What is (a) Life?
A hundred years ago, Lucy Maude Montgomery (henceforth L.M.M or Maude) was putting the finishing touches on her novel “Emily of New Moon,” the first in a new trilogy she was writing, about another orphan girl who makes good.
LMM’s first published novel was of course, Anne of Green Gables. It came out in 1908 and made her an instant celebrity. It was life-changing for Maude, and plucked her from obscurity as they say, leading to money, movies and making tiny Prince Edward Island, Canada’s smallest province, the goal of a stream of pilgrims that has never since stopped. I thought I knew waaay too much about L.M.M, patron saint of my life, as she is for all acolytes wishing for the good and the beautiful.
But did I?
Well, I know more now. This is it, the biography of L.M.M. It is the product of twenty years of dedicated research and Mary Henley Rubio actually interviewed dozens of people connected with L.M.M, including her son, and seemingly entire South Ontarian towns. It is a document that can never be replicated, and it was the perfect, perfect thing for me to have read this January, and I enjoyed it thoroughly, while straining my eyes and enduring awful headaches from reading its 700 teeny pages on my phone. It was worth it though.
I haven’t got much to say really—it is an entire life in a book. Or is it? It’s rather the shadow-side of the six volumes of highly self-edited journals that L.M.M quite purposely left behind (oh yes, I have read them, I was unemployed one Canadian winter and I checked them out one after the other from the library). The thing about biography–the collecting of an objective look at a life from the outside, is that it is not going to be pretty (if done well), even if the writer adores the subject—because, well, life is not an Anne book.
Much of my teens and early twenties was spent trying to reconcile myself to the fact that life was not an Anne book.
Then, finally, I grew up a bit and decided that some things, tricky things, sexy things, feminist things, that LMM couldn’t write about were still worth pursuing. And that life, even if not steeped eternally in sunset colours, is still valuable.
I had long known that LMM’s life was not as charmed as her works, but before I read this biography I didn’t know how tortured a soul she really was. So very worried about what the neighbors would say, what her reviewers would say, what the people left on the Island would say. Forever living in (and re-working) her past, bitterly disappointed in her marriage, constantly manipulated and shamed by her eldest son in later life—its a detailed picture of a woman with such ambition, talent and goals…whose life didn’t work out the way she wanted. Also, her temperament could not always look on the bright side, she was pursued by depression even during good times. That I did know before, after all, this is the woman who gave us the quote “She will love deeply, she will suffer terribly, she will have glorious moments to compensate” –that so many girls write on their hearts as teens. (And, as you can see, it never really leaves you).
At several points in this engrossing read I was forced to admit that I don’t actually want to get so famous that biographies are written about me (not that I’m in any danger of it, but still)…To have everything probed, every foible researched and laid out…ugh, I can hardly stand my own recollections of embarrassing things I’ve done. This book has it all…but a life laid out like this can look so…well, the words that come to mind are choppy, futile, mis-matched, agonizing…even though Maude did have her fair share of (deserved) triumphs. Life can be so mundane, its pitfalls and annoyances so undeserved. And for what?
To quote Mr. Carson: “We shout and scream and wail and cry, but in the end we all must die.”
Life is just what happens. Too much rumination about it is never good. Having dreams and grand schemes for one’s life…well, it can be exhausting.
I was very glad to spend more time with Maude by reading this book, and looking at her from another angle. It was, I think, the best attempt to record and itemize and check the sources on a life that I have ever read—in comparison, the biography of Winston Churchill that I read last year was like an enormous formal portrait in a gilt frame, on the wall of a private house which charges you to go admire it. The Gift of Wings was very intimate —and yet. And yet we miss her her. We can’t catch what it was like to live behind her eyes.
We can either see her through her realest photo–this book, or we can see her through her journals (an insight into her psychology, in terms of how she wanted to be seen), or we can see her through the wonderful gifts she gave the world, which so many people keep on a shelf-shrine in their houses.
I think I will stick with the third means of seeing her. Through her own creations. It seems unreal that they were, most of them, half written from inspiration and half for sheer need of money. It doesn’t seem like lucre could ever enter into it. Without the necessity of providing for her family, some of her works may never have been.
This book was the best possible place for me to escape during a terribly rocky January. Now we are in a Europe-wide (really world-wide) very rocky February, but the less said about that for now, the better. This book inspired me to look more into what inspired Maude—clearly this was mostly the Romantic Poets. I have, of course, started a long and cumbersome plan to get to know this now hardly-taught sector of English literature, which formed like, all the literature Maude was raised on. She went to school before there was modernism, can you believe it? So I’m trying to listen to an audiobook of Wordsworth every now and then, and see if I am moved. I do like the rhymes, some of them are like lyrics from a half-forgotten song.
(Yes, Wordsworth is the one who “wandered lonely as a clud” if you were a teenage reader of the Angus, Thongs, and Full-Frontal Snogging series). “Clud” is just such a hard word to get out of your head, you never forget this immortal line after you have read it butchered in this way. Soooo yeah. If Wordsworth and I gel, then the door is open for Coleridge, but let’s see how we feel before we invite the ghost of Lord Byron. I can’t stand any more upheaval. Also I have no idea what the difference is between Yeats and Keats.