Dear Grandmother Maud on the Road to Heaven,
I hope I have addressed you in an acceptable and respectful manner. I have thought long and hard about the most appropriate way to address you since we never had a conversation in person, although over the years we’ve had hundreds of conversations in my imagination. I wonder if I should have called you Grandma or Grandmother Macdonald or Grandmother Lucy Maud or Nanna. I notice that you refer to your own grandmother as Grandmother Macneill, and I wonder if you would have wanted your grandchildren to address you in a respectful but less formal manner. I wonder also if it would please you to know that the language of today is not so formal anymore. Somehow I feel most comfortable addressing you as Grandmother Maud. There is no doubt in my mind that you would make your thoughts on this subject quite clear to me and the other grandchildren. There are seven of us, you know, four boys and three girls.
My beloved father, Stuart, often told me while I was growing up that I was named for his Aunt Kate of whom he was very fond. Who could that have been? Could it have been Kate Montgomery, your half-sister, the daughter from great-grandfather’s second marriage to Mary Ann McRae? Perhaps it was Katie Macneill, Uncle John Macneill’s fourth child and your first cousin. It seems unlikely that I would be named for Kate Montgomery since she had little contact with my father and cousin. Katie Macneill died in 1904 at the age of twenty, long before Stuart was born, although maybe it was through your warm stories and memories of Katie Macneill that he developed his own affection for her.
My father died in 1982, and I’ll never know the true significance of the other Kate in Dad’s life. There are so many questions I wish I had asked him, and I still miss him very much. I wish I had listened more attentively to his stories because, like you, he had the gift of storytelling. You were so well informed and immersed in the family histories of both the Montgomery and Macneill clans. Your journals are filled with descriptions of family gatherings, aunts, uncles, favourite foods, habits, furnishings; I love your appreciation of your own family history, and I wish I had paid more attention as a teenager to my father’s stories, many of which he must have heard from you. Isn’t that typical of youth that they don’t have the time or patience to listen to their elders and don’t know how invaluable their parents’ and grandparents’ oral histories are to their own fundamental sense of being?
I have many memories of social gatherings at my parents’ house on Glenvale Blvd, in a Toronto neighbourhood with a very similar feel to your neighbourhood on Riverside Drive. When Stuart was in the mood and had a receptive audience around the dining-room table, he was a dramatic and articulate storyteller. His favourite topics for discussion included his days as a child in Leaskdale and Norval. He had many fond reminiscences of Norval: his favourite stories involved the forks of the Credit River and the fun he had there with his tent and canoe. I had a sense from his stories that his summers in Norval were some of the happiest times of his childhood, and I hope you still remember those times with Stuart in a special way.
His university days were full of devilry, and, as I’m sure you are well aware, he was quite a prankster. One memorable story he told us many times happened during his years studying medicine at University of Toronto. Stuart had a fun-loving pal who will for now remain nameless, but I will tell you he was from a very prominent Prince Edward Island family and was a great friend of my father for the rest of his life. They got the notion into their heads that it would be fun to take the old grey mare that belonged to the milkman up the stairs of Knox College and deposit her in the room of Isaac Usher, a fellow student and friend. When Isaac had finished his classes for the day, he came back to residence to find that half of his room was taken up by an old grey mare and the other half by a sizable pile of manure. The interesting thing about horses is that they will go up stairs, but they won’t go down, and the pile of manure grew and grew and grew. I don’t know if Dad and his friend were ever found out for this prank, or if it was even true, but someone paid for the cost of lowering the mare out the window by way of a crane. Did you ever hear this story, Grandmother? I have always wondered if you were the anonymous benefactor who paid for the crane.
Dad had many more hilarious stories of his university days, and I wonder if you knew about them. I’m guessing that you probably didn’t find them quite as funny as his children did. I have a photograph taken of you and Father on his graduation day, you beaming with pride, and he looking like he was ready to take on the world. Were you there for the pigeons? Another of father’s dining-room stories occurred on the day that picture was taken at graduation. According to my father, on the steps of Convocation Hall, each of the graduating students had a pigeon under his gown. At the end of the last dignified speech by the president of the university, Stuart and his classmates simultaneously opened their gowns and released the birds, which flew en masse back to their home in the tower over the startled heads of the university’s finest. It was a good thing that all the faculty members were wearing mortar boards and gowns that day. I would love to have heard your version of that story.
Stuart went on to marry Ruth Eliza Steele, my mother, a graduate nurse at St Michael’s Hospital he had his eye on for several years. My mother never met you or Grandfather Ewan, but she has told me many times how touched she was by Stuart’s devotion to you during the last years of your life and his daily visits to your home on Riverside Drive.
I am writing this letter in the year 2013 to tell you some stories of how you continue to make a profound impact on the world today, even though you left us in 1942. This may seem like another of the yarns that you and my father loved to tell, but I promise you that I am not exaggerating. I hope you would be pleased to know that you have been acknowledged several times as one of Canada’s greatest writers of the twentieth century by readers’ polls across the country, and you have been designated as one of Canada’s top twenty heroes of all time. I want to tell you, my dear grandmother, that all of your books are still in print, and although in your lifetime there were Swedish, Dutch, Polish, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish, and French translations, your books have now been translated into more than twenty-five languages, including recent translations into Arabic, Slovak, Romanian, Chinese, and Icelandic.
14.1 Stuart’s graduation, University of Toronto (1940)
Your readership still crosses the boundaries of class, gender, age, race, culture, and time. Anne of Green Gables played a key role in Japan’s creative recovery in the 1950s, and your novels were hot sellers as part of the black market in an iron-curtain Poland that prized writing about love of home. I hope you will be proud that your hidden talent as a photographer has also been acknowledged publicly with your keen eye for your subjects, be they places of natural beauty, people, or your beloved pets. In the 1890s, you took many snaps (as you called them) and were experimenting with developing glass-plate negatives and films. I think of the fun you might have had with a digital camera and the ability to upload your personal pictures onto a social networking site, a phenomenon that has taken over the world now. So much of what you wrote in your journals was about the daily happenings of your life, your family, and your trips to Prince Edward Island, and I truly can envisage that you would have gotten a kick out of electronic media, Facebook, Instagram, and today’s challenging multi-media world. Of course, it is so difficult to presume to know your inner thoughts . . . someone who kept so much of her interior life private. Maybe you would have disapproved of Facebook for the same reasons I am uncomfortable with the lack of privacy in general on these social networking sites.
There is a complex cultural industry that has been created as a direct result of you and your books. Tourists from around the world visit museums dedicated to the preservation of your memory. Plaques mark your residences from infancy to death, and historical groups have restored some of the homes in which you lived. Publishers, archivists, librarians, academics, historians, research groups, movie moguls, television executives, theatrical stage producers, artisans, online fan sites, merchandisers, and intellectual property and entertainment lawyers continue to ensure that your name will never be forgotten.
As your heirs, we have made it our primary goal always to respect your wishes – often this involves some speculation – and, at the same time, to ensure that your works continue to be made available to the public and, also, to consider new projects and initiatives that are brought to our attention without denigrating the spirit of your writing. You’ll be pleased to know that the Anne and Emily novels continue to be introduced to new generations through the printed word, film, and television series, on the dramatic and musical stages, in multimedia formats, and even on three-dimensional merchandise. I do think about how other famous writers’ estates are managed. I have heard, for example, that both the T.S. Eliot and James Joyce estates are perceived by some as being difficult and restrictive and that the Ernest Hemingway estate authorized the posthumous publication of a novel that Hemingway himself didn’t want published because he considered it to be second rate. I recently read that his grandson has authorized the reissue of a new version of A Moveable Feast, removing some unpleasant family material from the original published memoir. J.D. Salinger is known to have repeatedly said that there will be no movie made of his most famous novel, The Catcher in the Rye, but it is not an impossible scenario to imagine that his literary executors might be tempted one day to sell movie rights. I’m not kidding when I say I lie awake in bed thinking of how you would have wanted your family to act on your behalf, and we continue to respect what we hope would be your wishes and to act responsibly.
Often, the public image of a famous person is different from the private person. Dear grandmother, you were a very complicated person who kept many of your most intimate thoughts well hidden but also wrote some of them down in your private journals. In your will, you left specific instructions for my father to arrange for the publication of your unpublished journals, which, you’ll be pleased to know, have been published in a five-volume edition by Oxford University Press. The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery, painstakingly edited by professors Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston, has opened up a new adult readership for you and your work and allowed us an edited version of parts of your private life. And now the Prince Edward Island years have been fully captured in the two-volume Complete Journals of L.M. Montgomery. I have bittersweet memories of spending time with my father at the family home, where he would sit at the dining-room table, poring over the contents of these old, worn, rather shabby black ledgers with handwriting in longhand that was totally undecipherable to me. Sometimes he would read aloud from them to us kids – my brothers, Deke and Rod, and myself – and we could see and hear from his voice how important these journals were to him. We were all aware that they should be treated with the utmost respect. He talked about editing and publishing them himself, but as the years went on, it seemed their presence was a mixed blessing for him. He was a devoted doctor, and while he was a talented writer, I think he was too overwhelmed at the prospect, for reasons he never explained. He may have felt more at ease tackling some of your fiction manuscripts, and he did authorize the publication of two collections of short stories, The Doctor’s Sweetheart and The Road to Yesterday, published after your death.
As your legal heirs and literary executors, we contemplate many opportunities, and we take this responsibility very seriously. Caring for your legacy of creative material has been very different from managing real estate or a family business. Inheriting a literary legacy is a different sort of gift, because it is covered by copyright laws, and the duration of copyright is finite. Unlike the gift of a physical property, copyright doesn’t last forever. Your heirs realized a number of years ago that one of the most important responsibilities we had was to protect your name, as well as some of the characters and settings from your novels. We formed a company and registered some valuable trademarks, including the trademark “L.M. Montgomery.” A trademark may be a word or words, symbols or designs, or a combination of words and designs. For example, we have registered a trademark for your L.M. Montgomery cat and signature design, which is such a distinctive symbol associated with you. Given your great love of cats, I know that you would approve. We have also considered your personality or character rights. For example, if a biographical film is made, “L.M. Montgomery” trademark, personality, and character rights will be negotiated into any film contract. Another important decision we made was to join with the Government of the Province of Prince Edward Island in 1994 to form a company to pursue our common interests in preserving your legacy and the integrity of the characters and images you created that continue to be associated with Prince Edward Island. The Anne of Green Gables Licensing Authority Inc. owns “Anne of Green Gables” and other related “Anne” trademarks in Canada and around the world and oversees the licensing of their use. I sometimes wonder if you would be pleased or shocked – or perhaps a little of both – to learn that the name “L.M. Montgomery” is a trademark belonging to your heirs. With the phenomenal interest in your life and your works, we felt that this would be the best way to ensure the integrity of your legacy and to respect your memory.
You are also an incredible inspiration as a business woman, and I am especially proud of your reputation as a heroine on the legal front. Your creation of Anne Shirley was so powerful, as you well know, that her distinctive “Titian red” hair played a major part in a lawsuit with the L.C. Page Company in Boston, a lawsuit that began in 1920 when you were forty-six and ended in 1928. I know you refused to knuckle under to the Boston publishing house that was cheating you, and you sued them, were counter-sued by them, and, after almost nine years of trials, hearings appeals, and judgments, you won your cases outright. There is a delicious irony for me, Grandmother, in the spirit with which you won your lawsuit, for lawsuits about Anne and her books are not just matters of the past. I’d love to write to you privately about these – how cases from the past prepared the scene for the struggles of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, more than 125 years after your birth. There are some uncanny similarities.
The history of your first publishing experience is a fascinating story in itself. I know that you tried four times to get Anne of Green Gables published before L.C. Page and Company finally accepted it in 1907. It had languished in a hat box for many months after its early rejections, and when you rediscovered it, you decided to send it out one more time. When L.C. Page accepted it, you were offered a contract that was not very author friendly. The first edition cover of Anne of Green Gables shows that Page was aiming the book at a general audience and not just the children’s market. The portrait of red-haired Anne on the first edition cover shows a very sophisticated Gibson-girl image. The later Anne books published by Page have similar red-haired portraits in mahogany or brown frames on a beige or a light green background. As a licensor myself, I can see how savvy Lewis Page was in establishing a brand name and brand look for what would become the highly successful and extremely marketable Anne stories. In fact, exhibitions have been mounted and academic papers published on these book covers.
I am confident that you would be proud to know that your family eventually did regain many of the rights that publishers and others around the world had acquired long ago or, even more recently, have claimed to your works. Mostly this reversion has happened through amicable negotiation and renegotiation of contracts, although we have not shied away from the possibility of litigation. All of this cost us a lot of energy, anxiety, and expense, but in the end, we were successful in regaining control over many of our rights that you had given up or – in the case of film rights – were tricked into signing away. I have been reading in your diary your reaction to the 1934 RKO film version of Anne of Green Gables, from which you did not benefit financially because Page turned around and sold film rights right after they secured the rights from you. I’m quoting your 29 November 1934 diary entry here: “‘Marilla,’ played by Helen Westley, was in no respect whatever my tall, thin, Puritan Marilla. She was, indeed, my perfect conception of ‘Mrs Rachel Lynde’ (who was not in the picture at all). But her performance, judged on its own merits, was capital. ‘Matthew’ was very good also, though he had no beard. ‘Gilbert,’ at least in the earlier scenes, was much too crude and ‘Diana’ was a complete wash-out. However, on the whole, the picture was a thousandfold better than the silent film in 1921.” What I find so interesting from your diary entries is that this problem continues. We have licensed some of the stories you wrote so many years ago, and we face similar problems to those you did. Characters have been deleted, some have been amalgamated, and some have been invented; story lines have been distorted so much that one often wonders whether this interpretation is based on the Montgomery novel at all. I can’t tell you how I enjoyed your reply when asked how you liked the characters: “I am pestered to death by questions as to ‘how I like it’ and ‘what I feel like’ seeing my characters ‘come to life’ like that. I liked it well enough but I had no sense of seeing my characters come to life because they were not my characters as I saw them, with the exception of ‘Anne.’ The whole picture was so entirely different from my vision of the scenes and the people that it did not seem my book at all. It was just a pleasant, well-directed little play by somebody else.”
Perhaps you would not be surprised to hear that there are debates concerning the use of the name “Anne of Green Gables.” Often, Grandmother, I feel that I have swung back to the 1920s and your own case against a business world intent on profiting from Anne and your other characters. I take comfort from your words about your struggles. Your Anne is considered the quintessential symbol for good-hearted innocence and imagination, but it is sometimes difficult to control the use and potential misuse of your creations. Some people first learn of Anne and your other characters through one of the many adaptations. We are glad when these lead them back to the originals.
Just think, if Anne of Green Gables were first published in 2008 and if you lived in today’s plugged-in world . . . would you be on Facebook, have a Twitter account, possibly your own website and blog? Would you have thousands of virtual friends, pen pals, and kindred spirits? I think it is a pretty safe bet that you would since you were interested in what the public thought about your writing and you kept detailed scrapbooks of your life, including book reviews and items of interest, both on the personal and world fronts.
I anticipate that we, as your heirs, will continue to struggle with new proposals that may use artistic licence to interpret your work, be it fiction or non-fiction. Some of these proposals will contribute to my lying awake at night and imagining how you would have wanted to respond. Sometimes it is quite challenging to manage your literary estate, but we try our best to do so with integrity and sensitivity.
Your vision is one of imagination and creativity that has captivated the world for over one hundred years and will likely do so for many years to come – be it on a Kindle, or a PDA (personal digital assistant), or maybe on electronic reading devices that contain all your works, including all your family photographs, in a miniscule computer chip. Change is inevitable, I know, and I welcome the new world of communication, most particularly if it respects and acknowledges the rights of creators and makes both classic and contemporary literature available to the readers of today. I have great faith that your name will continue to be a household name in another hundred years’ time.
Yours respectfully,
Kate Macdonald Butler