Lucy Maud Montgomery

by Mary Henley Rubio

  The first-born son who had been her pride and joy had been, in the end, her undoing. She had been unable to cope with the anxiety he caused.

  Right after Chester’s birth, Maud had written some of the most poignant lines ever written about motherhood:

  As I hold little Punch’s dear body in my arms I am lost in wonder—and awe—and terror—when I realize that everybody was once a baby just like this. All the great men, all the good men, all the wicked men of history. Napoleon was once a chubby baby, kicking on his nurse’s lap—Caesar once smacked his lips over his mother’s milk as does my mannie—Milton once squirmed with colic—Shakespeare cried in the night when he grew hungry. Yes, and—horrible thought—Nero once looked up with just such dear, star-like innocent eyes and Judas cooed to himself with the same sweet noises and vocables—Nay, even that wondrous Person—so grand and wonderful and amazing that it seems almost sacrilege to call him man, even to those of us who can no longer believe him anything but the consummate flower of humanity at its best—even He was once a white, dimple-fisted, waxen-faced little creature like this, cuddled in his mother’s arms and drawing his life from her breast. What a terrible thing it is to be a mother—almost as terrible as it is beautiful! Oh, mothers of Caesar and Judas and Jesus, what did you dream of when you held your babies against your beating heart. Of nothing but sweetness and goodness and holiness perhaps. Yet one of the children was a Caesar—and one was a Judas—and one a Messiah! (December 1, 1912)

  She had also written about the time when her cat had shrieked, and Chester, a nursing babe at her breast, had “uttered a cry of terror.” She had comforted him, and afterwards wrote in her journal: “But ah, little son, some day there may come a Fear into your life such as not even your mother can charm away. The ‘twin Eumenides—Fear and Pain’—they cannot be escaped by mortals.” Now she had come to a point in life where that beloved little son, now a grown man, had brought her more fear and pain than she could endure.

  —

  Stuart knew his mother was very ill, and that she was worried about her finances now that she could not write, but he was caught totally off guard by what happened next. So were many others. On April 24, 1942, Dr. Lane had dropped by to see her before he left to work, as he often did because she was in a fragile state. Later in the day, Dr. Lane called Stuart at the hospital. His mother had been found dead in her bed (by Anita Webb, who was back). Dr. Lane and Stuart each rushed to the house from uptown, arriving at approximately the same time. In the bedroom, Dr. Lane motioned to Maud’s bedside table. He told Stuart to “take care” of the things on it and he would “take care of the body.” Her bedside table held some bottles and a sheet of paper.

  Both doctors took her death as a suicide. Dr. Lane was eager to dispose of evidence that she had taken medicines that might have killed her. The death certificate lists Maud’s primary cause of death as “coronary thrombosis,” and Dr. Lane attributed it to “arteriosclerosis and a very high degree of neurasthenia.” He did not tick the box that listed suicide as a possible cause of death. Dr. Lane knew that Stuart’s medical career would be damaged if people thought his famous mother had committed suicide—suicide then brought a terrible stigma to the family—so he would not have ticked this box in any case. Dr. Lane also would not have wanted it spread that his most famous patient might have died of a drug overdose under his watch, whether that overdose had been intentional or inadvertent.

  Neither of these two doctors paused in the pressure of the moment to study what the page on the bedside table actually said. Nor did they notice that there was a very specific page number—176—at the top of it. The note, which was dated April 22 (two days before her death), was not, as they believed, and as Stuart believed all his life, specifically a suicide note. It was the final page of Maud’s journal, her “life-book,” her journals, which she had written up in draft form to copy into the formal ledger. This page 176, written in ink, in fairly fluid, confident handwriting, said:

  This copy is unfinished and never will be. It is in a terrible state because I made it when I had begun to suffer my terrible breakdown of 1940. It must end here. If any publishers wish to publish extracts from it under the terms of my will they must stop here. The tenth volume can never be copied and must not be made public during my lifetime. Parts of it are too terrible and would hurt people. I have lost my mind by spells and I do not dare to think what I may do in those spells. May God forgive me and I hope everyone else will forgive me even if they cannot understand. My position is too awful to endure and nobody realizes it. What an end to a life in which I tried always to do my best in spite of many mistakes.104

  This page is clearly numbered “176.” It is clearly dated April 22, not March 23, the date on the last entry in her journals, or April 24, 1942, the date of her death. The question is: where did the other 175 pages go?

  Maud’s lifelong practice had been to keep rough notes on numbered pages of scrap paper such as this and to write them up in her journal eventually. When she had an involved tale to tell—as was the case with the Herman Leard story—she wrote up one or more rough drafts before transcription. When her trials were particularly upsetting, she waited a long time to see how events would turn out, as in the gap between 1933 and 1936 after Chester’s marriage. But she had finally filled that gap in 1936 and after, even though committing the story to paper was painful.

  Now she had a gap between 1939 and 1942. This piece of paper—the page 176—appears to have been the final page of an account of those years.105 These pages would have detailed her terrible heartbreak over Chester, and possibly her fear of his rages. Where did they go?

  Chester had had nowhere to go after he failed in his practice in Aurora, Downey having ended his contract, so he had returned to Toronto, in anger and disgrace. When the Toronto General Trust Company began taking their inventory of the house after Maud’s death, as part of settling the estate, they recorded that Chester occupied the basement. Chester always had a key, and he had access to everything in the house before and after his mother’s death. He certainly could have taken the missing pages and destroyed them. (He would not have dared to touch the ten bound volumes of her formal handwritten journals because they were described in her will, but loose pages that no one knew about would have been a different matter.)

  There is no way of determining exactly when they disappeared. If some or all of those 175 pages went missing before Maud’s death, and she discovered this, she would have been devastated. She was a driven and compulsive woman, and she was lucid enough during these last years to have had every intention of finishing her life-book, in spite of all its sadness, so she could leave it for posterity. If the pages went missing before her death, this would explain the very short entries for 1941 and 1942: her data to recopy into the remaining blank pages of Volume 10 of her journal would have been gone. But why would Chester have taken the first 175 pages and not the final one, if they were all stacked together, as presumably they would have been? She had this final page in her possession at the time of her death. Under this possible but unlikely theory, Chester either did not find the final page, or she rewrote page 176 from memory (both implausible scenarios).

  It seems more probable that the 175 pages went missing after her death, and that the final page was next to her bed, perhaps to signal (as Stuart thought) that it was indeed the end of her story, even though that story was not yet written down in the journals. Or perhaps it was her final message to the world, written two days earlier when she felt her life ebbing (for she was very weak and ill). Perhaps she had felt very weak and fuzzy-headed that morning, and had taken the top page to contemplate, wondering what to do with this manuscript. To her, the life lived on the page was as real as life in the flesh. Her life was in the written manuscript. She had lived to write, and she had written to live.

  Chester was out of the house when his mother was found dead. It follows that he would not have known about page 176 having been found on her bedside table; Stuart folded it
into his pocket. Stuart would not have known about the other 175 pages being elsewhere. He interpreted this page as a single, stand-alone note written solely to explain her final despondency, and it is easy to see why he did.

  Chester had always had free run of his mother’s bedroom, and he had every motive to prowl through his mother’s business papers after her death, particularly since he knew she was given to making changes in her will that affected his inheritance. He was not living with Luella now, so nothing would or should come to him by the terms of the will—unless she had drawn up another codicil. Ewan was there, but he was so ill that he comprehended only part of the time that Maud had died.

  Chester also knew his mother kept a journal, and he had good reason to think it would contain much about him. It is very likely that when he came home later that day, he went rummaging and found the other 175 pages.106

  Between Maud’s last entry in her journals on March 23, 1942, and the dated page 176 of April 22, 1942, Maud had perhaps written her life almost to its conclusion. The statement on March 23 that “I shall be driven to end my life” does suggest that she had at least contemplated suicide, but she did not in fact die until April 24, 1942. Did Maud retire to her room on April 24 to take a modified and private rest cure after bundling her last manuscript (The Blythes are Quoted) off to the publisher on April 23, and then accidentally overdose on drugs? It is easy to overdose on barbiturates if one has developed a serious dependency on them. Maud’s body weight had dropped so much that a small amount of two central nervous system depressants could easily have killed her. However, Maud’s comment to Margaret Mustard the week before her death tips the evidence in the direction of a premeditated death by someone who was in the grip of a major depressive episode, and may or may not have understood that she was dependent on drugs that were killing her. Whatever the case, there is little question that Maud was suffering unbearable psychological pain. Death would have been welcome.107

  After Maud’s death, Chester began removing carloads of materials from the house when Stuart was at the hospital working. He did this before the trust company had taken inventory. Neighbours alerted the trust company and Stuart and the bank immediately changed the locks on the doors so nothing further would be taken until they had made their inventory. Stuart relocated his father to a nursing home as soon as he could. Chester no longer had access to the contents of the house.

  Chester was not living with Luella when his mother died, so technically none of the 180 items on the list were to come to him. Many of them were not in the house when the inventory was made, and some were never found. (They may have been pawned.) Chester kept many other items that he valued, including his mother’s books, her manuscripts, a large crazy quilt (which he later gave to a relative on the Island), and certain other items such as a china dog figurine and the silver tea service. Stuart offered him what household furnishings he wanted (out of Stuart’s share) because Stuart was going to be shipped off to the war. Then a sale was held.

  Maud’s final journal entries recognize that her mind and creative spirit were damaged. Did she recognize her drug dependency when she wrote: “My position is too awful to endure and nobody realizes it”? Or was she referring to Chester? Or both? In any case, she was still a rational and lucid woman who knew that she had come to a very sad state.

  Her final entries in her completed handwritten journal ledgers function to fulfill the tragic trajectory that she had seen emerging for her life back in 1897, as does the final page 176 that was never transcribed into her ledgers. It is a chilling thought indeed that her need for artistic completeness in her journals (her “life-book”) might have played a part in making her want to end her own life. We are reminded again of Anne’s advice to her daughter in Anne of Ingleside, published in 1939:

  An imagination is a wonderful thing to have … but like every gift we must possess it and not let it possess us.… you must learn to keep on this side of the borderline between the real and the unreal. Then the power to escape at will into a beautiful world of your own will help you amazingly through the hard places of life.

  Maud seems once again to have been writing out of her very own experience, and an increasing awareness of the bifurcated nature of her own reality. Her imagination had not deserted her, but the creative spirit that turned the dross and disappointments in life into witty, uplifting laughter in her books was seeping away. Her gift of wings—the passionate nature that brought her both depths and glory, and fed her art—began to sink her under the pressure of flight.

  Still, Maud had soared gloriously in her lifetime. Her creative spirit produced books that have raised the spirits of millions of readers all over the globe. They are books that changed lives. They inspired innumerable women to greater heights of achievement. They brought comfort and consolation to heads of state yearning for the more tranquil years before the outbreak of World War I. They brought courage and hope to Polish soldiers in the trenches in World War II, inspiring them to fight for home and love.108 They anchored innumerable grandmothers and mothers and children in shared and joyous spots of time. They brought millions of people from all over the world to see the landscapes she wrote about and loved. They showed women writers that they could write about ordinary women in small towns and have a fascinating subject. Maud knew that what went on in people’s minds was the most interesting thing in the world, and that the vagaries of human emotion would almost always trump the intellect. She understood that the grand narratives that direct civilization all begin in the longings and fears of individual human hearts. She understood the complexities of human motivation. Most important of all, her books helped us laugh at human foibles, bringing readers into a shared human community. Her best books conveyed a joy in life that has lived long after their creator departed from the “shores of time.”

  Maud had lived much of her life, like her volatile little heroine Anne, between the soaring of the imagination and the “depths of despair.” A fitting epitaph might be found in her own words, written after a period of great distress on January 31, 1920:

  One cannot have imagination and the gift of wings, along with the placidity and contentment of those who creep on the earth’s solid surface and never open their eyes on aught but material things. But the gift of wings is better than placidity and contentment after all.

  William Arthur Deacon during the 1930s.

  Eric Gaskell in uniform after the war had started and he had resigned as head of the Canadian Authors Association.

  CAA officials, June 29, 1937. Back row: Howard Angus Kennedy, Leslie Gordon Barnard, Laurence E. Brownell Front row: Maud, Pelham Edgar, Margaret Lawrence.

  Hugh MacLennan, John Morgan Grey, and Violet King at the CAA Convention in June 1946. (Maud corresponded with Violet, encouraging her to write.)

  Chester Macdonald and his second wife, Ida Birrell.

  From Maud’s copy of Sir Walter Scott.

  Maud’s funeral in Cavendish, PEI, in April 1942.

  Chester Macdonald at the time of his arrest.

  Dr. E. Stuart Macdonald of St. Michael’s Hospital, Toronto.

  Ruth Steele and Dr. Stuart Macdonald at the time of their marriage.

  Most of these pictures are available on the University of Guelph website (www.lmmrc.ca), as well as many others that could not be included for reasons of space.

  EPILOGUE

  Maud’s story

  Maud wanted to be buried in Prince Edward Island, the isle of her birth, in the Cavendish cemetery where all her kinsmen lay. Her husband and two sons made the thousand-mile train ride with her remains. They crossed the windy Northumberland Strait by ferry, travelled to Hunter River by local train, and were driven the last twelve miles by car.

  The burial was in Cavendish on April 29, 1942, in the “cemetery on the hill,” next to the schoolyard where she had played, and near her mother’s and maternal grandparents’ graves. In one direction lay the “Green Gables” house and “The Haunted Wood.” In the other direction, towards the sea,
lay sand dunes and lingering patches of white ice floating on the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The “reluctant Canadian spring” had not yet come to the Island, and some drifts were still unmelted. Normally, cold winds blew off the sea, but on the day of Maud’s funeral a warm, soft wind blew over the land towards the ice. In that gentle breeze, a few songbirds sang, according to accounts at the time.

  The little white wooden church was filled to capacity, and many mourners had to stand outside. They had come from all over the Island. The officiating minister was the Reverend John Stirling, who some thirty-one years earlier had married Maud Montgomery and Ewan Macdonald. Recalling the funeral years later, his daughter observed that in 1942 he was close to death himself, facing the most difficult funeral sermon of his life. He fought to control his own emotions as he spoke. His sermon was followed by the comforts of the Twenty-Third Psalm, a prayer by the Reverend J. B. Skinner of Winsloe, and a scripture reading by the Reverend G. W. Tilley, pastor of the Cavendish church.

  The official account of this funeral in the Presbyterian Record does not record a somewhat unseemly disturbance in the church also recalled by his daughter. Ewan Macdonald kept looking around in confusion and crying out, “Who is dead? Who is dead?” Each time he was told by his sons who it was, he would ask cheerfully, “Who is she? Too bad! Too bad!” Then the “Who is dead?” questioning would begin again.

  Ewan’s disruptions, which his sons tried desperately to silence, added to John Stirling’s distress and, for those who heard them, to the pathos of the service. The church was filled with those who either had known Maud or who felt enormous pride in her achievements. The mourners were stifling the sounds of grief they felt for one of their own, one who had gone away and had now come home in death to the land that had produced her talent. Even people who had never met her basked in the glory she had brought the Island. Those who had read her books instinctively loved anyone who could have written them; they did not have to have known her personally.