Lucy Maud Montgomery

by Mary Henley Rubio

  50. Almost everyone I interviewed about Chester talked about his compulsive thieving: maids, Stuart, friends of the family.

  51. This article followed, with some irony, on the heels of an earlier one that made her life sound idyllic and her books like didactic Sunday School texts, reinforcing the idea that she was a moral-toting sentimentalist. Following a dinner with her in Norval, author A. V. Brown wrote, “Anyone with the mental equipment of L. M. Montgomery should be happy almost anywhere.” He went on to praise her books as “[far more than] just pretty playthings, they are messages, and the pulpit has yet to be built in this country that has any better. There is a moral in them.… Every book she writes is a voice pleading for the rights of childhood, [or] the sterling worth that is disguised by an ungracious exterior, [or] the love which cannot show itself in speech or look, [or] the tenderness which lives beneath an iron creed.… If anyone would increase his faith in God, in man, in nature, and in all the finest things of life, let him scan the pages of L. M. Montgomery’s books.” See Scrapbook of Clippings … pp. 364–65.

  52. Brampton Archives, minutes of the Brampton Literary and Travel Club, Book 5.

  53. See Black Scrapbook #2, p. 13.

  54. Performers wore pioneer costumes, including high silk hats. The program “consisted of old-time melodies, with a series of tableaux, recalling old-time scenes.”

  55. The first reference to this love affair is in her “old journal” on December 6, 1906. She rewrote and recopied it into her “handwritten” journals in March 1920. By the time when she was typing the 1931 copy, she left out the Herman affair, writing on June 30, 1897: “The entry in my original diary cannot be written here. I shall present the bare bones of it. I made a terrible mistake and paid the penalty of my folly in intense suffering.”

  56. Knister’s unpublished essay on the Canadian girl was among his papers when he drowned in 1932. Knister had read Anne of Green Gables, for he mentioned it in a review he wrote of her Emily books. The full article can be read in The Journal of Canadian Fiction, vol. iv, no. 2, 1975.

  57. Called “The Man Who Forgot,” it appeared in the Family Herald.

  58. Part of letter to Roberta Sparks, Saskatchewan, July 4, 1933, now held in the University of Guelph Archives.

  59. When Luella read through Maud’s journals at my house in the 1990s, she herself was in her late seventies, and she commented with great personal sadness: “It would have been unimaginably shameful to them,” she explained, “I feel very, very sorry for them now.”

  60. See Exodus 20:5–6; 34–7; Numbers 14:18; Deuteronomy 5:9–10; Jeremiah 32:18; also Greek writers like Euripides speak of the “gods” visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children.

  61. For entries referring to Maud’s wine see July 11, 1931; July 18, 1934; July 23, 1934; July 24, 1934; August 11, 1934; July 28, 1936. Luella’s comment, when asked about it, was to laugh “They were Maritimers!” and she said of course there was “medicinal” alcohol about, and that they used it.

  62. In the early 1980s, Dr. Stuart Macdonald and I read through his father’s case file at Homewood.

  63. Luella Macdonald remembered the night her father came home from the Session meeting at which they had decided to fire Ewan. As soon as her father came into the house, he kicked a chair across the room. When Luella read through Maud’s journals at my house, she said Maud’s account of the trouble at the end of Ewan’s preaching career in Norval was quite accurate.

  64. A. E. LePage was only thirteen years younger than Maud. The LePages, originally from Guernsey in the Channel Islands, were an extended clan on Prince Edward Island. The LePage clan had intermarried into Maud’s own family—the Woolners of her grandmother’s line, the Macneills of her grandfather’s clan, and others. A. E. LePage himself had been raised in Toronto, where his father moved when he was a boy.

  PART FOUR: THE TORONTO YEARS

  1. Letter to Jack Lewis. March 3, 1936.

  2. Swansea’s boundaries were Bloor Street to the north, the Humber River to the west, Lakeshore Boulevard to the south, and Grenadier Pond/High Park to the east. Swansea had incorporated as a village with its own reeve, police, and volunteer fire department around 1926, becoming part of Toronto only in the 1960s when Toronto had grown around it and borders had vanished. Today it is merely part of metropolitan Toronto, and the rural area that Maud looked out on from her bedroom window is fully developed, with the ravine behind her house now full of other houses.

  3. Personal interview with Richard and Nora Lane Braiden in their home in Toronto. March 20, 1991.

  4. Gardiner Cowan was to serve in World War II, was treated for an injury by Stuart, and later become a highly regarded architect in Toronto. He died in 1972.

  5. See entry of September 26, 1933.

  6. Maud’s dress was adorned with two long glass clips at the neck plus two big buckles at the waist. Around her neck she wore a strand of pearls, with an oval-shaped pin in her hat. A little-known secret was that Maud often purchased beads at Woolworth’s dime-store, and restrung them herself, quipping that people would think they were real jewels just as they would assume she was wealthy.

  7. Telegram, p. 2.

  8. Letter to Jack Lewis, February 28, 1930.

  9. Letter of January 19, 1932.

  10. See Black Scrapbook #2, p. 13, where Lorne Pierce calls Canadian literature “objective” rather than “subjective,” and says authors must go down “into the very crypt and abyss of a man’s soul and faithfully” report what is there in order to produce “high art.”

  11. Arthur L. Phelps, Canadian Writers.

  12. See Thomas and Lennox, p. 202.

  13. See Black Scrapbook #2, p. 51.

  14. Like many men of his generation, Deacon held a patronizing attitude towards women, despite the immense assistance he received from his own devoted and talented second wife. He had once written to a friend: “Nor about the sex matter can there be any dispute. Females being so tied to physical life are not so imaginative … as men who, not so tied, can wander in mental realms …” (Letter to Dr. Logan, October 20, 1924). Deacon was a lifelong friend of one powerful woman, Judge Emily Murphy, who had encouraged him early in his career, but strong women who neither admired nor flattered him garnered little respect from him.

  15. Luella’s description fits that of what is sometimes called a “wry neck,” or technically, sternocleidomastoid muscles in spasm. Severe muscle spasms in the neck area can compress the area around the vegus nerve, and this in turn can induce vomiting and a feeling of depression, symptoms reported by Maud.

  16. Psychiatric literature says that it is not unusual for “depression” to spread in a family in situations like the Macdonalds’s, and her feeling of being doomed was similar to Ewan’s. But the difference was that she knew her feelings were abnormal. He did not.

  17. See p. 52 of Black Scrapbook #2, where Maud speaks of “the adverse criticism she frequently receives because she portrays the lovelier side of people’s natures, and sees so much beauty in the commonplace.”

  18. The Globe and Mail, October 4, 1935.

  19. The Toronto Star was a huge paper of some thirty to sixty pages, advertising a daily circulation of 255,000, some 90,000 more subscribers than any other paper. It featured some three to five pages devoted exclusively to women’s social events, teas, and organizations.

  20. Maud was not the first to flaunt social norms here: she had heard Lady Byng speak on the same topic.

  21. See Black Scrapbook #2, p. 81. See also the remark about pigstyes in modern literature in the journals on December 30, 1928.

  22. These were “Off to the Fishing Grounds,” “When the Dark Comes Down,” and “The Hill Road.”

  23. Owen Sound Daily Times, November 6, p. 3.

  24. See Maud’s comments on Callaghan in her journal entry of December 30, 1928. By 1935, the critical debate over how to evaluate literature was gathering steam in Canada. In a Mail and Empire article on September 14, 1935, Deacon had hailed C
allaghan’s most recent book, They Shall Inherit the Earth, as “a great novel, [something] conspicuous in the front rank of Canadian fiction.” He stated that it dealt with serious moral issues, even though it had some language that would shock Canadians and showed sympathetic characters “living in sin” before marriage. Deacon noted that such language and issues were allowed in other more sophisticated countries, implying that Canada was backward and “provincial.” When two of Callaghan’s books—Such is My Beloved and They Shall Inherit the Earth—were banned by the Toronto Public Library system, this stirred up huge controversy in the newspapers. Deacon asked Callaghan if he “thought of himself as a writer of filthy literature,” to which Callaghan indignantly swore that he certainly did not. Experts were called in to pass judgment on whether they thought Callaghan’s novels offended public morality. Deacon ended one of several articles on Callaghan by quoting Hugh Eayrs, managing director of MacMillan (and Callaghan’s publisher), who asserted that Callaghan was “most certainly one of the ace-high, first-rank writers of this continent, in fact of the world” [my italics].

  25. The Sudbury Star, December 4, 1935, p. 14.

  26. See January 20, 1924, journal entry.

  27. See her reference to this in her journal entry of November 27, 1931.

  28. See The Globe and Mail, December 12, 1935, p. 10.

  29. Many women in the second half of the twentieth century have written about the influence of Maud’s novels on them at a time women were still fighting for a place in the public sphere.

  30. The London Times, November 27, 1935, p. 1.

  31. Anne of Windy Poplars, p. 151.

  32. Toronto Telegram, March 4, 1936, p. 15.

  33. The Canadian literary scene was so small that reviewers and writers invariably knew each other. Maud writes in her journals, for instance, that Marjory MacMurchy asked her to review one of Marjory’s new novels. (See the polite but unenthusiastic review on page 46 of Black Scrapbook #2.) She felt obliged to do so, even though she thought the novel very mediocre, because Marjory had given so many teas honouring her. It was particularly hard to refuse reviewing books of friends in the CAA, and most writers were in the CAA. This gave the CAA a not-unjustified image of a booster club.

  34. Of Grove’s Over Prairie Trails, Maud’s endorsement read: “This book seems to me one of the few pieces of real and vital literature that Canada has produced. The style is finished and exquisite, the restraint admirable, the atmosphere and close observance of nature wonderful.” Scrapbook of Reviews, p. 349.

  35. The fact that she gives her fictional Greaves a split Scotch-French ancestry points to Grove as a possible model since he had initially claimed split ancestry, with a Scotch mother. He later changed his story, saying he was Swedish, and of noble birth, instead of being of very ordinary birth in Germany.

  36. The term “Modernist” seemed to have variable meanings in that time.

  37. It had been back in 1926, after she had written the complimentary blurb for Over Prairie Trails, that Grove wrote his friend Professor A. L. Phelps, as quoted earlier in the Leaskdale section, that he wondered how a woman who judged other authors so accurately as Montgomery did could stand writing the books she wrote.

  38. Maud’s correspondence with Miss Elmo is on the back of manuscripts in the Confederation Centre in Prince Edward Island.

  39. See the March 3, 1936, letter to Jack Lewis for some of these comments.

  40. George Campbell’s mother, who had been raised by Maud’s Aunt Emily, had no idea what Emily’s real objection to Maud was when she said she was “ashamed to know” her—but it was a visceral and strong one, perhaps going back to Maud’s childhood stay with her. Perhaps Emily had been influenced by her brother, John F. Macneill, who passed along gossip critical of young Maud’s character and behaviour.

  41. See Margaret Lawrence (1896–1973), The School of Femininity, A Book For and About Women as They Are Interpreted Through Feminine Writers of Yesterday and Today (Stokes, 1936), and We Write as Women; Bliss Carman’s Letters to Margaret Lawrence.

  42. In Emily Climbs, published in 1925, there are many references to “owl’s laughter” and Emily’s first published poem is entitled “Owl’s Laughter,” which suggests that Grey Owl had not read her books or he would have noticed this.

  43. Archie Belaney (Grey Owl) had emigrated to Canada from England at age seventeen, refashioning himself as a native. He married an Indian wife, lived in the wilderness, and became a dedicated conservationist, passing himself off as a native in his lecture tours. Maud wrote in her entry of April 12, 1938, that she had thought he was part Indian, although she did not think him purebred.

  44. Mail and Empire, November 10, 1936, p. 6.

  45. The Globe and Mail, November 10, 1936, p. 10, announces it; The Toronto Daily Star, November 12, 1936, p. 37, covers it.

  46. Toronto Daily Star, November 14, 1936, p. 26.

  47. Toronto Daily Star, November 14, 1936, p. 26.

  48. The exception to this was that she and Stuart did discuss both Chester and Ewan, and what was perceived as mental instability in them.

  49. It was illegal to advertise or disseminate information about birth control to unmarried people or the public in general, but doctors could discuss methods of contraception with married couples. On February 12, 1937 (p. 3) and March 18, 1937 (p. 3), the Globe described a landmark case where a bookstore owner was charged and eventually acquitted on charges brought by the Crown that she distributed a pamphlet containing information about contraceptives. The judgment acquitted her, stating that she was acting for the public good: the argument went that the rich and middle-class people could get contraceptive information from doctors, but the poor were “generally breeding large families” because they couldn’t get contraceptive information, and their children, poorly cared for, were “a burden on the taxpayer” and “crowded the juvenile courts.”

  50. This rumour has been neither confirmed nor disproved.

  51. Justice Douglas Latimer (1929–2007) was Crown attorney for this region for many years.

  52. All the maids I interviewed, as well as Margaret Russell and Luella, believed that Chester was very jealous of Stuart, thinking him the favoured son and resenting that Stuart attracted friends wherever he went.

  53. This grooming intimacy feels almost disturbed psychologically, and it is likely that she was beginning to feel a sense of personal guilt over Chester’s aberrant behaviour. Perhaps, like so many of the working mothers today, she felt she had not given him enough physical contact and attention when he was young.

  54. Lucky made a lasting impression on the people in Norval, too, for he was remembered as a bit of a clown. In the summer, Lucky would wait at the back of the church until everyone was seated on a Sunday. Then, he would come in and walk up the centre isle majestically, with his tail held high, until he reached Maud’s pew. He hopped up beside her, and sat upright and motionless, just like a person, his dignified head showing above the back of the pew (for he was a large cat). He listened with rapt attention while Ewan preached the service. Then he would walk out with the Macdonald family just as if he were a family member. People said that it was worth going to church just to see Lucky’s performance.

  55. This story comes from an interview with Ethel Dennis Curry in the 1990s.

  56. Ethel characterized Ewan as a likeable but shadowy figure. He didn’t joke or talk, only said a polite “Good morning.” He often played solitaire in the dining room with a strange intensity. He did no gardening, didn’t play with the cats, did not even play with his grandchildren beyond speaking to them when they visited. Ethel remembered Maud becoming provoked at him when he would not help with any of the work, either inside or out in the yard. If asked to do some work, he immediately left and went out visiting around the neighbourhood. She, like the other maids, insisted that she didn’t notice anything wrong with him mentally, except for being a very sluggish person, old for his years, and very forgetful.

  57. The Globe and
Mail, March 19, 1937, p. 16. Her journal entry of March 23, 1937, reports that she and Dickens were tied, but the Globe account, presumably by Deacon, says she ran a close second to Dickens.

  58. See The Globe and Mail, March 24, 1937, p. 15.

  59. See The Toronto Daily Star, May 5, 1937, p. 10.

  60. Horowitz, 1997.

  61. Wacks, Oster, et al., 1990. When I was a teenager, billboards advertising Bromo-Seltzer lined the American highways.

  62. The dangers of barbiturates received much press in the last quarter of the twentieth century, when high-profile entertainers died of overdoses of barbiturates combined with alcohol. In 2007, the drug chloral hydrate, a central nervous system depressant and sedative that Maud and Ewan record taking (as Chloral) through 1919, 1924, 1925, and 1934, was said to be part of the toxic drug mix that killed American celebrity “Playboy Playmate” Anna Nicole Smith. See The Globe and Mail, March 27, 2007. It is also suspected of playing a role in Marilyn Monroe’s death. Chloral hydrate is illegal without a prescription now, and is sometimes called the “date-rape drug.” References to “chloral” have appeared in fiction such as Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, and Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies.

  63. For instance, on March 25, 1924, when Ewan was having some of his worst attacks, these were treated with both Chloral and bromides (and maybe Veronal, since this was prescribed all through this same period for the Macdonalds). Maud notes that she made Ewan drink water “copiously” because “His kidneys are not acting right, as is always the case in these attacks. His breath reeks with urea … [and she thinks] his liver is disordered, too, for his skin is such a bad colour.” The combination of all of these medications, taken over a long period in high enough doses, would have affected his kidneys and his liver. Urea is also a component used in making Veronal.

  64. Ewan was very attached to his cough syrup bottle, which he carried in his pocket all through the Norval and Toronto years, taking gulps from it when he coughed.