The Books: My Dear Mr. M: Letters to G.B. MacMillan, by L.M. Montgomery

Daily Book Excerpt: Memoirs:

Next book on the Memoir/Letters/Journals shelf is My Dear Mr. M:, by L.M. Montgomery

A fascinating small volume, My Dear Mr. M. is the 39-year correspondence between Canadian author Lucy Maud Montgomery, and an aspiring writer from Scotland, George Boyd MacMillan. They only met once in their entire lives, during Montgomery’s honeymoon trip to Scotland. Their correspondence began through a mutual writing friend, who wanted to create a literary circle of correspondents. The literary circle never really flourished, but Montgomery and MacMillan hit it off like gangbusters and began their own private correspondence. At the time they began writing to one another, in 1902, 1903, Montgomery was living at home with her grandparents and well on her way to becoming a successful short story writer, published in almost every Canadian magazine. A prolific and devoted writer, Montgomery was approaching her 30s, unmarried, independent (she had spent time as a teacher, as well as a reporter at a newspaper), and devoted to her craft. She and MacMillan bonded about their shared ambition. Then, of course, came the publication of Anne of Green Gables, which pushed Lucy Maud Montgomery far beyond MacMillan, in terms of accomplishment, but their correspondence continues. They write to one another, off and on, for almost 40 years. This volume, edited by Francis Bolger and Elizabeth Epperly only provides Montgomery’s side of the correspondence, but it’s an illuminating look at Montgomery. She doesn’t correspond with MacMillan as a fan or an acolyte – she really talks to him as she would a friend. Their letters are quite open. Of course there is a lot of omission as well. While Montgomery openly shares with MacMillan about her failed love affair with Herman Leard (something that marked her life), and some of her husband’s health problems – she also leaves things out. But that’s the way it goes with correspondence. It will never be an exhaustive record.

What I love about the correspondence is how free Montgomery obviously felt with this pen pal – something she didn’t feel with too many people. It speaks well of Mr. MacMillan, his openness, kindness, and interest in her viewpoint – that they could correspond about love and sex and writing and family with such freedom.

By the end, as is the case with Montgomery’s fifth volume of her journals, the letters get shorter, blunter, and more panicked in a wild despair. There are times when you can tell MacMillan gets concerned, and sends her brief notes to bolster her up, tell her to hang on, everything’s going to be okay. Like any friend would. She sends him brief postcards basically to tell him, “I can’t write anymore. But I got your cards and gifts. I am thankful for your friendship. I will never get better.” It is heartwrenching.

Despite the fact that MacMillan wanted to be a writer, too, there seems to be very little professional jealousy between the two, and the Montgomery that shows up in these letters is different from any other Montgomery we’ve seen yet. So far, there are not volumes of her letters that have been published. Writing a letter to a trusted correspondent is different than scribbling in one’s private journal. We see who Montgomery is here, with a friend. How willing she is to talk philosophically, to consider all sides, to open up about what she’s worried about. Here, with her good long-distance friend, she is intelligent, social, funny, open. He was obviously the type of man who didn’t dismiss a woman’s experience of life – but, rather, reveled in it. They were “kindred spirits”.

I know it’s silly – I never knew Lucy Maud Montgomery, obviously – but reading this small sweet volume, I do have a moment of being thankful that G.B. MacMillan came into what would prove to be a very lonely life. He was there for her. Until the end. He was obviously a good and kind man.

Here is a letter from early on in their correspondence. Anne of Green Gables has not been published yet. Montgomery has not gotten married yet.

Excerpt from My Dear Mr. M:, by L.M. Montgomery

Cavendish, P.E.I.
Can.

Monday Evening
April 1, 1907

My dear Mr. McMillan:

I don’t know whether I can write a letter tonight but I mean to try. As a general rule I endeavor to write my letters only when I feel in the mood for it – and I’m afraid I don’t feel so tonight. But just at present time is so precious with me that I can’t waste any spare minutes and as I have a few tonight I mean to make the most of them answering your letter. For all the sins of omission I shall probably commit in it I ask your forgiveness beforehand. By the way, have you ever heard of the little boy who told his S.S. Superintendent that “sins of omission were sins we ought to have committed and didn’t”? He was probably a connection of the little girl who said faith was “believing things you knew weren’t true.”
. . .
Yes, I agree with you that in marriage it is not desirable that likeness is found. In theory one would think it must be, but in reality it is very different. I believe that for friendship there should be similarity; but for love there must be dissimilarity. Of course, as I’ve never been married my conclusions on the subject can hardly be considered final; but from observation I have decided that the happiest marriages I know are between people who are not at all alike, while some that are unhappy do exist between people who are very much alike. The trouble seems to be that two people finding themselves very harmonious in friendship jump to the conclusion that it will be just the same and even better in marriage. Their angles are similar and so when brought into the contact of an intimate union they jar on each other instead of fitting smoothly in.

Yes, it is very seldom indeed that a man and a woman can discuss love either pleasurably or profitably especially face to face. As you say, there is the danger of drifting into a flirtation or “platonics”. Then again it is hard to separate self-consciousness from the subject. People are afraid to tell one what they really think about the matter – afraid that they will not be understood. I should be afraid myself in most instances. It is much easier to discuss it by letter. I can always write a great many things I could never say.

You ask: —

“Do you think that love depends upon an admiration for qualities possessed by the loved one? Or is it something more subtle than this?”

In answer to the first question I say most emphatically, “NO”. In explaining why I think so it will be necessary for me to inflict on you a bit of my own experience. Please regard it as quite impersonal, introduced merely to throw light on my conclusions.

I loved a man – let us call him A – once. It was emphatically the love of my life. Yet mark this – I did not respect him – I did not admire him in the least. Before this experience I would have laughed at the idea that one could love a man they didn’t respect. (The grammar of that sentence is shocking but never mind!) Yet I certainly did. I would not have married him for anything. He was my inferior in every respect. This is not vanity on my part at all. He simply was. He had no brains, no particular good looks, in short, nothing that I admire in a man. Yet I loved him as I never can love any other man. There was about him “the subtle something” you speak of in the second part of your question. This man died and I have always been thankful that it ended so; because if he had lived I daresay I couldn’t have helped marrying him and it would have been a most disastrous union in most respects. I feel sure this will all be rather unintelligible to you – it would have been to me before I underwent that experience.

Well, before I met A I had met a man whom I will call B. He was everything that I admire in a man – he was handsome, brilliant, cultured, successful. A was not worthy to tie B‘s shoelace. Well, I liked B very much. I was very young and knowing nothing mistook my liking and admiration for love. I became engaged to him – and then simply hated him. Yes, laugh. I daresay you will. But it was no laughing matter to me – it was a tragedy. That man’s kiss turned me cold with horror of it and of him – I knew I could never marry him. I tried for a year to be true to him and hell couldn’t be worse than that year for me. In the end I told him the truth and broke the engagement. Immediately I was free. I liked him just as well as I had before that dreadful time, but I have been haunted ever since by the wretched conviction that I have spoiled his life. He has never married and says he can’t forget.

Well, in those two experiences of mine you have all the answer I can make to your question. I loved one man in whom nobody could see anything to admire. I couldn’t care for the other who was in all respects admirable. If I had married B, I should have been unhappy all my life. If I had married A I should I believe have been happy but I would have deteriorated in every way – “lowered to his level,” as Tennyson says. But Tennyson is not always right. When I was a schoolgirl I very much admired and believed a line in his poem “Lancelot and Guinevere.”

“We needs must love the highest when we see it.”

I don’t believe it now. It is not true. We must admire the highest but love is an entirely different matter and is quite likely to leave the best and go to the worst. Oh, it is a horribly perplexing subject and I grow dizzy thinking of it. I think, too, love varies very much with different temperaments. What would be true for me might be altogether false with a woman of a different temperament. But my own experience has taught me to understand a great many of the strange and perplexing happenings of life. The rules laid down in novels won’t work out in real existence. I came across a bit of doggerel the other day that has more truth than poetry in it.

“There’s a lot of things that never go by rule,
There’s an awful lot of knowledge
That you never get at college,
There are heaps of things you never learn at school.”
And that’s about the way of it!

. . .

Now I’ve just got to finish this letter right up, owing to “circumstances over which I have no control.” It isn’t a satisfactory epistle, especially the part about love but I’ll try to discuss that subject more lucidly in future. I’ve been interrupted a score of times since beginning.

Ever yours sincerely,
L.M. Montgomery