Daily Book Excerpt: Memoirs:
Next book on the Memoir/Letters/Journals shelf is The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery: Volume III: 1921-1929
It’s been a while since I read the third volume, and just flipping through it makes me realize how much I had forgotten. These years were busy busy years for Montgomery: raising two kids, writing six books (some of her best: all the Emily books, and Blue Castle), being a busy minister’s wife, dealing with her husband’s attacks of “religious melancholia” (which started to become more severe and more frequent) – and then there was a protracted lawsuit against her first publisher, The Page Company, in Boston. It went on forever, harrowing her soul. There was also a minor fender-bender in her town, which also ended up becoming a huge brou-haha, but the details are now lost to me. It was tiresome to read about. You feel that everyone is making a mountain out of a molehill. And then, even more importantly, if I can read between the lines it seems that her husband, the Reverend Ewan MacDonald, who had been a minister in Leaksdale for some time, was basically run out of his own congregation. They had to find a new job, a new place. Lucy Maud doesn’t say so, but I wonder if his mental illness got to be so extreme that the congregation basically decided: “Let’s get rid of him – we deserve a Pastor who isn’t insane.” The feeling in the town, which Montgomery had at first found welcoming, turned. There was a hostile energy, and Montgomery became morbidly sensitive to slights, and insults. She felt betrayed by these neighbors, who were running them out of town, and she never forgave any of them. The entire situation poisoned her life for a good year and a half.
Meanwhile, she was a world-famous author, but because of her familial obligations (and MacDonald, being a minister, needed an involved wife – it was essential to keeping up the goodwill in whatever town he was “stationed” in) – she couldn’t go to as many events or dinners as she would have liked. She obsesses over the raising of her sons, especially her oldest. She seemed to feel, very early on, that he was going to be “trouble”.
Her own nervous attacks, which seemed to come over her when she was stressed or worried about something, were quite severe – and yet she still seems to bounce back relatively quickly at this stage of her life (this would vanish completely by the end of her life, when there was no bouncing back from anything, as far as I can tell.) One walk through a pine wood, or one glimpse of a sunset, would restore her equilibrium. These were difficult years, with MacDonald in a state of insanity for much of the time, and she writes about how much she threw herself into the writing of the Emily books, and what solace they gave her. How intensely she LIVED those books as she wrote them (it shows). She seemed to handle fame with a lot of humor, laughing about some of the critiques her books got – and how contradictory they were (there’s a scene just like this in Emily’s Quest, when her first book comes out, and each review contradicts the one before). For her, it wasn’t about the fame, although she appreciated the financial rewards. It was about the ability to keep working. Because her first book was such a slam-dunk, she was able to pretty much do whatever she wanted (especially since she seemed willing to give the public what they wanted, which was more and more Anne books). But this was not an Anne decade. Except for Rilla of Ingleside, published in 1921, this decade was the Emily decade. It seems she didn’t rest between books. It’s almost like the three Emily books, which came out separately, were written as one big book.
She does a lot of reminiscing in her journals, and that tendency got more pronounced the longer she lived. An obituary telling her that so-and-so died back on Prince Edward Island would send her catapulting back into the past, and she would write pages of delightful memories about these people. Or sometimes not so delightful. But specific. I get the feeling that she always felt that whatever had happened to her, every single memory – even things like crocheted pillows or yellow china pitchers – whatever – were seen as material for a book eventually. It is those details, sometimes domestic, sometimes not, that give her books such a breath of life. I mean, can’t you SEE New Moon? I feel like I could even write a floor plan of that damn house, her descriptions of it are so specific. In later years (with the dreaded “Pat” series, only two books, thank God) that very same obsession with detail which had served her so well failed her. That book is ONLY about the house, and the more detailed she gets about the window seats and the dining room, etc., the emptier it all seems, because the characters somehow don’t “live”. Judy Plum (in my opinion) is the only LIVING character in that book. Regardless: her attention to domestic detail is seen in her journals as well. She just had that kind of eye: a journalist’s eye about the everyday reality of most people’s lives. She got attached to objects. Perhaps unhealthily so, but I relate to it. I feel my heart would crack if the fir tree in my parents’ side yard ever fell down. I would grieve that tree like a person.
That kind of thing is so present in Lucy Maud’s books, as well as her journals, and it’s interesting to see how much she lifted out of her journals to put into her books.
And, you know, as much as I dislike the Ewan I meet in these pages, and as frustrated as I get with him, my heart aches for him. He was mentally ill in the 1920s. The treatment was often barbaric. He was in a job COMPLETELY unsuited to his temperament. It must have been a torment for him.
And then there’s Lucy Maud who admits openly, time and time again, that she does not love him, and never loved him. Perhaps that was a blessing, actually, because if she had loved him, she perhaps might have been more tormented by how lost he was to his illness. But as it is, she is just frustrated and disgusted by him. At least MacDonald never got in the way of her writing, at least not directly. He didn’t inhibit her output, he didn’t give her a head-trip about the fact that she was a busy career woman, he stayed out of her way. He didn’t expect a happy little homemaker. He was pretty easygoing about all of her other obligations. So at least she didn’t have that on her mind.
Here is an entry from 1924, a rough year (but also a busy productive year).
Excerpt from The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery: Volume III: 1921-1929
Sunday, Mar. 9, 1924
The Manse, Leaksdale, Ont.
This has been a bitter week.
Ever since Ewan took his first attack five years ago I do not think it has once failed that if I venture to express to myself or write in this journal the hope that he was permanently well, another attack would follow immediately. On Monday Ewan seemed perfectly well; on Tuesday I went into the library and found him sitting there, a handkerchief tied round his head, his eyes wild and terrified, his face repulsive with the vacant almost imbecile expression so characteristic of these attacks at their worst.
It is very disheartening. I feel as if I had not, and could not, gather together enough courage to undergo the weeks before me. Ewan will never be well. Why was I so foolish as to hope it? But it seems harder to bear after the comparative happiness of the past six months.
I have felt better myself this week – have not been troubled by dizziness. But I feel uneasy about the fact of Chester’s development. On Monday, when Ewan was well, I wanted him to consult a doctor about it but he pooh-poohed the idea. He had matured at twelve, therefore it was all right for Chester. But this fact, which assures him, alarms me. I am afraid that Ewan’s early maturity may be linked up with his constitutional tendency to melancholia. Chester is not delicate physically. He is robust, rosy, and sturdy. But is there any lurking mental unsoundness? The next six years will answer that question.
I had a letter from Bertie on Monday which filled me with delight. She is coming east this summer …
The Missionary Tea came off Tuesday – and it was very hard for me to have it that day of all others. My mind was preoccupied with Ewan’s condition when I wanted to concentrate it on the problem of feeding thirty guests. I never enjoy the Tea and always have a sigh of relief when it is over. But I find a certain enjoyment in doing everything necessary competently and efficiently – making a success of it, in short. But this year I longed only to have it over, to get them all away, and be alone to face the facts of existence.
One of the facts was a disappointing report from McClelland. I had expected it but not quite so discouraging a one. Emily sold only about 8,500 copies where Rilla sold 12,000. As Emily has done just as well as my other books in the States it can’t be because it wasn’t an Anne book but simply because of the rotten business conditions prevalent in Canada for the past year. I must share in the general slump of course. But it isn’t exhilarating coming along with everything else.
The hardest thing about this week was that we had promised, before the attack came on Ewan, to go out to tea on three consecutive evenings, being anxious to overtake our allotted “visiting” before the spring break-up. We went but the evenings were torture. I tried desperately to keep talking, to conceal Ewan’s silence and depression; and he himself always tries when out in company, to affect cheerfulness. I think the effort is good for him; but there is always a reaction as soon as we leave. The drives home, over the bad roads, have been dreadful, the horse plunging in the holes of the track, Ewan sitting beside me in unbroken silence. Friday night I cried silently all the way home. My nerves had been under such a strain all the evening, trying to talk brightly and naturally, that it was a relief to cry it out in the dark. Ewan never suspected my tears. He was wrapped in his own gloomy meditations to the exclusion of all else.
Well, in a few days I shall have adjusted myself to these conditions again and be able to endure them calmly.
Yesterday I finished my second revision of Emily II. It is now ready for the typist. I have called it Emily Climbs – a vile title, but the only one I can think of which includes “Emily’s” name. It has been hard to do these revisions when ever since New Year’s I have been so upset and worried. And yet, whenever I forced myself to sit down to it, I found solace and escape – I was free from my bonds and torments and roamed in an ideal world – coming back to reality at the end of my three hour’s “stint” with renewed courage and “grit”.
Ewan has been very miserable today and made a mess of preaching. But he did well to preach at all. Yet he is always better when he forces himself to do his work. When he gives himself over to inactive brooding it intensifies his conviction of his “lost” condition.
A curse on the devilish theology that implanted such ideas in his consciousness! But had he been a normal man they would not have taken such hold on him; and I suppose if it were not this delusion it would be something else.
I read two books this week – Waverley and The Blind Bow Boy! The gulf between them is as wide as the gulf between sanity and degeneracy. The latter book is an incredible compound of stupidity, vacuity, and nastiness. Yet it has been praised in reviews as “exceedingly clever and brilliant’. I should class it with the dull, dirty things obscene little boys scribble on the walls of waterclosets. Faugh! I flung the thing into the furnace when I had finished it and washed my hands to get rid of the atmosphere of putrescence. To turn from it to Waverley was like coming out of a pigsty to a blue moorland hill swept clean by the winds of heaven.
It is a dull day but mild. The afternoon is a symphony of beautiful grays and smokes and pearls. One feels that spring is hiding around the corner. Oh, if it were only here.
I am writing with Luck curled up on my lap. We are all quite silly over that cat. He is so lovable. I never in all my experience with cats have known one so much so. Everybody who comes to the house raves over him. The girls who were here Tuesday burned incense at his shrine. I suppose something will happen to him erelong. I have grown so cringingly afraid of fate that I dare not hope that anything so beautiful and charming as this little purring cat will long escape the devil.
