The Book of Small (2 page)

If we shift our focus from the scene inside the room to the construction of the room itself, we see that in
The Book of Small
, Emily Carr has created what is arguably the best memoir of early child-hood that we have in Canada. Central to her success is the device of making Small a fictional character. Of course, the outlines of Small's life are a close match to those of Emily Carr's. The house and its history, family friends from bishop to washerwoman, Richard Carr and his story, all these have real-life equivalents. Sisters Bigger and Middle from “The Cow Yard” and Elder from “Singing” are close re-creations of Emily's own sisters—Lizzie, Alice and Dede. But this is not history. Paula Blanchard, in her biography
The Life of Emily Carr
, reveals some of the distortions in Carr's account of herself in
Small
and subsequent books. Carr had a tendency to portray herself as younger than she was, for example, and to suggest that her two eldest sisters were English-born.

Carr's fictionalization of her childhood self lies not so much in adjusting the facts as in an artful selection of details in order to re-create the spirit and point of view of a young child.
The Book of Small
concerns a very young child, from around age four to age nine or so, with the occasional flashforward. Memoirs of this period of childhood succeed insofar as they are able to recall and re-create authentic sensual experience. Beatrix Potter, a contemporary of Emily Carr's and a fellow woman artist against the odds, says of childhood memory: “On thinking of a place the first recollection is the smell and the amount of light.” In
Deceived with Kindness: A Bloomsbury Childhood
, painter Angelica Garnett writes: “At the age of five one is nothing but a little animal: the
world is made of light, colour, smells and sounds which are more urgent and compelling then than ever again.”

In Small's world, all thinking stems from wonder, and all wonder is sparked by physical sensation. “Some wonders started inside you just like a stomach-ache. Some started in outside things when you saw, smelled, heard or felt them.” Carr evokes those sensations with clarity and originality. We hear the sound of milking, “milk purring into the pail in long, even streams, first sounding tinny in the empty pail and then making a deeper and richer sound as the pail filled.” We take an olfactory journey through Victoria, from roses to mud flats to Chinatown to the gas works to the sawmill (“the new sawdust smelled so nice that you forgot your nose”) to the tannery to the slaughterhouse. We experience the particular feel of the flattened feathers of a laying hen and the tickle of a horse's lips when you feed him sugar. Everywhere, we see light and colour. The Evangelical church is lit by chandeliers: “They had round, wide reflectors made of very shiny, very crinkly tin. Every crinkle caught its own particular bit of light and tossed it round the church.” The rust colour of a lily's stamens, the multicoloured Anne Mitchell seen through stained glass, the clean pink of the bishop's hands against his white surplice, the grey eyelids of dead chickens, the refuse from the soapworks that turns the mud flats to “glorious iridescent colours.”

Another key to an authentic portrait of a young child lies in respect for the intensity of emotion: terror rather than fear, for example. Molly Hughes recalls her almost existential terror of the void: “Once I was perturbed more seriously than a grown-up ever imagines. God had very kindly made the world, but suppose the notion had never occurred to Him? Suppose there had never
been any God? Suppose there never had been anything at all? I was so devastated by the thought that I had to run about violently up and down stairs to kill the demon.” Similarly, Carr reserves her most detailed descriptions of Small's fears for a terror born of misunderstanding. An ivy-covered tree, already a source of unease, becomes a source of positive horror when Small overhears her father say, “The ivy has killed that tree.” The tree transforms itself into “the killing tree” and remains terrifying until it is burnt to nothingness.

One of Carr's greatest accomplishments in
The Book of Small
lies in her ability to express the visceral and transcendent joy of a small child, “boiling over like the jam kettle.” In her memoir,
The Alpine Path
, L. M. Montgomery, another child of the 1870s, speaks of her childhood kinship with nature in rather sentimental terms: “It has always seemed to me, ever since early childhood, that, amid all the commonplaces of life, I was very near to a kingdom of ideal beauty. Between it and me hung only a thin veil.” Carr's description of this same perception, the feeling of an almost achievable state of synaesthetic integration and joy in which one will see into the living heart of things, has a feeling of immediacy, detail and authenticity. She observes the ripening white currants becoming almost transparent and she races her imaginary white horse above the old garden. “Everything was going so fast—the butterflies' wings, the pink flowers, the hum and the smell, that they stopped being four things and became one most lovely thing, and the little boy and the white horses and I were in the middle of it, like the seeds that you saw dimly inside the white currants. In fact, the beautiful thing
was
like the white currants, like a big splendid secret getting clearer and clearer every moment—just a second more and———.”

Memoir as history and memoir as fiction come together in the question of memoir as biography. How do the stories of Small preview the adult Emily Carr? Do we see an artist and a writer in the making? There are certainly hints. Small views her world as simultaneously animated and composed. This is a world where objects have life. A hansom cab thinks itself very smart. Lizzie's biblical texts and moral homilies lie poised, waiting to be aired. From the elements of this protean world, Small composes still lifes. She gives us the literal point of view. When the cow comes to stand in front of Small, the view of the barn, the henhouse and the manure pile is obscured so that everything is foreground. At the end of “Mrs. Crane,” Small comes to see this narrow, difficult woman in a new way, literally, as she stands above her. “I had never seen the top of her before. I saw the part of her hair, the round of her shoulders, her broad back, her thickness when you saw her from the top.” Describing the setting for Sunday evening Bible reading, Small gives us colour, temperature, the shapes of the furniture and the sources of the light—notes for a Vermeer. Small has an artist's memory. She says that her first view of the wild lily field imprints itself on the back of her eyes forever.

As the visual artist in embryo notes perspective, texture and intensity, so the writer relishes words: “uppish,” “spankety,” “brown-windsory” prayers, “chawing” the sapless stems of pinks to cut a bouquet. A writer in the making, Small notices how diction reveals character—the hypocritical “dear” that Auntie attaches to her many requests and judgments, the pompous “patering and matering” of the English-educated. Again, these disparate elements are artfully composed. The story of Mrs. Crane, an examination of childhood's griefs, is bookended by a discussion of the size of the woman's heart. “Singing,” a poignant look at
colonial homesickness, is similarly framed by a pair of sound clips of Small belting out song full voice in the cow yard.

In
The Book of Small
, we certainly see Small's potential as a painter and as a writer. But do we see the future Emily Carr? If all I knew of Emily Carr was this memoir and the realities of nineteenth-century British Columbia, I would have predicted a woman of conviction and accomplishment who did not willingly toe the line. I would have predicted an early environmental and animal-rights activist, perhaps, or a subtly subversive children's writer, or a splendid mother of highly evolved sons and daughters, or a successful painter of portraits that punctured the pretensions of the rich and famous without the subjects ever noticing. I would not, however, have predicted the painting
Scorned as Timber, Beloved of the Sky
. I would not have predicted a legacy that would inspire such a range of poets, novelists, actors, dancers, composers, biographers, painters and other visual artists. In her biography of Carr, Paula Blanchard asks how this one woman, this one artist and writer, transcended the expectations and conventions of her time and place while others did not.
The Book of Small
does not give us the neat package of an answer. It gives us, instead, an unforgettable portrait of one small fully realized child peering over the garden wall at one small unique corner of the world “Western as West can be.”

Emily Carr,
Broom, Beacon Hill
, 1937,
oil on paper on board, Art Gallery of Greater Victoria 940222br

ALL OUR SUNDAYS
were exactly alike. They began on Saturday night after Bong the Chinaboy had washed up and gone away, after our toys, dolls and books, all but
The Peep of Day
and Bunyan's
Pilgrim's Progress
, had been stored away in drawers and boxes till Monday, and every Bible and prayerbook in the house was puffing itself out, looking more important every minute.

Then the clothes-horse came galloping into the kitchen and straddled round the stove inviting our clean clothes to mount and be aired. The enormous wooden tub that looked half coffin and half baby-bath was set in the middle of the kitchen floor with a rag mat for dripping on laid close beside it. The great iron soup pot, the copper wash-boiler and several kettles covered the top of the stove, and big sister Dede filled them by working the kitchen pump-handle furiously. It was a sad old pump and always groaned several times before it poured. Dede got the brown windsor soap, heated the towels and put on a thick white apron with a bib. Mother unbuttoned us and by that time the pots and kettles were steaming.

Dede scrubbed hard. If you wriggled, the flat of the long-handled tin dipper came down spankety on your skin.

As soon as each child was bathed Dede took it pick-a-back and rushed it upstairs through the cold house. We were allowed to say our prayers kneeling in bed on Saturday night, steamy, brown-windsory prayers—then we cuddled down and tumbled very comfortably into Sunday.

AT SEVEN O'CLOCK
Father stood beside our bed and said, “Rise up! Rise up! It's Sunday, children.” He need not have told us; we knew Father's Sunday smell—Wright's coal-tar soap and camphor. Father had a splendid chest of camphor-wood which had come from England round the Horn in a sailing ship with him. His clean clothes lived in it and on Sunday he was very camphory. The chest was high and very heavy. It had brass handles and wooden knobs. The top let down as a writing desk with pigeonholes; below there were little drawers for handkerchiefs and collars and long drawers for clothes. On top of the chest stood Father's locked desk for papers. The key of it was on his ring with lots of others. This desk had a secret drawer and a brass plate with
R. H. CARR
engraved on it.

On top of the top desk stood the little Dutchman, a china figure with a head that took off and a stomach full of little candies like coloured hailstones. If we had been very good all week we got hailstones Sunday morning.

Family prayers were uppish with big words on Sunday—reverend awe-ful words that only God and Father understood.

No work was done in the Carr house on Sunday. Everything had been polished frightfully on Saturday and all Sunday's food cooked too. On Sunday morning Bong milked the cow and went away from breakfast until evening milking-time. Beds were made,
the dinner-table set, and then we got into our very starchiest and most uncomfortable clothes for church.

OUR FAMILY HAD
a big gap in the middle of it where William, John and Thomas had all been born and died in quick succession, which left a wide space between Dede and Tallie and the four younger children.

Lizzie, Alice and I were always dressed exactly alike. Father wanted my two big sisters to dress the same, but they rebelled, and Mother stood behind them. Father thought we looked like orphans if we were clothed differently. The Orphans sat in front of us at church. No two of them had anything alike. People gave them all the things their own children had grown out of—some of them were very strange in shape and colour.

When we were all dressed, we went to Mother's room to be looked over. Mother was very delicate and could not get up early or walk the two miles to church, and neither could Tallie or little Dick.

Father went to Dr. Reid's Presbyterian Church at the corner of Pandora and Blanshard Streets. Father was not particularly Presbyterian, but he was a little deaf and he liked Dr. Reid because, if we sat at the top of the church, he could hear his sermons. There was just the Orphans in front of us, and the stove in front of them. The heat of the stove sent them all to sleep. But Dr. Reid was a kind preacher—he did not bang the Bible, nor shout to wake them up. Sometimes I went to sleep too, but I tried not to because of what happened at home after Sunday's dinner.