Hundreds and Thousands (3 page)

The journals also provide a fascinating picture of Carr’s everyday world and social environment as she experienced it. They have been an important source for social historians as well as for her biographers. Unfortunately, one very important aspect of her life is hardly represented, partly because of the journals’ specific time span and partly by editorial decision — her contact with First Nations cultures on the Northwest Coast, which formed such an important basis for her entire work. In 1929, Carr recorded her experiences and observations on sketching trips to Pacheedaht (Port Renfrew) and to Yuquot on Nootka island, and in August 1930 to Alert Bay, Fort Rupert and Quatsino, but these were omitted from the published version of the journals. Some of this material has been included in Susan Crean’s
Opposite Contraries
, and Carr’s preoccupation with her memories of the First Nations villages she had visited is evident in the stories in
Klee Wyck
, which she was writing throughout the 1930s.

When it comes to her social environment in Victoria, Carr uses her lively command of language to weave a tapestry of the life around her. Her observations are down to earth and often unexpected. We catch her impressed by the comments of her chimney sweep on “the state of Russia and communism and soul-stirring things! He knew lots more than me” (p.
218
), or pondering that “it must be rather illuminating to be a garbage man — the dregs of human discards pouring out of the big, dirty cans: dust and mildew, mold, decay, roots and parings, papers full of old news that has flared in the world and gone out” (p.
320
). Or, after purchasing her first radio, her “strange nervous loathing, as if the power of the thing was using me to pass through, like drawing a nutmeg grater across a piece of satin” (p.
313
).

The most intriguing aspect of the journals is the direct and unguarded reflection that Carr gives of herself and her self-image. She reveals her emotional temperament and her mood swings, often in a humorous way. “Things can be altogether abominable and they are today” (p.
210
). “Well, today has been like a day of lead. Why are there days when yeast, gunpowder and champagne are lifeless and you are brown and sagging as a rotten apple?” (p.
236
). Fortunately, there are also happy days: “I’m just whizzy! Sold four pictures … Everything seemed shining today, from the freshly cleaned house and the sleek new pups to sunny little ‘Mrs. Bird’ [her neighbour’s six-year-old daughter] and my visitors” (p.
334
). Among the themes in her journals that have struck commentators are her frequent laments about loneliness and the lack of friends. “I haven’t one friend of my own age and generation. I wish I had … I haven’t a
single thing
in common with them” (p.
199
). This kind of complaint records an emotional state rather than a literal fact. Carr may often have
felt and acted like an outsider, but there is plenty of evidence in the journals that she was respected, befriended and appreciated by the growing body of people, especially younger people, engaged in the arts and education in Victoria and even in Vancouver. This was not enough to offset Carr’s sense of rejection, which had become ingrained since the death of her parents in her early teens. The journals show how dependent she remained on a family of sisters with whom she felt painfully mismatched (p.
133
). There are fleeting moments of harmony with her sisters — “we three old girls” (pp.
224
,
288
) — but the clashes are inevitable and bring out memories of long-standing family conflicts. Often, too, she vents her frustration at not being understood with angry or spiteful descriptions of people who irritate her. Just as often she reproaches herself for uncharitable thoughts, ill-temper or selfishness. This has made it easy for commentators to belabour the image of Carr the cross-tempered misfit, but the journals also show us why she had so many faithful friends. Her vitality, her sense of the absurd, her romantic’s intensity of response to the world within her and around her, and her ability to express all this in striking and original words made her a challenging and stimulating companion.

With the advent of feminist scholarship, we have come to understand more clearly the sacrifices that women of Carr’s time had to make if they chose to devote themselves to a serious art career. For most of them, it ruled out marriage. Those of her younger contemporaries who lived in large metropolitan centres —Georgia O’Keeffe in New York and Virginia Woolf in London, for example — might find artistic communities of peers and sometimes equally creative partners with whom to share their lives. Carr’s own life as a spinster in a provincial society,
and the drudgery to which she had to resort to earn a living and make her art despite the poverty in which she was trapped, turned her into a figure of ridicule for many people during her lifetime. The defiance and anger with which she faced these conditions inflated her legend as an eccentric but made it possible for her to survive.

After Emily Carr died on March 2, 1945, Kathleen Coburn, an instructor in English literature at the University of Toronto, made a prophetic claim: “She lives and will live by her complete candor as a writer and artist, a candor at times almost brutal.”
⁵
These journals, more than any of Carr’s other writings, bring us the private world and longings of a forceful yet sensitive and highly complex woman. They allow us to travel alongside her and to experience for ourselves the cost and the gains of the determined efforts through which her artistic creativity reached its height.

ENDNOTES

1
See Linda Morra, ed.,
Corresponding Influence: Selected Letters of Emily Carr and Ira Dilworth
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 271. 2

2
“Exhibit Works of Emily Carr,”
Globe and Mail
, Toronto, October 20, 1945, unsigned.

3
Susan Crean,
Opposite Contraries: The Unknown Journals of Emily Carr and Other Writings
(Vancouver/Toronto/Berkeley: Douglas & McIntyre, 2003).

4
In Emily Carr’s manuscripts, the name Lee Nam is variously spelled Lee Nan and Lee Nam. In
Hundreds and Thousands,
the editors used Lee Nan. However, since Nam is the more common Cantonese name, that is the spelling that I have adopted in my introduction.

5
Kathleen Coburn, “Emily Carr: In Memoriam,”
Canadian Forum,
April 25, 1945, 24.

PREFACE
to the
FIRST EDITION

WHY CALL THIS
manuscript
Hundreds and Thousands?
Because it is made up of scraps of nothing which, put together, made the trimming and furnished the sweetness for what might otherwise have been a drab life sucked away without crunch. Hundreds and Thousands are minute candies made in England — round sweetnesses, all colours and so small that separately they are not worth eating. But to eat them as we ate them in childhood was a different matter. Father would take the big fat bottle off his sample shelf in his office and say, “Hold out your hands.” Father tipped and poured, and down bobbed our three hands and out came our three tongues and licked in the Hundreds and Thousands, and lapped them up, lovely and sweet and crunchy.

It was these tiny things that, collectively, taught me how to live. Too insignificant to have been considered individually, but like the Hundreds and Thousands lapped up and sticking to our moist tongues, the little scraps and nothingnesses of my life have made a definite pattern. Only now, when the river has nearly reached the sea and small eddies gush up into the river’s mouth and repulse the sluggish onflow, have they made a pattern
in the mud flats, before gurgling out into the sea. Thank you, tiny Hundreds and Thousands. Thanks, before you merge into the great waters.

From a notebook found among Miss Carr’s papers

PUBLISHER’S FOREWORD
to the
FIRST EDITION

FROM LETTERS FOUND
among her papers we know that Emily Carr intended her journals to be published. She even thought of the title,
Hundreds and Thousands,
and her explanation of the choice is contained in the preface to this volume. In a letter to Ira Dilworth, her literary executor, she says, “I have been planning all summer to do with
Hundreds and Thousands
as I did with the Biography and give it to you as my Christmas present. Of course it will be yours in any case, but perhaps it would seem especially yours that way… . I think it is something I shall have to keep working on as long as I live.”

In the journals Miss Carr poured out her private thoughts. The notebooks were, she said, “to jot me down in, unvarnished me, old at fifty-eight… .” What emerges is indeed the unvarnished Emily Carr, who often felt old and tired and crotchety, often discouraged and doubting, but who was always honest and true to her own ideals. The jottings present a vivid, revealing self-portrait of an intensely interesting person.

The work of preparing the journals for publication was commenced by Ira Dilworth after Miss Carr’s death. He began the monumental task of transcribing the notebooks from the artist’s
handwriting. The publishers have carried on where he left off, with the support of Dr. Dilworth’s niece and heir, Mrs. Phyllis Inglis of Vancouver.

In this task the publishers have taken as their guide the author’s expressed views on the editing of her writing. She objected violently to being polished and said at one point, “I don’t know how much one should be influenced by critics. I
do know
my mechanics are poor. I realize that when I read good literature, but I know lots of excellently written stuff says nothing. Is it better to say nothing politely or to say
something
poorly? I suppose only if one says something ultra-honest, ultra-true, some deep realizing of life, can it make the grade, ride over the top, having surmounted mechanics.” At another point she said, “Flora is correcting and it galls me. She has command of English; I have not. I am glad of the help; I want it. But when she and Ruth have finished with them, I hate my manuscripts. I feel that the writer (me) is a pedantic prig. If they’d only
punctuate
and let me be me and leave them at the best I can do… .” Taking this as their terms of reference, the publishers have refrained from tidying up the author’s sentences, but have sought always to preserve the spontaneous eccentricities of her style.