Emily Carr

ALSO IN THE

EXTRAORDINARY CANADIANS

SERIES:

Big Bear
by Rudy Wiebe

Lord Beaverbrook
by David Adams Richards

Norman Bethune
by Adrienne Clarkson

Tommy Douglas
by Vincent Lam

Glenn Gould
by Mark Kingwell

Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine and Robert Baldwin

by John Ralston Saul

Stephen Leacock
by Margaret MacMillan

Nellie McClung
by Charlotte Gray

Marshall McLuhan
by Douglas Coupland

L.M. Montgomery
by Jane Urquhart

Lester B. Pearson
by Andrew Cohen

Mordecai Richler
by M.G. Vassanji

Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont
by Joseph Boyden

Pierre Elliott Trudeau
by Nino Ricci

SERIES EDITOR:

John Ralston Saul

With an Introduction by

SERIES EDITOR

PENGUIN CANADA

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First published 2008

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (RRD)

Copyright © Lewis DeSoto, 2008

Introduction copyright © John Ralston Saul, 2008

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ISBN-10: 0-670-06670-2

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     CONTENTS

       
Introduction by John Ralston Saul

  
1   A Meeting

  
2   The Past

  
3   Victoria

  
4   A Student of Art

  
5   A Canadian Abroad

  
6   Vancouver

  
7   In the French Style

  
8   The Wild Beast

  
9   How to Be a Woman

10   Female Hysteria

11   The Edge of Nowhere

12   The Great Stillness

13   In the Wilderness

14   A Canadian Artist

15   Lawren

16   Some Ladies Prefer Indians

17   Sophie

18   Animals

19   The Face in the Mirror

20   The Painter

21   The Loves of Emily

22   Her Little Book

23   Into the Mystic

24   The Failure and Success of Emily Carr

25   Epitaph

     
CHRONOLOGY

     
SOURCES

How do civilizations imagine themselves? One way is for each of us to look at ourselves through our society's most remarkable figures. I'm not talking about hero worship or political iconography. That is a danger to be avoided at all costs. And yet people in every country do keep on going back to the most important people in their past.

This series of Extraordinary Canadians brings together rebels, reformers, martyrs, writers, painters, thinkers, political leaders. Why? What is it that makes them relevant to us so long after their deaths?

For one thing, their contributions are there before us, like the building blocks of our society. More important than that are their convictions and drive, their sense of what is right and wrong, their willingness to risk all, whether it be their lives, their reputations, or simply being wrong in public. Their ideas, their triumphs and failures, all of these some-how constitute a mirror of our society. We look at these people, all dead, and discover what we have been, but also
what we can be. A mirror is an instrument for measuring ourselves. What we see can be both a warning and an encouragement.

These eighteen biographies of twenty key Canadians are centred on the meaning of each of their lives. Each of them is very different, but these are not randomly chosen great figures. Together they produce a grand sweep of the creation of modern Canada, from our first steps as a democracy in 1848 to our questioning of modernity late in the twentieth century.

All of them except one were highly visible on the cutting edge of their day while still in their twenties, thirties, and forties. They were young, driven, curious. An astonishing level of fresh energy surrounded them and still does. We in the twenty-first century talk endlessly of youth, but power today is often controlled by people who fear the sort of risks and innovations embraced by everyone in this series. A number of them were dead—hanged, infected on a battlefield, broken by their exertions—well before middle age. Others hung on into old age, often profoundly dissatisfied with themselves.

Each one of these people has changed you. In some cases you know this already. In others you will discover how through these portraits. They changed the way the world hears music, thinks of war, communicates. They changed
how each of us sees what surrounds us, how minorities are treated, how we think of immigrants, how we look after each other, how we imagine ourselves through what are now our stories.

You will notice that many of them were people of the word. Not just the writers. Why? Because civilizations are built around many themes, but they require a shared public language. So Laurier, Bethune, Douglas, Riel, LaFontaine, McClung, Trudeau, Lévesque, Big Bear, even Carr and Gould, were masters of the power of language. Beaverbrook was one of the most powerful newspaper publishers of his day. Countries need action and laws and courage. But civilization is not a collection of prime ministers. Words, words, words—it is around these that civilizations create and imagine themselves.

The authors I have chosen for each subject are not the obvious experts. They are imaginative, questioning minds from among our leading writers and activists. They have, each one of them, a powerful connection to their subject. And in their own lives, each is engaged in building what Canada is now becoming.

That is why a documentary is being filmed around each subject. Images are yet another way to get at each subject and to understand their effect on us.

There has not been a biographical project as ambitious as this in a hundred years, not since the Makers of Canada series. And yet every generation understands the past differently, and so sees in the mirror of these remarkable figures somewhat different lessons.

What strikes me again and again is just how dramatically ethical decisions figured in their lives. They form the backbone of history and memory. Some of these people, Big Bear, for example, or Dumont, or even Lucy Maud Montgomery, thought of themselves as failures by the end of their lives. But the ethical cord that was strung taut through their work has now carried them on to a new meaning and even greater strength, long after their deaths.

Each of these stories is a revelation of the tough choices unusual people must make to find their way. And each of us as readers will find in the desperation of the Chinese revolution, the search for truth in fiction, the political and military dramas, different meanings that strike a personal chord. At first it is that personal emotive link to such figures which draws us in. Then we find they are a key that opens the whole society of their time to us. Then we realize that in that 150-year period many of them knew each other, were friends, opposed each other. Finally, when all these stories are put together, you will see that a whole new debate has
been created around Canadian civilization and the shape of our continuous experiment.

Emily Carr is like an iron rod running through this whole debate. I had always felt there was something deeply rigorous and original in her paintings. Here Lewis DeSoto has found a way to the heart of her toughness. Art historians like to talk about how painters were influenced by others. Many Canadian art historians prefer to see our painters as not just influenced by, but derivative of, European schools. Certainly Carr picked up things here and there. Every painter everywhere does that. But what is remarkable is just how original Carr is. Along with Paul-Émile Borduas, she is our greatest painter. She somehow summoned up the deep heart not just of the British Columbia forest, but of Canada as forest and Canada as Aboriginal. That's why people all over the country so instinctively identify with her images. This mysterious place is us. Emily Carr, with her toughness and humour and writing skills, is a sharp reminder of how edgy Canadians need to be to occupy this enormous, difficult space.

I didn't like Emily Carr. The paintings, that is. I knew nothing of the woman herself. I first encountered her work when I was studying painting in Vancouver at what would later be renamed the Emily Carr College of Art and Design, housed in a building within sight of the spot where she once had a studio.

When I used to visit the Vancouver Art Gallery, it seemed as though most of the rooms were given over to Carr's paintings—dark and brooding pictures of forests and totem poles. What I wanted to see instead was the new, bright, contemporary art that was being made in New York and London, not paintings made a hundred years ago by some little old lady who lived in the woods.

Some years later, a painter myself and interested in the landscape, I paid a visit to my father on Saturna Island, an hour's boat ride from Victoria. One afternoon, I took what I thought was a shortcut back from the cove and somehow missed a fork in the path. Within minutes I found myself
standing alone in the deep forest that covers most of the island.