Common Sense and Uncommon Sentiment

“You know what I’m glad Xhiv never got into?” my brother asked, apropos of nothing in particular one Sunday afternoon before he had to return to his military base. “Anne of Green Gables.”

Our mother replied mildly that Xhiv, our fifteen-year-old sister, had been into Anne of Green Gables — when she was a good deal younger. My brother only grunted in return, and the conversation took another tack.

I’d been listening to Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain Chronicles, downloaded from Audible, in the evenings when I worked on my daily comic strip. But The High King was drawing to a close, and I wanted another not-particularly-challenging series to replace it. L. M. Montgomery’s Anne series had been the one I was thinking of, for no real reason except the mysterious sense that tells you what song should come next in a playlist, or what movie you’re in a mood to see. My brother’s unexplained disdain of it made me curious: what was it really like, after all?

So when Taran, Assistant Pig-Keeper, had become High King of all Prydain, with Eilonwy of the red-gold hair as his Queen (oh, whoops — spoiler), I downloaded Anne of Green Gables. I hadn’t thought particularly about the book, or the series, for nearly twenty years. I’d read them all, rather in a gulp, when I was twelve and my family had just moved to Guatemala; the family we stayed with for those first few weeks had the little Bantam paperbacks, and I had always dealt with anything uncomfortable by burying myself in books. A few years later, my sister (the other one; married now, with kids) had gotten into the series. I don’t know if she ever read them, but she borrowed the CBC adaptations from somewhere and the family watched them during our Sunday-night ritual of popcorn and VHS tapes.

I remembered the sentimental basics of the plot: red-headed orphan goes to live with astringent elderly couple, wins their hearts with her unpredictable ways, grows up, et cetera. My haphazard investigations into popular fiction of a hundred years ago had given me a somewhat better impression of L. M. Montgomery than of the other three plucky-girl novelists she would have been compared to in her day: Eleanor H. Porter (Pollyanna), Kate Douglas Wiggin (Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm), and Gene Stratton-Porter (A Girl of the Limberlost). And I didn’t remember wanting to throw up over Anne’s excesses, as I had when I read Pollyanna around roughly the same time, so that was in her favor.

I don’t know that I’ve ever cried so much over fiction.

Let me remind you (in case you ever knew): I’m a twenty-nine year old man, not particularly given to displays of emotion. (One of the few girls I ever thought I loved once asked me irritably why I never reacted to anything.) I’m large, soft-spoken, and very much given to sneering disdainfully at popular culture, especially anything that tries to play on the emotions. Yet several times over the past three weeks I’ve had to wipe tears not only from my eyes, but from my cheeks. While sitting at my desk, under fluorescent lights, in front of a computer, surrounded by co-workers. I’m not sure there’s not something wrong with me.

(Not that anyone noticed; or if they did they never said anything. My countenance is probably best described as “stolid.”)

But there are a couple of reasons for this flood of emotion that I want to get into. The least interesting is that I was already in an emotionally precarious state anyway. Ordinary cycle of depression, nothing to be alarmed about. But when I’m in that state, I’m much more inclined to feel innocence and beauty — in the abstract — as emotional realities, to compare them to the dust and dryness of my own life, and to feel heartbroken at the result. (Can’t make head or tail of what I’m driving at? Never mind. Very likely I won’t either, before long.) Anyway. Lucy Maud Montgomery deserves to be known as more than a writer of books for children; but as long as otherwise sensible people conflate a commercial distinction with a critical or aesthetic one, then she’ll never really be understood.

There is deep, unruffled wisdom in these books, a shrewd understanding of the soul’s delight in beauty, an intelligent appreciation of all the good things in life (nature, friendship, family, work, study, food, religion), a sense of humor that keeps nearly all mawkishness at bay (but only nearly all: once or twice Anne’s pensive flights of fancy made me snort with laughter and think of Madeline Bassett), and, especially in the later books, an intellect as handy with a classic quotation as Lord Peter Wimsey or Jeeves.

I’d been afraid she might turn out to be the disappointment that Louisa May Alcott was to me — I’d thrilled as a youth to Little Women, but on returning to Alcott as an adult I found her insufferably preachy, the mothers and sisters forever laying insipid little guilt trips on the boys about drinking alcohol and reading trashy pulps (which Alcott herself wrote, one remembers with a grim little smile) — but no, Montgomery presents a world of almost unnatural charm in which it is a positive pleasure to lose oneself for hours on end. The saving grace (and the word is apt, when you think of what grace actually does, theologically) of the books is their sense of humor. Unlike Alcott’s prim little New England towns, Montgomery’s Prince Edward Island villages are steadfastly rural, which at that time meant comic. Anne’s somewhat overripe fancies are always balanced out by the practicalities and common sense — always humorously expressed — of other characters, and on the whole the tone is one of calm amusement at the foibles and follies of humanity. If women’s literature is on a spectrum with Jane Austen at one end and the Brontës at another, Montgomery is much nearer Austen — which is, of course, why I liked her so much.

Before I go farther, that “almost unnatural charm” crack: yes, of course Anne (Avonlea, Gilbert, everything in the books) is too good to be true. That’s one of the ground rules for this sort of fiction. Of course Anne has only to set her heart on something for her to get it; the pleasure is in discovering how. There are no surprises, no curveballs; even the death in Rilla of Ingleside is necessary by the rules of good fiction. (You don’t send three sons to war and have all three come back any more than you leave a loaded gun unfired.) And anyway, even if none of the characters are wholly human in the furiously-degrading twenty-first century sense — the sexual act doesn’t have any particular existence, for example — they are infinitely more amusing and sympathetic than any more naturalistic figures would be. (But this gets into my theory of light fiction, on which more later.)

The first book, Anne of Green Gables, is deservedly a classic, ranking with Tom Sawyer, Penrod and Sam, and The Railway Children as superb fiction about children which leaves room for adults. And Anne’s overactive imagination, fanciful and tempestuous, is treated mostly as a comic device, allowing her to make absurd speeches and getting her into absurd difficulties. But as the series continues and the child grows into a woman, what was briskly comic in youth deepens into sudden lyricism, or into half-painful stabs of nostalgia. (A hopelessly trivial word, much abused by those who don’t understand its power. The German sehnsucht would be better, if one could be certain of its being understood.) (Actually, after a jaunt on Wikipedia, the Portuguese saudade and the Japanese mono no aware also fit.) (And Virgil’s “sunt lacrimae rerum.”) (Not that Montgomery meant that for a persistent theme; I’m somewhat cracked on the subject.) The long passages of delight in natural beauty (does anybody even do that anymore?), the thirsty romances of everyone, young and old, who passes through the pages — the very anecdotality of it all — it satisfies something deep and persistently hungry in me. I’m sick of urban, man-made territories, of cynicism and idol-smashing and “going right deep down into life and not giving a damn,” as Wodehouse said. O for a house made of wood that acknowledges the seasons, to look out of one’s windows and not see your neighbors crowded all around you, to laugh and cry and bleed and feast and die surrounded by love, or even by companionship.

And then I have to laugh, because when all is said and done the books are Canadian, and as an American I can never quite take Canada seriously. There’s something risible about the World War I-era patriotism of Rilla of Ingleside, even though I know I wouldn’t feel that about American, or English, or even French patrotism.

Still . . . I just realized that the first girl I ever thought I loved had red hair, and I met her not long after reading these books for the first time. I’m not saying there was a connection — but I have my own opinon.