Frank comments,
humor in Emily Carr's diary*

Adapted from:
Weiselberger, Carl. "Frank comments, humor in Emily Carr's diary".
Ottawa Citizen. December 5, 1966.

Hundreds and Thousands, The Journals of Emily Carr, Clarke Irwin and Co. Ltd, Toronto, with 12 color reproductions; $10.00, regular edition.

In her autobiography, Growing Pains, Emily Carr described how she would carry a little note book in her sketchsack. And while sitting before her subject - a group of totem poles, and Indian village, a grove of mystically whirling pine trees in the twilight of the British Columbian "virgin forest", she would try to write down her essential thoughts. Saying it in words helped her to say it ultimately in color and in painterly composition.

Few painters possess this double talent. Van Gogh, in his stirring letters to his brother Theo, described the paintings he planned in a most eloquent and graphic manner.

Delacroix's African diaries are valuable additions to his great Romantic paintings. And the modern 20th century artists Kokosckhka and Barlach, in their expressionistic plays, provided powerful, though not always equally successful, sideshows to their creative urge.

Emily Carr, one of Canada's most important painters, died 21 years ago. But strangely enough, her journals have been published only now.

She called the manuscript "Hundreds and Thousands", after the minute candies made in England -- "round sweetnesses, all colors and so small that separately they are not worth eating..."

Emily Carr's journals are worth reading, especially if one is still an admirer of her art and reads her books with enjoyment. The journals, which she began in 1927 and continued, with interruptions, until a few years before her death in 1945, are even more eloquent than her colorful books; they are intimate, abrupt, full of the spontaneous eccentricities of her style.

Emily Carr -- thank goodness! -- was not a learned, intellectual writer (like some of our present-day Toronto and Montreal avant-garde who, bearded or non-bearded, in a mumbo jumbo stew of Freud, Kierkegaard and Beatles, attempt to tell us how they "express themselves".)

Not so Emily Carr! This old spinster, who ran a boarding house in Victoria, feeding her roomers and her numerous cats, expressed herself in a powerfully simple manner:

"Delve! Study! Think!" she wrote in her Journals. Or several times merely: "Dig! Dig!"

Despite her admiration for Lawren Harris, she stayed away from his interst in theosophy "and such things"...She agreed with Varley, that one should not bring "religion in too much."

Her meeting with the artists of the Group of Seven is a climax in the Journals. She gives a graphic description of her trip to the East, to Toronto and Ottawa.

"The old lady from Victoria", visiting the National Gallery in the old museum building on McLeod Street, is immensely proud and happy to find "them all there" and in her quaint, old-fashioned way she enumerates "them all," from "Mr. Brown", the director, to "Mr. McCurry", his successor.

A chapter of Canadian art history becomes suddenly alive...And there are many wise, human remarks on life, aging, ill health, and signs of courage, in these diaries.

Take this humorous portrait of "two would-be art critics," who came to her studio. They were "pose-y", she writes, "waved their paws describing sweeps and motions in my pictures, screwed their eyes, made monocles of their fists, discoursed on aesthetics, asked prices..."

--C.W.

© By permission of the Ottawa Citizen.

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