Resonance and a common muse?

Foy-Munger House, New Bern, NC

"Even the old folks who never knew

   Why they call it like they do

I was wondering since the age of two

   Down on Copperline...."

                       James Taylor, Copperline                  

The Spirit of Place:

Even in the land where I live, which is the place of mystic illusion so illustriously named by James as "Copperline",  there are places that closely resonate with Anne Shirley's "Green Gables". 

This is what James remembers about growing up on Morgan Creek in Chapel Hill,  a place almost spot on in proximity to where my children were born and where they toddled in their earliest years:

"There are things I remember about growing up here," he said. "I remember the landscape. I remember the trees. I remember the wet leaves in the rain. I remember falling down in the grass. I remember Morgan Creek.  James Taylor

"What I remember most about Chapel Hill is the landscape. I tell my kids that we were pre-TV and there was a lot of empty time there, slow weekends when you just walked into the woods and found whatever you could to kill time. There was this long, uninterrupted time to let your imagination grow. I believe that was an important part of whatever creative life I've had."  James Taylor

A common muse?

In poetical descriptions of nature and in displaying a genius for evoking a nostalgia of place, Maud and James seem to be mystically connected by a common muse. It seems ironic that they both sift down to the common denominator of a rich Scottish heritage. James' ggg-grandfather, a Scotch immigrant built a beautiful Federal style home in New Bern in 1793.
Middle St, New Bern, NC

A resonance:

As for me, Anne (through Maud) might have been describing the landscape of my own childhood, the echo of the sea, the sage and emerald green forests, the shining waters, all of these and more were the elements in the matrix of my formative years on the Eastern Seaboard of North Carolina...another thing being Matthew, the kind and gentle elderly man who was so much like my own grandfather.  My "papa" , like Matthew, died suddenly of a heart attack when I was 13 years old, and it took the wind out of me. There has never been another like him.

"Hey, babe, the sky's on fire-

I'm dyin', ain't I?

Gone to Carolina in my mind."

                  James Taylor, Carolina in my mind

"When I am asked, 'Is Anne real?'"

"When I am asked if Anne herself is a "real person" I always answer "no" with an odd reluctance and uncomfortable feeling of not telling the truth. For she is and always has been, from the moment I first thought of her, so real tome that I feel i am doing violence to something when I deny her an existence anywhere save Dreamland. Does she not stand at my elbow even now--if I turned my head quickly should I not see her--with her eager, starry eyes and her long braids of red-hair and her little pointed chin? To tell that haunting elf that she is not real, because, forsooth, I never met her in the flesh! No, I cannot do it! She is so real that, although I've never met her, i feel quite sure I shall do so some day--perhaps in a stroll through Lover's Lane in the twilight--or in the moonlit Birch Path--I shall lift my eyes and find her, child or maiden, by my side. And I shall not be in the least surprised because I have always known she was somewhere." The Selected Journals of LM Montgomery, Vol I, p 39, Rubio & Waterston

Though this entry was written before her marriage to Ewan in June of the same year, Maud's manner in speaking of Anne causes me to jump ahead into the long future that was to be her life with her husband. It occurs to me that Ewan, being an extremely short sighted human being, probably never had the slightest idea of whom he was married to-- beyond the fact that Maud was famous and provided money for his comfort.  This passage gives rise to an image that Anne, in reality, was never very far from Maud;  so, with tongue in cheek, I wonder if Ewan ever had the slightest idea that an extra person was living in their house? Knowing the probable answer to this question gives rise to another idea, of how lonely and unknown Maud must have felt in her marriage to Ewan.

Maud always maintained throughout her life that she was "fond" of Ewan and that she "liked" him.  Her long suffering devotion, for whatever reason,  is a reflection of her own honour.

New Moon Pudding - Aunt Annie Campbell's Recipe

Saturday, June 25, 1927
...today I made a certain special pudding which I make on special occasions-and on special occasions only, it being rather merciless on the eggs. It is an old Park Corner recipe and as it was nameless I have christened it "New Moon Pudding."

The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery,
Volume III,  p. 338

Ingredients

1 quart of milk                                    

2 cups breadcrumbs

1 and 1/6 cups sugar

rind of one lemon (grated)

juice of 1 lemon

6 eggs

1/2 teaspoons salt

Directions:

"Into one quart of milk put two full cups of bread crumbs, 2/3 cup sugar, the rind of one lemon grated, the slightly beaten yolks of six eggs and 1/2 teaspoon salt. Bake in oven until a silver knife comes out clean. Beat the whites of the eggs stiff with 1/2 cup of white sugar and the juice of one lemon. Spread on top. Return to oven and brown. Serve cold with cream."

A "Shadowy Tryst" in Cavendish

This entry gives a thrilling feeling of Holiday joy.  Yet, it has nothing at all to do with a Holiday.

  I suppose it is the wonderful feeling of  a "homecoming" that Maud's experience evokes...

Sunday, June 27, 1915

The Manse, Cavendish, PEI

"...Last night I had a very dear, very sad, very strange and unlooked for experience."

"When I was on the Island before, I shrank from the very thought of going near my old home. This year I felt the same until last night. I was on the manse veranda. The dew was falling. In the south-east a large, hazy, full moon was rising. To my left lay the dark trees that screened the old house from sight. Suddenly an irresistible longing took possession of me to go to it once more--in that pale enchantment of moonlight when one might chance to slip back through some magic loophole into the olden years. I could not withstand it. I slipped over to the church grounds and through the old gap in the fence through which I used to go to church. I walked along the meadow edge where the foot path used to be, past the grove of spruces, and on till the old house lay before me in a soft, silvery shadow. I turned aside for a moment to the old well and looked down it. The ferns that always lined its sides had grown completely across it.....

...How lovely and lonely it all was, and yet how unreal. I seemed to be in a dream--and yet it seemed the only waking. Oh, as long as that moonlit magic worked the past was mine once more--the old past, before the last sad years I had spent in the old home. Oh, beloved old place, that half hour I spent with you last night was worth the coming from a far land. You were glad, I think to have me back--me, who loved you so. For there is not one living now but me who loves you--not one. As I stood there I seemed to feel a presence enfolding me as if it claimed me--as if something that had been forsaken and desolate were once more rejoicing in my affection. Have not old homesteads souls that cling to them until they crumble to dust?...

... Certainly, all the pleasures and joys of my real life seemed to grow pale and fade into nothingness beside the strange enchantment of that shadowy tryst."

The Selected Journals of LM Montgomery, Vol II, Rubio & Waterston, pp. 168-169

Herman Leard: the Assessment of 1920 & Unequal Power

 I get a feeling that Maud is playing to an audience here. I don't know why I'm keeping this up....unfinished business, I guess...

When something is written in italics, as you see now, these are my own words being interjected into the context.

Saturday, January 31, 1920
Leaskdale, Ont

"Life," says "Ouida" in one of her novels, "never gives two opposite sets of gifts to the same recipient; it never bestows both the king's dominion and the peasant's peace," Amen! One cannot have imagination and the gift of wings, along with the placidity and contentment of those who creep on the earth's solid surface and never open their eyes on aught but material things. But the gift of wings is better than placidity and contentment after all.
   In Oliver Shreiner's African Farm--which long ago was one of my wonder books--is a very fine and unforgettable paragraph on love.--
   "There are different species of love that go under the same name. There is a love that begins in the head and goes down to the heart and grows slowly; but it lasts till death and asks less than it gives. There is another love that blots out wisdom, that is sweet with the sweetness of life and bitter with the bitterness of death lasting for an hour. But it is worth having lived a whole life for that hour. ...

There is a much longer quote on this subject from African Farm,

but I find myself snoozing over it so, I think I will wield here the absolute power of the ellipsis and skim on down to where Maud is really leading us...

   ....Yes, I think there must be a love which embraces them all--but it is rarer than a blue diamond. Most of us have to content ourselves with far less. I have loved different men in vastly different ways; but I have never loved any man with the whole force of my nature--with passion and friendship and worship. Perhaps it is well, for such a love in spite of its rapture and wonder and happiness, would make a woman an absolute slave, and if the man so loved--the Master--were not something very little lower than the angels I think the result, in one way or another, would be disastrous for the woman.

Please remember that Maud is a married woman
as she is romanticizing these feelings in her journal -
 perhaps it is late at night and Ewan is in the room with her-
 I sense an inner conflict here.

   And yet- such a love might be worth disaster. One would always have its memory at least. My own love for Herman Leard, though so incomplete, is a memory beside which all the rest of life seems gray and dowdy--a memory which I would not barter for anything save the lives of my children and the return of Frede."

  Wow, it sounds like she has really thought this out.

The Selected Journals of LM Montgomery, Vol II, pp 369 - 370, Mary Rubio & ElizabethWaterston

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Branwell Bronte's unhappy relationship with Mrs. Robinson (a married, older woman) knocked him over the edge of sanity into a world of depression, drugs and alcohol and the result was a premature end to his life.  So it seems to me that Maud's idea of a Master/Slave (unequal power) phenomena between men and women is not particularly gender related.  The 1960's movie, "The Graduate" and the song, "Mrs. Robinson" by Simon & Garfunkle is based on Branwell Bronte's relationship with an older, married woman.

On a rainy Veteran's Day, Holiday 

Ewan, happy at last

It is a very tough piece of the puzzle to figure out how Maud remained "fond" of Ewan throughout the entirety of an emotionally starved marriage. It kind of bums me out to read in The Gift of Wings-- at the funeral-- as a part of "Maud's story" of the epilogue:

"There were whispers asking how she had died:  it was an open casket, and, wasted to nothing,  she did not resemble the woman they had known.

She looked 'horrible', some whispered,  lacking fitting words."

 The Gift of Wings, Mary Rubio, p. 584

 I have a note that is scribbled at the end of "Maud's Story" in my copy of GOW :  "YIKES" , it says, and the note was probably a response to the following:

"Maud had asked in her journals that her tombstone be inscribed with a line she adapted from Shakespeare: "After life's fitful fever, she sleeps well." No one had read the request in her journals, and so she sleeps peacefully among her own folk without it, her grave visited regularly by fans from all over the world."  The Gift of Wings, Mary Rubio, p. 584

If you compare "Maud's Story"  to "Ewan's Story" in the same epilogue, it seems that Ewan's final years were happier and jollier in the nursing home at St. Michael's:

"He was showered with attention there by nurses who loved this gentle, dimpled smiling old man, and made his final year happy."

The Gift of Wings, Mary Rubio, p 585

Can we conclude by comparing the variables of these two endings that Maud was simply a martyr throughout her years of marriage with Ewan???

"Was it a Ghost of the future?" - the red-haired girl behind the screen

I love this little entry in Maud's journal and I've always wanted to post it. By chance, I landed on it this morning as I was scanning through Journal V-- so I deeked it appropriate to post it here today on All Hallow's Eve.

Wednesday, June 24, 1936

"I felt worried and nervous all day....

Twelve o'clock

"I have just had a very peculiar experience! I was lying in bed, having just laid down my book for a moment. The light was on. Ewan was reading beside me. I was not asleep. Suddenly around the screen that stood across the door came a young girl and sat down on the edge of my bed, and bent forward with a smile, opening her lips to speak. She was pretty, fresh-colored with red hair. When she first appeared around the screen I thought it must be Ethel and wondered had she gone crazy to come into our room like that. Then I realized it was not Ethel but someone I had never seen and in my amazement I cried out--and she was gone! I sprang up, crying out "Who was that? Who was here just now?" Ewan said nobody had been here.

Well, I saw her. That is all I can say. I remember distinctly what she looked like. And I am convinced she was on the point of telling me something when I cried out. What would she have told me? I shall never know.

I feel rather strange. It has been an uncanny experience....."

The Selected Journals of LM Montgomery, Rubio & Waterston, Vol V. pp. 73 -74

Maud and Charlotte Bronte

Monday, July 18, 1932

...In the afternoon I made my escape and in a corner of the lake among the pines read Bensons new book on Charlotte Bronte. A fascinating volume. But I do not think Charlotte was in the least like the domineering little shrew he pictures her, any more, perhaps than she was like the rather saintly heroine of Mrs. Gaskell's biography. I doubt if anyone knows, or knew , or ever will know the real Charlotte Bronte.

The Selected Journals of LM Montgomery, Vol. IV, Rubio - Waterston) pp. 187 - 188

________________________________________________________________

Thursday, March 29, 1934

These past ten days have generally been cold or stormy, filled with a lot of routine duties. I find it hard to put any heart in them. But yesternight, after enduring a chilly house all day I hied me to bed with a new book--Benson's Bronte--and forgot the world and its worries and heartbreaks for a few hours. The book is very fascinating. But he is too hard on Charlotte and his idea of Branwell's helping Emily to write Wuthering Heights is simply silly. What a fascination that strange family exercise on the world!! Every year fresh books, filled with fresh guesses about them, pour from the press. How furious they would have been had they dreamed how every action and motive of their lives would be thus raked over and held up to the world, with all sorts of absurd interpretations and suppositions.

The Selected Journals of LM Montgomery, Vol IV, Rubio - Waterston, p 257

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Yesterday, I hied myself out the back gate of the garden and took the few steps to the library to pick up some books on The Brontes. Yesterday was errand day but I never made it very far as I spent most of the afternoon sitting in my car in the parking lot of the grocery store and devouring the lives of the Brontes. I stayed so long in the car that I was too hungry to do the grocery shopping and then to go home and make a meal, so it seemed by luck I espied a Chinese Buffet in the same shopping center. Boy was I hungry! So, the books went with me and there was I able to be left in peace to do exactly as Maud was wont to do on occasions of her life, to escape the mundane world of the present and slip into the fascinating lives of the Brontes.

Light and Shadows

In the long ago days of my childhood there was an alcove near the altar that served as the library for our little Baptist Church. On one Sunday morning I found myself there, glancing at the titles which were lined up neatly on a lonely bookshelf. The room appeared or rather seemed to be dusky, but there was a little spray of light swimming through the smoky window above me which diffused into the shadows of the shallow room and made it seem a deeper, different dimension. It was on the dusty bookshelf that I spied a book whose spine appeared to me to look straighter than the others.. The book was clean , but jacket-less, and it gave the impression of having held it's sway amongst the other, similarly aged titles. The title on the spine read as follows: "Anne of Green Gables." The book, in my memory, seems to have shivered and quivered on the shelf. It shouldn't be hard to guess the rest of this story. "Anne of Green Gables" is the book that came home with me that day. From the first page to the end I was enveloped with a keen consciousness of feeling that the magic of my life had finally fallen upon me.

Over a span of 40 years since, I have read many other books and short stories written by Lucy Maud.Montgomery. Though I looked and tried over most of those years, there was scant information to be found concerning the life of Maud herself, so it wasn't until my Mother took a trip to Prince Edward Island back in the 1980's and returned home with a gift which was happily a bio, "The Years Before Anne" by Mr. Bolger, where I finally was able to get an idea of the life of my favorite author. I learned from Bolger's book, or rather was given a hint, of the heartache and unhappiness that seemed to have grabbed on to Maud and followed her throughout her life. Of course, there must have been some happiness for her. There had to be. How else could she know it and write it so well?

There has been scant information over the years concerning Maud Montgomery that I could find in the bookstores of the sandy plains of North Carolina. So, imagine my delight when the Internet Age came upon me, and there I discovered that diaries, 5 volumes of diaries, had scupulously been kept by Maud and then published 40 some years after her death, beginning in the late 1980's. It's hard to fathom the time and work that it took in order to decipher the old fashioned scrawl as was written by hand on the lined pages of ledger books. But thanks to Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston, the work was done, and all were published by the time I found them in the late 1990's. It was in the diaries that I discovered Maud's unhappiness for real. However, I drew the conclusion on reading the journals that Maud in writing about her own life, was rather ambiguous and almost manipulative in what she presented , knowing that someday the world would see what she wrote. The biographies are truly just a rendering of her side of the story, a terrible story really.

So, with my deep interest in the subject and because of a characteristic curiosity about things, I have spent a great deal of time in reading all that I can about the life of Maud Montgomery, and mostly reading between the lines. I get impressions and perceptions as I'm reading. These intuitions, right or wrong, run deep with me.