Opposite Contraries: The Unknown Journals of Emily Carr and Other Writings

257 Pages·2004·2.07 MB·English

by  Emily Carr, Susan Crean

E MILY CARR Crean
was an extraordinary writer and artist. O P P O S I T E
Although primarily a painter, she first gained recognition as the author
C O N T R A R I E S
of seven critically acclaimed books. O
Award-winning author Susan Crean has gathered here previously
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unpublished writings from Emily Carr’s journals, notebooks and
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correspondence. Included are expurgated passages from Carr’s pub- THE UNKNOWN JOURNALS OF
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lished journals, which reveal details of E M I LY C A RR
TS
Carr’s spiritual quest, her dreams, and H
“R igorously annotated by a topnotch I
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anguished thoughts about her sisters UT A N D O T H E R W R I T I N G S
cultural critic, Opposite Contraries and family. NE
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is a valuable addition to the Those who love Emily Carr’s art will N
OC
delight in reading the complete text of
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vast bibliography pertaining to her ground-breaking 1913 “Lecture on NO

an important Canadian artist.” Totems,” her first writing on Native JON
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imagery and Native people. Crean also RT
GLOBE AND MAIL presents significant portions deleted N
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from Carr’s first book, Klee Wyck. L
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Susan Crean’s introduction to Opposite Contraries and to each of O
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the book’s three sections provide an illuminating context in the
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fascinating story of Emily Carr. MI
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YS
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SUSAN CREAN is a well-known cultural critic and the author of The A
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Laughing One: A Journey to Emily Carr, short-listed for the 2001 R

Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction and winner of the B.C. A
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Book Prize for Non-Fiction in 2002. She lectures at Ryerson’s School D

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of Journalism in Toronto.
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B W
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Douglas & McIntyre IN
vancouver / toronto / berkeley G
$24.95 canada · $19.95 u.s. S
Cover design by Ingrid Paulson
Cover painting: Detail from Three Totems
(Kispiox), 1928, by Emily Carr, oil on canvas
108.0 × 68.6 cm. Courtesy Vancouver Art Gallery
Printed and bound in Canada edited by Susan Crean
Douglas &
Printed on acid-free paper
Distributed in the U.S. by Publishers Group West McIntyre
Opposite PBK mech FINAL.indd 1 3/31/06 2:08:32 PM
Opposite Contraries.pages/2 5/30/03 12:20 Page i
OPPOSITE CONTRARIES
Opposite Contraries.pages/2 5/30/03 12:20 Page ii
Opposite Contraries.pages FINAL 6/2/03 00:04 Page iii
O P P O S I T E
C O N T R A R I E S
THE UNKNOWN JOURNALS OF
E M I LY C A RR
A N D O T H E R W R I T I N G S
edited by Susan Crean
Douglas &McIntyre
vancouver/toronto/berkeley
Opposite Contraries.pages/2 5/30/03 12:20 Page iv
Copyright © 2003 by Susan Crean
First United States edition published in 2004
03 04 05 06 07 5 4 3 2 1
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from
the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright).
For a copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca
or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.
Douglas & McIntyre
2323 Quebec Street, Suite 201
Vancouver, British Columbia v5t 4s7
www.douglas-mcintyre.com
national library of canada cataloguing in publication data
Carr, Emily, 1871–1945
Opposite contraries : the unknown journals of
Emily Carr and other writings / edited by Susan Crean.
Includes bibliographical references.
isbn1-55054-896-4
1. Carr, Emily, 1871–1945—Diaries. 2. Painters—Canada—Biography.
I. Crean, Susan, 1945– II. Title.
nd249.c3a35 2003 759.11 c2003-910714-0
Editing by Saeko Usukawa
Design by Ingrid Paulson
Printed and bound in Canada by Friesens
Printed on acid-free paper
Distributed in the U.S. by Publishers Group West
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the financial support of
the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council,
and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry
Development Program (bpidp) for its publishing activities.
Opposite Contraries.pages/2 5/30/03 12:20 Page v
CONTENTS
Introduction: The Unpublished Emily Carr..... 1
part one
Introduction: Carr’s Journals .................... 15
The Journals
Simcoe Street, 1930–33................... 24
The Elephant, 1933......................... 39
Trip to Chicago, 1933...................... 43
Moving Forward, 1933–34................ 54
Noah’s Ark, 1934 ........................... 74
Hopes and Doldrums, 1934–35.......... 77
Spring and Summer, 1935................. 99
A Tabernacle in the Wood, 1935....... 121
Beckley Street, 1936...................... 129
Goodbye to Lizzie, 1936................. 134
Hospital, 1937.............................. 138
The Shadow of War, 1938–39........... 143
New Growth, 1940–41................... 144
Journal Fragments
Young Town and Little Girl............. 147
British Columbia Nightingales......... 153
Mother....................................... 156
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A Dream..................................... 160
Love .......................................... 161
Sophie........................................ 162
part two
Introduction: The Public Carr and Klee Wyck 169
Lecture on Totems............................. 177
Autobiography.................................. 203
A People’s Gallery............................. 205
The Expurgated Klee Wyck
Ucluelet...................................... 208
Friends....................................... 210
Martha’s Joey............................... 212
part three
Introduction: Carr’s Correspondence.......... 217
Letters from Sophie and
Jimmy Frank to Emily Carr............. 220
Letters from Emily Carr to Ira Dilworth.. 223
Bibliography...................................... 244
Emily Carr: A Brief Chronology................ 246
Acknowledgements.............................. 250
Opposite Contraries.pages/2 5/30/03 12:20 Page 1
INTRODUCTION: THE UNPUBLISHED EMILY CARR
Anyone who has gone looking for information in the public
..archives knows how seductive they are. How easily the
material distracts attention from the task at hand, enticing you
off on detours and down dead ends, one thing leading to another
while the hours slip past in a stream. Like a trip to the Sally
Ann, the search is often serendipitous: you go looking for one
particular thing and come back with something else entirely,
something you perhaps hadn’t known you needed or even
wanted. If the search is into a person’s life, it is more like a
treasure hunt. Lists aren’t much help; intuition and visual
alertness are your best assets, as chance and circumstance have
more to do with what is left behind than rational activity on
any person’s part. Of course, the highly ordered conditions in
which historical documents are kept—every page catalogued
and accounted for—tend to contradict this. Nonetheless, “the
record” is a capriciousness thing, and this is especially true of
people who become famous late in life, as Emily Carr did.
Lawren Harris, who met her in 1927 and corresponded with
her over many years, but intensely through the period 1928–34
during her artistic flowering, did not keep her letters. A decade
later, Ira Dilworth, who shepherded Carr’s first book, Klee
Wyck, into publication and watched the ailing painter receive a
Opposite Contraries.pages/2 5/30/03 12:20 Page 2
2 opposite contraries
Governor General’s Literary Award for it in 1942, diligently kept
her correspondence. For her part, Carr preserved the letters from
both men. Harris had been an intellectual and artistic lifeline
for her, a connection for which she was starved at the time.
Dilworth, who was much more than an editor to her, inspired
her confidences and her love, and his letters were longingly
awaited and treasured. Writing to him in 1942, Carr mentions
that she was rereading Harris’s letters and had burned a few
she thought too personal. Such was her attitude; she had kept
Harris’s letters for private reasons, but now she was keeping
them for public ones. And, indeed, she was right. His letters to
her serve as a unique record of the artistic crisis he underwent
as he moved away from representational art into abstraction.
Archival research, I am suggesting, depends rather more on
coincidence than people like to admit. And just as happenstance
seems to control what makes its way into climate-controlled
safekeeping, so the job of ferreting out the details that will tell
the whole story years or decades later defies logic. It has as
much or more to do with stamina and empathy than with
intellectual application, for there is a psychological dimension
to the activity; a spiritual relationship, you could almost say.
Something like the bond that exists between birds and birders,
which explains how it is you can sometimes go out into the
woods and see nothing and at other times be astonished by the
number and brilliance of the winged ones you encounter. In
the archives, there are days when the slog over miles of curvi-
linear lettering strung across fields of yellowing paper yields
nothing more than a sore neck and bleary eyes. And then there
are moments when documents reveal themselves, as the birds
Opposite Contraries.pages/2 5/30/03 12:20 Page 3
Introduction 3
do. It took time, but one day I realized I had finally got the gist
of Carr’s difficult handwriting and could read whole tracts of it
without faltering. I had became familiar with her misspellings
(“shure” for “sure”)and contracted words, and could anticipate
her meanings. I was no longer an intruder reading a script; I was
present, listening to her speak. With birds, that same sort of
thing happens when proximity between creature and human
being becomes an unconscious thing, and the barrier in between
disappears. It did the other night when a young barred owl,
whose territory I inhabit on Gabriola Island, called to me from
a perch in a fir tree high above the cabin porch. “Up here!” he
insisted as I tried to find him in the twilight. Once spotted,
he drifted down to a bare twig on the adjacent arbutus, closer,
more visible, and curiously looked at me through great brown
eyes. The ancients thought of owls as prescient and wise.
Human beings have always warmed to their curiosity, their bold-
ness and their throaty calls, but we are unnerved by their stealth
and by the sense that they know something we do not. So it is
with the business of wresting the past from piles of paper; the
sense that truth lurks among them, if only we could see it.
Being familiar with archives, I was wary, reluctant to get
involved. Yet, when Saeko Usukawa remarked to me one day
that someone “really ought to go back and reread Emily Carr’s
actual journals,” it started me thinking. Not being much of a
betting person, the idea of rummaging through the forgotten
corners of the Emily Carr archive on the lookout for missing
bits of her story struck me as sentimental. How big could that
archive be, anyway? How likely were any new revelations? As
I had been researching Carr’s life and afterlife as an icon to