by Lewis Desoto
It was her sisters, finally, whom Emily loved best and longest. They were her most constant friends and companions. They always lived within walking distance of one another and saw each other almost daily. Although the relationships had all the tensions that can exist between siblings, and were often contentious, the sisters were life-long companions.
In the end Emily became like a nun in her love, which became spiritual, a love turned outward and away from the personal, toward what she called God, that divine presence which she found in the forests.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Her Little Book
Most Canadians first heard the name Emily Carr on the radio, and it was not because of her paintings, but because some of her stories were being read aloud over the air. In fact, as her fame spread across Canada, many people did not even know that she was a painter. They thought of her as a writer, author of the bestselling Klee Wyck.
Emily had always been something of a secret writer. As a young woman she had written poems and kept a diary, which she stored in a green cloth bag, and forgot for many years until she unearthed them when she was in her mid-sixties.
During the 1920s, when she wasn’t painting much, she began to write little sketches and anecdotes surreptitiously, not showing them to anyone, mindful of the disdain with which her paintings were often greeted by family and acquaintances. In 1929 she enrolled in a correspondence course with her friend Flora Burns. In the evenings the two women would compare assignments and give critiques of each other’s work. Soon, Emily bought a second-hand typewriter and learned to use it. Her spelling and punctuation left much to be desired, and Flora took on the task of correcting Emily’s writing.
Later, she sent some of her stories to Lawren Harris and other friends, and the response was encouraging. Harris even suggested she write an autobiography. She had resumed writing a journal in 1927, but for the moment she was content to stick with something less ambitious than a full account of her life. The stories she wrote instead were usually about her encounters with Native culture and about her childhood.
In 1934 she took a summer course in writing, and then another one that winter, and began to submit her stories to various magazines, including Maclean’s and Saturday Evening Post. The rejection slips piled up, but she wasn’t deterred: she had lived a life of rejection. She persevered. She tried sending her manuscripts to publishers, but these were also rejected. One was even lost.
She studied writing as thoroughly as she had studied painting. She took courses and sought advice. And when she had absorbed what she considered useful, she turned her back on her critics and teachers and went her own way. One of those teachers, Ruth Humphrey, to whom Emily gave a painting in return for instruction, would prove to be instrumental in boosting her writing career.
In 1937, at the age of sixty-six, Emily suffered a heart attack. During her recuperation, unable to paint, she completed seventeen stories in six months, while lying on her back and writing with a pencil in her notebooks. Ruth Humphrey showed Emily’s stories to Ira Dilworth, the regional director for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Dilworth was familiar with Emily, having grown up in Victoria, and he was immediately impressed by the originality and freshness of the writing. He arranged for some of the stories to be read in a nationally broadcast radio program in 1940, doing the reading himself. And he went further, submitting the manuscript to Oxford University Press in Toronto. The collected stories about Emily’s travels in British Columbia and her exploration of Native culture were published under the title Klee Wyck. Dilworth took over the job of editing Emily’s writing, and during the process, with Dilworth correcting the manuscript’s spelling and grammar while sitting across the table from Emily, a great affection sprang up between them. Like Lawren Harris before him, Dilworth became a mentor and friend.
Dilworth was thirty years younger than Emily. He had been a teacher before he took a post with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. He lived in Vancouver with his ailing mother but made frequent trips to Victoria to work with Emily on her manuscripts. The letters between them are tender, full of affection, and constitute a literary gem in their own right. Emily made a pun of Dilworth’s first initial and addressed him in her letters as “Eye,” and often signed off with “Your loving Emily & Small.”
When he first read her stories, Dilworth wrote to Emily that he was lifted from his “stupid humdrum existence into something exquisite and beautiful.”
When Emily gave her affection, she gave it unstintingly. More than two hundred letters to Dilworth exist. In 1942 she wrote to him, saying:
The love I gave you certainly was not the type I gave to my sweetheart, a love that expects a whole heap back. It was a better love than any of these; its foundation was in lovely things.... Perhaps the kind of meaning my love has for you and I’d like yours to have for me is comrade; comradeship seems so expansive somehow, a turning into things together.
In her last years, Ira’s affection was crucial to Emily. She had never really loved a man, but toward Dilworth she expressed all the love that she contained. A few months before she died in 1944, she wrote to him, “I’ve been so proud of your friendship, and my love for you has been very deep and sincere. I can’t imagine life since I had to give up painting without it.” Dilworth reciprocated the affection in his own letters to Emily, writing that, “You will never know how much your confidence and love have meant to me.” His letters were signed with “bundles of love.”
Emily’s reminiscences of her childhood, published as The Book of Small, is dedicated to Dilworth, and in her will she made him her literary executor, as well as leaving to him the royalties from her books. The foreword to Growing Pains, Emily’s autobiography, closes with these tender words by Dilworth: “High in the Canadian sky wild geese, great flocks of them, are shouting their mysterious cry. They are all going on as you and I must, Emily. Life will not stand still. So, fare forward, dear soul.”
When Klee Wyck was published, readers were captivated by the adventures of this solitary woman in an exotic environment, and it was an instant success. For many, this was their first glimpse into the British Columbia landscape and the world of the West Coast Native peoples. While we now see some of Emily’s attitudes toward that world as outdated, her accounts were generally considered to be sympathetic.
Klee Wyck received the Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-fiction the year after it was published, and has remained a classic of Canadian literature ever since. The Book of Small followed in 1942. Emily resurrected her childhood nickname, Small, and lets that character enact the remembered incidents from her youngest years. In her final years she wrote little, but there were manuscripts waiting for a publisher. Shortly before her death, in 1944, a recounting of her years managing a boarding house was published as The House of All Sorts. In it, Emily tells of the ups and downs of that period, with its odd characters and odder happenings. Growing Pains, the official autobiography of Emily Carr, the artist, appeared a year after her death.
Two other books were published in the 1950s, and then, finally, her journals from 1927 to 1941 were published in 1966. The collected works, published together in an omnibus edition, run to almost nine hundred pages, a considerable achievement for a woman who published her first book when she was sixty-nine years old and who was incapacitated by two heart attacks and two strokes. She was a force of nature to the end.
In her writing, Emily found a way to express the intimate, private side of her personality. She was never interested in painting the personal details of her life, but always sought a larger quality that was more universal. Other than the journals, which were not written for publication, all her books are fiction of sorts. They were written from the perspective of a woman approaching seventy years of age, so what she recalls is, first of all, not immediate, and second, is structured and altered with the intention of making a good story. That the stories are vivid and original in the telling is a testament to her talent as an author.
T
he autobiography Growing Pains must also be read as a selective account of her life. Much is omitted, sometimes intentionally, and much is misremembered. Emily, after all, was always aware of her reputation, and had a hand in crafting her own myth. But, as subsequent biographies have demonstrated, the essential story of her life is authentic. In Growing Pains, and in the other books about her life, she is often self-critical, and the book served her as a self-examination and as an assessment of her life.
From the moment she became publicly known, a constructed figure called “Emily Carr” began to emerge. This figure is partly factual and partly invented, by Emily and by others. Emily knew that if she didn’t craft her own image, she would inevitably be misrepresented. She wanted to be self-created. Her relations with journalists and critics were conflicted. She resented their intrusions, but wanted their attention, and wanted to be taken seriously. She also knew that art criticism is a kind of vivisection, destroying what it attempts to explain. Her publications are an attempt to control her own biography—to name herself.
Her humour is evident in all her writing. She sometimes mocked others, but she never excluded herself as an object of ridicule. The caricatures she drew when she was young, and the satirical verses she wrote to accompany them, were especially sharp.
For the modern reader, her style, values, and attitudes can seem archaic. She sometimes exemplified the prejudices and racism of her times. She often portrayed the Natives as simplistic. Nevertheless, her books remain readable and are without malice.
The book that offers the most candid insights into both the woman and the painter is her journal, Hundreds and Thousands, named after a small, multicoloured candy from England that Richard Carr poured into the Carr children’s hands from a big jar—to their great delight. Emily called the journal “my dear little book,” but it is so much more than that. It stands as one of the great records of an artist’s thoughts, rivalled only by the letters of Vincent van Gogh or the diaries of the painter Eugène Delacroix. Here is a soul laid bare, confessing to her doubts and aspirations, turning to the book both in moments of joy and in moments of black despair. Sometimes the book is a prosaic record of daily life, and as such, it is a fascinating account of a specific time and place. Sometimes it is a confessional, where everything that is left out of the fiction appears in candid detail. She tells us about her struggle to realize a painting, and about the technical details of how it is made. There are animals, family, neighbours, and tenants. Sometimes it is heartbreaking to read, and sometimes it is pure poetry. Above all, the book is the naked voice of one woman, but one who speaks for the human heart in all of us.
The last lines in that journal, written on March 7, 1941, three years before her death, end with the words “carry on, carry on, carry on.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Into the Mystic
An inclination to mysticism is not a Canadian trait. It is tolerated in poetry, less so in painting, but is usually regarded with embarrassment at best, or seen as unhealthy at worst.
Canadians prefer to regard themselves as sensible, sober, and down-to-earth, not given to excess in matters of belief. “Reason over Passion,” as Pierre Trudeau might have put it. When it comes to religion, Canadians have a preference for the innocuous United Church’s mild Presbyterianism over any of the more demonstrative forms of worship. Religion asks and answers the big questions: Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going? It also provides a code of moral and societal behaviour, answering the question: How shall we live? The religious impulse has never been entirely dormant in human culture. Some thinkers have proposed that it is the primary force at work in human consciousness—the drive to find and understand our place in the universe. Its expression is often powerfully manifested in the arts.
The Church, in whatever denomination, prefers to be the mediator and explicator of all things spiritual, and looks with suspicion on individual paths to wisdom. It tends to be intolerant of paths that lead beyond its theology. It prefers to be the authority that dispenses and interprets dogma and iconography and tends to frown upon religious expression in the arts when it falls outside the canon.
Emily grew up in a conventional Christian household, set in a Christian society that took its cues from the Anglican Church. Everybody was religious; churchgoing was an act that confirmed your place in society, and while you needn’t worship with fervour, it was expected that you believed in the Church.
The Carr household wasn’t fanatically pious, but on Sundays Emily’s father insisted upon prayers, Bible readings, and Sunday school classes organized by one of the sisters. Sunday was not a day for leisure or idle entertainment. Emily’s sister Lizzie was interested in doing missionary work among the Indians, a vocation to which many young women of the era aspired as a way of being useful, since so many other occupations were closed to them.
Emily, from an early age, resented the way religion intruded on her life, and she found her sisters too prim and orthodox. She also felt that a certain amount of hypocrisy lay behind their conformist demeanour. After the break with her father, she considered his religious expression fraudulent. Her experience at art school in San Francisco was liberating: Without the dictates of parental authority, she no longer participated in her sisters’ prayer meetings or Bible study groups, or felt compelled to attend church services.
Her later encounters with Native art showed her that there were other ways to express the religious impulse. Aside from their practical functions, the totem poles presented a cosmology different from the Christian one. Christianity had no place in this world of rain and forest and people whose stories made no mention of Jesus.
In Carr’s lifetime, the identity that Canadians promoted to themselves and the world was a virile, masculine one. The arts, or any concern with the heart and the emotions, were seen as soft, self-indulgent, too feminine, and fundamentally unserious. The Group of Seven painters were promoted as pioneers at work in the forests—hardy trappers and hunters who just happened to paint well. Their art was seen as fresh, with none of that soft decadence that characterized the old European art. And if their painting looked to some viewers a bit like the dangerous modernism infecting the arts, the growing consensus was that this was an art made sharp by the bracing winds of Georgian Bay and the hard sunlit colours of Algonquin Park in the fall.
Painting, of course, was part of culture, which was generally preferred in a form that had been approved already in Europe, was easy to understand, and somehow contributed to moulding a healthy and uplifting character. True, art could also harbour sensualists, bohemians, misfits, and modernists who had no respect for tradition and who preferred the primitive to the civilized. But they were best ignored or dismissed.
This image of the hardy, no-nonsense Canadian art is still widely believed in today. However, the new style of modernist painting, of which the Group of Seven was a regional manifestation, had for a long time had an undercurrent of interest in spiritual pursuits. The sources were many: English Romantic poetry, German anti-materialist idealism, the symbolist movement, the ideas of the American transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. And, of course, theosophy, a movement that had a profound effect on Canadian art.
A strong mystical tendency existed in the Group of Seven, but this was de-emphasized or obscured by the nationalist program. They used terms such as “the spirit of the landscape” freely, but there was little analysis of exactly what that spirit was. Even today, nature is seen as a place for healthy exercise, such as hiking, or as a place to think about ecology. Awe, terror, and rapture are not mentioned.
Theosophy was not a religion, a philosophy, a cult, or a church. The Theosophical Society was founded in New York in 1875 by a Russian, Helena Blavatsky. After she had travelled in various countries, she developed what could best be described as a synthesis of religious and mystical thinking in order to arrive at a way of understanding the divine and achieving spiritual wisdom. By the 1880s the Soc
iety had become an international organization with branches in India, across Europe, and in Canada and the United States. It drew on Buddhism and Hinduism, traditional Western religions, and on more esoteric traditions. Independent religions were something of a phenomenon in the late 1800s, and many of them were of the most dubious kind. Theosophy, too, had some precepts that verged on hocus-pocus, but then, so do the established religions.
As it affected Emily, theosophy is relevant only because of Lawren Harris, and the way he translated some of its suggestions into his art and encouraged her to do the same. The essence of what Emily took from Harris and theosophy can be summed up in the idea that through contact with nature we can experience the animating principle that governs the universe. The artist can articulate that principle. For a time, Carr tried to adapt her thinking to the principles of theosophy, but eventually rejected it, not without feeling some guilt that she was betraying Harris.
Yet she longed for connection, and for a way to express that connection, for a way to find a new god, or the old gods. She rejected orthodox Christianity and theosophy, needing no doctrine, or finding none that corresponded to her own experience. In the totem poles, Emily saw a total expression of Native cosmology. It came out of their society, which was part of the landscape and the forest. Emily saw it as art that expressed the West Coast landscape. If we see a Greek sculpture, we might not know which god or hero it represents, but we can still respond to the sculptor’s depiction of a human being. In the same way, Emily responded to a depiction not of a culture, of which she remained somewhat ignorant, but to the way that culture expressed itself. Through it, she could discover and articulate what she had only felt before.