Hundreds and Thousands (2 page)

Because of the 1966 publisher’s foreword to
Hundreds and Thousands
, readers have been led to believe that Carr actually wrote her journals with a view to their eventual publication. There is no documentary evidence at all for this. Indeed, during the years when she was writing them, no such notion could have
entered her head, since the stories that she was crafting with such great care throughout the 1930s were invariably returned to her with rejection slips. We know that she often despaired of there being any public at all for her writing. Carr wrote these journals for herself — to record events important to her that she did not want to forget, to vent feelings of joy or anger that she could not share with anyone, to clarify her ideas on art and painting or on religion. Despite her talents and forthright personality, Carr felt painfully vulnerable and self-conscious when it came to her creative work and deepest feelings. She could not bear to be watched while painting and was horrified when she discovered that Lawren Harris had shared some of her letters with mutual friends in Toronto. “After that I could not write so freely … I could not write my innermost thoughts if
anybody
was to read them,” she noted in her journal (p.
44
). The fact that she left her personal journals to Ira Dilworth is consistent with her complete trust in and love for him, and with her desire that he should know her fully. It is unlikely she would have written so frankly if she had thought they would be published. We cannot know absolutely that Carr never discussed their possible publication in conversation with Dilworth, but his statement in 1945 suggests that they were a discovery when he received them upon her death. We can also guess that she would have trusted him in any decision he made in their regard, but that she would have felt horrified to see her most naked thoughts on a printed page.

In the event, Dilworth’s transcription of the journals from the twenty notebooks in which they were interspersed with drafts of some of Carr’s stories was incomplete when he died in 1962. One of his heirs, Phyllis Inglis, brought them to Clarke, Irwin and Co., where the process was completed by the firm’s
editor, Ruth Don Carlos, under the supervision of Irene and William Clarke, with assistance in the checking of names and facts from various authorities, particularly Carr’s long-time friend Flora Burns. The publisher’s editorial decisions were based on Dilworth’s policy of respecting “the spontaneous eccentricities of her style” (p.
18
) while correcting her spelling and punctuation, and of omitting repetitions, passages that dealt with the private affairs of people still alive and what was regarded as material of too personal a nature. This resulted in considerable cuts to pages where Carr discussed sexual matters or negative and upsetting experiences: for example, her frequent conflicts with her elder sister Lizzie, memories of her quarrel with her father after the so-called “brutal telling” when he told her the “facts of life” in what seemed to her a bestial fashion and her oblique references to an early intense but unrequited love. These and other passages have been discussed and published by Susan Crean in
Opposite Contraries: The Unknown Journals of Emily Carr and Other Writings.
³
They fill in some darker shadows in Carr’s life that could not be publicly discussed in 1966, when rigid standards of decorum were still upheld by Carr’s many surviving friends and supporters.

Although the journals give the reader many insights into Carr’s life during the years 1927–41, they should not be confused either with autobiography or with memoirs. Those forms of writing are found in Carr’s other books, but they involve planning, structure and considered perspective. It is important to realize just how selective, spontaneous and accidentally fragmentary the journals are. Carr started these journals soon after ending a decade of artistic inactivity due to economic difficulties and the complete lack of an audience for modern art in
British Columbia. The journals begin, appropriately, with the epoch-making three weeks in 1927 when she travelled across Canada by rail from Victoria to Ottawa and Toronto to participate in the National Gallery’s
Exhibition of West Coast Art, Native and Modern.
She records the explosive impact on her of her first meetings with members of the Group of Seven, of the revelation that there was now a successful modern art movement in eastern Canada and her own conflicting emotions of joy and disbelief at being accepted by the National Gallery and by members of the Group as a respected colleague. After describing these momentous experiences, which would provide inspiration for the rest of her career, Carr did not immediately continue the journal. She threw herself with renewed energy into her painting activities, travelling in 1928 to First Nations villages in northern British Columbia, where she had worked in 1907–12, to make a record in paint of the totem poles and villages, and also into sketching the forested landscape near Victoria. We thus have few written reflections by her during the highly experimental phase of her work in 1928–30, mainly a handful of letters to friends. Her correspondence with Lawren Harris at this time (letters which unfortunately he did not keep) was very important to her. Harris’s letters to her (carefully preserved by Carr) “made many things clear, and the unaccustomed putting down of my own thoughts in black and white helped me to clarify them and to find out my own aims and beliefs” (p.
44
). She noted this as one of her motivations when she resumed writing her journals more consistently at the end of November 1930. She now set herself some specific goals: “Yesterday I went to town and bought this book to enter scraps in, not a diary of statistics and dates … but just to jot me down in, unvarnished me … It
seems to me it helps to write things and thoughts down … It sorts out jumbled up thoughts and helps to clarify them, and I want my thoughts clear and straight for my work.” An important purpose of the journal, then, was to assist her in thinking through issues in her work and to reinforce her resolve to make her own contribution to “an art worthy of our great country … to put in a little spoke for the West, one woman holding up my end” (p.
24
). She found this useful and stimulating. “If you don’t write things down where do they go?” she asked herself in 1935. “Into the lazy bog of neglected opportunities … Inertia and deadness” (p.
238
).

The journals became increasingly important to Carr as the 1930s went on and her ties with her friends and colleagues in central Canada faded, particularly after Lawren Harris’s remarriage and departure to the United States in 1934 (p.
215
). During that time, they became the chief arena where she examined her experiences and thoughts. “Little book,” she sometimes began her entries, as though talking to a cherished friend (pp.
95
,
96
,
195
). But after the major heart attack of 1937 that put Carr into hospital for a month and resulted in severe limits on what she could do, the journals waned and her story writing activities increased, as she completed
Klee Wyck
and began to develop further collections of stories. A mere 76 of the 440 pages of
Hundreds and Thousands
give us sparse glimpses of the next four years until the last entry on March 7, 1941.

It was in 1940 that Ira Dilworth invited one of Carr’s mentors, Dr. Garnett Sedgewick, to read her stories on
CBC
radio, and that the friendship between her and Dilworth began. By 1941, their relationship had developed into a regular correspondence that took the place of Carr’s journal writing. That solitary dance in front of the mirror had never fully assuaged her loneliness,
and it was now replaced by a friend who reflected her back to herself with appreciation and understanding. In 1935, she had written: “Why are there days when … one
longs
for somebody with their whole soul? … Somebody with no body or appearance but with an enormous love and sympathy who would not only give to you but call out from you oceans of sweetness and the lovely feel of giving it out with a lavish hand to someone who
wanted
it, giving it generously and unashamed” (p.
236
). The journals ended because Carr’s wish had come true.

What light do the journals throw on Carr’s life as an artist? As she stated, they are “not a diary of statistics and dates” (p.
43
), so for an account of her exhibiting career and reception we must turn to the art historians. In the journals, we find the day-to-day subjective experiences of an artist who has to put bread on the table and keep a roof over her head. We hear about her frustration with curators who let months elapse before returning her work (usually because they were promoting it for further exhibitions, but with no tangible results for Carr in her remote backwater). Being included in shows was some acknowledgement of the value of her art, but during the Depression of the 1930s, though Carr’s artistic output grew, she was making so few sales that she was still unable to cover the cost of making her art. Her grievance over this was justified, for in the meantime the National Gallery had almost uninterruptedly continued to buy works by the Group of Seven. The National Gallery had bought three 1912 watercolours from her in 1928, but bought none of her new, artistically much bolder works until 1937, when her heart attack placed her virtually at death’s door. Carr in the meantime had difficulty scraping together the cost of having her work crated and shipped for shows in central Canada.

The journals also show Carr’s changing perspectives on her relations with members of the Group of Seven, her comments on art books, on lectures that she attended, on her contacts with younger artists like her Chinese friends Lee Nam
⁴
and Mayo Tong and with the generation of young British Columbia artists represented by Edythe Hembroff, Max Maynard and Jack Shad-bolt, as well as on the varied visitors to her studio. The journals are a rich resource of details on Carr’s artistic goals and evolution during the 1930s. We follow her articulation of what is important to her: the importance of pursuing “an idea, a feeling … the something that interested or inspired you sufficiently to make you desire to express it” (pp.
49
–50), that will make the picture a thought rather than just a pleasing design (p.
50
). We find descriptions of many of her well-known paintings in progress, together with the thoughts and feelings that she wished to express through them: memories of visits to lonely First Nations villages (for example, pp.
50
–52) or her observations of nature through the different seasons and the environments of forest, field and seashore, conveyed through the flow of movement and space. We follow her search for a new visual language with which to render her responses to the landscape, experiments with large charcoal compositions (p.
49
) and later with oil paints diluted with gasoline so that she could paint fluidly and swiftly on large sheets of inexpensive paper (pp.
60
,
150
–51,
154
–55).

In many vivid passages in the journals, Carr describes her intense responses and relationship to the landscape. There are vivid evocations of her various camping places — both the pictorial ideas for which she finds “themes everywhere, something sublime, something ridiculous, or joyous, or calm, or mysterious” (p.
265
) and her immersion in the activities of insects, birds,
wind and rain. From the window beside her bed in the caravan, she sees “the sea and the stars at night as thick as the daisies by day” (p.
170
) or, when it rains, she registers the infinite variety of sounds made by the water falling on her canvas tent fly, in drops, splashes, and downpours (p.
265
). Nearer to home, she derives constant inspiration from her walks on Beacon Hill or the beach (pp.
53
,
161
–62). Again and again, she analyzes in words what she perceives and wants to capture in paint. One day, she finds “High and blue sky, straggle of distant pines and stumps and dry grass in the foreground, and all soused in light and vibrating with glow” (p.
208
). Another day, “There is a sea of sallal and bracken, waving, surging, rolling towards you … Perfectly ordered disorder designed with a helter-skelter magnificence. How can one express all this?” (p.
273
). Then, “I have started a woods canvas. I am aiming at a trembling upward movement full of light and joy” (p.
391
). Carr’s word pictures vibrate with the same life that fills her paintings.

One element that may seem strange to many contemporary readers is Carr’s way of continually interweaving art with religion. “There is no true art without religion,” she writes in 1933. “The artist himself may not think he is religious but if he is sincere his sincerity in itself is religion” (p.
69
). “Every living thing is God made manifest. All real art is the eternal seeking to express God, the one substance out of which all things are made” (p.
55
). The religious search chronicled in her journals and her interest in free-thinking approaches that were open to the experience of different world religions were Carr’s means of breaking free from the conformist Christian upbringing that continued to dominate her family circle. She was drawn to the theosophy then current in artistic circles, to which Lawren Harris was her link —
“his religion, whatever it is, and his painting are one and the same” she wrote in 1927 (p.
38
). It is significant that theosophy was also important to her European contemporaries such as Piet Mondrian and Wassily Kandinsky, who found in it an assurance that art was a means of expressing higher realities through visual forms. Although Carr ultimately rejected theosophy as too austere and abstract, the vitalist and pantheist language that she found in the poems of Walt Whitman encouraged her to translate her intense emotional responses to the world of nature, her deep empathy with woods and sea and sky, into her own language of mystical union. Whether or not we accept her equation of these experiences with religion, it is clear that they assisted her to find a convincing metaphorical force and intensity in her landscape imagery.