Since Maud Lewis’s death in 1970, her story has become so mythologized it’s just about impossible to separate hearsay from reality, original information from an ever-deepening well of common knowledge. While certain commercial interests sugar-coat Maud’s life, few can gloss the misery she must have suffered living with advanced rheumatoid arthritis under conditions of dreadful poverty. Yet her paintings show a huge creative spirit, joie de vivre, and an astonishing ability to defy adversity.
These remarkable qualities of hers were first made public by photographer Bob Brooks and arts journalist Murray Barnard in their 1965 Star Weekly article. Besides her paintings themselves, Brooks’s photos of Maud and her husband, Everett, in their tiny home, its every surface adorned with her joyful artwork, are our most vivid record of her. Here’s a woman who looks shy and canny, is physically disabled and perhaps bemused but unfazed by the photographer’s attention—as happy and content as she claimed to be in interviews and as contemporaries remembered her, and at ease with Everett despite his well-known faults.
Maud appears no less happy in the CBC’s 1965 Telescope documentary, The Once-Upon-A-Time-World of Maud Lewis, in which Everett shares views that probably weren’t so unusual at the time but would rightly see him condemned today. As her friend Olive Hayden, the warden’s wife at the Marshalltown Almshouse, insisted, “[Maud] was happy. She had what she wanted. They said [Everett] was mean, but…. He might’ve been mean, but…he wasn’t to her. No, I think he really loved her, and she did him” [Elder Transcripts]. And just as Everett’s attitudes weren’t that uncommon, as others have noted, neither was the poverty that was the couple’s “normal” all that rare in rural Nova Scotia in the 1940s, ’50s, and early ’60s. Simply put, Maud and Everett were products of their time.
Precious few people who knew the couple are still alive or able to share their recollections of either individual. Through a stroke of luck, I was put in contact with ninety-seven-year-old Kay Hooper, one of Maud’s friends and a regular visitor to the Lewis home. Hooper attests to the misery Maud was subjected to amidst Everett’s drinking and controlling, miserly ways. “It was not a happy place,” she told me, calling Maud’s living conditions “shocking,” “sparse,” and “horrible,” and suggesting that “Maud was not used to anything better.” During her visits, Hooper recalls Maud as “very shy” though “she enjoyed company.” Owing to the deformity of her chin, “she had a hard time looking up at you…and was always trying to hide her hands. [In conversations] you had to ask questions to her…. She would tuck in her hands and talk…about the weather…. She never painted in front of you.” With great fondness, Hooper remembers admiring a beautiful milk pitcher Maud kept money in, Maud dumping out the “two or four dollars” that were in it, giving it to Hooper, and insisting that she take it. As for Everett, Hooper says, “I didn’t think much of him, didn’t take to him. He would sit quiet in the room, just waiting for the money.” She also recalls Maud standing by the road, thumbing a ride to Yarmouth to escape him. If Maud wasn’t abused physically by her husband, without doubt he exploited her financially while depriving her of amenities many of us (though certainly not all) take for granted.
But who can say what Maud really thought of her experience? So much is lost to the vagaries of recycled second- and third-hand memories, and even of public records. To this day, for example, Maud’s exact age remains unclear, with various sources listing her birth year as 1901, 1902, and 1903. My decision to abide by the birthdate recorded in her grandmother Isabella Dowley’s family Bible—March 7th, 1902—on display at the Yarmouth County Museum, reflects my choice to negotiate a middle ground in writing this version of Maud’s story. As with many things in life, I suspect the reality of her experience lies in between abject darkness and cheery sunshine, in the grey areas of shifting light. Not to sugar-coat any aspect of Maud’s life, but in dramatizing parts of this shadowy ground, I ask you to remember that, as Margaret Atwood says, all fiction is speculative.
–Carol Bruneau, July 2, 2020