The Blythes Are Quoted
L. M. Montgomery
THE
BLYTHES
ARE
QUOTED
L.M. MONTGOMERY
THE
BLYTHES
ARE
QUOTED
Edited and with an
Afterword by
Benjamin Lefebvre
Foreword by
Elizabeth Rollins Epperly
VIKING CANADA
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First published 2009
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Text by L.M. Montgomery and Afterword copyright © 2009 David Macdonald, trustee,
and Ruth Macdonald and Benjamin Lefebvre
Foreword copyright © 2009 Elizabeth Rollins Epperly
L.M. Montgomery and L.M. Montgomery’s signature and cat design are trademarks of
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Manufactured in the U.S.A.
* * *
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Montgomery, L. M. (Lucy Maud), 1874–1942
The Blythes are quoted / L.M. Montgomery ; edited
and with an afterword by Benjamin Lefebvre ;
foreword by Elizabeth Rollins Epperly.
ISBN 978-0-670-06391-8
I. Lefebvre, Benjamin, 1977– II. Title.
PS8526.O55B58 2009 C813’.52 C2009-903955-9
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CONTENTS
Foreword by Elizabeth Rollins Epperly ~
~ PART ONE ~
“The Piper” ~
Some Fools and a Saint ~
Twilight at Ingleside ~
“I Wish You” ~
“The Old Path Round the Shore” ~
“Guest Room in the Country” ~
An Afternoon with Mr. Jenkins ~
The Second Evening ~
“The New House” ~
“Robin Vespers” ~
“Night” ~
“Man and Woman” ~
Retribution ~
The Third Evening ~
“There Is a House I Love” ~
“Sea Song” ~
The Twins Pretend ~
The Fourth Evening ~
“To a Desired Friend” ~
Fancy’s Fool ~
The Fifth Evening ~
“Midsummer Day” ~
“Remembered” ~
A Dream Comes True ~
The Sixth Evening ~
“Farewell to an Old Room” ~
“The Haunted Room” ~
“Song of Winter” ~
Penelope Struts Her Theories ~
The Seventh Evening ~
“Success” ~
“The Gate of Dream” ~
“An Old Face” ~
The Reconciliation ~
The Cheated Child ~
Fool’s Errand ~
The Pot and the Kettle ~
~ PART TWO ~
Another Ingleside Twilight ~
“Interlude” ~
“Come, Let Us Go” ~
“A June Day” ~
“Wind of Autumn ~
“The Wild Places” ~
“For Its Own Sake” ~
“The Change” ~
“I Know” ~
Brother Beware ~
The Second Evening ~
“The Wind” ~
“The Bride Dreams” ~
“May Song” ~
Here Comes the Bride ~
The Third Evening ~
“The Parting Soul” ~
“My House” ~
“Memories” ~
A Commonplace Woman ~
The Fourth Evening ~
“Canadian Twilight” ~
“Oh, We Will Walk with Spring Today” ~
“Grief” ~
“The Room” ~
The Road to Yesterday ~
Au Revoir ~
“I Want” ~
“The Pilgrim” ~
“Spring Song” ~
“The Aftermath” ~
Afterword by Benjamin Lefebvre ~
A Note on the Text ~
Acknowledgments ~
Books by L.M. Montgomery ~
FOREWORD
by Elizabeth Rollins Epperly
Even for those who know and love L.M. Montgomery’s twenty other novels, hundreds of short stories and poems, diaries, letters, and scrapbooks, this first-time publication of the full text of The Blythes Are Quoted will bring sharp surprises. It may be a fractured work, even full of splinters, but I am drawn through its parts and pieces by Montgomery’s power to make me care.
The Blythes Are Quoted is the last work of fiction the world-famous author of Anne of Green Gables prepared for publication before her untimely death on April 24, 1942. It has never before been published in its entirety. Why? The publishing history of The Blythes Are Quoted involves mystery; the very appearance of the current volume is a triumph of several kinds.
Until now, the full text of The Blythes Are Quoted has remained something of a secret, and largely enigmatic. The typescript was delivered to Montgomery’s publisher on the day she died—by whom we do not know; Montgomery evidently intended it for publication, since it is amended in her hand-writing. The collection is mentioned in her obituary in the Globe and Mail newspaper (see Afterword for details), but for many years it never appeared. The frame story takes Anne Shirley Blythe and her family a full two decades beyond anything else Montgomery published about them. Surely her publishers would have been delighted to issue a book that took Anne right up to the current day? It wasn’t until 1974 that another publisher decided to bring the book out, but not before changing the title and recasting the work completely. The typescript they used lacked the longest story, “Some F
ools and a Saint,” and they stripped out all but one of the original forty-one poems and all the interconnecting vignettes featuring Anne and family, and then rearranged the remaining stories as though the book had been intended to be merely another volume of short fiction. Editors in 1942 and 1974 were evidently troubled by aspects of the book; what disturbed them may be precisely what will intrigue readers today.
Was the book deliberately suppressed as too volatile? The world was aflame with war at the time of Montgomery’s death. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December of 1941, the Americans had joined the Allies, and by the spring of 1942, the whole globe must have seemed locked in a death grapple, the very kind Montgomery had perceived in the First World War. She had described the Great War with patriotic ardour in Rilla of Ingleside (1921), the last of the original Anne series. The two Anne novels written during the war itself, Anne’s House of Dreams (1917) and Rainbow Valley (1919), were meant to hearten the home front and the trenches with images of the sacred beauty of home, a home imperilled by war. The Blythes Are Quoted does not applaud war; its poetry and interludes—the very shape of the book—call war and its rhetoric into question.
Perhaps her publishers in 1942 were unwilling to tamper with Montgomery’s text but could also not countenance publishing a work framed to address war. Montgomery introduced and ended the book with war pieces, and she divided the collection into two parts, with the First World War as its pivotal point. She linked the two world wars at the very outset of the book by leading with her poem “The Piper.” Probably inspired at the time Montgomery wrote Rilla of Ingleside by John McRae’s “In Flanders Fields,” Walter’s “Piper” became famous overnight and symbolized the war effort within the story but was never produced in the novel itself. Montgomery explains in an authorial note in The Blythes that she had only recently written the poem, believing it even more appropriate for “now” (the Second World War) than earlier (in the First World War). A lacklustre lyric, Montgomery’s “Piper” is also a tepid endorsement of war. Its weakness is underscored by the fact that the volume ends with another war poem, also by Walter, but “The Aftermath” is a gripping, agonizing piece in the manner of Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sassoon. Walter’s last poem is followed by a final dialogue between Anne and her son Jem, now himself the father of sons ready to go to war. In one line, Anne delivers a scorching indictment of the First World War, if not the Second.
In 1974, whether or not the editors were perturbed by the war references, they were certainly disturbed by the book’s shape. Their solution was to cut out the frame story entirely and to eliminate many of the remaining stories’ references to war. Montgomery had created a two-part text, with Part One set before the First World War and Part Two beginning after that war and concluding after the start of the Second World War. Interspersed through each part were short vignettes or dialogues, evenings where Anne reads poetry aloud to various family members and they briefly comment. Between the vignettes, and sometimes in provocative relationship to them, Montgomery placed the short stories, singly or in groups. Each story contains references to, quotations from, or even brief appearances by one or more of the Blythe family members. The poems and dialogues capture intimate moments with the Blythe family, and the stories offer glimpses of them within a larger surrounding community. The 1974 editors retained the internal story references to the Blythes but removed the context in which the use of the Blythes as a touchstone makes sense. Instead, the 1974 editors hoped for shock value. They made their collection of stories begin and end with themes they hoped might startle readers who may have come to accept as true the modernist debunking of Montgomery as a sunny, one-song warbler. Beginning the book with “An Afternoon with Mr. Jenkins,” about a man newly released from prison and his encounter with a son who does not know him, and ending with “A Commonplace Woman,” involving a dying woman’s satisfied recollection of an undetected murder, the 1974 editors replaced Montgomery’s controversial war framework with a controversial arrangement of their own.
However the earlier editors estimated the reading public and undervalued the full text of The Blythes Are Quoted, we are left—even with this full-text version—with a fascinating mystery: what did Montgomery intend The Blythes Are Quoted to show and to question? Why did she choose these stories and poems from among her hundreds and arrange them, with interludes, in this precise order?
Perhaps we are meant to feel Montgomery’s resistance to easy answers. No one who reads the poetry here and explores the stories’ carefully patterned alternations between the opti-mistic and the harsh is going to mistake this book for an easy endorsement of anything—whether it is war or romance. The two halves of the book comment on each other, and the stories, poems, and dialogues invite questions throughout about what lasts, what is inevitable, and what must change. Poems by the grieving mother Anne Blythe stand in stark contrast to her own early cheerful lyrics and those of Walter. We see how Anne’s poetry influenced Walter’s, and there is even one poem about mortality that Walter began and Anne has finished years after his death. Gilbert makes a comment, early in Part One, about memory and the need to forget; Jem quotes this comment at the book’s end, thinking about his own son. What is Montgomery saying about what is passed from one generation to another? It would have been easy to suggest that the world changed forever after the First World War, but the persistence of vision and themes in this novel, from one war to another, belies that view.
Perhaps by undercutting and alternating perspectives, Montgomery was also defying critics of her work—modernist or anti-Victorian and anti-Edwardian—who continued to misread her as some predictable, pre-war, naive romantic with only one way of writing. Belonging to the same often starkly realistic vision that created Anne of Ingleside (1939), The Blythes Are Quoted will stir up discussion and debate and deserves to take its rightful place in Montgomery’s list of works. There are now nine Anne books, not eight.
Montgomery makes her readers care about her characters, the world they inhabit, and our world in relationship to theirs. She attained world fame in her own lifetime (1874–1942) and has since been translated into more than thirty languages. Her fame is spreading to new audiences as more of her works are published for the first time and more is uncovered about her own life and thinking. The five published volumes of her diaries, her letters to two male pen-friends, her scrap-books that constitute visual autobiography—all of these works fuel biographies and incite debates over the complex interior life of one of the world’s best-loved authors. The intricate intertwining of ideas in The Blythes Are Quoted will add new material for the consideration of Montgomery’s life work.
The publication of the full text of The Blythes Are Quoted is a triumph of good sense and respectful high-mindedness on the part of Penguin Canada, and of scholarly persistence by Benjamin Lefebvre. Perhaps Montgomery intended this last story of Anne to be her farewell letter to a world she knew she was leaving soon. Perhaps this is why so many of the pieces are preoccupied with finding, feeling, and speaking truth and why Montgomery is at pains to show there is seldom one truth only. Montgomery the artist triumphs in shaping this final book: there is no easy closure for Anne’s story, and we care how and why this is so.
Elizabeth Rollins Epperly, Ph.D., is professor emerita of English at the University of Prince Edward Island and the founding chair of the L.M. Montgomery Institute. An internationally recognized scholar, she is the author of numerous articles and books on Montgomery, the most recent being Imagining Anne: The Island Scrapbooks of L.M. Montgomery
The first half of this book deals with life before the First World War.
The second part deals with it after the war.
~ Part One ~
In my books Rainbow Valley and Rilla of Ingleside, a poem is mentioned, “The Piper,” supposed to have been written and published by Walter Blythe before his death in the First World War. Although the poem had no real existence many people have written me, asking me where they could get it. It has been writte
n recently, but seems even more appropriate now than then.
THE PIPER
One day the Piper came down the Glen ...
Sweet and long and low played he!
The children followed from door to door,
No matter how those who loved might implore,
So wiling the song of his melody
As the song of a woodland rill.
Some day the Piper will come again
To pipe to the sons of the maple tree!
You and I will follow from door to door,
Many of us will come back no more ...
What matter that if Freedom still
Be the crown of each native hill?
Some Fools and a Saint
“You are going to board at Long Alec’s!” exclaimed Mr. Sheldon in amazement.
The old minister of the Methodist Mowbray Narrows congregation and the new minister were in the little church classroom. The old minister ... who was retiring ... had looked kindly at the new minister ... kindly and rather wistfully. This boy was so like what he had been himself forty years before ... young, enthusiastic, full of hope, energy and high purpose. Good-looking, too. Mr. Sheldon smiled a bit in the back of his mind and wondered if Curtis Burns were engaged. Probably. Most young ministers were. If not, there would be some fluttering in the girlish hearts of Mowbray Narrows. And small blame to them.
The reception had been held in the afternoon and had been followed by a supper in the basement. Curtis Burns had met the most of his people and shaken hands with them. He was feeling a little confused and bewildered and rather glad to find himself in the vine-shaded classroom with old Mr. Sheldon, his saintly predecessor, who had decided to spend the rest of his days in Glen St. Mary, the neighbouring settlement. People said it was because he felt he could not get along without Dr. Gilbert Blythe of Ingleside. Some of the older Methodists said it disapprovingly. They had always thought he ought to patronize the Methodist doctor of Lowbridge.
