The Books: The Selected Journals of L. M. Montgomery: Volume V: 1935-1942

Daily Book Excerpt: Memoirs:

Next book on the Memoir/Letters/Journals shelf is The Selected Journals of L. M. Montgomery: Volume V: 1935-1942

Here, sadly, is the final volume of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s journals. There are times when they are nearly unreadable. It makes me feel disloyal to even say that. However, during these years, she also managed to write Mistress Pat, Anne of Windy Poplars, Jane of Lantern Hill and Anne of Ingleside (not to mention a final book of short stories about Anne and Gilbert’s family, published as The Road to Yesterday). Not a bad output for a woman who seems to be suffering from a nervous condition, not to mention her husband having a huge breakdown (yet another one), and her compounding worries and stress about her now-grown-up sons. As well as the darkening situation in Europe which weighed heavily on her. Almost none of her old introspection goes into these final journals. It is as though she has no more energy left. The entries are mostly very short, and mostly talk about how she slept and how Ewan slept. She details their physical maladies, and usually ends each short entry with some bleak statement about how she can go on living. Then, when the entries are long, they are bizarrely long – like the 20 page entry about her cat Luck. I believe, if I remember correctly, the editors mentioning that there were more such entries – writing about her cat seemed to relax and soothe Lucy Maud – but I had an odd experience as I slogged through that 20 page biography of a cat. I love my cat, too. I find her little existence to be a fascinating and relevant thing, and I do my best to take good care of her, because I think she deserves it. She’s a good girl, and a creature I share the planet with, and if anything bad happened to her, I would be crushed. I love that damn cat. But I haven’t written reams and reams of entries about her in my journal. Maybe later, once she has passed away, I might find that comforting to do. But it is a strange experience to read that entry about Luck. She always was obsessed with the cat, writing about him a lot in her journal, but in these final years, it seems to turn into something else. I think the editors did not include all of the material about her cats, thinking (rightly) that readers would be bored out of their minds, but I am glad they included at least the one. It is not interesting reading, and a part of me kept thinking, “Okay, Lucy, wrap it up now.” But she can’t. This is her private journal. I’m not meant to be reading it anyway. Although she had some eye on posterity (and would rewrite her old journals, editing and cleaning up the prose), probably believing that one day they would be published … her mindset when writing in them was clearly private. And, in a weird way, reading that interminable entry about her cat Luck, felt like a violation of her privacy. She was writing it for her own reasons, obviously, and I respect her reasons. I have had many a dark season in my life. Times when the doors of introspection were closed to me. 2009 comes to mind. The things I wrote in my journal then are basically unreadable to me now. Panic and grief had made me a wild woman. When the worst of it subsided, pulling out like the tide (after four unending months), I felt quiet and almost chastened, afraid of how bad it had gotten, and instead of calmly writing in my journal about what had happened, “catching my journal up”, so to speak, I stopped writing altogether. So let’s say my journal was published. You would get wild prose of the bleakest stuff, raging on for MONTHS, and then …. nothing. The journal itself tells a very different story than what actually happened. It’s what is left OUT that is often the truth. With Lucy Maud Montgomery, what we have is what she wrote. Small entries about her sleep, worries about Ewan, and then worries of a greater nature – that she seems unable to express at all. She writes 20 page entries about her cat. She will scribble down panicked responses to the news from Europe, wondering if it were possible that the world would soon be at war again. At least from her journal, you get the sense that she resents her two sons for giving her so much worry. There is very little motherly fondness, at least in the pages of the journal. Just lashing out at how much trouble they have been, what a disappointment.

She seems to stop being able to get joy from nature, something that was always so intense for her, and yet I hesitate to make that statement, because if you look at the books that she wrote at that time, you see that the opposite is true. Jane of Lantern Hill is a love letter to P.E. Island, with lush descriptive prose about the sea, the red roads, the atmosphere. The two “Anne” books are lovely, comedic, and successful as stories. Lucy Maud was a woman who could pull herself together, when it came time for her real work. It is nearly impossible to imagine that the wild woman spouting how hopeless she feels in entry after entry would be capable of writing four novels during those years, but there you have it. The beauty, the mystery, of art.

So even though I found most of this volume to be boring and repetitive, I read every word, because I felt somehow I owed her that. She’s one of my idols. This was what was going on with her privately. I got to know her through her public persona, as the author of all of these wonderful books I have loved since I was little, and it is shocking and sad to hear what a bad time she had of it. It feels important to honor ALL of her, the wonderful author and the bleak fatalistic woman in these pages. It is all her.

Here’s an entry from 1937. She and Ewan had moved to Toronto to a house she really loved, called “Journey’s End”.

Excerpt from The Selected Journals of L. M. Montgomery: Volume V: 1935-1942

Saturday, Oct. 30, 1937
“Journey’s End”

I have spent a very miserable day. Tortured by a dreadful restlessness. I took a sedative Lane advised but it did not help. I went to Loblaw’s in the afternoon to do my weekly shopping. Chester as usual drove me but never spoke and looked very furious. I think he hates me.

In the later afternoon I walked to Bloor because I could not remain in the house. It was a lovely day – warm and sunny; the drive was dotted with the ethereal purple of Michaelmas daisies in the gardens. But there was no healing for me. Why, oh why? I have many faults and have made many mistakes but I have tried to do right – to be a good wife and mother. Why must I endure this endless hopeless misery?

Tonight everyone is out. My loneliness is terrible. My head feels as if an iron band were round it and my arms ache and burn. I can’t even read. If only Lucky were here, my dear comforting old companion! The cats we have mean nothing to me.

I am so tortured I don’t know where to turn or what to do. I have a return of claustrophobia tonight but cannot go out because the wind is too cold. I am really in a dreadful state and am making a little relief in “writing it out”. I can’t believe Lane was right when he said that bleeding did not mean anything serious. I feel I am doomed to die a terrible death of torture – I would welcome an easy death but not such a one as that. I cannot believe anything good will ever again come to me or anyone I love. Everything presents itself to me in the darkest hours. This is the state to which the child I have loved has brought me. I wish I could stop loving him. He could not torture me then. But this is my curse. I cannot.