The Jalna Saga – Deluxe Edition: All Sixteen Books of the Enduring Classic Series & The Biography of Mazo de la Roche (661 page)

The next day Gordon left for the Royal Military College without saying goodbye.

Mazo de la Roche in her early thirties with her father.

Breakdown

I have little patience with writers who declare that all their works are composed in an agony of spirit
.

At noon on a hot July day, Mazo went with her father to look at Grandpa Lundy in his coffin in the back parlour. All the blinds were closed, so it was like a cool dark night in the house. Still, Mazo could see that there was nothing to be afraid of. Grandpa’s face was white as marble, but he was not suffering. Actually, he seemed about to smile.

“Poor Grandpa,” said Mazo’s father as he stood looking down into the coffin. Tears ran down his cheeks.

For six years, until 1900, Mazo and Caroline had enjoyed a well-balanced youth while they stayed in the Lundy household in Toronto. They had finished growing up. After the death of Grandfather Lundy in his Toronto home and his burial in the old Newmarket cemetery, the extended family slowly dispersed, for Will Roche was not a patriarchal man who could gather weaker beings around him and give them shelter and leadership for long periods.

Oh, at first they stayed together. Will Roche promptly relocated the whole family from out-of-the-way Parkdale to central, fashionable, and dignified Jarvis Street, where important families like the Masseys lived. But soon Will was on the move again, changing jobs and residences frequently. Grandma Lundy sought more permanent quarters with her daughter Eva, now Mrs. James Smith, and son Walter, now an eligible bachelor and a fledgling dentist. Bertie, Mazo, and Caroline followed Will to a long list of addresses in Toronto and vicinity that included 54 Wellington Street, Toronto; Richmond Hill P.O.; and 435 Indian Road, Port Credit.

The Port Credit address, twenty kilometres east of Toronto, was the home of G.A. Reid, a visual artist and a teacher at the Ontario School of Art in Toronto. The Roches stayed in Reid’s house several times while Reid was absent. While Caroline remained at home with Bertie, and became absorbed in domestic activities, Mazo attended classes at the School of Art and the University of Toronto.

Mazo was dreaming about going to Paris and becoming a book illustrator. Then suddenly she changed dreams. She thought she might like to become a book writer.

Mazo wanted to write a story and send it to a magazine. She had to do this in secret, so that if she were not successful, no one would know. Of course if she were successful, the family would have a lovely surprise.

Mazo’s story would be about French Canadians in the mythical village of St. Loo. She was French, wasn’t she? Anyway, her Roche ancestors had been French many generations before, as had Caroline’s Clement ancestors. And Will Roche quite often went on business to Montreal, Quebec.

Now
, thought Mazo,
how do you write a story?

You have to be in excruciating agony. Isn’t that how it goes? Half starved and living in a freezing cold attic
.

Well, I’m not in such dire circumstances. And I just have a few hours to myself Unfortunately, I will have to write without starving or freezing
.

Perhaps excruciating excitement will do. When writers close their eyes, they see shimmering visions of the truth. Don’t they?

Luckily nobody was home.

Mazo lay on the sofa in the living room. She tensed her body until it was rigid. She watched the pictures that passed through her mind. She rose from the sofa, went over to her paper and pencil, and wrote. Then she stretched herself on the sofa again. She tensed her body again. She watched the pictures in her mind again. And again she got up and wrote.

Mazo wrote her story in pencil. Then she copied it out carefully in pen and ink. She had no idea that it should be typed. Finally she put it in a big envelope and sent it to to a magazine called
Munsey’s
.

For weeks she was the first person to reach the front door when the postman delivered the mail. Then finally came a small envelope from
Munsey’s
. Enclosed was a cheque for fifty dollars. Her story had been accepted for publication!

Mazo finally revealed to her family what she had done. She took Caroline with her when she went to spend the money on a gift for Bertie. They chose an ornate lamp.

Mazo began to write another story. This time she did not keep her activity secret.

Many years later, when Mazo was an established writer, the pretended agony in which she had written her early stories seemed funny. But the real agony she had suffered as a young woman never seemed funny.

One day Mazo felt she had written an especially good story. This feeling was reinforced when Caroline and Bertie read the story and agreed with her. Mazo, full of confidence, mailed the story to
Munsey’s
.

She waited and waited. More weeks passed than usual.
Did I forget to put postage on the envelope?
Mazo wondered.
Did the envelope get lost in the mail?
Mazo could think about nothing but the missing manuscript. Sometimes the pavement and floors beneath her seemed to slope away as though into an abyss.

When Mazo went alone to see the medieval morality play
Everyman
, she suffered the same strange sensation again. Again there was the abyss. She had been raised Protestant, but suddenly she went to a Catholic church – Saint Michaels Cathedral in Toronto – and knelt at all the stations of the cross. She seemed to be hoping for a miracle, but no miracle happened.

When Mazo returned home, she told her mother and Grandma Lundy what she had done. Grandma Lundy, still a staunch Methodist, glared at her scornfully.

Feeling exhausted, Mazo went upstairs and sat down on her bed. She was trembling all over. Her symptoms did not abate, so her family called the doctor. Mazo hated this doctor and could not talk to him. She felt he was jeering at her. Perhaps he was.

Mazo’s illness lasted several years, and for most of this time she couldn’t write. Indeed, she couldn’t do much of anything. She slept poorly at night. She frequently wept. She was extremely depressed. Yet the especially good story she had sent to
Munsey’s
had not been lost, and it was eventually published.

Her illness seems to have been psychosomatic: a so-called “mental” illness or “nervous breakdown.”

“I’m done for. I shall never be well again,” moaned Mazo when an uncle came to her room and asked how she was feeling. “I’m going to die. Like Grandpa died.”

Her uncle laughed angrily.

“You couldn’t die,” he said. “You couldn’t. Not even if you
tried
. There’s plenty of time for you to develop. You’re only beginning. What you need is a different doctor.”

Unfortunately a different doctor was not forthcoming. And perhaps no doctor in her own time and place could have helped her anyway. Had Mazo become severely depressed today, of course, most doctors would have prescribed a drug and arranged for her to receive therapy from a medical professional like a psychiatrist. But in Victorian and Edwardian Canada, no such help was available.

There are many possible reasons for Mazo’s emotional collapse. She turned twenty-one in 1900: a time when women’s roles were rigidly defined. A woman was expected to become a wife and mother. Period. Yet Mazo longed for a career as an artist – visual or literary – and she knew she could not have both a husband and a career, as one can today. The primitive contraceptives available one hundred years ago were not effective.

What’s more, Mazo lived in Canada, a colonial country where careers in the arts were difficult for men and almost impossible for women. Mazo would have been well aware that her chosen path was almost without precedent, and she would have doubted her ability to follow that path successfully. Mazo had no role models because there were no outstanding Canadian-born writers of the female sex when she was young.