by Lewis Desoto
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.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Edge of Nowhere
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.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Great Stillness
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.
In 1907, after her years of art classes in England, Emily and Alice took a cruise up the coast to Alaska. On a stop of a few hours in the
Kwakiutl village of Alert Bay, Emily saw totem poles for the first time. The sisters’ destination was the town of Sitka, already something of a tourist spot, and there, in a wooded area known as Totem Walk, where totem poles of the Haida and Tlingit people had been re-erected for the tourists, Emily had a chance to make her first painting of totem poles in the forest.
The painting is a muted watercolour of a tree-lined path, mostly in browns and greens, and yet to one side is a brilliant splash of colour, red and blue and white with black lines—a totem pole, bright as a beacon in the shadows. She will come back to this motif again and again. In this small watercolour is the beginning of the great artist she will become.
At about this time, Emily also met an American artist, T.E. Richardson, who had spent numerous summers travelling to Native villages in Alaska to paint, and then selling the pictures in New York for handsome prices.
Anyone who has seen a totem pole, either in a museum or in a natural environment, can attest to its tremendous effect and presence. When Emily Carr saw them for the first time, their colours and shapes so vivid against the backdrop of the forest, she must have found them stunning. She had visited the Louvre in Paris and the British Museum in London, but had never encountered anything quite like this. She saw it as art, yes, but also as an expression of the place and the people who were of that place. What she saw was art with a purpose and an art of great originality. The common misperception among most non-Native people at this time was that the Aboriginal culture of the West Coast was declining, and that the totem poles were already disappearing. Emily probably had some inkling of the enormous transformations Native culture was being subjected to by white society, and this may have been why she undertook what she saw as a socially useful project: to make a visual record of the poles. Whatever her intention as a sort of amateur anthropologist, it was as an artist that she approached the project.
Emily embarked on her mission in the summer of 1908. In the years that followed she would return again and again to the forest, each time finding new subjects, new places, new techniques. When she came back from France, with a new, colourful palette and a different way of applying the paint, she would paint the poles and houses. Later, after her success at the National Gallery in 1927 and inspired by Lawren Harris and the Group of Seven, she would throw herself back into her sketching trips with a renewed passion, producing some of her finest paintings.
When her work entered a new stage, she abandoned Native motifs for a time and turned to pure landscape painting, but even then, at the very end of her career, she occasionally picked up one of her early sketches and worked it up into a finished painting. The chronology of her painting trips is the chronology of a journey, not only physical but also artistic, and it is the trajectory of a quest both to find and make meaning from what she found in the primeval forest.
But what are these totem poles, these carved and decorated tree trunks that became so important to her? What was their function? Who made them? What do they represent?
The totem poles of the West Coast Native peoples are unique. The geographical area where they are created is limited to the coastland from southern Alaska down to mid-British Columbia and does not extend much inland. As generally used in Native culture, a totem is an object or animal that is adopted as the emblem of an individual, family, or larger social group. It serves as an identifier and as a symbol of unity within the clan.
The European equivalent might be a heraldic crest or flag. Some scholars say that the term “crest poles” is more accurate. The crests belong to specific individuals and groups, and in that sense they are owned only by them. They are not works of art in the Western meaning of the term, although there is a creative and aesthetic aspect to their design. The images on the poles are drawn from the environment in which they are created and most often consist of animal motifs—raven, bear, salmon, eagle, frog—as well as human faces and mythological creatures.
Totem poles can be part of a ceremony. They can illustrate stories or personify elements in the mythology of the group. They can also mark territory or a burial place. Because the coastal peoples did not use a written language or make pictures, the poles are carriers of meaning and history.
Europeans began to collect and remove the totem poles and carved masks almost as soon as they encountered them. They took them as exotic curios, as souvenirs, as oddities, as objects for museums, and as items that could be sold. The Christian missionaries, who brought their own iconography in the symbol of the crucifix and in the tales collected in the Bible, saw the Native poles as a competing system of “heathen” beliefs. They made a concerted effort to shame the Natives into seeing their masks and totems as uncivilized and primitive. Totem poles were destroyed, abandoned, removed, and the art of carving was actively discouraged.
In 1894, under the Indian Act, the potlatch ceremony, in which masks and poles played a part, was banned by the government. The potlatch was a gathering of Native peoples that served many social purposes and functions. Economic and governance matters might be dealt with. Rites of passage, such as births and weddings, might be celebrated. Historical and spiritual rituals would be enacted. It was also an occasion of feasting and celebration. The potlatch strengthened relations between different tribes and confirmed Native identity as separate from that of the Europeans. Suppression of the potlatch also had the effect of making totem poles irrelevant to the lives of the Native peoples.
Because they are carved from trees, totem poles naturally decay and must be replaced by fresh ones. But the poles were losing their original function, and were reduced, through European intervention, to the archeological remnants of a dying culture. Many of the villages that Emily Carr visited had been abandoned for other reasons: either the inhabitants had been relocated under pressure to assimilate, or their traditional hunting and fishing practices had been disrupted, or the populations had died from the newly introduced diseases like smallpox and measles. The irony that some of the newcomers were trying to preserve the poles while others worked actively to destroy the culture that created them was lost on many people.
Emily might not have been aware of the political and cultural complexity of the situation, but she did see the changes taking place. As an artist, she was deeply affected by the power of the poles, and if only for that reason she felt compelled to make others aware of them, too. It was also through the totem poles that Emily found her identity as an artist, and through them she would find purpose and meaning in her life.
The argillite sculpture I have on my desk, although removed from its true meaning and context, still resonates not only with personal memories but also with deeper meanings that stretch back through time and connect me to Emily Carr, and then further back to the First Peoples who created the original totem poles, and through them even further into the great mystery that is life.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
In the Wilderness
There are fallow periods in every creative person’s life, when they lose faith in their endeavours and it seems as if all their efforts have come to nothing. The composer Richard Wagner went into exile for years and then emerged with the stunning Ring Cycle operas. After a lost election Winston Churchill retreated into political silence, a period he called “the wilderness years,” before coming back to lead his country through the Second World War. Even the tremendously prolific Picasso was inactive for a couple of years, turning away from painting to take up poetry and playwriting instead. Adversity can silence the creative impulse, but the flame is never extinguished.
After 1913, Emily’s grand project to record the Native totem poles for posterity had been abandoned. The exhibition of her French works had met with indifference and hostility and she was unable to resume her teaching positions in Vancouver. She retreated to Victoria, discouraged and depressed.
Meanwhile, there was a growing threat of war in Europe while, at home, an economic depression resulted in higher property taxes, unemployment, and inflation. The Carr family funds had shrunk o
ver the years and the sisters were forced to sell off some of their land. The family home was rented out and the sisters built other accommodation for themselves. Emily had a house constructed next to Beacon Hill Park, with the idea of renting out part of it while setting aside a studio and apartment for herself. But long-term tenants were hard to come by in those unsettled years, so she took in boarders instead. The studio became a sitting-dining room for tenants and Emily made do with rooms in the attic for herself.
Two myths have arisen about this period in Emily’s life: first, that she lived in dire poverty, and second, that she gave up painting entirely. Both are only partly true.
Although Emily owned land and the house, she had no regular income other than the rent she collected. Consequently, she took on the management of the boarding house herself. She did the repairs and maintenance, the finances, the cooking, and the washing. She even stoked the furnace with coal and shovelled snow in winter. She planted a vegetable and fruit garden and raised rabbits and chickens, both for the pot and for sale.
During this period, she also spent some months in San Francisco painting decorations for a ballroom. She raised sheepdogs for sale. She made pottery and rugs to sell, and when times became very lean, sold off part of the lot on which the house stood.
