed freely throughout the early twentieth century as sedatives. Maud had been given her first prescription for barbiturates as early as 1904 when still in Prince Edward Island. The doctor who prescribed it for her prudently warned her against overusing it, but the full dangers were still unknown. Maud and Ewan were given a whole range of barbiturates over their lifetimes, especially following Ewan’s 1919 breakdown: Veronal, Barbital, Luminal, Medinal, and Nembutal. They did not realize they were all related, and that combining them was dangerous.63

  Barbiturates are habit-forming. Users can easily become dependent, both physically and psychologically, requiring increasing doses to achieve the same effect. Growing dependence causes secondary withdrawal problems; severe withdrawal can even lead to death. Withdrawal symptoms can be relieved, of course, by taking more of the drug (or alcohol).

  Symptoms of barbiturate withdrawal include irritability, anxiety, rapid mood swings, mental confusion, hallucinations, slurred speech, elevated heart rate, slowed respiration, tremors, and agitation—similar to a response to bromides. All of these were symptoms that Ewan exhibited. Maud often remarked on her inability to comprehend the speed with which he shifted between “crazy” and “normal,” but if his problems were drug-enhanced, this would be completely understandable. Dependency on barbiturates often results in sleeping difficulties and increased mood disturbances, especially depression; no surprise that Maud’s journals are full of descriptions of these symptoms.

  Barbiturates depress normal rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep, so dependence on them can also produce particularly vivid dreaming, another symptom described by Maud and Ewan. In June 1936, for instance, Maud described an extremely intense dream, almost a hallucination, in which a young girl with red hair walked around the folding screen in their bedroom. Ewan assured her it was only a dream, but the intensity of the image stayed with Maud for some time.

  On September 20, 1936, Maud wrote of Ewan’s treatment: “Lane, of course, prescribed bromides. There is nothing else for it but they are not good for Ewan in other ways. Medicine will not help an obsessed mind.” She
seemed to sense on an intuitive level that the treatments might be a problem, but she was not sufficiently convinced to stop them.

  Maud’s journals chronicle Ewan’s mental instability in pathetic and depressing detail. But she had her own problems, too, which undoubtedly originated in her volatile temperament, cycling as it did between flights of imagination and depths of despair. The stress of living with Ewan’s mental instability (whatever its cause) took a great toll. Chester’s erratic and self-destructive behaviour also caused much greater anxiety in her later years. She was alarmed further by her declining critical reputation in the Toronto book world. She was anxious by nature, but this would have been greatly intensified by the continuing use of barbiturates and bromides.

  Maud kept careful note of her symptoms and those of Ewan, but neither she nor Ewan understood that bromides, barbiturates, and alcohol should not be taken together. Sometimes, when Ewan was feeling depressed, Maud would give him a dose of prescribed barbiturates. If it did not take effect, she would give him another dose. If that didn’t work, she might try a bromide, or a shot of brandy. Eventually, these multiple doses would tamp him down. Sometimes he would afterwards lie in bed in a stupor for a full day or more. They had no understanding of the toxic relationship between the medication and the perceived disease.

  And Ewan also medicated himself when he felt he needed relief; often people who develop a greater and greater tolerance to barbiturates may forget that they have already dosed themselves. They will take another dose, a phenomenon common enough to have its own name (“automatism”). He probably did this without Maud’s knowledge.

  It appears that the combined effects of increasing amounts of prescribed bromides and barbiturates, in addition to the gulps of the alcohol-laced cough syrup Ewan carried in his pockets, plus the medicinal brandy or homemade wine that Maud sometimes administered, had a cumulative and seriously damaging effect.64 As early as March 1924, Maud had suspected liver problems in Ewan, and in 1938, he was diagnosed with an “enlarged” liver. The heavy doses of medications he was taking may very plausibly explain the zombie-like demeanour so often described by Maud in her journals. He was neither an athletic nor an energetic man—his temperament was naturally phlegmatic and easygoing until he began his depressive brooding—and the sedating effect of medications and cough syrup would have made him even more lethargic.