In Norval, Maud had sometimes given Ewan a drink of her homemade wine to get him going on a Sunday during an attack of “his malady,” and she said that the drink enabled him to stumble over to the church and get through his sermon. This takes on a new meaning in light of what we now know about the properties of barbiturates and bromides. A shot of alcohol could have suppressed the withdrawal symptoms he may have been suffering from, giving him a temporary boost.
Likewise, considering Maud’s accounts of Ewan’s psychotic episodes and threats of suicide during the Norval period in light of his increasing doses of medications, new interpretations become possible. (See, for instance, the Norval entries of March 25, 1924, and September 4, 1934.) Normally a very peaceable, gentle man, Ewan frightened Maud with occasional shows of violent behaviour in the Norval period (see October 10, 1934). She feared he might go fully insane and kill them all. The episode in which he pointed a real gun at Nora Lefurgey’s head in the Norval manse reflects behaviour totally out of character. In the Toronto period, there were other times in which his “malady” was entirely consistent with the symptoms of bromide poisoning and/or barbiturate withdrawal (the symptoms are similar, although the biochemical causes are different).65
Ewan did not disclose full details about his “nervous problems,” such as phobias and hallucinations, to the doctors he consulted. To the extent that he remembered these episodes after the fact, he was terribly ashamed over what he believed were signs of mental illness. So the doctors did not get the full story, and they prescribed more of the same medications for him.
Maud did record, however, that one doctor in Georgetown had told Ewan to moderate his use of barbiturates. But Ewan did not—or could not—follow this advice. Perhaps he did not understand the reasons for it, and possibly he had become too dependent on the medications to quit. He was a troubled man, and clearly he hoped the drugs would make him feel better. People in the community put his memory problems and unusual behaviour down to encroaching senility, when in fact many of his worst symptoms were in fact drug-related.
We know from Maud’s journals (as well as from Stuart’s account in the 1980s) that Ewan self-medicated extensively in his later years. Stuart called his father a “hypochondriac.” We will never know how many of his problems were genuine mental illness and how many were caused—or intensified—by the combination of bromides, barbiturates, and alcohol. Today, experts in forensic pharmacology agree on one thing: that the poorly regulated use of both barbiturates and bromides caused many problems throughout the early twentieth century. In the 1930s, bromides were the drug of choice for anxious patients, and the Macdonalds certainly qualified in that department.
Maud took a break from her writing in the third week of June to accompany Ewan on the dreaded trip to Leaskdale. Months before, he had promised to give the sermons for the seventy-fifth anniversary celebrations of the Leaskdale and Zephyr congregations. He was still fondly remembered—almost revered—there, and he had wanted to oblige his old friends. His worry about this coming engagement intensified his search for new doctors and drug prescriptions, inevitably leading him into deeper trouble.
He grew more and more agitated the week before, and, according to Maud, he wanted to back out of the engagement. She stood firm in pressuring him to go, believing that the trip and the adulation would both be restorative. Two nights before leaving, he was too restless to sleep in his own bed, and the next morning he declared he was “dying.” To calm him, Maud dosed him up with “sal volatile.”66 He soon stopped claiming that he was dying, but he continued in a very agitated state. Of course there is every likelihood that he’d taken more medicine on his own during the night, thinking it would steady him.
On the drive up to Leaskdale the next day, he was too befuddled to remember the routes he had driven over scores of times. At dinner, his hands had severe tremors. The next morning he tried to read from the sermon Maud had typed, but he was in too addled a state even for this. After he babbled out disconnected remarks for some ten minutes, he sat down in confusion. People were kind; one parishioner comforted Maud by saying that, “It was enough to hear his voice again, no matter what he said” (June 24, 1937). Many parishioners thought he was simply “showing his age.” A second service at the church in Zephyr was a repeat performance and equally agonizing for Maud. At a meal, Ewan could not even lift a cup without his hands shaking so much the contents spilled. Maud felt deeply humiliated both for herself and for Ewan in front of old friends and parishioners.
After dinner, the Macdonalds started on the two-hour drive home, but Ewan was still too confused to remember directions. He became furious at Maud for insisting that they take the correct routes. Worse, he was too disoriented to keep the car on the road, and, like a drunk driver, he kept going too far to the right. Finally, late at night, they landed in a ditch, and they had to wait for help to repair a burst tire and move the car back onto the road again. Following this first mishap, Maud wrote in her journal account, she hauled the sal volatile and brandy out of her case and dosed him up. This brought a temporary improvement. But then, as the immediate effect wore off, Ewan became progressively more irrational and angry. They went over in the right-hand ditch again. Finally, when a fog came up in the very early hours of morning, and they could not see the road at all, Maud insisted that they sit out the night on the roadside.
In her account, Ewan “worked himself up into a fury” (June 24, 1937) whenever she spoke to him. She was terrified, fearing complete insanity. (His memory lapses, bad temper, paranoia, and weird behaviour would all fit the symptoms of either a severe withdrawal reaction from barbiturates or from bromide poisoning, or a mixture of drugs.)67 After considerable trouble, they finally arrived home early the next day. The trip was a disaster, and Maud was never to forget her fright and her humiliation.
At Maud’s urgent request, Dr. Lane examined Ewan after their return and diagnosed his problem as “complete nervous prostration.” Following doctor’s orders, Maud gave Ewan more bromide, thinking sedation the right medicine. Ewan grew very weak. From Maud’s description of Ewan’s weak pulse, his short breath, and his groaning sleep for long periods through the day, it sounds like a near-fatal overdose.68
The inexplicable nature of Ewan’s malady was wearing her down; Maud’s description of her feelings in her journals is very graphic:
… a man saw a fly fall into a shallow ink bottle on his desk. He fished it out and placed it on a sheet of paper to watch scientifically. The fly went to work to groom itself and soon succeeded in cleaning all the ink away. Then he dropped it in again. Again the fly cleaned itself. And again and again that fiend dropped the poor fly back. Again and again the gallant little fly cleaned itself, albeit a little more slowly every time. And at last, after I forget how many immersions it made no further attempt to rid itself of the ink. It lay inert and spiritless, a mere blot of blackness, resigned to die. It would make no more effort.
I felt I was like that fly. (Dated June 24, 1937, but written in retrospect.)
Maud was able to function at a high level publicly, even under this kind of stress. On the very same day they arrived home from the nightmare trip to Leaskdale, she left Ewan in Stuart’s care and travelled to the Royal York Hotel to deliver a speech to the Canadian Authors’ Association convention. (She had missed the opening night’s events on June 28 at the King Edward Hotel, but she probably did not mind: Professor Pelham Edgar had been the opening speaker, with Deacon presiding—two of her least favourites.) A picture of Maud taken on this day with Pelham Edgar, Margaret Lawrence, H. A. Kennedy, Leslie Barnard, and Laurence Brownell shows her looking just as composed as the others.
Ewan continued taking the doctor’s prescribed medications (bromides and barbiturates). His mental condition grew worse—irrationality, temper outbursts, even the inability to construct a complete sentence. He developed a wracking cough that kept him awake. Finally, a week later, he developed a rash—what a doctor thirty years later would likely have identifie
d as the telltale skin rash of bromide poisoning. Even Maud herself began to suspect that he had had too many bromides, and she insisted that Dr. Lane quit giving them to Ewan (July 6, 1937).
In three days, Ewan’s blood pressure and pulse returned to normal. But whenever he took the barbiturate called Luminal, he began “talking rather foolishly and forgetting words again.” Maud reports that he had vivid dreams of “men cutting themselves to death.” He was so addled that he could not dress or shave himself. At one point, Maud describes him as looking like “a fiend from the pit—hair bristling, blue underlip hanging down, eyes glaring, face livid” (July 11, 1937). Yet, he would alternate between periods of delusions and then total lucidity, in which he could read and talk normally (perhaps as the drug wore off). Still, following doctor’s orders, Maud gave him sporadic doses of Luminal, but she did fully stop the bromides.
As fewer doses were needed, Ewan predictably improved; by the end of July, he was able to drive again. His cough improved, requiring less medication. His “jolly smile” returned. Maud says that he became “thoughtful and affectionate” again, and on August 4, he told Maud fondly that he could see her “as I saw you on our wedding day.” He returned to his lawn bowling clubs and to taking long walks. By the second week of August, he was well enough to go for a visit to the Island for a month. His sisters adored him, and their kindly attentions always made him feel better.
The episode of this illness had taken a great toll on Maud’s own nerves, but she was quick to recover. As soon as Ewan had departed on vacation, she perked up, went to a movie, did her work, and enjoyed her freedom. She had time to read, and on August 15, 1937, she writes that she turned to one of her favourite biographies, Clement Shorter’s life of Charlotte Brontë, a writer she admired greatly. News reached her, too, that a play by Mildred Barker based on The Blue Castle would be produced in Hollywood. Soon she stated in her journals that she missed Ewan—the cheery Ewan with the jolly smile, the man she had married. Such a statement reminds us that there was another side to the Ewan so often depicted in her journals as a mentally unstable liability.
During all of Maud’s disappointment with Chester, Stuart had remained a bright spot in her life. She was pleased that he was still dating Margaret Cowan next door. However, in the first week of July, Mrs. Cowan broadsided Maud with an astonishing demand—that the two of them should try to break up Stuart’s and Margaret’s romance. Maud was deeply offended and hurt: she regarded the handsome and witty Stuart as a “good catch” for any young woman. He was by now a very promising medical student and a university athlete of much acclaim. Maud wrote in her journals that Mrs. Cowan said, rather disingenuously, that it was because “Margaret was so fickle,” but she believed the request reflected Mrs. Cowan’s wish for her daughters to “marry money”; Stuart was not rich enough to suit her.
Quite possibly Mrs. Cowan’s real concern was over her daughter marrying into such a troubled family. Out of Maud’s hearing, Mrs. Cowan apparently referred to the Macdonalds’ home as the “crazy house”—an ungracious term, given that she had often used Maud as a drawing card when she entertained at her formal teas. When Maud experienced Mrs. Cowan’s desire to break up the young romance as another attack on her status; she failed to see the irony that Mrs. Cowan’s prejudice against the Macdonald family was similar to her own prejudice against Joy Laird’s family.
Although Maud continued to socialize with Mrs. Cowan, she was very hurt and angry. She had lived for years with her own lingering baggage from childhood—that although she came from a “good family,” she herself did not quite measure up, and perhaps her children would not measure up, either. And worse, the perceived attack was on what she now called her “good” son, not on Chester.
It was in August 1937 that Maud confirmed for herself that Chester was having an affair with a young woman named Ida Birrell. She felt the terrible irony of having encouraged Chester’s involvement with the Young People’s Society in the first place, for it was under the umbrella of this church organization that he had met Ida. Ida lived at 204 Quebec Avenue, a reasonable walking distance away and easy by car, so it was simple for Chester to slip out to see her.
Maud finally accosted Chester, eliciting from him a promise to break off the romance. On August 25, she describes writing a “certain letter”—perhaps to Ida—and showing it to Chester before mailing it. To her, Chester’s behaviour was a dishonour to their family name. Divorce at that time was still a terrible scandal, but conducting an extramarital affair was even worse.
It is hard for our society to understand the anxiety and shame that Maud’s era felt over sexual dalliance, adultery, and divorce. These “sins” were scandalous even in Hollywood then, where public disapproval could be felt at the box office. Maud’s generation remembered all too well the scandal, for instance, over the 1919 silent movie version of Anne of Green Gables, which was well received across North America on its release. But then William Desmond Taylor (1872–1922), the movie’s married and middle-aged director, was found murdered, and compromising letters from the actress who played Anne, Mary Miles Minter, as well as her monogrammed underwear, were reportedly found in his room. Mary Miles Minter herself was not suspected of the murder (though her mother, angry at her daughter’s “seduction,” was under some suspicion). But the public was so shocked at the immorality of a starlet—especially one who was known as “Anne of Green Gables”—having an affair with an older, married man that the film was withdrawn and all copies were said to be destroyed. No known intact copy has survived.69
Mary Miles Minter had been a highly paid star with many pictures to her credit when the scandal occurred. Her immense box-office appeal had made her a rival of Mary Pickford, an equally popular silent-film star. But this scandal ended Minter’s movie career. Her Hollywood producers dropped her immediately, even though she was still under contract for additional pictures. She was apparently considered too “tainted” even for parts in westerns.
Chester’s extramarital affair filled Maud with shame and fear. She knew it could become the talk of the women’s afternoon teas in Toronto society, and the gossip would also travel to the Island. Having her own professional status under attack was one thing, but to have her family name besmirched would be more than she could bear. She thought, quite rightly, that it would even affect Stuart’s career.
With nerves already frayed, in August 1937 Maud began to increase her doses of barbiturates. She wrote in her journal that she did not like taking them, but claimed they were necessary. An anguished entry about Chester in her journal concludes, “And it is my curse that I can’t help loving you … my bonny little first born who has changed so much” (August 23, 1937). On September 6, she learned—to no great surprise—that Chester was still seeing Ida, despite his promise to break off the affair.
Hoping a brief change of scene would reorient Chester to respectability, cooling his ardour for Ida, she arranged for him to drive her and Ewan to Cleveland, Ohio, on the third weekend in September. They would visit Ewan’s niece, who was married to a medical doctor named Michael Oman. In Cleveland, Chester impressed everyone with his “brilliant” talk. Maud was proud, but despaired because he would not focus on his legal studies.
Little surprise that this trip did not achieve her goal. Chester was in the “grip of one of those infatuations which will make a man do anything,” as Maud had put it earlier on August 23, 1937. He was in that over-stimulated emotional high, with its accompanying feeling of well-being, that is unleashed by new sexual affairs, especially where danger and “the forbidden” fan the flames of passion. He was beginning his second year in the study of law again, but he suddenly was rushing off in all directions but towards the study of law.
Chester had become involved in the Victoria-Royce Young People’s Society’s dramatic program back in 1936. According to the church archives, one of the highlights of their 1937 program, performed on October 5, 1937, was a piece in which “Barrister Chester Macdonald argues, far, far into t
he night with J. Elmo Ewing, as Lionel Marrymore, in a Breech of Promise suit.”70Chester’s verbal pyrotechnics, on dazzling display, must have made him look like one of the most promising young lawyers in the area, and quite likely had an electrifying effect on the young women attending the performance (who did not know he was married). Maud does not mention this performance in her journals. She only says on September 4 that she had encouraged his joining the YPS, and his affair was the result. Chester was indeed riding the wind, and as a biblical proverb has it, he would reap the whirlwind.
Chester’s feverish social life was of course affecting his performance at work. Mr. Bogart became enraged with Chester’s unreliability and inattention to his work. On October 14, he wrote to the Macdonalds informing them that Chester was fired. This was the second time that Chester had been dismissed by Mr. Bogart. Maud rushed down and humbled herself to plead for another chance, as she had before; Bogart reluctantly granted it. There was no dispute that Chester was exceptionally good at law when he applied himself.
Four days later, Maud complained that Chester was “grim” all the time and his “resentment” hung “like an icy cloud between us.” By October 29, Chester was “sulky” and “ugly.” The next day, when he drove her to grocery shop at Loblaws, he was silent and glowering. On November 14, in church, Maud saw Chester’s new love, Ida Birrell, for the first time. She wept for the rest of the evening at home: “It is so dreadful to find yourself wishing your son had never been born. And I was so happy when he was!” (November 14, 1937).
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