The Books: The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery: Volume IV: 1929-1935

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Next book on the Memoir/Letters/Journals shelf is The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery: Volume IV: 1929-1935

Busy difficult years for Lucy Maud Montgomery. She starts to become obsessed with her sleep, and every entry starts with a comment about how well or how poorly she slept the night before. She starts to have what seems an overwhelming dread about the future. She shivers when she starts a new journal, anticipating all of the pain that will show up in those pages. Clearly, there was some sort of nervous condition affecting her, and her “veronal tablets” start to be mentioned in almost every entry. At the same time, she was very busy with her duties as minister’s wife, her writing (in these years she wrote Magic for Marigold, A Tangled Web, and the two Pat books, Pat of Silver Bush and Mistress Pat), her duties as a famous woman (interviews, Press Club dinners, etc.), and her growing panic about her oldest son. Chester was asked to withdraw from university, and to Lucy Maud this is a scandal for which she will not forgive him. (It’s been a while since I’ve read this journal, so there may be more to it.) It’s almost like she gives up on him. And every choice he makes from there on out is clouded by how disappointed and embarrassed she is by him. Granted, she lived in a VERY gossipy community – and as minister’s wife (and also famous writer) she had more scrutiny on her than regular mortals did. That probably had something to do with her dread of scandal, and her dread of being talked about. (Sometimes you get the feeling that people are talking about you behind your back because people are actually talking about you behind your back.) Her husband Ewan continued on in his gloomy humorless way, and the journal is broken up with periodic breakdowns, one which was quite severe and required hospitalization. Again, it’s been a while, but none of this seemed to sit well with her husband’s congregation. They were now in a place called Norval. And by the end of the book, Ewan Macdonald is basically handed his hat and sent packing. Entries and entries are taken up with Montgomery’s seething resentment about the ingratitude of the congregation. She hated them. She is one of those sensitive people (I include myself in that grouping) who never forgot a slight. She seems to have gotten into a state at this time where literally everything hurt her, and she became afraid of more and more hurts, so she cringed back from life, fearful. It’s heartbreaking to read.

There’s also an interesting story in these years where she is contacted by a woman named Isobel who appears to be her greatest fan (although Isobel certainly had competition). Isobel insinuates herself into Montgomery’s life, even getting invitations to come over and spend time with her idol personally … and Lucy Maud Montgomery, who was put off by the sycophantic tone of the first letter, against her better judgment decided to be kind to this “queer” woman. Huge mistake. Isobel is clearly unbalanced, and not only loves Montgomery’s books but loves HER. The saga goes on for months. Isobel torments Montgomery with love letters, accusatory, heartbroken, begging Lucy Maud to sleep with her, demanding sex, just one night, please just give me one night. Poor Lucy Maud, an older woman by this point, was shocked and annoyed by what amounts to harassment. She was not a prude, and also seemed to accept the fact that Isobel was a lesbian (although she doesn’t use that word), but no matter how hard she tried, she could not get rid of this woman. She writes firm letters to Isobel, even unkind ones, saying, essentially, “Back off, girl” but Isobel will not back off. She is OBSESSED. Her love for Lucy Maud Montgomery is unrequited and has ruined her life. It is an incredible annoyance, with everything else Montgomery had on her plate, and it completely impacted her everyday existence, haunting her. She starts to dread the mail coming, she cringes from the sight of Isobel’s handwriting. It’s quite awful.

I have made my thoughts clear about the Pat books, and my conviction (from when I first read them, knowing nothing about Montgomery’s personal life) that something was going ON with Lucy Maud Montgomery, who was so good, so on top of her writing game, in book after book … that something was happening with her that would make her write two stinkers, one after the other. Mistress Pat, especially: I felt her literally running out of steam over the second half of the book. Like she couldn’t wait to finish it. And when I finally read the journals of those years she was writing the Pat books, it was heartbreaking. Her heart wasn’t in it. Finishing the books was a grueling chore. And yet she knew (this is her survival, her courage) that this was what she was capable of writing at that difficult moment. So she put it out there. Not her best books, but she put them out there anyway, because it was more important to write than to hold back until her strength returned. So in that sense, the two Pat books which are not successful are HUGE successes. I would say they kept her alive, they kept her going. (What is even more amazing is that the final volume of her journal is almost unreadable in its open unhappiness … and yet during those years Anne of Windy Poplars, Jane of Lantern Hill, Anne of Ingleside, and a book of short stories called The Blythes are Quoted – first published as The Road to Yesterday: these are good books. Funny, sweet, deep books. I am amazed by her stick-to-it-iveness, even as her own personal life gave her ZERO happiness, especially at the end.)

And as war heated up in Europe again, she began to lose it. Her experience of the first World War had been so intense that she felt she couldn’t face another one. The 30s were a tough decade for the entire world, and Montgomery felt the impact of the stock market crash on her book sales, which in a way was a blessing: she HAD to keep writing.

A couple of trends that accelerate as she becomes older: She goes off down Memory Lane much more often, and there are entries about aunts, uncles, long dead, which take up pages and pages of her journal. I always get the sense that yes, she found great comfort in strolling down “the road to Yesterday’, and she would lose herself in these entries, forcing herself back to her childhood where she was happier, freer. But I also get the sense that these forced nostalgic trips are part of her writer’s outlook. This is the stuff, the good stuff, from which she created. Even books like the Pat books are made up of memories, dreams, people she knew, funny quotes she had heard once, anecdotes. Every book she wrote was a personal book. And by keeping those avenues to her past open in her journals, she continued to allow herself to access it, even as she yowled with pain about her current-day life. Her work is a great act of self-preservation.

Here is one of the entries where she seems to force herself to go down Memory Lane. Lucy Maud Montgomery fans, familiar with all of her books, will recognize much of the material here. It is such details of which her great books are made. A lot of her descriptions here are in her books. The “cookhouse” is in the Emily books, and the “cheese hoops” and cheese stones are in the Pat books. There is more cross-referencing to be done. What is so special about these journals is you see the current flowing back and forth between Montgomery the woman and Montgomery the writers. No divide.

Excerpt from The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery: Volume IV: 1929-1935

Saturday, July 11, 1931

Made red currant jelly. It looks like rubies and tastes as good as it looks. Red currants always make me think of Grandmother and her currant wine. I love making jellies and jams and nice things to eat generally. If I had not been a poor devil of an author I think I would have made an excellent cook.

Tonight I cut all my lilies and put them in the church. A great basket of Madonna lilies and one of regale lilies – the latter have bloomed this year for the first time and are most wonderful. I could stand before them with all the ecstasy of worship.

Hodder and Stoughton have written that the new book can’t be called A Tangled Web in England because last year they published a book The Tangled Web. So it is to be Aunt Becky Began It in England. Surely this would be the end of the tamasha about the name of that blessed book!

Do we ever forget anything? I think not. This afternoon I was rummaging through an old notebook to find an idea for a story I had promised The Chatelaine to write. I read one over – and in a moment nearly forty years had become as naught. I was back in the winter of 1892 – I was sitting by the east window of the sitting room at Park Corner. It was the early evening of a stormy winter day. The snow was sifting under the sills, fine as sugar. The wind was roaring outside – and how cosy it was to hear it in that warm fire-lighted room, with the delicious odors of one of Aunt Annie’s suppers seeping in from the kitchen. I was alone – I had been working my “stint” of arithmetic and it had grown too dark for it. So I laid down my pencil and slate – slates were still in use then – leaned dreamily back, and looked out of the window – as so many eyes had done before me. I saw a landscape of spruce-dotted hills with the wind blowing over it and fields where there seemed to be a winter dance of goblins. There was one austere old hill that sometimes warmed briefly to a glow of sunset; and half way up this hill, I think by the line fence between the Cuthbert Montgomery’s farm and his neighbor’s, was a group of tall spruce trees – three of them, growing closely together and marked out from all the others in my vision by an oddity of outline which made them look like three tall women huddled together, whispering. Of what were the trees talking? I began to weave a story around that question. The trees were talking of and watching a story that was being lived in the house I sat in. For years it went on and the trees had a part in it – always watching, always whispering, as joy and sorrow, tears and laughter came to the house they loved. I had a very happy hour of creation there before it grew so dark that the trees were swallowed up in the storm wrack.

Afterwards, I wrote the idea of the story in my little notebook. Someday I would write it, I thought. But I never did. I don’t think now I ever will. It is too slight and fairy-like for the robust appetite of today. I am a little sorry, too.

From that time I seemed to have a particular interest in those three trees. They and I shared a secret. Always when I was at Park Corner I looked across to them and they seemed to wave their arms to me and whisper “Is it written yet – our story?” I saw them the last time I was there. But they had grown very old. Half their boughs were dead. They were beaten to death by the winds of so many years. They were only old crones who had been young green maidens when they whispered that tale to me on that stormy winter evening of long ago.

I hate to think of all the lovely things I remember being forgotten when I’m dead!

It is curious how old memories bob up. A phrase in what I have just written – “the odors of supper seeping in from the kitchen” – makes me remember our old “cook house at home”. There was a little building at right angles to the kitchen, with a plank platform beneath. It had been, I recall being told, the porch of the “old” church in Cavendish – that is of the church that preceded the “old” church I went to as a girl. I think it was the first church ever built in Cavendish and judging from its porch it could not have been a very imposing building. I used to picture the porch in the days before it came down in the world, when the old Scotch men and women of the early 1800’s came into it and the lads waited for their lasses at the door. I daresay it was steeped in romance and theology.

Every spring the cookstove – first the old “Waterloo” and then the coal stove – was moved out to the “cookhouse” and all the cooking done there for the summer. It must have meant a great many extra steps for the cooks but it kept the main house cool and free from flies – which was a desired thing in the days before screens. Many a good bite was cooked in that old spot. The shelves all around the walls were used as a pantry. Grandma kept her dried hams in a big box of oats in the corner and bunches of garden herbs and “shalottes” hanging from the beams. Grandma made her cheese curds there, too, and put them into the “hoops” which were then carried out to the cheese press at the corner of the orchard fence where a big gray stone served as a weight. Grandma was a “master hand” at making cheese. It is a lost art as far as individuals are concerned. All cheeses nowadays are made in factories. And as a result they have not the flavor of the cheeses Grandma made. Something is lost when things are made en masse. I wonder if there is a single woman in Canada today who can make a cheese – unless it be someone in the “foreign” colonies.

The mention of cheeses wakens another memory. It is evening. Grandmother and Grandfather are adjusting the cheese hoop under the press. I am standing by watching them and drinking in the loveliness around me. June was walking over the fields. The sun had just set and I saw that loveliest of all created things – a young moon in an amber evening sky.

And the lambs were playing in the pasture field by the house.

Do lambs play like that now? I suppose they do, only I never have a chance to see them. But what gorgeous times those lambs did have at their evening games while their placid old mothers nibbled on around them. In a drove they tore from one end of the field and back again, the noise of their small hoofs like mild thunder. They would run those races until dark fell – seemingly just for the joy of running. I never saw such happy creatures.

Today I heard someone use the expression “see stars”. I wondered if she ever had “seen stars” as she meant. For many years of my life I was well acquainted with the expression “it made me see stars” – had indeed used it myself. But I believed it to be merely a figure of speech, conveying the idea that one was rather knocked out or dazed. But one night I had an experience that convinced me of its literalness.

It was a cold winter’s night. I had undressed shiveringly and hopped into bed eager to draw the blankets close around my ears and snuggle down. But whoever had made the bed had tucked the clothes rather too far and firmly down at the foot. I gave two or three gentle tugs but apparently made no headway. I must have loosened them however, for when I suddenly gave a hard, impatient tug they came away without the least resistance and my doubled right fist which had been clutching the top edges flew up and struck me a whacking blow on my right temple.

Stars! I saw a whole constellation. There was one tremendous star as large as my fist and around it a galaxy of smaller stars all dancing madly against a dead black universe. I fell back on the pillow half stunned, dazed; the next morning I had a yellow and purple bruise on my maiden brow and a sore spot for weeks. But I had “seen stars”.

Why do devilish things always happen to the things we prize most? When the “loot” of the blue chest was divided at Park Corner I got a couple of glass plates, one very small, the other about six inches across. I have prized it all these years – and last year I broke it in the silliest, most incredible way. Broke it badly, too. I cried for an hour about it. Then I took it to a place in Toronto where they do wizard work and really they patched and rivetted it wonderfully. But it is only a flawed plate, for all, and will always have to be handled as such. I had a dozen other glass plates recently bought and if they had all been smashed I would not have greatly cared. But it had to be this prized old plate of story and old tradition!

Yes, there is a devil!

We had our first apple pie of the season today. It was good. But where oh where are the apple pies of yesteryear – or rather the apple turnovers? Grandmother was a crackerjack at making apple turnovers. She always made me one when she baked the pies – a delectable creation with fluted edge where the “turned over” crust was pinched together, full of juicy spiced apples. To run in from outdoors on a crisp cold autumn dusk and eat a hot, spicy, juicy apple “turnover” was to pity the gods on high Olympus with nothing to eat but ambrosia.

So, one doesn’t forget anything. The other day something recalled to me an old poem, “The Haunted Spring”, which I learned for a Friday afternoon recitation when I was about ten years old. I haven’t thought of it for years, but I found I could go through it without a line missed – and I suppose I will always remember it with a thrill of its old charm until time gets through with me. I do not remember the name of the author. It was no famous name. The poem was in an old anthology that was lying around the house …

Of course, with my love of dramatizing everything, the “Haunted Spring” was the old fir-shadowed spring down in the school woods and the hills back around Lover’s Lane were the “hills so green” where the lost hunter dwelt with his fairy bride. When I loitered in the twilight meadows of our old farm and repeated that poem over to myself I ached with the beauty of it, as if some supernal musician had swept my soul with his fingers and evoked some ethereal harmony. Some other world drew very near. Back among those darkening hills shadow ladies were beckoning lone wanderers to goblin banquets. Little ghosts of laughter seemed to drift to me over the valleys. I, too, drank from the waters of paradise – I too kept tryst with mystic lovers by the little brooks back in the hilly land – and was never quite the same again. One cannot be who drinks even in imagination from such a magic cup. One has stepped ever so little a way over some strange, impalpable barrier which forever must intervene between one and the realities of existence. Which is both a blessing and a curse.

It seems that my new book cannot be called A Tangled Web in England because last year Hodder & Stoughton published a book The Tabled Web. So mine is to be called Aunt Becky Began It in England. I don’t like having two names for it but it cannot be helped.

A letter from Ella contained worrying news of Alec Macneill. He has not been well all spring – his old stomach trouble – and now they say he is melancholy. This may only be distorted gossip of course.