7.09 Ghost in the Garden - Dark Montgomery Pt 1

 

The Closed Chambers

Following in the footsteps of authors, we make pilgrimages: to birth sites, to grave sites, to drinking sites, to “once slept here” windows, to bedrooms and studies, to regions where the author walked or swam or once made bread or apocryphally played atomic pineapple poker during an autumn festival where they lost exactly $42.23. “Why yes, so the legend goes . . . “

And so I walked through the legendary Post Office where Lucy Maud Montgomery once mailed her manuscripts to publishers. Well, she also worked there as what we will call the “assistant postmaster,” because her grandparents each took turns as the “Postmaster.” That is, they handled the mail in the village of Cavendish in their kitchen, and since orphan Lucy Maud was living with her grandmother then, she helped. This was fortunate, because Lucy Maud could write her poems and stories on the backs of old letters and envelopes at the table–paper was kind of hard to come by. 

And you could visit there and see where it happened. Again, well, not exactly. The Post Office we visited was actually a different building the Parks authority found on the other side of the island, dragged over to Cavendish, and restored into a museum. Then it was filled with various antiques to tell the story. I could even get an “authentic” Cavendish postage stamp: it wasn’t and I didn’t. Still, as a small and unique museum, it was one of the most interesting and friendly stops we made. And if you ever wanted to learn about 19th century rural island postal delivery, this was the place to do it.

But let’s not use that word, “authentic,” for all the reasons we’ve already discussed, okay? And let’s, while we’re at it, be a bit cautious about calling this stop something like biography.  It’s another curated space with glass display cases and interactive videos. And to walk its rooms and pretend I was somehow “there” experiencing what Lucy Maud Montgomery did is really nothing more than farce. I mean, between this and the equally fake McNeill farm transformed into an Anne house, believing that I am somehow closer to the real author and her creative moment has got be a very particular delusion.

What we meet here is what we’ve already chatted about: a curated story, one cleansed of the more difficult passages of life, one stripped of nuance and complexity, one barren of all the complications that make up humanity. 

I suspect most travelers here are drawn by the Anne of Green Gables story and they know in the most general of ways that Anne’s author Lucy Maud built much of the stories around her own places and experiences on the island. In the most general of ways. And so the island satisfies: in the most general of ways. Please: don’t ask too many questions.

Anne is a happy character and her stories fairly harmlessly bring joy and optimism to most all who read them. Very few genuine tragedies befall anyone. And even when they do, like Matthew Cuthbert’s death near the end of Book One, it’s built as a kind of literary necessity, no matter how sad it is for readers. After it, Anne is compelled to stay on PEI and not travel to college; she must help care for Marilla and besides, Matthew’s heart attack comes partly at learning their savings have been lost. Some years later, author Montgomery expressed regret at having killed him off in the novel; a young writer still, she admitted she just needed some device to root Anne to the island. 

Otherwise, we need to get to the fifth book before anything of equally tragic weight occurs. The island is a place of adventure and comedic mishaps and hard-working people and gossip and summer evening concerts and bake sales. Just like Lucy Maud Montgomery’s life. We think. And as far as the Parks Authority manufactures for our visit, it’s true. Sun and forest walkways and Enchanted Bookcases and carriage rides and raspberry cordials. People often come to Anne-land to be married. 

And I say all this, and I imagine you are now waiting for the turnabout I often drop in at such moments. You expect me to say, “Aha! But not so fast! Lucy Maud’s life was a tragic mess! We’ve all been lied to!” Well, okay then, I will. Not completely, of course, she became a fair celebrity in her lifetime. But my point is, people are complicated. And I’m going to do a bit more these next two episodes than simply “spoil” our dream view of Montgomery, and we’re going to go a fair distance in giving us a good reason to travel to PEI that has little to do with buying plastic orange Anne braids and commemorative china. 

I want to make the case that, even though her popular books are of happy and sylvan spaces—and to be sure, not all of her books were happy–we’ll get to that!—but even though what most know is a utopia PEI landscape, these Anne stories are not reflections of Lucy Maud’s peaceful childhood, not just passive mirrors of memories. Instead, the complex and difficult life that Lucy Maud Montgomery had both as a child and adult required a defense, an active strategy to cope with anxieties and even oppressive relationships.

In brief, Anne of Green Gables helped save her author’s life.

 

 

Theme

This is Literary Nomads, where we wander through literature and language, near and far.

I’m Steve Chisnell, and it’s time we explore more of Montgomery’s writing to see what puzzle pieces we might assemble.

 

 

Cages

 

To start today, I want to first recommend the excellent, thorough, and fairly recent biography, Mary Henley Rubio’s 2008 work, Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Gift of Wings. Many of the overall points and biographical notes I cover today and next time are from this text. If you are truly a fan of Montgomery or of Anne, I encourage you buying and reading it: book, ebook, audiobook, whatever. Now among all of the souvenirs on PEI I saw, this biography usually sat somewhere amongst them, enormous in hardcover and paperback versions, over 700 pages. What I probably don’t have to tell you is how infrequently it seemed to be purchased, even looked at. People grabbed commemorative and special editions of Anne books, graphic novels and young reader versions, audiobooks, DVDs of films and TV series and cartoons, even manga versions. But I don’t think I saw once anyone even pick up a copy of Rubio’s book to consider it. Many came to PEI for the Anne illusion of happiness, the curated narrative.

But I want to come at Rubio’s points—and then supplement them—through some of Lucy Maud’s books, some which are less well known to us. I have often advised my students against reading author autobiography from fictional works. It’s a sloppy and dangerous practice. I can write about a murder in a short story and not have killed or have any intention of it. I can create characters in severe financial stress and not been in similar situations myself. Dodie Smith can write 101 Dalmations without ever having met a Cruella de Ville. On the other hand, yeah, in that case she had a lot of inspiration and one of her favorite dogs was named Pongo, so . . . 

Okay. My point is, trying to guess about our authors through their fiction is generally sloppy and often a case of very amateurish psychology invention. So here, I’m going to be fairly careful and build some points from Rubio’s biography by seeing if we can’t find some references in Montgomery’s fiction. 

Let me show you what I mean. Here is a small section from one of Montgomery’s romance novels, The Blue Castle from 1926. Our heroine Valancy is stuck living with her suffocating relatives for the first 29 years of her life: 

“She knew the ugliness of that room by heart—knew it and hated it. The yellow-painted floor, with one hideous, ‘hooked’ rug by the bed, with a grotesque, ‘hooked’ dog on it, always grinning at her when she awoke… Every room in the house was ugly, of course… People who wanted to be alone, so Mrs. Frederick Stirling and Cousin Stickles believed, could only want to be alone for some sinister purpose…

 

Mrs. Frederick Stirling and Cousin Stickles… never knew that Valancy had two homes—the ugly red brick box of a home, on Elm Street, and the Blue Castle in Spain. Valancy had lived spiritually in the Blue Castle ever since she could remember… About [the Stirling house] was the desolate, barren peace of an old house whose life is lived.”

Ah, the Blue Castle is a dream space, an idyllic retreat of the imagination, a place as distant as exotic Spain, a spiritual space. Contrast this to the “ugly red brick box” of the house, the hideous hooked dog, the ugly and sinister and desolate watching of her relatives. 

Eventually Valancy will escape this place, and in a series of highly improbable coincidences, end up very happy. It’s a romance, after all. But in another passage from the book, Valancy’s favorite author John Foster writes: “Fear is the original sin. Almost all the evil in the world has its origin in the fact that someone is afraid of something.” A mantra, perhaps, against despair.

And we may, of course, wonder at Lucy Maud’s own experience. In fact, being raised by her grandparents—her mother died early of TB and her father abandoned her to work in Western Canada—she found herself in a fairly loveless space. Her grandfather was autocratic, temperamental, and cruel, once telling her after she developed a cough at age 9 that she would die before the spring. Her grandmother? More concerned with “what people might say” than with affection, was concerned that she had “bad blood” from the Montgomery side which had to be kept in check. As she grew to her teens, she was forbidden from taking walks in the countryside she so often wrote about. When her grandmother grew ill, Lucy Maud spent the final ten years there restricted to the house to care for her, a place with no plumbing and only occasional limited electricity. Her writing she kept secret, writing on the backs of letters and stray papers at the kitchen table, out of sight. A kind of captive in that space.

I liked the Post Office visit I made, but I had not read Rubio’s biography by then. And I can tell you that the museum makes no mention of any of this. You and I at the start of the episode today, we might have imagined a village-friendly post office with a young Lucy Maud helping her grandmother in some clean-spaced domestic happiness. But instead she was a young woman who, in the words of The Blue Castle, “could only want to be alone for some sinister purpose.”

 

 

Shields

I’ll offer a quick aside here, and that is that we already know that Montgomery wrote her PEI stories based on her own experiences, both in settings and in life. It’s one of the reasons that it’s so difficult to distinguish on PEI just what we are exploring: the author or Anne or both somehow synthesized or something else completely. The Green Gables Heritage Place, for instance, is a biographically important place for Montgomery, a family-connected farm of the MacNeill’s, the Webb family, which was also of course the inspiration for the Green Gables house where Anne grows up, and so has been renovated and repainted to match the fiction instead of the inspirational fact. The Anne of Green Gables Museum down the road still sits apart from the Parks Authority and is owned by Lucy Maud’s cousins. Across her childhood and teen years she was sometimes able to retreat from her grandparents to this farm: historically she found solace here with the family, occasionally found space to write, and even got married. It’s also where we find the Enchanted Bookcase I’ve spoken about earlier. And even though it’s more historically significant for Lucy Maud the author, it’s called the “Anne of Green Gables” museum. (*sigh*) It’s easy to get all this confused.

I’d like to read to you two more passages now, one from her nonfiction autobiography, The Alpine Path, and one from the first Anne book, Anne of Green Gables. Perhaps we can understand the overlap a bit. But also, I want to underscore again this extension of Lucy Maud’s own life into her fiction.

Here, from The Alpine Path, a section I’ve read in part earlier, a little expanded now:

“Anne’s Katie Maurice was mine. In our sitting-room there had always stood a big book-case used as a china cabinet. In each door was a large oval glass, dimly reflecting the room. When I was very small each of my reflections in these glass doors were ‘real folk’ to my imagination. The one in the left-hand door was Katie Maurice, the one in the right, Lucy Gray…

 

As far back as consciousness runs, Katie Maurice and Lucy Gray lived in the fairy room behind the bookcase. Katie Maurice was a little girl like myself, and I loved her dearly… Lucy Gray was grown-up and a widow! I did not like her as well as Katie. She was always sad, and always had dismal stories of her troubles to relate to me; nevertheless, I visited her scrupulously in turn, lest her feelings should be hurt… All this sounds like the veriest nonsense, but I cannot describe how real it was to me.”

We already know that Katie Maurice finds her way in just this same way in the Anne books, a reflected and imagined image of a friend in Anne’s lonelier times. And it’s not very hard to imagine that a young Lucy Maud, compelled to stay close and with few friends, looked to her imagination for happiness. This capacity to imagination is the foundation for everything Anne really is. Here is a typical passage from the first book where Anne tells her new acquaintance and soon-to-be adoptive father Matthew Cuthbert about how her mind works:

“She came out of her reverie with a deep sigh and looked at him with the dreamy gaze of a soul that had been wondering afar, star-led. “Oh, Mr. Cuthbert,” she whispered, “that place we came through—that white place—what was it?” … “Pretty? Oh, pretty doesn’t seem the right word to use. Nor beautiful, either. They don’t go far enough. Oh, it was wonderful— wonderful. It’s the first thing I ever saw that couldn’t be improved upon by imagination. It just satisfied me here”—she put one hand on her breast— “it made a queer funny ache and yet it was a pleasant ache. Did you ever have an ache like that, Mr. Cuthbert?” … “They should call it—let me see—the White Way of Delight. Isn’t that a nice imaginative name? When I don’t like the name of a place or a person I always imagine a new one and always think of them so… other people may call that place the Avenue, but I shall always call it the White Way of Delight.”

Imagination is the primary avenue to happiness, the Blue Castle, the White Way of Delight, the escape that rewrites reality. Better, that re-stories it. 

 

 

Closed Doors

That re-names the world we need it to be. It’s kind of cliche, isn’t it, to argue only that reading and writing is an “escape”? I mean, it certainly can be, but this barely taps its full potential, the opportunity to give the world a name that makes us who we wish to be. Lucy Maud’s grandfather promised her she’d die by spring, a naming. Who knows how many other names she was given? And, of course, we want children, especially women, especially in earlier decades, to find this power, to build strength upon whatever foundation they might as they weather discrimination and abuse, neglect and . . . well, worse.

If Lucy Maud found comfort in her imagination, found relief in her writing, it is because she was able to imagine a world different from her own. One shaped by her own words. It’s interesting, then, that of all the motifs that we find playing over and over across her stories, one which stands out is the door—or, the closed door. Her protagonist in Emily of New Moon finds herself locked in a church after dark; The Blue Castle’s mysterious locked room of secrets; a locked and forbidden chest in the “The Blue Chest of Rachel Ward,” or the story “The Closed Door” where children are led into a secret and haunted garden by an elf-like Rachel:

“An odd hush lay over the windless place. Cecil remembered an old poem he had heard Uncle Egerton reading … a poem that spoke of a land ‘where the wind never blew.’ Had they come to it? What was this lost garden, so full of inescapable mystery?…

 

Rachel knocked but nobody came. The cat stared at them unblinkingly. The scent of lilacs came on the air, although this was late summer and lilacs are in spring. Never again, as long as he lived, could Cecil endure the scent of lilacs. Beyond they saw a large, square hall and on one side of it was a closed door. Rachel went in and across the hall to the door… she simply set her teeth, turned the knob and went in.”

Why all the doors and entranceways, the locked spaces and the magical entries? We can ourselves imagine, easily enough, that they form the thresholds between one world and another. Classic archetypes and this idea makes sense. But let’s suggest, too, that these spaces are rightly protected. Not always that the imaginative world wants to keep us out, but we who might exist and find safety and power in the imaginative world want to keep the real and chaotic world out. We name ourselves there; we need no disapprovals from outsiders. 

Here is a defiant older woman who lives in solitude and sickness in the Montgomery’s story, “Min”:

“She lifted one large but shapely brown hand and pointed to the gate. ‘Go!’ she said threateningly.

 

‘Mrs. Palmer,’ began Telford, but she silenced him with an imperious gesture. ‘I don’t want any of your kind here. I hate all you ministers. Did you come here to lecture me? I suppose some of the Corner saints set you on me. You’ll never cross my threshold… Don’t call me that,’ she interrupted passionately. She flung out her hands as if pushing some loathly, invisible thing from her. ‘I hate the name—as I hated all who ever bore it. I never had anything but wrong and dog-usage from them all. Call me Min—that’s the only name that belongs to me now.’”

Carolyn Heilbrun, in her book Writing a Woman’s Life, argues that “women will starve in silence until new stories are created which confer on them the power of naming themselves.” In this way, it isn’t exactly that women write futile fantasies as failed efforts to find respite from the real world. Put that way, it fits pretty neatly into the male prejudice of women as vulnerable and suffering. Turn it around. Through the defense of the closed door, the agency or power which comes from writing the fantasy, women might—might—find the means to write themselves into realities of power.  For Heilbrun, who studied dozens of female writers, their stories are a subversive and deliberate narrative strategy to claim financial independence and creative agency within patriarchal structures.

It might operate with what Heilbrun calls a “Double Escape.” The first escape is breaking into the publishing world on its own, hiding behind anonymous pen names like the Bells for all of the Bronte sisters, George Eliot, George Sand, J.K. Rowling (so she wouldn’t put off potential young boy readers)–and let’s go with her other name, Robert Galbraith, too. Science fiction writers like James Tiptree Jr., Andre Norton, and C.L. Moore. P.D. James, S. E. Hinton, and L. M. Montgomery. It’s an old (and still new, sadly) strategy for a business which carries any number of prejudices. Just ask gamers.

But while they’re doing that, they’re also creating characters who defy social norms, those who undertake dangerous quests and break with polite society, not concerned about what “other people think” as Montgomery’s grandmother was, as Mrs. Lynde in the stories so often does. And as Anne clearly does not. We love her because she breaks the rules. Because she has crossed into dangerous territories and adventures, through doors others never enter. 

When Montgomery found success (quietly posting her manuscripts in hat boxes to publishers under her L. M. pseudonym), she also suddenly discovered popular success, and this meant dealing with that publishing world. Remember that she is still living in a run-down rural house caring for her aging and sick grandmother now; she’s 32 years old, she’ll live here for another 3 or 4 years until her grandmother dies, but she’ll also be almost immediately one of the best-selling authors in North America. On top of her domestic challenges, she now must manage the business world. Unfortunately, her first publisher was not a friendly man.

Taking advantage of her lack of experience, editor Lewis Page (of L.C. Page Company) changed the standard writer contract to give Lucy Maud 10% of the book’s wholesale price, not its retail price, effectively cutting her profits in half, at only about 8 cents per book sold instead of 19 cents. The contract also bound her to write sequels at the same rate. She didn’t really understand the cheat until a 1910 visit to Page’s estate, where he was buying baseball teams and living lavishly on her book profits. 

She was able to finally break the contract with Page in 1915. She published a volume of poetry elsewhere and joined the Author’s League of America in anticipation of needing to defend herself if Page retaliated. He did.

He began by withholding her royalties and claiming that there was an “accounting error” for over three years of profits. He then used her signature on a check as a binding agreement to give him rights to her next book. Lawsuits followed, and each side won different cases, all while Montgomery continued to write and publish other books with the new company. Page by now had control of the rights of her first seven books for a single paltry sum. And he had copies of all of her earlier stories that had been rejected; he said he’d publish them as a new Anne book, Further Chronicles of Avonlea. She agreed to let him for an out-of-court settlement if he erased any references to Anne in them. Well, she did it, physically erasing all the references in the pages. What she didn’t know is that Page had already signed for an American silent film version of Anne, and he kept all of her share of the profits, about $20,000. To get a sense of that in today’s dollars, just add a zero or two at the end of that number.

Page then published his Further Chronicles with all the Anne references (and a cover picture of her). What followed was an eight year lawsuit battle and Lucy Maud is now in her 50s. For those keeping track, we’re at a 20 year battle with the publisher now. But Page was not done. He filed libel suits against Montgomery, claiming she had ruined his business reputation. All the courts, including the US Supreme Court itself, threw the case and its appeals out. In the meantime, he denied her royalty checks in an effort to break her budget and fire her lawyers. Her own lawyers and both her American and Canadian publishers were by now asking her to settle with Page, but she would not back down. 

By 1928 it was over. Page’s other clients were abandoning him. His own brother who was his treasurer left in disgust and died suddenly afterwards. That fall, she won a final settlement of $15,000. She wrote in her journal: “It is over! Over! Over!! And —I—am—free!”

But at what cost? She had paid out about $14,000 in legal fees over the past decade. Lucy Maud took her settlement money and invested it in the stock market to secure an education for her sons. That was in November of 1928. And in the Crash of 1929, it was all gone.

Even so. Even so. What we might see here is Montgomery’s resolve despite the male-dominated world around her, determined to cheat and subdue, to thwart her business success. Seen this way, Montgomery’s writing of happy books is not merely a passive retreat but also a strategy for naming herself as economically independent. Those beautiful scenes on PEI helped fund her legal battles for her family’s physical security. And, as we’ll see, that need was great.

What gave her such spine? In another odd twist, one of Anne’s earlier stories, pre-Anne, is “Prue’s Patent Medicine Advertisement.” The young woman in it winds up threatening, even blackmailing, her bullying uncle into funding an education for her and her brother. Knowing he suffers from intense family pride, she allows a cheap patent medicine to publish pictures and testimonials of herself in the newspaper, a social disgrace. The uncle gasps at her, crying that, “The girl’s mad! Stark, staring mad!” and then our heroine Prue responds:

“Oh, no, I’m not, Uncle Abimelech. I’m merely a pretty good businesswoman. You won’t help Murray to go to college, so I must. This is the only way I have, and I’m going to see it through.”

A foreshadowing of the lawsuits in her future? Maybe. But it was also a time when her grandfather would not pay for Lucy Maud’s education and so she struggled to fund it herself. He also “disapproved” of lady teachers and spending cash on women’s needs. 

And for you Anne fans out there, this is hardly the only time Montgomery used patent medicine as a plot device. In the second Anne book, the Avonlea Village Improvement Society is horrified, of course, to learn that a farmer neighbor strapped for cash is about to sell his fence space for patent medicine billboards, a reflection of the then emerging commercialization of the island over Anne.

 

 

Exercising Our Skepticism

We are, of course, hardly done looking at Montgomery’s life and unfortunately pervasive challenges through all of it. I wish I could say that each of its chapters resulted at least in some agency and freedom for her. The Anne books are happy spaces, but they hardly existed in isolation from the politics and lives of the people creating and living through them. And this is true no matter how many times the Heritage Place museum whitewashes that farmhouse to give us a sanitized Anne experience. But our understanding of Anne and of the larger life challenges of her author are an uneasy exchange between the fictional and real worlds, the crafted World and the raw Earth of our experience. We have no need to separate them. Nor should we try.

Knowing some of this history of Montgomery doesn’t necessarily give us deeper insight into her books and stories. Knowing that Edgar Allan Poe drank heavily and did opium doesn’t explain his writing talents. I’m not forwarding the biography here to reveal the themes of Anne of Green Gables or her other stories. I’m saying that there is a richer and more complex story to our quests for authenticity, for our pilgrimages to literary sites. For me, and perhaps for you, learning a little more about Montgomery’s life and the publishing history gives me more respect for her efforts. I wish I knew this when I went to PEI, because I had very little chance of learning any of it while I was there. PEI is almost completely the Green Gables happy place. Let’s embrace that whole story a bit. 

Try it on your own, too.  For this round’s Skeptical Pilgrim Experiments, I’ve got three different ways to bring our curated and raw worlds together a little tighter. Here’s one:

Choose a completely mundane, worn-out item in your house, like an old coffee mug, a scratched desk, a pair of beat-up shoes. Better if it’s something you’ve had some experiences or memories with. Now write a short “museum plaque” for it as if you were a curator 100 years from now. But this time, unlike so many museums, don’t smooth over the stains and wear; explain the daily friction and stress that caused them.

Find this and two other experiments to try at a link in the Show Notes along with the experiments from previous episodes this season’s journey. We’ll explore more of Montgomery’s experiences next time. 

Go embrace today’s stresses a bit. Note that angry Threads or BlueSky post you are holding back. Pay some bills or tear some up. Live the daily lives our authors have. And give yourself some credit for what you produce despite it all.  

But also, don’t forget, go read something.

 

 

Closing Credits

Follow me and find me along with supplements, bonus episodes, resources, newsletters, and still more at Waywords Studio dot com.  That’s Waywords Studio (two s’s in the middle) dot com. Thanks for listening! 

Music for Literary Nomads is by Randon Myles

Chapter headings by Natalie Harrison and Sarah Skaleski

Literary Nomads is a production of Waywords Studio. Find me at Waywords Studio on most social media and at Waywords Studio .com.

 

 

Bibliography

Heilbrun, Carolyn G. Writing a Woman’s Life. W. W. Norton & Company, 1988. 

Montgomery, L. M. Anne of Green Gables. L. C. Page & Co., 1908.

Montgomery, L. M. “Min.” Short Stories 1902 to 1903, 1903.

Montgomery, L. M. The Alpine Path: The Story of My Career. Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 1975. [Originally published in Everywoman’s World, 1917].

Montgomery, L. M. The Blue Castle. Frederick A. Stokes, 1926.

Montgomery, L. M. “The Closed Door.” Faded Page, 1934.

Rubio, Mary Henley. Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Gift of Wings. Doubleday Canada, 2008.