Emily Carr (6 page)

Neither was Carr anti-male. She had a number of significant platonic friendships with men. She preferred the company of women, but in her professional life she responded to the advice of men. This comes as no surprise, considering the authority men wielded both in society and the arts, but we must remember also that she had grown up in a house-hold of women whose wills were ultimately subordinate to that of Richard Carr.

To see Carr as an entirely rejected and isolated woman is inaccurate. Her artistic contacts with the mainstream in Canada and elsewhere were sporadic, but she did have the company of other artists in Victoria and Vancouver, and had her supporters among them. She exhibited frequently, albeit
in minor venues or in her own studios. She had a great many friends and relatives, as well as the constant company of her sisters, and in most respects lived a fully integrated social life. The fact that she was an unconventional and independent artist, frustrated in her ambitions and development, often led Emily to portray herself as lonely and isolated. There is truth in that self-characterization, but only to a degree.

Emily was not physically weak. She undertook arduous sketching trips and engaged in strenuous physical labour during her years as a landlady. Nevertheless, she suffered from a variety of ailments over the course of her life, one severe enough to confine her to a sanatorium for fifteen months.

In 1900, shortly after she arrived in London, one of her big toes was amputated when it did not heal properly after a carriage accident in Canada. Just before her scheduled departure for Paris in 1910, she contracted diphtheria and was confined to bed for weeks. In Paris she became ill with what she described as either bronchitis or jaundice. Twice she spent periods of about six weeks in the American Student Hostel infirmary, and eventually she travelled with her sister Alice to a spa in Sweden, where she recovered. In her forties she had a gall bladder operation that was apparently unsuccessful. Finally, in her later years, she was felled by two heart attacks and two strokes, the combination of which caused her death.

Throughout her life she suffered from periods of depression, and her journals frequently refer to the black moods that sent her to bed in despair. But it was during her stay in England that a combination of physical and psychological disorders resulted in a complete breakdown. Her toe took a long time to heal and must certainly have been painful. She received news of the death from tuberculosis of her brother, Dick, in California. At the same time, a suitor, Mayo Paddon, was visiting and importuning her to marry him. She began to suffer debilitating headaches and nausea. Emily actually collapsed when she and Alice were among the crowd watching the funeral procession for Queen Victoria, the first sign that her health was in a precarious state. She found London oppressive and confining, but a summer in the country brought no respite from the headaches. In Cornwall, where she went to attend sketching classes, the glaring light on the beach made her flee into the shade of the woods, angering her teacher.

Before returning to London she spent a period in a nursing home trying to regain her energy, but when she did go back to the city she again suffered fainting spells, accompanied by numbness in her right arm and leg. A friend in the country took her in for just over a month. No record of a diagnosis exists, but it was likely that the strenuous effort she made at her
work, knowing how much rode on her success, coupled with the effects of the surgery on her foot, contributed to her constant bouts of illness. The headaches and nausea probably had a physical cause, migraine perhaps, but the only advice she received was to rest.

In July 1902, Emily's sister Lizzie arrived in England. Unable to bear a return to the city, which she saw as a prison, Emily moved to a succession of lodgings outside London. She would recover, and then a relapse would come. Her symptoms included fits of stuttering, heart palpitations, and numbness on one side. A specialist was consulted. He concluded that she was suffering from a nervous breakdown.

Eventually, in January 1903, Emily was admitted to a sanatorium in Suffolk. She would remain there until March of the following year.

Women's health problems tended to be under-diagnosed and were often dismissed as psychosomatic under the general heading of “female hysteria.” (Male hysteria, which usually manifests itself in wars and sports, has of course never been considered a psychosis.) The origin of the illness was often attributed to sexual repression and familial conflicts, which were converted into physical symptoms. The growing popularity of Sigmund Freud's pseudo-scientific speculations encouraged the view that women were sexually repressed. This
repression was attributed neither to male domination nor societal strictures, but instead to supposedly unconscious fantasies. Among the alleged fantasies were feelings of sexual attraction to the father, resulting in such severe anxiety that impairment of speech and limb might result.

A number of later writers have applied these imaginative speculations to Emily Carr's breakdown, equating her refusal to marry with sexual frigidity or unacknowledged homosexuality, or even to an actual sexual encounter with her own father. Such judgments are perhaps too easy to make upon a woman who consciously violated conventional rules of behaviour.

What is more likely is that Emily was suffering from specific physical ailments that were left unattended. Her psychological breakdown could just as easily have been a result of the enormous pressure she put on herself. She was thirty-three in 1904, older than most other students in the classes she attended. She knew that her family and her acquaintances in Victoria expected her to succeed, perhaps as her old friend Sophie Pemberton had done—with success at the Royal Academy and further triumph in Paris. Pemberton was a talented painter in the Beaux-Arts tradition, but the kind of art Emily wanted to make had no tradition. As well, the Carr sisters had allocated family
funds to Emily's continuing education and she did not want to disappoint them.

Emily felt alone and out of place in England. She was slighted as a “colonial,” and she longed for the landscape of home. Yet she had to stay. To leave would be to admit failure. Finally, she was still considered eligible for marriage, and relatives in England constantly tried to pair her off with suitable men. The combination of all these factors, along with exhaustion and ill health, broke her down.

The treatment for the breakdown was dubious, to say the least. The medical establishment was as ignorant as Emily herself as to what ailed her. She was kept on a strict diet, then was switched to a different one that made her gain weight. There were experimental electric massages and enforced bed rest. Stimulation of any kind was discouraged, and she was forbidden to paint or even to think about it. In her memoir Emily wrote that she felt like a vegetable at this time, living in an uneventful forever and forever. What kept her sane were the satirical sketches and verses she made up, and the little birds she raised in her room.

That Emily did not succumb, either to the diagnosis or the treatment, but returned to her grand ambition, is a testament not so much to her physical strength as to the deep resources of inner courage she possessed.

Emily once referred to herself as a little old lady on the edge of nowhere. But she was a great traveller. She saw more of Canada and parts of Europe than the majority of people of her time and class, and more than many of us have done, even today.

Although Victoria was always her home, and she never lived more than a few blocks from where she had been born, throughout her life she regularly packed her bags and set off for distant locations. She took her first journey when she was twenty-two, and didn't unpack for the final time until she was in her sixties.

Here is a partial list of the places she visited: San Francisco, New York, Chicago, London, Cornwall, Paris, Brittany, Sweden, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Quebec City, Edmonton, the Cariboo, Alaska, Seattle, various places in the British Columbia interior, the Queen Charlotte Islands, and then the many trips she made to Native villages and towns up and down the coast.

If all her sketching trips in British Columbia were compounded into one imaginary journey, it would go something like this: she begins her journey on a steamer from Victoria to Prince Rupert, a distance of five hundred kilometres. From Prince Rupert she heads inland, perhaps to Hazleton, another three hundred kilometres. First she travels by rail, and then by paddle steamer up the river for some distance. She then transfers to a smaller boat which takes her to a town. There she boards a horse-drawn cart, and sits among the lumber and sacks of oats for another journey of some hours. Once she reaches the village that is her destination, she hires a horse and rides farther inland until she reaches a smaller settlement. Here, where there are no more roads and tracks, she will have to progress onward by foot. She has brought with her a small folding stool, a bedroll, some canned provisions, and a canvas sheet that functions as a kind of tent when it rains. She also carries her paintbox containing small canvas panels and her brushes and paints.

This journey is not accomplished all in one continuous sequence. Emily breaks up the trip with stopovers, during which she stays with relatives, friends, missionaries, and Indian agents. The accommodation varies. Sometimes it's a small hotel, a borrowed cottage, a lighthouse, an abandoned school, or a Native longhouse. It all depends on who her host
of the moment is. She sketches the people and the landscapes she visits, producing some of her most interesting work, from a historical perspective.

She travels alone, but she is not alone. Always she has her little dog for company, and there are guides along the way, sometimes a fisherman, or a Native couple she hires to transport her in their boat, or a young Native girl who is sent to show her a path into the forest.

Sometimes she is frightened. On one occasion, she imagines that she has been abandoned on a beach where a fisherman has left her. He promised to return in a few hours, but then a storm blows up, and she must huddle in her tent waiting to be rescued. Often, when she is alone in the forest, she imagines a wild animal seizing her from behind. Sometimes it is just the eerie silence that gives her what she calls the “creeps,” so far from human voices, a thousand kilometres from home. But she perseveres.

The mist blows in from the unseen ocean, moss droops from the trees, a brooding silence fills the spaces. She goes deeper into the forest, into the dense dark green of the shadows, where the only illumination is from the narrow shafts of sunlight that pierce the canopy high above her head.

She arrives at the totem poles that she has come to find. They are solemn and tall as the cedars from which they
were carved, weathered by time, half obscured at the base by thick nettles. A peculiar feeling comes over her, a mixture of awe and fear at their strangeness. In her words, “The ferocious, strangled lonesomeness of that place . . . full of unseen things and great silence.” Those carved and painted figures, are they human, are they animal, or something else altogether? She sees herself in the totem poles' faces, and she sees herself in the dark primeval forest, and for a moment she is terrified.

She unfolds her stool and sets up her paints, then she lights a cigarette to keep away the insects that have started to hover around her head. A kind of desolation hangs over the place, but also a beauty that she has found nowhere else, either in the docile English countryside or in the rocky coastal villages of Brittany. She has glimpsed the grandeur of Canadian landscapes in some paintings by Lawren Harris and his fellow artists in Toronto, but here in the West, no artist has painted this forest. That is why she has come to this place, to paint this terrible beauty.

A painting from 1931,
Strangled by Growth,
shows a carved face peering out of a swirling mass of greenery that is half garment and half light waves that have somehow become solid. The painting is very still and yet at the same time bursting with life.

All of these elements—the tree when it was growing, the carver who cut into the wood, the history and the myths and the people who once lived here—are in the painting. All of them and more: the slow invisible growth, the particles of dust, and the insects drifting in the shafts of sunlight, all are alive in some big way that she senses but cannot put into words. There is a force that pulses through everything. She feels it in her veins, in the beating of her heart, in the slow turning of the earth, and in the invisible stars in the sky. Not even the word “god” is big enough to encompass what she feels.

How to tell it? How to say it? How to touch it and show it? Emily speaks in the only way she can, with her brush. She dips it into the dabs of paint on her palette and makes a mark on the canvas—a gentle, rhythmic curve of green, a shape and a form and a feeling. There it is. And now, here in the great stillness on the edge of nowhere, she makes something for eternity.

I have on the desk in front of me a small sculpture, about twenty-five centimetres high, made of argillite, a black stone found in Haida Gwaii. The sculpture is a miniature totem pole, purchased for a few dollars in a tourist shop many years ago, as a souvenir of a visit to Vancouver's Stanley Park. The sculpture represents, as far as I can tell, an eagle, a frog, a bear, and at the very top, a small human face topped by a conical hat. The notice on the back explains: “Totem poles are visual representations of legends past. Each crest interwoven with one another symbolizes stories of mysticism, nature and man.” Even though it is a mass-produced object for the tourist trade, and I am ignorant of the meanings of the creatures, it has a very powerful and distinctive presence.

The sculpture, which is similar to a model that Emily owned, reminds me a bit of Emily's paintings, particularly one called, simply,
Totem and Forest
(1931), where the totem with its compacted and dense representations of life rises, iconic and glowing, against the dense mass of the dark forest.