The Canadian Authors Association (CAA) was founded in Montreal in 1921, and a Toronto branch was established shortly thereafter. L.M. Montgomery was active in the Toronto branch from its inception throughout her years in Leaskdale and Norval, and, with her move to Toronto in 1935, her involvement deepened, including serving a term as second vice-president. Her involvement with the CAA was just one aspect of Montgomery’s literary life in Toronto, but it stands as something of a microcosm of the latter part of her career and thus provides an illuminating lens through which to examine broader themes such as her relationships with fellow writers and critics and her place in Canadian literature.
The Montreal meeting in March 1921 out of which the CAA emerged was organized by a group of writers and academics including Stephen Leacock, Pelham Edgar, J.M. Gibbon, and B.K. Sandwell. The intent was to bring together Canadian authors and educate them about copyright in order to galvanize opposition to a new copyright bill then working its way through Parliament.1 The bill was intended in part to protect the interests of Canadian printers, but it did so at the expense of writers. The licensing provisions it contained were of particular concern in that they appeared to leave Canadian writers wholly without copyright protection for work first published outside Canada.2
The organizers received an enthusiastic response to their invitations to the Montreal meeting. With more than one hundred authors in attendance (and hundreds more expressing support in absentia), a motion calling for the establishment of a national association with local branches was resoundingly approved, a slate of executive officers elected, and a constitution passed. The objectives of the new association were articulated in its constitution:
1 To act for the mutual benefit and protection of Canadian Authors and for the maintenance of high ideals and practice in the literary profession.
2 To procure adequate copyright legislation.
3 To assist in protecting the literary property of its members, and to disseminate information as to the business rights and interests of its members as authors.
4 To promote the general professional interests of all creators of copyrightable material.
5 To encourage the cordial relationships among the members and with authors of other nations.3
Within months, local branches of the CAA were formed in Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Winnipeg, Edmonton, Calgary, Vancouver, Victoria, Halifax, and Saint John, and expansion into other cities continued steadily.4 There were two categories of membership: “creator[s] of copyrightable material . . . of recognized position in [their] profession as author, composer, or artist” were accorded regular membership, while those “in sympathy with the objectives of the Association” but not yet considered to be qualified for regular membership could join as associate members.5 The category for which an applicant qualified was left to the discretion of local executive committees.
The original purpose of fighting for Canadian copyright laws serving the interests of authors remained central in the CAA’s early years, but efforts to that end were largely unsuccessful, at least in so far as the 1921 act and a 1923 amendment to it were concerned.6 The CAA won only minor concessions for authors. Nevertheless, in her detailed history of the CAA, Lyn Harrington concludes that the battle was not fought entirely in vain: “After seven years of altruistic struggle and expense, countless hours of unpaid effort, what had the authors achieved? They were organized into an articulate body, no longer too isolated and timid to speak up for themselves and their convictions.”7
Thus empowered, the CAA sought to serve the interests of Canadian authors in other ways, including the general promotion of Canadian literature, the encouragement of the production of Canadian literature through mentorship of young writers, and the facilitation of literary community. The promotion of Canadian literature was most visibly effected through the vehicle of Canadian Book Week, a long-running annual event first held in November 1921. Mary Vipond summarizes the event: “Book Week was simply a massive, multi-faceted publicity campaign. At the instigation of the CAA, Canadian magazines reviewed Canadian books, schools held literary competitions and awarded Canadian books as prizes, bookstores displayed Canadian books in their windows while authors autographed them inside, service club luncheons and church services alike were addressed by leading literary figures with one common message: buy Canadian books.”8
Montgomery did not attend the founding meeting of the CAA in Montreal in March 1921. Her biographer Mary Rubio notes that at that time, living in Leaskdale, assisting her minister husband, and raising two young sons, she was too busy to do so; but “she followed events with great interest,”9 and she was on hand for the first meeting of the Toronto branch shortly thereafter.10 Five years before, in 1916, she had joined the Authors League of America prior to initiating legal action against her first US publisher, L.C. Page and Company. Although that gruelling litigation would not reach a final conclusion until 1928, by 1921 Montgomery had chalked up one legal victory against Page with the assistance of a lawyer obtained through the Authors League. A lack of effective copyright protection for Canadian authors was one of the factors that rendered her vulnerable to the exploitation by Page that culminated in their legal battle. In part, Montgomery endured that lengthy battle despite its enormous personal and financial cost because she felt an obligation to stand up not just for her own rights but also for those of her fellow authors.11
Against that backdrop, it is no surprise that she was quick to see the value of a parallel Canadian organization to advocate for authors in her home country on the issue of copyright reform as well as other literary matters. Indeed, Montgomery was explicitly named in the CAA’s submissions to Parliament as an example of a popular Canadian author who would be harmed by the passage of the 1921 Copyright Bill.12 Publishing some of her stories first in Canada had put her at a disadvantage in her dealings with an unscrupulous US publisher under US copyright law; if the Canadian bill were to be passed in its original form, the alternative course of publishing first in the United States (adopted by many successful Canadian writers) would deny her copyright protection in Canada.
Montgomery was also in sympathy with the broader aims of the CAA, as evidenced by the content of her public speeches and by the various activities in which she engaged to assist fellow writers.13 She encouraged readers to buy Canadian books, and she praised the books of lesser-known Canadian authors in her speeches and reviews. She took pleasure in the fact that the profits generated by her books enabled her publishers, McClelland and Stewart, to take chances on the work of new, young Canadian writers, and she wrote blurbs to promote their books. She maintained a lively correspondence with a number of up-and-coming writers, offering them encouragement and advice. Finally, as Lesley Clement explores in depth in the next chapter, she relished the intellectual stimulation that participation in literary gatherings in Toronto and elsewhere provided.
Clearly Montgomery was well suited for an active role in the CAA, and she was an enthusiastic participant in the activities of the Toronto branch from its inception, despite then living some distance away in Leaskdale. For example, on 16 November 1921, on the eve of the inaugural Book Week, she reports in her journal, “I have been very busy, and have sat up till twelve or one every night writing letters and publicity articles for the Canadian Book Week which begins Saturday.” She travelled to Toronto the following day to take part in the event, sitting at the head table at a dinner in honour of Nellie McClung held at the Arts and Letters Club on the first night and attending a series of speeches, plays, and receptions over subsequent days.14
On 23 April 1923, she wrote of going to Toronto to attend that year’s CAA convention where, at another dinner at the Arts and Letters Club, she experienced the novelty of her first sight of Canadian women smoking in public. On that occasion, she has this to say after being updated on the status of the CAA’s ongoing copyright fight: “We had a breeze over the newly passed Copyright Bill. Nobody can understand it. I believe it will kill our young Canadian authors altogether and in the end our Canadian literature. Under the terms of it publishers will be afraid to accept the work of unknown authors.”15
Montgomery’s CAA involvement continued after her move to Norval in 1926, from where it was easier to travel to Toronto. In her journal, she documents giving an address to the CAA on 11 February 1928, and, later the same year, again playing a prominent role in Book Week: “Yesterday I went into Toronto and at night Dr Charles Roberts, Arthur Stringer, Bernard Sandwell and I opened the annual Canadian Book Week by speaking in Convocation Hall to an audience of 2,000 people, after another thousand had been turned away. I had never faced such a big audience before and for a moment I came all out in goose-flesh. But they received me so rapturously that I forgot to be nervous and told my stories of the old north shore as to friends.”16
Montgomery found these jaunts to Toronto a welcome respite from the stresses and sometimes boredom of her domestic life as a mother and a minister’s wife. After a trip to Toronto on 14 February 1931 to read a chapter from her new book, A Tangled Web, at the CAA, she confides: “I had little heart for it but I found that I enjoyed the evening for all. A little incense does hearten one up! And a little conversation with people who are interested in something besides local gossip.” She often felt that her writing was undervalued or even actively disapproved of at home and so relished being lauded at such events for her talent and success by her readers – “After the affair was over I was literally mobbed by hundreds of girls wanting autographs” – and especially by literary peers: “I did not find it unpleasant when Dr. Logan of Halifax came up to me and said, ‘Hail, Queen of Canadian Novelists.’” On occasion, Montgomery rued that other obligations prevented her from participating even more fully in CAA affairs. She particularly regretted missing out on a trip to England in the company of fellow CAA members in June 1933: “The Canadian Authors’ Association is going to England – leaves Wednesday – at least most of them. I wanted to go too, more than I’ve wanted anything for years but several reasons made it impossible.”17
When Montgomery moved to Toronto in 1935, she no doubt anticipated greater opportunity to participate in the literary culture that she had so enjoyed on visits. Rubio writes: “She had wanted all her life to be part of an intellectual community of people who loved books, and now she was on the verge of getting her wish.” Further, with her husband retired and her sons grown, she was released from parish duties and some of her domestic responsibilities and could put the time and energy thus freed up into literary service: “Maud looked forward to putting her organizational skills and her celebrity to use in a new context. She was public-spirited, and as an ardent Canadian nationalist, she wanted to foster the growing field of Canadian literature.”18 She likely expected that her work with the CAA would be a central part of her life in Toronto as a prominent and successful author.
To a considerable extent, this proved to be the case. Her involvement with the Toronto branch of the CAA deepened, including a term as second vice-president. Minutes of the executive committee meetings show her regularly in attendance, making and seconding motions, and participating in decisions about branch membership and activities.19 She also continued to attend CAA events, sometimes on the podium and other times in the audience. Her Toronto years, from 1935 until her death in 1942, were difficult ones marked by illness (her own and her husband’s) and anxiety. She worried about her sons’ difficulties in university and their questionable romantic entanglements and, most dominantly, about the possibility that her elder son, Chester, had inherited his father’s mental illness. Her work on the CAA executive and her attendance at CAA and other literary events provided distraction from that illness and worry. Her journals from those years are peppered with references to meetings and events that, whatever her prior expectations, ultimately lifted her spirits.20 A poignant example can be found in an entry dated 28 January 1937, following the death of her beloved cat Lucky: “I went to a meeting of the Authors’ Association tonight and ‘forgot’ for a little while. But when I came home – there was no Lucky. Who could have believed that the passing of a little cat could leave a house so empty – so desolate? But I have so little companionship. Ewan is wrapped in his hypochondriac fears and symptoms – I am alone – alone.” In October of the same year, her concern about Chester’s behaviour and mental state now intensifying, she writes: “I went to the opening meeting of the Authors’ Association this evening and found it rather pleasant. A lady told me she had met a family in BC who had ‘read all my books and all Hardy’s’! What a conjunction! I walked home from the car line in the crisp cool night. Thank God I can escape now and then from reality again. I could not go on if it were not for these occasional moments.”21
However, Montgomery’s experience on the CAA executive was by no means uniformly positive. She was often frustrated by lack of progress at meetings. She sums up 22 September 1937: “In the evening I went to an Executive meeting of Canadian Authors’ at Mrs. Junor’s. Much talk and little done as usual.” In a similar vein, on 18 October, she reports: “This evening I went to an executive meeting of the CAA. The men smoked and argued till a quarter to twelve over the program for book week and got nowhere. My head ached and I was glad when it ended.” She had long felt that “the Association is not what it should be and is not doing the work it should be.”22 Rubio writes: “According to Eric Gaskell, later the national executive director of the CAA, Maud brought many ideas to these CAA meetings,” including suggestions to improve “management, organization, and fund-raising within the CAA.”23 However, even as second vice-president, she does not appear to have had the power to put her ideas into effect.
Her efforts may well have been stymied by some of the men whom she encountered within the CAA, members of Canada’s developing literary old boys’ network who had openly expressed disdain for Montgomery’s writing. Interaction with these men could thoroughly sour her enjoyment of CAA activities. Chief among them was William Arthur Deacon, a powerful critic who was shortly to become literary editor of the Globe and Mail and president of the Toronto branch of the CAA. In a journal entry dated 16 September 1935, Montgomery says of Deacon: “I am on the [CAA] executive this year and heartily wish I were not. One of the men on it is no friend of mine and has gone out of his way many a time to sneer at my books in the nastiest fashion. So it is not pleasant for me to be associated with him.”24 Deacon had gone very public with his criticism of Montgomery some years previously, writing in a “Survey of Canadian Literature” published in his 1926 essay collection Poteen: “Lucy Maud Montgomery of Prince Edward Island shared the quick popularity of [Ralph] Connor in a series of girls’ sugary stories begun with Anne of Green Gables (1908). Canadian fiction was to go no lower; and she is only mentioned to show the dearth of mature novels at the time.”25 This pronouncement had been a surprise and a serious blow to Montgomery. Certainly she had weathered bad reviews before, but on the whole, her work had been well received by critics.26 Just two years earlier, in a more broad-ranging survey, John Logan and Donald French had identified 1908 as “the real beginning of the Second Renaissance in Canadian fiction,” in part because it was the publication date of Anne of Green Gables; of the novel, they said that it “may confidently be labeled a ‘Canadian classic.’” They had expressed praise for Montgomery’s entire oeuvre and, far from dismissing her work as being for children only, had described Emily of New Moon as “an adult’s story of youth” by virtue of the “analytic psychological method” that Montgomery employed in depicting her heroine.27
Montgomery could be forgiven for assuming that she had earned a solid place for herself in the pantheon of Canadian letters. But stark condemnation and dismissal by a high-profile critic such as Deacon in a critically acclaimed and briskly selling book dented her hard-earned literary reputation. And Deacon, although he was clearly trying to make a splash by going against the popular grain, did not prove an outlier. With the growing embrace of realist and modernist fiction, other critics soon piled on. Although her books remained popular with readers, more and more often they were dismissed by critics as sentimental, poorly written, and of interest only to children if at all. Little wonder then that Montgomery did not enjoy her interaction with Deacon in the CAA, particularly since his disdain for her work seemed to extend to her person. She recounted being snubbed by him at a Press Club lunch at which he was seated next to her but did not speak one word to her, leaving her to dine in silence.28
Other CAA members critically dismissed and personally slighted Montgomery as well. The esteemed University of Toronto English professor Pelham Edgar barely made mention of her when tasked with proposing a toast to her and four others at a CAA dinner given in their honour: “He orated freely about Sir Charles Roberts who fitly represented Canada’s poetry, Sir Ernest MacMillan who had rendered great services to music and Sir Wyly Grier, a worthy representative of Canada in arts. Remained only Dr Hardy and myself. Dr Hardy is a noted educationalist and had I not been one of the five I know Prof. Edgar would have made as fulsome a speech about him as about any of the others. But to have done this and then merely mentioned my name – for Prof. E. would have died any death you could mention rather than admit I represented Canadian literature – would have been too pointed, so the good Edgar selected his horn of the dilemma and impaled himself thereon. He merely said, ‘The other two who are included in this toast are Dr Hardy and Mrs Macdonald’!!”29
Despite its frustrations and occasional indignities, Montgomery generally enjoyed her CAA work and valued it enormously. Thus, it was a great blow to her when, through some backroom manoeuvring, she was ousted from the executive in 1938. She laid the blame squarely at the feet of Deacon.30 In a journal entry dated 8 April, she recounts: “I have had two bad days. It has been stormy and cold. Tonight I went to the Authors’. The election of a new executive was held and I was elbowed out. It is not worth while going into details. Deacon had it all planned very astutely and things went exactly as he had foreseen. I at once withdrew my name from the list of candidates. It does not matter in the least to me that I am not on the executive. Deacon has always pursued me with malice and I am glad I will have no longer to work with him. He is exceedingly petty and vindictive and seems to be detested by everybody who knows him. All this would have hurt me once but now it doesn’t matter at all.”31
There is no public record of how the ousting of Montgomery was effected nor of what precisely Deacon’s role in it was, but Rubio fills in some of the gaps: “In 1937, Maud had been the second vice-president of the Toronto branch of the CAA, and had things progressed normally she might have ascended to the presidency . . . [but] Deacon saw this power vacuum after Kennedy’s death [then national executive secretary of the CAA] as a chance to sweep the ‘old guard’ out of the Toronto CAA executive. Maud was one of his targets. It was widely known that he was not a fan of Maud’s writing. He liked to be in charge, and he liked even more to be ‘seen’ to be in charge, as his biographers note. The leadership vacuum gave him the opportunity to work behind the scenes to shake up the executive slate and dump Maud in the process.” There were those who could see the value that Montgomery had brought to her work with the executive and who regretted her departure. Perhaps in recognition of this as well as of her successful literary career, in 1940 she was awarded an honorary membership, “the highest distinction of the CAA.”32 But after her painful ousting, she was never to regain her prominence within the organization.
The conflict between Montgomery and Deacon within the CAA is a tale worth telling simply on the basis that both are important figures in Canadian literary history and both are fascinating personalities. But a detailed consideration of this episode is also a valuable undertaking for the insight that it can afford into the latter part of Montgomery’s career, as well as for what it reveals about Deacon and the inner workings of the CAA and how it thereby illuminates Canadian literary culture in the interwar period.
What prompted Deacon’s strong animus toward Montgomery? What grounded his determination to remove her from the executive of the Toronto branch of the CAA? Rubio points to evidence that “like many men of his generation, Deacon held a patronizing attitude towards women.”33 Yet this attitude did not manifest in a general denigration of women writers. He publicly championed several novels by women, including Martha Ostenso’s Wild Geese, Laura Salverson’s The Viking Heart, and Mazo de la Roche’s Jalna.34 And there were a number of women writers whom he mentored in private correspondence.35 Further, he was a close friend of prominent feminist Emily Murphy and even praised her as a pioneer for women’s rights in a memorial published in the Mail and Empire on her death in 1933.36 I do think that sexism was a key factor in Deacon’s dealings with Montgomery, but it operated in complex ways. It was not a simple matter of dismissing Montgomery’s work because of her gender but rather because of the presumed gender of her readers (“girls’ sugary stories”) and, relatedly, because of the genre of fiction she wrote (popular, sentimental, provincial). Fully exploring how this dynamic affected Deacon’s personal interaction with Montgomery requires a closer look at the gender and genre politics in play within the CAA and in its relationship with its external critics.
Large numbers of women were involved in the CAA from its inception, including in positions of power. Indeed, Carole Gerson points out, “By the 1930s women comprised the majority of [its] members.”37 In 1939, Madge Macbeth was the first woman to be voted in as national president, and she was re-elected twice to serve a record three terms. This is not to say, however, that the CAA was a bastion of equality. At the outset, the organizers of the founding meeting in Montreal in 1921 were horrified to find that more than half of the authors who had agreed to attend were women (“They could make the time for travel”).38 In subsequent years, the ascension of women to leadership positions sometimes provoked bitter opposition, not least in the case of the historic election of Macbeth to the office of national president. Those who sought to block her bid for the presidency were motivated by a range of factors, but her sex was unquestionably one of them.39 A group led by Charles G.D. Roberts nominated Deacon as an alternative, and Deacon, although he had already pledged to support Macbeth, agreed to run, leading to a nasty six-week campaign at the conclusion of which Macbeth prevailed.40 That was not the end of the matter, however. Deacon remained resentful, and his unhappiness and that of other members of the Toronto branch over the outcome manifested in a very disrespectful reception for Macbeth when she travelled from Ottawa to make a speech at the annual CAA dinner. Kathryn Colquhoun describes the scene: “[E.J.] Pratt was in the chair and he, and Prof De Lury, spoke so long, that she didn’t get a chance to say a word. A lot of people thought that it was a put up job, as Pratt had charge of things as chairman. Then, when she was [re]elected National President, none of the executive, Pratt, Deacon or Edgar, attended the Convention.”41
There are echoes in this campaign and these incidents of the treatment that Montgomery received within the CAA – the public slights delivered to her by Deacon and Edgar and the machinations to prevent her from advancing further in the CAA power structure. Perhaps the role played by Deacon in both scenarios also provides some indication that, while he was generous in mentoring some women writers from a position of power, he was not so keen to have women serve in positions of power parallel to or above him. Certainly he was not prepared to let women such as Montgomery and Macbeth stand in the way of his personal ambition.
The foregoing offers some insight into gender politics within the CAA in Montgomery’s time: but what of the gender dimension to external critiques of the CAA and of the way in which that in turn affected gender relations within the CAA? Daisy Neijmann highlights two factions of the Canadian literary scene during the interwar period and describes how the CAA, rather than serving as a forum for debate between them, came to be identified with only one side: “The association’s vigorous and largely conservative nationalism, as well as its attention to writers’ professional and financial interests and its apparent disregard for the quality of its membership’s work, which was perceived to cater to a morally and culturally conservative readership . . . soon incurred the scorn of younger, more radical writers such as [Raymond] Knister, [Frederick Philip] Grove, and [Morley] Callaghan, whose isolated attempts at more ‘universal’ and innovative writing aimed to jolt Canadian literature out of its staid, Victorian mould, into the twentieth century.” Neijmann identifies a gender as well as a genre dimension to the opposition between these factions: “It represents in many ways a debate between writers of a more popular Canadian literature, much of it written by women, and those of intellectual, cosmopolitan, and experimental writing.”42
Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston offer a more detailed articulation of the link between gender and genre in the context of the shifting winds of literary fashion in this period: “Romantic, affirmative women novelists like Mazo de la Roche, Marian Keith, and Marshall Saunders – and L.M. Montgomery – had been dominant throughout the first part of the twentieth century. Their dominance was now giving way (at least in the eyes of literary critics) to a new cadre of darker (male) realists, including F.P. Grove and Morley Callaghan.”43 Gerson asserts: “The assumption underlying the reception of women writers in Canada during the critical canon-forming decades between the wars was that women’s writing was expected to conform to a Romantic/sentimental/domestic model. Those who followed suit and did not practice modernism were then easily dismissed, while those who engaged with modernist methods were seldom taken as seriously as their male counterparts and have been consistently under-represented in the canon.”44
Thus, Rubio points out that Montgomery’s style and subject matter were such that she was never going to attain acceptance under the modernist aesthetic in ascendency in the 1920s and 1930s: “The new post-war Modernist critics called for a tough, hard-edged, pared-down style, as well as gritty subject matter, including tortured people, war, criminality, and sex. Maud’s writing – humorous, domestic, and localized in a rural region – fell short on all counts.”45 And Gerson makes clear that, even if Montgomery had changed her writing, she would have been unlikely to have thereby garnered the approval of the modernist faction.46 The fate of Icelandic Canadian writer Laura Salverson is instructive in this respect. In her later work, she embraced the realist and, to some extent, modernist credo, only to have her work censored by her publishers and to experience diminishment of sales and of critical acclaim, and she still failed to gain any attention in the male-dominated modernist realm.47
A vivid demonstration of the conflation of gender and genre in the criticism levelled against the CAA from outside can be found in F.R. Scott’s poem “The Canadian Authors Meet.” In it he pokes vicious fun at the “poetesses” of the CAA personified by one “Miss Crochet” whose “muse has failed to function” and characterized en masse as “virgins of sixty who still write of passion.”48 Gerson notes that it is no surprise that Scott would choose to ridicule the CAA in this highly gendered way at a moment in time when it was increasingly dominated by women and aligned in the eyes of young academic critics with sentimental styles and subject matter primarily identified as female.49 A parallel although less public example of the subjection of the CAA to ridicule by virtue of its association with women writers can be found in the incident described in the next chapter of “a ‘rare night at Arts and Letters monthly dinner’ featuring ‘a debate in burlesque’ on a resolution to abolish the Canadian Authors Association and about women as authors” at which “Doug Hallam, in drag” impersonated recent CAA honouree Nellie McClung.50
What, then, were members of the CAA to do if they wished to remain personally and institutionally relevant in the face of such criticism? One strategy would have been to reform the CAA, sweeping away the old guard, in particular the senior women and the writers and supporters of sentimental fiction and verse whose presence made the ridicule of Scott and others resonate, and to draw in up-and-coming young writers who were increasingly garnering acclaim with gritty, realist fiction or experimental poems. This, I would argue, was the course adopted by Deacon.
Deacon’s biographers Clara Thomas and John Lennox indicate that, upon becoming president of the Toronto branch of the CAA in 1937, he “had several objectives for the reconstruction of the branch which was then, he thought, part of a ‘pretty dead organization,’” including “the consolidation and increase of membership, particularly of young writers” and “the creation of a new sense of purpose and direction.” Further, they note, “As his term continued he was more and more apprehensive of the inhibiting effect of what he called the Old Guard – Pelham Edgar, W.G. Hardy, B.K. Sandwell – on the association’s ability to change and adapt.”51 Deacon’s correspondence suggests that his plans to divest the old guard of their power were speedily put into motion. In a letter dated 7 October 1937 to a young male writer who had been critical of the CAA, Deacon attempted to persuade him to join by taking the following tack. He conceded that “there are maiden ladies in the membership” but signalled that that might shortly change in that a “palace revolution is going on at the present moment” whereby “older people of established fame are standing aside for those in mid-career.”52 Montgomery was not Deacon’s only target, but it seems clear that pushing her out of the executive in 1938 was part of a strategy to steer the CAA away from its identification with popular, and sentimental, and Victorian literature, in effect to de-feminize it in a bid to curry favour with a new guard, and to thereby protect Deacon’s position in the vanguard of Canadian literary criticism.
I would argue too that, in so doing, Deacon was not merely propagating his own literary tastes but also in some measure covering what he perceived to be his deficiencies. Thomas and Lennox note that, although “Deacon consistently denigrated [Montgomery and Connor] for their sentimental optimism, his own fantasies about Canada and Canadians . . . ran on the same track”; even though he championed Callaghan and other controversial young writers, “he was never as radical in his literary opinions as he thought himself to be.” In particular, “he always remained somewhat baffled by the work of the modernist poets and more than a little defensive about all poets and critics he felt to be of the academic world.”53 That defensiveness may account for the vehemence with which he denigrated Montgomery and threw in his lot with her realist and modernist critics. Perhaps just as Deacon had become an emblem for Montgomery of the forces conspiring to push her hard-won literary reputation into decline, she had become an emblem for him of the literary past that had to be cut loose for Canadian literature, and for himself as its most prominent booster and critic, to thrive. Hence their seemingly out of proportion antipathy to one another.
Montgomery’s involvement with the CAA was just one part of her literary life in Toronto, but it serves as an effective lens to magnify and sharpen our understanding of the forces at play in the decline of her critical reputation in the latter part of her career, a central aspect of her Toronto years. For those familiar with Montgomery’s personal story, and for those who value her work, it is heartbreaking to contemplate her having to confront those forces in the midst of all of the other difficulties she endured in the final years of her life. As Rubio notes, “Once her critical descent started, Maud’s loss of status would continue steadily until her death. Not until near the end of the twentieth century, long after she was dead, would literary critics dismantle and discredit the norms that the entire generation of academic critics had worked so hard to establish in the 1930s, norms that pushed popular fiction – and almost all women’s writing – completely out of the canon and off the map of literary culture.”54 But Montgomery’s resurgence would eventually occur, and a fuller understanding of the literary landscape including the gender and genre politics of her time assists in making sense of the trajectory of her career and of the evolution of her posthumous reputation.