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He Shouldn’t Have Called Her “Carrots,” But Oh, That Gilbert Blythe!

The course of true love never did run smooth.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM

IT WAS A SNOW DAY, and Phoebe, eight, was downstairs watching the luminous Anne of Green Gables miniseries on DVD. (The first eight hours are luminous. As for the add-on movies, completely unrelated to the books, I pretend the Anne and Gilbert actors are instead part of a World War I movie.) Suddenly, I heard Phoebe pounding up the stairs to my office. She burst through the door, eyes wide with alarm.

“Mom! Something tragic has happened! Gilbert Blythe is dying, and he’s engaged to someone else—not Anne!”

I restrained myself from explaining that Gilbert is never engaged to anyone but Anne in the books, that Anne just thinks he is, and then I agreed—this was the height of tragedy. “Just keep watching,” I said, giving her a squeeze. “You never know how things are going to turn out.”

Phoebe loves Gilbert Blythe because, well, who wouldn’t? Also, her very favorite part of the whole story is the slate incident. Phoebe’s idea of a good time would definitely be smashing slates over the heads of her classmates Owen Silasma, Nolan Kaiser, and their ilk. She laughs hysterically every time that slate comes down on Gil’s cute head.

Ah, Gilbert Blythe . . . How about a collective swoon for the guy who was so into our Anne he took the blame when she tried to give him a concussion? Sigh. Who doesn’t have a literary crush on Gilbert Blythe? I don’t see a lot of hands raised. So great was his devotion and gallantry to Anne of Green Gables, I submit to you that Gilbert is the leading man to end leading men. Just a boy next door, you say? Yes and no. It’s his quiet smoldering—for years—that elevates this boy next door to crush-worthy.

Sure, there’s always Mr. Darcy, all suppressed passion behind an aloof exterior. Yes, in England there is a statue of him emerging from water, wearing a white shirt and seething wildly. By all means, Mr. Darcy possesses that unapproachable-yet-simmering-with-unbridled-passion aura that most women find irresistible. But take away the mists and the moors, and what do you have? A cranky man in short pants, that’s what!

There’s also Manly Wilder. To be fair, many bookworm girls have developed an infatuation for Almanzo Wilder, he of the log-sawing biceps and heated looks at Laura Ingalls across snow-covered prairie sleighs. Certainly Almanzo is a valid storybook squeeze. After all, he did risk his life to save the pioneers (including Laura’s family) of De Smet, South Dakota, from starvation during the hard winter of 1881. Really, he had most of us at “Hello, my name is Almanzo [for some strange reason], but you, l’il lady? You can call me Manly.”

Yet next to our guy Gil, even the mannish Manly is reduced to so much Farmer Boy eye candy.

Those two heartthrobs of the written word, Fitzwilliam Darcy and Almanzo Wilder, pined for their Lizzie and their Laura for what—months? Their pining cannot hold a candle to the constancy, the steadfastness, the inextinguishable flame of yearning that burned in Gilbert’s heart for Anne Shirley for those many years.

This is why one can buy pillows with Gilbert’s face on them,[50] or rather, the face of Jonathan Crombie, the actor who played Gilbert in the movie.

Jonathan Crombie . . . he was gone too soon. When news of his death broke in mid-April 2015, the outpouring of love for this actor and the character he brought to vivid, yearning life brought me to tears. He made manifest the Gilbert of our imaginations so that it was impossible to read the books again (and again) without picturing him as Anne’s one and only. He brought Anne’s kindred mate to life with sparks, grace, and depth.

The response to Crombie’s death underscored for me the enormous affection millions of us have, not only for Anne, but for Matthew, Marilla, Mrs. Rachel, Diana—and especially for Gilbert. It made me ache to see #GilbertBlythe trending on social media, and then I felt stung again when he wasn’t trending just two days later. People had moved on, so quickly. Yet I knew that the global expression of grief and love had not been a fluke. Crombie’s death reminded readers of Gilbert’s place in their hearts, as an old friend and a first love. It reminded us that we all want to be loved as Gil loved Anne, to be noticed and adored for exactly who we are—pungent hair color, quirks, flaws, and all. One of my friends, Alexandra, put it so beautifully: “Gilbert taught me how love felt. As I watched him on screen and read all of the books over and over as a girl, I wanted what he and Anne had: chemistry, devotion and mutual respect.”[51]

I think that helps explain why, even before Crombie’s death, there were manifestations of our collective adoration for Gil, such as pillows, and Gilbert Toffee, which I bought, though I don’t even care for toffee. There are knitting patterns for Gilbert-style, vaguely Edwardian scarves. There are musical montages on YouTube featuring tender scenes of Anne and Gilbert set to the ballads of Air Supply and other great bands of our time. It’s a wonder to me that Gilbert cologne has not been developed, sold, and sprayed on the menfolk of Anne fans everywhere.

This is why I like to do dishes alone to the strains of Anne and Gilbert, the soundtrack to the perfectly luscious new musical that debuted in Charlottetown in 2013. (I say “alone” because my husband does not sufficiently appreciate musical theater; though, as he points out, he has watched all eight legitimate hours of the Anne of Green Gables movie and listened to both the first and fifth books of the book series on tape, so surely he cannot be expected to also enjoy bouncy show tunes about Gilbert Blythe. In deference to a long and successful marriage, I do grant him this point.) The first song is entitled “Mr. Blythe,” and it is an homage to Avonlea’s cutest new schoolteacher (and a whopping improvement over Mr. Phillips, that’s what).

Every human being who draws breath should go see Anne and Gilbert, mind you, but in case that’s not an option just this minute, here is a snippet of the soundtrack’s first tune: “Mr. Blythe! You’re not just bee-auuut-iful . . . Mr. Blythe! You’re not just wonderful to seeeee.”[52] It evolves (Doyle would say “devolves”) from there into ever more rapturous statements of giddiness, gaiety, and potential fainting.

Well, it’s about time someone wrote a song about Gilbert Blythe, winker of inexpressible drollery, foeman worthy of Anne’s steel, and prompter of quick, queer little beats in the hearts of us all.

“Carrots!”

Oh, Gilbert, I’m begging you—don’t say it! You’ve been getting away with calling dark-haired Diana “Crow” for years, but this lassie is unlike any you’ve teased before.

I just wish there were a way to book travel and warn G. Blythe that it will be an ill wind that blows in the aftermath of comparing this girl’s hair to that harvest vegetable. It will blow for years, and it will blow at minus thirty degrees with the wind chill factor. It will blow so cold, his very shadow will freeze to the ground. But he’s going to do what he’s going to do.

One of my chief pleasures in reentering Anne’s story when writing this book was to experience again the delicious flutters and tizzies of her romance with Gilbert. The flirting, the longing, the attraction, the almost endless wait for emotional payoff, the sparks! It’s all just so delectable! As a grown woman, I found I had a whole new appreciation for Gilbert’s devotion for his girl. We know she is worthy, deep down, but Gooseberry Girl sure doesn’t behave in a worthy manner for what seems like a stone age.

But it’s Gilbert who behaved badly, shortly after they laid eyes on each other for the first time. Mere moments after their meeting, Gilbert winked at Anne with a look so dense with drollery we are told it is “inexpressible.”[53] Unfortunately, Anne did not find this wink funny or within the bounds of good manners.

You know what they say about first impressions.

But it was not until the afternoon that things really began to happen.

Had Gilbert Blythe known what he knew just moments later, he would never, ever have uttered the words he thought were mildly teasing and flirty but were actually appallingly flammable. But you don’t know what you don’t know.

Gilbert reached across the aisle, picked up the end of Anne’s long red braid, held it out at arm’s length, and said in a piercing whisper, “Carrots! Carrots!”[54]

Anne responded immediately, springing from her seat, calling him names, and crrrrr--aaaaacking her slate over his head with a booming thwack. That had to hurt—both his ego and his head.

Mr. Phillips, that paragon of pedagogy, punished Anne for her behavior, at which point Gilbert Blythe showed us a hint of the absolute mensch he was to become. He spoke up “stoutly”[55]—nothing wishy-washy about our Gil—taking the blame for Anne’s explosive act. It was really my fault. I provoked her . . .

Of course, this did nothing to soften Anne’s rage. Nor did Gilbert’s apology, filled with remorse, ending with “Don’t be mad for keeps, now.”[56] Nor his feeble attempts at flirting a little later on, when Anne was forced to sit next to him in class. Gil, did you really think a pink candy heart stamped with “You are sweet” would make everything hunky-dory once again?

Her comeback is deluxe: “Whereupon Anne arose, took the pink heart gingerly between the tips of her fingers, dropped it on the floor, ground it to powder beneath her heel, and resumed her position without deigning to bestow a glance on Gilbert.”[57]

Clearly, Gilbert was struggling, trying to restore order to his cute-boy universe. But throwing a pink candy heart at the problem was like trying to put out a fire by spitting on it.

You’re in for it now, buddy. We know you didn’t mean a thing by that “Carrots” comment, but you’ve hurt her feelings excruciatingly, and now you will be ground to powder beneath her feet. The iron has entered her soul! Anne was mad for keeps, and then some.

Reopening Anne and Gilbert’s story also brought to mind memories of my own beginnings with the love of my life, an overused term but one that fits. Like Gilbert, my love was no flash in the pan, though it started with an unexpected flash of attraction, a wink of allure over a cafeteria table. Before finding the one, there were a number of others, boys whom I thought at the time would complete me and fill forever my orphan heart’s hunger pangs. What I didn’t know then was that even after you’ve found the one, a good and steady love, only a Father’s love, only the Bread of Life, can really make you full. Only a Father’s love can make you belong.

Nobody thought it would last between Doyle and me. We had come to our urban college from two very different worlds. He was a country boy through and through, down to his fringed mountain-man moccasins and his woolly beard. He was quiet, steady, and calm. On the other hand, I relished living in a high-rise apartment in downtown Chicago—the smells of gyros and the chocolate factory, the sounds of sirens, “Taxi!”, and a never-ending strum and twang of humanity. He was Jeremiah Johnson, far from his wilderness, weary of civilization, and I was Mary Tyler Moore throwing my hat in the air in the city I adored. I was giggly, a talker, on the social activities committee at school. He sang bass in the men’s chorus and played his guitar up on high in Culbertson Hall. Doyle and Lorilee did not make sense on paper. But oh—those flickering blue eyes and those gleaming white teeth.

It was 1990, and I paraded around campus like a giant American Girl doll in my puffed sleeves and raging floral patterns. One day at dinner, someone made the not untrue remark that I looked like a sofa. “Doyle, do you think I look like a sofa?” I fluttered.

“Nope,” he said, flashing pearly whites and winking at me with what might be construed as inexpressible drollery. “Sofas are horizontal.”

The bluest eyes, the whitest teeth, and drollery, too? It was all over for me. Unfortunately, it was not all over for Doyle, as he thought I was dating this guy who kept coming around our cafeteria table at dinner. Indeed, this guy did have designs on me, but I only had eyes for Jeremiah in the City.

After a month of pining and mad, mad flirting on my part, I had to resort to telling Doyle’s best friend, Kyle, that I liked Doyle. A classic middle school move? Absolutely—that’s why it’s a classic. It works.

Next thing you know, it was St. Patrick’s Day in Chicago, and Doyle and I were shivering in the cold on the shores of Lake Michigan’s Olive Park. He had asked me out for a picnic, and after several costume changes, I ended up wearing my friend Rachel’s yellow cable-knit sweater, not that he could see it under my coat. I resolved not to look like a sofa on our first date. He unpacked the bagels, cream cheese, and thermos of hot chocolate that he’d brought. He was droll, I was giggly, and both our sets of teeth clattered uncontrollably, which didn’t lend itself to much conversation.

So we packed up the picnic and headed to 3rd Coast Cafe, where the bohemian warmth matched the balminess we felt inside. I had apple cinnamon tea in a diffuser, and he had a coffee drink with Torani syrup. We stopped chattering as the heat from the steaming drinks circulated everything with a warm glow. Oh, it was on.

If a passerby happened to glance down at the cafe in the basement of that brownstone on the corner of Dearborn and Goethe, he or she would have born witness to two college students sipping their drinks distractedly, laughing and listening, telling stories, and falling for each other. It was the birthday of their happiness. And if that person had the gift of prophecy, he or she might have seen this same duo, twenty years aged, sitting in the same cafe, this time joined by two blond-haired youths and a black-haired little girl, sharing an omelet and telling their children about the cafe’s significance, remembering when their family began.

Much as I pined for Doyle early on, there is so much fabulous yearning in the love story of Gilbert Blythe and Anne Shirley, most of it on his part. He had no idea how unrequited this longing would be, and for how long. Over and over, as Anne swept by him disdainfully, Gilbert tried to appease her. Still, he yearned on.

It struck me anew that though Maud didn’t even have the right to vote, she made the smitten boy and the stubborn girl equals and academic rivals. Anne’s intelligence, though it would have been off-putting to most boys, made Gilbert like her all the more. So though Anne was pretending he was dead to her, in reality she was completely obsessed with besting him at school. Back and forth they went: “Now Gilbert was head of the spelling class; now Anne, with a toss of her long red braids, spelled him down.”[58]

She spelled him down! And then Gil turned around and spelled her down too. Test by test, challenge by challenge, they were iron sharpening iron. It could have been great fun, if only Anne weren’t such a ninny.

Even Diana tried to intercede on several occasions, once chiding Anne for going overboard in her grudge against Gilbert at the Debating Club recital.

I’m with Diana on this one. Really, Anne? You pretended to read a library book instead of listening to Gilbert’s “Bingen on the Rhine” oration? When he came to the line, “There’s another, not a sister,”[59] and looked right at her, she pretended not to notice.

Me, caterwauling to Anne through the pages: “Clearly, the hottest boy in Avonlea thinks of you in unbrotherly ways! This is Gilbert Blythe we’re talking about—are you made of stone, woman? My suggestion: Shut that library book right now and gaze back into his soulful brown eyes. Mind you, don’t wink at him, or he’ll fall off the podium. Smile a little, give the poor guy a crumb of hope. Then, when the time is right, invite him over for some of Marilla’s matchless plum puffs and a tumbler full of raspberry cordial!”

But no, Anne didn’t listen to anybody when it came to “that person.”[60]

If Gilbert only knew that saving Anne’s life would be the catalyst that would begin to soften her heart, he would have rowed Harmon Andrews’s dory in Barry’s Pond every single day for the chance. But even after he rowed himself to the right place at the right time and plucked a white-faced, white-knuckled girl off the bridge piling to which she was clinging like a marine gastropod—which, you’d think would suffice as absolution—she didn’t melt.

Instead she sat in his boat, “drabbled and furious”[61] and refused his helping hand out of the boat when he rowed her safely to shore. And instead of responding graciously to his heartfelt apology—again—and his sincere sentiment that her hair was awfully pretty, Anne chose her grudge over grace, vanity over vulnerability.

She almost lost him forever. Even Gilbert Blythe had his limits. He was angry, and rightfully so, when Anne refused to accept his apology and told him she would never be his friend. Yet something changed that day on the shores of the Lake of Shining Waters. Unbeknownst to Gilbert, Anne did feel something as she looked at the half-shy, half-eager expression in Gilbert’s eyes, and it gave her mulish heart a quick, queer little beat.

It would take Anne’s world cracking wide open for her to lay down her pride. A year or so later, Gilbert sacrificed comfort, convenience, and his own ambitions to give up the Avonlea school teaching position so she could remain with Marilla after Matthew’s death. It was then that Anne finally saw the valiant knight before her. This makes me think about my own stubborn ways. What honor, what valiance, have I missed because of it?

This part makes me smile: When Anne extended a hand of confession and regret at long last, Gilbert grabbed on for dear life. (Literally, the text tells us Anne tried “unsuccessfully”[62] to let go of his hand.) After a five-year standoff, the good enemies had become good friends, and maybe even more, because after all that yearning, Gilbert Blythe was not letting go.

As Maud says at the end of Anne of the Island, “There is a book of Revelation in every one’s life.”[63] I read mine on a bitter night when I thought I might be dying. “Doyle. . . . Where’s Doyle? . . . Is Doyle okay?!” I was barely conscious and calling out for Doyle every few minutes, despite the fact that he was right by my side in the hospital, holding my hand.

Rewind four or five months, when I had been miserable. It was a slow-growing misery that began to take root when the fires of new love were tamped down after the wedding by the realities of paying the electric bill, choosing how to spend our spare time, and realizing that we were in fact—shocker—extremely different. We were going on five years of marriage, and it was the autumn of my discontent.

To no one’s surprise, this coincided with hunting season, Doyle’s great passion in life and my bane. We fought about the way he seemed to prefer cavorting with deer over canoodling with me. With my upbringing as a city bookseller’s daughter, I couldn’t begin to understand the appeal of getting up at four thirty in the morning, drizzling raccoon pee on your camo boots, and sitting in the cold and rain and snow for hours in hopes of spotting a doe or a buck. I went with him once when we were dating, clad in the petroleum camo suit his parents had gotten me for Christmas. Being from Manitoba, the cold never bothered me anyway, but it was raining that day, and to call it “morning” would have been premature. I’ve never been accused of being an early bird. So I fell asleep in the nook of a tree and woke up sputtering like a wet hen when rain fell in my mouth. Obviously, hunting wasn’t the hobby for me.

From late August on, my husband seemed to think of nothing else, his eyes glazing over at any attempt on my part to bring up another topic. I had married Jeremiah Johnson alright, and I was stuck with him. “Oh, but you knew what you were getting yourself into,” Doyle rallied when I complained about his outdoor pursuits. But the truth is, no one really knows what he or she is getting into—not really. The real decision is whether you stay when it dawns on you: Oh, so this is what I got myself into.

My malaise that autumn and winter went deeper than being put off by hunting. I felt alienated and misunderstood. I was a Canadian, Mennonite city girl who married into an American, Baptist rural family. (I would add to this tally “gun happy” and not offend anyone.) So five years into our marriage I wondered, Do I belong with this family, this man, so far from home? It surely didn’t feel that way. I daydreamed about back doors and side doors and greener pastures, until the morning in January when I read my severe mercy in a hospital bed.

We think the brakes on Grandma Finney’s car failed. I have no memory of anything, not blowing through the red light on the nexus of Burton Avenue and Madison Avenue, two seconds from where we lived; not being T-boned at forty miles per hour, not having giant metal claws exhume me from what could have been my crushed tomb. Doyle heard the crash, and somehow he knew it was me. When he saw the powder-blue Citation smashed in like a tin can, he thought I was dead or paralyzed. He watched in helpless fear as I was lifted out of the wreckage, my head limp and blood streaming everywhere.

I didn’t wake up until later at St. Mary’s Hospital, and all I could think about was Doyle. Doyle . . . I choose you! I choose you! In my confusion, I was terrified that he had been hurt too, and it took a while before I recognized his calming voice and strong hand in mine.

The accident exposed a bone-deep truth: There would never be anyone for me but Doyle. He was the love of my life—flannel shirts, venison, and raccoon pee included. As my closed head injury and broken pelvis and tailbone healed, so did my expectations of marriage. Like Anne, I was weaned on sentimental romances in books and, unlike Anne, in movies. Our culture casts romance and excitement as our savior and rescuer—we will be healed and whole if only we find our soul mate at the top of the Empire State Building on Valentine’s Day. Like Anne, I almost missed out on true love by expecting a fairy tale. (This may be why Jonathan Crombie’s death hit us so hard. He had become the epitome of the soul mate we all hoped to find.)

But as I lay there in pieces, half-conscious, my terrible, wonderful book of revelation showed me this was a lie. I did belong with Doyle, with whom I had nothing and everything in common. Who were the poetry-spouting, urban-living sophisticates of my fantasies—the fish that got away—when I had a country-fried man who would turn me and my fractured pelvis over gently every time my hip cramped? They were as vaporous as the fantasies I harbored about my birth family—misty puffs of smoke and mirrors that didn’t stand up to reality.

Similarly, Anne read her book of revelation that agonizing night when she thought Gilbert was dying of typhoid. As she sat vigil in her room all night long—not even able to go to Gilbert’s side because they were supposedly still just friends—she realized that “she must pay for her folly as for a crime.”[64] For years she had bought into the illusions of the tall, dark, handsome, and enigmatic man—a Roy Gardner or her own fictional concoction—Perceval Dalrymple.[65] Now those trickeries were swept away by the knowledge that she might never be able to tell Gilbert he was loved, so loved. Comparably, the frauds I had bought into—fantasies of bliss and soul mates and deepest belonging—were swept away by the knowledge that Doyle was my one and only.

In the words of Rachel Lynde, “while there’s life there’s hope,”[66] and joy came in the morning for Anne and Gilbert. Finally, she was ready to share his humble dream, of a home with a hearth fire, a cat, a dog, and the footsteps of friends. At long last, we readers receive a beautiful reckoning, a single kiss on the last page of Anne of the Island, the third book in the series. After almost a thousand pages of yearning, Gilbert’s hopes were fulfilled, and we can only sigh with satisfaction. Anne and Gilbert’s love story is meltingly romantic—’tis true—but it also reveals a practical lesson for the ages. She didn’t find her happiness in diamond sunbursts and marble halls, and we won’t either. Anne found hers in the boy next door, a companion with whom her brokenness was not something she needed to hide. When we find our own Gilbert, we are kept, we are seen, and we belong to each other until death do us part.