L. M. Montgomery and Anne of Green Gables

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I'm working my way through the Anne books, as far as the two puppies and my energetic daughter and her even more energetic friends allow.  This area triggers off my allergies something awful, so I live in a constant haze of antihistamines.

I have to retract some of my hostility towards bottled drinking water.  I began using bottled water to make tea and coffee, because the mineral-laden local water does not yield very good coffee or tea; the minerals seem to inhibit release of the flavors.  (There must be an explanation based on statistical mechanics, but I'm too lazy to follow it up in this heat...)

It is ironic that Lucy Maud Montgomery, who recorded so faithfully the foibles of her generation and her elderly neighbors, but still saw through the grumpy surfaces of many of them to the warmth and humor concealed below, whose trademark was a sort of irrepressible delight in everything, is now considered to have been an unhappy woman towards the end of her life.  Reading her, one is acutely aware of how much attuned to her times she was.  I can say with confidence that I feel equally at home with the manners and the environment of 2010 as with those of 1963, as well as 1750, or 1890.  The wide availability of literature enables us to be immersed in other times and places, and to some extent, to be comfortable with the prejudices and values of those times.  But Lucy Maud Montgomery found that her mind was not so flexible that she could get her mind around the two World Wars; evidently WWI was the beginning of the end for her.  She reportedly recorded her misery and her depression in her journal, but eventually found herself so demoralized that she stopped writing altogether, and committed suicide.  This must remain, at this point in time, essentially speculation, but that Ms Montgomery's life ended in depression seems beyond doubt.

There really is no moral to this story.  There must be others out there, who must create a fictional world, which is a distillation of all that is beautiful in this world, and live in that fictional world, simply in order to survive.  Sometimes I suspect that this is true even of myself.  Many authors are idealists, and it is their idealism that must attract many readers to them, and the worlds they create.  The average human mind depends on idealization and abstraction in order to understand the world, and presumably a more fragrant idealization does no harm.  Above all, fictional worlds must be rational.  We are necessarily tolerant of irrationality in this world simply as a survival characteristic: the good are seldom rewarded, while the cruel and vicious seem to enjoy a certain degree of enjoyment of their ill-gotten gains.  But we cannot bear this kind of illogic in a fictional world, unless it is served up in the guise of humor, e.g. Voltaire's Candide.  (I have never read the latter --I can tell a lie, but I won't-- I only know about it from hearsay.)  But of course, there is no rule that says that kind actions must be followed immediately by some reward.  The longer the action and the reward are separated, the more skillful the writing is deemed.  Even more so for cruelty: the phenomenon is called dramatic irony, which reduces the principle to the level of a mere literary device.

The goodness which we atheists ascribe to our essential nature does need some nurturing.  The belief that kindness begets kindness is one that must be reinforced in childhood, and this is one of Ms Montgomery's basic axioms.  The more mature Anne becomes, the longer she is prepared to wait in order that the kindness of her actions should bring forth kindness to her in return, and that could be another measure of maturity.  The ultimate maturity, of course, is to be kind with no expectation of benefit from it: disinterested love, which is a precept of Buddhism.  This Buddhist concept, named maithri, is an ideal that it appears the vast majority of Buddhists have given up.  This is not surprising, since the vast majority of Christians have given up on 'selfless love', but of course Jesus is all-forgiving, so there isn't really a problem there.

On the face of it, disinterested love is not hard: just give something to charity, and don't report it to the IRS.  (Reporting it brings a small benefit, so that the action would not be entirely disinterested!)  But there are obviously hidden benefits, such as improved self-esteem.

In 1929, Lloyd C. Douglas wrote a major novel called Magnificent Obsession, which outlined a sort of metaphysical mathematization of the concept of doing good.  I wonder what L. M. Montgomery would have thought of that book, and its sequels?  After initial slight embarrassment, she would have probably embraced the books wholeheartedly.  Certainly she had already stumbled on the idea that a kind deed has a life of its own, quite apart from either the author or the recipient of the deed.  (Douglas wrote other well-known novels, including The Robe, a story with great charm and persuasion.)

Lucy Maud Montgomery lavished her love on her heroine Anne Shirley, though one has to suspect that Anne was at least partly a surrogate for Ms Montgomery herself.  (I keep suspecting this of every interesting fictional character, and one of these days I'm going to be wrong.  I thought Hermione Granger was a surrogate for Jane Rowling, but evidently she has stated that Dumbledore was that.  I suppose there's nothing to prevent both being true; an author puts him- or herself into all her characters.)  If we are to interpret Ms Montgomery's love for Anne Shirley as love for herself --in other words, if we were to see it as a sort of Pygmalion phenomenon-- it would seem that Ms Montgomery was a very mentally healthy person.  (We must think of the circumstances as similar to the Pygmalion story, but without the implied psychological judgment.  Good self-image is good; self adoration is considered unhealthy.  It is these fine judgments that are the reason psychologists earn the big bucks, and you and I must struggle along...)

The following passage (from Anne's House of Dreams) is particularly poetic, and I thought I would quote it to give you a taste of how beautiful was the world Montgomery created for Anne.  In some ways, this scene is the romantic climax of the entire series; Anne and Gilbert are on their honeymoon, and have just been welcomed to their cottage by friendly neighbors:

"The laughter of the good-nights died away.  Anne and Gilbert walked hand in hand around their garden.  The brook that ran across the corner dimpled pellucidly in the shadows of the birches.  The poppies along its banks were like shallow cups of moonlight.  Flowers that had been planted by the Schoolmaster's Bride* flung their sweetness on the shadowy air, like the beauty and blessing of sacred yesterdays.  Anne paused in the gloom to gather a spray."

[*The first occupant of the cottage]

Arch

P.S: I bought myself the last couple of books in the series to read on the plane, so that I would not have to break up my daughter's complete collection.  I bought them at one of the stores of the chain called Bookmans, which sell used books, CDs and DVDs.  One hopes that the Media Lobby will not succeed in clamping down on the recycling of these things.  Some companies would rather rent stuff to you.