The Blythes Are Quoted (56 page)

Walter Blythe

DIANA
:- “He wrote that just before the beginning of the last war.”

DR. BLYTHE
:- “A child talking of his dreams of yesterday!”

ANNE
:- “That is the only time we can talk of them. It is too bitter when we get old.”

SUSAN
,
indignantly:
-“You and the doctor will never get old, Mrs. Dr. dear.”

ANNE
,
sighing:
-“I feel old enough sometimes—even older than I am.”

FAITH
BLYTHE
:- “Beauty
was
Walter’s guiding star ... and we know he found it forever, Mother Blythe.”

O gypsy winds that pipe and sing

In budding boughs of beech,

I know I hear the laugh of spring

In all your silver speech.

O little mists that hide and curl

In hollows wild and green,

I know you come in gauze and pearl

To wait upon your queen.

O little seed in mellow earth

Where rain and sunshine kiss,

I know the quivering joy of birth

Throbs in your chrysalis.

O Hope, you blossom on my way

Like violet from the clod,

And Love makes rosy all the way

When spring comes back from God.

Walter Blythe

DR. BLYTHE
:- “Yes, God always sends the spring, thanks be.”

SUSAN
:- “It is late this year, though. The daffodils are only peeping through.”
(To herself )
“How Walter loved daffodils!”

ANNE
:- “I used to love winter—even through the last twenty years. And now I wonder how we could live through it if it were not for the hope of spring.”

DR. BLYTHE
:- “Is life with me as hard as that, Anne-girl?”

SUSAN
,
thinking:
- “The dear man
has
to have his joke.”

I

Yesterday we were young who now are old ...

We fought hot-hearted under a sweet sky,

The lust of blood made even cowards bold,

And no one feared to die;

We were all drunken with a horrid joy,

We laughed as devils laugh from hell released,

And, when the moon rose redly in the east,

I killed a stripling boy!

He might have been my brother slim and fair ...

I killed him horribly and I was glad,

It pleased me much to see his dabbled hair,

The pale and pretty lad!

I waved my bayonet aloft in glee ...

He writhed there like a worm, and all around

Dead men were scattered o’er the reeking ground ...

Ours was the victory!

II

Now we are old who yesterday were young

And cannot see the beauty of the skies,

For we have gazed the pits of hell among

And they have scorched our eyes.

The dead are happier than we who live,

For, dying, they have purged their memory thus

And won forgetfulness; but what to us

Can such oblivion give?

We must remember always;
evermore

Must spring be hateful and the dawn a shame ...

We shall not sleep as we have slept before

That withering blast of flame.

The wind has voices that may not be stilled ...

The wind that yester morning was so blithe ...

And everywhere I look I see him writhe,

That pretty boy I killed!

Walter Blythe

This poem was written “somewhere in France” in the year of Courcelette and sent home to his mother with the rest of his papers. She has never read it to anyone but Jem Blythe who says,

“Walter never bayonetted anyone, mother. But he saw ... he saw ...”

ANNE
,
steadily:
- “I am thankful now, Jem, that Walter did not come back. He could never have lived with his memories ... and if he had seen the futility of the sacrifice they made then mirrored in this ghastly holocaust ...”

JEM
,
thinking of Jem, Jr., and young Walter:
- “I know ... I know. Even I who am a tougher brand than Walter ... but let us talk of something else. Who was it said, ‘We forget because we must’? He was right.”

When I first travelled to the University of Guelph archives in 1999 to read L.M. Montgomery’s typescript version of
The Blythes Are Quoted
, I had no way of knowing what literary discovery I was about to make. For a long time, I had taken for granted the reports of several commentators that
The Blythes Are Quoted
had been published in its entirety, minus a short introductory sketch, in 1974 as
The Road to Yesterday
. But then a colleague told me she had read Montgomery’s typescript herself and found that there was much more missing from
The Road to Yesterday
than these reports suggested. She generously sent me her notes summarizing the missing parts and encouraged me to take a look for myself. When I did, I realized that quite substantial portions of
The Blythes Are Quoted
had been cut: not only had vignettes and poems amounting to almost a hundred pages of text been removed from between the short stories, but as I glanced through the stories themselves I found several sections that I did not recall from my reading of the abridged book. Surely, I thought, there was more here than met the eye. And then, as I sat at my desk in the middle of the sunny afternoon, the archivists wheeled out two more typescripts of
The Blythes Are Quoted
, each a substantially different version of the text. I began to wonder if I had stumbled upon buried treasure. It occurred to me that this late project, completed near the end of Montgomery’s life in 1942, could change the way readers perceived the author and her work.

One of the first things to strike me as I read through the three typescripts of
The Blythes Are Quoted
was their overall tone and outlook, which seemed completely unlike any of Montgomery’s earlier work. Wearing a pair of white cotton gloves to help preserve the original documents, I made a list in my notebook of themes and topics that kept recurring: adultery, illegitimacy, despair, misogyny, murder, revenge, bitterness, hatred, aging, and death. Surely, I thought, these were not what most readers associated with L.M. Montgomery. And later, as I discussed what I had found with friends and colleagues, some of whom had only a passing familiarity with Montgomery’s writing, the almost unanimous response I received was that I had stumbled upon a completely different work.

As the novelty wore off, however, I began to wonder if the change in tone and subject matter could really be that abrupt. I know of several individuals and groups who regularly read through all of Montgomery’s books in chronological order, from
Anne of Green Gables
(1908) to
Anne of Ingleside
(1939), in an attempt to trace the ways in which the author’s style and outlook evolve throughout her career. I have often done this myself, and with each rereading of these familiar texts I always see something new. When I first did so after several months of immersion in the pages of
The Blythes Are Quoted
, I noticed that the elements on my list began to emerge from the margins of the earlier books in ways I hadn’t noticed before.

It is well known that Montgomery suffered from bouts of depression and despair throughout her adult life, but I was interested nevertheless when in September 2008 it was made public that she had died of a drug overdose that may have been deliberate. Montgomery’s possible suicide has some bearing on
The Blythes Are Quoted
, particularly since her obituary in
The Globe and Mail
offers a tantalizing hint of the book’s relationship to the end of her life. Noting on April 25, 1942, that Montgomery “died suddenly yesterday,” the obituary continues: “For the past two years she had been in ill health, but during the past winter Mrs. Macdonald compiled a collection of magazine stories she had written many years ago, and these were placed in the hands of a publishing firm only yesterday.” While the obituary does not shed light on whether Montgomery or someone else submitted this work to her publisher, the presence of a typescript and a carbon copy in the archives for McClelland and Stewart confirm that it arrived.

Readers who have enjoyed Montgomery’s larger body of work—which includes twenty novels, over five hundred short stories, five hundred poems, ten volumes of journals, and numerous essays—will in fact recognize much that is familiar in this final book. It picks up familiar story patterns, such as orphans yearning for healthy homes, marriages culminating after years of delay, the creation of alternative families, and the resolution of past grievances and misunderstandings. As well, Montgomery returns to a series of debates that preoccupied her throughout her career: between romance and realism, individual and community, hope and hopelessness, harmony and conflict, order and chaos, memory and forgetting. Much like her protagonists, who walk the fine line between their ambitions and the expectations of their families and communities, Montgomery always strove for the happy medium between the stories she yearned to tell and the predictable packages that could contain them. Partly for these reasons, and partly because her own marriage was a disaster, many of her romantic resolutions appear unsatisfying to some readers. In
The Blythes Are Quoted
, she shifts the emphasis but retains the familiar format, reviving for a final experiment her best-known characters: Anne and Gilbert Blythe, their six children, housekeeper Susan Baker, and friends and neighbours in their community.

But while these elements are all familiar, what changes is the way these final stories are told. As the storms of the Second World War raged on, Montgomery returned, with this final sequel to
Anne of Green Gables
, to two conventions about which she had always been ambivalent: the romance plot and the book sequel. Montgomery had a love-hate relationship with both, feeling trapped by expectations she found both financially profitable and creatively stagnating. Although courtship and marriage are frequent themes in her work, she privately complained that she felt awkward writing about romance, preferring the humour to be found in stories concerning the young and old. She had difficulty bringing Anne’s romance to a “proper” conclusion that would satisfy her readers, but six years after
Anne of Avonlea
(1909), she finally produced, at the insistence of her publisher,
Anne of the Island
(1915), in which Anne finally agrees to marry Gilbert Blythe.

While this resolution concluded Anne’s romance plot, Montgomery seems to have found new life in her characters when she realized that their popularity gave her an established audience for her most central preoccupation throughout this period: the Great War of 1914–1918. Montgomery agonized over the events of the war, living through them vicariously as they were described to her in the mainstream press. Although her next two novels are set several years earlier, they are written in wartime and address the worldwide conflict in indirect ways:
Anne’s House of Dreams
(1917), about the early years of Anne and Gilbert’s marriage, culminates in the stillbirth of their daughter Joyce and the birth of their eldest son, Jem; and
Rainbow Valley
(1919), set thirteen years later, focuses on the Blythe children and their friends. Her next novel,
Rilla of Ingleside
(1921), revisits these characters as young adults and focuses on the impact that the Great War has on the lives of community members at home. This last book, in the planning stages as early as 1917, was not begun until four months after the Armistice was signed; as she drafted, Montgomery had full knowledge of the war’s outcome along with the expectation of a new utopian world about to be born. Although the focus of this novel is on the women at the home front, with Rilla Blythe and maid-of-all-work Susan Baker representing two generations of women who had to adapt to a rapidly changing world, the book encompasses an entire generation of young men in Anne and Gilbert’s son Walter, an aspiring poet who struggles to reconcile his love of beauty with his duty to serve his country. His death symbolizes the larger sacrifice made in defence of the British Empire, and his poem, “The Piper,” circulates around the world as an inspiring message of courage and optimism in the face of terrifying chaos. Although readers of
Rilla of Ingleside
are offered only one phrase from this poem— the call to “keep faith,” recalling John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields”—Walter Blythe’s “The Piper” is the only war poem worth commemorating in Montgomery’s depiction of these events.

Upon completing this second trilogy of Anne books in 1920, Montgomery recorded in her journal that she did not intend to pursue this series further. New projects beckoned to her, including a semi-autobiographical trilogy about a young girl, Emily Byrd Starr, who dreams of becoming a writer, and the plot of a more mature novel that would never materialize. But she continued to feel bound by the conventions that had made her earlier books such a success, and the economic chaos that followed the stock market crash of 1929 made her resist straying too far from patterns that had already proven financially profitable. By the mid-1930s, once she began work on a novel that would fill the three-year gap between
Anne of the Island
and
Anne’s House of Dreams
, the purpose that writing served for her had likewise evolved: although she returned to Anne partly to capitalize on the commercial success of a 1934 movie version of
Anne of Green Gables
, she also yearned for the security and the comfort that this series had always offered her. As a result, both
Anne of Windy Poplars
(1936) and
Anne of Ingleside
(1939) are largely episodic, filled with recycled plot elements that seem increasingly old-fashioned by this time. And yet in
Anne of Ingleside
we see Montgomery having difficulty maintaining the patterns for which she is best known: amusing anecdotes about Anne’s young children experiencing disappointment and disillusion are juxtaposed with two storylines involving marital hatred and disintegration, including Anne’s suspicion that Gilbert has lost interest in her. These suspicions are proven in the end to be unfounded, but many adult readers have found the happy ending to be unconvincing.