Lucy Maud Montgomery, The Woman Behind The Books - Memoirs & Private Letters (Including The Complete Anne of Green Gables Series, Emily Starr Trilogy & The Blue Castle). Lucy Maud Montgomery
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my new book to “kindred spirits.” You, therefore, will have a share in it. But many folks will think they have who haven’t.
Yours tiredly, headachely, listlessly, don’t careishly—but not hopelessly,
L. M. Montgomery.
Cavendish, P.E.I.,
Tuesday Evening,
December 22, 1908.
Thermometer 5 below zero. A raging snowstorm to boot. Frost on window panes. Wind wailing in chimney. A box of white Roman hyacinths sending out alien whiffs of old summers.
* * *
My dear Mr. Weber:—
When I received your last letter on October 29th, I said to myself, “For once I’m going to be decent and I’ll answer this letter next week.” What is more, I really meant it. Yet here it is December 22nd. Well, I couldn’t help it, that is all there is to it. I’ve been so busy—and so tired. I’m still the latter. I’d love to go to bed and stay there for a whole month, doing nothing, seeing nothing and thinking nothing. I really don’t feel at all well—and yet there is nothing the matter with me. I’ve simply “gone stale.” If you’ve ever experienced the feeling I’m sure of your sympathy. If you haven’t it’s quite indescribable and I won’t try to describe it. Instead I’ll just pick up my notebook, turn back to the entry of my last letter to you and discuss the jottings of any possibly interesting happenings since. I daresay the most of the letter will be about that detestable Anne. There doesn’t seem to be anything but her in my life just now and I’m so horribly tired of her that I could wish in all truth and candour that I’d never written her, if it were not for just two things. One of these things is a letter I received last month from a poor little cripple in Ohio who wrote to thank me for writing Anne because she said it had taught her how to endure her long lonely days of imprisonment by just “imagining things.” And the other is that Anne has gone through six editions and that must mean a decent check when pay day comes!
Well, it was September when I last wrote. We had the most exquisite autumn here this year. October was more beautiful than any June I ever remember. I couldn’t help enjoying it, tired and rushed as I was. Every morning before sitting down to my typewriter I’d take a walk over the hill and feel almost like I should feel for a little while. November was also a decent month as Novembers go, but December has been very cold. Today as aforesaid has been a big storm. We are drifted up, have had no mail, and were it not for my hyacinths I should feel inclined to stop being an optimist.
Well, I’ve done my duty by the weather, haven’t I? Of course, one had to mention it. ’Twouldn’t be lucky not to.
* * *
I beg leave to call your attention to a new and original thought which you have not probably heard before. It is this—“every rose has its thorn.” This refers to a brief and cryptic entry in my notebook for September 12th, which entry I am not going to disclose but which I shall take as a concealed text to hang a few comments on.
I’ve written a successful book, which will probably bring me in some hard cash. This fact has many results. One of the results is this. An old schoolgirl chum, on whom I have always been on friendly terms, suddenly becomes cool, says spiteful things of me and my book, displays incivility and rudeness to me whenever we meet and finally withdraws herself into lofty disregard of my existence. I have not “put on airs” about my book at all. Why then should she behave so? Some people say she is jealous. I hate to think so but am forced to do so. Whatever be the cause I have lost an old friend. You will say such “friendship” is not real and is better lost. I agree with you. Nevertheless, old affections rooted in childhood are lasting things and I have felt a good deal of pain over my friend’s attitude.
Again, if you have lived all your life in a little village where everybody is every whit as good and clever and successful as everybody else, and if you are foolish enough to do something which the others in the village cannot do, especially if that something brings you in a small modicum of fame and fortune a certain class of people will take it as a personal insult to themselves, will belittle you and your accomplishment in every way and will go out of their way to make sure that you are informed of their opinions. I could not begin to tell you all the petty flings of malice and spite of which I have been the target of late, even among some of my own relations.
Well, I mustn’t growl about this. I tell it to you merely that you need not be afraid I ought to sacrifice something dear to the gods to avert their envy. My sunshine is not so unclouded as to be a “weather breeder.”
* * *
I’ve been doing very little “free lance work” since I wrote. After I finished my book MS I took a six weeks’ rest from all literary work. It did not do me the good I had hoped. Indeed, I think I would have been better at work. I had only more time for morbid brooding over certain worries and troubles that have been ever present in my life for the past six years. They are caused by people and circumstances over which I have no control, so I am quite helpless in regard to them and when I get run-down I take a too morbid view of them. Last week I began work again by blocking out a short serial for girls.
In September the Youth’s Companion took a poem and sent ten dollars for it, and the Red Book sent $25 for a story. In October the Pictorial Review of New York published a short story I had sent them in June and never heard from since. It was a much peddled tale, brazen from many rejections. They sent me fifty dollars for it. It was not worth ten. It must have been on Anne’s merits this tale sold. Well, I’ll soon be done peddling off my old MSS. I’m almost completely sold out of them now. In future I’m going to cut out all “hack work” and write up only ideas which appeal to me. Thanks to Anne’s success I expect to be able to afford this, even should it prove a losing venture. But I don’t think it will. I believe if I write solely to please myself it will “take” better than writing to please somebody else. I wrote Anne that way and I believe it’s the only way to appeal to a large audience. But of course a writer who is struggling up can seldom afford to do this at first. I’ve served a long and hard apprenticeship—how hard no one knows but myself. The world only hears of my successes. It doesn’t hear of all my early buffets and repulses.
* * *
Letters! Don’t mention them. I have often read of the way authors were pestered with letters but now I realize it acutely. It has become a pest. At first I was delighted when once or twice a week I got a nice kind letter saying nice things of Anne; but now they come, four or five a day, all waiting an answer. I’m tired of writing them—I can’t attend properly to my personal correspondence because of them. Of course they are all nice and some of them are from people I am very proud to think like my book. I think I wrote you about Mark Twain’s letter. Bliss Carman and Sir Louis Davies also wrote me very kind and flattering epistles. No, I see by my notebook Mark Twain’s letter came after I wrote you. He wrote me that in Anne I had created “the dearest, and most lovable child in fiction since the immortal Alice.” Do you think I wasn’t proud of Mark’s encomium? Oh, perhaps not!
Anne went into her sixth edition on December first. Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, London, has brought out an English Edition. I had a letter from William Briggs Toronto today asking to be permitted to publish my next book. I could not do this if I wished since I signed an agreement with Page’s to give them the refusal of all my books for five years. But even if I were free I wouldn’t give the MS. to a Canadian firm. It is much better financially to have it published in the States.
The reviews keep coming in as usual. Success seems, as usual, to have succeeded—that is they are almost all favourable now. Since I last wrote I have had only two unfavourable ones. One said nobody over 14 years of age would find the book of interest. In reference to that I might quote what T. H. Leavitt, Inspector of Public Libraries for Ontario, wrote me, “It is usually a sign of dotage when an old man falls in love with a young girl; but there are exceptions, such as in my case. I am not ashamed to say that I am the old man and Anne of Green Gables is the young girl.”
He must be