Hundreds and Thousands (35 page)

Sheep and other creatures have made a few trails. It will be best to stick to these. The sallal is tough and stubborn, rose and blackberry thorny. There are the fallen logs and mossy stumps, the thousand varieties of growth and shapes and obstacles, the dips and hollows, hillocks and mounds, riverbeds, forests of young pines and spruce piercing up through the tangle to get to the quiet light diluted through the overhanging branches of great overtopping trees. Should you sit down, the great, dry, green sea would sweep over and engulf you. If you called out, a thousand echoes would mock back. If you wrestle with the growth it will strike back. If you listen it will talk, if you jabber it will shut up tight, stay inside itself. If you
let
yourself get “creepy,” creepy you can be. If you face it calmly, claiming relationship, standing honestly before the trees, recognizing one Creator of you and them, one life pulsing through all, one mystery engulfing all, then you can say with the Psalmist who looked for a place to build a tabernacle to the Lord, I “found it in the hills and in the fields of the wood.”

The year’s last month. Everything broods today, the sky low and heavy. Was there ever a sun? Where has he gone? Nor ray, nor warmth has he left behind him. There is a heavy, waiting feel (like you get in a dentist’s ante-room waiting your turn).

A dumpish day — cold spreading from the feet up, the sodden earth piercing up through your boot soles, jeering at your stockings, and aching your feet to the ankle.

People have been to see the puppies. They are four weeks old, like a box full of precious gems, sparkling and perfect. I hate to sell, to take filthy money for life and love. Isn’t it horrid to mate creatures so that lives may be produced that we may sell those lives and use the money to feed ourselves and keep our lives going? Life is all wheels within wheels!

Life, life, how difficult! The horrible doubts that come, that brood over you and eat into the very marrow, turning the whole world into an ache! This morning’s mail brought an envelope full of theosophical literature. Once it interested me, now it sends me into a rage of revolt. I burnt the whole thing. I thought they had something, Lawren, Bess, Fred, something I wanted. I tried to see things in their light, to see my painting through theosophy. All the time, in the back of my soul, I was sore at their attitude to Christ, their jeering at some parts of the Bible. Raja Singh came; I hurled H.P. Blavatsky across the room. Who was she to set herself up? Who was she to be a know-it-all of life and death? I wrote to those in the East, told them I’d gone back to the beliefs of childhood. The exchanged letters cut all the real bonds between us. Now there is a great yawn — unbridgeable — their way and my way; the gap is filled with silence.

Real success must be this — to feel down in your own soul that the thing you have striven for has been accomplished. To this must be added the appreciation of the thing done by those
you love and whose appreciation you value. The person who counts is the person who has nothing to gain, who lets himself go out to meet the thing you have been striving to create, the nameless something that carries beyond, what your finger cannot point to.

I am sixty-three tomorrow and have not yet known real success. When someone comes to my door I hide my canvas, as if it was something shameful, before I open to a stranger. If people ask to see my pictures I show reluctantly. It is
torture
to exhibit to some. I say to myself, “Why? Is this some type of ingrowing conceit?” But I can’t say. I do not know the answer. If anybody whose judgment meant anything real to me came, I would be very glad. But I do not know of any such person — an absolutely honest soul. There is something down deep in our own selves that is our critic and our judge. Everybody carries his own judge and jury round inside him and tries to dodge them too, or to argue them down and sass them back.

A friend brought me today a piece from
Saturday Night.
A man who had been to my studio wrote it.

WORLD OF ART
*
by G. Campbell McInnes
I have made the acquaintance recently of one of the most sincere,
forceful and genuinely artistic personalities it has been my
pleasure to meet. She is Miss Emily Carr, of Victoria, B.C., who
is having a showing at the Women’s Art Association at 23 Prince

*
Saturday Night
, Vol. 51, No. 5, Dec. 7, 1935. By permission.

Arthur Avenue. She calls her pictures “Impressions of British Columbia”; she does herself less than justice. Impressions they may be, but so striking, so vivid, so full of the real
furor poeticus,
that they are unforgettable.

She paints quickly and with a fierceness and passion that are completely convincing. Her technique is astonishing. Viewed closely, the sheer audacity of her rapid brush strokes compels admiration, while each picture, regarded as a whole, has in it the concentrated essence of the impact of a deeply sensitive and fervent nature on a scene for which she feels with an intensity that only prolonged study and profound conviction can bring.

Painting to her is almost a religious experience, but there is no suggestion of a sentimental mysticism. Rather there is, in her work, despite its strength and dynamic movement, a joyous quality reminiscent of the early work of Vlaminck. But Vlaminck has since become what the cruel French call a
faiseur;
Miss Carr is a great artist and will never do that. I should not like to think that anyone would miss this exhibition. They will meet an artist who is, in her own way, as
possessed
with the creative urge as that powerful and tragic figure of the last century whose name was Vincent Van Gogh.

I felt dreadfully embarrassed and blushed up when she read it out.

Today writing Christmas letters, saying the usual easy, tossed-off) “Merrys,” the same “Happy New Years.” This 1936, what will it bring to the world? Will the nations rush at each other’s throats
and spill each other’s blood? One can only wait day by day with one’s hand on the little day-by-day jobs. I wonder if I shall crawl from under the weight of my house this year. I have ceased dreading the change; the wait has become irksome, unbearable. The house is like a jail about me. I feel curiously hard now, tired of it all. Honour has come to me here; some of the flattering things said in my studio have rung true. I feel to the house like a bird must to her last year’s nest. What happens to the old birds that are beyond nesting? That has always been a wonderment to me.

Not so cranky today. I guess the liver is the seat of the Devil anyhow. Mercy, but Alice is patient with all those people’s rasping brats and, worse than them, the mammas, papas and grands.

People have been looking my house over. I would not care so much if they confined their looks to the house. They prod the walls, smell up the chimneys, poke into cupboards, investigate leaks, examine the furnace’s inside with lighted newspaper. One expects all that. But they don’t stop at that; they examine
me,
and I resent it. I suppose your home is full of yourself, your own little notions and mannerisms and hobbies and idiosyncrasies, the use you’ve put things to, the stamp of yourself on your own things. These things they smile at and remark on. That is not their business. You are not trying to sell these things any more than you are trying to sell yourself. I resent being a show for strangers, exposing the me-ness of my home, and I shiver when they peer and discuss the personality in my studio, my mode of painting and living. “And she keeps a monkey!” “And she has a van and takes all the creatures!” “And… .” “And… .” “And… .” And I pull them back severely to the money value, income-bearing properties, to the garden, the chimney, the big windows, the
high ceilings. Then there is a bellow, “Look at the chairs hanging from the ceiling!” What business of theirs where I keep my chairs? I’d strap them round my waist so that they’d naturally sit me whenever I bent, if I
wanted
to. I want to hit out, but also I want to sell, so I bottle down. But I sizzle sometimes like a tap without a new washer.

These nights the mists lie low across the lake and among the pines. They drench the earth, more penetrating than rain. Five pines, thin, gawky ones, point up over the top of the mist like long fingers with the palm they belong to down in the mist. When you look straight up you see above the mist and the sky is a deep blue-black peppered with stars. Stars frighten me and that awful space between you and them, terrifying, unknown, filled with lights and colours and sounds that we don’t know yet. Even I can remember when the park was full of woods and wild flowers, and owls hooted and there were lady-slippers and wild lilies and the lakes were swampy pools with thick straggly growth round and in them. In winter we slid on the ponds. In summer they covered up with green slime and frogs hatched there and croaked madly. The flowers that grow in the park now would turn up their noses, if they had them, at the flowers that grew then. I, walking there, am as different to what I was than as all the rest is different to what it was.

We have just had our present-giving at Alice’s, just we three old girls. Alice’s house was full of the smell of new bread. The loaves were piled on the kitchen table; the dining-room table was piled with parcels, things changing hands. This is our system and works well: we agree on a stated amount — it is small because our
big giving is birthdays. Each of us buys something for ourselves to our own liking, goods amounting to the stated sums. We bring them along and Christmas Eve, with kissings and thankings, accept them from each other — homely, practical little wants, torch batteries, hearth brooms, coffee strainers, iron handles, etc. It’s lots of fun. We lit four red candles in the window and drank ginger ale and ate Christmas cake and new bread and joked and discussed today and tomorrow and yesterday and compared tiredness and rheumatics and rejoiced that Christmas came only once per year. We love each other, we three; with all our differences we are very close.

Praise be! It’s over! Why do we do it? It is not Christian. Oh, I’d have
loved
to sneak off to the woods and be hidden, the week before and the week behind Christmas, and remember the real meaning of it and give thanks in my heart. I love my friends for their kind thoughts of me, but it’s all wrong; it’s cheap and commercial and fluffy. You can point to all the full churches and special music and decorations, but what does it all
mean
to them? The girls would say shame and shame again on me. I get more rebellious every year.

THE GIRLS ARE IN
Vancouver. How strange to pass Lizzie’s house and see her rooms dark and then Alice’s house and see that dark too, to know I can’t dongle their telephone bells or run in. My spirit is still black and smarting. I can’t think why it riled up against Christmas so this year. It kicked with its boots on. It did not want to do, or see, or be; it wanted to hide away from the fuss and weariness. Liver, I suspect.

Two would-be art critics came to the studio. They were “pose-y,” waved their paws describing sweeps and motions in my pictures, screwed their eyes, made monocles of their fists, discoursed on aesthetics, asked prices, and expounded on technique. One paints a little and teaches a lot, the other “aesthetics” with I do not quite know what aim. Both think women and their works beneath contempt but ask to come to the studio on every occasion. Why?

Nineteen thirty-five has two hours more to run. Then 1936 and what? What will the poor old world get up to?

BECKLEY STREET 1936

1936 has sniveled in. The darkness held hard as though the first day did not want to start. It did not blow or bluster; it just wept down-heartedly as if it did not know quite what was the matter. I wonder will it find out before the year ends. The man next door let his guests out of the house at 5:55 a.m. They were not noisy. In fact they seemed depressed, though one man kept wishing Harry “Merry Christmas.” Old “Two-Bitty,” the aged Chinaman, came half an hour late to do the chores. When I expostulated with him he groaned, “No care. Me too welly tired.” Fellow feeling made my wrath dry up. He
is
very old. His breath is gaspy and he collects heaps of boxes to mount his basket to his shoulder because he can’t swing it up. He loves his dinner. I try to make it tasty for the poor soul — his head is so bald.