L. M. Montgomery, curses and two suspicious deaths

The article about the novelist Mary Webb contains an account of what happened some years after her death to her husband and his second wife. This is a good example of the 'curse or coincidence?' scenario, which is featured in several other articles.

I was reminded of this case by something that I recently read in a biography of Lucy Maud Montgomery: there are two similar, possibly suspicious, deaths in her life too.

Each case is all the more significant in the light of the other one, and even more so when put into the wider context of suspicious deaths involving other creative people who might have used unseen influences against someone who injured them.

A summary of the Mary Webb affair

Mary Webb's husband Henry became more and more distant from her: she was difficult to live with and he was attached to an attractive young pupil of his.  When Mary Webb died, the sales of her books took off; her husband soon married the ex-pupil and they got all the royalties. Their new life of luxury came to an end when Henry Webb died prematurely after an 'accident' while mountain climbing. His widow remarried, but just like Mary Webb she died of an incurable disease at the age of forty-six.

A summary of the L. M. Montgomery affair

When she was around 23 years old, L. M. Montgomery became infatuated with a very attractive man called Herman Leard. They enjoyed each other's company, but nothing came of it. Her side of the story, which she mentioned in journals written for eventual publication, is that despite being overwhelmed by her feelings for him, she rejected him because he was unworthy of her. She considered him beneath her socially, intellectually and educationally. 

Herman Leard died in 1899, one year after she had last seen him, possibly of complications from influenza. He was almost 29 years old. He had been engaged to a very beautiful young woman who mourned him for some years, married someone else and died 10 years after Leard's death.

Daydreams and the imagination in Stella Gibbons's My American

There is some material about daydreams and the imagination in Stella Gibbons's My American that reminds me of points I have made in various articles in the past, articles written long before I had read this novel. The contexts and the people may be very different but the principles are the same.

The young writer Amy Lee in My American spends much of her time in a trance-like state; her life is one long waking dream. What Stella Gibbons tells us about Amy's imagination and the imaginary people she dreams about provides independent confirmation of and adds to material in articles such as the ones about Stella Benson's imagination and Stella Benson's imaginary friends.

Stella Gibbons's words provide further support for the proposition that a strong, vivid imagination can be a two-edged sword, a handicap or even a curse that ruins lives and destroys its possessor. She mentions the dangers of having a super-developed imagination: it can cause mild delusions; it can create a mist that shuts the owner away from the world; it can prevent the owner from growing up, getting on well with people and acting effectively in the real world. The article about Terry Pratchett's sinister Fairyland is relevant here.

Amy Lee's imaginary companions

Stella Gibbons says this about Amy's attitude towards the characters she created for her stories:

“Day by day she cared less for people and more for imaginary pictures so strong that they were more like feelings or dreams than ideas inside her head. She felt only a passive affection for the Beedings. Indeed, she did not feel active affection for anyone living; she only loved the memory of her mother, while for the dream-people in her mind she felt such a strong interest and concern that it could have been described as love.”

This is exactly how some people feel about fictional and imaginary characters who are much more glamorous and  interesting and do more exciting things than the real people in the dreamers' and readers' lives. 

Yet more about Stella Gibbons's My American

Amy Lee's story has been told and the writing, money and envy elements in Stella Gibbons's My American covered; now there is some amusing material, an unexpected connection and yet another unconvincing element to be commented on. 

I find this very funny:

“It was May Day, and Mrs. Beeding was indignant because on her way out to buy sausages she had been held up by a procession of Communists and on her way back from buying sausages she had been held up by a procession of Fascists.”

Such processions were very common in London in the years leading up to World War II. 

Demands to join in

I know from experience how unpleasant it is to be pestered to say something or do something or go somewhere by someone who just cannot keep quiet or sit still and must have company at all times, but the descriptions of the young Mona Beeding's unwelcome, sometimes unbearable, demands do have their funny side in addition to being very painful to read because of the memories they stir up.

Amy's first evening with the Beeding family after her father's death slowly turns into a nightmare:

“Only Mona was left, a bored and ever-present peril to the occupied, lounging round the room, picking up things and dropping them again, putting on the headphones and taking them off, interrupting Baby’s game, saying at intervals she wished she hadn’t finished her knitting.

John Christopher’s Guardians: Part V

This article in the series inspired by John Christopher’s Guardians is mainly about some minor connections and a major influence that I detected.

Feeling different and Eoin Colfer's imp No.1

Both Rob Randall and the little imp Number One from Eoin Colfer's Lost Colony feel - and are - different from their colleagues. They take opposite approaches when it comes to saying this out loud.

Number One tells his teacher that even thinking about the slime associated with 'warping' makes him sick; he also tells him why:

“Rawley shook his head in disgust. 'Slime makes you sick? What kind of imp are you? The others live for slime.'

No.l took a deep breath and said something aloud that he had known for a long time. 'I'm not like the others.' “

Mike asks Rob Randall why Conurbans are not permitted to enter the County; Rob doesn't like to tell Mike why he found the courage to overcome his programming and enter the forbidden area:

"“Conurbans are not allowed to come into the County. Why is that?”

“They don't want to come.”

“You did.”

Rob could hardly say he was different from the rest. Immodesty, by the standards of the County, was one of the deadlier sins."

Incidentally, immodesty is not the only thing that does not go down well in the County: 

“To be described as clever was not, as Rob had discovered, a complimentary thing in the County. Most people who were clever did their best to disguise it.”

“One did not enthuse about things that impressed one: it was not customary.”

Custom rules all in the County; it is definitely not the right place for someone like Rob Randall!

Money and envy in Stella Gibbons's My American

This article in the series inspired by Stella Gibbons’s My American contains some minor material of particular interest.

The power of money
Stella Gibbons obviously knew the value of money. Some of her books describe the big difference that a small increase in someone's wages - or even a few extra coins - can make. 

She informs us that the Beeding children were rather afraid of their mother – until they became old enough to leave school and start earning some money for themselves:

“All three were larger, more self-confident, less afraid of their mother than they had been three years ago. Mona and Maurice’s weekly pay envelopes had done that for them...Dora had recently been given a rise of five shillings a week and promoted to taking letters in Spanish, which had considerably increased her ambition and self-respect.”

There are some good points here. I know from experience that having an income of one's own – money that has been fairly earned from suitable work, reflects competence and is a by-product of self-improvement – does indeed increase morale and self-assurance. A certain amount of independence is no bad thing; people treat you better when they know that you have other options.

Stella Gibbons balances the positive effect that earning a wage has on the young Beedings with an account of Amy Lee's increasing unhappiness after she becomes very wealthy: 

“It is commonly admitted that money is delightful: but it must also be admitted that money is not much use if you happen to want things which money cannot buy. There is no extraordinary merit in wanting such things; to want them does not give you the right to despise other people who want the things that money can buy; it only means that your money, though useful, will not be more important to you than anything else in the world.

Amy did not know what she wanted; but she was already sure that money could not buy it. She was deeply unhappy, and her unhappiness grew deeper every week. Her luxurious home, her lovely clothes, the charming and intelligent people to whom Lady Welwoodham had introduced her, did not make her one atom less unhappy.”

The Polar Express: a controversial Christmas film

The Polar Express (2004) is a film about some children who take a ride on a magical train to the North Pole to visit Santa Claus and his elves.

It was the first film I ever saw in an IMAX cinema. I went to the drum-shaped BFI one at Waterloo, which has the biggest screen in Britain. This was my Christmas treat for 2004.

I think that this was the first time I ever saw  'uncanny valley' CGI characters too, so there were three new experiences in one outing.

The snowy landscapes in The Polar Express were beautiful, but the film as a whole was rather eerie; it had a weird and dreamlike atmosphere that made me feel uneasy. I did not like the hybrid animated/human characters either: they gave me the uncomfortable, something isn't right, feelings that some robotic people in this world do, people who seem neither dead nor fully alive, people who seem more like ghosts or zombies than real people.

The film was in 3-D; the roller-coaster swoops of the camera made me dizzy!

The friend who came to see the film with me had much the same opinion of it: the IMAX experience was great apart from the times when we had to close our eyes because the vertical drops made us feel seasick, but parts of the film were rather disturbing.

With hindsight, even the 'normal' scenes in The Polar Express, children in their homes for example, seem like fantasy; they look like an alternate version of reality similar to the one in the film Coraline (2009). 

Stella Gibbons’s My American and writing: Part III

There comes a time when Amy Lee changes direction: she stops producing tales of heroism and adventure and joins the school of domestic realism. 

The  reasons given for this drastic transformation are rather contrived and not altogether convincing. I suspect that this element was introduced mainly for the sake of the plot and to make some points; Stella Gibbons could also have used it to clear up some unfinished business of her own .

From danger and death to domesticity

As a child Amy Lee scribbles non-stop, producing exciting adventure stories such as Pharaoh’s Curse: A Tale of  Ancient Egypt and The Wolf of Leningrad: A Thrilling Story of The Russian Revolution purely for her own enjoyment. The books she reads fire her imagination and provide the ideas for her stories.

As a young woman, she writes exciting adventure stories for publication.  She may not have any first-hand knowledge, any personal experience, of the sort of people and action that she writes about, but her readers love her work. She becomes a best-seller; her books are made into films and this gains her world-wide popularity.

After moving to America, Amy Lee changes track and writes a very different kind of story for a whole new constituency of readers:

“Her stories of family life communicated (because she herself felt it) to the passing of an examination or the breaking of a betrothal the excitement she had once given to escapes from death and last-minute rescues, and she charmed her readers by showing them the variety and interest of every day.”

So what happened here? Why did Amy abandon her heroic avatars? Why the farewell to adventure in favour of embracing mundane subject matters? One of the reasons given is that Amy's adventure stories lack moral values; they are in some ways unethical, unedifying and unwholesome, something that she is unaware of until she visits America and comes in for some direct criticism. She also cools off after experiencing danger, death amd great fear at first hand.