Lucy Maud Montgomery

by Mary Henley Rubio

  … bear my burden again since that terrible obsession and unrest has lifted. Though I am very sad and very weary of life and would be glad if it were over, that terrible craving for death has left me. Nothing is really changed. My problems are still with me in all their ugliness—there is a dreadful year to be lived through. But I can face it again, now that I have subdued that inner conflict.

  I feel as if I had shut a crowd of snarling beasts in a cage, the door of which I am holding closed with one hand, while with the other I re-arrange my life. Now and then one of them rakes me with his paw but they cannot mangle me as before—as long as I can keep the door shut.

  Maud’s journals do not describe a friendship that was very important to her at this time—that of Eric Gaskell, the young man who was the new national executive secretary of the CAA. Eric had worked enough in the CAA to see that Maud’s ouster from the executive was a genuine loss to the organization. But Deacon was powerful, and no young man dared cross him if he wanted to advance in the book world. So Gaskell often visited Maud in her home during this period, or talked to her by phone, garnering her ideas for the CAA. His recollections provide another view of Maud.

  They had first met in 1931 in Norval, after she had read some of his essays and, impressed by them, had invited him to visit. They had seen each other frequently at CAA meetings since. He said she was:

  unfailingly kind to young and aspiring writers. I had many chances to observe her with many authors of varying reputation, and she was kind to all, even when under personal emotional strain. She was a “gentle” person. She spoke at branch meetings of the CAA, was always interesting, homely, down to earth, unpretentious. She had many good suggestions to make about the management, organization, and fund-raising within the CAA.… She told me that her husband was going through acute depression and she steeled herself to cope by getting out to talk to people.

  Gaskell saw Ewan only a few times over the years, for very short periods, in their home. Ewan would offer a few perfunctory pleasantries, then disappear. To Eric Gaskell, he seemed “introspective and anti-social, making no effort to identify with his wife’s friends.” He was “a sad person who was trying to come to grips with situations he did not understand, and with people he was not interested in.” His face and posture looked like “he had the weight of the world on his shoulders.”79

  Less than two weeks after Maud was ousted from the CAA executive, Gaskell asked her to write out two of her poems for him. An observant young man, he knew that she was upset by Deacon’s manoeuvre. He had visited enough in her home to sense that she was having serious troubles there— troubles she attributed entirely to Ewan’s condition. Gaskell thought Ewan a “polite bore,” but saw no reason to deduce that there was anything seriously wrong with him mentally. He knew nothing about Chester.

  Eric Gaskell described Maud as a “witty and vibrant personality,” gracious in her home. He said that there were signs from time to time that she was under personal stress, but she was always full of helpful ideas and jokes, and she laughed a lot. His frequent contact with Maud, by phone or occasional visits, lasted until a few days before her death.

  By August 1938, Chester finally appeared to be giving some thought to the future. If he passed his courses over the next academic year, he would graduate in June. The legal profession was greatly overcrowded, however, and only the best young lawyers were taken into firms, while the rest had a hard time making their way. Moreover, his mother’s will was still standing, and if he did not reconcile with Luella and his children, he knew that he would be cut out of his inheritance. He started hinting to his mother that he was thinking kindly of Luella again, making little quips like “that’s the kind of house Luella likes” (July 25, 1938). Maud’s hopes rose.

  Four weeks later, she discovered that he was still seeing Ida. Maud started taking more Veronal.

  In September 1938, Chester began wiggling his way back into his mother’s good graces. He dropped more favourable comments about Luella and his children. With these hopeful hints of reform, Maud’s mood improved; this in turn helped her writing. Once she was softened up again, Chester again came into his parents’ bedroom, lay down beside his mother, and put his head on her shoulder “in the old way.” “I stroked his hair,” she writes in her journal, “but the gulf between us seems too wide ever to be crossed” (September 3, 1938). She adds hopefully in the same entry that he seems to be “different in some indefinable way these past two weeks.” Three days later, she writes with excitement that Chester has referred to that “youngster of mine” at dinnertime. She notes the change: “He has never referred to either of his children voluntarily for over two years” (September 6, 1938).

  Maud watched for other signs that Chester might be thinking of reconciling with Luella. He began inviting his mother to go on drives again. She accompanied him to deliver a writ for Mr. Bogart, and she listened while Chester talked “brilliantly” to her about the origins of languages. Maud opined it was a pity that he didn’t “interest himself in his law studies like that” (September 20, 1938). (One of the young women Chester had dated that summer had been studying classical languages at the University of Toronto and was probably the source of his knowledge, but when she learned he was married, she’d immediately dropped him.) When, at the end of October, Chester asked his mother if Luella and the kids might come for Christmas, Maud was beside herself with joy.

  Chester became Maud’s best friend again. She was inordinately happy at the thought of reclaiming her “old intimacy” with him. Given her estrangement from the CAA, she needed his intellectual companionship even more now. He needed hers, too. Most young people studying for a career establish some lasting friendships, but Chester had not. Friends were transient in his life. His mother noted this and felt sympathy because he was “lonely.” She knew all about loneliness.

  Through 1938 Stuart continued to see Margaret Cowan, now a practising dentist. Maud did not know that he had maintained his long-standing friendship with Joy Laird. Both boys’ personal lives seemed more settled, and in acceptable ways. Stuart was working hard on his course of study in Medicine, and on the University of Toronto gymnastics team he was doing so well that it looked as if he would be one of Canada’s entrants in the next set of Olympic Games in Germany.80 Her anxiety subsided, her need for sedatives again decreased, and she was able to work on Anne of Ingleside all through the fall.

  Maud had a big psychological boost in September 1938 when Hodder and Stoughton, who had rejected Mistress Pat, wrote asking for her next book. Another publisher, Harraps, had taken and published Mistress Pat, and it had sold very well. Like so many sensitive people who overreact to insults, Maud carried grudges a long time, and she enjoyed giving Hodder and Stoughton a lofty refusal. Things were again looking up.

  Soon a worried Maud contacted the doctor Ewan had seen in the Lockwood Clinic. He had blamed Ewan’s problems on general “nervousness.” Maud was alarmed because Ewan was amassing so many different medications from different doctors that she feared he might not remember taking one drug before he took another and accidentally overdose. Probably this is what caused the events described in Maud’s November 3, 1938, entry.

  Ewan experienced chills (but no fever) and hallucinations in the evening. He imagined he was arguing some point before a civic group and broke into sustained oration. Stuart thought perhaps his father was drunk—a telling detail suggesting that Ewan did imbibe, especially if Stuart could smell alcohol on him.

  Maud and Stuart finally quieted Evan down by giving him a barbiturate (Medinal). He slept through most of the next day. When he awoke, he remembered nothing of his remarkable impromptu “address.” He continued to alternate between irritability (a side-effect of drug withdrawal) and reasonable normalcy (when he may have taken another dose). In his cranky mood, he accused Maud and the boys of being “leagued against him.”

  Three days after that episode, again in the middle of the night, Ewan got up to go to the bathroom and stumbled into
a bookcase, knocking it over. The overwrought Maud lay awake the rest of the night. Even so, during this period she was writing furiously to finish Anne of Ingleside.

  Maud’s state of mind throughout 1938 continued to be dependent on the state of her relationship with Chester. After he reverted to his attentive self, he took her for drives, showed her mystery stories he was writing (and dropped endearing comments, suggesting that they might “amuse the children someday”), and accompanied her to movies. (Some of his writing has survived; it is singularly lacking in any literary quality.) He even visited his family in Norval. A few days before his mother’s sixty-fourth birthday on November 30, 1938, he put his arms around her and told her she was “a pretty wise little mother.” She called it her happiest birthday in years. “All Chester’s old affection for me seems to have come back,” she wrote (November 26, 1938). She felt her “tough love” (in changing her will) had worked.

  On December 6, 1938, Maud travelled by train to Thornhill to deliver a promised speech on the background of her books, telling her favourite story of the first Montgomery coming to Prince Edward Island. She met a Mrs. Colclough, who filled her in on what had supposedly happened to the other two of the original three Montgomery brothers who came to Canada. One did not like it and returned to Scotland (and was never heard from again), but one (Richard) stayed and figured as the ancestor of the Montgomery who kept Montgomery’s Tavern in Toronto. Eglinton Avenue was named for the Montgomery family connection to the earls of Eglinton.

  Family had always been an important part of Maud’s self-definition. Maud was thrilled to hear about the Montgomery connection to Toronto history. The next day, she wrote that she had not felt so well in years. Chester was behaving, and Stuart loved his obstetrical training (and would be off in January for a short period of training at Queen’s University in Kingston). Maud’s pen was flying. A day later, she wrote the last chapter of Anne of Ingleside. It was, she said proudly, her “twenty-first book” (December 8, 1938). A new book coming would replenish her income.

  Chester’s redemption as an acceptable son made her less anxious over Ewan. As she hustled through her revision of Ingleside, she wrote quite imperturbably that poor Ewan had had a bad day, and that she sometimes found herself wondering “how I ever came to marry this stooped, shambling, blear-eyed man lying round with a hot water bottle tied to his forehead. It seems quite impossible that he could ever have been the straight, merry-eyed dimple-cheeked man he was thirty years ago” (December 11, 1938). It was not age, she observed sadly, but his mental condition that had made the change. She mentioned wearily that he was trying every new medicine he could get again (which undoubtedly increased the likelihood of more bad days). With Chester on the right track, however, she could take other frustrations in stride.

  Her bruised self-esteem was further restored when, in mid-December 1938, the Canadian Pacific Railway invited her to contribute a piece for The Spirit of Canada, an illustrated book that they were preparing to present to King George and Queen Elizabeth during the Royal Tour of Canada the following May. She dashed that essay off easily.

  Luella and the children came and enjoyed Christmas 1938 with the Macdonalds—a big contrast to the previous Christmas, when the Birrells had found out that Chester was married. Even Ewan was in good enough spirits that he actually played with his baby grandson, Cameron, now two. Maud described this Christmas 1938 as her happiest ever, fulfilling her dreams of a happy family home. Like the biblical parent with the prodigal son, she rejoiced.

  CHAPTER 22

  Maud had always been encouraging to younger writers, knowing from her own youth how bleak life was without encouragement. After her ousting from the CAA executive, she continued reaching out to young authors through letters. Most of one set of ongoing correspondence has survived, a series of some nine letters written between April 13, 1936, and March 18, 1939, to a twenty-year-old woman named Violet May King (born 1916), an aspiring young author in Toronto. Violet’s mother had died when she was sixteen and the next year, at age seventeen, her best girlfriend died, too. Like Eric Gaskell’s recollection of Maud in her final years, these letters show a different side of Maud from her journals.

  Violet had been inspired by Maud’s books. She took a three-mile walk one evening to hear Maud speak at a local church, followed by “a very dark and scary hike home, but nothing could stop me. Later I wrote to her and she responded. Her letters put a little light in my rather dark world.”81 Maud became a mentor to Violet.

  At that time, Violet was writing poems for the “Little of Everything” column on the editorial page of The Toronto Star, as well as for the Globe. “Montgomery wrote many heart-warming compliments re my letters and advised me to write short stories before tackling books.”82 She said that Maud’s “kindness to me, expressed in these treasured letters, kept alive a spark that might well have disappeared entirely.”83

  Maud’s first letter, written back on April 13, 1936, was warm and encouraging, and gives a glimpse into how poverty affected people in the post-Depression years. After apologizing for the delay in answering her “very nice” letter, and explaining that she answers all of her letters in turn, Maud reassures Violet that she completely understands how it is to feel less well-dressed than others: “when we are shabby we think everyone notices it, whereas the majority do not.” As proof, Maud says that she did not notice any girl dressed “shabbily”—she only noticed faces, and then only if they were “amazingly beautiful or ditto ugly.” The letters continue in the same friendly tone, talking, among other things, about the loss of their mothers. Maud mentions her love of cats, and then shifts to the discussion of writing. She advises Violet not to be disappointed if a novel she has submitted for a prize does not win, for “seventeen is very young” and she may have to be older before being “able to write books as they should be written.” She advises her to learn the craft by starting with short stories. She comments lightly that she is glad Violet “liked” her nose, for “I never did!!” She signs off encouragingly, telling Violet: “You have real talent. Keep on.”

  Maud’s next letter to Violet, on January 25, 1937, was written only six days after Lucky died. This was the year she was too distressed over Chester to write anything in her journal—for the entire year. Yet, she writes a cheerful letter to Violet, telling her how she laughed over parts of her last letter. She continues:

  Yes, you are right to want your own style. Never try to imitate anybody. It’s well to read good stylists (of which I am not one). One soaks in something by doing that. But never imitate them.

  On another point, Maud assures Violet that it is human nature to mistrust “what puzzles it.” Being able to see “beauty” is “a birthright a princess might envy,” Maud says, assuring Violet that she believes that others, including Violet, can “have the flash” (a reference to “Emily of New Moon,” who has the “flash” and sees “beyond the veil”). Then she comments on the “happy ending” debate, saying that the “world must have something to keep it alive.” Violet seems to have referred to Maud as someone who is always happy, and Maud gently sets her straight: “As for my being ‘supremely happy’ nobody is that for very long in this kind of a world, my dear.… But I have always been happy in my work.”

  About Mistress Pat, and Violet’s dissatisfaction that Judy died and Silver Bush burned to the ground (which make the happy ending possible), Maud writes that books should not be “too fairy-taleish.” Then she moves to incidentals: her eye colour is grey-blue, and her cat Lucky died a week ago. After some loving comments about him, she has to end the letter because she is crying, a sad way of signing off what has otherwise been a cheerful letter.

  Their correspondence continued with advice on writing, publishing, and life. On April 4, 1937, Maud writes to her telling her not to be discouraged that MacMillan’s has returned her novel—they had also rejected Anne of Green Gables—and, she adds, without a complimentary note like the one the editor sent Violet. Maud suggests that Violet send the nov
el to her own agent, Miss Elmo, who has offices in New York and London, but warns her that no agent can force publishers to publish a book they don’t want. She tells her that getting that first book accepted is hard, and that Green Gables was rejected five times. Maud’s next letter, on May 17, 1937, is a short response to Violet’s news that Miss Elmo is going to try to place one of her stories. She cautions her against getting too excited lest she be disappointed.

  Two days after Maud writes in her journal that she doesn’t think Chester is “normal” (April 4, 1938), she describes a terrible nervous unrest and anguish which lasts all day, and “a horrible longing for death. It seems to me that everything I have done has been a mistake …” (April 6, 1938). Yet, on that same day, she writes a fairly long letter to Violet. She apologizes for a slow reply, saying she has less “pep” than she used to have. She agrees with Violet that our dreams of “tomorrow” keep people going, but warns that people can become “too tired to want a tomorrow.” Although Maud makes several allusions like this to her depression, her letter is for the most part positive and helpful. Regarding some lines of Maud’s in the Readers’ Digest, Maud tells her that the three dollars they sent her for the six words—“I was moonlighted into loving him”—is the highest payment per word she ever got for anything. She says there will be no more Emily books, then admits that she once said the same about Anne and later produced Windy Poplars. And indeed, she says, she now intends to do another Anne book, Anne of Ingleside, when she feels better. She reassures Violet that it is fine to write “pot-boilers” and advises her to read magazines for current styles. She expresses surprise that Violet thought the Pat books “sad,” because she hadn’t seen them that way, but she admits they were written during some very “unhappy” years in her life, adding that “It doesn’t do to make books all happiness. They aren’t true to life then.” Then, answering a question, she tells Violet that, yes, she does have some children— two sons at university, but no daughters: “Fate” would have deemed it “too cruel to ask any girl to live up to Anne and Co.”