Adapted from:
Growing Pains: The Autobiography of Emily Carr.
Foreword by Ira Dilworth. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1946.
The Writings of Emily Carr
With Emily Carr, writing was only a substitute for painting. In her late sixties, her great heart gave out and she was forbidden by her doctor to go again into her beloved woods, carrying with her the heavy paraphernalia of the artist. Deprived of her normal medium, and driven still by her need to express Canada, she turned to writing. She came late to that trade, and she served no great apprenticeship in it. She was the first to admit deficiencies in her formal education which were to plague her as an author. Yet with KLEE WYCK, her first book, she stepped into the front rank of Canadian writers and found immediate favour with the critics as a stylist.
In this there is no cause for surprise; for she brought to her new trade the gifts which had made her a great artist. She was possessed of a fine and original mind; she had the artist's eye for subject, scene and colour. These natural gifts she submitted to a vigorous discipline. "It was not handling the paint," she tells us, "but handling of thoughts which overwhelmed me." To teach herself to handle thoughts, she made it a practice never to permit herself to touch a brush until she could answer these questions, in writing, in the fewest possible words: "What attracted me to this subject?" "Why do I want to paint it?" "What is the thing I am trying to express?"
When she turned from painting to writing, she added to these gifts and to this training, two principles which might well be carved above the entrance door of every School of Journalism. "They were about the same," she writes, "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."
In writing, as in painting, Emily carr was a master-craftsman. Practitioners of both crafts could find worse text books for their trade than the formula of this master.
From the dust jacket of Growing Pains
With a Frontispiece and six reproductions in full colour of paintings by the author
Emily Carr was born of English parents in Victoria, most English of Canadian cities. Yet she was to escape entirely her English heritage. The sea, the fishing villages, the Indains and the forests of Canada's West early claimed her as their own and her whole life was passed in an effort to express her love and her feeling for those things and for Canada. She was destined to travel far, to England and France, but she sought from the Old World only its art techniques and its skills, with which to express better the New. Later in her life, when she was forbidden to paint, she turned to writing to give expression to those things, Canadian things, which in her life had touched her deeply. Thus were born the Indian sketches, the stories of life in ealy Victoria which, published as KLEE WYCK and THE BOOK OF SMALL, were taken instantly to the hearts of Canadians everywhere.
Now, in GROWING PAINS, completed just before her death in 1945, we have Emily Carr's own story. GROWING PAINS is many things. It is the record of her girlhood in Victoria and of her training as an artist in San Francisco, England and France. It is the ironic story of her rejection by the Canadian people; of the years of despair when she ceased to paint, when Bobtails, pottery and paying guests claimed all her time; of her vindication and triumph when the Group of Seven had persuaded Canadians that Canada needed more than a representational Art to express her. The wit, the nostalgic charm, the good stories, the artist's descriptions, all the things that made great, KLEE WYCK and THE BOOK OF SMALL are to be found again, here, in full measure. Amateurs of style will find once more the economy of words, the freedom from literary affectations that have distinguished her other books. Over and above and through all this, there appears the strongest force of her life, her love for Canada.
GROWING PAINS is the very personal record of the life of a great woman, a great Canadian.
© By Permission of Stoddart Publishing Co. Limited, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada.
Copyright. The National Library of Canada.
(Revised: 19 August 1997).
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