The House of All Sorts (2 page)

Emily did not paint in her “fine studio” as much as she had planned; she felt her tenants encroaching on both her work and her living space. Eventually, she began to resent Hill House: its “grim outline,” she wrote, seemed to “slap her in the face” as she approached it from the street. She felt “
screwed
into the house… twist by twist. Every circumstance, financial, public, personal, artistic, had taken a hand in that cruel twirling of the driver. My
screws were down to their heads. Each twist had demanded—Forget you ever wanted to be an artist. Nobody wanted your art. Buckle down to being a landlady.”

She tried buckling down, but “Art would keep poking at me from unexpected places. Art being so much greater than ourselves, it will not give up once it has taken hold.”

At the start of her venture, Emily had been so optimistic about her financial future that she had included, on the upper floor of the house, a maid's room. Not only had a maid been out of the question, she had to become her own janitor. She rose before dawn each day—“To part from pillow and blanket is like bidding goodbye to all your relatives suddenly smitten with plague”—and descended to the cheerless basement to feed “that grim… and malevolent brute,” the coal furnace, before her tenants could wake and grouse about the cold. When the fire finally caught, she trudged to the garden, a heavy bucket of ashes in each hand, “feeling like an anchor dropped overboard.”

In 1916, times became even harder, and Emily was again forced to renovate. Moving her own bedroom into the attic, she turned the whole top floor into a boarding house for women, using the Doll's House as their sleeping quarters and her studio as their dining hall and common area. The move meant more work, more headaches, for Emily. This fiercely independent soul was now, instead of painting her large, bold works of art, cooking endless meals, shovelling coal and snow, tending the garden, taking phone messages at all hours, whitewashing walls, doing laundry and unplugging drains.

Emily went to bed at night hating her lot in life. “The weight of the house crushed me,” she wrote. “Tenants tore me to shreds.” By 1918, she was able to discontinue her boarding house and move
back into her studio, but the huge physical challenge of earning a living, combined with the harsh criticism she received whenever she exhibited her work, had taken its toll. Reviews in the Victoria papers were, at their best, negative. Emily had begun to lose faith—not in her art, but in her art's ability to mean anything to anyone other than herself.

Far from having freed Emily to pursue her art, the House of All Sorts had imprisoned her. She became depressed, unable to paint. She thought that her career as an artist was over, felt only “a dead lump… in my heart where my work had been,” that she was doomed to be a landlady for the rest of her life. Only her morning jaunts to the park, circled by a whirl of dogs, gave her the strength to carry on. “I wanted to loose the Bobtails, follow them—run, and run, and run into forever—beyond sound of every tenant in the world.”

Although Emily did submit to anger and discouragement in her “bitter” period, she continued to work hard to keep a roof over her head. She grew and sold produce from her garden, raised chickens and rabbits for meat, made and sold hooked rugs from raw wool yarn and remnants of old clothes. She churned out pots, hundreds of “stupid objects, the kind that tourists pick up,” as a further attempt to make ends meet. If, as Jean-Paul Sartre claimed, genius is not a gift but the way one invents in desperate situations, Emily Carr was a bona fide genius.

In 1917, she took a position as a cartoonist with the Vancouver-based
Western Woman's Weekly
. Some of the material for her pen-and-ink sketches and accompanying verses that mocked human folly was drawn from her experience as a landlady. The problems of apartment living, the difficulties of finding dependable
help, the notion that men were stupid and women vain: the
Western Woman's Weekly
provided yet another outlet for the longtime grudges and nagging prejudices she held.

That same year, Emily followed through on an idea she had entertained for much of her life—that of opening a “Bobtail Kennel.” After procuring a female, Loo, and a local sire, she spent the next four years raising a total of 350 Old English Bobtail Sheepdog puppies, “healthy, intelligent, working stock,” which she sold “at a price the man of moderate means could afford.”

The puppies needed full-time care, and Emily became a surrogate mum, bottle-feeding the litters up to three times a day. When a distemper epidemic struck in 1919, she tried to nurse fifteen sick puppies, then, as they lay dying, was forced to drown them, one by one, in a bucket. She buried as many as she could in her garden, piled the rest in her wicker perambulator and wheeled them to the cliffs, where she tossed them into the sea. Reading
The House of All Sorts
, one feels she would have much preferred to have dispatched her tenants this way. “I would far rather have… catered to creatures,” she'd written, in her fledgling landladying days.

In the early 1930s, Emily came up with another idea to rid herself of the burdensome apartment house so that she could devote more time to her painting: Hill House could provide a permanent space for artists to exhibit their work, a gallery in which “the spirit of art could grow.” The Beacon Hill Park authorities would manage the building; she would remain in the upper suite, a live-in director-curator-caretaker. The house was well situated (though Victoria's “smart set” at the time maintained Beacon Hill was “out of the way”) and would, during the summer
months, attract tourists who frequently complained of there being no picture gallery in Victoria.

Emily, to demonstrate the feasibility of her plan, emptied the lower floor of the House of All Sorts, put in a connecting door and installed an exhibition of paintings: her own works and those of two friends. About forty people came to hear her talk about the “modest operation” she proposed, a “people's gallery in a people's park,” a place to exhibit art of all kinds: “conservative, progressive, oriental, children's.” It would be, she told potential supporters, a place that “touched all classes, all nationalities, all colours.”

Once again, money became a factor. In January 1933, after two months of wrangling with bureaucrats, fellow artists and the general public—whose interest in supporting the arts she seemed to have misconceived—Emily wrote in her journal (later published as
Hundreds and Thousands
): “The People's Gallery scheme is over for the present…I went ahead as far as I could; then it came to a
cul de sac:
no money, no help, no nothing but to let her lie by and sleep.”

Soon after, she put Hill House, which was “both out of date & out of repair,” up for sale. “I wonder will we ever consciously look back and see the plan of things, the reason for this and that and the good of it?” she wrote, near the end of her life. “This house—what a mixture of love and hate! What a dear house and studio and garden—as a renting proposition how beastly! Was this very thing needed for the good of my soul?”

In the depressed real estate market, the house didn't sell; eventually, she traded it for a bungalow, which she let, on the eastern side of Beacon Hill Park, and found a cottage she could live in more cheaply, for twelve dollars a month.

She soon made this rented cottage, in a blue-collar neighbourhood in western James Bay, feel like home. Her dogs had the run of the garden; bantams nested in the chicken house, budgies in an aviary on the large back porch. Woo, her monkey, inhabited the kitchen with the rest of her menagerie. Her studio, “the size of an aspirin box,” was, as Emily wished, “a quiet place to study and paint and die in.”

For the first time in years, she was living alone. She found it “lonesome and drifting not to have any tenants to do for.” Even though they had made her life miserable, she'd become used to hearing them banging about the house. Now, there were no sounds other than the snufflings of animals and her own shuffling from one room to the next.

But the “filthy tenants” who had plagued her life, “sapping the joy out of everything,” became cannon fodder for Emily when, years later, she began to write. In her stories, she paints unforgiving caricatures of the likes of Mrs. Pillcrest, lying in bed in a daze of poetry and tobacco smoke: “The sheets (mine) were punctured lavishly with little brown-edged holes. It seemed necessary for her to gesticulate with lighted cigarette as she ‘poemed.' ”

Emily came to writing late, in the last decade of her life. After the success of
Klee Wyck
in 1941 and
The Book of Small
in 1942, her publisher was eager to see a third book. Emily favoured “Creatures,” a collection of dog and monkey stories, but Oxford's editor wasn't keen on “Woo's Life” and felt there weren't enough dog stories to justify a single volume. In the latter half of 1944, the last full year of her life, a decision was made to combine the apartment house and dog stories in one volume, to be called
The House of All Sorts
.

Emily's apartment house stories were her ultimate revenge. “I'll be even with them yet,” she said of those who had broken her heart with broken leases and broken promises, by “using them for stories.” Two generations of readers have cheered Emily on when a rent dodger or abusive tenant gets his or her comeuppance. Her uncompromising, no nonsense writing style contributes to the book's continuing appeal and the feeling that the stories are
au courant
, untrapped in time.

Violent verbs, aggressive adjectives, volatile metaphors: Emily did much more than just get even. Detaching herself from any vestiges of humanity her victims might have possessed, she portrays them as animals, objects, even as forces of nature. No one escapes her vitriol: children with measles are “spotted miseries”; a crying baby has a head “split in two—eyes, cheeks, brow retired, all became mouth, and out of the mouth poured a roar the equal of Niagara Falls”; an ingrate of a grannie is “a vast woman with a rolling gait, too much fat, too little wind, only one eye.”

There were, of course—though few and far between—“little exchanges that sweetened the sour of landladying,” for her tenants did come in “all sorts”: they weren't a completely disagreeable lot. She shared “giggles and jokes” with a newlywed couple who “were like sunshine pouring upon things” and who “left the memory of their joyousness in every corner” when they moved on. There were amiable home-loving bachelors who looked to her for advice, and mild-mannered elderly ladies who would sooner give notice than complain about the late-night goings-on in another flat. When Emily was away at a luncheon and her favourite Bobtail was in whelp, a young woman heard Loo's lonely whimpers and sat keeping her company until Emily returned. “I
think that little kindness to my mother Bobtail touched me deeper than anything any tenant ever did for me.”

Emily realized her own shortcomings when it came to writing about people; she was much more at home depicting the natural world. She felt she didn't know human beings very well and tended to set “their faults above their virtues.” In contrast, when writing about her dogs, her prose becomes lyrical, and, like her Bobbies themselves, bursting with good-natured exuberance.

Ira Dilworth, Emily's closest friend, became her “honorary editor”: he made his suggestions for small changes directly onto the typescript of
The House of All Sorts
, appended his more general comments to each story, then mailed them back to her. Emily was by this time resting in the hospital (“Over-doing has enraged your heart,” the doctor said, and warned her not to write so much as to tire herself out); but she would promptly revise and return a story to Dilworth. “I did not know book rules,” she wrote, in her autobiography,
Growing Pains
. “I made two for myself. They were about the same as the principles I used in painting—Get to the point as directly as you can; never use a big word if a little one will do.”

A three-hundred dollar advance from Oxford and the pleasure of seeing “Bobtails,” the stories that make up the second half of the book, in print, made Emily happy, and favourable reviews made
The House of All Sorts
another literary success. With this book, the last to be published in her lifetime, her reputation as a unique stylist with a rare gift for picturesque expression was secured.

“Bothers cannot be escaped by property owners and builders of houses,” Emily Carr wrote of her travails as a landlady. By the last page of
The House of All Sorts
, I felt I knew her well enough
to be able to share with her very palpable presence the frustration I feel when writing and revising my own work.

The fuss and botheration of writing and revising, I realize, though, are trifles compared to the torments Emily Carr must have endured, trying to balance her responsibilities as a landlady and her artistic calling, in the House of All Sorts' hurting embrace.

To my friends
Bill and Irene Clarke

THE HOUSE OF
All Sorts could not have been quite itself in any other spot in the world than just where it stood, here, in Victoria, across James' Bay and right next to Beacon Hill Park. The house was built on part of the original property my father had chosen when he came to the new world and settled down to raise his family. This lot was my share of the old cow pasture. Father's acreage had long ago been cut into city lots. Three houses had been built in the cow yard, more in the garden and others in the lily field. The old house in which I was born was half a block away; one of my sisters still lived in it, and another in her little schoolhouse built in what had once been the family vegetable garden.

Bothers cannot be escaped by property owners and builders of houses. I got my share from the very digging of the hole for the foundation of the House of All Sorts. But the foundations of my house were not entirely of brick and cement. Underneath lay something too deep to be uprooted when they dug for the basement. The builders did not even know it was there, did not see it when they spread the cement floor. It was in my memory as much as it was in the soil. No house
could
sit it down, no house blind what my memory saw—a cow, an old white horse, three
little girls in pinafores, their arms full of dolls and Canton-flannel rabbits made and stuffed with bran by an aunt, three little girls running across the pasture to play “ladies” in the shrubberies that were screened from Simcoe Street by Father's hawthorn hedge, a hedge now grown into tall trees, flowering in the month of May.