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Robert Amos Book Reviews (Carr and Colville)

Posted: September 29, 2003
} Robert Amos Book Reviews (Carr and Colville) Opposite Contraries: The Unknown Journals of Emily Carr and other writings edited by Susan Crean Douglas and Macintyre, Vancouver, 2003, 250 pp. $35.00 cdn. I had assumed that every word Emily Car wrote is now in print: her five volumes of stories, her journals, her letters late in life. Susan Crean has discovered that there is more for us. And as is so often the case, it was the good bits they cut out. Susan Crean is the most thoughtful of all writers about Carr. Her book, The Laughing One: A Journey to Emily Carr (Douglas and Macintyre, 2001) brought a new level to our understanding about Canada’s most important artist. In writing that book, she ventured from appreciation to research to travelogue to “creative non-fiction” in aid of telling Carr’s story. This time out, Crean has returned to the original manuscripts, kept in Victoria’s Provincial Archives. Wearing white cotton gloves, she turned every yellowing leaf of Carr’s “scribbler” notebooks, and learned to decipher the artist’s idiosyncratic scrawl. Crean says Carr’s journals were “highly polished” and that she was a “prose stylist very much in control of her language.” Yet early editors had cut out 45,000 words when the journals were published as Hundreds and Thousands. Many of her entries were so candid that, Crean says, “you could swear she had forgotten anyone was going to be reading them.” Carr was her unvarnished self in the journals. “A lunatic, a prostitue and a Chinese artist,” she reminisced, “these are among my friends.” Carr’s comments about people range from ingenuous to libelous. Regarding A. Y. Jackson, she commented that “something about that man riles me. He has one of those noses I never get on with.” After her mother’s death, Carr’s father called his teenage daughter for a talking-to which she would ever after describe as “the brutal telling.” It was about matters sexual, we assume. Mention of this has haunted Carr’s biographers for years, and now Crean has returned to the source and offers some further information about the artist’s relations with her father. Additionally, Carr expands upon her early love affair. She expresses her conclusion that “marriage is at best a mutual convenience and at worst a sham.” It was during the years of Carr’s closest relationship with Lawren Harris that he left his wife and children, and moved to America with Bess, the wife of his best friend. Carr’s editors eliminated the artist’s vexed relationship with Bess Harris.Carr’s subsequent relations with Lawren Harris continued when he moved to Vancouver in 1940 (he was an executor of her estate) but this relationship was always coloured by Carr’s feelings toward Bess. Now we have the full story. Through her career Carr benefitted from an abiding closeness with Sophie Frank, a Squamish native living on the reserve in North Vancouver. In her stories, Carr fictionalized and generalized Frank, and in the journals she was edited considerably. Carr’s relationship with native people is of particular interest to Crean and now we have the artist’s genuine expression of empathy and intimacy with Sophie Frank. It is deeper than we may have thought. Many of us consider Emily Carr a friend. She has opened herself to us through her paintings and her writing. Since her death, this fascinating character has been subjected to a considerable amount of speculation. What could be more pleasant, then, to let Carr’s journals tell us how it really was? ___________________________________________ Alex Colville: Return by Tom Smart Douglas and Macintyre, Vancouver, 2003. 144 pp., $55. “As a witness to war and the aftermath of genocide at Berten-Belsen, Colville has looked into the eyes of death and spent his life depicting its dimensions in image after image, each cloaked in a different iconography.” Tom Smart Alex Colville is Canada’s leading painter in the style called Magic Realism. Tom Smart, author of a new book on Colville, says magic realists “paint faithfully the mystery in real life rather than the dream world of fantasy.” Colville’s fastidious draftsmanship makes us believe in the reality of these imaginary scenes. For the most part, Colville’s narratives are inconclusive. We are left to puzzle about the unreconciled tensions he creates in settings which Smart calls “astoundingly banal”. A short biography assures us that Colville is basically an optimistic person, but that his vision of human destiny is not a joyful one. “I see the human condition as tragic.” Colville’s world is bleak and uncompromising and he spends his time composing enigmas. This new book is a meditation on the meaning of 18 paintings, in which Smart identifies Colville’s symbolic language of longing and mortality. In writing about Colville, Smart seems to have ransacked a particular section of his lexicon: absence, loss, emptiness, disquiet, mystery, alienation, anxiety, menace, imprisonment,discordant, obsessive, evil, absurdity, melancholic, dolorous, malevolent, painful, dislocated, oblivious, sombre, sinister, unsettling, lugubrious... I think you get the picture. ___________________________________________ Copyright © 2003 Robert Amos Robert Amos is an artist and art writer who lives in Victoria, B. C.. He can be contacted by e-mail and you can view his paintings at www.robertamos.com