The House of All Sorts
THE HOUSE OF ALL SORTS
Emily Carr,
Shacks and Trees in a Wood
, 1930, oil on canvas board, Vancouver Art Gallery, 62.2 Ã 47.1 cm, Vancouver Art Gallery, Emily Carr Trust,
VAG
42.3.43. Photo by Trevor Mills
ALL SORTS
EMILY CARR
INTRODUCTION BY SUSAN MUSGRAVE
Copyright © 2004 by Douglas & McIntyre
Text of
The House of All Sorts
copyright © 2004 by Yvonne Fisher, Estate of Emily Carr
Introduction copyright © 2004 by Susan Musgrave
04 05 06 07 08 5 4 3 2 1
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First published in 1944 by Oxford University Press
Douglas & McIntyre Ltd.
2323 Quebec Street, Suite 201
Vancouver, British Columbia
Canada
V5T 4S7
www.douglas-mcintyre.com
NATIONAL LIBRARY OF CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Carr, Emily, 1871â1945
The house of all sorts/Emily Carr; introduction by Susan Musgrave.
ISBN
1-55365-054-9
1. Carr, Emily, 1871â1945. 2. PaintersâCanadaâBiography. I. Title.
ND249.C3A2
2004d     759.11    Â
C2003-907410-2
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Carr, Emily, 1871â1945.
The house of all sorts/Emily Carr; introduction by Susan Musgrave.
p. cm.
ISBN
1-55365-054-9 (pbk. alk. paper)
1. Carr, Emily, 1871â1945. 2. PaintersâCanadaâBiography.
3. Victoria (B.C.)âSocial life and customs. 4. Apartment housesâ
British ColumbiaâVictoria. 5. Old English sheepdog. I. Title.
ND249.C3A2
2004Â Â Â Â Â 759.11âdc22Â Â Â Â Â 2004041415
Editing by Saeko Usukawa
Cover and text design by Ingrid Paulson
Cover painting: Emily Carr, detail from
Shacks and Trees in a Wood
, 1930,
oil on canvas board, Vancouver Art Gallery, 62.2 Ã 47.1 cm,
Vancouver Art Gallery, Emily Carr Trust,
VAG
42.3.43. Photo by Trevor Mills
Printed and bound in Canada by Friesens
Printed on acid-free, forest friendly, 100% post-consumer
recycled paper processed chlorine-free
Distributed in the U.S. by Publishers Group West
We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Book
Publishing Industry Development Program (
BPIDP
) for our publishing activities.
INTRODUCTION: A HOUSE OF ONE'S OWN
by Susan Musgrave
A HOUSE OF ONE'S OWN
by Susan Musgrave
I guess it's in my blood
to want to be like Emily Carr.
I don't know much about her
but we've been to some
of the same places
.
IN THE EARLY1970S
, while living on the Queen Charlotte Islands/Haida Gwaii, I discovered Emily Carr's first book,
Klee Wyck
. Emily herself had long been part of my landscape: my family held her paintings in the same esteem as my adolescent poetry. A great-aunt, who came holiday-making from England, referred to her as “that dreadful woman” after viewing her paintings in a Vancouver gallery. An uncle, who dabbled in oils, dubbed her “Jamily Jarr.” Aunt Constance, who had rooms in the Empress Hotel, bequeathed Uncle Charles's watercolours of the Khyber Pass and other locales to my mother but couldn't bear to “saddle anyone” with the “daubings” of “the local Miss Carr.” She donated them to the Goodwill Enterprises.
Emily had come to the Queen Charlottes long before me; wherever I went, I felt haunted by her hungry ghost. An “Indian,” Jimmie, had taken her by boat to the abandoned villages of Tanu and Skedans; the two friends camped in an old cabin, listening to the waves splashing along the beach, breathing “the lovely smoky smell of their wood fire” on the bare earth floor. In the morning, Jimmie cut a path “like a green tunnel from the house to the beach” so they could come and go more easily, while Emily sketched the battered row of totem poles circling the bay.
I, too, had stayed at Tanu and at Skedans, in a falling-down house with my own friend Jimmy, a prince of a man, and now chief of his clan in Masset.
Emily and I
shared him for a whileâ
I know that. He was
impossible to paint
and what's more
she found the forest
a deeper attraction
.
Jimmy's Haida name was Skil-wans-sas, which meant “the sound the little waves and gravel make rolling in on the beach.” One morning when we woke, the tide was out, and Jimmy had to drag our boat half a mile over the sand to reach the sea⦠while I sat on the bank and wrote,
Jimmy rows
further into the
sea-drift
,
Emily says
it's too rough
to go sailing
â¦
Years later, after I'd left the Charlottes, I bought my first house on Vancouver Island, a cottage built by the poet Ernest Fern, in 1929, on Patricia Bay, near Sidney; neighbours informed me that pieces of Emily Carr's pottery had been found in my attic and that in the early 1930s she had spent her summers painting in my Treehouse (so named because of the 190-foot tall Douglas fir around which the poet had built the house). Since then, I have discovered, she is purported to have painted in as many island cottages as there are pieces of the true cross for sale in Europe.
Carl Jung, when he described a house as an extension of the unconscious, “a kind of representation of one's innermost thoughts,” obviously wasn't talking about a rental property. He couldn't have been a landlord, obliged to share his house, and, by extension, his inner worlds, with others, who “by paying rentâ¦felt they were entitled to⦠make certain demands upon me and upon my things,” as Emily put it. She was to spend twenty-two years renting out rooms to strangers, trying, at the same time, to make roomâtime enough and space enoughâfor her art.
In early 1913, Emily had become fed up with trying to eke out a living, teaching and exhibiting her paintings in Vancouver; she decided to move back to her native Victoria, where she could continue to paint, and to support herself by renting rooms in a house she would build on the property she had inherited from her father.
She drew up her own plans for the apartment house, on Simcoe Street in James Bay, a short walk to the Dallas Road cliffs and beach, entrusting the construction to a “querulous, dictatorial”
architect who antagonized his workers, violated city building codes, and taxed both Emily's pocketbook and temper. “It was a disheartening start⦠but, when once I was quit of the builders and saw my way to climbing out of the hole of debt they had landed me in,” she wrote, “I was as thrilled as a woman is over her first baby even if it is a cripple.”
In the spring, when work had begun on Hill Houseâso called because of its proximity to Beacon Hill Park (the name “House of All Sorts” came later, a literary construct)âit was a landlord's market. But by December, when the classified adâ“flat, furnished or unfurnished”âappeared in the local paper, as Emily wrote, “The big boom in Victoria property tumbled into a slump, an anxious shuddery time for every landowner.” Tenants, now, could afford to be choosey.
Emily had intended the top floor of the House of All Sorts to be her studio-apartment. There, she would live and paint, while the two lower suites covered her mortgage and bills. Far from making a comfortable living, all the rentals (assuming the tenants paidâit was wartime and Victoria was rife with shady fly-by-nights skulking from one apartment house to another)âbarely scraped out a subsistence. After only a year, Emily was forced to divide her upstairs quarters into two suites. The smaller, reserved for “hand-picked” tenants, she named the “Doll's House.”