She became obsessed with discovering his whereabouts. She knew that if he went to Norval he would not stay late; and she knew that Ida’s parents no longer welcomed him in their house. But she also was quite sure that Chester was up to no good, since he took their car.
In fact, Chester was spending much time cruising around in search of new girlfriends, and his erratic moods likely reflected the vicissitudes of the chase. Eventually Maud found out that Chester was involved with more women than just Ida, but she never mentions this detail in her journals—even though Chester brought at least one of them (who did not know he was married at the time) to meet her. (Some of these other liaisons came to light after Maud’s first journal was published, and several women who had dated Chester—without knowing he was married when they were seeing him— inquired what had happened to him.)
She was turning more and more to barbiturates as a sleep aid. In January 1938, a new “much vaunted tonic” was added to their arsenal of palliatives: neoboronine. This bromide compound, in later decades of the twentieth century was held responsible for much bromide poisoning. The list of medications she records in 1938 is shocking, revealing that she and Ewan were constantly relying on medical palliatives: the barbiturates Luminal and Medinal regularly for Maud, and bromides for Ewan. Ewan had long demonstrated what we would now think of as symptoms of dependency on these sedatives, and Maud now began to follow the same pattern.
Maud’s strained nerves showed in other ways, too. Mrs. Cowan may have thought her daughter too good for Stuart, but she still wanted to enliven the social events in her home with Maud’s performances. When Maud recited there in February, she closed with a poem she had written years earlier called “To My Enemy.” It makes the point that an enemy’s sneer can goad one to climb dizzying heights more effectively than friendly encouragement. Maud reported reading the poem with so much “venom” that her “smug audience” was startled. The night after the reading, Maud broke down and wept bitterly. Stuart tried to comfort her, telling her he couldn’t see why she still loved Chester so much and felt so “tortured” by his behaviour.
On March 9, 1938, Maud decided she had to take action. Chester was not studying at all. She may have suspected by this time that he was not attending his classes, either. Out all the time, he was churlish at home, making meals tense, and the general atmosphere in the house sour and explosive. She had not told Ewan about Chester’s philandering, but Ewan may have suspected it. He too was also exhibiting symptoms of anxiety and distress, constantly searching for new doctors and medications.
Maud’s course of action was to rewrite her will. On principle she decided that if Chester abandoned his family, she would ensure that his children were provided for, but Chester himself would be cut out.73 Despite these tough measures, she agonized over her inability to stop loving this errant son.
Chester, involved in another YPS dramatic production called “Simon the Sorcerer,” was off and flying again—and not in the right direction. She makes no mention of this play in her journals, except for a brief allusion to his filling in someone’s part in a play. Chester was not a good actor, but he had much force of personality. His bombastic performances seem to have energized the entire cast. This production, competing with the Young People’s Societies from many other churches, won the Bible drama championship of the Toronto Presbytery that year.74
Through his performance, in the role of “Peter, Christ’s Disciple,” Chester made other contacts. He met another young woman and courted her steadily throughout the spring, calling and taking her out frequently, giving her the “royal rush.” He presented himself as unmarried. (We do not know how much contact he still had with Ida, but her parents’ objections to him made it more difficult for them to meet.) With the new woman, a student at Victoria College, he called himself “Jerry Macdonald.” She described him as “a courtly, romantic suitor, always arriving with chocolates or flowers.” She said that her cousin laughed that “with the ‘line’ Chester had, he should be writing the books.” The romance stalled when she went away to work as a waitress in the Muskoka lake district for the summer of 1938.
When she returned in the fall, she was “met with the question, ‘How does it feel to be the other woman?’ ” A friend had found out that Chester was married, and had children. She was shocked. Her family forbade her to talk to him again, and she dropped him abruptly. When he called at her house anyway, her muscular six-foot cousin was enlisted to “strong-arm … him off the premises,” warning him never to return.75 By March 22, on the day that Maud went downtown and signed her new will, she wrote: “Tonight I discovered a hideous danger which I cannot write of. Chester must be crazy.” We can only speculate about this discovery. Maud observed that Luella’s picture had disappeared from Chester’s bureau. This drove her to further action.
She wrote Chester a bracing letter in the first week of April (April 3, 1938). She told him that he had wrecked both Ewan’s and her life by what he had done with Luella, and that Luella was now struggling to bring up his children by herself. Moreover, she wrote, if he thought he would force Luella to divorce him so he could marry another woman, he was in for a surprise: Luella was within her rights to refuse a divorce. In addition, Maud informed him that she had just rewritten her will, stipulating that he would be cut out if he abandoned his wife and children for another woman. If he kept behaving as “a scoundrel,” she stated, she “would never look on his face again.” She hoped that the threat of being cut from her will and excommunicated from the family would bring him to his senses. Maud confessed that writing this letter made her unbearably miserable.
Chester likely knew that his mother depended on his companionship too much to enforce her threat, and he knew he could charm his way back into her good graces. He rightly guessed that he would not be thrown out of the house until his law degree was done. Perhaps experience had shown him that he could get his way if he alternated between displaying cold rage and offering shreds of hope that he was reforming. Another possibility is that Chester did not think matters through at all—he was by nature impulsive, not mindful of future consequences. The letter had no immediate effect on his behaviour, aside from making him treat his mother with a stony, angry silence throughout the rest of April.
Maud had also been very impulsive as a child, but her grandmother’s training had helped her learn to think out consequences and discipline herself. She could not understand Chester’s inability to do the same. Maud sorrowfully admitted that she didn’t think Chester was “quite normal” (April 4, 1938). But Chester was only part of her misery in April 1938.
The Canadian Authors Association had been very important to Maud after the move to Toronto. The CAA was a lifeline, in fact, that pulled her out of her personal stress at home. In early 1938, Howard Angus Kennedy, the national executive secretary of the CAA, died suddenly. Kennedy (1861–1938) had been an exceedingly able and much-respected administrator, and the loss left the CAA floundering without leadership. Things began to unravel in February, with no one of his experience and stature to take over. The resulting upheaval in the association would have a profound effect on Maud.
A young man named Eric Gaskell, who had been working in the Toronto and Montreal book worlds in the 1930s and had been assisting Kennedy, was finally given the post, as well as the editorship of The Canadian Author, official journal of the CAA. Maud had known and admired Kennedy, and she knew and liked Gaskell. But he was young and had much to learn about internecine politics. In 1937, Maud had been the second vice-president of the Toronto branch of the CAA, and had things progressed normally she might have ascended to the presidency. At the very least, she would have continued working hard behind the scenes on the executive. She liked going to the meetings. She enjoyed the companionship of the people she knew there—except for William Arthur Deacon, of course—and she put her ideas and organizational skills to use in the planning sessions. She had always loved using her gift of “making things go.”
Deacon saw this
power vacuum after Kennedy’s death as a chance to sweep the “old guard” out of the Toronto CAA executive. Maud was one of his targets. It was widely known that he was not a fan of Maud’s writing. He liked to be in charge, and he liked even more to be “seen” to be in charge, as his biographers note.76 The leadership vacuum gave him the opportunity to work behind the scenes to shake up the executive slate and dump Maud in the process.
On April 8, 1938, Maud wrote a very short, flat entry in her journals:
Tonight I went to the Authors. The election of a new executive was held and I was elbowed out. It is not worthwhile going into details. Deacon had it all planned very astutely and things went exactly as he had foreseen. I at once withdrew my name from the list of candidates.
We do not know the specifics of what happened, but clearly, in forcing this issue, Deacon managed to devastate Maud in a way that no one else could have done. He caught her by total surprise. This happened only a few days after she had given Chester the “bracing” letter on April 3, and when she was suffering from his cold rage at home. About Deacon’s manoeuvre she adds— rather disingenuously— that,
It does not matter in the least to me that I am not on the executive. Deacon has always pursued me with malice and I am glad I will have no longer to work with him. He is exceedingly petty and vindictive and seems to be detested by everybody who knows him.
She concludes unconvincingly: “All this would have hurt me once but now it doesn’t matter at all.”
Of course, it did matter to her—a huge amount. It was the final coup de grâce in the destruction of her courage. It was an attack on her sense of herself as a worldwide celebrity, a beloved Canadian writer, and a valuable contributor to the Toronto literary scene—indeed, on her whole professional identity. In Maud’s depressed periods, she already felt she was a failure as a mother and a wife. Now that she was elbowed out of her position in the literary world she had worked so hard to join, she felt rejected on the public stage, too. (Later she would depict a similar attack on the personal identity of Anne’s little daughter in Anne of Ingleside.)
She had been frustrated when the 1937 Book Week authors had all bleated about how the outside world was not interested in anything Canadian. She believed that Canada should and could develop a literature to take a place in the pantheon of world classics. She had devoted much time to privately encouraging younger writers, hoping they would find their own voice. In her many speeches, she urged people to buy Canadian books. Her best-sellerdom helped other new writers get published, but she wanted to help in other, more tangible ways. And now, in April 1938, she was cut off.
Too proud to admit in her journals the impact of this rejection, she retreated in dignified humiliation. She wrote in her journal the next day: “I have been ill all day with nervous collapse. Could not do anything. I am sick with dread that I am going to break down altogether. A broken spirit is worse than a broken heart” (April 9, 1938). She had undoubtedly medicated herself more with the same compounds that had been causing various secondary symptoms like vivid dreams, excessive restlessness, and the feeling that her mind was out of control.
She resolved that she would no longer unburden herself to Stuart, and at any rate, was too proud to reveal to him how hurt she was over being ousted from the CAA executive. Had her personal life been in less disarray, she would undoubtedly have bounced back. This final blow left her mired too deeply in her slough of despondency.
For nearly a month after Maud gave Chester the letter telling him that she would cut him out of her will if he kept seeing Ida, he did not speak to her. He continued to drive or accompany her to meetings and to shop, but he did so with a grim silence, as if he were punishing her for disapproving of his actions. She had increasing problems with headaches, insomnia, and obsessions. She took barbiturates to calm herself, and for weeks she could sleep only with the help of these hypnotics and sedatives. In addition to several barbiturate compounds, she was probably also taking bromides and drinking her homemade wine.
No surprise that a “dreadful restlessness” kept her pacing floors after shutting herself in a room. She had tremors so severe that she could not sit through a church service; she suffered frightening “vivid, symbolic dreams,” and periods of uncontrollable weeping. She was unable to find escape either in her “dream world” or in reading. She could not settle her jumpy mind enough to write.
“What is to become of us if I cannot write?” she agonized on April 27, 1938. She felt in the grip of an “icy horror” and was overcome with the fear that she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, which added to her terror. She did not realize the role that prescribed medications might be playing in her torment, but she did realize the effect of her condition. The medications settled her, but only temporarily: “I hate taking such drugs but it seems just now to be the least of two evils,” she wrote on April 23, 1938.
For the first time ever, she dreaded social obligations out of fear that she would break down at them. She began turning invitations down. She holed up in her house. She forced herself out of the house towards the end of April, but at the same time she cited one of Frederick Philip Grove’s sentences to represent how she felt: “My whole inner consciousness was like the raw flesh of a dreadful wound” (April 26, 1938). She went out again to a Nature Study Club and felt better for the sociability. She had some more outings, and felt better each time she left the house; returning home, however, was hard.
At the end of April, with his mother’s nerves still raw, Chester flew into a rage and carried on “like a crazy man” after receiving a letter she believed to be from Ida. It is not clear from Maud’s record, or from other women’s accounts after 1985, how many women he was seeing at this period, but she did know there were others. In her journals, Maud cast Ida as the only “other woman,” apparently feeling that one affair was preferable to indiscriminate philandering.
A month after the onset of this hostile treatment, Maud wrote that “Chester kissed me again today—for the first time since I gave him that letter. I was weak enough to feel glad” (April 29, 1938). She added, defensively if unconvincingly, that she couldn’t take him back into her life when he might have to be ejected again some day. The next day she added “Hell is a place from which hope is excluded.”
Determined to carry her own standard proudly, Maud forced herself to go to the annual CAA meeting on May 15. However, attending the meeting upset her profoundly, and she had to take more sedatives afterwards. She continued to feel she was at the mercy of “hideous obsessions” and nervous unrest. On top of this was her concern about Chester passing the year. Grades would be out in June.
Through all of this period, Maud’s symptoms alternated with short periods in which she felt passably good—as could be the case if there was interplay between withdrawal symptoms and taking more medicine. Dr. Lane often dropped in to check on her on his way home from his office. She kept taking Dr. Lane’s pills, but they did not help her. She focused on the effects of her anxiety—her inability to write creatively when under stress (which created stress in itself), her many physical and mental symptoms (which she did not fully understand and thus felt frightened by), and her continuing use of medications. Dr. Lane kept encouraging her, telling her she would recover, but he had little understanding of what was wrong with her. To him, she was merely a highly “neurasthenic” patient, and the standard medical treatments for such people at that time were more barbiturates and bromides.
During these tortured months she began to type up her handwritten journals as a calming task—at this point, she still wanted to be equitable, and to make a copy for Chester—but this process brought its own pain. Maud wrote on June 6, 1938, “I must not think any more of those lost lovely days. The contrast is too terrible between the happy hopeful girl I was then—‘always laughing’ it was said of me—and the creature, helpless and in torment of today.”
Ever the disciplined woman, she was determined to recover. As spring came, she made herself go outside an
d garden, attend social functions, and walk to the local theatre. This activity, aided by the warmer weather, helped her recover her footing, and she was able to cut down on medications.
She began to accept that she could not change Chester, and with the loss of hope came some peace. She had few hopes that he would enjoy any professional success in his field—he was too lazy and erratic—but she hoped he would at least give up “running around” and reclaim his family. Her anxiety over him was genuine and compelling. All parents would have felt great pain over a gifted child who seemed intent on squandering his future.
For several years, Maud had been reading all the books she could find on psychiatry and mental illness. She hoped to learn something about the abnormal behaviours she had seen in Chester, Ewan, and Isabel Anderson. She ordered books through the local public library, and Stuart brought her books from the University of Toronto, too, where he had been taking a course in psychiatry as part of his medical training. They discussed Chester’s behavioural symptoms together, and Stuart told her that Chester had all the classic traits of the “psychopathic personality.”77 Maud wrote in her journals that she had already come to the same conclusion from her own reading (June 7, 1938). She felt that:
… Nothing else can explain certain aspects of Chester’s conduct and lack of moral sense. He is not normal and perhaps should be pitied rather than blamed. I am not referring to his infatuation for Ida Birrell, which might happen to any man and especially to one in Chester’s unfortunate position, but to certain other things I have not—and cannot—write here.78
As mid-June approached, Maud wrote: “Oh, motherhood is awful— motherhood is awful!” as she waited to see if Chester had passed his year (June 15, 1938). Good news came—Chester had passed every single course. In one more year, he could graduate and begin to practise law. With this news, Maud’s spirits improved, and with less need for medications, she found herself able to write, and to escape into her “dream lives” again. But her moods were volatile, and depended much on Chester’s moods and behaviour. On June 27 she writes in her journal, after sending a letter to Luella, that everything in her life feels “poisoned.” However, she adds that she can
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