Maud had lived much of her life, like her volatile little heroine Anne, between the soaring of the imagination and the 'depths of despair.' " This sentence from the final chapter of the much-anticipated new biography by veteran scholar Mary Henley Rubio might serve as its motto. The result of several decades of research, Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Gift of Wings soars with the energy of its title, but delves even deeper into the darker side of the author's life.
Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Gift of Wings
, by Mary Henley Rubio, Doubleday Canada, 684 pages, $39.95
The book begins with Montgomery's birth on her beloved Prince Edward Island, and with her family roots in Scotland, closely following The Selected Journals of L. M. Montgomery, co-edited by Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston. But the voluminous biography's most revealing parts ponder her life in Ontario after she became the celebrity author of Anne of Green Gables.
Rubio deftly paints the portrait of a multitasking modern woman with an amazing work ethic and discipline. She wrote fiction, gave recitations and talks to thousands of people, promoted Canada's national literature through the Canadian Authors Association, supported younger authors, wrote letters to her fans and read at least one book a day. A loyal wife, she supported her husband on parish visits, organized theatre performances and kept an immaculate house. The main breadwinner, she was generous to a fault, making loans to friends and family. Yet there is a tendency for Maud's house of dreams to turn into a house of disappointments.
Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, in her book Subject to Biography, writes that female biographers often turn to their subject in search of an ideal, "an ideal friend or sister, a sexual ideal, an ideal of productivity, and of creativity, an ideal liver of life - and in some way, often more than one way, being disappointed." The biographer works to find a balance toward the subject.
In the introduction, Rubio recollects such a moment of disillusionment when, in "the late 1970s," she first met Dr. Stuart Macdonald, whom Montgomery called her "one good son." The young Rubio made the mistake of telling Stuart that Montgomery must have been "the ideal mother": "That ill-advised remark clearly hit a nerve, and I will never forget Dr. Macdonald's slow, appraising look, first at me and then into me and finally through me."
There is pathos in little Stuart learning to recite all 50 stanzas of Walter Scott's The Lady of the Lake, one of her favourite poems, to attract his busy mother's attention. There is even more pathos in a woman who comes to motherhood late in life only to have her adored son Chester grow up to become a liar, thief, swindler, manipulator and, from all accounts, an exhibitionist. (The reader is startled to see an image of Chester in handcuffs, arrested for embezzlement in 1954, fortunately after his mother's death). Her first-born was a spoiled brat who knew how to charm his mother.
Her most agonizing struggle was against depression, her husband's and her own
The biography is also the tale of the marriage of a celebrity author and a country pastor, the Rev. Ewan Macdonald, who cannot possibly understand his talented wife's ambitious desires, let alone satisfy them. Flaubert's Emma and Charles Bovary come to mind, though Maud was no Emma when it came to sex. She kept a screen in her bedroom, and advised her daughter-in-law to do the same in order not to let her husband see her naked. If there was extramarital desire, as a gossipy maid insinuated, it was sublimated into the writing of The Blue Castle. Fiction was the canvas for the projection of emotion.
Meanwhile, Ewan remains curiously voiceless in this biography, as Rubio admits: "His side of his story will never be told." Described by his son Stuart as a hypochondriac, Ewan had several severe mental breakdowns; he escaped into prescription medication (carrying his cough medicine like a flask and apparently begging various doctors for codeine). After his retirement, when asked to help with chores in the house, he sought refuge with neighbours, who thought him a lovely and lonely old man.
