Bala Kindreds, Jack & Linda, ride in a Gray Dort (Like LM Montgomery's!)

Kindred Spirits Tea Room, Harkers Island, North Carolina

I don't go to Harker's Island very often any more so I don't know if this tea room still exists.

However, this is proof positive of just how far a distance that the long arm of Maud's talent could reach. 

It reached me, way down here in North Carolina!

Prince Edward Island,  I'll see you in 9 days.

Kindred Photography

Like Maud, I like to take photographs.

I am lucky enough to live in a land rich in photographic opportunities.  The people in my town like to dress up for any and all occasions.  These photos are from a large archive and were taken with a cheap camera. I have been playing  with these otherwise nice photos using a editing tool to make them look like newspaper clippings.  It's a good way to make poor quality photos work for you.

It's so strange, that I can only get the backs of these ladies, it's always this way in my photos of the dressed up people.

Maud tells the truth - the song and dance of duty

Duke analyzes life from behind the fence - "A Southern Green Gables" - New Bern, NC

"And no one would realize the bone-weariness she suffered as she did what duty demanded.  One part of her enjoyed it;  one part resented its intrusions.  She would write: "Sometimes I get so sick of them (mission bands, missionary auxiliaries, ladies' aids, Women's Institutes, Sunday School teachers' meetings, etc., etc., etc.) that I could hang myself on the handiest gooseberry bush rather than go to another.  And yet--it's odd--it's always in prospect only that I hate them.  When I go to them I find myself really quite enjoying them.  I like 'making things go,' having, so I have been told, a 'gift' that way.  It is really only because of the inroads they make on my time that I rise up and howl occasionally."  Yet she could write, "I have lost the art of living entirely...It isn't right.  We weren't meant to live like that."  Separately, she could have enjoyed any of her current activities.  All together, crammed into one life, they were too much." 

The Wheel of Things, A Biography of LM Montgomery, Mollie Gillen, p. 129   
______________________________________
"I've got an idea that a lot of work in this world gets done by lazy people.  That's the reason they work--because thy're so lazy...You work because you have to drive yourself to such a fury to begin. It's so hard to get started that once you do you're afraid of slipping back.  You'd rather do anything than go through all that agony again...Then people say you're a glutton for work, but it isn't so.   It's laziness--just plain, damned, simple laziness, that's all."

Thomas Wolfe, You Can't Go Home Again

All things being relative in a parallel world....July & August 1915

Maud wrote often of the "hot" summers on PEI with the house full of company (Uncle Leander and entourage.)  Her discomfort seems incredible after I found that the high temps for the Island are recorded as 73 degrees for the month of July.  Yesterday, it was 102 degrees here on the inner banks of North Carolina.  (73 degrees is the mark where we set our air conditioners in order to feel comfortable in our homes.)

Perhaps it felt hotter in Maud's grandmother's house, because of the baking that she was required to do, and with the long hair, dresses and layers of underclothing.

All things being relative in a parallel universe...
________________________________________
One of the important lessons that may be gleaned from reading Maud's Journals (and it's a big one) is that it might be better not to depend on your children for your happiness. This passage is coming from Maud long before some even harder blows befell her.  It seems evident by this passage that Maud was always prone to depression..

The Manse, Leaskdale, Ont
August 13, 1915

"It is just a year to-day since little Hugh was born dead.  Oh, that hideous day!  Shall I ever be able to forget its agony?  And will it be repeated in October?  This thought is ever present with me.  I have had some bad attacks of nervous depression lately--one last night that was almost unbearable.  My condition--the war news --the weather--all combined to make me very miserable.  Sometimes I feel so unutterably disheartened that if it were not for Chester it seems to me that I would rather not go on living."

The Selected Journals of LM Montgomery, Vol I, p. 171, Rubio & Waterston 

----------------------------------------------------------

A lovely walk with her cousin Frede at Park Corner...

Park Corner

Sunday, July 18, 1915

Tomorrow I leave Park Corner...To-night Frede and I planned to have a walk together over the bridge in the dusk--a last farewell walk, the last one we could have there for many years--perhaps forever.  In the twilight we slipped away and had our hour.  The western sky was full of the hues of a weird sunset.  Before us the old pond lay in shadow and silver.  The evening was very still, very calm, very clear.  And through the stillness came the strangest, saddest most unforgettable sound in nature--the soft, ceaseless wash on a distant shore of the breakers of a spent storm.  It is more mournful than the rain wind of night--the heartbreak of all creation is in it.

  Frede and I walked back and forth over the bridge many times, sometimes in silence, sometimes speaking lowly of the deepest thoughts in our hearts.  We seemed a part of the night--of the dreaming water, of the dusk in the cloudy firs, of the far remote stars, of that haunting moan of the sea.  And when the twilight suddenly was night and the shining new moon swung above the tree tops that bend over that old homestead, we walked away from the glamor in a silence that touched the lands of dream and tears."

The Selected Journals of LM Montgomery, Vol I, p 170, Rubio & Waterston

"the old past was mine once more...."

As I am winding down the days till I board a plane in North Carolina to embark on my sojourn to PEI, I  am hoping to find a way to connect with Maud's feelings of homecoming.  It is nice to have this place--this blog--to share her record, and to validate my own feelings about this dream like Odyssey, to be where she has been, to see what she has seen, and perhaps to feel what she has felt.

It is a certain homecoming for me, too!

In a personal way, it seems strangely poignant that Maud--always self-searching and with a book on hand-- had missed the profoundly correspondent themes about home and self  in Thomas Wolfe's works.  After all, they were living in a contemporary world.  How could she have missed him?

Maud:

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 th 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 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.
     I went on to the old kitchen door.  Beside it, every summer a certain shoot of balsam poplar used to start up, to be trodden down under passing feet.  Since the old house was closed it had been able to grow and so fast had it grown that the whole angle between the kitchen and the cook house was full of it.  It as as high as the kitchen roof.
     I went around to the end of the house and stood under my old window.  The moon was floating over the valley below.  I had looked on that very scene a thousand times on moonlit nights of long ago.  My heart beat with mingled pain and pleasure until it almost choked me.  Everything in that kind radiance seemed so much the same.  For a space the years turned back their pages.  The silent sleepers in the graveyard yonder wakened and filled their old places.  Grandfather and grandmother read in the lighted kitchen.  Old friends and comrades walked with me in the lane.  Daffy frisked in the caraway.  Above me my old white bed waited for me to press its pillow of dreams.
     Most of the windows were boarded up but the south one in the parlor was not.  through it I could see the bare old room distinctly with the black mantelpiece that was the admiration of my childhood.  I went around and stood on the stone steps of the front door.  The old "front orchard" and the grove beside it seemed more bowery and bosky than of yore but I think that was only because i have grown used to a thinner screen of trees on my Leaskdale lawn.  How lovely and lonely it all was, and yet how unreal.  I seemed to be in a dream--and yet it seemed th only waking.  Oh, as long as that moonlit magic worked the past was mine once more--the old past, before the last sad years 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?
   I could hardly tear myself away from the spot.  Perhaps the charm it had for me is not a wholesome one--not altogether one to which it was well to yield.  Perhaps the dead past should bury it's dead.  It may not be well to linger too long among ghosts, lest they lay a cold grasp upon you and bind you too closely to their chill, sweet, unearthly companionship.  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 I, pp 168 - 169, Rubio & Waterston

"...and he had an instant sense of something re-found that he had always known--something far, near, strange, and so familiar--and it seemed to him that he had never left the hills, and all that had passed in the years between was like a dream."

Thmas Wolfe, "You Can't Go Home Again"    

Going home....

"...it was silly, anyhow, to feel as he did about the place. But  why had he always felt so strongly the magnetic pull of home, why had he thought so much about it and remembered it with such blazing accuracy, if it did not matter, and if this little town, and the immortal hills around it, was not the only home he had on earth?"    

 Thomas Wolfe,

 You Can't Go Home Again

                     Asheville, North Carolina   

Maud:

Cavendish trip, 1913

..."Voices were calling to me that could not be resisted--voices of the past, fraught with all the past's enchantment.  They summoned me imperiously and I obeyed the summons.  I slipped out into the darkness of the summer evening and went to find the lost years....
  ...In the dim, still, eerie twilight I slipped down the hill, over the bridge across the brook and up the dark path under the spruces.  It was the old way home.  I found the little gate in the fence and went through.... 
....Yes, there it was.  In the fading gray light I could see the old gray house hooded in shadows--I could see the little window of my old room--
.....I wept bitterly...."

The Selected Journals of LM Montgomery, p. 126, Rubio & Waterston

"… for once seen, and list the moment that he sees it, it is his forever and he can never forget it. And then the slow toiling train has passed these lives and faces and is gone, and there is something in his heart he cannot say."

Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River  

Crimes of the Heart

"Yes; it was a crime to marry you. I have paid for it."
Irene Forsyte to Soames Forsyte, "The Forsyte Saga",  John Galsworthy

There is a strange feeling of sadness that has been falling on me as I am preparing for our trip to PEI in July. It seems as if Maud comes to me, and then I feel her intense love of the Island.  It is her marriage, and her disappointment over it that is getting to me. As I am shopping for my traveling clothes I begin to think of Maud's great attention to detail in the choosing of her honeymoon trousseau. Anyway, it all went so bad over time. It makes me sad.

Maud
" I had been feeling contented all morning.  I had gone through the ceremony and the congratulations unflustered and unregretful.  And now, when it was all over and I found myself sitting there by my husband's side-my husband!--I felt a sudden horrible inrush of rebellion and despair. I wanted to be free!  I felt like a prisoner--a hopeless prisoner.  Something in me--something wild and free and untamed--something that Ewan had not tamed--could never tame--something that did not acknowledge him as master--rose up in one frantic protest against the fetters which bound me.  At that moment if I could have torn the wedding ring from my finger and so freed myself I would have done it!  But it was too late--and the realization that it was too late fell over me like a black cloud of wretchedness. I sat at that gay bridal feast, in my white veil and orange blossoms, beside the man I had married--and I was as unhappy as I had ever been in my life."

 The Selected Journals of LM Montgomery - Vol I, p 68, Rubio & Waterston
_______________________________________________________________________

"Oh! Jolyon, yes.  He's in love, I feel he's in love.  And he'd say:  'My mother once married without love!  How could she have!'  It'll seem to him a crime!  And so it was!"

Irene Forsyte - "The Forsyte Saga", John Galsworthy

The Forsyte Saga - Granada Television 2002

Fate - and the Nine Lives of LM Montgomery

Mike and Leo

It seems incredibly fortuitous that during our upcoming July Odyssey on PEI,  there will be a happening!  Adam-Michael James and co-writer Leo Marchildon are working on a musical reunion of their well known production, "The Nine Lives of LM Montgomery."   We haven't heard the final details yet, but according to Mike, the stars are lining up!

Methinks I can see the hand of Maud in this.  If only someday, I can meet Mrs. Mary Rubio to ask a few questions that have been burning in my mind.  That will happen too, if it's meant to be.

Counting Down the Days to PEI - feeling a sadness for Maud

New Bern, North Carolina - my home

"bannered with crimson, sentineled by star.." LM Montgomery

 
It is 31 days till the fulfillment of a lifelong dream, a long yearned for visit to PEI -Maud's home and her lovely vista of childhood wonder.

Today, I feel a sadness for Maud that almost brings me to tears.  I think it has to do with some words by Thomas Wolfe which are ringing like a sad bell.  It is a quote from "Look Homeward Angel" where he describes his feelings of being "lost, on this weary unbright cinder".  Maud never knew that she was lost and in darkness.  The outside world was so beautiful to her.

Perhaps when the ugliness crept into her life,  if she had known, like Wolfe, that being lost and in darkness is the common state of man, she would not have felt so desperately alone.

I hope to get a sense of the spirit of Maud Montgomery on my visit to PEI, though I'm not sure that it is necessary to travel there to get it.

Still, Maud loved the island so very much!! There must be some shadow or a whispering of her spirit which is lingering there.

O waste of loss, in the hot mazes, lost, among bright stars on this most weary unbright cinder, lost! Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When? O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again. 

Thomas Wolfe - Look Homeward Angel

Six String Nation Elements: Lucy Maud Montgomery's House

Lucy Maud's relatives become emotional when sharing thoughts on the home that was her inspiration.

Russian Quotations, the Wedding Dress & Dorothy in the Land of Anne

Boris Pasternak has made a couple of statements through his great literary work of "Dr. Zhivago" which seem to me to sum up Maud's life in a teaspoon...

"The great majority of us are required to live a life of constant, systematic duplicity. Your health is bound to be affected if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, if you grovel before what you dislike and rejoice at what bring you nothing but misfortune. Our nervous system isn't just a fiction, it's part of our physical body, and our soul exists in space and is inside us, like teeth in our mouth. It can't be forever violated with impunity."

I can't help but wonder about Maud and why it is that she, a voracious reader, never lets the Russian novelists as a factor into her literary life?  (Zhivago was published in 1957, 15 years after  Maud's death,  but there were always the works of other great Russian novelists that abounded during her time).  Could it be that the Russian people with their foreign and intrinsic mysticism would have made Maud feel uncomfortable within the boundaries of her steady Presbyterianism?  Or, perhaps it is simply this:  that for Maud, the Russian
literary geniuses simply walked too close to the razor's edge.

It has always seemed to me that it is exactly what isn't evident in Maud's world that is more telling than what is evident. For instance, the razor cut pages of her journal that pertain to the time of her wedding to Ewan point the way to so much more information than what she leaves in and allows for us to see..   (I always feel a regard for Maud's journals much like the Sherlock Holmes mystery, "The Dog that didn't Bark in the Night.")

Why didn't Maud leave us any wedding photographs of the two of them anyway, or even a photo of her in her wedding dress?  Bridal and wedding issues were so important to her life and stories.

But back to Pasternak and wishing that Maud--always seeking self understanding--- could have found one such as he...                                                                                                                                 

"Oh, how one wishes sometimes to escape from the meaningless dullness of human eloquence, from all those sublime phrases, to take refuge in nature, apparently so inarticulate, or in the wordlessness of long grinding labor, of sound sleep, of true music, or of a human understanding, rendered speechless by emotion!"

Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago - (1890 - 1960)
____________________________________________________  

Just 60 days (and counting) till I will be picking up my Canon Powershot camera and heading NorthEast to Maud's Magical Island for my first visit ever!

I do wonder if her Island will prove to be any more magical than my own back yard in North Carolina?  Perhaps, after all, this venture will turn out to be much like Dorothy in the Land of OZ.  Perhaps, all  that was ever needed was to click my heels three times and repeat to myself,  "There's no place like home."

Still, this is an Odyssey that has been building up since childhood, and it must be done!

I wonder if there will be traces of Maud Montgomery yet lingering within the green canopied shadows of the hallowed confines of Lover's Lane....?

 More to come....

A Gilded Cage and a Hearkening

(Photo taken at a "Southern Green Gables" on Johnson St., New Bern, NC--May 3, 2010)
This photo taken yesterday of a beautiful flower protected by a fence reminds me in a symbolic way of the life of LM Montgomery. Maud, during her raising up years, was able to develop into a beautiful flower largely due to the protection and puritanical restrictions applied by her prim and proper (and Presbyterian) Grandmother McNeil. The symbolism here is that the beautiful flower is admiring the liberty of the brittle leaves that are able to fly like feathers in the whimsy of the wind.

There is irony in this-- that after Grandmother McNeil passed away and freedom was at hand--Maud remained in the condition of one who is still restrained. She is like a tamed bird who has always admired the freedom of birds in the sky, but when the cage door is opened, she does not realize that freedom is at hand, and thus remains unaware of her real nature of flying free at last....
____________________________________________________

Morning along Shore
by Lucy Maud Montgomery

Hark, oh hark the elfin laughter
All the little waves along,
As if echoes speeding after
Mocked a merry merman's song!
All the gulls are out, delighting
In a wild, uncharted quest­
See the first red sunshine smiting
Silver sheen of wing and breast!
Ho, the sunrise rainbow-hearted
Steals athwart the misty brine,
And the sky where clouds have parted
Is a bowl of amber wine!
Sweet, its cradle-lilt partaking,
Dreams that hover o'er the sea,
But the lyric of its waking
Is a sweeter thing to me!
Who would drowze in dull devotion
To his ease when dark is done,
And upon its breast the ocean
Like a jewel wears the sun?
"Up, forsake a lazy pillow!"
Calls the sea from cleft and cave,
Ho, for antic wind and billow
When the morn is on the wave!

In Memory of Lucy Maud Montgomery - 68 years ago, today

November 30, 1874 - April 24, 1942

We miss you and we remember you-

In Memory of Maggie
by Lucy Maud Montgomery

Naught but a little cat, you say;
Yet we remember her,
A creature loving, loyal, kind,
With merry, mellow purr;
The faithful friend of many years,
Shall we not give her meed of tears?
Sleek-suited in her velvet coat,
White-breasted and bright-eyed,
Feeling when she was praised and stroked
A very human pride;
A quiet nook was sure to please
Where she might take her cushioned ease.
Little gray friend, we shall not feel
Ashamed to grieve for you;
Many we know of human-kind
Are not so fond and true;
Dear puss, in all the years to be
We'll keep your memory loyally.

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???