One wonderful day, when I was nine years old, I discovered that I could write poetry. I had been reading Thomson’s Seasons, of which a little black, curly-covered atrociously printed copy had fallen into my hands. So I composed a “poem” called “Autumn” in blank verse in imitation thereof. I wrote it, I remember, on the back of one of the long red “letter bills” then used in the postal service. It was seldom easy for me to get all the paper I wanted, and those blessed old letter bills were positive boons. Grandfather kept the post office, and three times a week a discarded “letter bill” came my grateful way. The Government was not so economical then as now, at least in the matter of letter bills; they were then half a yard long.
As for “Autumn,” I remember only the opening lines:
“Now autumn comes, laden with peach and pear;
The sportsman’s horn is heard throughout the land,
And the poor partridge, fluttering, falls dead.”
True, peaches and pears were not abundant in Prince Edward Island at any season, and I am sure nobody ever heard a “sportsman’s horn” in that Province, though there really was some partridge shooting. But in those glorious days my imagination refused to be hampered by facts. Thomson had sportsman’s horns and so forth; therefore I must have them too.
Father came to see me the very day I wrote it, and I proudly read it to him. He remarked unenthusiastically that “it didn’t sound much like poetry.” This squelched me for a time; but if the love of writing is bred in your bones, you will be practically non-squelchable. Once I had found out that I could write poetry I overflowed into verse over everything. I wrote in rhyme after that, though, having concluded that it was because “Autumn” did not rhyme that Father thought it wasn’t poetry. I wrote yards of verses about flowers and months and trees and stars and sunsets. and I addressed “Lives” to my friends.
A school chum of mine, Alma M — , had also a knack of writing rhyme. She and I had a habit, no doubt, a reprehensible one, of getting out together on the old side bench at school, and writing “po’try” on our slates, when the master fondly supposed we were sharpening our intellects on fractions.
We began by first writing acrostics on our names; then we wrote poems addressed to each other in which we praised each other fulsomely; finally, one day, we agreed to write up in stirring rhyme all our teachers, including the master himself. We filled our slates; two verses were devoted to each teacher, and the two concerning the reigning pedagogue were very sarcastic effusions dealing with some of his flirtations with the Cavendish belles. Alma and I were gleefully comparing our productions when the master himself, who had been standing before us but with his back toward us, hearing a class, suddenly wheeled about and took my slate out of my paralyzed hand. Horrors! I stood up, firmly believing that the end of all things was at hand. Why he did not read it I do not know, it may be he had a dim suspicion what it was and wanted to save his dignity. Whatever his reason, he handed the slate back to me in silence, and I sat down with a gasp, sweeping off the accusing words as I did so lest he might change his mind. Alma and I were so badly scared that we gave up at once and forever the stolen delight of writing poetry in company on the side bench!
I remember – who could ever forget it? – the first commendation my writing received. I was about twelve and I had a stack of poems written out and hidden jealously from all eyes, for I was very sensitive in regard to my scribblings and could not bear the thought of having them seen and laughed at. Nevertheless, I wanted to know what others would think of them, not from vanity, but from a strong desire to find out if an impartial judge would see any merit in them. So I employed a little ruse to find out. It all seems very funny to me now, and a little pitiful; but then it seemed to me that I was at the bar of judgment for all time. It would be too much to say that, had the verdict been unfavourable, I would have forever surrendered my dreams, but they would certainly have been frosted for a time.
A lady was visiting us who was something of a singer. One evening I timidly asked her if she had ever heard a song called “Evening Dreams.”
She certainly had not, for the said “Evening Dreams” was a poem of my own composition, which I then considered my masterpiece. It is not now extant, and I can remember the first two verses only. I suppose that they were indelibly impressed on my memory by the fact that the visitor asked me if I knew any of the words of the “song.” Whereupon I, in a trembling voice, recited the two opening verses:
“When the evening sun is setting
Quietly in the west,
In a halo of rainbow glory,
I sit me down to rest.
I forget the present and future,
I live over the past once more,
As I see before me crowding
The beautiful days of yore.”
Strikingly original! Also, a child of twelve would have a long “past” to live over!
I finished up with a positive gasp, but the visitor was busy with her fancy work, and did not notice my pallor and general shakiness. For I was pale, it was a moment of awful import to me. She placidly said that she had never heard the song, but “the words were very pretty.”
The fact that she was sincere must certainly detract from her reputation for literary discrimination. But to me it was the sweetest morsel of commendation that had ever fallen to my lot, or that ever has fallen since, for that matter. Nothing has ever surpassed that delicious moment. I ran out of the house – it wasn’t big enough to contain my joy, I must have all outdoors for that – and danced down the lane under the birches in a frenzy of delight, hugging to my heart the remembrance of those words.
Perhaps it was this that encouraged me sometime during the following winter to write out my “Evening Dreams” very painstakingly – on both sides of the paper, alas! – and to send them to the editor of The Household, an American magazine we took. The idea of being paid for them never entered my head. Indeed, I am not at all sure that I knew at that time that people were ever paid for writing. At least, my early dreams of literary fame were untainted by any mercenary speculations.
Alack! the editor of The Household was less complimentary than our visitor. He sent the verses back, although I had not “enclosed a stamp” for the purpose, being in blissful ignorance of any such requirement.
My aspirations were nipped in the bud for a time. It was a year before I recovered from the blow. Then I essayed a more modest flight. I copied out my “Evening Dreams” again and sent them to the Charlottetown Examiner. I felt quite sure it would print them, for it often printed verses which I thought, and, for that matter, still think, were no better than mine.
For a week I dreamed delicious dreams of seeing my verses in the Poet’s Corner, with my name appended thereto. When the Examiner came, I opened it with tremulous eagerness. There was not a sign of an evening dream about it!
I drained the cup of failure to the very dregs. It seems very amusing to me now, but it was horribly real and tragic to me then. I was crushed in the very dust of humiliation and I had no hope of rising again. I burned my “Evening Dreams,” and, although I continued to write because I couldn’t help it, I sent no more poems to the editors.
Poems, however, were not all I wrote. Very soon after I began to write verses I also began to write stories. The “Story Club” in Anne of Green Gables was suggested by a little incident of schooldays when Janie S — , Amanda M — and I all wrote a story with the same plot. I remember only that it was a very tragic plot, and the heroines were all drowned while bathing on Cavendish sandshore! Oh, it was very sad! It was the first, and probably the last, time that Janie and Amanda attempted fiction, but I had already quite a library of stories in which almost everyone died. A certain lugubrious yarn, “My Graves,” was my masterpiece. It was a long tale of the peregrinations of a Methodist minister’s wife, who buried a child in every circuit to which she went. The oldest was buried in Newfoundland, the last in Vancouver, and all Canada between was dotted with those graves. I wrote the story i
n the first person, described the children, pictured out their death beds, and detailed their tombstones and epitaphs.
Then there was “This History of Flossy Brighteyes,” the biography of a doll. I couldn’t kill a doll, but I dragged her through every other tribulation. However, I allowed her to have a happy old age with a good little girl who loved her for the dangers she had passed and overlooked her consequent lack of beauty.
Nowadays, my reviewers say that my forte is humour. Well, there was not much humour in those early tales, at least, it was not intended there should be. Perhaps I worked all the tragedy out of my system in them, and left an unimpeded current of humour. I think it was my love of the dramatic that urged me to so much infanticide. In real life I couldn’t have hurt a fly, and the thought that superfluous kittens had to be drowned was torture to me. But in my stories battle, murder and sudden death were the order of the day.
When I was fifteen I had my first ride on a railway train, and it was a long one. I went with Grandfather Montgomery to Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, where Father had married again and was then living. I spent a year in Prince Albert and attended the High School there.
It was now three years since I had suffered so much mortification over “Evening Dreams.” By this time my long-paralyzed ambition was beginning to recover and lift its head again. I wrote up the old Cape Leforce legend in rhyme and sent it down home to the Patriot, no more of the Examiner for me!
Four weeks passed. One afternoon Father came in with a copy of the Patriot. My verses were in it! It was the first sweet bubble on the cup of success and of course it intoxicated me. There were some fearful printers’ errors in the poem which fairly made the flesh creep on my bones, but it was my poem, and in a real newspaper! The moment we see our first darling brain-child arrayed in black type is never to be forgotten. It has in it some of the wonderful awe and delight that comes to a mother when she looks for the first time on the face of her first born.
During that winter I had other verses and articles printed. A story I had written in a prize competition was published in the Montreal Witness, and a descriptive article on Saskatchewan was printed in the Prince Albert Times, and copied and commented on favourably by several Winnipeg papers. After several effusions on “June” and kindred subjects appeared in that long-suffering Patriot, I was beginning to plume myself on being quite a literary person.
But the demon of filthy lucre was creeping into my heart. I wrote a story and sent it to the New York Sun, because I had been told that it paid for articles; and the New York Sun sent it back to me. I flinched, as from a slap in the face, but went on writing. You see I had learned the first, last, and middle lesson – “Never give up!”
The next summer I returned to Prince Edward Island and spent the following winter in Park Corner, giving music lessons and writing verses for the Patriot. Then I attended the Cavendish school for another year, studying for the Entrance Examination into Prince of Wales College. In the fall of 1803 I went to Charlottetown, and attended the Prince of Wales College that winter studying for a teacher’s license.
I was still sending away things and getting them back. But one day I went into the Charlottetown post office and got a thin letter with the address of an American magazine in the corner. In it was a brief note accepting a poem, “Only a Violet.” The editor offered me two subscriptions to the magazine in payment. I kept one myself and gave the other to a friend, and those magazines, with their vapid little stories, were the first tangible recompense my pen brought me.
“It is a start, and I mean to keep on,” I find written in my old journal of that year. “Oh, I wonder if I shall ever be able to do anything worth while in the way of writing. It is my dearest ambition.”
After leaving Prince of Wales College I taught school for a year in Bideford, Prince Edward Island. I wrote a good deal and learned a good deal, but still my stuff came back, except from two periodicals the editors of which evidently thought that literature was its own reward, and quite independent of monetary considerations. I often wonder that I did not give up in utter discouragement. At first I used to feel dreadfully hurt when a story or poem over which I had laboured and agonized came back, with one of those icy little rejection slips. Tears of disappointment would come in spite of myself, as I crept away to hide the poor, crimpled manuscript in the depths of my trunk. But after a while I got hardened to it and did not mind. I only set my teeth and said “I will succeed.” I believed in myself and I struggled on alone, in secrecy and silence. I never told my ambitions and efforts and failures to any one. Down, deep down, under all discouragement and rebuff, I knew I would “arrive” some day.
In the autumn of 1895 I went to Halifax and spent the winter taking a selected course in English literature at Dalhousie College. Through the winter came a “Big Week” for me. On Monday I received a letter from Golden Days, a Philadelphia juvenile, accepting a short story I had sent there and enclosing a cheque for five dollars. It was the first money my pen had ever earned; I did not squander it in riotous living, neither did I invest it in necessary boots and gloves. I went up town and bought five volumes of poetry with it – Tennyson, Byron, Milton, Longfellow, Whittier. I wanted something I could keep for ever in memory of having “arrived.”
On Wednesday of the same week I won the prize of five dollars offered by the Halifax Evening Mail for the best letter on the subject, “Which has the greater patience – man or woman?”
My letter was in the form of some verses, which I had composed during a sleepless night and got up at three o’clock in the wee sma’ hours to write down. On Saturday the Youth’s Companion sent me a cheque for twelve dollars for a poem. I really felt quite bloated with so much wealth. Never in my life, before or since have I been so rich!
After my Dalhousie winter I taught school for two more years. In those two years I wrote scores of stories, generally for Sunday School publications and juvenile periodicals. The following entry from my journal refers to this period:
I have grubbed away industriously all this summer and ground out stories and verses on days so hot that I feared my very marrow would melt and my gray matter be hopelessly sizzled up. But oh, I love my work! I love spinning stories, and I love to sit by the window of my room and shape some ‘airy fairy’ fancy into verse. I have got on well this summer and added several new journals to my list. They are a varied assortment, and their separate tastes all have to be catered to. I write a great many juvenile stories. I like doing these, but I should like it better if I didn’t have to drag a ‘moral’ into most of them. They won’t sell without it, as a rule. So in the moral must go, broad or subtle, as suits the fibre of the particular editor I have in view. The kind of juvenile story I like best to write – and read, too, for the matter of that – is a good, jolly one, “art for art’s sake,” or rather “fun for fun’s sake,” with no insidious moral hidden away in it like a pill in a spoonful of jam!
It was not always hot weather when I was writing. During one of those winters of school teaching I boarded in a very cold farmhouse. In the evenings, after a day of strenuous school work, I would be too tired to write. So I religiously arose an hour earlier in the mornings for that purpose. For five months I got up at six o’clock and dressed by lamplight. The fires would not yet be on, of course, and the house would be very cold. But I would put on a heavy coat, sit on my feet to keep them from freezing and with fingers so cramped that I could scarcely hold the pen, I would write my “stunt” for the day. Sometimes it would be a poem in which I would carol blithely of blue skies and rippling brooks and flowery meads! Then I would thaw out my hands, eat breakfast and go to school.
When people say to me, as they occasionally do, “Oh, how I envy you your gift, how I wish I could write as you do,” I am inclined to wonder, with some inward amusement, how much they would have envied me on those dark, cold, winter mornings of my apprenticeship.
Grandfather died in 1898 and Grandmother was left alone in the old homestead. So I gave up teachin
g and stayed home with her. By 1901 I was beginning to make a “livable” income for myself by my pen, though that did not mean everything I wrote was accepted on its first journey. Far from it. Nine out of ten manuscripts came back to me. But I sent them out over and over again, and eventually they found resting places. Another extract from my journal may serve as a sort of milestone to show how far I had travelled.
March 21, 1901
Munsey’s came to-day with my poem “Comparisons” in it, illustrated. It really looked nice. I’ve been quite in luck of late, for several new and good magazines have opened their portals to this poor wandering sheepkin of thorny literary ways. I feel that I am improving and developing in regard to my verses. I suppose it would be strange if I did not, considering how hard I study and work. Every now and then I write a poem which serves as a sort of landmark to emphasize my progress. I know, by looking back, that I could not have written it six months, or a year, or four years ago, any more than I could have made a garment the material of which was still unwoven. I wrote two poems this week. A year ago, I could not have written them, but now they come easily and naturally. This encourages me to hope that in the future I may achieve something worth while. I never expect to be famous. I merely want to have a recognized place among good workers in my chosen profession. That, I honestly believe, is happiness, and the harder to win the sweeter and more lasting when won.
In the fall of 1901 I went again to Halifax and worked for the winter on the staff of the Daily Echo, the evening edition of the Chronicle. A series of extracts from my journal will tell the tale of that experience with sufficient fulness.
11 November, 1901
I am here alone in the office of the Daily Echo. The paper is gone to press and the extra proofs have not yet begun to come down. Overhead, in the composing room, they are rolling machines and making a diabolical noise. Outside of the window the engine exhaust is puffing furiously. In the inner office two reporters are having a wrangle. And here sit I – the Echo proof-reader and general handy-man. Quite a ‘presto change’ from last entry!
The Complete Works of L M Montgomery Page 791