This simply stunning biography was written last year and passed me by, probably because it appears to be published in Canada only, and it was recently mentioned in the Guardian and once spotted I knew I had to have it. Got it through the Book Depository in the end and after a two week wait it thudded on my door mat last weekend and that was the day gone as I opened it, plunged in and emerged about 12 hours later blinking and wondering where I was, so caught up was I in the life of this amazing woman.
Having recently read two volumes of LMM's Journals (there are five in all) the first part of the biography was on fairly familiar ground as the author uses these as background and for illustration and example, but we soon come to the nitty gritty. Did LMM write these journals with future publication in mind (yes she did) and did she therefore present herself as she wanted to be seen and not as she really was? After reading The Gift of Wings I think the answer is both yes and no. LMM scribbled notes when she did not have time to writer her journals and then wrote them up retrospectively, sometimes months later. Of course, we all know how it is easy to represent events and happenings as we would have liked to have had them happen and I think that LMM has done the same in places.
One instance of this is her outpouring in Journal 1 which had me pinned to the sofa, about her passionate love for Hermann Leard, which totally overwhelmed her and really awakened her sensual feelings. She makes it very clear that she pulled back from the 'abyss' and did not surrender her virginity to him, much though she wanted to. She was worried that he would think the less of her and that rumours would spread. Also, at the time she was engaged to Edwin Simpson, an engagement which she knew was wrong and which she wanted to end. So in the journals we learn of her love and desire for this man and how she resisted him. What she does not mention is that he, also, was engaged to another and, therefore, how much this love was really reciprocated is left open to question. Whatever the answer to this may be, these pages in the journals make for powerful reading and her feelings at the time were genuine and true.
LMM herself makes the point, on re-reading her journals at a later date, that they were the recipient of her outpourings when she was unhappy and depressed and that we were not to think that she was unhappy all the time. Though she seems to have suffered dreadfully from a nervous state most of her life, Maud seemed to accept this knowing that she had to suffer the lows because the highs were so wonderful and that she would hate to be "phlegmatic and dull with an even temperament".
She wrote "I desire that these journals never be destroyed and kept as long as the leaves hold together. I leave this to my descendants or my literary heirs as a sacred charge....there is so much of myself in these volumes that I cannot bear the thought of them ever being destroyed"
Happy the biographer who has such material to use and Mary Henley Rubio, author of this biography, was one of the editors of the five volumes. When they were first published, starting in 1985, readers, including a recent one, myself, felt we were on intimate terms with Maud having suffered though the pages of her life. I found myself staggered at the frustration and torments revealed but in this biography, we find that those who still remembered her in the late 1970's and early 1980s (as their relative, minister's wife, their employer) knew another Maud: "an empathetic person deeply interested in others and sympathetic to them, a witty conversationalist who liked to socialise, tell stories and gossip; a lively woman who liked to attend movies discuss books and ideas and take joy in the beauty of the natural world around her"
Maud did not marry until she was 37 and had three children in the first few years of her marriage. Considering her age she was lucky to have two out of three survive, but her marriage was not a happy one. Her husband, Ewan McDonald, suffered from depression which afflicted him for years. Treatment was rather rough and ready as knowledge of this mental problem is not as sophisticated as it is now, and it would appear he was mainly treated with a series of drugs, Chloral, Nembutal, Veronal which were taken continuously. Mary Rubio has investigated and feels that he was probably medicated into a worse position than when he first fell ill. Maud, herself a highly nervous person with depressive tendencies, suffered bouts of the same depressive kind (these seemed to come in the winter when she was enclosed indoors because of the severe weather and unable to get out), but she was more clear sighted about these episodes and knew they came because she was not busy enough. She was able to nurse herself through them though by the latter years of her life, stressed and worried, she was also taking large quantities of drugs which rendered her nervous and shaky. I think that modern medical science would prove that she and Ewan, all unknowingly, had become addicted to their medication.
Her two sons, Stewart and Chester were dearly loved but Chester turned out to be a huge disappointment to her. He was lazy, spendthrift, obsessed with girls and sex (one episode which we read about in the book but which LMM glossed over in the journals, was the resignation of a much loved member of staff when Chester exposed himself to her), his habit of masturbation was so frequent that his brother slept in a tent in the garden rather than share a bedroom with him and as the years went by and his mother expended thousands of dollars on his lawyer training, he flunked his exams, made a rash and secret marriage when he got his girl friend pregnant and later on (fortunately after his mother's death) he was arrested for fraud and jailed for two years. Pretty ghastly character. No matter how much Maud tried to hide these facts from herself, she knew deep down that he was a wastrel and his much vaunted love for her was merely because he saw her as the source of comfort and money.
Her death, when it came, was viewed as suicide. The doctors who came to see her, after she was found dead in bed, both thought so and when her younger son Stuart, himself a doctor, arrived he was 'motioned towards Maud's bedside table. Dr Lane told Stuart to "take care" of the things on it and he would take care of the body. Her bedside table held some bottles and a sheet of paper'. Her possible suicide was kept secret. Stuart's medical career would be damaged if his famous mother had killed herself and suicide brought a terrible stigma on the family. The note which was left was a page numbered 176 which would appear to be a journal entry, but the other pages were missing and it was assumed that Chester took these as these covered her heartbreak over Chester and her fear of his rages. The entry which has been taken as a suicide note is ambiguous: "My position is too awful to endure and nobody realises it. What an end to a life in which I tried always to do my best in spite of many mistakes".
Maud was ill when she wrote this, knowing that her life would soon be at an end and she may have just been finshing her entries for her final Journal and was summing up her feelings at the time of writing. Easy to feel that this might be a suicide note, but it is not clear.
We will probably never know and when I came to the end of this wonderful book, I felt a deep sadness for her sense of loss and sorrow. She has given me and millions of readers so many happy hours reading her books, I still re-read them now and feel the real Maud is in her stories, and know that she had many happy times even if they were those hours she spent in writing where she could close out the harsh reality of her life and just be.
I simply loved this biography, it took me a few days just to sit down and think about it before I could write this post. Sometimes a book can take hold of a reader and you never want it to finish - this is how I felt with The Gift of Wings. It made me smile and it made me cry and I am so glad to have read it.
Her journal was her saviour and her best friend and in it she wrote a latter to a future great-great- granddaughter:
"I lived a hundred years before you did, but my blood runs in your veins and I lived and loved and suffered and enjoyed and struggled and toiled just as you do. I found life good, in spite of everything. May you find it so. I found that courage and kindness are the two essential things......I hope you'll be merry and witty and brave and wise, and I hope you'll say to yourself 'if great-great-grandmother were alive today, I think I'd like her in spite of her faults"
Well, I do.
(Since writing this post I came across an article by LMM's granddaughter, not seen by Mary Rubio when she published this book last year. The article was printed in the Ontarian this month, July 2009, and in it there is an unequivocal statement of her suicide. See the link here.)
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