The Books: The Blue Castle (L.M. Montgomery)

Daily Book Excerpt: YA/Children’s books:

6a00c2251fc04a604a00c2251fc2c7604a-500pi.jpgThe Blue Castle – by L.M. Montgomery. Another excerpt!

Yet another Valancy/Barney montage.

I love this one because … with the crisis at the end of the excerpt – you can see that Barney basically lets Valancy love him with all her heart. He may not love her back in the same way (not yet anyway) – and he may kind of tease her about her intensity – but he doesn’t try to hold her back, or make her not love him, or keep her calm, or talk her down from her feelings … I guess I’m just speaking from my own experience where … you know. When I’m in love, I am in LOVE, man. I’m an old-fashioned girl. I am not a modern woman. And so it is devastating when a guy – who also has feelings for me – tries to get me to calm down, be more cool about it, and not “let” me just go there. Go hot and cold, put on the brakes, whatever. Perhaps Barney feels safe in letting Valancy “go there” because as far as the two of them are concerned – this is not for a lifetime. Valancy will soon die … so maybe he figures: “in the meantime, I’ll just let her be in love with me. It’s okay that she loves me that way.”

Oh, and girls: in this excerpt it is quite explicit that they sleep in the same bed. I can’t imagine either of them could lie there and not … you know. Not that it’s all about the sex, but I know it’s on ALL of our minds!!!

(I love the cat Banjo. Lucky’s cool, too – but I especially love psychotic split-personality cats like Banjo. They crack me up.)

Also, sorry, one more thing:

empery of silence

Lucy Maud’s words. That is gorgeous. It gives me the “flash”. “Empery of silence”. I wish I had come up with that.

Oops, one last thing: Knowing the misery of Lucy Maud’s marriage, the unrelenting misery, passages like these make me ache with sympathy. She never sat around and talked with her husband, for hours on end, about books, and the world, and life. He was barely interested in anything outside of his own feverish conviction that he would burn for eternity in hell. He was, obviously, a barrel of laughs. She married him because … uhm … why? But he was no companion. He was no mate. He had ZERO sense of humor. He resented her writing. Etc. The guy was a jackass, sorry. I know he was ill, but man. I’m on her side, completely. So these long passages of companionship have an intensity to them that perhaps might not have existed if that part of Lucy Maud were satisfied in her real life. At least that’s what I like to believe. Lucy Maud’s life was hell – in many ways. But if it had been easier, perhaps she wouldn’t have written so much or so poetically? She taps right into our deepest longings, dreams … and maybe that’s because she lived mainly in her dream-land in her head, too.


Excerpt from The Blue Castle – by L.M. Montgomery.

New year. The old, shabby, inglorious outlived calendar came down. The new one went up. January was a month of storms. It snowed for three weeks on end. The thermometer went miles below zero and stayed there. But, as Barney and Valancy pointed out to each other, there were no mosquitoes. And the roar and crackle of their big fire drowned the howls of the north wind. Good Luck and Banjo waxed fat and developed resplendent coats of thick, silky fur. Nip and Tuck had gone.

“But they’ll come back in spring,” promised Barney.

There was no monotony. Sometimes they had dramatic little private spats that never even thought of becoming quarrels. Sometimes Roaring Abel dropped in – for an evening or a whole day – with his old tartan cap and his long red beard coated with snow. He generally brought his fiddle and played for them, to the delight of all except Banjo, who would go temporarily insane and retreat under Valancy’s bed. Sometimes Abel and barney talked while Valancy made candy for them; sometimes they sat and smoked in silence a la Tennyson and Carlyle, until the Blue Castle reeked and Valancy fled to the open. Sometimes they played checkers fiercely and silently the whole night through. Sometimes they all ate the russet apples Abel had brought, while the jolly old clock ticked the delightful minutes away.

“A plate of apples, an open fire, and ‘a jolly goode booke’ are a fair substitute for heaven,” vowed Barney. “Any one can have the streets of gold. Let’s have another whack at Carman.”

It was easier now for the Stirlings to believe Valancy of the dead. Not even dim rumours of her having been over at the Port came to trouble them, though she and Barney used to skate there occasionally to see a moive and eat hot dogs shamelessly at the corner stand afterwards. Presumably none of the Stirlings ever thought about her – except Cousin Georgiana, who used to lie awake worrying about poor Doss. Did she have enough to eat? Was that dreadful creature good to her? Was she warm enough at nights?

Valancy was quite warm at nights. She used to wake up and revel silently in the cosiness of those winter nights on that little island in the frozen lake. The nights of other winters had been so cold and long. Valancy hated to wake up in them and think about the bleakness and emptiness of the day that had passed and the bleakness and emptiness of the day that would come. Now she almost counted that night lost on which she didn’t wake up and lie awake for half an hour just being happy, while Barney’s regular breathing went on beside her, and through the open door the smouldering brands in the fireplace winked at her in the gloom. It was very nice to feel a little Lucky cat jump up on your bed in the darkness and snuggle down at your feet, purring; but Banjo would be sitting dourly by himself out in front of the fire like a brooding demon. At such moments Banjo was anything but canny, but Valancy loved his uncanniness.

The side of the bed had to be right against the window. There was no other place for it in the tiny room. Valancy, lying there, could look out of the window, through the big pine boughs that actually touched it, away up Mistawis, white and lustrous as a pavement of pearl, or dark and terrible in the storm. Sometimes the pine boughs tapped against the panes with friendly signals. Sometimes she heard the little whisper of snow against them right at her side. Some nights the whole outer world seemed given over to the empery of silence; then came nights when there would be a majestic sweep of wind in the pines; nights of dear starlight when it whistled freakishly and joyously around the Blue Castle; brooding nights before storm when it crept along the floor of the lake with a low, wailing cry of brooding and mystery. Valancy wasted many perfectly good sleeping hours in these delightful communings. But she could sleep as long in the morning as she wanted to. Nobody cared. Barney cooked his own breakfast of bacon and eggs and then shut himself up in Bluebeard’s Chamber till supper time. Then they had an evening of reading and talk. They talked about everything in this world and a good many things in other worlds. They laughed over their own jokes until the Blue Castle reechoed.

“You do laugh beautifully,” Barney told her once. “It makes me want to laugh just to hear you laugh. There’s a trick about your laugh – as if there were so much more fun back of it that you wouldn’t let out. Did you laugh like that before you came to Mistawis, Moonlight?”

“I never laughed at all – really. I used to giggle foolishly when I felt I was expected to. But now – the laugh just comes.”

It struck Valancy more than once that Barney himself laughed a great deal oftener than he used to and that his laugh had changed. It had become wholesome. She rarely heard the little cynical note in it now. Could a man laugh like that who had crimes on his conscience? Yet Barney must have done something. Valancy had indifferently made up her mind as to what he had done. She concluded he was a defaulting bank cashier. She had found in one of Barney’s books an old clipping cut from a Montreal paper in which a vanishing, defaulting cashier was described. The description applied to Barney – as well as to half a dozen other men Valancy knew – and from some casual remarks he had dropped from time to time she concluded he knew Montreal rather well. Valancy had it all figured out in the back of her mind. Barney had been in a bank. He was tempted to take some money to speculate – meaning, of course, to put it back. He had got in deeper and deeper, until he found there was nothing for it but flight. It had happened so to scores of men. He had, Valancy was absolutely certain, never meant to do wrong. Of course, the name of the man in the clipping was Bernard Craig. But Valancy had always thought Snaith was an alias. Not that it mattered.

Valancy had only one unhappy night that winter. It came in late March when most of the snow had gone and Nip and Tuck had returned. Barney had gone off in the afternoon for a long, woodland tramp, saying he would be back by dark if all went well. Soon after he had gone it had begun to snow. The wind rose and presently Mistawis was in the grip of one of the worst storms of the winter. It tore up the lake and struck at the little house. The dark angry woods on the mainland scowled at Valancy, menace in the toss of their boughs, threats in their windy gloom, terror in the roar of their hearts. The trees of the island crouched in fear. Valancy spent the night huddled on the rug before the fire, her face buried in her hands, when she was not vainly peering from the oriel in a futile effort to see through the furious smoke of wind and snow that had once been blue-dimpled Mistawis. Where was Barney? Lost on the merciless lakes? Sinking exhausted in the drifts of the pathless woods? Valancy died a hundred deaths that night and paid in full for all the happiness of her Blue Castle. When morning came the storm broke and cleared; the sun shone gloriously over Mistawis; and at noon Barney came home. Valancy saw him from the oriel as he came around a wooded point, slender and black against the glistening white world. She did not run to meet him. Something happened to her knees and she dropped down on Banjo’s chair. Luckily Banjo got out from under in time, his whiskers bristling with indignation. Barney found her there, her head buried in her hands.

“Barney, I thought you were dead,” she whispered.

Barney hooted.

“After two years of the Klondike did you think a baby storm like this could get me? I spent the night in that old lumber shanty over by Muskoka. A bit cold but snug enough. Little goose! Your eyes look like burnt holes in a blanket. Did you sit up here all night worrying over an old woodsman like me?”

“Yes,” said Valancy. “I — couldn’t help it. The storm seemed so wild. Anybody might have been lost in it. When — I saw you — come round the point — there — something happened to me. I don’t know what. It was as if I had died and come back to life. I can’t describe it any other way.”

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10 Responses to The Books: The Blue Castle (L.M. Montgomery)

  1. charlene says:

    oh, these montages are so neat! I love how Valancy and Barney are so right for each other. I mean, I think a lot of people would have some difficulty with just *how* freeform their life is… or want scheduled together time, or something (like, my sister would have conniptions over the playing checkers all night)… but it is perfect for them.

    and hahahaha… thank you for satisfying my prurient curiosity!!

  2. red says:

    I love, too, how Lucy Maud includes the part about the “spats”, To me, this has the ring of truth to it – that they would actually disagree, and have dramatic little arguments. It just seems really human to me.

    I want to live in that house. Seriously.

  3. Narcissa says:

    I was a bit uncertain whether I should write this, because it has been a while since the entry was published, but then I read that you had a lifelong obsession with Lucy Maud Montgomery, so *g*

    I have always returned to your posts whenever I read or reread one her books. And now I have read the first four volumes of her journals (I have to order the fifth). And… Why, why, why? Why did she ever marry that man? He isn’t funny (she refers to *one* joke he makes – all the time… Which annoys her.). He isn’t charming. He’s not kind, or obliging (I don’t mean to say he’s cruel. Just… indifferent. You don’t want indifferent in a man). He’s not proud of her. He doesn’t like (“is incapable of “) discussing books, or nature. He doesn’t care about *anything*. And Lucy Maud who cared about *everything*!

  4. sheila says:

    Narcissa – Hi, there. Reading those journals is so painful, isn’t it? – because compared to her books it is one long yowl of anxiety and unhappiness. (Makes her books seem even more miraculous, don’t you think??)

    I have no idea why she married him, although I can make some guesses. Perhaps desperation that she would never get married? That she was no longer a young woman and she needed to have kids? That she felt she had buried her heart when her first-love died? Herman was his name, right??

    I mean, she was a working-woman, she was well on her way to not making just a nice living from writing, but a fantastic living from writing – she didn’t “need” a man, but it was a different time. I have ZERO idea what she saw in him. Even his face makes me angry. hahahaha

    I don’ t know, but BOY what a disastrous match. I find it difficult to have sympathy for him, even though I know he was mentally ill, and must have had a harrowing time of it. He sounds like a dreadful man, and her unhappiness just SCREAMS off the page. And yet, she continued to be so prolific – I am so admiring of her work ethic and how good so many (most) of her books are, written under those horrible conditions.

    I read the journals and I know it was a different time but I found myself thinking, “Well. This is exactly what Divorce is made for.” I know she couldn’t, and there was the added pressure that he was a priest. I think she had a fatalistic streak – which was also mixed with deep loyalty. Her grandparents were pretty awful, too, but it was “her lot” to take care of them and delay marriage until they died. That was what you did then. Ewan walked into that world and maybe she thought he would be an “escape”.

    UGH.

    The fifth journal is pretty brutal. I found it almost un-readable, she was in so much pain.

    Thanks so much for the comment, I hope you return.

  5. Narcissa says:

    Oh God. It gets worse? And I who so happy for her, her and her beautiful house o’ Dreams :( :( :(

    I get why she wanted to get married. I get why women of today want to get married! :) I just don’t get why she couldn’t have taken one of the kind, perfectly decent men who asked her. I knew (because I had been reading these posts) how it would turn out, so I found myself cheering her on whenever another love interest showed up, hoping against all hope (and historical facts…) that she would have taken one of those instead. Obviously, I don’t mean that she should have married anyone she didn’t want to marry, I just don’t understand why she didn’t want any of those, and did want… him.

    Oliver MacNeil(l?), for instance. He was really into her and came into her life at the opportune moment. Before that I liked Nate Lockheart, Lou Dystant, and Herman Leard, but I knew there wasn’t any hope for any of them.

    But she didn’t seem to be into any of the men that were really into her. And I can’t help but wonder if that is the crux of the matter. Lucy Maud had never experienced being really *adored*, you know? She hadn’t experienced that side of love, hardly love at all, if you ask me…

    By the way, what did you think of her father?

    And she seems, in her youth, actually up until the fourth volume of the journal, to be almost… contemptuous of the young men who loved her. Or their love. She describes their talk as “sentimental” etc. The only one she talks of without this touch when she looks back in the third journal is Alf Simpson, the worst of the lot, really. My interpretation: Because he didn’t declare himself.

    We often search the familiar in love. I don’t think Lucy Maud understood, until it was all too late, that love isn’t always restrained or dignified. Sometimes it’s chintz cards and flowery frases and messy hugs in airports (how much ideally, is up to the individual :) ). Sometimes that just means that the other person doesn’t love you. I mean, I can imagine that proposal scene, dispassionate and polite.

    If she is implying what I think she’s implying about Edwin Simpson, and she is right, that shows that the two times she chose she chose men who weren’t *into* her. It has been written elsewhere that Ewan waited patiently for her for four years. Isn’t that in itself… a bit unnatural? I don’t mean that he should have been resentful or sullen (though apparently he was quite good at that…), but as you say, they were both getting on in years, and wouldn’t it have been a bit natural that he was a bit impatient? Or wanted to keep the Cavendish parish or try to get it back to be near her? Or marry her and stay in that house with her? (Mr. Knightley comes to mind…) Was he even back for visiting those four years in between? And Lucy Maud writes *nothing* of him in those years, after that winter of hoping for his letters to cheer her up and being disappointed. (That was *heartbreaking*.)

  6. sheila says:

    Narcissa – You are making me want to go back and read them again. I had forgotten about poor Edwin Simpson!! I know she was madly in love with Herman (it’s even somewhat implied that she went rather far, sexually, with him – as far as she had ever gone) – but she knew it could “never work” – he had never read a book, he was a farmer, he wasn’t of her class, all that stuff. Then of course he died the following year, and seriously, 35, 40 years later – she still shuddered at the thought of him. maybe she felt like she could never love again after that.

    Yes, the final journal is a litany of panic and anxiety. WWII approached, and she couldn’t bear it. She was obsessed with the “failures” of one of her sons – which just seems like normal growing pains to me, although he did get a girl pregnant – but she was just HEARTbroken by her children. She makes mountains out of molehills. They get speeding tickets and she acts like the world is coming to an end. She did not really “roll with the punches”, if you know what I mean, at least not as a mother.

    She only wrote a couple of entries in her final years and they are literally wails of pain. “How will I bear it?” and things like that. Very painful to read. Meanwhile, though, she was STILL writing. The “Pat” books (her worst books, I think) – and also “Jane of Lantern Hill”, which is lovely. But the journal kind of tapers out.

    A couple of years ago, her granddaughter revealed that Montgomery had apparently committed suicide, via drug overdose. (She was always taking those sleeping pills – I can’t remember the name of them).

    But there is some dispute about that. Reading her journal, I thought it was amazing she held out for that long, her unhappiness seems so STARK – and perhaps clinically based. Like, she needed to have HELP in dealing with her anxieties and sadnesses, perhaps she was bipolar, I don’t know – but it was as though only work kept her on the right path.

    God, I love her. And yes, some really nice men courted her. You know how there is that strain of stubbornness in most of her heroines? Anne refusing to fall in love with Gilbert, and Emily making a mess of her love affairs because of her un-spoken-of love for Teddy – it’s a theme. I think Lucy Maud was pretty wild, actually, and probably would have been suited to a life as a single woman, if she could have thought outside the box a bit. Like Louisa May Alcott did, and other women. Would any of those other men have been okay with her having to travel, and lecture, and write a book a year? I can’t remember if she writes about that in her journals, the worries that a man will get in the way of her work.

    Of course she wanted to be a mother, but I don’t remember her going on much about that when Ewan started coming around. And he had a breakdown pretty soon after they got married, if I’m recalling correctly?? Like, he had not warned her at all that he had these fits, she went into it totally blindly.

    Maybe, somehow, she sensed that Ewan was indifferent enough to her and her work that he at LEAST wouldn’t “get in the way”.

    Not sure. May be grasping at straws here. I had completely the same response you did to the journals.

  7. sheila says:

    Oh, and her father drove me batshit crazy. I know, I know, it was a different time – but who does that to their child?

    Of course, conversely: if he HADN’T, then she may not have had the wellspring of creativity in regards to abandonment, where so many of her books come from. That abandonment really made her into a storyteller, or at least gave her her narrative.

    But I was always quite angry with him.

    I love Frede, and was so sad when she passed in the 1918 influenza epidemic. Another blow – really Maud’s only close friend if you think about it.

  8. sheila says:

    When I say Lucy Maud was ‘wild’, I don’t mean that she was a burlesque dancer at heart or anything like that. I just think that she was not really “fit” for that domesticated life, and would have flourished as a single working woman, even with the loneliness. I think she was very very unconventional – you can feel it in her heroines, right? – and probably had a big battle with herself in keeping herself conventional (especially as a minister’s wife).

    How many times did I read those journals and want to pull Ewan aside and tell him to grow the eff UP.

  9. Narcissa says:

    Oh, great insights! Yes, I too, had noticed this in the Anne and Emily books. In Jane Austen, every man is eligible until the opposite is proved, but in L.M. Montgomery’s books the opposite is true. I have to admit that this confused me a bit, as the former is pretty much my approach *g* So I too linked this with Lucy Maud’s personality. There’s a section in her journals where she writes her annoyance that she can’t write in any romances for Emily in “Emily Climbs” because of the audience. There is something about that that didn’t ring quite true to me. I’m not saying it wasn’t true, just that reading the romance parts of the Emily books gave me the same feeling as reading the concordant in her journals. I think Lucy Maud put quite a lot of herself in Emily.

    And that explains that weird feeling of triumph she feels whenever she has conquered her romantic feelings for someone, which to me was a little strange. That’s just not usually how you feel, you know?

    Poor Edwin Simpson. No love anywhere for him *g*

    Ahahaha, the image of Lucy Maud as a burlesque dancer may never leave me! *g*

    Oh, Herman Leard. I think I fall a little bit in love with him myself, reading about him. I think the thing that really made me like him was the fact that he brought her books. Speaking of looking for the familiar in love, the people who have loved me the most have always been the ones that brought me things. Not necessesarily anything expensive, just, you know, candy that is hard to get that they saw and know that I love, souvenirs, just little things that show you that you’re always on their mind. So that was what made me fall for him hard.

    He knew that she loved books and wanted her to have them. That to me shows that he *got* her on some fundamental level.

    But it wouldn’t have meant the same to Lucy Maud. She writes herself that she never lacked for anything materially from her grandmother, and that her grandmother loved her. But it was not a love that in any way was *useful* to her, you know? It wasn’t a love that made her feel cherished, or wanted or understood.

    Oh yes, apparently they went quite far *g* She writes something about the word ‘No’ being the only thing between her and ruin.

    NARCISSA’S VOICE FROM THE FUTURE: Do it. Doooo eeeeeeet.

    THEY: What the heck was that?

    NARCISSA: Eh. Sorry. *withdraws*

    I’m not sure he was all that illiterate. She writes that later on, and it’s in all the articles, but I think it said somewhere when she writes that year that they had read the same book and discussed it and some others. Which is more that can be said for “I couldn’t discuss a book if my life depended on it” Ewan MacBoring… I’m not absolutely sure about this, though.

    But, besides from the kids, I think she also wanted a family and companionship. Louisa May Alcott had her sisters, and their children, but Lucy Maud didn’t have *anyone*. There’s this line when she explains her reasons for marrying Edwin Simpson, that she is run-down and that she wanted to be “protected and looked after”. Just awful :(

    And for a while she is at least proud of Ewan. She writes proudly of his relatives (and this was a big thing for women of elder generations. Mights still be for some today). Because they became her family too, the sisters especially important. And all that disappers with the discovery of his illness. She never mentions them again. That Chester “is so like his father” goes from being a thing of pride to a cause of worry. All that gets taken away from her.

    No, he didn’t tell her. It comes from completely out of the blue. At first she is bitter because of this, because she wouldn’t have married him if she had known, but later she writes that “he couldn’t have known what it was” etc. I don’t completely buy this. He should have told her. Maybe I could have forgiven him if he really loved her, in a movie, played by Johnny Depp, or just himself… more sympathetic. But as it is, no.

    When Oliver Macneill showed up, I was like, YES!, take him! He had money (so he said himself ;) ), he could have bought the old homestead from uncle John, they could have spent every summer there, she could have written while he was away making money, enough servants that she wouldn’t have needed to do anything she didn’t want to, no *visiting*, no socialising with people she didn’t want to…

    See how I have planned it all out for her? *g* You just want her to be happy, you know?

    It seems so strange that both the men she accepted both belonged to a profession that seems particularly unsuitable to her. *sigh*

    Before reading her journals, I didn’t believe that it was suicide. After reading them I am left feeling the same way as you do. I can’t believe that she held on for so long.

    About Ewan: I plain don’t like him. It’s not even the disease.

    Eh… I have to confess I kind of like the Pat books *ducks* *g* But I recognise that they are among her weakest. It is interesting to me that all of the books I think are among her weakest are written in this period. Pat and the sequel, A Tangled Web, Anne of Windy Poplars (the only one of L.M. Montgomery’s books I did not like at all). (Except Kimberley. Do not get me started on Kimberley.) What Pat, sequel and A Tangled Web needed was a good editing. (Pat: tone down Pat, cut annoying best friend and most of family or flesh out, sequel: insert Jingle, don’t change name, never change name of characters in books, it’s like changing actors in TV shows, sister-in-law burning instead of house, while at it, include annoying brother too, with A Tangled Web I never managed to read part a certain incident, in spite of enjoying the book so far, and that whole subplot was bungled anyway, so remove, fix, presto. Anne of Avonlea: More Gilbert, Marilla, Mrs. Lynde, Avonlea and love in the letters. Less of… the rest. Feel free to cut that altogheter.) While two of her best books where written later, Jane of Lantern Hill and Anne of Ingleside.

    *Thank you.* I hated the guy. It’s like when people write that someone was a wifebeater because it was a “different time”. No. It’s because they were a horrible person. There was still decent, good men around. And please, Mr. I-Abandoned-My-Daughter, you couldn’t spare her fifty cents after giving your horrible wife loads of money to take pictures of her children for? And he so saw how she treated Lucy Maud. And asking her to cut her holiday short to placate the shrew… *grits teeth* (Lucy Maud had been invited to Laura Agnew’s for a week, her stepmother was in a rage, her father asked her to stay… She only got two days at Laura’s even though she loved it there and very much wanted the whole week.)

    That’s the great thing. We can hate him as much as we like and still have her books *g*

  10. Narcissa says:

    *Kilmeny

    Also, I didn’t mean that Lucy Maud was particularly close to Ewan’s sisters, just that sisters-in-law in general was a big thing :)

    Frede, that was just so tragic. If she had only been allowed to keep her. I was sobbing all through that diary entry. I had already been deeply touched by what you wrote about her.

    I think you understand Lucy Maud better than I do, I already feel that this conversation has enhanced my understanding of her :) I adore her too. And I completely agree about her inherent wildness. I wonder if she had been happier if she hadn’t married? It’s difficult to imagine how she would have been unhappier…
    And I agree that she probably did need help. I think she was so run-down in the end (she already is in volume four) that she probably couldn’t take anything. Prolonged unhappiness isn’t healthy.

    I don’t mean to be too hard on Ewan. He was ill, and there was mitigating circumstances. I suppose it’s because I’ve never been drawn to cold people myself. I like warm, actively kind and witty people myself.

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