Emily Carr

by Lewis Desoto

  The general view was that the First Nations were a vanishing race whose art and culture were doomed. The cause of their imminent destruction—the presence of the new settlers—was not acknowledged. The European settlers dismissed Native art and culture as part of a primitive, prehistoric past, and as incompatible with that of the new arrivals. Carr was no stranger to First Nations people. The Songhees reserve was just across the harbour from her home when she was growing up. During her early years, there were almost as many Natives as whites in Victoria. Native women would sell game, berries, or handicrafts from door to door, and were sometimes employed by white families as domestic help.

  The general attitude toward the Natives around Victoria was patronizing at best, frankly racist at worst. Natives were seen as a general nuisance, as an urban blight so close to the city, and as a constant source of trouble. The Songhees reserve would eventually be moved away from the city, as the land became desirable to Victoria’s newer citizens. Christian missionaries were the first Europeans to establish a presence in coastal settlements. Their proselytizing mission was to bring Natives into the Christian community. Native art and customs were denigrated as heathen and primitive, and their world view was discredited and dismissed. With time, churches and schools were established in Native communities, and then further afield. Eventually, many Native children were sent to reside in schools that banned their languages.

  In early 1899 Emily was invited to visit the Presbyterian mission school at Ucluelet. The mission had been established five years previously as part of the effort to convert the Nootka people to Christianity. Already, at this point in her life, Emily had little patience for the missionary project. Although she came to Ucluelet as a tourist and a spectator, she made a genuine effort to get to know some of the inhabitants. It was here that she was named Klee Wyck, the laughing one, from her humour-filled efforts to communicate across the language and cultural divide. She was impressed by what she saw as a dignified people, at home in their coastal forest landscape. She saw that there were other ways to live than the one she knew in Victoria. As the child of immigrants, aware of her own culture’s recent arrival in North America, she might even have envied the inhabitants of Ucluelet for their sense of belonging. Emily had recently returned from three years of study in San Francisco and thought of herself as an artist. She took water-colours and drawing materials with her, and sketched the inhabitants of the village as well as their houses and canoes. There were no totem poles or decorated house fronts of the kind she would paint elsewhere, but this first contact made a profound impression upon her. It was not until her trip to Alaska in 1907 that Emily encountered totem poles and began to form her ambitious project, to travel to as many Native communities as possible and to make a pictorial record of the totem poles. She was aware of the enormous transformations Native culture was being subjected to by white society, and this may have been why she undertook what she saw as a socially meaningful project.

  Before Marius Barbeau became aware of Emily’s paintings, he had encouraged and assisted other artists to visit and paint in the Upper Skeena River region. In an early example of corporate sponsorship of the arts, Barbeau secured free passage for the artists from the Canadian National Railway, which had extended its line to the area. In return, the railway company received commercially exploitable images with which to promote tourism. Carr would later participate in the same venture. A brochure from the CNR used one of her paintings in an advertisement that encouraged readers to

  Visit the land of the mystic TOTEM. Romance, tradition, the history of an age-old people are carved on the totems of British Columbia. Grotesque, heroic, they tell of war and peace; life and death; singing a veritable saga to those who can read them. In quaint native coastal villages they await your spellbound gaze.

  The various artists’ paintings that resulted from Barbeau’s venture present the Native villages as picturesque sites, and show no understanding of either the inhabitants who had lived there for hundreds of years or of the totem poles that belonged to them. A comparison between these other paintings and Carr’s representations of the same sites shows that she strove for more than a merely scenic view.

  Barbeau and Brown’s attempts to include Native art in a national cultural identity did not necessarily mean that the Natives wanted to be included. They were not consulted. The arrival of tourists in the villages on the railway was sometimes seen by the local inhabitants as a further extension of colonization.

  One of the artists from Ontario who visited the Skeena in 1926, Edwin Holgate, went on to decorate the tea room in the Chateau Laurier Hotel in Ottawa, which was owned by the Canadian National Railway. The tea room and adjacent dance hall were done in the “Skeena River Style.” It is unlikely that any Natives took tea there. Similarly, no Natives were invited to the opening of the Canadian West Coast Art: Native and Modern exhibition. The Native works in that exhibition were drawn from museums and private collections and presented as art, with little attention to the function of the items shown or to the context in which they were created.

  Modern critics have condemned non-Native society for using Native art inappropriately. Some have challenged the popular views of Emily Carr’s association with Native peoples. On many counts she is guilty as charged. She did sometimes exploit her Native connection in the establishment of her own artistic identity. She made rugs and pottery for sale that used Native designs, and she allowed them to be included in the National Gallery exhibition. She also designed the cover for the exhibition brochure with Native motifs and signed it Klee Wyck, thereby enhancing her identification as an individual with privileged knowledge of Native culture. She neither learned any Native language nor had extensive contact with Native peoples, except on her painting trips. In her later writings, she demeaned Native society to humorous ends. But if she sometimes acquiesced in the romantic notion of Natives as noble savages, her writings show that she also saw them as people like any other, possessing the same virtues and faults.

  Emily Carr was very much a part of her time, and embodied many of the prevailing attitudes that patronized the Natives. In her defence we can say that no other artist, and very few people at all, took as much of an interest in Native culture as she did. She hardly benefited financially from this association, and always had misgivings about using their motifs in her art. Her depictions of the totem poles are accurate; while being artistic interpretations, they neither intentionally distort nor misrepresent what she saw.

  West Coast Native culture had neither a written language nor a pictorial tradition outside of carving and decorating. The paintings of Emily Carr have given us a record in pictures of objects that have been dispersed, destroyed, or have simply disappeared.

  It is important, even crucial, when looking at her paintings, to be aware that what we see are, first of all, images of Emily Carr’s relationship to the totem poles she saw. She was an artist, and it is the right of the artist to paint whatever she chooses. They are only paintings, after all; however we may use or interpret them, they remain the expression of one person’s imagination. They are not a pronouncement, a definition, or a decree. In fact, her paintings of totem poles can even be seen as a homage of sorts to Native art.

  In the totem poles, Emily saw something that had been lost or obscured in European art. It was stark, bold, larger than life, and hinted at the magical and supernatural. They were a fusion of art and what Emily would term religion. The poles have a profound relationship to the environment in which they were developed. Emily responded to an extremely powerful human expression made by people living close to the source of life. Native art was the doorway that led her to that source and helped her become an artist of distinction. She never lost sight of her inspiration’s origin, and always acknowledged her debt.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Sophie

  In many of the photographs of Emily’s studio, a small portrait of a woman is visible on the wall. The painting is a watercolour made by Emily in 1914. The s
ubject is Sophie Frank.

  Emily’s account of their meeting is told in Klee Wyck, in the chapter titled Sophie. In 1906 Emily went to live in Vancouver. One day a woman selling baskets, accompanied by her three children, appeared at Emily’s door. Emily wanted one of the baskets but did not have the money to pay for it. Sophie agreed to accept some clothes instead, and returned later to collect them. She lived on the Salish reserve in North Vancouver, across the inlet from the city. Soon after, Emily visited her on the reserve. So began a friendship that would last thirty years.

  Close friendship between Natives and whites was unusual. A kind of apartheid existed that kept the two groups apart physically and socially. The relationship between Emily and Sophie took place within unequal spheres of power and entitlement, but it prospered nevertheless. Sophie’s situation was a difficult one. Most of her children would die in childbirth or infancy, and both she and her husband sometimes succumbed to alcoholism. Sophie and Emily did not mingle in society at large—their visits were always private. Usually it was Emily who visited the reserve. As a white woman, she had easier access to the Native community than Sophie would have had to a tea room in Vancouver.

  Emily wrote about Sophie in Klee Wyck in a tone that, to the modern ear, is patronizing and overly picturesque. Curiously, she mentions in the story that Sophie’s English was good, yet the words she gives to her are in pidgin English. Nevertheless, the two women were friends. Sophie even named one of her children after Emily, although the baby lived for only three months. Many of Sophie’s other children also died at young ages, and there were fifteen family graves in the cemetery to which she took Emily on one occasion.

  Sophie was an artist, too, and the designs she used in her baskets inspired Emily. Sophie also served as an interpreter of Native culture to Emily, opening many doors. The two women visited the Catholic mission church next to Sophie’s house and exchanged letters often. When they met, Emily talked of art and her travels; Sophie told her stories from the world of the First Nations. In Sophie’s calm, stoical acceptance of a diminished life, Emily found an example of strength and balance to carry her through her own travails. In Hundreds and Thousands, Emily wrote of Sophie, “Her love for me is real and mine for her. Somewhere we meet. Where? Out in the spaces? There is a bond between us where colour, creed, environment don’t count. The woman in us meets on common ground and we love each other.”

  Although Emily came to be identified in popular imagination with Native peoples, Sophie was really her only true, personal contact with a Native person. After Emily left Vancouver and moved back to Victoria, the two women maintained a correspondence, augmented by Emily’s visits to the mainland.

  In a letter in 1929, Sophie wrote:

  We feel sorry you was sick with the flu and I hope you will be strong in the near future.... Yes, I am selling baskets and making baskets for my living. Frank can’t work now. He got odd jobs once in a while. Well, my father is old now and his house got burned a month ago. I feel bad for I cannot get to go and see him up Squamish Valley....

  Your friend,

  Sophie Frank

  The letters to Emily were almost always signed “your dear friend,” or “your ever loving friend.”

  Sophie remains a vague figure in the life of Emily Carr. We know little of her other than the details recounted in Emily’s writings and the evidence of a few remaining letters. Sophie’s family history, her stature in her own community, how her baskets were regarded by her own people—all of this is left to conjecture. Sophie’s lapses into alcoholism and prostitution were not uncommon among her peers, and the societal causes were many: racism, poverty, inadequate health care, segregation. For all these reasons, Sophie remains largely unknown to us and her voice is silent.

  Sophie and her husband, Jimmy Frank, must have given Emily many insights into Native culture. Emily’s knowledge of Native art could not have come only from printed sources or her sporadic contact with people in the villages. Certainly, the lecture that Emily gave in Vancouver on the context of her paintings of totem poles must have been informed by Sophie’s contributions. In December 1939, Emily received the following letter:

  My dear friend,

  I guess you thought I forgot you but I still think of you. So I just thought I would drop a line and let you know how I’m getting along. I am quite well at present as I still staying at Squamish as I left North Vancouver after my wife died.

  I’m keeping away from drink. I’m better off here. I’m having a hard time but I get along.

  I cannot forget my wife. It’s pretty hard and sure is very lonesome without her. I hope you are well and please answer.

  Jimmy Frank

  Klee Wyck, Emily’s first book, was dedicated to Sophie Frank. She died five years before it was published.

  CHAPTER EIGHTTEEN

  Animals

  In practically every photograph that exists of Emily, from childhood until her last years, she is in the company of animals. This is one of the most singular aspects of her personality: she simply could not live without the companionship of a pet of some kind. At different times in her life (and sometimes in combination and in multiples) she had a cat, a duck, a hen, a rooster, a horse, a crow, a peacock, a thrush, a blackbird, a bullfinch, a vulture, a cockatoo, a parrot, a chipmunk, a squirrel, a raccoon, a white rat, a rabbit, and dogs, dogs, dogs. (She owned dogs as pets, and also raised and sold more than three hundred of them in a commercial venture.) And most famously of all, she had a monkey.

  Even when she travelled she took at least one animal with her. On her trip to France, when the boat stopped at Liverpool, she went to London, purchased a parrot at a bird market, and took it with her to Paris. Earlier, when she was ill in England and confined to a sanatorium for months, she managed to collect some nests of baby thrushes and finches, which she raised in her room. She planned to take these songbirds back to Victoria with her, and let them populate the woods with their singing.

  On her painting trips, when she went to the northern forests, a dog always accompanied her. Cougars and bears inhabited the forests, and there were semi-feral dogs and cats near the Native villages. Emily’s own dogs served not only as companions on her solitary excursions, but also as sentinels and guardians.

  A portrait of Billy, her sheepdog, completed in 1909 and rendered with great sensitivity and skill, shows that Emily could have had a career as an animal painter. But, except for two paintings of the monkey, Woo, made when Emily was in her sixties, and a few early watercolours of parrots, there are no other paintings of animals in her entire output. The fact that she did not paint her countless pets is curious. But then, she didn’t paint people much either.

  Depictions of friends and family, creatures and pets, are reserved for the other side of Emily’s creative output: the comical drawings and her writings. Emily might at times have been melancholy, or irritable, but she had a tremendous sense of humour. We see this in her cartoons, where she lampoons not only those around her, but also herself. Her paintings have a gravitas to them, but the cartoons and verses show the other side of her personality. The same might be said of the photographs. Usually they show a rather sober woman, but when the photographs capture an unposed moment, she is often smiling and laughing. Her smile is often either mischievous or radiates great warmth. And, after all, hadn’t she once been called Klee Wyck, the laughing one?

  There is a popular misconception that Emily wandered the streets of Victoria in bohemian garb, with her monkey perched on her shoulder. It is an image that has been promulgated in films, children’s books, and biographical sketches, and it has contributed to the picture of her as an eccentric. The image is colourful, but erroneous. At home, the monkey often scampered loose, and Emily dressed as she pleased, but she always had a strong sense of propriety. When she went out she always dressed appropriately, in a manner befitting a middle-aged matron from an established family.

  But what of the monkey? Who was Woo?

  Around 1923, when she was in he
r early fifties, Emily saw a Javanese monkey caged in a pet shop. She rescued the creature by purchasing it. Emily named the monkey Woo, after the sound it made, and this little creature would be her constant companion for the next thirteen of its fifteen years, until they were separated by old age.

  Emily made only two paintings of Woo. One dates from the early 1930s and shows Woo standing upright, holding onto a branch with her hands. She is wearing a yellow pinafore that has an enormous bow on the back. The face, shown in profile, is remarkably human.

  Emily did dress her monkey in a pinafore on occasion, especially during the wet cold months. Java is a tropical country, and Emily was concerned for Woo’s health. No doubt when Woo was dressed up, the temptation to see this lively, affectionate, mischievous creature as a kind of little girl would have been irresistible. And, perhaps Emily also saw a part of herself in Woo: that independent little girl who was once known as Small.

  There is another painting of Woo, done much later, perhaps one of the last pictures Emily did. The first Woo is made to seem human, but in the later painting she stares back at the viewer, defiant and wild. No sweet little girl in this creature. Against a background of swirling branches and green fruit, an untamed animal looks out at us with blazing yellow eyes. This is a creature from the other world, that we glimpse only rarely, where Emily trod more often than most of us ever will. Perhaps this is a self-portrait, showing her dark and moody side.