Opposite Contraries (2 page)

In addition to the original journals, the Emily Carr archive contains her collected papers, correspondence and the manuscripts of her books. Among them, in typescript, is the short autobiography that Carr wrote at the time she first went to eastern Canada in 1927 and also the text of a presentation she gave about the Beacon Hill Galleries in 1932; this latter was her idea for a public gallery in Victoria. Both documents are published here for the first time. In longhand, and at much greater length, is the “Lecture on Totems” that Carr delivered in 1913 on the occasion of her first major exhibition in Vancouver. She had rented the Dominion Hall on Pender Street, framed and hung two hundred of her sketches and canvases, most of them dealing with Native imagery, and invited the public to attend. Twice during the week-long exhibit, she gave a public talk about the paintings, explaining how they came to be made, how she had travelled up the Skeena River and to the Queen Charlotte Islands (Haida Gwaii) to record the carvings of a “disappearing” and “primitive” people. Quoting the white experts of the day and alluding to a Native informant, she gives a description of what
the images and totems were thought to signify in Native culture, what animals the various figures represented and so forth. Here, the seeds of
Klee Wyck
are planted; and, here, Carr recounts the story of her naming for the first time.

The “Lecture on Totems” is often mentioned and quoted in books about Carr. However, few people are aware that sections of
Klee Wyck
have been expurgated in the versions that followed the original Oxford University Press edition published in 1941. One whole story, “Martha’s Joey,” was removed, and several passages from two others, “Ucluelet” (about her first trip to a Native community in 1899) and “Friends”; as well, short bits from “Tanoo” and “Sophie” were deleted. “Martha’s Joey” was restored in
The Complete Writings of Emily Carr
published by Douglas & McIntyre in 1993, and along with the deleted sections from the other stories is restored and republished here.

What else did my search uncover? The story of the feud between Emily and her niece, Una Boultbee. Details of the “brutal telling” and of Carr’s unnamed first love. And evidence of her obsession with Bess Harris, and what Carr perceived as Bess’s betrayal of their friendship. Carr had first known Bess Harris as Bess Housser, wife of the writer and theosophist Fred Housser. In 1934, the couple divorced, as did Lawren Harris and his wife, Trixie. Lawren and Bess subsequently married each other. Carr was one of the last to know about the “bust up,” and she always felt that Bess had been dishonest in not telling her sooner.

The search also revealed a good deal about Sophie Frank, the First Nations woman whom Carr met in Vancouver in 1906, including information that shows her to be a literate person
with much to contribute to Carr’s artistic project as well as her emotional life. She could well be the “Squamish Indian” whom Carr mentions as a source in her “Lecture on Totems.” And she is definitely the friend Carr commemorates when she dedicated
Klee Wyck
“To Sophie.” The letters written by Sophie Frank (and the one from her husband, Jimmy Frank, to Carr, following Sophie’s death in 1939), are the only documents in this volume not written by Carr. They are included because of their singular importance to the record and because, together with the heretofore unpublished passages about Sophie Frank in Carr’s journals, they give substance to the friendship between the two women. One of the letters, written on August 6, 1915, has been published before, by Edythe Hembroff-Schleicher in
Emily Carr: The Untold Story
(page 102), but it is included here so that the small collection can been seen together.

And, finally, Emily Carr’s correspondence with Ira Dilworth also adds to our knowledge about her emotional life, being a record of one of the few intimate friendships she sustained in her life. Like the relationship with Sophie Frank, this one, too, has largely gone unexamined by scholars. Only seven of the more than two hundred letters are printed here for reasons of space and because such a correspondence is best read with both sides of the exchange present.

Originally, I undertook the review of the Carr archive as research for a book I was writing on Carr and her legacy, called
The Laughing One: A Journey to Emily Carr.
Having benefited from the unpublished resource, and having appreciated the extent and particularity of it, I thought that more of it ought to be made accessible, that it should be put on the public record by way of being published as a book. Publisher Scott McIntyre
agreed. The next step was locating the rights owner. Carr had left all her papers and manuscripts to Ira Dilworth, and these, in turn, had been passed down to his two adopted daughters, Phylis Inglis and Edna Parnall. All this material is now in the British Columbia Archives, but the Phylis Inglis collection almost did not make it. The federal government was approached when a bid was made by a wealthy Vancouver entrepreneur to buy the papers from Mrs. Inglis. The concern was that the Carr papers might be split up and that some of them might leave the country. Emergency funds were found and the collection was bought by the National Museums Corporation in 1976 and placed in the National Archives. In 1985 the Inglis collection was returned to British Columbia, to be housed in the provincial archives in Victoria. By 1999 none of these institutions knew exactly who owned the rights to the material. For though Carr died in 1945 and the normal term of copyright in Canada (life of the artist plus fifty years) was up, changes in the Copyright Act governing the publication of unpublished text material meant that the term covering the Inglis archive would not expire until 2004. The first step was to check the legacy through the chain of wills: Carr to Dilworth, Dilworth to Inglis and Parnall — and from there to whom? It took some sleuthing, but eventually I tracked down Phylis Inglis’s son, the only progeny of the two sisters and the apparent owner of the rights in the unpublished material. He was elusive at first. Phone calls to members of the Parnall family produced shards of information but no offers of help; no one had seen him in years. Finally, I got an address and wrote directly, dreading silence or, worse, a flat rejection. Five days later the phone rang, and it was John Ira Dilworth Inglis, perfectly genial and willing
to help. He reported that his mother had loathed Emily Carr and rid herself of all the paintings and memorabilia she had the moment that Ira Dilworth died in 1962. He himself had never investigated his inheritance or seen the archive, but he was happy to see it was still being used.

With Mr. Inglis’s permission, a major portion of the Emily Carr archive now meets the light of day, notably the restored portions of the journals, Carr’s earliest autobiographical statement and the text of her first public talk. This completes the personal record as Carr herself bequeathed it. Although caches of material (mostly correspondence) still remain to be unearthed from both public and private collections, this publication, together with Carr’s already published books, represents the voice of the artist narrating her own life. That voice spans thirty-two years of her career in this volume, from her public debut as an independent artist in 1913 to the last weeks of her life in 1945.

The title of this volume comes from Emily Carr’s journals. It appears in a passage in which Carr describes a journey by train from Chicago back to Canada in 1933. “Life is full of opposite contraries,” she declares as she watches the countryside slipping by through the window, noticing turkeys roosting on barn rooftops, away from the icicles. “Opposite contraries” was indeed the way Carr viewed the world. As the journals attest, she was endlessly fascinated by differences between people and between places. Even as a child, she was attuned to the hypocrisy imbedded in the transplanted English culture of her father’s generation, and in reaction she embraced the West and its people
for what it was and what they had become. She started early down the path of difference, becoming a contrary within her family, and then remaining a contrary within Canadian society all her life. Emily Carr was a woman who consciously did things differently, and even though this difference bedevilled her, she embraced it.

Susan Crean
Gabriola Island

Emily Carr and her brother Dick in 1891. B.C. Archives I-60892

The expurgated portions of the journals of Emily Carr fall into two categories: one comprises passages, sometimes entire entries, left out of
Hundreds and Thousands
, and the other comprises a handful of short stories that are in the notebooks in which Carr kept her journals but are plainly not part of them.

What was edited out of
Hundreds and Thousands
is indicative. The story of Carr’s break with her older sister Clara’s daughter, Una Boultbee, which featured a silence of eleven or twelve years, set off by a letter that Emily saw and wasn’t supposed to, involved people who were still living in 1966 when the journals were first published. Decorum and libel laws may have suggested this be cut. To avoid repetition, a good many passages detailing angst about her family were also left out, along with several of the searing laments over her (thus far) fruitless artistic quest, a quest she viewed, more and more, as a spiritual one. The work of preparing
Hundreds and Thousands
for publication was begun by Ira Dilworth and, after he died, was completed by the publishers with the help of Phyllis Inglis. Collectively, these editors took a dim view of Carr’s gratuitous commentary, particularly her scathing remarks about people’s looks and behaviour, observed while she was attending social events or travelling about (Carr’s trip to Chicago by train in 1933 is the main example of
this). These were unceremoniously dropped from the published version. Similarly, the diatribes against her tenants seemed excessive and were trimmed. Passages of both types are included here in some number, but not in their entirety for the same reasons of excess and repetition.

The unpublished portions of the journals also contain the inside view of Carr’s spiritual return to Christianity, her struggle with theosophy having resulted in its rejection, and the initiation of a new search outside the main circle of the established Christian church and received Protestant wisdom. Here are long philosophic ruminations about the sermons of the men whom she sought out as spiritual guides: Raja Singh, Garland Anderson and Clem Davies. Almost as long but more frequent are the passages, better described as laments, about her sisters and their inability to cherish her, about her poor fit in the Carr family. These are included, too, but not exhaustively, as Carr indulged in tedious repetition on this subject — another indication that the journals were not always meant for readers and at least sometimes provided a place where she tussled with demons.

The removed sections contain some spicy commentary on the sexual politics of her day: on the fickleness of female friendship, for instance; of the disdain of married women for spinsters, and of the general untrustworthiness of men. She writes about the profundity of motherhood and, by comparison, the puny purpose of fatherhood. Observing the way these roles play out in human and animal families, she speaks of sex and her preference for the uncluttered approach of animals and her distaste for the overheated, low and dirty attitude of people. She discusses her own aversion to sex, citing horror stories and tragedies, but also, occasionally, mentions some poignant exceptions she has
observed. She expresses her conclusion that marriage is at best a mutual convenience and at worst a sham.

All of the short stories within the journal notebooks are titled, and some are easily recognizable as drafts for sections that appear in
Klee Wyck, The Book of Small
and
Growing Pains
, the latter written in the last few years of her life and published posthumously. (Carr actually compiled the manuscript of
Growing Pains
in book form, complete with a handmade cover, as a present to Ira Dilworth for Christmas in 1941.) The story “Martyn” in
Growing Pains
is about a young man who loved the young Emily and pursued her to England, hoping she would relent in her decision against marrying him. There are three drafts of this, but as they are all close cousins of the published version, they are not included here. Another short piece, a discarded version of the opening to the story “Sophie” that appears in
Klee Wyck,
details the first meeting of Carr and Sophie Frank in Carr’s studio in Vancouver, around 1906. Two stories of Carr’s childhood, “British Columbia Nightingales” and “Young Town and Little Girl” are likewise early and quite different versions of “British Columbia Nightingales” and “Saloons and Roadhouses” in
The Book of Small.
The first recounts her father’s joke about the sound of tree frogs mating in the spring, and the second is about Richard Carr’s store, downtown by the docks. In both cases, the changes involved taking out sections describing racial difference. In the first instance, details of the dress and manner of Bong, the Carr family’s Chinese manservant, are deleted; in the second, vocabulary is altered. The three other stories — “Mother,” “Love”and “A Dream”— have never been published in any form in Carr’s books, though there is another story entitled “Mother” in
Growing Pains.