The Books: The Alpine Path, by L.M. Montgomery

Daily Book Excerpt: Memoirs:

Next book on the Memoir/Letters/Journals shelf is The Alpine Path: The Story of My Career, by L.M. Montgomery

The “Alpine Path” is how Lucy Maud Montgomery always referred to her road to success as a writer, which required much faith in the unknown, in the future. The Alpine Path was treacherous and hard, but if she made it to the top – IF she made it to the top – what a view she would receive! Obviously, she reached the top, but not after years and years of toil. The woman never stopped working. Before Anne of Green Gables was even thought of, she was sending stuff out to magazines on a weekly basis, keeping track of what went where in her journal. Rejections piled up. Then she got some acceptances. But, in this business of art, there is always more rejection than acceptance. The scales are never equal.

In 1917, Montgomery was 42 years old and a celebrated author. Anne of Green Gables had been published in 1908, when she was already in her 30s (that’s a late start for a writer). But to think she was an overnight success is to discount the two decades of hard work that came before Anne. A woman’s magazine in Toronto asked Montgomery to write “the story of her career”, which she did, and they published it in six installments. These essays were finally published in book-form in 1975.

Montgomery writes about her childhood and its influences. She soft-pedals the sadness of her childhood, and focuses instead on how these events shaped her, and what books she read as a child, and what she thought about said books. Much of this material (I would say 90% of it) ends up in one of her books or another. She used everything. You’ll recognize all OF IT.

Here is an excerpt from the section on writing/publishing Anne of Green Gables.

Excerpt from The Alpine Path: The Story of My Career, by L.M. Montgomery

Many people have told me that they regretted Matthew’s death in Green Gables. I regret it myself. If I had the book to write over again I would spare Matthew for several years. But when I wrote it I thought he must die, that there might be a necessity for self-sacrifice on Anne’s part, so poor Matthew joined the long procession of ghosts that haunt my literary past.

Well, my book was finally written. The next thing was to find a publisher. I typewrote it myself, on an old second-hand typewriter that never made the capitals plain and wouldn’t print “w” at all, and I sent it to a new American firm that had recently come to the front with several “bestsellers”. I thought I might stand a better chance with a new firm than with an old established one that had already a preferred list of writers. But the new firm very promptly sent it back. Next I sent it to one of the “old, established firms,” and the old established firm sent it back. Then I sent it, in turn, to three “Betwixt-and-between firms,” and they all sent it back. Four of them returned it with a cold, printed note of rejection; one of them “damned with faint praise”. They wrote that “Our readers report that they find some merit in your story, but not enough to warrant its acceptance.”

That finished me. I put Anne away in an old hatbox in the clothes room, resolving that some day when I had time I would take her and reduce her to the original seven chapters of her first incarnation. In that case I was tolerably sure of getting thirty-five dollars for her at least, and perhaps even forty.

The manuscript lay in the hatbox until I came across it one winter day while rummaging. I began turning over the leaves, reading a bit here and there. It didn’t seem so very bad. “I’ll try once more,” I thought. The result was that a couple of months later an entry appeared in my journal to the effect that my book had been accepted. After some natural jubilation I wrote: “The book may or may not succeed. I wrote it for love, not money, but very often such books are the most successful, juts as everything in the world that is born of true love has life in it, as nothing constructed for mercenary ends can ever had. Well, I’ve written my book! The dream dreamed years ago at that old brown desk in school has come true at last after years of toil and struggle. And the realization is sweet, almost as sweet as the dream.”

When I wrote of the book succeeding or not succeeding, I had in mind only a very moderate success indeed, compared to that which it did attain. I never dreamed that it would appeal to young and old. I thought girls in their teens might like to read it, that was the only audience I hoped to reach. But men and women who are grandparents have written to tell me how they loved Anne, and boys at college have done the same. The very day on which these words are written has come a letter to me from an English lad of nineteen, totally unknown to me, who writes that he is leaving for “the front” and wants to tell me “before he goes” how much my books and especially Anne have meant to him. It is in such letters that a writer finds meet reward for all sacrifice and labor.

Well, Anne was accepted; but I had to wait yet another year before the book was published. Then on June 20th, 1908, I wrote in my journal:

“To-day has been, as Anne herself would say, ‘an epoch in my life’. My book came to-day, ‘spleet-new’ from the publishers. I candidly confess that it was to me a proud and wonderful and thrilling moment. There, in my hand, lay the material realization of all the dreams and hopes and ambitions and struggles of my whole conscious existence – my first book. Not a great book, but mine, mine, mine, something which I had created.”