Emily Carr As I Knew Her

by Carol Pearson

  Emily Carr

  As I Knew Her

  CAROL PEARSON

  forewords by Robert Amos

  and Kathleen Coburn

  CONTENTS

  Foreword by Robert Amos

  Foreword to the 1954 edition by Kathleen Coburn

  Lucky Seven

  Painting Lessons

  Moulding Clay, and Hearts

  Gathering the Clay

  Indian Pottery

  Sketching Trips

  Pulling Daisies: He Will, He Won’t

  Her Animal Friends

  Green Thumbs, or Hearts

  Falling Stars

  Old Shoes

  Puddings

  The Guest Room

  Butterflies

  Tides, Sands, and Wind

  Corks, Plugs, and “Stop Her”

  Aprons or Pinafores

  Pillar to Post

  Letters

  Treasures: We All Have Them

  FOREWORD

  The little room under the eaves! It was no wonder that this was her favourite or, as Miss Carr said, “mostest favourite” room! Yet every time I stayed with her, if only for a night, she would make it up fresh, and insist that I use it. The first two years after I met Miss Carr, she was my teacher, in art and modelling [in clay]. As our relationship developed, the teaching was only an incident. She was like a fairy Godmother, complete with animals, whom I loved completely, a childish worship if you like, but she returned my love. After the first year I was her guest from time to time, casually, but after two years she asked me to move right in, and the small room was then known as “Baboo’s eyrie.” She never used it again, after I left the West to be married. “All things come home to roost, Baboo; it will be ready when you come,” she said.

  Carol Pearson, Emily Carr As I Knew Her, p. 144

  ALL the scholarship and research that have accumulated since her time adds to our appreciation of Emily Carr, helps us understand her place in society and the messages she conveyed in words and pictures. But what was she really like? That’s what we want to know. And there is no better guide than Carol Pearson. Pearson was a child herself, and Carr was as an eternal child of wonder. Later, when Carr’s painting days were past, her animals were all gone, and Carol had grown and married, she was there again with Emily Carr.

  Emily Carr died in 1944, and it must have been soon after that time when Carol Pearson sat down to write her memoir of what had happened between them from 1920 and 1944. It was her first book, and a surprisingly good one it is. It seems she wrote it with Emily Carr’s writing style as a guide—never use two words when you can say it in one, and never use a long word where a short one will do. The prose is effortless, and generous with the reader.

  For many years, Emily Carr seemed to have lost the joy of life that was so evident in her stories in The Book of Small. Orphaned at sixteen years old, she didn’t have the guidance and support of her parents while facing the emotional and economic struggles of a young artist. Her older sisters either ignored her ambition or tried to curb her efforts, believing that the life of an artist was not appropriate for someone of her social standing and God-fearing upbringing. Among the Victorians of the day, they were not alone in this attitude.

  After a long struggle, when Carr was in her forties, she built her own little apartment building on Simcoe Street in 1913, the “House of All Sorts” of her later book. But as an income generator and as a refuge for an artist it was useless; she had no privacy and no time to paint. The economic realities of being a landlady put her in a position she did not enjoy. Those golden days of childhood were long gone.

  Then little Carol moved to the neighbourhood with her parents. The best source of information about Carol Pearson (née Williams) is Maria Tippett’s book Emily Carr: A Biography (Oxford University Press, Toronto, 1979). Tippett, who interviewed Pearson and read her correspondence with Carr, says the Williams family moved from Toronto to Victoria around 1920. Carol was enrolled at Queen Margaret’s School in Duncan, where she boarded.

  In the summers, when her parents returned to Ontario, she and her brother stayed in Victoria at Alice Carr’s little school. Little Carol took art classes from Emily Carr, and the two found a deep and immediate sympathy. As Carr later told Ira Dilworth, it was “love at first sight.” In subsequent summers, Carol lived with Emily, sharing a friendship both innocent and profound, and Carr regained her joy of youth.

  On her property on Simcoe Street, Carr had raised English sheepdogs—“bobtails.” This was a commercial enterprise, and between 1917 and 1921, Carr raised more than 350 of these large dogs. When some of her property was sold, she turned her attention to the smaller griffon dogs. Emily and Carol shared a profound rapport with animals, and Carr taught her all she could about dogs.

  They walked the dogs at Beacon Hill; they searched for clay at building sites and then worked on Carr’s Klee Wyck pottery; they went on sketching expeditions up the east coast of the island, taken there by gas boat by First Nations elders. As Maria Tippett has written, “Carol wanted to be an artist like Emily, who gave her painting lessons, often on the Dallas Road cliffs. Alongside her young pupil, Emily was herself spurred on to paint more.”

  Carol called Miss Carr “Mom,” and was called by her “Baboo.” Her concern in this book is not so much Carr’s painting as her way with words and ideas, and the warmth of their loving relationship.

  At age eighteen, Carol married William Pearson, and they moved to a horse farm north of Toronto. Miss Carr arrived to visit the newlyweds in 1927, at a key juncture in her artistic career. Carr had been “discovered” by Marius Barbeau of the National Museum in Ottawa. At the time, her paintings—and rugs and pottery—made a striking centrepiece in his exhibit of native art and paintings of the West Coast, held in Ottawa, and at the Art Gallery of Toronto. Carr came east for the show. Her efforts were utterly vindicated, and at this time she met Lawren Harris and the Group of Seven. Between Ottawa and Toronto, she stayed with Carol, and returned again for subsequent visits with the Pearsons.

  During her last years, when Carr’s health was declining, Carol was summoned to the West, and Miss Carr sent her the tickets. Reading Carol’s book, Emily Carr As I Knew Her, enables you to accompany her as she pushes Miss Carr, warmly wrapped up and sitting in a wheelchair, as they return again to Dallas Road. The author shares her thoughts and feelings about the dogs, the monkey Woo, and the artist who was her friend. Carol was with Miss Carr almost to the end.

  Do we need another book about Emily Carr? She herself provided more than enough information about her life and thoughts. Yet, perhaps for literary effect, she does not present herself in the best light. Since her death, all her journals, and even the “outtakes” from her journals, have come into print. But the extreme close-up of the self-portrait lacks the perspective a loving friend can bring.

  Subsequently, others have written about Carr, a woman I consider Canada’s most important artist. Edythe Hembroff came into Carr’s life around 1930 after returning from her art education in San Francisco and London, which strangely paralleled Carr’s own studies. Edythe accompanied Carr during her sketching trips around Victoria in the 1930s, and the word pictures she paints in her book M.E.: A Portrayal of Emily Carr (Clarke, Irwin & Company, Toronto, 1969) are invaluable. Later, in her book Emily Carr: The Untold Story (Hancock House, Saanich, 1978) Hembroff wrote that Carol was “an affectionate friend of Emily’s, but one should not forget that she is a fantasist who has written a shockingly untruthful book . . . I emphatically dispute the fairy tales she relates in her book about her very special �
�secret’ relationship with Emily.”

  While the odd fact may be disputed, Hembroff’s comments seem spurred by jealousy. In her biography, Maria Tippett commented, “If Emily expected to find in her another Carol Williams, she was disappointed. Hembroff was older, she did not possess the childlike spontaneity . . . nor was she as passionately fond of Emily’s creatures.” Perhaps Hembroff’s intemperate comments kept Carol’s book out of print for many years.

  I discovered a tattered copy of the 1954 edition years ago and have read Carol’s book numerous times, both to myself and aloud to my painting companions at Mount St. Mary Hospital, where I conduct an art group. I found it utterly engaging, and asked TouchWood Editions to consider bringing it back for us. Once again we can share the best of all character studies of an artist each of us seems to know—in Carol Pearson’s Emily Carr As I Knew Her.

  Robert Amos, RCA

  To my mother

  Lenore Dennis Williams

  FOREWORD TO THE 1954 EDITION

  THE word genius is one to be used sparingly, if indeed it has not been so misused as to have no meaning at all. And perhaps we do well to forget an epithet that has often separated the artist or the scientist from his fellow-men. Yet if we use genius as a word to fall back on when the quality of the human vision and the urgency and power of its expression arouse our astonishment and awe so as to defy analysis, then I think there is no Canadian imaginative artist to whom it can be more spontaneously and truly applied than to Emily Carr. One quality prominent in genius is the childlike nearness to the primal source of things, the eye fresh to the wonder of the universe, the constantly inquiring mind, and—in the widest sense—the uncorrupted heart. When this essential innocence-wisdom is driven to communicate and highly endowed, to a degree highly inconvenient to itself, were happiness and social ease the aim, we get an Emily Carr.

  Such characters are difficult to write about. The absence, since her death nearly a decade ago, of any book of biography or reminiscence makes this evident. But these unpretentious, artless pencil sketches walk over all the difficulties by not noticing them. These are undoubtedly the most personal day-to-day stories we shall ever have about her. Here are tumbled forth, with ardour, and humour, and a vivid immediacy, the impressions she made first of all on a child, and then, periodically for twenty-five years, in a relation of unflagging respect and affection. The child had never heard of Boswell (nor was Emily Carr, though quick of tongue, a talker); nor had she any notion of the recognition that was to come. It is obvious that she knew clearly, with the stormy anger of a child smarting under injustice, that recognition was due and that understanding was being withheld. But this book is not a defence of Emily Carr as an artist, nor a comment on her work, except obliquely. Nor is it a new and unknown Emily Carr we see here. A lonely, fiercely gentle woman, fond of children, Indians, animals, and all outcasts, proud, hurt, impatient, blunt, amusing, difficult, and Klee Wyck, the Laughing One—this is a person we know. Her gaiety and quickness of wit is delightfully underlined in these pieces, with some choice specimens of it—and we see for the first time Emily Carr, educator. But Carol Pearson’s book gives us more particularly the inner sense of her, as only one who is willing to share privacy can give it. For this is a work of sentiment—“a little journey into the heart,” as Sterne called his Sentimental Journey.

  In an indirect way we get a heightened feeling of that terrible driving energy, that self-crucifying, self-expressing integrity that gave her painting its strange mixture of impersonality and intense subjectivity, a compelling power compounded of a sense of vastness, and a sense of intimacy. Real intimacy has not been a predominant quality in Canadian painting and writing, but Emily Carr certainly knew that by the paradox of its nature it is capable of coming to terms with forces of great magnitude. The forest paintings are full of this, and many of the Indian paintings: the little white human church and the overpowering forest jungle all around; the Indian bear totem, sign of human effort (and as such tenderly described in Klee Wyck), all but submerged in a sea of swirling grass as nature takes over; or the awe-struck and awe-inspiring Indian figures seen at Blunden Harbour against the darkening Pacific seascape. The immensity of the universe and the frailty and dignity of the creatures on it—this is to my mind one of her central themes. And this she conveyed to her pupil.

  Here we see Emily Carr in that reciprocal relation she knew how to establish with the creatures, mostly four-legged. Of the two-legged species, she liked best children and birds. This is a book about Emily Carr with the young, and it hints at the outlook of Emily Carr and the young on the conventional or stuffy—to wit, those “customers’” chairs on pulleys! It must strike every reader that not only was Emily Carr at her freest in these relationships, but that we are being given a report of them by one who was unusually sensitive to them.

  There is here that almost uncannily direct and acute awareness of what was really going on that belongs to what Blake called Innocence; this is what to my mind gives these personal and sometimes sentimental anecdotes their unique value. No one else saw Emily Carr in just this way—as pupil, goddaughter, member of her household for months at a time. And yet the external facts of the relation do not explain this book. As we feel the flicks on the skin from these stories, we soon grow aware that the active receptivity of this “child” was extraordinary.

  Good books have often been written by people who were not writers. Carol Pearson makes no claim to be one. (After all, she did not go on with that correspondence course, and “Mom” did!) A professional writer would have pruned many a phrase, and dramatized more fully many an incident in this book. But it is in fact in the completely non-professional, non-literary character of it that its special quality and charm lies.

  Carol Pearson’s art is the training of horses, for which she has a reputation not confined to Canada, nor indeed to the American continent. From Emily Carr she says she learned much that she knows about animals. She has brought up baby giraffes, and has administered injections to grateful lions for equally grateful keepers. She knows the tones of voice of an unhappy horse, and the precise meaning of the twitching of a sleeping dog’s nose. She clearly has an eye that is not merely an optical instrument. She needed it, and used it, developed it probably, living with Emily Carr.

  Anyway, she recognized greatness when she saw it. She is entitled to our gratitude and respect for cherishing it. Personally I am full of admiration and envy.

  Kathleen Coburn

  LUCKY SEVEN

  ABOUT 1917 my parents moved from Ontario to the west coast. For a time we journeyed from place to place while they looked for a spot to settle. Finally we landed in Victoria, in late summer. Though I was only seven years old my luck started then. Emily Carr, at that time nearly fifty, was giving lessons in painting and clay modelling. She happened to live just around the corner from us. Clay modelling was new to me but I was very interested in it, so my Mother arranged for me to take both the classes, daily from four to six.

  You must know something of her studio; then when I tell you of Emily Carr, you will feel that you know her better. It was on Simcoe Street, just below Beacon Hill Park, on the second floor of a lovely old house which she had had built for herself. I loved the studio. Emily Carr was practical and the studio was a demonstration of her practical nature. There were two huge windows, one taking up most of one wall. On the other two walls were large paintings. Great hand-hooked rugs, her own handiwork, covered the floor. They carried out the Indian themes, so loved by her, in their colourful original designs. I have wondered often what became of her old studio table. It resembled most the table in the pictures I have seen of our Lord’s last supper. It was solid and large, only about three feet wide but long and heavy, with leather inlaid down the centre, strong, beautifully carved legs, and lovely dark old wood—truly a collector’s item. For Miss Carr it was a studio table.

  The room was large and high, and so were many of th
e canvases she worked on. To leave plenty of room for working, the three big easy chairs had ropes at each corner which ran through a pulley overhead and were tied to a small nail within easy reach. When a visitor or prospective buyer called, a chair was lowered, and there he sat, as she often said, “like a fly in a web and I the fat old spider!” Those who knew her well could tell quite easily in what esteem she held the visitor by the manner in which she returned the chair to its airy perch. If it was drawn up immediately the guest rose to his feet, he was a bore, a time-waster: “a dawdler,” she would say, as the chair went up with a jerk! But if the chair was allowed to remain till the guest had departed, then it was understood that she was genuinely sorry to see him go. The new pupils, who had heard tales of the swinging chairs, would sit in high glee, waiting for callers important enough to be asked to stay till the lesson was over. They were much more interested in the lowering of the chair than in the lesson! At times like these Miss Carr would say, “No pupils today, I am afraid, only curious kittens, and we all know what happened to the old cat.” Her easy sarcasm and gentle way of lightly poking fun at the children made those who were interested settle down right away.

  At each end of the studio table were straight chairs and a stool with long legs for the younger pupils. They sat facing her at the long end of the array of partly painted pots, newly moulded things of all shapes, lumps of raw clay, boxes and tubes of paints. And always, in the middle, helping, sat the little monkey, Woo. Wherever Emily Carr worked, there was Woo and three of the little Belgian Griffons that she loved best. There were many more in the kennel at the end of the pretty garden. Ginger Pop and Coco, rough-coated little fellows, were her favourites. They were extremely jealous, always carrying on a half-friendly growling feud, but too well trained to do anything more about it. The third Griffon, a smooth-coated little female named Sugar Plum, was beautiful, but for that very reason a little less loved than the other two. “Beauty,” Miss Carr would say, “reaps its own rewards, in whatever form it comes.” Sugar Plum gloried in the affection the callers gave her, friends and strangers alike. Fickle? Well, we used to wonder, and it was amazing how many people we knew who were like her. We used to laugh about it. Miss Carr’s sense of humour was wonderful; she loved to laugh.