Maud had been going at a rapid pace professionally ever since the move to Toronto, and in the early fall of 1936 she desperately needed a break. It had been four years since she had been “down home.” She loved the Island for its natural beauty, but she also loved the unqualified admiration she felt there with friends and family.
She travelled by train, arriving at the beginning of October for a month’s stay. She noticed changes there: her Uncle John F. Macneill had cut down her beloved old apple tree before he died. “Lovers’ Lane” trees had also been cut down, and her friends had aged noticeably. She took her O.B.E. medal to show her friends and family, and all shared her pride in it, except her aging Aunt Emily, who looked at it only long enough to note, dismissively, that it was “pretty” (October 26, 1936). Maud wrote in her journal that Emily should “not grudge me my small morsel of fame and success. God knows I have paid high for it.” She did not know that her Aunt Emily told other relatives that she was “ashamed to know” her niece, Maud.40
To all other Islanders and relatives, a visit from L. M. Montgomery was, as always, major news on the Island. Lieutenant-Governor DeBlois put on a reception at Government House for her, and over two hundred admiring Islanders trouped to the event. The Charlottetown Patriot reported that “Mrs. Macdonald … [is] as charming as she is talented …” The paper also gave a running account of which people Maud visited each week. The Webbs and Alec and May Macneill in Cavendish and her Campbell relatives in Park Corner were standard, but everyone else honoured with a visit from her felt especially important.
On November 7, 1936, the Globe ran a “letter” written while Maud was still in Cavendish. She explained that the farm where Anne of Green Gables was set had been purchased by the government for a National Park, ensuring that Anne’s haunts would remain forever. Her letter made it clear to the newspaper’s readers that even the Government of Canada in Ottawa, as well as the Island’s local government, recognized her celebrity and national significance. (Maud had watched the rising influx of tourists to Cavendish since 1908. In the 1920s, Ernest and Myrtle Webb began operating a tearoom and tourist home in “Green Gables.” Maud felt pride that her books had made the Island a tourist site, but she also felt terrible sorrow that her old haunts, so private and peaceful, were now overrun with tourists.)
After her return from the Island, she spoke in Goderich, Ontario, at a banquet for two hundred people (a combined group of Mission Circles, Evening Auxiliaries, and CGIT groups). The next night she spoke in Guelph, again at Chalmers Church. Her memory of her Grandfather Macneill was softening after her recent trip home, and she acknowledged that she had learned storytelling techniques and many old tales from him, according to the Guelph Mercury.
The Toronto Book Fair started on November 9, 1936, and it ran until the 14th. The Book Fair (which replaced the earlier CAA Book Week) was sponsored by a new organization, the Association of Canadian Bookmen (ACB), founded the previous year by a group of men including William Arthur Deacon. The ACB’s ranks were filled with professional men, unlike the CAA, which had many rather undistinguished “scribbling women” among its members. Dr. Pelham Edgar was the president of the ACB, as well as of the CAA. Hugh S. Eayrs, president of the MacMillan Company of Canada, was treasurer and chairman of the Book Fair Committee. Arthur H. Robson, president of the Toronto Branch of the CAA, was in charge of the speakers’ program. Major speakers of the official program would include Grey Owl, Margaret Lawrence (not the later writer, Margaret Laurence, but a young critic who had written a much-praised book on women’s contributions to literature), novelist Morley Callaghan, activist and novelist Nellie McClung, folklorist Marius Barbeau, Americans Edgar A. Guest and Carl Van Doren, and the Canadian Wilson Macdonald, a flamboyant and self-important poet and performer much touted then but now forgotten.41 William Arthur Deacon, whose hand was everywhere in this fair, was chair of the opening session. At this evening session, at 8:00 p.m., Sir Charles G. D. Roberts, Sir William Mulock, and Professor Pelham Edgar spoke. At 9:00 p.m., Grey Owl gave the keynote speech. The newspapers, especially The Mail and Empire where Deacon was literary editor, carried excited and detailed accounts of the week-long events.
Maud was conspicuous by her absence from the front lineup of speakers, despite her prominence on the CAA executive and her fame as a speaker who drew large crowds. In her journals, she wrote of the 1936 Book Fair as if she were part of it, but in fact she was sidelined into peripheral events, and women’s programs, at that. Grey Owl spoke twice during the Book Fair, as the keynote speaker on opening night, and again at the Canadian Women’s Press Club luncheon in Eaton’s Round Room.
At that luncheon Maud was seated between Grey Owl and William Arthur Deacon. Deacon turned his back on her and spoke only to the woman on his left. Grey Owl turned to his right, and focused only on the woman there, the event’s convener. Isolated between them, Maud quietly ate her lunch. Before dessert, Grey Owl turned to Maud and remarked abruptly: “You are a woman after my own heart.” Surprised, according to her journals, she responded: “How so?” His reply, to Maud’s amusement: “You don’t talk.”
It was Maud’s job to thank him after his speech. She told of hearing an “owl’s laughter” in Leaskdale. Grey Owl sprang up, exclaiming dramatically: “You are the first white person I have ever met who has heard owl’s laughter. I thought nobody but Indians ever heard it. We hear it often because we are a silent race. My full name is Laughing Grey Owl.”42 This anecdote made the papers the next day, even Deacon’s Mail and Empire.
Deacon, like most everyone else, was taken in by Grey Owl’s fictions about his origins. Grey Owl claimed that he had been born in Mexico, had gone to England with the “Buffalo Bill” show, and had then returned to Canada, where he had lived ever since. At the age of thirteen he could speak “fairly good ‘pidgin’ English,” he said. Deacon’s Mail and Empire account of Grey Owl’s appearance is dramatic:
Striding, gaunt and tall in fringed elk-skin tunic and leggings, wrapping around him a vividly red Indian blanket, Grey Owl received an ovation from 2,000 gathered at the Book Fair to hear [him]…. People stood for an hour to hear his oratory, the peculiarly Indian poetry of his delivery, shot through with humour, as he told of giving up hunting and taking to writing for a livelihood, and his early experiences as an author. There was magnificent pride in the great eagle-feather in his hair, and the scalping knife stuck through the wampum belt, and something almost of challenge as those beaded moccasins trod the dais, to and fro, to and fro. He dared his audience, as fellow Canadians, to put his people on a self-respecting basis by making them conservors of wild life, forests and natural resources.… ‘I’m almost frantically loyal to Canada,’ he said, declaring ‘I speak with a straight tongue; I tell you only what is true.’ [italics added] (November 11, 1936, p. 7)
The newspaper account builds to a dramatic end: “Well did Chairman Hugh Eayrs call him ‘A great Canadian, a great gentleman, a great friend, and a great writer.’ ”
Maud’s description of the event in her journals shows her skepticism: “[Grey Owl] was looking quite the Indian of romance, with his long black braids of hair, his feather headdress and a genuine scalping knife—at least he told us it was genuine …” (November 10, 1936).
Two years later, Grey Owl would be dead, at age fifty, and his real identity and name discovered.43 He left an important legacy through his popular books, including The Adventures of Sajo and Her Beaver People (1935), which showed his great love of the Canadian wilderness. His 1936 speech shows him to be a man much ahead of his time:
Canada’s greatest asset today is her forest lands. In my latest book I have attacked the average Canadian’s ignorance of his own country. He is prouder of skyscrapers on Yonge Street.… He can have those any time, but we can’t replace the natural resources we are destroying as fast as we can.… They make us one of the richest countries in the world, and I call on you to let my people help in preserving these riches for us, as the beaver conserve the water. (Mail and Empire, November 10, 1936, p. 7)
Maud had liked his speech—she too loved the natural flora and fauna, and she would remark in 1938, upon hearing of his death, that even though he had taken people in about his identity, his concern for animals and the natural world was real.
The same day that Deacon described Grey Owl’s speech, a fellow journalist gave Deacon a huge puff in the paper. He asserted that Deacon had discovered that Canadians “did not know they had any literature apart from that produced by a handful of minor poets” and that it was Deacon’s “prophetic eye which saw in the germinating kernel hidden in the earth, the full flower, the tall tree that was to be.… [and] his own assiduous tending, hoeing, weeding and trenching, helped create it and now he can with pride invite anyone to come into the Canadian garden.”44 Maud, addicted to newspaper reading each day, undoubtedly read this mythologizing about Deacon with some annoyance.
A few days later, William Arthur Deacon was officially appointed as literary editor of The Globe and Mail, a post he would hold until his retirement in 1961. He would wield enormous influence on Canadian letters, for better or worse, for almost forty years. He could do much to make or break an author, at least temporarily, until time sorted out who deserved to be remembered.
Maud marched through another round of speeches after the Book Fair. On November 12, she spoke to the Civitans’ Ladies’ Auxiliary in the Eaton’s Round Room.45 The following day, she gave the address at a banquet for the Lampton Mills graduating class, with over 165 in her audience, the largest number recorded there.46 On November 14, she was the guest of honour at a tea held by the L. M. Montgomery Chapter of the I.O.D.E.47 That engagement appears to have been her last for 1936, a very demanding year as far as speeches and public appearances were concerned.
A year after moving in, Maud felt that “Journey’s End” had started to seem like home. She had hired landscapers to make a small rock garden, a new fashion. But all was not well inside her home. Ewan started having his “sinking spells” again. By the second week in January 1936, he was into a “down cycle,” lying around and staring vacantly, “pawing at his head,” and complaining of “burning sensations.”
Maud’s novels show a deep understanding of complicated interpersonal relationships. Yet, within her immediate family, contentious or worrying matters were rarely addressed directly. She had grown up in a family where her grandfather’s explosive nature was to be avoided rather than confronted. She had learned conflict avoidance rather than discussion and negotiation. In her own family, this pattern was replicated. Instead of discussing contentious issues, the Macdonalds by-passed them, all the while watching each other closely. (Maud’s ability to “read” people’s emotions and character through non-verbal clues was legendary, and she often gives tonal quality to characters’ speeches by commenting on something she observes in their demeanour.) There might have been leading questions, but there was little open and serious confrontation of issues.48 Outbursts were rare in this house, which the maids all described as very “civilized,” and when tempers did flare, Maud was terribly upset. She certainly could speak her piece on the rare occasion when she reached the point of explosion, but she would suffer for a long time afterwards. Ewan, on the other hand, having grown up in a less intense house, was an excellent negotiator in his public life.
The undercurrent of anxiety in the Macdonald house was spreading. Stuart had applied himself to his studies this year, but by February 1936, Maud described him as being “dull and languid.” Typically she did not ask him what was wrong. He became less communicative, not his usual joking self. Stuart knew all too well that his mother was opposed to his continuing relationship with Joy Laird. He did not like to hide his visits to Norval, as he was very uncomfortable deceiving a mother he loved and admired. Also, his mother’s disappointment over Chester’s marriage was very clear to him, and he did not want to add to her misery. Yet, Stuart believed that he should be able to make his own choice of a girlfriend. He both resented his mother for her attitude and thought himself weak for capitulating to it.
Stuart wanted nothing more than to make his mother happy, but he also felt deep and long-standing affection for Joy, his chum since the Macdonalds moved to Norval when he was eleven. As they grew older, their friendship developed into a romantic relationship. All through his years at St. Andrew’s, Stuart and Joy had corresponded. Joy had been offered no opportunity for further education beyond high school, so Stuart had lent her books for self-education. Joy was not only pretty, bright, and witty, but her buoyant personality made her full of laughter and fun, something in increasingly short supply in his own home. According to memories in Norval, the Laird home was always cheerful, a congregating place for young people. Drunk or sober, even her father could be good company. Stuart missed seeing Joy, who was popular in Norval with everyone, it seemed, except his mother.
Strangely, Maud did not contemplate her own role in making Stuart “dull and languid.” Even more odd, Maud was just then plotting her new novel, Jane of Lantern Hill, in which she depicted a difficult and controlling grandmother interfering in her grown child’s love life. The meddling brings grief to everyone concerned in the novel.
But much more immediate problems were at hand. Marriage and fatherhood had not settled Chester. He had solemnly promised his parents that there would be no more babies until he could support them, but he was drifting without focus or discipline, showing minimal interest in his legal studies. Then the stunning news came on April 19, 1936, that Luella had given birth to a second child, a baby son. Chester had not even informed his parents that Luella was pregnant again. In 1936, information about contraception was available to married couples, and Maud was furious at Chester’s irresponsibility.49
Even worse, Luella had not even informed Chester when she was taken to the hospital. It was her father, Robert Reid, who had felt it appropriate, indeed necessary, to inform both Chester and his parents by telephone that a baby boy had arrived. The baby—sadly, wanted and welcomed by no one in the extended family he was born into—was named Cameron Stuart Craig Macdonald. He was the spitting image of his father, from the moment of birth. This event pushed Ewan into another round of deep depression, worse than any he had experienced thus far. He was soon needing medications to sleep. On May 1, 1936, Maud wrote in her journal, “If everything was as it should be how glad and interested I would be in the first little grandson. But as it is I feel only bitterness.” On May 3, when Ewan was suffering his worst attack since coming to Toronto, she attributed this to the news of the baby.
Maud felt hopelessly dispirited, grieving over Chester’s disinterest in his own children and over his failure to take control of his life. He could speak brilliantly on myriad subjects, but he was impulsive, erratic, arrogant, and dishonest—hardly promising qualities for a lawyer. Maud was beginning to wonder if Chester actually had serious mental problems.
But May 1936 brought Maud one huge relief: in spite of his earlier slump, Stuart passed his second-year Medicine courses with flying colours. Chester would not receive his grades for another month. As she waited to hear the results, Maud needed medications to sleep. When the “pass lists” were finally printed in the paper, Chester had failed two of his law courses: Criminal Procedures and Torts. So soon after the birth of his unwanted baby, this news was overwhelming. Chester would have to write “supplementals” in the coming autumn; this meant a summer of worry for Maud.
July 5, 1936, was Maud and Ewan’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary; no one noticed the date except Maud herself. She wrote in her journal: “The greater part of those 25 years has been a nightmare, owing mainly to Ewan’s attacks of melancholia, intensified these past six years by Chester’s behaviour” (July 5, 1936).
Another terrible blow came to the Macdonalds on the morning of September 13, 1936: Ewan and Maud opened the Globe to read that Ernest Barraclough was dead, reportedly of a stroke. The death was unexpected, and it hit them hard. The Barracloughs had provided an oasis of discreet friendship in Maud’s and Ewan’s often beleaguered lives. The Macdonalds rushed out to Glen Williams to give Mrs. Barraclough support. But Ida was prostrate with grief and there was little that they could do. Shortly after Ernest’s death, Ewan went across the street to see Dr. Lane to renew his prescription for sedatives.
Ewan and Maud continued to visit Ida, hoping to help her recover emotionally. Unfortunately no on could protect Ida from the blows that were coming, one after another. Immediately, hurtful rumours started circulating—the first was that Ernest had committed suicide.50 Next, some of Ida’s relatives gave her the unwelcome information that Ernest had had ongoing “liaisons” with young women in his factory. This was unbearably hurtful, for Ida had idolized her husband. (Luella, who was also distantly related to Ida, said that everyone knew about Ernest’s extramarital dalliances during his lifetime, except, perhaps, his wife and the Macdonalds.) In the 1990s, old-timers still remembered and joked that Ernest had been “very fond of the women.” After his death, when the Macdonalds heard about his affairs, they found it very hard to deal with the stories. They had seen him as a pillar of the church and above reproach.
Ida had yet another unpleasant surprise coming—it turned out, when the account books were opened, that the mill was in serious financial trouble. Everyone in the community, including the Macdonalds, had believed the Barracloughs to be quite wealthy. Ernest and Ida had lived very well in a big, finely appointed house, and always drove new cars. Even though Ida was excessively corpulent, she always dressed stylishly, and the small, dapper Ernest dressed impeccably, too. Like most husbands of the era, Ernest had handled all the money, telling Ida nothing.
Ida next discovered that her husband’s estate left her only enough money to live on modestly, and that his will specified that she would lose even this if she remarried. It is unlikely that she would have remarried in any case, but this stipulation came on top of the allegations that Ernest had been unfaithful to her. Ewan and Maud were very shaken by all the after-death revelations, and their visits to cheer the inconsolable Ida became increasingly difficult “duty visits.” (She lived some thirty years after the death of Ernest.) Ernest’s death provided one more fallen star in their increasingly unstable firmament.
—
Maud had been worrying all summer over whether Chester would pass his supplemental exams. He had wasted three years in Engineering before he was thrown out. Now he had invested three years in law—two in articling and one in coursework—and he might be thrown out again. But on the morning of September 22, Chester informed his relieved mother that he had passed—with a 92 percent in one and a bare pass in the other. This meant he could continue in law school. If he could pass his second year of courses, there would be only one final year, and he could graduate in 1938. Maud felt relief that he had passed, but she also knew that he would have been at the top of his class had he worked hard.
As Maud ended the ninth volume of her journals in September 29, 1936, she sounded the classic depressive note: “I have lost every hope for things ever being better.” She added: “Everything I hoped and dreamed and planned for has gone with the wind. I am broken and defeated.”
In actual fact, during 1936 her books were selling well, her readership still adored her, movie rights were in the offing, and Stuart was doing well in medical school and making a name for himself as an exceptionally talented gymnast in the University of Toronto’s gymnastic team competitions. The critical reputation of her books might have been under attack, but in 1936 she took in $6,093 in book royalties, and so was able to pay off a large part of her mortgage. Objectively, she had much to be thankful for. But all she could see was that Chester was heading towards failure.
She did not know for sure what was going on with Stuart now, either. Stuart had started a friendship with Margaret Cowan soon after their move to Riverside Drive, and Maud did all she could to foster this, thinking that the pretty, vivacious, and cultured Margaret was just the “right kind of girl” for Stuart. Maud had bought Stuart an expensive membership at the local golf club, thinking it an appropriate place for him to socialize with other nice girls from prominent families. Stuart also had ample opportunity to meet lots of young women at the University of Toronto. Although he was very popular, Maud suspected that he still exchanged letters with Joy and sometimes went to Norval to see her. When she had been on the Island that fall, the Webbs of Cavendish had casually referred to Joy as Stuart’s “girl,” and had spoken of their relationship as a suitable and serious one. That knowledge had all but ruined Maud’s otherwise happy vacation.
Then, a few days before his mother’s birthday, Stuart had come in after a date with Margaret Cowan and remarked in a significant way to his mother that it was a “good thing” they had left Norval when they did. Maud took this to mean that he had terminated the relationship with Joy. Nothing could have elevated her spirits more.
On her birthday, November 30, 1936, thinking that the romance with Joy was over, Maud spat out all her objections to Joy and the entire Laird family in her journal. Of Joy, she wrote:
Joy was common and cheap … but I would say with a good deal of the quality detestably called sex appeal.… Joy was certainly no companion for my son … I warned Stuart not to let himself get tangled up with any such people.… All these years [his relationship with Joy] has been … spoiling what had always been the beautiful relationship between us. The thought that one day he might ask me to accept that bootlegger’s spawn as a daughter was something I could not bear … (SJ 5 114–15).
These are strong words—and totally unfair, according to people from Norval. When Maud’s comments about Joy were published in 2004 (Joy was by then dead), there was a near-collective howl of indignation at this characterization of Joy and her family. The village asserted that the young Joy had been clever, pretty, poised, and full of personality. She was well liked throughout the community. As for her father being a bootlegger, the older residents of Norval said that every community had one or more, especially during Prohibition, and, in fact, many “respectable people regarded bootlegging as a useful business.”51The rest of the village took Mr. Laird as he was, and admitted he had a drinking problem; every community had a few characters who imbibed too much, but they were not ostracized unless they were destructive or “mean” drunks. When Lewis did go on a binge, his wife banished him out to “the Blue House,” a shack on the corner of their property, a cheerful gathering place for men who dropped in to chat or pick up a bottle and talk. The people of Norval—except for Maud—generally liked Joy’s father, despite his faults. No one was rich in Norval, and the other local people did not look down on Josie, Joy’s mother, as Maud did, for doing paid work outside her home. But once Maud made up her mind about people and their family status, she did not change her views. Nothing would make Joy acceptable to her.
The belief that Stuart had finally ended his romance with Joy unshackled Maud from the paralysis of worry. She had put her journal aside for three years, from 1933 to 1936, following Chester’s marriage. Now she had such a lift that she resumed writing up her journal at the beginning of December 1936. She began filling in retrospective entries from the notes she had kept those three years. Her creative work flew too: by the time the holidays came, she had only three chapters of Jane of Lantern Hill left to write.
But Christmas 1936 was a gloomy one: both boys escaped, leaving her home alone with dreary Ewan on an even drearier, rainy day. Stuart went next door to the Cowans for Christmas dinner, and Chester dutifully went to see Luella and his children in Norval. When Maud and Ewan tucked into their own roast goose that night, neither of them felt like talking. On December 31, 1936, Maud closed off her journal with the ominous statement that “a certain thing is making me very sick at heart.” She would not write anything again in her journal for over a year, until January 1938.
When Maud finally took up her pen on January 9, 1938, to write up all of the missing periods in her journals, she began by recapitulating her most difficult times. She labelled 1919 a “hideous year” (the year of Ewan’s first breakdown); 1933 and 1934 were “horrible beyond expression” (the year of Chester’s “forced” marriage and Ewan’s second breakdown); but nothing, she wrote, had been equal to 1937.
The story that began to unfold in 1937 about Chester—now twenty-two, married, and a father of two—is glossed over in her own journals. She felt that she must censor her journals because others would read them when she was dead, and “some things it would not be good for anyone but myself to know … [I] can never forget them and cannot tell them—to anyone” (January 9, 1938).
Nor did she write in her journals another story—that of her growing dependence on sedatives to cope with mounting anxieties. Throughout her journals, Maud mentions from time to time the medications that doctors gave either her or Ewan to calm them or to help them sleep, but these accounts are only incidental.
As 1937 opened, Maud, a determined professional, was still trying to write the ending of Jane of Lantern Hill. The book had to end happily, even though she was so wracked with apprehension over Chester that she could hardly concentrate. Chester was now taking the second year of his three years of law, but he was not studying. Nor did he seem to be going into the firm to work part-time, as required. She suspected the worst—that Chester was seeking female companionship outside his marriage.
Maud partially blamed herself for this turn of events. Understanding the value of social networking, especially for a young law student, she had thought Chester could meet more young people through the church. The Victoria-Royce Presbyterian Church Young People’s Society seemed a prime place to meet future community leaders. She had urged Chester to join the YPS, and he’d taken her advice. But instead of the YPS being a place where he could network with the “right kind of friends,” it became a venue to recruit new girlfriends.
Her relationship with Chester had become very complicated, and this was another reason why she wanted him to find more friends his own age. Since he had moved back home after his parents took up residence in Toronto, Maud and Chester had each been filling a void in the other’s life. They were both lonely, each cut off from the normal intellectual companionship and emotional support one might expect from a spouse. Chester had never been one to establish lasting friendships, and he played no sports, so he had more time to spend with his mother than Stuart did. (Stuart was always out of the house attending classes, practising with the University of Toronto gymnastics team, or socializing with friends, and when he came home, he ate and then went to his room to study.) Chester was always willing to drive his mother around, to accompany her to films, or to escort her to events, instead of studying. He was an insatiable reader—of everything except his law textbooks—and his mother loved discussing books with him. Maud valued his intellectual companionship, at home, walking to movies together, going for sodas at the local drugstore, or taking drives.
Initially a churlish “loner” who lacked social graces, Chester was learning from his mother how to “talk well” on many subjects outside of law. He was developing the ability to sail into a social gathering and make a very good impression with his fluent and informed conversation. Maud undoubtedly saw the “talking time” they spent together as grooming her son for success. He was a quick study.
In adolescence, Chester had smarted because he’d thought that Stuart was his mother’s favourite, but finally he had begun to feel like the “number one” son.52 Perhaps she found in Chester a younger and more intellectual version of Ewan, and she began to dote on her elder son in a way that often made others feel profoundly uncomfortable. Years later, people from Norval remembered how Chester made big public displays of affection to his mother—long after Stuart, three years younger, had quit kissing her in public. In Toronto, Chester bestowed courtly public kisses on his mother, opened doors for her with the flourish of a royal footman, and generally played the role of the adoring and attentive son. In Toronto, Chester kissed Maud often and told her what a “good little mother” she was. To many, Maud appeared quite besotted with him. Some thought Chester’s kisses and hugs for his mother seemed more for effect than genuine, but this was probably unfair: like everyone else, he undoubtedly did enjoy his mother’s company and attention.
Maids remembered how Chester would come into his parents’ bedroom when his mother was resting and lie down on the bed beside her to talk, sometimes putting his head on her shoulder. She would pat him or sometimes run her fingers through his hair—in their view, an odd intimacy for a mother and a grown, married son.53 As Chester became Maud’s constant companion and chauffeur, Ewan receded further into the background. Now, in early 1937, with new social skills and confidence under his belt, Chester was ready for a new social life, involving very late hours and the family car. His hyper-excited mood alarmed his watchful mother.
A sense of entitlement had taken hold and flowered in Chester during the final years they lived in Norval. He gloried in his mother’s worldwide fame and made sure that everyone knew he was her son. His developing elitist attitude was probably in part the result of his upbringing: his mother’s own sense of having come from two superior clans on the Island, and her glorification of all things Scottish. In the Norval and early Toronto days, Luella recalled how Maud, at the dinner table, often launched into romancing Sir Walter Scott and his works, filled as they were with the glamour of the “auld countree” and with noble characters who had a strong “sense of honour.”
When Maud talked about the old world and its values and romance, Luella, maids, and other visitors remembered how Ewan would look into the middle-distance, with an unhappy expression on his face. As someone who read very little, Ewan was largely excluded; and also, he knew his own family’s life in old Scotland had been very difficult. His tales would have been the stories of peasant Highlander relatives leaving Scotland in order to avoid a miserable life (or death) through near starvation. He had the wrong narrative of the Scottish past, so he kept quiet.
Without a counter-narrative, Chester seems to have bought it all. He had spent much of his life as an unhappy misfit in his own world. It would therefore have been very easy—and appealing—to become drawn into his mother’s idealized world of chivalric old Scotland. Chester’s most-quoted saying from this period was remembered with distaste by many: “There are two kinds of people in the world—those who are Scots, and those who wish they were.” He was not out of sync with many other citizens of Swansea (and other areas): in this era, the Scots did often feel superior to those of other ethnic descent— especially to Poles, Jews, and Chinese, and, to a lesser extent, the Irish and even the English. The social, religious, and ethnic prejudices that held in Swansea, appalling as they may seem today, were typical for that time. However, few would have advertised their perceived sense of superiority as Chester did.
Predictably, the relationship between Ewan and Chester deteriorated even further. The atmosphere between them was heavy and tense, and sometimes the tension sparked sharp words. Ewan had struggled hard for his education and professional standing in the ministry, and he was profoundly upset by Chester’s failure to apply himself when given good opportunities. Ewan continued to brood on the public humiliation that Chester had brought on them. People remembered that after Chester and Luella’s marriage Maud could cover her upset, but Ewan was openly devastated.
Both Ewan and Maud knew that former parishioners in Norval felt that Luella was being treated shabbily. The facts spoke for themselves: Maud had set the young couple up in an apartment in Toronto, in January 1934. After less than six months of living with Chester, Luella packed up and went back to her father, and she stayed there, even after a second baby came. Both Ewan and Maud cared a great deal about how they were regarded and remembered in Norval. If Chester had shown some remorse for the shame he’d brought on his parents, it would have helped, but instead, Chester’s response was to resent his wife and family.
There is no question that Chester had a genuine admiration for his mother. But Chester also knew that she was the one with the car and the money, and that she made all the real decisions. As long as Chester went for one obligatory visit to Luella and his children every month, and drove his mother wherever she wanted to go, he was given unrestricted use of the car. He would claim that he needed it to deliver writs or legal documents for Mr. Bogart’s office, and then simply disappear for long and unaccounted-for periods of time.
Ewan was charitable, not judgmental like Maud. But he was no fool, and he saw an irresponsible and self-indulgent son. Both Maud and Ewan began to suspect—rightly—that the family car was being used to troll for women, among other things. Maud thought ruefully of Mr. Bogart’s earlier comment that it was a good thing he would be living at home so she could “keep an eye” on him. There was nothing she could do. And more sadness was around the bend.
On January 18, 1937, after only a short illness, Maud’s beloved cat “Good Luck” suddenly died, and this temporarily upstaged Chester in his mother’s grief index. Little has been said in this biography of Maud’s loves for her cats, but her journals are full of accounts of them, with their pictures, and in one of her scrapbooks she even saved their fur. Maud’s favourite cat of all time was “Good Luck,” or “Lucky,” as he was fondly called. He had been a fixture in her life since he was shipped from Alec and May Macneill’s Cavendish farm in 1923. He was a connection to the Island, and he had been her most constant companion and comfort over the years.
Maud needed this beloved little pet in her life. He was a loyal and affectionate fellow who sat by his mistress and watched her when she wrote. He purred contentment when she was reading. He curled up with her and slept on her bed. He waited patiently for her when she was out, and greeted her on her return. He was miserable when she went away and remained disconsolate until she returned. When she was distressed, he became even more affectionate. Maud was a woman of many moods, and Lucky responded to all these moods with constant solicitous affection—a trait quite rare for a cat.54
Lucky’s death was sudden, the result of liver cancer. Bereft, Maud laid him out downstairs on a pile of newspapers inside the front door. For almost a day, she was too distraught to arrange any sort of burial. Ewan, Chester, and Stuart, who always expected Maud to sort out problems, were no help. Finally, Maud called on Mr. Fry, the builder, who brought a shovel and dug a grave. Lucky was wrapped in a shroud and buried in the backyard.
Maud’s loving portrait of this affectionate cat in her journals must be a tour de force in the annals of pet obituaries: in her journal entry of January 9, 1938, she writes nearly forty handwritten pages on his endearing qualities. Portions of her description almost eroticize her affection for him:
He lay there, his tiny flanks heaving up and down under my fingers and his little body vibrating with his rapturous purrs.… After Luck came to me I never cared for another cat. Cats before him I loved as cats. I loved Luck as a human being. And few human beings have given me the happiness he gave me.
The loss of this beloved cat was devastating. Maud had gone through life feeling deserted and disappointed. All the men in her life had essentially failed her, whether through failure to love and value her as a child, to help her get an education as a young woman, to take her seriously as a writer when she became a best-selling author, to share her joy in accomplishment, or to offer intellectual companionship. Her two grandfathers had failed her, as had her uncles and father. Deprived of a parent’s unconditional love and support, she had spent her entire life longing for her father’s love (since he seemed more real to her than her mother, whom she could not remember). Her books are all about young people who want a home and loving parents—and who suffer fear and loneliness until they find them. These were her deepest levels of longing. She had hoped for real companionship with Ewan, but despite his well-meaning intent, he could not offer that. She wanted to feel proud of her sons, but Chester was turning out to be a spectacular disappointment. She longed for someone responsive to her moods, as well as someone who could share in the pleasures she felt in her triumphs, her celebrity, success, her enthusiasms. Incredibly, this simple cat had become her most reliable partner in life, giving her more emotional support than the men in her life ever had. Losing a loved pet is hard on most people, but Maud’s psychological state was pitifully rendered in her reaction to his death.
Then, on January 19, the day that Lucky was buried, Maud’s maid, Ethel Dennis, gave notice that she would be leaving in March to marry her fiancé, Gordon Currie. Her youth and naïveté had prevented her from being the intellectual companion that both Mrs. Mason and Mrs. Thompson had been, but she was reliable, honest, and respectable. Her departure meant that Maud would have the trouble of finding and training a new maid. This was another blow.
Maud had heard that her previous maid, Faye Thompson, had not found another permanent job after leaving them; Maud contacted her to ask if she would consider returning. Maud had liked Mrs. Thompson—her sense of humour, her quick wit, her competency in all she did—and she hoped that she would come back. If she did, Maud would not have to train her. Maud had been very fond, too, of Mrs. Thompson’s sweet and well-behaved little daughter, June, now seven. The local schools were good, which would be a drawing card. Mrs. Thompson agreed to return.
The next day Maud’s worst fears came to pass: on January 20, 1937, she found that Chester had failed one law course (Practice) outright and managed only a bare pass—50 percent—in each of the other three. Her frustration was overwhelming. He seemed to be in a period of unfocused emotional upsurge, heading towards self-destruction.
Numb with frustration and disappointment, Maud again needed medication to sleep. The anniversary of Frede’s death, January 25, was always a difficult time for her, but now Maud kept recalling how Frede had adored Chester when he was a baby. When Maud tried to finish the first draft of Jane of Lantern Hill on January 27, she found that she simply could not write. How could she write a happy ending to this little waif’s search for loving parents and a joyous home? On January 28, she went to a Canadian Authors Association meeting. Her escape, as always, refreshed her. But then she writes a heartbroken entry, notable for its evasiveness.
There is no entry in my notebook for Friday, January 29. On that day all happiness departed from my life forever. I was sitting at my breakfast, planning out the day’s work when the blow fell. It cannot be written or told—that unspeakable horror. Oh God, can I ever forget that day? Not in eternity …
The journal gives no further explanation. A little later, she laments that she tried to teach her boys the right values, and she notes that Stuart is a “good boy” (February 8, 1937). We don’t know what she learned on January 29, but it seems to have been about Chester.
On January 30, there is another burst of anguish in the journals. She asks God how he could have “let this happen.” She fears she is going “mad.” She mentions in passing that she takes the drug Medinal to sleep. A few days later she makes a passing reference to taking Veronal to sleep. All these sketchy entries are written from notes and memory much later, hitting only high points of a terrible year. They are not intended as an exact record of events, but should rather be seen as an account of her dominant feelings, thoughts, and emotions at the time.
Maud had begun to feel increasingly anxious over her own mental health. The spectre of mental breakdown sent her to more medications, but there is no indication—in her journals or in other people’s memory—that she (or her doctor) had any idea what a dangerous path she was following. On January 31, she wrote that she wished she could only die. “People talk about the bitterness of death. It is not to be compared to the bitterness of life. Bitterness like some gnawing incurable disease …”
Then, a few days later, on February 2, Maud learned that Nora’s husband, Ned Campbell, had died. Maud, who was only slightly older than Ned, had known him when she taught in the Belmont School. In her distraught state, she went to comfort Nora. Perhaps Nora’s loss helped put her own troubles in perspective. She came home, and steeled herself to finish Jane of Lantern Hill the next day, managing to do so through sheer grit. She would dedicate this book “To the memory of Lucky.”
This novel depicts Toronto as a miserable place, standing in direct contrast to the magical Prince Edward Island. Jane Stuart is a young girl living with her pretty but weak-willed mother in Toronto; both are under the thumb of a manipulative, controlling, and powerful grandmother, Mrs. Kennedy. The characterization is powerful and the misery palpable.
Jane’s young mother had married her father impulsively during a vacation trip to the Island. Although he was a war veteran, Andrew Stuart did not suit his imperious mother-in-law who wanted her daughter to marry into a wealthy, prominent family. Nor did Mrs. Kennedy like the fact that her new son-in-law was a writer. She meddled, and the marriage disintegrated, and baby Jane and her mother returned to Toronto to live with Mrs. Kennedy. The novel opens with Jane living unhappily in the stately but soulless Toronto mansion, the victim of her grandmother’s hostility and her ineffectual mother’s failure to protect her only child.
One day Jane learns from a mean-spirited schoolmate that the father she had believed to be dead is actually alive, living in Prince Edward Island. Soon a letter arrives from him, demanding that her mother and grandmother send her for a summer with him. Jane does not want to go. But when she is forced to go, she finds that the Island is a magic place full of happiness and soul-healing qualities, in contrast to the soul-pinching Toronto, a place of vicious gossip and empty lives. At the end of the novel, she is instrumental in bringing her parents together again on Island soil.
The parallels with Maud’s own life are obvious. Maud herself believed in the Island’s remarkable restorative powers, particularly with respect to her own complicated life in Toronto. She also knew that she was herself partly trapped in Toronto by her own ambitions. Furthermore, Jane’s grandmother bears uncanny similarities to the woman Maud could sometimes be: a mother who meddled in her children’s romantic affairs, who tried to break up relationships she considered unsuitable, and who had fierce ambitions for her offspring. Maud no doubt saw this same behaviour in Mrs. Cowan and countless other aspiring mothers in her social milieu. At the same time, Mrs. Kennedy provides what a psychiatrist might call an extraordinary hate-portrait of Maud written by herself. The novel is resolved with a happy ending when Jane’s mother and father are reunited on the Island, to live happily ever after. Jane finds the redemption in life that Maud herself had not. Maud had always wanted her father, but Jane finds both father and mother.
Meanwhile, in the real Toronto home on Riverside Drive, Ethel Dennis had given notice in January of her intention to leave, but she stayed on for several months until her replacement came. Maud’s long-time practice was to thoroughly clean one room in the house each month, instead of doing everything in a massive spring cleaning. She always helped her maids with this. Towards the end of Ethel’s tenure in the Macdonald house, she and Maud cleaned Chester’s room together. Chester’s personal diary was lying out, open, where he had left it in his usual sloppy and careless manner. Maud stopped working and read it. Ethel observed that Maud was profoundly upset by what she read.55
Ethel Dennis was the least judgmental of all Maud’s maids, but she had come to detest Chester. In her view, he was a full-blown problem. “He never settled down,” she said, “and he lied.” Ethel was disgusted with the way he treated Luella and his children, and she knew, as Stuart also did, that Chester often claimed to be using the car to go see his family in Norval when he was doing other things. Maud often talked over the problem of Chester with Stuart, and was so preoccupied with Chester that she gave Stuart little positive attention for his own accomplishments—her attention was always on the wayward son.
“She wasn’t the type to tell her troubles,” Ethel observed, and since Ethel had her own life, she hadn’t been interested in what Maud read in Chester’s journal, but she remembered Maud’s reaction. Ethel disliked Chester’s attitude—that since his mother paid her hired help there was no reason for him to show consideration to a servant. Ethel said she worked hard to wash (with a non-electric hand-paddle washer), starch (by dipping in a solution of cooked-up starch), and iron (heating it on the stove) to keep the Macdonalds’ clothes nice—no small feat before permanent-press and wrinkle-resistant fabrics were developed. Chester would throw his clothes on the floor. Ethel would tidy his room, only to find it a dump again. She said that he “didn’t talk much” and “wasn’t sociable.”
Ethel remembered how Chester would lie in the basement recreation room on his back on a sofa, reading novels instead of studying. When he came to the main floor, he upset his father constantly, actively picking fights with him. Stuart simply “ducked out” whenever Chester tried to start arguments with him. Ethel recalled that towards the end of her stay, the Macdonald household was increasingly tense. She said that the Macdonalds read at the table rather than talking to each other—a sign of increasingly unhappy family dynamics. Ethel left, relieved to move on to a new life, in March 1937.56
Whatever Maud learned from Chester’s diary seems to have forced her to see him in a new light. On that fateful morning when (as she described it later) her world “fell apart,” Maud may have confronted Chester with what she had learned from his diary. Or there might have been a call from someone (like the minister at the church), or she simply may have laid a trap for Chester. On February 11, she wrote, without giving specific information, “And to think that the one who has brought me to this was once the little boy I loved so dearly …”
But, always able to carry on publicly, on February 12 Maud spoke at the Humber Valley Bird Club. Two days later, she travelled by train to speak at Beaverton, Ontario. The Beaverton newspaper described her as “pleasing and unassuming,” giving a talk that was at once “interesting” and “humorous.”
The contrast between her public life and private turmoil throughout these years is remarkable. But the strain took its toll. Confrontation with Chester’s unacceptable behaviour was often followed by descriptions in Maud’s journals of nervous misery, even while her public persona remained witty and gay. On February 21, 1937, she wrote:
I will not let this crush me. Chester is not worth suffering so for. Old as I am—broken as I am—I shall rise above it and live my own life—live it gallantly. I shall have recurrences of agony … but I must and will conquer them.… I must live a little longer for Ewan’s and Stuart’s sakes. Yet death would be so welcome.
After the speech in Beaverton on February 23, 1937, she recorded in her journal how she hated to return home; the next night she suffered from one of her “sick headaches” and vomiting. In fact, she described spending an entire month in “dreadful restlessness.”
Regardless of his mother’s distress, Chester continued to shirk responsibility. He quit visiting his family at all unless Maud pressured him. Sometimes she ensured that he actually went to Norval by going with him, visiting Marion Webb Laird while he went to see Luella.
When Chester did not come to Norval, Luella’s father insisted that Luella take the children to Riverside Drive for visits. Luella liked Maud and Ewan, but she found these visits humiliating. It was clear that Chester did not want to see them—he left as soon as they arrived and did not return until after they had gone (something that Ethel remembered well). Maud and Ewan pretended to be glad to see Chester’s family but did a poor job of it. Ewan could not relate to children—even if he had been well, he was not someone who would pick up and cuddle a child, or sit down on the floor to play with his grandchildren. Maud did not enjoy the visits either, given her embarrassment over Chester’s behaviour.
Throughout March 1937 Maud went out at least twice—to speak to the annual banquet of the Withrow Old Girls Association and to be a guest of honour at the Heliconian Club. Her Withrow speech was vintage Montgomery, and the Globe, the Star, and the Telegram all carried detailed accounts. She stated that Australia contributed heavily to her fan mail. On one occasion 87 letters had arrived in one mail following an article in an Antipodean newspaper, and within six months she had 750 letters. The speech was amusing in its detail, and it packed a strong message to detractors about the international and varied nature of her readership. She continued to use anecdotes to show that many of her fans were grown men and women.
At the Heliconian Club luncheon on March 23, Maud learned that the Montreal Family Herald had run a contest among its readers to see who was their “most read author”: she wrote that she was at the top with Charles Dickens, while Marshall Saunders and Leo Tolstoy were tied for second place.57 The featured speaker at the Heliconian Club luncheon was William Arthur Deacon, and his topic was “the function of a critic.” The critic’s job, he said, was “to give others a basis for discussion, for a clearer understanding of the author.” He asserted that the function of a critic was not to judge whether a book was good, but to answer the question, “Do I like it?” He stated that a critic should address whether a book was capable of “satisfying human wants.”58 No doubt Maud sat in the audience thinking that if she was the most read author in Canada according to The Family Herald, then her books must satisfy some human wants.
Maud was pleased when Mrs. Thompson returned to work as a maid in March 1937, replacing Ethel. Mrs. Thompson’s sense of humour would help lighten the tone in the house, her intelligence made her an engaging companion for Maud, and her daughter June would add sunshine. June, now seven and a pretty and cheerful little girl, would go to school in their district. This eased considerable domestic stress in Maud’s life, and in turn Maud reduced her use of sedatives.
On March 27, Maud wrote in her journals that she was “released from one of the most dreadful situations a woman could be placed in.” She does not explain further. Perhaps she had one of the several sessions with Chester that culminated with his promise—never kept—to give up his duplicitous life. Around this time, Maud also received some unexpected income: Simpson’s paid out $4,000 on her investment. This relieved much financial pressure, but of course it did not solve the problem of Chester. By April, Maud was having serious symptoms of stress again: her eyes and head were bothering her, and she again had a bout of vomiting and dysentery. She was obsessing about Chester and his behaviour: his marks for the year would be coming up in June, and she could see that he was not studying. She could not imagine what the future would hold for him if he failed his year.
Maud distracted herself by turning to thoughts of Frede, and copied out in her journals some “ten-year letters” that she and Frede had written each other in 1907 and 1917. Returning to memories of her Cavendish life always brought happy distraction. But this year was special: it was on April 24, 1937, that the Prince Edward Island National Park was officially opened, with the “Green Gables House” as its centrepiece.
In the first week of May, Maud attended the annual dinner of the Toronto branch of the Canadian Women’s Press Club. She sat at the head table with Lady Willison (Marjory MacMurchy) and others. During the same week, she attended a big banquet held by the CAA.
Not mentioned in Maud’s journals is another big social event from the first week in May. The Reverend John Mustard, pastor of the Oakwood Presbyterian Church, retired at age seventy. He was much loved by his congregation, and they gave him a splendid retirement party. He had been every bit as successful and beloved during his eight years at Oakwood as he had been previously at the Dufferin Street Church. At Oakwood, the congregation had risen from 118 to 302, and he’d built a new church seating 350 before he retired. (He was even given a new car by one of his churches.) His service in the Toronto Presbytery over a thirty-year period was so exceptional that the University of Toronto awarded him with an honorary doctorate. He was not one to forget old friends, and he had always maintained contact with Maud and Ewan.59
Since March, Maud had been trying to plan her next novel, Anne of Ingleside, but it was very hard going. She could not settle her mind enough to concentrate. She took the sedatives prescribed by her doctor to relieve her anxiety. Her symptoms intensified in June: according to her journals, after a vivid “hideous” dream, she thought she could bear the pain in her life no longer and would “break down or go crazy.” She forced herself to do preparatory planning on Anne of Ingleside but complained of feeling “tired,” “queer,” “weak,” “wobbly,” with “shooting pains” in her head behind her eyes. She was frightened: “What on earth is the matter with me?” she asked on June 9, 1937.
Ewan was feeling stress too, and he consulted various doctors, coming away with prescriptions for various compounds to relieve his symptoms. His night-table was loaded with medications, and there was a further supply in the bathroom cupboards. He was dosing himself with multiple prescription drugs, and by early June he was “hearing voices” again, as he had in his breakdowns between 1919 and 1924—symptoms that mimicked schizophrenia but may also have been drug-induced. On June 6, Maud describes his state: he lay on his bed with “staring eyes, his hair standing straight up and he talked unceasingly about himself and his symptoms.” Maud says she thought she was “hardened to this” but it got on her nerves unbearably.
Finally, the worst news that Maud could have imagined came—on June 15, 1937, Chester received his grades for his year: he had failed in four separate subjects. His year was lost. He would have to take the entire year all over again. More fees … more delay in his obtaining a paid position. But more frightening, the way things were going, was the possibility that he would be thrown out of law school, just as he had been thrown out of engineering, after the investment of a huge amount of time and money.
Ewan was so wrapped up in his own symptoms that he seemed unable to comprehend or care that Chester had failed his year.
The normally pleasant Ewan became irritable at mealtimes, and he began tying his handkerchief around his head as he had in his 1919 breakdown. He was growing more anxious: he had promised long ago to deliver a sermon at ceremonies in Leaskdale and Zephyr in the third week of June. He no longer felt up to the sermon and wanted to cancel, but Maud would not let him. She thought that if he forced himself to go ahead, it might help him focus his mind on something other than his symptoms. Plus they would both enjoy seeing old friends and remembering their happier years there. She would soon regret this.
On the advice of various doctors Maud and Ewan had tried different medications to alleviate their ailments, problems ranging from difficulty sleeping to more undefined “nervous disorders.” Neither the doctors nor the patients fully understood the effect of the medications prescribed at that time—or ones available at drug stores. These sedatives, common at that time, fell into two general categories: bromides and barbiturates. In periods of stress after Ewan’s breakdown in 1919, he intensified his use of these medications. And so, increasingly, did Maud.
Believed to be relatively safe then, the medications they were given in the 1920s and 1930s are now known to have been both dangerous and habit-forming. Taken over time and in unregulated and increasing doses, these have the potential to cause havoc. Barbiturates are addictive, and bromides are poisonous.
Ewan and Maud’s original problems—depression, in Ewan’s case, and anxiety and mood swings with Maud—were greatly worsened by the very sedatives prescribed to help them. These medications could easily have been what tipped Ewan from his initial “melancholia” (depression) into severe mental disorder, with psychotic episodes. Likewise, when Maud was distressed by Ewan’s symptoms and driven by her own anxieties, the medications she was given created dependencies that brought on new and terrifying symptoms; these symptoms, it now appears, pushed her towards even deeper problems.
Maud and Ewan were not the only victims of these particular medications; for nearly five decades in the twentieth century they were prescribed to millions of people with “nervous” symptoms. We see many descriptions of the mental problems caused by barbiturates and bromides in literature. Earlier in the century, there are many references in novels to “Veronal,” a substance taken by both Maud and Ewan. Veronal is believed to have been the drug that Virginia Woolf was using before her suicide. Evelyn Waugh’s 1957 novel The Ordeal of Gordon Pinfold details his own bromide psychosis.
Bromides and barbiturates are completely different classes of medications, but they are both central nervous system depressants. Both were discovered in the nineteenth century, and by the 1930s and 1940s they were widely used as general sedatives, taken for a host of medical and minor nervous problems ranging from headaches, aching muscles, and insomnia to general anxiety. In fact, in 1938, bromide compounds were outsold only by aspirin in North America.60 Bromides became a panacea for almost every ailment that could not be treated in other ways (hence the common expression, which could be anything from a joke to a dismissive statement: “Oh, go take a bromide!”).
Bromides are not addictive, but they are very dangerous. Substantial doses taken over a period of time build up slowly in the body because the kidneys cannot excrete them fast enough. This results in “bromide poisoning,” later called “bromism.” The symptoms of bromism can be psychiatric, cognitive, neurological, and even dermatological. Common manifestations are mental dullness, memory impairment, inability to concentrate, irritability, emotional instability, uninhibited behaviour, headaches, decreased visual acuity, slurred speech, lack of muscular control (shaking hands, tremors, unusual gaits), skin rashes, and a transitory state resembling paranoid schizophrenia, with auditory and visual hallucinations, phobias, paranoia, and sometimes violent behaviour, particularly at night. The effect of bromide poisoning on people subject to depressive episodes was to increase and intensify the depression—tragically, the very symptom bromides were often prescribed to alleviate. In large enough doses, bromides could even be fatal.
When Ewan suffered his first sustained depressive episode during the Leaskdale years (1919), he was treated with bromides and Chloral. This was not necessarily the first time he took bromides, but it is the first time Maud records them in her journals. Chloral is a sedative that can create dependency and cause liver damage. Following his treatment, he grew worse and was finally unable to preach. When he became irrational, psychotic, and suicidal, the doctors diagnosed his problem first as a “nervous breakdown” and then as a form of “insanity.” Maud accepted this diagnosis; she regarded all his subsequent episodes of mental instability as mental illness.
Ewan actually manifested many of the now-identified symptoms of bromide poisoning in 1919, then again in 1934 and 1937, the three dates of his most severe “mental breakdowns,” according to Maud’s journals. A tallying of the references to medications he was given (or took) in these years shows that his breakdowns coincided with his heavy use of medications. Although no firm diagnosis is possible at this remove, it does seem likely that Ewan’s condition started as simple depression, but that he was medicated into something far worse.
Doctors now believe that many people admitted to psychiatric hospitals between 1930 and 1950 may in fact have been suffering from bromide poisoning rather than real mental illness. Bromide poisoning caused disturbances that mimicked other psychiatric ailments like schizophrenia. And the treatment for these mental problems, unfortunately, was usually more bromides. Tests for bromide poisoning were being devised in the early 1940s, but it took another thirty years for the dangers of bromides to be fully identified and to reach the general medical community and public. Not until the mid-1970s were bromide compounds (like the widely advertised “Bromo-Seltzer” and “Miles Nervine”) that could be obtained without prescription taken off the market.61
In the days before electronic medical records, people suffering as Ewan did could visit many different doctors in search of an accurate diagnosis and the appropriate treatment. It was not hard to amass, as Ewan did, a collection of these medications, which went by a range of brand names. Patients would combine them, unaware that they were using excessive amounts of the same compound.62
Barbiturates were the second class of drugs that Ewan was regularly given for his depression. These medications, also a nineteenth-century discovery, were prescribed freely throughout the early twentieth century as sedatives. Maud had been given her first prescription for barbiturates as early as 1904 when still in Prince Edward Island. The doctor who prescribed it for her prudently warned her against overusing it, but the full dangers were still unknown. Maud and Ewan were given a whole range of barbiturates over their lifetimes, especially following Ewan’s 1919 breakdown: Veronal, Barbital, Luminal, Medinal, and Nembutal. They did not realize they were all related, and that combining them was dangerous.63
Barbiturates are habit-forming. Users can easily become dependent, both physically and psychologically, requiring increasing doses to achieve the same effect. Growing dependence causes secondary withdrawal problems; severe withdrawal can even lead to death. Withdrawal symptoms can be relieved, of course, by taking more of the drug (or alcohol).
Symptoms of barbiturate withdrawal include irritability, anxiety, rapid mood swings, mental confusion, hallucinations, slurred speech, elevated heart rate, slowed respiration, tremors, and agitation—similar to a response to bromides. All of these were symptoms that Ewan exhibited. Maud often remarked on her inability to comprehend the speed with which he shifted between “crazy” and “normal,” but if his problems were drug-enhanced, this would be completely understandable. Dependency on barbiturates often results in sleeping difficulties and increased mood disturbances, especially depression; no surprise that Maud’s journals are full of descriptions of these symptoms.
Barbiturates depress normal rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep, so dependence on them can also produce particularly vivid dreaming, another symptom described by Maud and Ewan. In June 1936, for instance, Maud described an extremely intense dream, almost a hallucination, in which a young girl with red hair walked around the folding screen in their bedroom. Ewan assured her it was only a dream, but the intensity of the image stayed with Maud for some time.
On September 20, 1936, Maud wrote of Ewan’s treatment: “Lane, of course, prescribed bromides. There is nothing else for it but they are not good for Ewan in other ways. Medicine will not help an obsessed mind.” She seemed to sense on an intuitive level that the treatments might be a problem, but she was not sufficiently convinced to stop them.
Maud’s journals chronicle Ewan’s mental instability in pathetic and depressing detail. But she had her own problems, too, which undoubtedly originated in her volatile temperament, cycling as it did between flights of imagination and depths of despair. The stress of living with Ewan’s mental instability (whatever its cause) took a great toll. Chester’s erratic and self-destructive behaviour also caused much greater anxiety in her later years. She was alarmed further by her declining critical reputation in the Toronto book world. She was anxious by nature, but this would have been greatly intensified by the continuing use of barbiturates and bromides.
Maud kept careful note of her symptoms and those of Ewan, but neither she nor Ewan understood that bromides, barbiturates, and alcohol should not be taken together. Sometimes, when Ewan was feeling depressed, Maud would give him a dose of prescribed barbiturates. If it did not take effect, she would give him another dose. If that didn’t work, she might try a bromide, or a shot of brandy. Eventually, these multiple doses would tamp him down. Sometimes he would afterwards lie in bed in a stupor for a full day or more. They had no understanding of the toxic relationship between the medication and the perceived disease.
And Ewan also medicated himself when he felt he needed relief; often people who develop a greater and greater tolerance to barbiturates may forget that they have already dosed themselves. They will take another dose, a phenomenon common enough to have its own name (“automatism”). He probably did this without Maud’s knowledge.
It appears that the combined effects of increasing amounts of prescribed bromides and barbiturates, in addition to the gulps of the alcohol-laced cough syrup Ewan carried in his pockets, plus the medicinal brandy or homemade wine that Maud sometimes administered, had a cumulative and seriously damaging effect.64 As early as March 1924, Maud had suspected liver problems in Ewan, and in 1938, he was diagnosed with an “enlarged” liver. The heavy doses of medications he was taking may very plausibly explain the zombie-like demeanour so often described by Maud in her journals. He was neither an athletic nor an energetic man—his temperament was naturally phlegmatic and easygoing until he began his depressive brooding—and the sedating effect of medications and cough syrup would have made him even more lethargic.
In Norval, Maud had sometimes given Ewan a drink of her homemade wine to get him going on a Sunday during an attack of “his malady,” and she said that the drink enabled him to stumble over to the church and get through his sermon. This takes on a new meaning in light of what we now know about the properties of barbiturates and bromides. A shot of alcohol could have suppressed the withdrawal symptoms he may have been suffering from, giving him a temporary boost.
Likewise, considering Maud’s accounts of Ewan’s psychotic episodes and threats of suicide during the Norval period in light of his increasing doses of medications, new interpretations become possible. (See, for instance, the Norval entries of March 25, 1924, and September 4, 1934.) Normally a very peaceable, gentle man, Ewan frightened Maud with occasional shows of violent behaviour in the Norval period (see October 10, 1934). She feared he might go fully insane and kill them all. The episode in which he pointed a real gun at Nora Lefurgey’s head in the Norval manse reflects behaviour totally out of character. In the Toronto period, there were other times in which his “malady” was entirely consistent with the symptoms of bromide poisoning and/or barbiturate withdrawal (the symptoms are similar, although the biochemical causes are different).65
Ewan did not disclose full details about his “nervous problems,” such as phobias and hallucinations, to the doctors he consulted. To the extent that he remembered these episodes after the fact, he was terribly ashamed over what he believed were signs of mental illness. So the doctors did not get the full story, and they prescribed more of the same medications for him.
Maud did record, however, that one doctor in Georgetown had told Ewan to moderate his use of barbiturates. But Ewan did not—or could not—follow this advice. Perhaps he did not understand the reasons for it, and possibly he had become too dependent on the medications to quit. He was a troubled man, and clearly he hoped the drugs would make him feel better. People in the community put his memory problems and unusual behaviour down to encroaching senility, when in fact many of his worst symptoms were in fact drug-related.
We know from Maud’s journals (as well as from Stuart’s account in the 1980s) that Ewan self-medicated extensively in his later years. Stuart called his father a “hypochondriac.” We will never know how many of his problems were genuine mental illness and how many were caused—or intensified—by the combination of bromides, barbiturates, and alcohol. Today, experts in forensic pharmacology agree on one thing: that the poorly regulated use of both barbiturates and bromides caused many problems throughout the early twentieth century. In the 1930s, bromides were the drug of choice for anxious patients, and the Macdonalds certainly qualified in that department.
Maud took a break from her writing in the third week of June to accompany Ewan on the dreaded trip to Leaskdale. Months before, he had promised to give the sermons for the seventy-fifth anniversary celebrations of the Leaskdale and Zephyr congregations. He was still fondly remembered—almost revered—there, and he had wanted to oblige his old friends. His worry about this coming engagement intensified his search for new doctors and drug prescriptions, inevitably leading him into deeper trouble.
He grew more and more agitated the week before, and, according to Maud, he wanted to back out of the engagement. She stood firm in pressuring him to go, believing that the trip and the adulation would both be restorative. Two nights before leaving, he was too restless to sleep in his own bed, and the next morning he declared he was “dying.” To calm him, Maud dosed him up with “sal volatile.”66 He soon stopped claiming that he was dying, but he continued in a very agitated state. Of course there is every likelihood that he’d taken more medicine on his own during the night, thinking it would steady him.
On the drive up to Leaskdale the next day, he was too befuddled to remember the routes he had driven over scores of times. At dinner, his hands had severe tremors. The next morning he tried to read from the sermon Maud had typed, but he was in too addled a state even for this. After he babbled out disconnected remarks for some ten minutes, he sat down in confusion. People were kind; one parishioner comforted Maud by saying that, “It was enough to hear his voice again, no matter what he said” (June 24, 1937). Many parishioners thought he was simply “showing his age.” A second service at the church in Zephyr was a repeat performance and equally agonizing for Maud. At a meal, Ewan could not even lift a cup without his hands shaking so much the contents spilled. Maud felt deeply humiliated both for herself and for Ewan in front of old friends and parishioners.
After dinner, the Macdonalds started on the two-hour drive home, but Ewan was still too confused to remember directions. He became furious at Maud for insisting that they take the correct routes. Worse, he was too disoriented to keep the car on the road, and, like a drunk driver, he kept going too far to the right. Finally, late at night, they landed in a ditch, and they had to wait for help to repair a burst tire and move the car back onto the road again. Following this first mishap, Maud wrote in her journal account, she hauled the sal volatile and brandy out of her case and dosed him up. This brought a temporary improvement. But then, as the immediate effect wore off, Ewan became progressively more irrational and angry. They went over in the right-hand ditch again. Finally, when a fog came up in the very early hours of morning, and they could not see the road at all, Maud insisted that they sit out the night on the roadside.
In her account, Ewan “worked himself up into a fury” (June 24, 1937) whenever she spoke to him. She was terrified, fearing complete insanity. (His memory lapses, bad temper, paranoia, and weird behaviour would all fit the symptoms of either a severe withdrawal reaction from barbiturates or from bromide poisoning, or a mixture of drugs.)67 After considerable trouble, they finally arrived home early the next day. The trip was a disaster, and Maud was never to forget her fright and her humiliation.
At Maud’s urgent request, Dr. Lane examined Ewan after their return and diagnosed his problem as “complete nervous prostration.” Following doctor’s orders, Maud gave Ewan more bromide, thinking sedation the right medicine. Ewan grew very weak. From Maud’s description of Ewan’s weak pulse, his short breath, and his groaning sleep for long periods through the day, it sounds like a near-fatal overdose.68
The inexplicable nature of Ewan’s malady was wearing her down; Maud’s description of her feelings in her journals is very graphic:
… a man saw a fly fall into a shallow ink bottle on his desk. He fished it out and placed it on a sheet of paper to watch scientifically. The fly went to work to groom itself and soon succeeded in cleaning all the ink away. Then he dropped it in again. Again the fly cleaned itself. And again and again that fiend dropped the poor fly back. Again and again the gallant little fly cleaned itself, albeit a little more slowly every time. And at last, after I forget how many immersions it made no further attempt to rid itself of the ink. It lay inert and spiritless, a mere blot of blackness, resigned to die. It would make no more effort.
I felt I was like that fly. (Dated June 24, 1937, but written in retrospect.)
Maud was able to function at a high level publicly, even under this kind of stress. On the very same day they arrived home from the nightmare trip to Leaskdale, she left Ewan in Stuart’s care and travelled to the Royal York Hotel to deliver a speech to the Canadian Authors’ Association convention. (She had missed the opening night’s events on June 28 at the King Edward Hotel, but she probably did not mind: Professor Pelham Edgar had been the opening speaker, with Deacon presiding—two of her least favourites.) A picture of Maud taken on this day with Pelham Edgar, Margaret Lawrence, H. A. Kennedy, Leslie Barnard, and Laurence Brownell shows her looking just as composed as the others.
Ewan continued taking the doctor’s prescribed medications (bromides and barbiturates). His mental condition grew worse—irrationality, temper outbursts, even the inability to construct a complete sentence. He developed a wracking cough that kept him awake. Finally, a week later, he developed a rash—what a doctor thirty years later would likely have identified as the telltale skin rash of bromide poisoning. Even Maud herself began to suspect that he had had too many bromides, and she insisted that Dr. Lane quit giving them to Ewan (July 6, 1937).
In three days, Ewan’s blood pressure and pulse returned to normal. But whenever he took the barbiturate called Luminal, he began “talking rather foolishly and forgetting words again.” Maud reports that he had vivid dreams of “men cutting themselves to death.” He was so addled that he could not dress or shave himself. At one point, Maud describes him as looking like “a fiend from the pit—hair bristling, blue underlip hanging down, eyes glaring, face livid” (July 11, 1937). Yet, he would alternate between periods of delusions and then total lucidity, in which he could read and talk normally (perhaps as the drug wore off). Still, following doctor’s orders, Maud gave him sporadic doses of Luminal, but she did fully stop the bromides.
As fewer doses were needed, Ewan predictably improved; by the end of July, he was able to drive again. His cough improved, requiring less medication. His “jolly smile” returned. Maud says that he became “thoughtful and affectionate” again, and on August 4, he told Maud fondly that he could see her “as I saw you on our wedding day.” He returned to his lawn bowling clubs and to taking long walks. By the second week of August, he was well enough to go for a visit to the Island for a month. His sisters adored him, and their kindly attentions always made him feel better.
The episode of this illness had taken a great toll on Maud’s own nerves, but she was quick to recover. As soon as Ewan had departed on vacation, she perked up, went to a movie, did her work, and enjoyed her freedom. She had time to read, and on August 15, 1937, she writes that she turned to one of her favourite biographies, Clement Shorter’s life of Charlotte Brontë, a writer she admired greatly. News reached her, too, that a play by Mildred Barker based on The Blue Castle would be produced in Hollywood. Soon she stated in her journals that she missed Ewan—the cheery Ewan with the jolly smile, the man she had married. Such a statement reminds us that there was another side to the Ewan so often depicted in her journals as a mentally unstable liability.
During all of Maud’s disappointment with Chester, Stuart had remained a bright spot in her life. She was pleased that he was still dating Margaret Cowan next door. However, in the first week of July, Mrs. Cowan broadsided Maud with an astonishing demand—that the two of them should try to break up Stuart’s and Margaret’s romance. Maud was deeply offended and hurt: she regarded the handsome and witty Stuart as a “good catch” for any young woman. He was by now a very promising medical student and a university athlete of much acclaim. Maud wrote in her journals that Mrs. Cowan said, rather disingenuously, that it was because “Margaret was so fickle,” but she believed the request reflected Mrs. Cowan’s wish for her daughters to “marry money”; Stuart was not rich enough to suit her.
Quite possibly Mrs. Cowan’s real concern was over her daughter marrying into such a troubled family. Out of Maud’s hearing, Mrs. Cowan apparently referred to the Macdonalds’ home as the “crazy house”—an ungracious term, given that she had often used Maud as a drawing card when she entertained at her formal teas. When Maud experienced Mrs. Cowan’s desire to break up the young romance as another attack on her status; she failed to see the irony that Mrs. Cowan’s prejudice against the Macdonald family was similar to her own prejudice against Joy Laird’s family.
Although Maud continued to socialize with Mrs. Cowan, she was very hurt and angry. She had lived for years with her own lingering baggage from childhood—that although she came from a “good family,” she herself did not quite measure up, and perhaps her children would not measure up, either. And worse, the perceived attack was on what she now called her “good” son, not on Chester.
It was in August 1937 that Maud confirmed for herself that Chester was having an affair with a young woman named Ida Birrell. She felt the terrible irony of having encouraged Chester’s involvement with the Young People’s Society in the first place, for it was under the umbrella of this church organization that he had met Ida. Ida lived at 204 Quebec Avenue, a reasonable walking distance away and easy by car, so it was simple for Chester to slip out to see her.
Maud finally accosted Chester, eliciting from him a promise to break off the romance. On August 25, she describes writing a “certain letter”—perhaps to Ida—and showing it to Chester before mailing it. To her, Chester’s behaviour was a dishonour to their family name. Divorce at that time was still a terrible scandal, but conducting an extramarital affair was even worse.
It is hard for our society to understand the anxiety and shame that Maud’s era felt over sexual dalliance, adultery, and divorce. These “sins” were scandalous even in Hollywood then, where public disapproval could be felt at the box office. Maud’s generation remembered all too well the scandal, for instance, over the 1919 silent movie version of Anne of Green Gables, which was well received across North America on its release. But then William Desmond Taylor (1872–1922), the movie’s married and middle-aged director, was found murdered, and compromising letters from the actress who played Anne, Mary Miles Minter, as well as her monogrammed underwear, were reportedly found in his room. Mary Miles Minter herself was not suspected of the murder (though her mother, angry at her daughter’s “seduction,” was under some suspicion). But the public was so shocked at the immorality of a starlet—especially one who was known as “Anne of Green Gables”—having an affair with an older, married man that the film was withdrawn and all copies were said to be destroyed. No known intact copy has survived.69
Mary Miles Minter had been a highly paid star with many pictures to her credit when the scandal occurred. Her immense box-office appeal had made her a rival of Mary Pickford, an equally popular silent-film star. But this scandal ended Minter’s movie career. Her Hollywood producers dropped her immediately, even though she was still under contract for additional pictures. She was apparently considered too “tainted” even for parts in westerns.
Chester’s extramarital affair filled Maud with shame and fear. She knew it could become the talk of the women’s afternoon teas in Toronto society, and the gossip would also travel to the Island. Having her own professional status under attack was one thing, but to have her family name besmirched would be more than she could bear. She thought, quite rightly, that it would even affect Stuart’s career.
With nerves already frayed, in August 1937 Maud began to increase her doses of barbiturates. She wrote in her journal that she did not like taking them, but claimed they were necessary. An anguished entry about Chester in her journal concludes, “And it is my curse that I can’t help loving you … my bonny little first born who has changed so much” (August 23, 1937). On September 6, she learned—to no great surprise—that Chester was still seeing Ida, despite his promise to break off the affair.
Hoping a brief change of scene would reorient Chester to respectability, cooling his ardour for Ida, she arranged for him to drive her and Ewan to Cleveland, Ohio, on the third weekend in September. They would visit Ewan’s niece, who was married to a medical doctor named Michael Oman. In Cleveland, Chester impressed everyone with his “brilliant” talk. Maud was proud, but despaired because he would not focus on his legal studies.
Little surprise that this trip did not achieve her goal. Chester was in the “grip of one of those infatuations which will make a man do anything,” as Maud had put it earlier on August 23, 1937. He was in that over-stimulated emotional high, with its accompanying feeling of well-being, that is unleashed by new sexual affairs, especially where danger and “the forbidden” fan the flames of passion. He was beginning his second year in the study of law again, but he suddenly was rushing off in all directions but towards the study of law.
Chester had become involved in the Victoria-Royce Young People’s Society’s dramatic program back in 1936. According to the church archives, one of the highlights of their 1937 program, performed on October 5, 1937, was a piece in which “Barrister Chester Macdonald argues, far, far into the night with J. Elmo Ewing, as Lionel Marrymore, in a Breech of Promise suit.”70Chester’s verbal pyrotechnics, on dazzling display, must have made him look like one of the most promising young lawyers in the area, and quite likely had an electrifying effect on the young women attending the performance (who did not know he was married). Maud does not mention this performance in her journals. She only says on September 4 that she had encouraged his joining the YPS, and his affair was the result. Chester was indeed riding the wind, and as a biblical proverb has it, he would reap the whirlwind.
Chester’s feverish social life was of course affecting his performance at work. Mr. Bogart became enraged with Chester’s unreliability and inattention to his work. On October 14, he wrote to the Macdonalds informing them that Chester was fired. This was the second time that Chester had been dismissed by Mr. Bogart. Maud rushed down and humbled herself to plead for another chance, as she had before; Bogart reluctantly granted it. There was no dispute that Chester was exceptionally good at law when he applied himself.
Four days later, Maud complained that Chester was “grim” all the time and his “resentment” hung “like an icy cloud between us.” By October 29, Chester was “sulky” and “ugly.” The next day, when he drove her to grocery shop at Loblaws, he was silent and glowering. On November 14, in church, Maud saw Chester’s new love, Ida Birrell, for the first time. She wept for the rest of the evening at home: “It is so dreadful to find yourself wishing your son had never been born. And I was so happy when he was!” (November 14, 1937).
—
Earlier in the autumn, when Maud was rereading her journals, she became obsessed with a line she had written back in 1897: “Some lives seem to be more essentially tragic than others and I fear mine is one of such” (October 13, 1937). Obsessive negative thoughts are often a feature of depression. Maud knew she was stuck in a mind-set, but still could not shake these “fixed ideas.” They became an overwhelming enemy now, not just the annoying “gnats” of earlier years. She continued taking medications to quell her depression, but predictably she only grew more despondent.
In her depressed state, her mind circled like a broken record. She had promoted the courtship of Marion Webb and Murray Laird. Their first little baby, born in 1935, had never looked normal to Maud; now, they confirmed that the child had Down’s Syndrome (and in those days would have been called “mongoloid”). This brought back the obsession: “It goes to prove— though I need no further proof—that I am under some curse and always have been. No one I love or am loved by has been fortunate or happy. No matter what I do to help anybody, though from the best and purest motives, it turns out accursed” (June 11, 1937). She knew she was being morbid but could not snap herself out of it.
But while Maud was recording such distress in her journals, once again the public record of her life at this time reveals a very different side. Maud’s calendar shows she remained professionally active all throughout the fall: September 22, a CAA executive meeting; October 5, a speech at the Centennial United Church; October 8, an open meeting of the CAA; October 18, another CAA executive meeting (she reports arguments over the forthcoming Book Week program in November); October 19, a tea at Knox College of the University of Toronto (her journal describes the misery of hearing other women brag about their successful sons); it was another tea on October 26. Her journals record that on October 28 she finished planning Anne of Ingleside. Back to the outside world: November 6, to Orillia to speak to the Young People’s Society; November 8, a PEN luncheon given in honour of Mr. Priestley, the well-known English author imported for Canadian Book Week, then went to the Book Fair to hear Nellie McClung and Katherine Hale speak.
On November 10, Maud did her own turn at the Toronto Book Fair. The November Book Fair was the kind of event that she loved. But the day before her speech, her former PEI fiancé Ed Simpson visited, possibly to show off his new bride, a woman twenty years younger than Ed. An astonished and irritated Maud had to admit that the new wife was surprisingly pretty and charming, in addition to being young. (Maud does not mention in her journals that the new bride was also reputedly wealthy, supposedly attached to the Fisk Tire fortune in the United States.) Maud groused that Ed was as self-obsessed as ever, and he did not once acknowledge her literary success during the visit.
At the Fair, Maud spoke the same afternoon as two other writers, Laura Salverson and Captain Eric Acland. Laura Salverson, whose parents had emigrated from Iceland to Canada when she was ten, had written nine novels and some one hundred short stories. Her best-known novel is The Viking Heart (1923), and in 1937 she won the Governor General’s Award for The Dark Weaver. Mrs. Salverson announced that she would write no more about contemporary Canadian life: Canadians, she said, did not want to read about other Canadians, and American and English folk refused to buy fiction with a Canadian background unless “Mounties” were involved.
In her own speech, Maud took the opposite stand. In a rousing call to promote Canada and its history and culture, she argued that stories were the essence of a culture, embodying the past. She said hearing all the old stories in her grandfather’s post office when she was a girl had prompted her to write. She joked that her stories were all set in Prince Edward Island because when she came to Ontario, as a minister’s wife, she “thought it not safe to lay the scene in Ontario lest all my husband’s congregation think they were in the book.”71 She stressed her belief that Canada and Canadianness were indeed interesting topics, and all it took to make them into literature was a talented writer. Maud’s best-selling books should have been ample testimony that even rural areas had characters who were uniquely interesting. Great themes, dramatic events, and larger-than-life characters were not necessarily essentials—all a writer needed was ordinary folk. Her message was the opposite of all the other Book Week speakers; she stood alone in urging pride in Canada and in things Canadian.
In the same Book Week lineup, the thirty-four-year-old Morley Callaghan also asserted that “young writers of talent stood virtually no chance of scoring ‘any kind of success’ in this country because there was ‘no medium for expression in Canada for the authentic writer.’ ” He continued that the “authentic” Canadian writer “must go some place where his work will be accepted … [and] where people will pay him for what he writes.” Callaghan, of course, went to Paris.
That Canadians were incapable of appreciating “authentic” and “serious” writing was the same message Frederick Philip Grove had carried across Canada in the late 1920s in a speaking tour. If writers’ books did not sell well, it was because Canadians were unable to appreciate serious literature. The implication followed that if an author’s books did sell, as Maud’s did, then those books were probably of little value.
Another speaker, Bertram Brooker, whose novel Think of the Earth had won the 1936 Governor General’s Award, continued: “while Canada reaped rewards from a national character of stability and orderliness, this very asset was reflected in a certain ‘humdrumness’ in her literature, for authors need … wide varieties of characters.” He argued that it was necessary for authors to make their characters “amusing and intriguing” as well as “interesting.” He criticized Canadian men for having adopted a uniform of “grey felt hats and navy blue overcoats” and urged them to be a little more “eccentric.”
Arthur Stringer also spoke at the conference. He was identified as a “Canadian born son, now among the most successful authors living in the United States.” He argued that “Every country must not only develop itself, but elucidate itself. It must sing its own song,” again implying that this had not yet been done. Maud’s books seemed to be invisible to these speakers, or perhaps beneath notice as only “children’s” or “popular” books. All these fellow writers and critics disparaged Canadian readers as unsophisticated and Canadian subjects as unsuitable for fiction. Maud was beating against the current when she urged Canadian writers to look into their own lives and communities for authentic material.
After a September visit on the Island, Ewan soon slipped back into depression and consequently began taking his medicines again. It was not long before he became much worse. He appealed to his physician brother, Dr. Angus Macdonald, to help him. In November, Angus drove up from Warsaw, Indiana. His unhelpful medical diagnosis was that Ewan was suffering from his “nerves” and that he should merely “forget” about things bothering him. Angus sniffed out other trouble and added to Maud’s exasperation by asking: “Is Chester a good boy?” The demoralized Ewan must have dosed himself with medication once more that night, because the next day Maud noted that his eyes “look wild and haunted again” (December 1, 1937).
The answer to Angus’s question, of course, was that Chester was not a good boy at all. Chester was rarely at home, still refusing to explain his whereabouts. On December 29, Chester persuaded Maud to let him hold a Young People’s executive meeting in their home. To Maud’s surprise, Chester hosted the occasion with an aplomb that she greatly admired; she commented in her journal that he should still be free, not married. But the day after the party, December 30, she wrote that she “just had a terrible scene with Chester. What has happened I am not sure but it seems that Ida Birrell’s family have found out he is married!” Apparently those people in the church who knew, like the minister, had not told Ida’s parents initially. And although Ida herself knew (according to Maud, indicating that she may have told her in the mysterious letter that Chester already had responsibilities to his family), Ida also had not told her parents. Instead of shame at having deceived Ida’s parents, Chester’s reaction was rage at being found out. Maud was the one left holding the bag of shame.
Maud had learned extraordinary self-control throughout her often difficult life, and she had determined to hide Ewan’s condition as much as she could, not letting it ruin her boys’ childhood. Now it seemed that her elder son was intent on spoiling his own life, and she was helpless. Chester, barely passing his law courses, had two babies in the basket and no interest in supporting them. It seemed to her that he regarded her as an endless source of funding. Maud anguished: what could lie ahead for such a man?
Maud and Ewan had been raised in a society where divorce was unacceptable under any condition. The early Island newspapers give ample testimony to the fact that spouses might be beaten, poisoned, or murdered, but divorce itself was not an option. More recently, the smell of the universally reviled divorcée Mrs. Wallis Warfield Simpson was in many people’s noses; there was much anger over the belief that she had undermined the British throne when the smitten young King Edward VIII had abdicated to marry her in June 1937. Yet, it is not so much the spectre of divorce that really upset Maud—after all, divorce comes up many times in Maud’s journals. It was Chester’s failure to accept responsibility for the children he had fathered. Maud was caught between sympathy for Luella, raising her children without a husband’s emotional and financial support, and resentment that Luella had allowed herself to get pregnant (since it was always the woman’s responsibility to refrain from sexual relations). Maud predictably blamed Luella more than Chester for their growing estrangement, noting that Luella was the one who had left Chester and gone home to her father in the first place—ignoring the reality, which was that Chester’s behaviour had driven her to leave.
Even though Maud thought Chester had married too soon and not well, she and Ewan wanted him to make the best of it and support his family. Luella was a fine young woman, and although she lacked social charm, she came from a very respectable family and had many good attributes, including a quick, inquiring mind. Maud was keenly aware of the promise she had given Luella’s dying mother to look after Luella. Chester’s indifference to his family was simply beyond the comprehension of his parents, who had always worn the yoke of duty even when it became a straitjacket.
Chester’s behaviour undermined Maud’s self-esteem in a particularly damaging way. She had grown up thinking of the Woolners, the Macneills, and the Montgomerys as elite families in PEI. Only “trash” behaved as Chester was doing. This insult to her pride came from within her own family—from her son, her own flesh and blood. How could he disregard the values of hard work, responsibility, and decency after she had driven herself to earn enough for his education? She had put so many hopes in her sons carrying the family flag into the next generation. Discovering Chester’s deceit and corruption was the worst blow imaginable. She had always hoped that he would mature, but it now seemed to her that he was rotten to the core, and her observations of life told her that this kind of person did not change.
She soon discovered that Stuart had known all about Chester’s philandering and lying and had not told her. She did not want Ewan to learn of it because he would only interpret this as further proof that God was against him. She put yet another burden on herself—bearing her pain alone.
So, despite all of her composure during public appearances throughout 1937, Maud was finding that her personal anxiety made writing difficult. She had finished the preparatory “spadework” on Anne of Ingleside at the end of October 1937, but her mind was jumpy. She was beset by ailments: roving muscle spasms and tension headaches, and other muscular-skeletal symptoms such as leg and foot numbness, neck problems, pain behind her eyes, and shooting sciatic-related discomfort. These intensified her depression, and depression maintained the cycle of misery, serving up obsessive negative images from the past, flavoured with the bitterness of the present. She felt little joy, even in writing. She imagined scenes of future desolation. And that sent her to more medication.
And yet, at Christmas time in 1937, Maud published a charming piece called “My Favourite Bookshelf” in a publication called The Island Crusader. It was about the little bookshelf she kept by her desk, the one thing she would “make a desperate effort to save if the house were on fire.” The shelves held a few select volumes, including verse, travel books, girls’ stories, garden books, historical novels, biography, history, essays, a book about cats, and ghost stories. “These books are my friends …” she wrote. “The books in other bookcases are merely agreeable acquaintances. Here is a book for my every mood and the white magic of it never fails. I sink wearily into my ‘lazy’ chair, open the worn covers, and presto, change! Everything is different as it should be.” Maud’s writing in this piece about her bookshelf is so light, so cheerful and wistful, that no one could read it and think that she had ever had a trouble in her life.72
Yet Maud had written in despair at the beginning of the year: “The present is unbearable. The past is spoiled. There is no future” (February 7, 1937). Mid-year, in August, she would write: “All my old pleasure in my work is gone—I can’t lose myself in it.” At the end of the year, she summed up: “There has never been any happiness in this house—there never will be” (December 31, 1937). Her dream of success—as a writer, as a wife, as a mother—now seemed an empty charade. It would be nearly a year before she would feel like writing in her journal again.
Luella Reid’s home outside Norval.
Isabel Anderson, Maud’s fan.
Chester, Ewan, Maud, and Stuart Macdonald in Toronto, circa 1935.
Stanley Baldwin, Prime Minister of Britain, made a point of meeting Montgomery when he toured Canada.
“Journey’s End,” the house Maud bought in Toronto on Riverside Drive.
Maud in Toronto, at the time of A Tangled Web’s publication, around 1931.
Maud and Ewan on a boat in Norval, circa 1931.
Toronto street scene, with Eaton’s, Maud’s favourite store, during the 1930s.
Stuart as member of the University of Toronto gymnastics team.
Stuart Macdonald.
Dr. Margaret Cowan, the girlfriend next door.
Maud and Ewan in Ohio.
Dr. Stuart Macdonald and his mother at his graduation in 1940.