The Books: “Emily of New Moon” (L.M. Montgomery)

Daily Book Excerpt: YA/Children’s books:

Emily of New Moon – by L.M. Montgomery

I’m almost NERVOUS to start this. I love the Emily books so much. I need to calm down. I have a greater affinity for the Emily books than the Anne books (Madeleine L’Engle wrote a WONDERFUL essay about the Emily books – and how much they enchanted her and inspired her as a child) … I love Anne Shirley, do not get me wrong … but there are times when I feel a WEE bit like Leslie Moore, looking at Anne with resentful eyes, wondering, “Do you EVER have a bad day? Do you EVER give up hope? Do you EVER lie awake at night, tormented??” She doesn’t seem to. After all, Lucy Maud makes a big point of telling us that she and Gilbert never fight in their marriage. Never fight. Mm-hmm. A bit of wishful thinking there, LM. I mean – Anne never comes off as saccharine, NEVER … she’s a living breathing funny warm human being … but Emily? There’s just something about Emily that I can totally click into. And this was so since I first read the books – which, I think, was late in high school or early college.

I think also there’s the whole artist thing. Emily is a person who has a CALLING. She knows it from when she is a small child. She is a writer. This is her CALLING. The Emily books are much more autobiographical than the Anne books – and there are certain sections that are taken almost word for word from Lucy Maud’s journals and personal essays, and the excerpt I’m posting today is one of them. Lucy Maud had written herself about “the flash” and what that meant to her, and what it WAS … so she gives that gift to Emily. (Oh, and Lucy Maud said, later, that she also could “see the wallpaper in the air” when she was a kid, and liked to amuse herself doing so. There are lots of little similarities here between Emily and the author).

Emily is a darker book than Anne. The mood is darker. Emily herself is a darker personality than Anne, much more rigid and unbending. She refuses to be bullied, even though she is a child, and man – is she surrounded by grown-up bullies. There are no character transformations like there are in the Anne books. For example: in the Anne books – Mrs. Lynde, while a comic character, is pretty blunt and rude to Anne at first meeting her. She’s kind of a busybody, and doesn’t treat children like they are human beings. But in the end, we come to see that Mrs. Lynde is one of the warmest most wonderful people on the planet – she would literally give you the damn shirt off her back (if she thought you deserved it, that is) – and she LOVES Marilla, and she LOVES Anne. In her own Mrs. Lynde way, of course … but we come to see that that first impression of her was just the tip of the iceberg. That kind of stuff doesn’t really happen in the Emily books. Aunt Elizabeth doesn’t transform, on closer knowing of her, into a warmer more loving person. We don’t see that her coldness is actually masking a deep pool of lava-like love (like we do with Marilla). Aunt Elizabeth is, for her own reasons, a cold and uptight woman, who cannot bear disagreement, and MUST be the boss. Emily MUST succumb to her will. This is the source of most of their battles. Emily wins some of the battles, but Elizabeth wins most of them. Emily finally is able to live her own life a bit – but that is ONLY because she reaches the age of adulthood. I am not saying that Elizabeth is not complex – oh God, she is – and I LOVE her – I love that character, and how she is written. She is terrifying, and confusing … and her clashes with Emily are terrifically written. Lucy Maud goes right into the psychology of it – she describes what is really going on. What Elizabeth is really feeling, even though she could never admit it to herself. Elizabeth thinks that Emily should not have a spirit of her own. Her will should be Elizabeth’s will. Because she is a child.

God, there are just so many things I love about this series. I can’t even get into it without writing a 20 page essay!!

And so I’m going to break with my own tradition (why not – it’s my blog!!) and do a couple of excerpts from each Emily book. One is JUST NOT ENOUGH.

The first excerpt is from the very first chapter in Emily of New Moon. Emily fanatics will immediately know the chapter and what happens in it: Emily goes out for a walk by herself, and with her imaginary companion – The Wind Woman. Emily runs around, glorying in nature (what a pallid way to describe this chapter!!), having a marvelous time – although somehow, in the prose, Lucy Maud lets us know the darkness of this world, of Emily’s world. The shabbiness of the house, the alone-ness of the child … there’s something dark in the MOOD, basically. Emily returns to her house after her walk (she’s 8 years old, I think??) and the housekeeper greets her bluntly at the door, “You know, don’t you, that your father is dying?”

Emily’s mother is dead. Her father – an abstracted gentle man – takes care of her. They live far off out of town, and Emily has never gone to school. She has grown up only in the company of her father, the cats (who take on intense 3-dimensional personalities in this book – just as they did for Lucy Maud in real life), the trees (some of which Emily names), and the Wind Woman. Emily lives a life of the mind and a life of the imagination. Her father accepts this in her, he does not judge her, he does not try to clip her wings, or trim her into a more acceptable shape. But the book opens with Emily getting the news broken to her – that her father is dying. He doesn’t have long to live.

The excerpt I am going to post (or, the first one) is from Emily’s walk (and it is also the very end of the first chapter – the last line of the excerpt below is the last line of the first chapter.).

It’s the whole “flash” thing. Lucy Maud wrote a lot about what she called “the flash” in her journals. And she also wrote about it in her long autobiographical essay The Alpine Path (which I will get to, later – I have placed THAT book in my “memoir” bookshelf. Forgive my autism). Anyway, she wrote about it almost exactly as she writes about it here.

I think this book just LIVES. I really do. There is something urgent and personal in the prose – something not careful – Lucy Maud uses dashes a lot (uhm, like I do) – because as her thoughts tumble out, this way, that way, they don’t organize themselves into neat little sentences. It’s a bit more breathless. The dashes are part of that.

Here’s Emily. Out on her walk.

Excerpt from Emily of New Moon – by L.M. Montgomery

And the barrens were such a splendid place in which to play hide and seek with the Wind Woman. She was so very real there; if you could just spring quickly enough around a little cluster of spruces — only you never could — you would see her as well as feel her and hear her. There she was — that was the sweep of her grey cloak — no, she was laughing up in the very top of the taller trees — and the chase was on again — till, all at once, it seemed as if the Wind Woman were gone — and the evening was bathed in a wonderful silence — and there was a sudden rift in the curdled clouds westward, and a lovely, pale, pinky-green lake of sky with a new moon in it.

Emily stood and looked at it with clasped hands and her little black head upturned. She must go home and write down a description of it in the yellow account book, where the last thing written had been, “Mike’s Biograffy.” It would hurt her with its beauty until she wrote it down. Then she would read it to Father. She must not forget how the tips of the trees on the hill came out like fine black lace across the edge of the pinky-green sky.

And then, for one glorious, supreme moment, came “the flash”.

Emily called it that, although she felt that the name didn’t exactly describe it. It couldn’t be described — not even to Father, who always seemed a little puzzled by it. Emily never spoke of it to anyone else.

It had always seemed to Emly, ever since she could rmember, that she was very, very near to a world of wonderful beauty. Between it and herself hung only a thin curtain; she could never draw the curtain aside — but sometimes, just for a moment, a wind fluttered it and then it was as if she caught a glimpse of the enchanting realm beyond — only a glimpse — and heard a note of unearthly music.

This moment came rarely — went swiftly, leaving her breathless with the inexpressible delight of it. She could never recall it — never summon it — never pretend it; but the wonder of it stayed with her for days. It never came twice with the same thing. To-night the dark boughs against that far-off sky had given it. It had come with a high, wild note of wind in the night, with a shadow wave over a ripe field, with a greybird lighting on her window-sill in a storm, with the singing of “Holy, holy, holy” in church, with a glimpse of the kitchen fire when she had come home on a dark autumn night, with the spirit-like blue of ice palms on a twilit pane, with a felicitous new word when she writing down a ‘description’ of something. And always when the flash came to her Emily felt that life was a wonderful, mysterious thing of persistent beauty.

She scuttled back to the house in the hollow, through the gathering twilight, all agog to get home and write down her “description” before the memory picture of what she had seen grew a little blurred. She knew just how she would begin it — the sentence seemed to shape itself in her mind: “The hill called to me and something in me called back to it.”

She found Ellen Greene waiting for her on the sunken front-doorstep. Emily was so full of happiness that she loved everything at that moment, even fat things of no importance. She flung her arms around Ellen’s knees and hugged them. Ellen looked down gloomily into the rapt little face, where excitement had kindled a faint wild-rose flush, and said, with a ponderous sigh,

“Do you know that your pa has only a week or two more to live?”