Lucy Maud Montgomery

by Mary Henley Rubio

  65. The symptoms of barbiturate withdrawal may occur some twelve to twenty hours after the last dose, depending on whether a patient was using a long- or short-acting barbiturate.

  66. Sal volatile (ammonium carbonate) was a drug given as a stimulant, often for hysteria, faintness, and lassitude. It was given either as smelling salts, a liniment, or internally, and overdoses could act as a narcotic and irritant poison.

  67. Each of these drug classes, as central nervous system depressants, could mimic the symptoms of being drunk. Ewan’s confusion when delivering the sermon, his shaky hands at dinner when he tried to hold the cup, his disorientation and irritability on the trip home, his inability to keep the car on the road—all are symptoms consistent with either too many bromides or barbiturates, or a mixture of the two. His brief sobering up after she gave him alcohol could point to a temporary reprieve from withdrawal symptoms.

  68. Because the doctor did not have the full picture of the medications Ewan had taken (or been given), and Maud was giving Ewan doses without knowing what he had already taken, the doctor was diagnosing on incomplete information.

  69. There are a number of still shots in Maud’s scrapbooks and other periodicals of the early 1920s.

  70. The description of this event, still remembered and recounted two years later, actually appears in the Victoria-Royce Young People’s Society notes for January 10, 1939.

  71. The Globe and Mail, November 11, 1937.

  72. Luella recounted how her mother-in-law could make her favourite novels and their characters so incredibly vivid that she felt Maud spent more time living in those worlds than in her own, retreating into them when real life became too depressing.

  73. See March 9, 1938, in Montgomery’s journals.

  74. This information came from the Victoria-Royce Church archives.

  75. Fifty years later, not knowing what had happened to Chester, this woman wrote the editors of Maud’s newly published journals, recounting her dates with Chester, and recalling how Maud had telephoned her mother to say that she and Ewan “now felt that perhaps they had made a mistake when they forced their son to marry his seventeen-year-old pregnant girlfriend. He wanted a divorce.” Maud, who was humiliated over Chester’s affairs, and undoubtedly trying to save face, had told the mother that “she was the only girl whom ‘Jerry’ [Chester] had really loved.” That did not soften her mother’s and father’s attitudes towards him, however. Chester’s last communication to her was to tell her that he was “posted to Bermuda with the 48th Highlanders.” This was a lie, of course—he had been turned down for medical reasons—but the lie gave him a noble exit. Nor was it true that Maud and Ewan had forced Chester to marry Luella; Chester and Luella had married secretly and then informed his parents.

  76. See Thomas and Lennox, William Arthur Deacon, p. 202.

  77. The traits of a psychopath would be laid out three years later in Hervey Cleckley’s The Masks of Sanity (1941), a book that is still considered the classic and definitive treatment of the psychopath (or sociopath) and can be read online. Cleckley gives a sixteen-point checklist of the traits of a psychopath, and the definitions do fit the behaviour recounted by Maud, Stuart, and later people who knew Chester in various capacities.

  78. We don’t know what she had in mind, but maids and many others who knew Chester recounted his compulsive lying and stealing, and some mentioned his impulsive sexual behaviour, which had shown up early and continued after he married. After the journals were published, another woman, also a university student at the time, wondering what had happened to Chester, recounted his driving her to a secluded road in a Toronto ravine, where he made sexual advances. When she vigorously resisted, he took her home.

  79. I interviewed Eric Gaskell in Ottawa in the 1990s, and had some phone conversations with him. The courtly Mr. Gaskell was by then a retired parliamentary secretary and government advisor living in Ottawa. He had retained the title of “Commodore” from his wartime service in the Canadian Navy.

  80. He was selected to go, but the Olympics were cancelled because of the war.

  81. Personal letter from Violet King Morgan, dated October 15, 1992.

  82. Violet King’s publications included the novel Better Harvest (Toronto: J. M. Dent, 1945), numerous poems, and several short stories between this period and 1965. A few of her stories were picked up by international publications.

  83. Letter of October 15, 1992, from Violet King Morgan.

  84. No doubt largely either caused or intensified by her use of medications.

  85. The Toronto Telegram, April 4, 1939, p. 89.

  86. To my great regret, I did not ask her why she left Maud’s employment, and I did not have a chance to get to know her well enough to ask this before she died.

  87. Joy only told this to me after I had known her for about ten years and she was in her eighties. Joy died before the fifth and final journal was published, and she never knew that Maud bore her the degree of malice that she did.

  88. It is unlikely that Maud herself heard the detailed gossip about Chester back in Norval—telling such tales to the minister’s wife would have been like “belling the cat” in the fairy tale—but Maud had already made her own observations about Chester’s excessive interest in sex. She also knew that most of the town’s young people, including Stuart, congregated in Josie Laird’s house, and she would have rightly suspected that Chester was the subject of gossip there. The idea that her family might be talked over in the Laird house would have been a very bitter thought, enough to make her despise Josie and Lewis Laird.

  89. In early summer 2004, before Volume 5 of the journals was published, I gave June Thompson the sections about her mother to read. After seeing what Maud wrote about her mother, June said her mother wouldn’t have known how to speak to Maud if she was “put on the mat to answer for herself.” She said that her mother was a very non-confrontational person, and would have been unnerved by Mrs. Macdonald’s force of personality. There is no proof that Chester ever behaved inappropriately towards June, but clearly Mrs. Thompson had taken his measure and was worried about his behaviour.

  90. Earlier instances where thefts by sons are covered up by the parents may seem incomprehensible today, but concealing family shame was deeply ingrained in that earlier culture.

  91. Did he feel hostility for Mrs. Thompson because she was friendly with Luella, and thought him a cad for many reasons? She had mistrusted him ever since her diamond engagement ring disappeared from her room in Norval, and she had reinforced her bad opinion of him since resuming employment with Maud in Toronto. Or, now that he was back on good terms with his mother, did he act partly out of displaced aggression at his mother for forcing him either to reconcile with Luella or be cut out of his inheritance? He could attack his mother through her maid. Or did his offensive behaviour come from self-loathing? Chester knew that he was not the son his mother wanted him to be. Or did Chester act impulsively on his ill-defined, accumulated resentments, without thinking anything out?

  92. As noted earlier, Maud was by nature a non-confrontational person. She would keep silent and watch people, and only when matters had come to a certain point would she explode.

  93. His class was full of lawyers who went on to very distinguished careers: the Honourable William Goldwin Carrington Howland, Kenneth Archibald Foulds, His Honour Jacie Charles Horwitz, Mervin Mirsky, Walter Halcro, Calvin Boyd, Rupert Alfred Parkinson, Q.C., and the Honourable Gregory Thomas Evans. In 1991, I contacted all Chester’s class members who were still living with a letter asking if they remembered Chester from their class. Most of the lawyers from that class knew each other. But despite the fact that I also enclosed Chester’s graduation picture, only two of the lawyers in the group had any memory of ever having seen him. One wrote that he knew almost all of the hundred-odd students in the class, and although he remembered Chester’s name, he did not remember his face at all. The second wrote that he could recall no particulars but he was pretty sure he had seen Ches
ter gambling “on the second floor of Osgoode Hall around the rectangular table” where they “rolled the dice.” At a time when the other young lawyers were establishing contacts with others in this gifted group, Chester was invisible.

  94. In the 1990s, James Innes Stewart, Q.C., the president of Chester’s 1939 graduating class, told me that Downey, an established K.C., would have taken Chester into partnership because in 1939 cash was in very short supply. Also, because Maud was so well known, having her son would help advertise the practice.

  95. My first interview with Anita was in Toronto, at the Stuart Macdonald residence, in 1982. She was a very forthright, good-humoured woman with a memory for details. I met her later, after Stuart’s death, for other talks.

  96. Maud’s gown fit Olive perfectly; at age eighteen in 1939, Olive was five feet four inches tall, weighing roughly 108 pounds, with a twenty-three-inch waist. Olive later changed her name to Linda, and her married name was Linda Sparks.

  97. Maud’s real estate was to be converted to cash when she died, and divided between her two sons (or their heirs), except for a fund of $4,000 set aside to care for Ewan during his lifetime. Should neither son survive, nor their issue, the estate was to go to the Prince of Wales College in Charlottetown.

  98. This breakup happened while Anita Webb was still with Maud.

  99. According to Anita, and Stuart, it was after the fall that Stuart had her blood checked and found she was “over-sedated.”

  100. At teaching hospitals like St. Michael’s, researchers had begun to suspect that too much bromide might cause serious secondary health problems, but its damaging psychiatric effects were not yet understood. Much later medical journals became full of articles on the dangers of bromide poisoning from frequently used medications like Miles-Nervine and Bromo-Seltzer, and around 1975, bromide compounds were withdrawn from the market. Bromide compounds are still used in some medicines and pesticides today, but they are carefully controlled. See Horowitz, 1997.

  101. The majority of the 180 items listed held enormous sentimental value for her: several framed paintings and watercolours, including a head view of “Anne of Green Gables” and the original artist’s painting for Anne’s House of Dreams; a large number of framed and unframed photographs of family, friends, relatives, and favourite scenes in PEI; the original manuscripts of Rilla of Ingleside, Anne of the Island, Rainbow Valley, Emily’s Quest, Magic for Marigold, Pat of Silver Bush, and Mistress Pat, plus the typewritten copy of her journal, with no rights of publication, and the manuscript of the story of “Jocelyn’s Home,” which appeared in A Tangled Web, and the manuscript play of The Blue Castle; her framed marriage certificate; Frede’s bridal nightgown; handiwork that Maud herself had done: a crazy quilt, a bolero of point lace, a tablecloth, plus a handkerchief and lace doily; some things from the “blue chest” at Park Corner; many china, silver, and pottery pieces with great sentimental value to her; some old coins, candlesticks, jugs; her opera glasses; a gilt parlour mirror; a cherry vase which figures in The Story Girl; her silver jewel casket; a silver gazing ball on a stand; a silver tea-set of four pieces which was a wedding gift to Frede from Maud; a pendant of pearls and peridots; a narrow gold bracelet given her by Ewan during their engagement; an old school reader with David Macneill’s name written in it, dated 1823; a tea wagon; a tall black vase and a painting given her by Isabel Anderson; Chester’s first pair of boots, metallized; a bedroom chair with a cane seat which was one of the six wedding chairs of the Reverend Mr. Geddie, the first missionary of the Presbyterian Church in Canada, given to David Macneill and then to Myrtle Webb; her red-striped glass marble, one of her prized childhood possessions; some specially bound copies of a few of her books; various books and anthologies; her gold thimble; Chester’s own baby book and photograph album; a ring with two topazes in it; typewritten script of the talking picture of Anne of Green Gables; warrant of her O.B.E. autographed by King George V and Edward, Prince of Wales; her miniature O.B.E. insignia; framed diploma of the Royal Society of Arts and Literature; her pair of small china dogs. Although many of these items had primarily sentimental value, there were some quite valuable.

  102. This phrase stuck in his mind over the years because he did not understand it. It could possibly have been a reference to the famous “rest cure” for women advocated by a famous American doctor named Silas Weir Mitchell (1829–1914). This is satirized in a famous short story of 1899 by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) called “The Yellow Wallpaper.” This cure of putting “neurasthenic” women into enforced bedrest had grown out of the widespread idea that women were weak creatures who could not handle the stress of life. The term “rest cure” had remained in currency after Dr. Weir Mitchell’s death, and bedrest was advocated when women needed to recover from mental distress.

  103. When she died, she had stocks and bonds with a face value of about $18,500, but with the war coming on, there was no telling what would happen to them. Her anxiety over money is partly explained by the fact that anyone who had been through the Crash of 1929 never felt secure again.

  104. It was written on the back of Frederick A. Stokes Company royalty statement from January 1, 1939, to June 30, 1939, for selling 123 books at $1.44 per copy, with a 10 percent royalty, $17.71, plus balance of $91.77, with a total of $109.48. This was not a recent scrap of paper on which she had scribbled out a suicide note, but part of the advance jottings that she did before copying her entries into a journal ledger later on.

  105. She had only twenty free legal-sized pages left in Volume Ten, but the handwritten letter-sized pages could have been greatly condensed into much tighter writing. Or she could have started a Volume Eleven, but I doubt she would have done that because ten was a round number to end off a life, and her life on paper was one that had become as real to her as her lived life.

  106. There is, of course, another possibility—that Maud destroyed the first 175 pages herself and kept the last page, 176, and did intend it as a final note. The last entry in her journal was dated March 23, and this loose page is dated April 22, so it finished off her life story. Yet, that she could have destroyed the pages herself seems highly unlikely— too much effort had gone into their creation, and they held the key to those final years. Her written life had assumed enormous importance to her, as part of her legacy to the world, an historical document of one woman’s journey through time.

  It is important to note that page “176” refers to itself as an “unfinished” document of which portions can be published after her death. On it, she makes a reference to a second document, the tenth handwritten journal (which had been finished off on March 23, 1942). She says that this tenth volume must never be made public during her lifetime—an odd thing to say on April 22, 1942, if she was contemplating suicide in the next day or so. In all cases, her will gave Stuart the right to make the decision about what could be published and when after her death. It appears that she expected that he would get the entire 176 pages, which she had not copied into her journals.

  107. See Volume 1 of her published journals, page 393, where she discusses suicide in her entry of February 7, 1910. In a later entry on May 10, 1922, she says: “Personally I have never felt the horror in regard to suicide that some feel …”

  108. See Wachowicz, in CCL, and the M.A. thesis by Krystana Sobkowska, describing how the Polish Army during World War II issued Montgomery books to the troops in the field, hoping to inspire them to fight harder for a vision of domestic happiness.

  EPILOGUE

  1. Presbyterian Record, June 1992, p. 45.

  2. The Toronto Telegram, September 14, 1955.

  SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

  This bibliography is highly selective. With a few exceptions, it cites only items quoted from or referred to in my text. For a more complete listing of books, articles, theses, and clippings that are part of any research into Montgomery’s life and worldwide influence, go to the bibliography I prepared for the L. M. Montgomery Research Centre at the University of Guelp
h . That bibliography is maintained and updated by the University of Guelph library.

  I have also excluded from the list below most of the massive body of literature on literary, Church, and Canadian history, as well as material from such contextualizing areas as book publishing, popular literature, feminist studies, and cultural theory. Also excluded are books and articles, both historical and contemporary, on mood disorder, manic-depression, and other psychiatric disorders, which are easily located in libraries or on the Internet. However, some lesser-known references of a general nature which are neither on the Internet nor readily accessible in most libraries but which provided useful background information are cited (e.g., materials relating to Montgomery’s Scottish and English ancestors and cultural heritage, her early reading, and recent articles in forensic pharmacology). Some of this material is located in the University of Guelph Scottish Collection of rare books, a partner to the L. M. Montgomery Collection.

  The bibliography also excludes scores of documents, booklets, letters, e-mails, and interviews assembled over the years, unless these are specifically cited or referenced in the text. Most of these items relating to Montgomery and her milieu, which have been gathered over a thirty-five-year period, will be donated to the University of Guelph Archives, where they will be catalogued and eventually opened to later researchers.

  A longer chronology of Montgomery’s life, as well as a list of her published books, can be found online at the University of Guelph website. A bibliography of all of the known editions of Anne of Green Gables is in preparation by Bernard Katz and will appear later on the University of Guelph website. An invaluable list of her books and translations, poems, and stories is in the Russell, Russell, and Wilmshurst Preliminary Bibliography (1986), which is now being updated by Benjamin Lefebvre and will eventually be available through a link from our website. Scholarly publications on Montgomery’s writing (including theses), as well as newspaper and magazine items, are constantly being added to our website at Guelph. Many links to other sources of information about Montgomery are also there.