Emily Carr Read online

  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

  Emily Carr

  by LEWIS DESOTO

  With an Introduction by

  John Ralston Saul

  SERIES EDITOR

  PENGUIN CANADA

  Published by the Penguin Group

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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

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part

  of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system,

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  Manufactured in the U.S.A.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-670-06670-4

  ISBN-10: 0-670-06670-2

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

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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

  INTRODUCTION BY

  by John Ralston Saul

  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 ever
y 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.

  Emily Carr

  CHAPTER ONE

  A Meeting

  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.

  The silence was absolute, almost a palpable physical presence. The tall, rust-coloured tree trunks of fir and cedar soared upward like the pillars of an ancient temple, and the shafts of sunlight falling down through the canopy glowed like molten gold. The swooping boughs of foliage seemed to hang in frozen waves of green—such a variety of greens.

  A raven croaked overhead, with that deep hollow sound they sometimes make, and in the following silence I heard its wings like a whisper in the trees.

  I sensed the vastness of this country, the emptiness of it, all the ancient days of it. I felt as if I were standing in a place where no human had stood, and none might ever stand again. I was nothing, an insignificant passing sigh on the breeze. A moment of unaccountable terror shivered over me.

  An image of an Emily Carr painting came to my mind, of a forest like this one, with the same primeval grandeur. But in that painting, the dread and solitude had been subsumed into a reverent harmony, as if the silence and the awe, the leaves and the raven, and the lone human being were part of a grand creation that could be approached only with wonder and celebration. I realized how much the scene in front of me looked like an Emily Carr painting. It was almost as if I were seeing it through her eyes. Those paintings that I used to frown at and dismiss had somehow imprinted themselves on my consciousness, in such a powerful manner that what I saw before me now was less a forest of trees and leaves and more a work of art, half nature, half Emily Carr.

  Later, I went back to the art gallery and looked again at the paintings. I began to be interested in this woman, whom I really knew nothing about. Who was she? Where did she come from? How had she lived? And, above all, how had she arrived at her extraordinary paintings?

  I would encounter a truly remarkable and talented woman who lived with bravado and curiosity. Not only was she physically brave and strong, but she also possessed deep psychological courage. She was not some little old lady in the woods, but a complex and contradictory individual who lived a noteworthy and varied existence of great originality, and in so doing made a part of the world visible in all its beauty and mystery.

  The tourist who visits the museums, the hiker in the rainforest, the visitor who buys a postcard of a Carr painting because it seems to contain some essence of this part of the country, the new immigrant turning the pages of a history of Canada, even the descendants of the original inhabitants of the West Coast—all see this place with just a little bit of Emily Carr in their vision.

  Emily Carr, the person, defies easy description. Painter, writer, world traveller, adventurer—she was also an original, a rebel, a free spirit, and a visionary mystic. She is one of those unique individuals, those few, who have created and articulated the symbols and images by which Canada knows itself, and through which we know ourselves.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Past

  Writing about the past is like standing on a cliff edge looking into the mist while trying to recognize a person you have never met. There is no truth about the past—there are versions only. But that does not preclude our attempts to know it. Curiosity is justification enough. In a time that is remote from us now, Emily Carr stands as an icon, a colossus almost, and if only for that reason she draws our attention.

  The elements in society that make reputations, that drive the buying and selling of art, that publicize and celebrate and define art, are not found in provincial cities but in the great urban centres of the world. Emily chose to remain in her small corner. If she had lived in Paris, London, or Berlin, or if the technology of communication and travel that exists now had been available in her time, then every book on the history of art would include an Emily Carr. Her works would hang in the Tate Modern in London, the Louvre in Paris, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. That is where they belong, alongside Vincent van Gogh and Edvard Munch and Paul Cézanne.

  Nevertheless, Emily’s name is in our history books. A busy industry revolves around Emily Carr: academics write and argue about her; museums mount exhibitions of her work; the tourist business markets her life and images; her childhood house is a museum. Her story, with its drama and eccentricity, satisfies our need for larger-than-life figures with whom to populate our mythology. Her paintings are reproduced on postage stamps, calendars, and postcards. Novels have been written about her, films made, even a stage play. Along with the Group of Seven and Tom Thomson, she is, for many, the best-known Canadian artist. But more than that, her work is among the images of Canada itself.

  We see the West Coast landscape through the prism of Emily Carr’s paintings, just as much as the central Ontario landscape is filtered through the paintings of the Group of Seven. There are no paintings that describe the coastal rain-forest before Emily. That is the mark of her originality—not her technique or colours or style. She gave a form and a m
eaning to a landscape. Her paintings are images through which Canada becomes visible, to us and to others.

  In the end, the paintings are what remain—the most significant verifiable fact in the history of Emily Carr. We need to know nothing of the artist, her times, or the context in which the paintings were made to respond to them as art. But an image is never either neutral or mute. We can say with certainty of the paintings only that they are made of canvas and pigment. What they say to us depends as much on what we know as on what we don’t know. And so we must try to know the woman, if only to consider what other things the paintings speak of. As she put it in her journal, “Something of you can get trapped forever in the picture as long as it lasts.” Each one of her paintings is the evidence of a woman’s hand. Each brush stroke is the trace of a gesture and a thought.

  For all the words written by and about Emily Carr, she remains something of an enigma. We continue to be fascinated by her, this woman who travelled to the wild, dark places and returned to tell us the tale of where she had been.

  WE CAN NEVER REALLY KNOW anyone from the past. There are some facts, some speculations, many opinions, and a great many disagreements. There are Emily Carr’s writings, her correspondence, some photos. And, of course, there are the paintings. In the end, there is only an interpretation, and the hope of a small measure of truth.

  The past does leave a legacy that accumulates, and through which we can understand ourselves. Emily Carr is situated in our history now, and the legacy she left, in her paintings and writings and in the trajectory of her life, is a part of that always-forming idea we call Canada.

  A common error we make when thinking about distant times is to imagine them as somehow old-fashioned, and the people who inhabited another era to be equally out of date. We look backward into time and see its inhabitants as being ignorant, quaint, and mistaken in so much. But every person is always born into a modern world, every moment is the lived present, on the threshold of the future.