—
Earlier in the autumn, when Maud was rereading her journals, she became obsessed with a line she had written back in 1897: “Some lives seem to be more essentially tragic than others and I fear mine is one of such” (October 13, 1937). Obsessive negative thoughts are often a feature of depression. Maud knew she was stuck in a mind-set, but still could not shake these “fixed ideas.” They became an overwhelming enemy now, not just the annoying “gnats” of earlier years. She continued taking medications to quell her depression, but predictably she only grew more despondent.
In her depressed state, her mind circled like a broken record. She had promoted the courtship of Marion Webb and Murray Laird. Their first little baby, born in 1935, had never looked normal to Maud; now, they confirmed that the child had Down’s Syndrome (and in those days would have been called “mongoloid”). This brought back the obsession: “It goes to prove— though I need no further proof—that I am under some curse and always have been. No one I love or am loved by has been fortunate or happy. No matter what I do to help anybody, though from the best and purest motives, it turns out accursed” (June 11, 1937). She knew she was being morbid but could not snap herself out of it.
But while Maud was recording such distress in her journals, once again the public record of her life at this time reveals a very different side. Maud’s calendar shows she remained professionally active all throughout the fall: September 22, a CAA executive meeting; October 5, a speech at the Centennial United Church; October 8, an open meeting of the CAA; October 18, another CAA executive meeting (she reports arguments over the forthcoming Book Week program in November); October 19, a tea at Knox College of the University of Toronto (her journal describes the misery of hearing other women brag about their successful sons); it was another tea on October 26. Her journals record that on October 28 she finished planning Anne of Ingleside. Back to the outside world: November 6, to Orillia to speak to the Young People’s Society; November 8, a PEN luncheon given in honour of Mr. Priestley, the well-known English author imported for Canadian Book Week, then went to the Book Fair to hear Nellie McClung and Katherine Hale speak.
On November 10, Maud did her own turn at the Toronto Book Fair. The November Book Fair was the kind of event that she loved. But the day before her speech, her former PEI fiancé Ed Simpson visited, possibly to show off his new bride, a woman twenty years younger than Ed. An astonished and irritated Maud had to admit that the new wife was surprisingly pretty and charming, in addition to being young. (Maud does not mention in her journals that the new bride was also reputedly wealthy, supposedly attached to the Fisk Tire fortune in the United States.) Maud groused that Ed was as self-obsessed as ever, and he did not once acknowledge her literary success during the visit.
At the Fair, Maud spoke the same afternoon as two other writers, Laura Salverson and Captain Eric Acland. Laura Salverson, whose parents had emigrated from Iceland to Canada when she was ten, had written nine novels and some one hundred short stories. Her best-known novel is The Viking Heart (1923), and in 1937 she won the Governor General’s Award for The Dark Weaver. Mrs. Salverson announced that she would write no more about contemporary Canadian life: Canadians, she said, did not want to read about other Canadians, and American and English folk refused to buy fiction with a Canadian background unless “Mounties” were involved.
In her own speech, Maud took the opposite stand. In a rousing call to promote Canada and its history and culture, she argued that stories were the essence of a culture, embodying the past. She said hearing all the old stories in her grandfather’s post office when she was a girl had prompted her to write. She joked that her stories were all set in Prince Edward Island because when she came to Ontario, as a minister’s wife, she “thought it not safe to lay the scene in Ontario lest all my husband’s congregation think they were in the book.”71 She stressed her belief that Canada and Canadianness were indeed interesting topics, and all it took to make them into literature was a talented writer. Maud’s best-selling books should have been ample testimony that even rural areas had characters who were uniquely interesting. Great themes, dramatic events, and larger-than-life characters were not necessarily essentials—all a writer needed was ordinary folk. Her message was the opposite of all the other Book Week speakers; she stood alone in urging pride in Canada and in things Canadian.
In the same Book Week lineup, the thirty-four-year-old Morley Callaghan also asserted that “young writers of talent stood virtually no chance of scoring ‘any kind of success’ in this country because there was ‘no medium for expression in Canada for the authentic writer.’ ” He continued that the “authentic” Canadian writer “must go some place where his work will be accepted … [and] where people will pay him for what he writes.” Callaghan, of course, went to Paris.
That Canadians were incapable of appreciating “authentic” and “serious” writing was the same message Frederick Philip Grove had carried across Canada in the late 1920s in a speaking tour. If writers’ books did not sell well, it was because Canadians were unable to appreciate serious literature. The implication followed that if an author’s books did sell, as Maud’s did, then those books were probably of little value.
Another speaker, Bertram Brooker, whose novel Think of the Earth had won the 1936 Governor General’s Award, continued: “while Canada reaped rewards from a national character of stability and orderliness, this very asset was reflected in a certain ‘humdrumness’ in her literature, for authors need … wide varieties of characters.” He argued that it was necessary for authors to make their characters “amusing and intriguing” as well as “interesting.” He criticized Canadian men for having adopted a uniform of “grey felt hats and navy blue overcoats” and urged them to be a little more “eccentric.”
Arthur Stringer also spoke at the conference. He was identified as a “Canadian born son, now among the most successful authors living in the United States.” He argued that “Every country must not only develop itself, but elucidate itself. It must sing its own song,” again implying that this had not yet been done. Maud’s books seemed to be invisible to these speakers, or perhaps beneath notice as only “children’s” or “popular” books. All these fellow writers and critics disparaged Canadian readers as unsophisticated and Canadian subjects as unsuitable for fiction. Maud was beating against the current when she urged Canadian writers to look into their own lives and communities for authentic material.
After a September visit on the Island, Ewan soon slipped back into depression and consequently began taking his medicines again. It was not long before he became much worse. He appealed to his physician brother, Dr. Angus Macdonald, to help him. In November, Angus drove up from Warsaw, Indiana. His unhelpful medical diagnosis was that Ewan was suffering from his “nerves” and that he should merely “forget” about things bothering him. Angus sniffed out other trouble and added to Maud’s exasperation by asking: “Is Chester a good boy?” The demoralized Ewan must have dosed himself with medication once more that night, because the next day Maud noted that his eyes “look wild and haunted again” (December 1, 1937).
The answer to Angus’s question, of course, was that Chester was not a good boy at all. Chester was rarely at home, still refusing to explain his whereabouts. On December 29, Chester persuaded Maud to let him hold a Young People’s executive meeting in their home. To Maud’s surprise, Chester hosted the occasion with an aplomb that she greatly admired; she commented in her journal that he should still be free, not married. But the day after the party, December 30, she wrote that she “just had a terrible scene with Chester. What has happened I am not sure but it seems that Ida Birrell’s family have found out he is married!” Apparently those people in the church who knew, like the minister, had not told Ida’s parents initially. And although Ida herself knew (according to Maud, indicating that she may have told her in the mysterious letter that Chester already had responsibilities to his family), Ida also had not told her parents. Instead of shame at having d
eceived Ida’s parents, Chester’s reaction was rage at being found out. Maud was the one left holding the bag of shame.
Maud had learned extraordinary self-control throughout her often difficult life, and she had determined to hide Ewan’s condition as much as she could, not letting it ruin her boys’ childhood. Now it seemed that her elder son was intent on spoiling his own life, and she was helpless. Chester, barely passing his law courses, had two babies in the basket and no interest in supporting them. It seemed to her that he regarded her as an endless source of funding. Maud anguished: what could lie ahead for such a man?
Maud and Ewan had been raised in a society where divorce was unacceptable under any condition. The early Island newspapers give ample testimony to the fact that spouses might be beaten, poisoned, or murdered, but divorce itself was not an option. More recently, the smell of the universally reviled divorcée Mrs. Wallis Warfield Simpson was in many people’s noses; there was much anger over the belief that she had undermined the British throne when the smitten young King Edward VIII had abdicated to marry her in June 1937. Yet, it is not so much the spectre of divorce that really upset Maud—after all, divorce comes up many times in Maud’s journals. It was Chester’s failure to accept responsibility for the children he had fathered. Maud was caught between sympathy for Luella, raising her children without a husband’s emotional and financial support, and resentment that Luella had allowed herself to get pregnant (since it was always the woman’s responsibility to refrain from sexual relations). Maud predictably blamed Luella more than Chester for their growing estrangement, noting that Luella was the one who had left Chester and gone home to her father in the first place—ignoring the reality, which was that Chester’s behaviour had driven her to leave.
Even though Maud thought Chester had married too soon and not well, she and Ewan wanted him to make the best of it and support his family. Luella was a fine young woman, and although she lacked social charm, she came from a very respectable family and had many good attributes, including a quick, inquiring mind. Maud was keenly aware of the promise she had given Luella’s dying mother to look after Luella. Chester’s indifference to his family was simply beyond the comprehension of his parents, who had always worn the yoke of duty even when it became a straitjacket.
Chester’s behaviour undermined Maud’s self-esteem in a particularly damaging way. She had grown up thinking of the Woolners, the Macneills, and the Montgomerys as elite families in PEI. Only “trash” behaved as Chester was doing. This insult to her pride came from within her own family—from her son, her own flesh and blood. How could he disregard the values of hard work, responsibility, and decency after she had driven herself to earn enough for his education? She had put so many hopes in her sons carrying the family flag into the next generation. Discovering Chester’s deceit and corruption was the worst blow imaginable. She had always hoped that he would mature, but it now seemed to her that he was rotten to the core, and her observations of life told her that this kind of person did not change.
She soon discovered that Stuart had known all about Chester’s philandering and lying and had not told her. She did not want Ewan to learn of it because he would only interpret this as further proof that God was against him. She put yet another burden on herself—bearing her pain alone.
So, despite all of her composure during public appearances throughout 1937, Maud was finding that her personal anxiety made writing difficult. She had finished the preparatory “spadework” on Anne of Ingleside at the end of October 1937, but her mind was jumpy. She was beset by ailments: roving muscle spasms and tension headaches, and other muscular-skeletal symptoms such as leg and foot numbness, neck problems, pain behind her eyes, and shooting sciatic-related discomfort. These intensified her depression, and depression maintained the cycle of misery, serving up obsessive negative images from the past, flavoured with the bitterness of the present. She felt little joy, even in writing. She imagined scenes of future desolation. And that sent her to more medication.
And yet, at Christmas time in 1937, Maud published a charming piece called “My Favourite Bookshelf” in a publication called The Island Crusader. It was about the little bookshelf she kept by her desk, the one thing she would “make a desperate effort to save if the house were on fire.” The shelves held a few select volumes, including verse, travel books, girls’ stories, garden books, historical novels, biography, history, essays, a book about cats, and ghost stories. “These books are my friends …” she wrote. “The books in other bookcases are merely agreeable acquaintances. Here is a book for my every mood and the white magic of it never fails. I sink wearily into my ‘lazy’ chair, open the worn covers, and presto, change! Everything is different as it should be.” Maud’s writing in this piece about her bookshelf is so light, so cheerful and wistful, that no one could read it and think that she had ever had a trouble in her life.72
Yet Maud had written in despair at the beginning of the year: “The present is unbearable. The past is spoiled. There is no future” (February 7, 1937). Mid-year, in August, she would write: “All my old pleasure in my work is gone—I can’t lose myself in it.” At the end of the year, she summed up: “There has never been any happiness in this house—there never will be” (December 31, 1937). Her dream of success—as a writer, as a wife, as a mother—now seemed an empty charade. It would be nearly a year before she would feel like writing in her journal again.
Luella Reid’s home outside Norval.
Isabel Anderson, Maud’s fan.
Chester, Ewan, Maud, and Stuart Macdonald in Toronto, circa 1935.
Stanley Baldwin, Prime Minister of Britain, made a point of meeting Montgomery when he toured Canada.
“Journey’s End,” the house Maud bought in Toronto on Riverside Drive.
Maud in Toronto, at the time of A Tangled Web’s publication, around 1931.
Maud and Ewan on a boat in Norval, circa 1931.
Toronto street scene, with Eaton’s, Maud’s favourite store, during the 1930s.
Stuart as member of the University of Toronto gymnastics team.
Stuart Macdonald.
Dr. Margaret Cowan, the girlfriend next door.
Maud and Ewan in Ohio.
Dr. Stuart Macdonald and his mother at his graduation in 1940.
CHAPTER 21
Maud’s journals of 1937, written up a year after the fact, are demonstrably not a full and accurate index to her life. They are a reflection of how she recalled her feelings from a distance. Any delay in writing up her journals naturally facilitated a growing compulsion to shape her entries (and her life). She did not feel she had to report all external events, given that she was increasingly treating her journals as the record of her innermost feelings, not as a full account of the facts and events. This emphasis meant that she was fully honest about her upset over Chester, but she edited his story, omitting facts and significant details. Not knowing how Chester’s story would end, she did not want to leave a written account that could humiliate him later on.
In other cases, Maud focused on her response to events, rather than on their specifics. Another huge omission in her journals, running concurrently with Chester’s story, was her distress over the continuing slippage of her celebrity. She was increasingly annoyed that her books were now being marketed primarily as children’s books, although they were written for a general market. But she was silent about her anguish over her books being devalued by modern critics because they were best-selling popular literature. She was too proud to write in journals destined for eventual publication about how upset she was. The full story of events in her professional life, particularly in the CAA, was glossed over so dismissively in her journals that a casual reader would miss the real significance of events between February 1938 and mid-April 1938.
Maud’s 1938 social engagements started right after Christmas. On January 4, she spoke to the Victoria-Royce Young People’s Society, and she attended another of their meetings two weeks later. In February she addressed an as
semblage of women at the Granite Club, “poured” at a CAA tea, and recited for an I.O.D.E. chapter meeting at Mrs. Cowan’s house. She joined four others in pouring at a Press Club tea in March for two hundred people held in the Royal York to honour the actress Ethel Barrymore. She also lunched with a relative, Lena McClure, whose father, from Prince Edward Island, was a federal politician (and who always had lots of good Island gossip). Given the tension in the Macdonald house at this time, interacting and laughing with normal, happy people revived her.
The big problem at home was Chester, of course. After her speech at his YPS on January 4, he resumed coming into his mother’s bedroom, kissing her, and generally displaying affection. Ever the indulgent mother, Maud commented that he “craves love.” It would have been just as apt to observe that she craved her son’s love, too—and if she got it, Chester knew he was assured of getting the car.
Chester continued throwing himself into the YPS social and drama activities and neglecting his studies. Still, he managed to pass all his mid-term exams in January 1938, albeit with low marks. He went out every night, but Maud did not know where. She never knew when he would be in a sulky rage and when he would be a loving son. She believed that he was still seeing Ida, and went to another YPS evening with him partly to keep an eye on him. In an entry of February 7, she reports that he has turned sociable again, expressing concern that she looked “tired.” He put his head on her shoulders, wanting some petting and sympathy himself, and she stroked his head for a time, but she adds bitterly that “my heart is hard to him.” She knew she could never trust him, but she also could not quit loving him. Her memory kept flooding her mind with images of him as a young child. Now that his life was spinning out of control, she could only watch helplessly.
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