Website Hosting Members
SEARCH Artists
Art Galleries Art Resources
Canada

Art Articles & Reviews

2024 | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015 | 2014 | 2013 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 | 2003 | 2002 |

This and That

Posted: April 20, 2007
Virtually every word Emily Carr wrote has come to print. During her lifetime she published Klee Wyck, The Book of Small and The House of All Sorts. Posthumously Growing Pains and The Heart of a Peacock came out, followed by her journals published as Hundreds and Thousands. What had been edited out of that volume was in large measure restored in Opposite Contraries. Her letters from late in life were gathered as Dear Nan and those she wrote to Ira Dilworth have recently been published as Corresponding Influence. A collection of stories called Wildflowers illustrated another artist’s paintings. And now we can read This and That. This and That, Emily Carr (edited by Ann-Lee Switzer, Ti-Jean Press, Victoria, 2007. 206 pp., $17.00) Emily Carr wrote throughout her whole life. In her last words, newly published as This and That, she tells us about her first journals, and her pseudonym Topsy Tiddles. Later, in 1926, she took a correspondence course in writing from a school in California. She deliberately set out to improve her writing in 1934, with a summer school course in Victoria. This came at a crucial time in her life. Carr was then at the pinnacle of her career as a painter. She had set aside the Theosophical inspiration of Lawren Harris, and moved toward a more oriental, freely flowing style of brushwork. She was reading Walt Whitman avidly and sought movement in nature. With all this going on, in 1937 she was felled by a heart attack. In convalesence she set to work gathering her thoughts and stories, and sent the work to magazines - the New Yorker, McLean’s, Canadian Forum. All of them rejected her contributions. During these years she met Ira Dilworth, a professor of English and director of programming for Western Canada of CBC Radio. Dilworth went to bat for Carr. He gave her encouragement, professional editing and an entree into broadcasting and publishing. With his management her first volume of stories, Klee Wyck, won the Governor General’s Award in 1941 and was broadcast nationally. Dilworth helped Carr shape the five volumes of her stories which were published before and shortly after her death. In 1943 Carr wrote to Dilworth to tell him “I have made a few feeble scratchings towards something else.”. She was now writing stories for her own enjoyment and they were accumulating at a great rate. “These little jottings are too small to call stories. They are just little isolated incidences told as clean cut and briefly as I can. Each is a separate unit with a thought tied up in it.” She tagged and titled them “for Hundreds and Thousands”. Though Carr wrote out tables of contents for the proposed book, it was never published. Confusingly, Dilworth poached the title Hundreds and Thousands for his selection of her journal writing, a book which is otherwise unrelated. Her tiny stories, named for the minute colourful candy, remained uncollected - until now. Ann-Lee Switzer discovered Carr’s paintings at the old Vancouver Art Gallery in the late 1970’s and told me that “I knew she was a kindred spirit”. Moving to Victoria in the 1990’s Switzer began visiting the B. C. Provincial Archives to read Carr’s manuscripts. “I majored in history,” she noted, “and I’m used to researching things.” She was delighted to turn the pages of Richard Carr’s diary and to leaf through Emily’s original typescripts. “I felt so privileged,” Switzer reported. She is grateful to the Archives staff - “I had nothing but wonderful experiences”, she added. (Now, she reads the files on microfilm.) It dawned on her that there was an unknown book lurking there. At first she noted the change in Carr’s tone, a headlong rush by the writer, “straight from her head and heart”. Then she found a letter in which Carr explained that her new book will be called Hundreds and Thousands and dedicated to Dilworth. Switzer began methodically to gather the pieces of this book which were scattered among the many boxes of Carr’s papers in the Archives collection. This was Carr’s most mature writing, dashed off in full confidence during the last two and a half years of her life. Of more than 70 pieces Switzer chose to publish 61. The editor’s work involved transcribing the stories and sometimes choosing between alternate versions of a phrase. “It wasn’t scholarship,” Switzer insists. “I didn’t put in all those footnotes, or set [amendments] in square brackets. That’s not what Emily wanted. She asked Dilworth to correct her spelling, punctuation and what she called “the mechanics”. She didn’t want the stories to be prettied up.” The book is a delight. Carr comes to us full of personality and good cheer, setting down in the most direct way moments and memories which had stayed with her all her. Her child-self Small is the major character, and we come closer than ever to the Carr sisters and parents. I particularly enjoyed a look into turn-of-the-century Victoria. The stories range across most of her long and productive life. It is unlikely that any more than a few bits and pieces remain to be brought to light. This little volume, locally published and in a tiny edition, will surely become a collector’s item as it takes its place in the corpus of the writing of this remarkable woman, Emily Carr.