The Complete Works of L M Montgomery, page 792
I’m a newspaper woman!
Sounds nice? Yes, and the reality is very nice, too. Being of the earth, it is earthy, and has its drawbacks. Life in a newspaper office isn’t all ‘beer and skittles’ any more than anywhere else. But on the whole it is not a bad life at all! I rather like proof-reading, although it is tedious. The headlines and editorials are my worst thorns in the flesh. Headlines have a natural tendency to depravity, and the editor-in-chief has a ghastly habit of making puns over which I am apt to come to grief. In spite of all my care ‘errors will creep in’ and then there is the mischief to pay. When I have nightmares now they are of headlines wildly askew and editorials hopelessly hocussed, which an infuriated chief is flourishing in my face.
The paper goes to press at 2.30, but I have to stay till six to answer the ‘phone, sign for wires, and read extra proofs.
On Saturdays the Echo has a lot of extra stuff, a page of ‘society letters’ among the rest. It usually falls to my lot to edit these. Can’t say I fancy the job much, but the only thing I positively abhor is ‘faking’ a society letter. This is one of the tricks of newspaperdom. When a society letter fails to turn up from a certain place – say from Windsor – in due time, the news editor slaps a Windsor Weekly down before me and says blandly, ‘fake up a society letter from that, Miss Montgomery.’
So poor Miss Montgomery goes meekly to work, and concocts an introductory paragraph or so about ‘autumn leaves’ and ‘mellow days’ and ‘October frosts,’ or any old stuff like that to suit the season. Then I go carefully over the columns of the weekly, clip out all the available personals and news items, about weddings, and engagements, and teas, etc., hash them up in epistolary style, forge the Windsor correspondent’s nom de plume – and there’s your society letter! I used to include funerals, too, but I found the news editor blue-pencilled them. Evidently funerals have no place in society.
Then I write a column or so of giddy paragraphs for Monday’s Echo. I call it “Around the Tea-Table,” and sign it “Cynthia.”
My office is a back room looking out on a back yard in the middle of the block. I don’t know that all the Haligonian washerwomen live around it, but certainly a good percentage of them must, for the yard is a network of lines from which sundry and divers garments are always streaming gaily to the breezes. On the ground and over the roof cats are prowling continually, and when they fight, the walls resound with their howls. Most of them are lank, starved-looking beasties enough, but there is one lovely gray fellow who basks on a window sill opposite me and looks so much like ‘Daffy’ that, when I look at him, I could squeeze out a homesick tear if I were not afraid that would wash a clean spot on my grimy face. This office is really the worst place for getting dirty I ever was in.
November 18, 1901
Have had a difficult time trying to arrange for enough spare minutes to do some writing. I could not write in the evenings, I was always too tired. Besides, I had to keep my buttons sewed on and my stockings darned. Then I reverted to my old practice, and tried getting up at six in the morning. But it did not work, as of yore. I could never get to bed as early as I could when I was a country ‘schoolma’am’ and I found it impossible to do without a certain amount of sleep.
There was only one alternative.
Hitherto, I had thought that undisturbed solitude was necessary that the fire of genius might burn and even the fire for pot-boiling. I must be alone, and the room must be quiet. I could never have even imagined that I could possibly write anything in a newspaper office, with rolls of proof shooting down every ten minutes, people coming and conversing, telephones ringing, and machines being thumped and dragged overhead. I would have laughed at the idea, yea, I would have laughed it to scorn. But the impossible has happened. I am of one mind with the Irishman who said you could get used to anything, even to being hanged!
All my spare time here I write, and not such bad stuff either, since the Delineator, the Smart Set and Ainslies’ have taken some of it. I have grown accustomed to stopping in the middle of a paragraph to interview a prowling caller, and to pausing in full career after an elusive rhyme, to read a lot of proof, and snarled-up copy.
Saturday, December 8, 1901
Of late I’ve been Busy with a capital B. ‘Tending to office work, writing pot-boilers, making Christmas presents, etc., mostly etc.
One of the “etcs.” is a job I heartily detest. It makes my soul cringe. It is bad enough to have your flesh cringe, but when it strikes into your soul it gets on your spiritual nerves terribly. We are giving all the firms who advertise with us a free “write-up” of their holiday goods, and I have to visit all the stores, interview the proprietors, and crystallize my information into two “sticks” of copy. From three to five every afternoon I potter around the business blocks until my nose is purple with the cold and my fingers numb from much scribbling of notes.
Wednesday, December 12, 1901
It is an ill wind that blows no good and my disagreeable assignment has blown me some. The other evening I went in to write up the Bon Marche, which sets up to be the millinery establishment of Halifax, and I found the proprietor very genial. He said he was delighted that the Echo had sent a lady, and by way of encouraging it not to weary in well doing he would send me up one of the new walking hats if I gave the Bon Marche a good write-up. I rather thought he was only joking, but sure enough, when the write-up came out yesterday, up came the hat, and a very pretty one it is too.
Thursday, December 20, 1901
All the odd jobs that go a-begging in this office are handed over to the present scribe. The very queerest one up to date came yesterday.
The compositors were setting up, for the weekly edition, a story called ‘A Royal Betrothal,’ taken from an English paper, and when about half through they lost the copy. Whereupon the news-editor requested me to go and write an ‘end’ for the story. At first I did not think I could. What was set up of the story was not enough to give me any insight into the solution of the plot. Moreover, my knowledge of royal love affairs is limited, and I have not been accustomed to write with flippant levity of kings and queens.
However, I fell to work and somehow got it done. To-day it came out, and as yet nobody has guessed where the ‘seam’ comes in. If the original author ever beholds it, I wonder what he will think.
I may remark, in passing, that more than ten years afterward I came across a copy of the original story in an old scrapbook, and was much amused to discover that the author’s development of the plot was about as different from mine as anything could possibly be.
Thursday, December 27th, 1901
Christmas is over. I had been rather dreading it, for I had been expecting to feel very much the stranger in a strange land. But, as usual, anticipation was discounted by realization. I had a very pleasant time although not, of course, so wildly exhilarating as to endanger life, limb or nerves, which was, no doubt, just as well.
I had a holiday, the first since coming here, and so was haunted all day by the impression that it was Sunday. I had dinner at the Halifax with B. and spent the afternoon with her. In the evening we went to the opera to see The Little Minister. It was good but not nearly so good as the book. I don’t care for dramatized novels. They always jar on my preconceptions of the characters. Also, I had to write a criticism of the play and cast for the Chronicle and I dislike that very much.
Saturday, March 29, 1902
This week has been a miserable one of rain and fog and neuralgia. But I’ve lived through it. I’ve read proofs and dissected headlines and fought with compositors and bandied jokes with the marine editor. I have ground out various blameless rhymes for a consideration of filthy lucre, and I’ve written one real poem out of my heart.
I hate my “pot-boiling” stuff. But it gives me the keenest pleasure to write something that is good, a fit and proper incarnation of the art I worship. The news-editor has just been in to give me an assignment for to-morrow, bad ‘cess to him. It is Easter Sunday, and I have to write up the ‘parade’ down Pleasant Street after church, for Monday’s Echo.
Palmday, May 3, 1902
I spent the afternoon “expurgating” a novel for the news-editor’s use and behoof. When he was away on his vacation his substitute began to run a serial in the Echo called “Under the Shadow.” Instead of getting some A.P.A. stuff as he should have done, he simply bought a sensational novel and used it. It was very long and was only about half done when the news-editor returned. So, as it would run all summer, in its present form, I was bidden to take it and cut mercilessly out all unnecessary stuff. I have followed instructions, cutting out most of the kisses and embraces, two-thirds of the love-making, and all the descriptions, with the happy result that I have reduced it to about a third of its normal length, and all I can say ‘Lord, have mercy on the soul of the compositor who has set it up in its present mutilated condition.’
Saturday, May 31, 1901
I had a good internal laugh to-night. I was in a street car and two ladies beside me were discussing the serial that had just ended in the Echo. ‘You know,’ said one, ‘it was the strangest story I ever read. It wandered on, chapter after chapter, for weeks, and never seemed to get anywhere; and then it just finished up in eight chapters, licketty-split. I can’t understand it!’
I could have solved the mystery, but I didn’t.
In June, 1902, I returned to Cavendish, where I remained unbrokenly for the next nine years. For the first two years after my return I wrote only short stories and serials as before. But I was beginning to think of writing a book. It had always been my hope and ambition to write one. But I never seemed able to make a beginning.
I have always hated beginning a story. When I get the first paragraph written I feel as though it were half done. The rest comes easily. To begin a book, therefore, seemed quite a stupendous task. Besides, I did not see just how I could get time for it. I could not afford to take the time from my regular writing hours. And, in the end, I never deliberately sat down and said “Go to! Here are pens, paper, ink and plot. Let me write a book.” It really all just “happened.”
I had always kept a notebook in which I jotted down, as they occurred to me, ideas for plots, incidents, characters, and descriptions. In the spring of 1904 I was looking over this notebook in search of some idea for a short serial I wanted to write for a certain Sunday School paper. I found a faded entry, written many years before: “Elderly couple apply to orphan asylum for a boy. By mistake a girl is sent them.” I thought this would do. I began to block out the chapters, devise, and select incidents and “brood up” my heroine. Anne – she was not so named of malice aforethought, but flashed into my fancy already christened, even to the all important “e” – began to expand in such a fashion that she soon seemed very real to me and took possession of me to an unusual extent. She appealed to me, and I thought it rather a shame to waste her on an ephemeral little serial. Then the thought came, “Write a book. You have the central idea. All you need do is to spread it out over enough chapters to amount to a book.”
The result was Anne of Green Gables. I wrote it in the evenings after my regular day’s work was done, wrote most of it at the window of the little gable room which had been mine for many years. I began it, as I have said, in the spring of 1904. I finished it in the October of 1905.
Ever since my first book was published I have been persecuted by the question “Was so-and-so the original of such-and-such in your book?” And behind my back they don’t put it in the interrogative form, but in the affirmative. I know many people who have asserted that they are well acquainted with the “originals” of my characters. Now, for my own part, I have never, during all the years I have studied human nature, met one human being who could, as a whole, be put into a book without injuring it. Any artist knows that to paint exactly from life is to give a false impression of the subject. Study from life he must, copying suitable heads or arms, appropriating bits of character, personal or mental idiosyncracies, “making use of the real to perfect the ideal.”
But the ideal, his ideal, must be behind and beyond it all. The writer must create his characters, or they will not be life-like.
With but one exception I have never drawn any of my book people from life. That exception was “Peg Bowen” in The Story Girl. And even then I painted the lily very freely. I have used real places in my books and many real incidents. But hitherto I have depended wholly on the creative power of my own imagination for my characters.
Cavendish was “Avonlea” to a certain extent. “Lover’s Lane” was a very beautiful lane through the woods on a neighbour’s farm. It was a beloved haunt of mine from my earliest days. The “Shore Road” has a real existence, between Cavendish and Rustico. But the “White Way of Delight,” “Wiltonmere,” and “Violet Vale” were transplanted from the estates of my castles in Spain. “The Lake of Shining Waters” is generally supposed to be Cavendish Pond. This is not so. The pond I had in mind is the one at Park Corner, below Uncle John Campbell’s house. But I suppose that a good many of the effects of light and shadow I had seen on the Cavendish pond figured unconsciously in my descriptions. Anne’s habit of naming places was an old one of my own. I named all the pretty nooks and corners about the old farm. I had, I remember, a “Fairyland,” a “Dreamland,” a “Pussy-Willow Palace,” a “No-Man’s-Land,” a “Queen’s Bower,” and many others. The “Dryads Bubble” was purely imaginary, but the “Old Log Bridge” was a real thing. It was formed by a single large tree that had blown down and lay across the brook. It had served as a bridge to the generation before my time, and was hollowed out like a shell by the tread of hundreds of passing feet. Earth had blown into the crevices, and ferns and grasses had found root and fringed it luxuriantly. Velvet moss covered its sides and below was a deep, clear, sun-flecked stream.
Anne’s Katie Maurice was mine. In our sitting-room there had always stood a big book-case used as a china cabinet. In each door was a large oval glass, dimly reflecting the room. When I was very small each of my reflections in these glass doors were “real folk” to my imagination. The one in the left-hand door was Katie Maurice, the one in the right, Lucy Gray. Why I named them thus I cannot say. Wordsworth’s ballad had no connection with the latter, for I had never read it at that time. Indeed, I have no recollection of deliberately naming them at all. As far back as consciousness runs, Katie Maurice and Lucy Gray lived in the fairy room behind the bookcase. Katie Maurice was a little girl like myself, and I loved her dearly. I would stand before that door and prattle to Katie for hours, giving and receiving confidences. In especial, I liked to do this at twilight, when the fire had been lit and the room and its reflections were a glamour of light and shadow.
Lucy Gray was grown-up and a widow! I did not like her as well as Katie. She was always sad, and always had dismal stories of her troubles to relate to me; nevertheless, I visited her scrupulously in turn, lest her feelings should be hurt, because she was jealous of Katie, who also disliked her. All this sounds like the veriest nonsense, but I cannot describe how real it was to me. I never passed through the room without a wave of my hand to Katie in the glass door at the other end.
The notable incident of the liniment cake happened when I was teaching school in Bideford and boarding at the Methodist parsonage there. Its charming mistress flavoured a layer cake with anodyne liniment one day. Never shall I forget the taste of that cake and the fun we had over it, for the mistake was not discovered until tea-time. A strange minister was there to tea that night. He ate every crumb of his piece of cake. What he thought of it we never discovered. Possibly he imagined it was simply some new-fangled flavouring.
Many people have told me that they regretted Matthew’s death in Green Gables. I regret it myself. If I had the book to write over again I would spare Matthew for several years. But when I wrote it I thought he must die, that there might be a necessity for self-sacrifice on Anne’s part, so poor Matthew joined the long procession of ghosts that haunt my literary past.
Well, my book was finally written. The next thing was to find a publisher. I typewrote it myself, on my old secondhand typewriter that never made the capitals plain and wouldn’t print “w” at all, and I sent it to a new American firm that had recently come to the front with several “best sellers.” I thought I might stand a better chance with a new firm than with an old established one that had already a preferred list of writers. But the new firm very promptly sent it back. Next I sent it to one of the “old, established firms,” and the old established firm sent it back. Then I sent it, in turn, to three “Betwixt-and-between firms”, and they all sent it back. Four of them returned it with a cold, printed note of rejection; one of them “damned with faint praise.” They wrote that “Our readers report that they find some merit in your story, but not enough to warrant its acceptance.”
That finished me. I put Anne away in an old hat-box in the clothes room, resolving that some day when I had time I would take her and reduce her to the original seven chapters of her first incarnation. In that case I was tolerably sure of getting thirty-five dollars for her at least, and perhaps even forty.
The manuscript lay in the hatbox until I came across it one winter day while rummaging. I began turning over the leaves, reading a bit here and there. It didn’t seem so very bad. “I’ll try once more,” I thought. The result was that a couple of months later an entry appeared in my journal to the effect that my book had been accepted. After some natural jubilation I wrote: “The book may or may not succeed. I wrote it for love, not money, but very often such books are the most successful, just as everything in the world that is born of true love has life in it, as nothing constructed for mercenary ends can ever have.
“Well, I’ve written my book! The dream dreamed years ago at that old brown desk in school has come true at last after years of toil and struggle. And the realization is sweet, almost as sweet as the dream.”
