This conjunction of despondent journal entry and cheerful letter demonstrates what a biased view of Maud’s complicated emotional life the journals by themselves give. She made huge efforts to pull herself out of despondency, in this case by trying to help others.
In June 1938, Maud again writes, saying that she has wanted to write earlier to thank her for the “dear little handkerchief,” but she has not been well. She quotes some favourite lines of poetry from Marjorie Pickthall and Bliss Carman. Violet had not heard from Miss Elmo, and Maud warns her not to bother the agent again, because it takes time to place material.
Maud writes next on November 23, 1938, after Chester has started to repair his relationship with Luella, saying she feels much better than she did in the spring, when she was in the middle of “a very serious nervous breakdown.”84She adds:
Don’t you think your question, “What on earth could make you nervous?” just a wee bit silly? What is there in being a writer that can fence out the cares and problems that enter into all lives? Nothing, alas! And if a strain is too long continued something must give way. Never judge anyone’s life from the outside: Nobody can tell what may be going on under the exterior.
Maud tells Violet that she has finished Anne of Ingleside and hopes for its publication the next summer. Maud adds that her own birthday is coming up, on St. Andrew’s Day (November 30), and is in the “dourest, dreariest, drabbest month of the whole year.” There is chitchat about cats, and explanation of her term “the race of Joseph.” (That this began in an old family joke that referred to the biblical phrase “King who knew not Joseph,” and it refers to “people who share our taste in loves and jokes and whom we recognize as ‘kindred souls’ as soon as we meet them.”) Finally, Maud comments that Chester is in his last year of law and Stuart in the fifth year of Medicine. Maud adds (presumably to a question Violet has asked in a previous letter) that it is not for her to say if they are “nice” but that she “likes them very much” herself.
The Macdonalds could not sound like a more normal family, and Maud chatters on about a range of incidental topics: making sweet clover silk sachets for their drawers; a letter from an English lady who read Jane of Lantern Hill in Jerusalem; a new play by Alice Chadwick (a pseudonym) based on Anne of Green Gables that is being put on in Brampton. This full and happy letter was designed to offer Violet encouragement.
—
Maud’s spirits soared at Christmas in 1938 with Chester and Luella back together. The minute January 1939 rolled around, she returned to typing up the revised Anne of Ingleside. She and Chester went to movies again, took companionable walks, and discussed books. One day, when he stayed home sick, Chester flattered Maud by telling her he had read all her books that he hadn’t read previously. January brought was more good news: Chester had passed his first-term exams, and since two of these were finals, only five remained to pass in the following spring, and then he would graduate in law.
Chester’s relationship with Maud improved, but Ewan’s situation did not. One evening Ewan came up to their bedroom in the evening while Maud was trying to work. He created a “terrible scene” she says, adding that she was tired of these—twenty years of them (January 24, 1959). This comment is a surprise. Everyone who knew him, including his son Stuart, repeatedly characterized Ewan as a kind and gentle man. He was someone who smoothed over arguments, not someone who started them. Maud gives no explanation about those “twenty years” of “terrible scenes.” She has described Ewan during his so-called mental breakdowns, and perhaps this is what she refers to. She says she cried some after this, but returned to her writing. What was this scene about? Did Ewan want commiseration over his illness, or attention from his wife (such as Chester got, lying on the bed with his mother stroking his hair)? Did Ewan complain about Chester’s new-found grace in his mother’s eyes and think it insincere? Did Ewan merely want to go to bed, but felt that his own bedroom was not his own space? Or did he have a psychotic episode from the medications he was taking?
Both maids—Ethel Dennis and Anita Webb—said that all real business in the Macdonald household was conducted in the bedroom, behind closed doors. It was Maud who held the purse-strings. When the bedroom became a boardroom, Ewan was not part of these discussions. Since the bedroom was Maud’s space, both for writing and for family business, Ewan’s entry into his own bedroom could disrupt his wife, and he was of course very conscious of this. Chester, by contrast, regarded Maud’s bedroom as his personal roaming territory.
There is a story from Luella describing how Chester barged into the bedroom late in the evening during the Christmas week she was there, looking for Maud. Ewan, sitting naked on the side of the bed, was very embarrassed and quickly grabbed a wad of bedclothes to cover his private parts. Chester went downstairs to the kitchen and laughed about his father’s modesty to Maud and Luella, calling his father a “prude.” The incident shows Chester’s insensitivity—ironic given that Chester’s own lack of inhibitions and his “forced marriage” had driven his father into a near-suicidal depression and helped end his career as a minister.
Ewan continued to deteriorate throughout early 1939, with occasional sudden returns to his friendly, normal self. Two doctors told him he needed an “operation” on his “nerves.” Others told him more honestly that they could not give him any help. He gathered more medications. In February 1939, when Dr. Lane came to check on Ewan, he commiserated with Maud for having “a heavy problem” on her hands. “Nineteen years of it,” Maud writes in her journals. “Ewan will never be well again. And yet most of his trouble is purely psychic …” (February 20, 1939). She did not know the full extent to which he was self-medicating, and no one then, including the doctors, fully understood the dangers in barbiturates and bromides.
Maud still had remarkable powers of rejuvenation herself. When Chester was agreeable and her writing was going well, she could withstand a great deal. A comment about Ewan’s spells of raving, dreadful appearance, and declarations that he “would not last long” is followed by her laconic statement that she “typed all day” (January 26, 1939).
Maud had first started planning Anne of Ingleside in 1937, her “terrible” year. Apparently she had been unable to work on it for a long period, with her mind so unsettled by Chester—not to mention addled by the medications she took. But when she started writing again in September 1938, she finished her first draft in three months, and she had it revised and typed up in less than two months. It was finished on January 31, 1939. She signed the contract on February 1, 1939. She dedicated Anne of Ingleside to “W.G.P.” in memory of Will Pritchard, brother of her best friend Laura Pritchard in Prince Albert. She had been reading over Will’s letters and said that she felt the attraction of his “wholesome” personality again.
Anne of Ingleside (1939)
Anne of Ingleside dips back into Anne’s married life, filling in the time after Rilla’s birth. It is episodic, each chapter built around a self-contained narrative taking place within the Blythe family. Some of the stories are riveting in their depiction of evil and pent-up anger. The narrator tells us that the Blythe household is an idyllic one, in which there is endless laughter and joy, but few of the tales actually demonstrate this. Many chapters show Maud deflecting the misery in her own life into fictional constructs. She lightens her touch with humour and pieces of nostalgic fluff, but it seems likely that frustration over her own family’s dysfunction is the main narrative force.
Maud knew that gossip was one key source of female power in a patriarchal culture, and she often used it to instigate action or to move the narrative along. Ingleside is built on gossip, reportage, and hearsay—the narrator tells tales, and the people (mostly women) within the narratives relate gossip, sometimes gently, other times maliciously. In the majority of the stories, Maud walks in adult emotional territory even when the primary characters are children. Manipulative, controlling adults (or nasty children) mislead innocent ones; there are also offhand references to tortured marriag
es (where men are reputed to bully and beat their wives), and even women who have poisoned their husbands. This toxic territory is leavened with sentimentalizing about motherhood, the nurturing power of women’s friendship, the cute sayings of children, and love of beauty in the PEI landscape. The fact that many of the stories are told via gossip distances the reader from the pain they reflect.
An example of the intertwining of gossip and narrative appears in Chapter 32, when Anne hosts a quilting party for the Ladies’ Aid Society. Anne’s son Walter hides under a table and is only later discovered. By that point, he (and the book’s readers) have overheard a barrage of salacious gossip not intended for children’s ears. In this quilting party, there is reference to “what happened at Peter Kirk’s funeral,” but the story is not told until Chapter 33.
This chapter describes a disruption at the funeral of Peter Kirk, a pillar in the Presbyterian Church and a rock in the local community. The story is a clear depiction of how long-term suffering in a marriage can grind anyone down. In this case, Peter Kirk’s cruelty is deliberate, and we can speculate that Chester’s behaviour has helped focus Maud’s mind on psychological cruelty.
Peter Kirk was an elder in the church, and a tyrant in his own home. The community assembles at his funeral for the usual eulogizing service. When the sister of his first wife enters, people are astonished and remember that Clara Wilson had vowed at her sister’s funeral that she would “never enter” Peter’s “house again until she came to his funeral.” After the minister finishes the service, Clara Wilson rises and spits out another tale to the assembled mourners saying that she will now speak the truth about him: the maddened diatribe that follows recounts how he made his wife’s life a misery by torturing and humiliating her, destroying first her joy, then her soul, then driving her to her death after ten years of marriage.
In the chapter on Peter Kirk, Maud bundles up all the hypocrisy she has witnessed over a lifetime of funerals, takes aim at decorous piety, and delivers herself of an immense amount of anger at men who were tyrants in their own homes—men supposedly like her Grandfather Macneill and Uncle John F. Macneill. And perhaps Maud saw aspects of these men reincarnated in Chester’s frightening rages.
Throughout Anne of Ingleside, funerals are a constant theme, although they are oddly represented as some of the happier events in the community. The narrative catches Maud’s core emotions: she knew very well the experience of being imprisoned within a rigid church and patriarchal culture, within social propriety and platitudes that embalm the truth, and within a human community that used cruelty and gossip as social control. She knew the pain of tension in a family home. Though Maud took aim at male tyranny, she also criticized women’s gossip.
In Anne’s own home, she is described as “surrounded and encompassed by love” (Chapter 3), but this home is invaded by Gilbert’s Aunt Mary Maria, a fifty-five-year-old self-pitying spinster who poisons the atmosphere with hurtful barbs and constant complaints. Aunt Mary Maria is also full of ailments—asthma, allergies, and bad headaches—all things from which Maud herself was suffering. It appears that Aunt Mary Maria intends to stay forever. When this aunt is placed beside the depressive Maud of the journals, she begins to sound like a “doppelgänger”: she’s the shadowy voice behind the cheerful public Maud who wrote happy novels. It almost seems that Maud had developed a spite against her own character, Anne, for having such a happy family, and sharing a space in life alongside Maud’s. It seems as though Maud felt some latent urge to inflict on Anne the torments that she, Maud, felt from her “sick” self. Maud’s characterization is sharp and funny, and she obviously enjoyed the writing so much that she did not dispense with Aunt Mary Maria until Chapter 16.
In subsequent chapters, Maud moved into very dark territory, depicting how innocent children can be taken in by bad children who lie. In Chapters 28 and 29 we meet Jenny Penny, the first of three evil children who come into the community and mislead Anne’s innocent daughters. Jenny Penny is from a trashy family, unsuitable for a Blythe child, and with her “round creamy face,” “soot-black hair,” and “enormous dusky blue eyes with long tangled black lashes,” she bears faint similarity to Stuart’s girlfriend, Joy Laird.
Chapters 30 and 31 deal with another malevolent child, Dovie Johnson, who initially seems “nice-mannered,” well dressed, and ladylike. This story shows how “secrets” become cruel commodities of trade in child culture: one of Anne’s daughters, Nan, trades her new red parasol for the “secret” that evil Dovie then tells her—that Nan is really someone else and that they were exchanged at birth by a malicious nurse who disliked her mother. Nan, devastated at first, thinking she is really the daughter of drunken, six-toed Jimmy, a marginal and very scary fisherman, eventually finds out it is a big lie, but only after terrible grief.
Maud had long been fascinated by the idea of the “changeling” being substituted at birth, a motif from faerie lore that explained how normal parents sometimes found themselves producing children who were truly alien or evil. This novel resonates on many levels. The concept plays with the construction of identity, too, and Maud knew all too well what it was to have others destroy your sense of who you are. As Anne says lightly in Chapter 27, “Life and death are in the power of the tongue.”
In the final chapters of Anne of Ingleside, marital jealousy threatens the happy Blythe home. The book ends, of course, as do all of Maud’s books, with harmony restored to the social order. Maud could not write the ending to her own life so easily, but she had not lost her storytelling ability. Her vision was darkening and her physical energy flagging, but she still maintained her whimsical touch.
No sooner was Ingleside finished than Maud went off to a Women’s Press Club dinner. In early February 1939, she spoke to a Toronto Ministers’ Wives Association, and then gave another talk for the Victoria-Royce Young People’s Society to please Chester. Then, a few days before Valentine’s Day in 1939, Chester floated a trial balloon: he told his mother that a prominent local lawyer might take him into his practice if he had sufficient financial backing. On Valentine’s Day, he gave his mother a nice box of chocolates. Three days later, she proudly snapped a picture of her son in his 48th Highlander kilt, commenting how well he looked in it—better, she felt, than in his “civilian clothes.”
Her energy level soared. She went on a shopping spree downtown and bought, among many other things, the latest Agatha Christie mystery to add to her favourite shelf of other Christie mysteries. She wrote a fat, newsy letter to Myrtle Webb, attended a CAA meeting, played card games with neighbours, and wrote happy entries in her journal, remembering old days. In March she worked for most of the month on an enormous catch-up letter to G. B. MacMillan in Scotland. She travelled to Lucknow, Ontario, to speak at their Book Fair. She got a letter off to Violet King, full of chitchat and advice on Violet’s writing. She mentioned she had enjoyed writing Jane of Lantern Hill because it was a new heroine and setting, unlike Ingleside which was about “old characters.” She would not be able to write something “stupendous,” as Violet had suggested, she said because that wasn’t her style: “The wise writer knows her métier and sticks to it.” She also informed Violet that she couldn’t write a novel about “pioneer days” because it would require too much research, and she didn’t have time for that, but she did plan to write some short stories in the spring. “I love writing short stories,” she concluded in this letter of March 18, 1939.
When Luella and the children next visited, little Cam broke his grandmother’s beloved china spotted dog, Gog, to “smithereens”—one of her most prized purchases from her 1911 honeymoon— and even that didn’t faze her. She merely gathered up the shards of the china dog, trundled downtown with them, and had him professionally restored.
She was even happier in March 1939 when RKO Studios started angling for screen rights to Anne of Windy Poplars. They offered $7,500 for the rights and for an option on Anne’s House of Dreams. This promise coincided with some other good royalty cheques
of over $1,500, spurring her to splurge on a new car since Chester would need their old one to visit them once he moved out. On April 4, she was the “guest of honour” at the Toronto Branch of the Canadian Women’s Press Club afternoon tea.85 All seemed to be righting itself in her world.
—
And, then, on March 29, 1939, Maud suddenly wrote in her journals that something was terribly “wrong in this household” and she could not seem to find her way “to the bottom of it.” Everything had changed. She had noticed that Mrs. Thompson’s behaviour had seemed strained some months earlier. Her first suspicion was that Chester had in some way behaved offensively towards her. He spent much time reading on the couch in the basement recreation room, an area Mrs. Thompson constantly passed through this area on her way to the laundry room; it was also the place where June’s toys were kept and where she played. Chester could be very charming, but Maud knew that he could also be blunt and patronizing, particularly to people he believed beneath him—people like hired help or servants. She suspected a problem with Chester.
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