Carr - Hundreds and Thousands: the Journals of Emily Carr

HUNDREDS AND THOUSANDS

Emily Carr, Odds & Ends, 1939, oil on canvas, AGGV1998.001.001.
Formerly in the collection of the Greater Victoria Public Library,
transferred to the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria.

EMILY CARR

THE JOURNALS OF EMILY CARR

INTRODUCTION BY GERTA MORAY

Copyright 2006 by Douglas & McIntyre
Text of Hundreds and Thousands copyright 2006 by John Inglis, Estate of Emily Carr
Introduction copyright 2006 by Gerta Moray

06 07 08 09 10 5 4 3 2 1

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First published in 1966 by Clarke, Irwin & Company Limited

Douglas & McIntyre Ltd.
2323 Quebec Street, Suite 201
Vancouver, British Columbia
Canada V5T 4S7
www.douglas-mcintyre.com

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Carr, Emily, 18711945.
Hundreds and thousands: the journals of Emily Carr/
Emily Carr ; introduction by Gerta Moray.
ISBN-13: 978-1-55365-172-7 ISBN-10: 1-55365-172-3
1. Carr, Emily, 18711945Diaries. 2. PaintersCanadaBiography. I. Title.
ND249.C3A2 2006 759.11 C2006-900824-8

Editing by Saeko Usukawa
Cover and text design by Ingrid Paulson
Cover painting: Emily Carr, detail from Odds & Ends, 1939, oil on canvas,
AGGV1998.001.001. Formerly in the collection of the Greater Victoria
Public Library, transferred to the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria.

Printed and bound in Canada by Friesens
Printed on acid-free, forest-friendly (100 per cent 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.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION: AN UNVARNISHED EMILY CARR
by Gerta Moray

INTRODUCTION AN UNVARNISHED EMILY CARR

by Gerta Moray

AS WE READ EMILY CARRS journals, we realize we are looking over the artists shoulder as she writes down her most intimate day-to-day thoughts and experiences. In these pages, she records her conversations with herself, her thoughts about her art and her search for a meaning in life. We witness her frequent anger and guilt towards family, neighbours and colleagues, her emotional life of alternate elation and depression, and her frustration at the struggle to earn a living as a landlady while attempting to be an ambitious modern painter in a provincial town. The journals provide a fascinating window into the personality and subjective experience of an artist and human being. Their stream of consciousness reveals Carrs search not for peace but for vitality, for a sense of life as change and movement. The journals also reveal her intense appetite for connection to the surrounding world of nature, so lavish on the Northwest Coast, and to the more difficult world of human relationships. They show how she sublimated these longings into art through bold orchestrations of visual form and through striking prose poetry, as well as through explorations of an eclectic new language of religion emerging in her time. But we must realize that Carrs stream of consciousness, unlike that in the novels Virginia Woolf was writing at the same time, was not composed with a view to publication (more of that later), that the journals were never considered, structured, pruned or polished for a critical readers eye. They therefore give us an Emily Carr exposed and vulnerable to judgment. Most readers will either love or hate her journals, or even both at once, depending to a great extent on their temperamental and experiential common ground with the writer.

Some background information on the publication history of the journals, on their context as writing and on their relationship to Carrs life history and artistic career, will offer a broader basis for understanding and interpreting what is recorded in Hundreds and Thousands. First of all, there is the books publication in 1966, more than twenty years after Carrs death, and the incorrect statement about its origins launched by her publisher. From letters found among her papers, the publishers foreword claims, we know that Emily Carr intended her journals to be published. She even thought of the title, Hundreds and Thousands. Carr did indeed invent this title; however, it was not intended for her journals but for a collection of short stories of her childhood that she was composing during 194345. And when, in the authors preface (provided by the publisher from a note found among Carrs papers), she commented that these little scraps and nothingnesses of my life have made a definite pattern, she was referring not to journal entries but to memories of her youth that she was intent on recapturing in literary form. In letters to her friend Ira Dilworth during 1943 and 1944, she makes repeated references to her work on these short

Because of the 1966 publishers foreword to Hundreds and Thousands, readers have been led to believe that Carr actually wrote her journals with a view to their eventual publication. There is no documentary evidence at all for this. Indeed, during the years when she was writing them, no such notion could have ). The fact that she left her personal journals to Ira Dilworth is consistent with her complete trust in and love for him, and with her desire that he should know her fully. It is unlikely she would have written so frankly if she had thought they would be published. We cannot know absolutely that Carr never discussed their possible publication in conversation with Dilworth, but his statement in 1945 suggests that they were a discovery when he received them upon her death. We can also guess that she would have trusted him in any decision he made in their regard, but that she would have felt horrified to see her most naked thoughts on a printed page.

In the event, Dilworths transcription of the journals from the twenty notebooks in which they were interspersed with drafts of some of Carrs stories was incomplete when he died in 1962. One of his heirs, Phyllis Inglis, brought them to Clarke, Irwin and Co., where the process was completed by the firms They fill in some darker shadows in Carrs life that could not be publicly discussed in 1966, when rigid standards of decorum were still upheld by Carrs many surviving friends and supporters.

Although the journals give the reader many insights into Carrs life during the years 192741, they should not be confused either with autobiography or with memoirs. Those forms of writing are found in Carrs other books, but they involve planning, structure and considered perspective. It is important to realize just how selective, spontaneous and accidentally fragmentary the journals are. Carr started these journals soon after ending a decade of artistic inactivity due to economic difficulties and the complete lack of an audience for modern art in ).