Growing Pains (2 page)

During Carr’s last decade, ill health forced her to give up painting for protracted periods of time, and she turned her creative energies to writing, completing autobiographical sketches that she had been developing for some years. Unlike her visual art, her published writing generated immediate critical and popular acclaim. Carr’s first book,
Klee Wyck,
which came out in 1941, was warmly reviewed, sold briskly and won a Governor General’s Award for non-fiction. It was followed by
The Book of Small
in 1942 and
The House of All Sorts
in 1944, also both well received.

Growing Pains: The Autobiography of Emily Carr
was published in 1946, the year following her death. As with her other books, it reveals that she was as accomplished a storyteller as she was a visual artist. Her determined sense of self and her forthright sentences, often powered by vehement and unusual verbs, carry her narrative through a series of scenes, anecdotes and descriptions of people and places. (Any reader who supposes that the backforming of verbs from nouns and adjectives is a phenomenon of the contemporary age will be surprised by Carr, who presses such words as “dusk,” “Christmas,” “monument,” “pink” and even “higgledy-piggledy” into predicate service.) Her unexpected use of language has in it some of the faux-naive qualities of Fauvist painting that she learned in France and practised in her middle years. With their broad, vigorous strokes and vivid, emotionally charged colours, painting and prose throw a similar kind of expressive punch. There is also something of the strong, streamlined style of her mature painting here, the shedding of superfluity and the consolidating of form. In
Growing Pains,
Carr tells us how her rules for writing accord with those for painting: “Get to the point as directly as you can; never use a big word if a little one will do.”

Together, the sketches in this book form a compelling, if not always factually accurate, record of Emily Carr’s life in art. Names, dates and explicit circumstances may be changed or omitted, altered perhaps by the underwater murk of memory or consciously shaped by a writer fully aware of the power of creative non-fiction (long before that term was coined).
¹
As all of Emily Carr’s biographers have noted, emotional truth and dramatic impact usually prevail over mere fact in her telling of her own story. That’s why
Growing Pains
makes for such good reading.

Although her middle-class Victorian childhood, her dispirited middle age, her encounters with Native people and culture, and her relationships with her many animals—from dogs, cats and parrots to chipmunks, white rats and a Javanese monkey—have been described in her other books, elements of each are alluded to here. Essentially, however,
Growing Pains
focusses on Emily Carr’s emergence as a fierce individual and a modern artist. The two strands, of course, are tightly intertwined, though initially it appears that the fractious, wilful and rebellious individual—who announces her almost congenital contrariness by being born in the middle of a snowstorm, after a long and difficult labour—might feed all her furious energy into her refusal to accommodate social and cultural conventions and thereby shortchange the claims of her creative being. Over the course of the book, Carr subtly, almost subliminally, builds our understanding of her commitment to her calling. Her first allusion to herself as an artist is offhand, almost incidental. At the age of eight, she tells us, she made a drawing of her father’s dog, impressing her family enough to grant her art lessons and a special status in the household. “I sat beside Carlow’s kennel and stared at him for a long time,” she writes. “Then I took a charred stick from the grate, split open a large brown-paper sack and drew a dog on the sack.” Here, Carr modestly signals to us that she was a natural and resourceful artist: there’s something determinedly primitive about her description, the primal impulse to draw being met with the crudest of improvised materials. Still, there is no early declaration of her calling, no outright account of prodigious talent. Instead, Carr says simply, “I wanted to draw a dog.” And when, as an orphaned teenager, she proposes to her guardian that she should travel to San Francisco to study art, it seems she was more anxious to escape her oldest sister’s tyranny than to pursue
a vocation. Only as the book progresses does Carr begin to reveal her dedication to her art through her pursuit of an education, her need to know more. She speaks, especially, of the challenge to find a way of painting what she has been told was unpaintable: the wild Canadian landscape, the vast, dense rain forest. “No artist that I knew, no Art School had taught Art this size. I would have to go to London or to Paris to learn to paint.” When even that instruction fails to meet her challenge, she writes, “Unknowingly, I was storing, storing, all unconscious, my working ideas against the time when I should be ready to use this material.”

It took decades for Carr to acquire the skills, the knowledge and the wisdom to harness her impassioned individualism to the needs of her painting, to become the Emily Carr we now encounter in art galleries and museums. Still, her themes and sympathies, the deep woods and wild places, the Native people and their material culture, were established early, the former in childhood, the latter during a trip to Alaska in her twenties. In a memorable and much-quoted account from
Growing Pains
of her teen years, Carr tells about riding Johnny, an old circus pony, out of the noisy city and into the silent woods. “When we came to some mossy little clearing where soft shade-growing grass grew Johnny stopped with a satisfied sigh.” As the pony grazes, the young Emily drinks in the “sacred beauty of Canada’s still woods.” In her seventh decade, she thanks Johnny “for finding the deep lovely places that were the very foundation on which my work as a painter was to be built.”

In
Growing Pains,
also, Carr describes the various art schools and classes she attended, her responses to her teachers and theirs to her. She assesses what she learned where, admits to feelings of humiliation, discouragement and occasional gratification. She
devotes a chapter to her first encounter with the work of the Group of Seven and her special affinity with the art of Lawren Harris, the man to whom she dedicated this book. Another chapter is given over to Harris’s teachings, with liberal quotes from his letters to her, letters that were both a creative and a spiritual lifeline for her. “Every letter he wrote stimulated me to search deeper,” she writes. “Lawren Harris made things worthwhile for their own sake.”

Carr’s writing resounds with descriptions of clashes with family members who attempted to constrain and control her and with acquaintances who struck her as pretentious, hypocritical or suffocatingly pious. She hates “sham” and sophistication, honours simplicity, even rusticity. In her often unkind descriptions of people and her obvious preference for trees and animals over her fellow human beings, she gives evidence of considerable social alienation, even misanthropy. Her commitment to her own otherness, her sense of difference, has contributed in no small measure to the enduring legends of her eccentricity. Even now, more than half a century after her death, popular culture references to her art are accompanied by allusions to her odd appearance, her curmudgeonliness, her menagerie of animals, her unconventional lifestyle. (The chairs that could be raised to the ceiling by ropes and pulleys to make room in her studio and, not incidentally, to discourage unwanted visitors—that was one of the stories that circulated when I lived in Emily Carr’s neighbourhood. Her trundling a pet monkey around in an old baby carriage that did double duty as a grocery cart—that was another.) In
Growing Pains,
Carr repeatedly dismisses her prim, proper and pious older sisters for failing to understand her art, as she does her community; and yet, as her delighted description of her seventieth birthday celebration reveals, she longed for their
approval. Most of all, she says, “I would rather have the goodwill and kind wishes of my home town, the people I have lived among all my life, than the praise of the whole world.”

But again, Carr’s social difference is a function of the same waywardness that drove her to become a modernist, to work in a style unknown in her city and region.
²
It was also the impulse that provoked her to defy gender bias. From the opening chapter of this book, Carr establishes her narrative and psychological templates, delineates the forms and conditions of her long war against propriety and patriarchy. The four-year-old Emily will not lie passively across the lap of the Presbyterian minister and receive his baptismal blessing, oh no. Instead, she kicks and thrashes and runs to her mother. The signs of her rebellion are further developed in her attempts to detach herself from the control of her strict, religious and authoritarian father. In one of the most touching and symbolically charged scenes in the book, Carr expresses her yearning for the maternal, for a sympathetic understanding of the defiant terms of her own being and for the generous embrace of nature. After an attempt to resist her father’s dominion over her—“He thinks he is as important as God,” she exclaims—the young Emily enjoys the rare treat of a picnic in Beacon Hill Park with her mother. Carr’s symbolism is overt when she describes her mother as the keeper of the key that unlocks the gate through which the two will pass from her father’s realm—house, garden, barnyard, pasture, demarcating hedges and fences—into the primordial abundance of the forest. “I stepped with Mother beyond the confines of our very fenced childhood … Beacon Hill Park was just as it had always been from the beginning of time, not cleared, not trimmed.” The afternoon is spent in peace and concord, the child Emily making daisy chains while her mother sews. In Carr’s
metaphorical view, the paternal force is the colonizer, the civilizer, the harsh tamer of the wild world—and of her wild ways. The maternal—loving, patient, non-judgmental—is clearly conflated with nature.
³
It is nature’s nurturance, her sustenance, to which Carr repeatedly returned in her art.

I find something extremely poignant in the image of an elderly, bedridden Carr reconstructing in story form her long-vanished childhood—though perhaps that childhood never fully disappeared. There’s evidence in
Growing Pains,
as in Carr’s other books, that she promoted and preserved her child persona as another form of resistance to social stricture and convention. In these stories, Carr consistently depicts herself as younger than she actually was; she also has her elders address her as “child” and “little girl” when she was fully an adult. In the chapter “Caribou Gold,” Carr’s return to Canada after more than five years in England is met by a friend’s dismayed exclamation: “Millie!…you are as immature and unsophisticated as when you left home.” Carr unashamedly concurs: immaturity accords with innocence, simplicity, lack of affectation, all good things in her view.
⁴
It also accords with brash Canadianness, with resisting Old World influences. She appalls her family and community with her newly acquired habits of smoking and of riding a horse “cross-saddle” rather than sidesaddle, then proudly declares, “Instead of England gentling me into an English Miss with nice ways I was more
me
than ever, just pure me.” It’s understood here that Carr cannot be an artist if she cannot be herself, and she cannot be herself if forced into conforming, Anglicized, unimaginative adulthood.
⁵

Nor, in her place and time, can she be an artist if she is married. This condition is made explicit in “Martyn,” a retelling of her
relationship with William “Mayo” Paddon, the suitor who travelled to England from Canada to try to persuade Emily to marry him. She refused. “I don’t love that way,” she tells him. “Besides—my work.” She doesn’t mean “besides” at all. Her work is absolutely the point. In “Martyn,” Carr declares out loud that it is her art that most signifies in her life. Although she will encounter many more patronizing teachers and colleagues, male artists who deprecate her talent because she is a woman, her rejection of Paddon’s proposal is the climax of the battle that begins with baptizing minister and authoritarian father. Turning away from the possibility of marriage, she finally and definitively took herself off the patriarchal map.

Yet, in the book’s later chapters, we are shown the ringing importance of her mature relationships with certain men, creative and knowledgeable and younger men, especially Lawren Harris and Ira Dilworth (her editor and literary executor, who also wrote the original foreword to
Growing Pains
). This is not exactly capitulation: following the course of Carr’s journey of learning, we understand how much art informs art, how like minds nurture like, how the impulse to make paintings (or write stories) does not alone create the means by which to realize them. In finally discovering the way to express the themes that have preoccupied her since her youth, there is reconciliation with family and community, reconciliation with a man-shaped world because it exists within a vast, swirling, ungendered cosmos. As in her late, ecstatic, light-filled paintings, there is at the end of Emily Carr’s life story a joyous sense of transcendence. In the new growth springing up in a deforested patch of land, in the migration of wild geese overhead, she finds acceptance of impending death. I evoke these images when I imagine the mortally ill Emily Carr
walking across the street that she last lived on to call the ambulance to take her away to the place of her passing. It comforts me to read her words here and to know how peacefully and unregretfully she undertook her final journey.

1
. Doris Shadbolt,
Emily Carr
(Vancouver/Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre, 1990), 21.

2
. Doris Shadbolt, Introduction,
The Complete Writings of Emily Carr,
originally published as
The Emily Carr Omnibus
(Vancouver/Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre; Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993), 7.

3
. Paula Blanchard,
The Life of Emily Carr
(Vancouver/Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre; Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1987), 55.