Emily Carr - Klee Wyck

KLEE WYCK

EMILY CARR was born in Victoria, British Columbia, in 1871. In 1890, after the death of her parents, she went to San Francisco to study art at the California School of Design, and in 1898, she made her first visit to the Nuuchahnulth (Nootka) village of Hitatsuu near Ucluelet on Vancouver Island, where she sketched Native subject matter. Carrs desire to deepen her studies took her to England in 1899 and to France in 1910 when the Paris art world was bursting into modernism. She began to paint the totem poles of the Tlingit in Alaska in 1907, the Kwakiutl along the British Columbia Coast in 1908, and the Coast Tsimshian, the Gitksan villages of the Upper Skeena River, and the Haida villages of the Queen Charlotte Islands in 1912. She was invited to submit her works for the landmark 1927 exhibition Canadian West Coast Art: Native and Modern at the National Gallery in Ottawa, which included paintings by the Group of Seven. This marked the beginning of her long and valuable association with the Group. An accomplished writer, Carr wrote a number of books, including The House of All Sorts, Growing Pains, and The Heart of a Peacock, but is best known for Klee Wyck, which won the Governor Generals Award in 1941. Carr died in 1945 in Victoria, British Columbia.

PENGUIN CANADA

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Canada Inc.)

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephens Green, Dublin 2, Ireland

(a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road,

Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

(a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park,

New Delhi 110 017, India

Penguin Group (NZ), cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310,

New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank,

Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Penguin Classics edition copyright Penguin Group (Canada), 2006.

This edition is an unabridged reprint of Klee Wyck, published in 1941 by Oxford

University Press.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Disclaimer:

Please note the following links contain information that is created and maintained by a variety of sources external to the Penguin (Group) Canada. While we have done our best to ensure that these resources are dependable, Penguin (Group) Canada is not responsible for the content, bandwidth requirements, or availability of these resources. All links to external website information provided within this edition should not be construed as an endorsement by Penguin (Group) Canada of the content or views of the linked materials. These sites contain the personal opinions of the persons who post the entries. Penguin (Group) Canada does not control, monitor or guarantee the information contained in these sites or information contained in links to other external web sites, and does not endorse any views expressed or products or services offered therein. In no event shall Penguin (Group) Canada be responsible or liable, directly or indirectly, for any damage or loss caused or alleged to be caused by or in connection with the use of or reliance on any such content, goods, or services available on or through any such site or resource.

ISBN-13: 978-0-670-06540-0

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication data available upon request.

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Visit the Penguin Group (Canada) website at www.penguin.ca

Special and corporate bulk purchase rates available; please see
www.penguin.ca/corporatesales or call 1-800-399-6858, ext. 477 or 474

If it be true that good wine needs no bush, tis true that a good play needs no epilogue. Yet to good wine they do use good bushes: and good plays prove the better by the help of good epilogues. What a case am I in then that am neither a good epilogue nor cannot insinuate with you in behalf of a good play ...

My plight is much less difficult than Rosalinds. I am not an epilogue at all, good or badin fact I should hate to be an epilogue. I have no other function to perform than to open the door for you and invite you into a new experience. I am also in better case than she, if we may trust her own statement, in that I can insinuate with you in behalf of a good book.

IT SEEMS ALMOST an impertinence that I should tell readers who Miss Carr ismy brief note concerning her must seek its justification in the fact that in the present volume she makes her very first appearance as a literary figure.

Born almost seventy years ago in Victoria of English parentage, Emily Carr is a thorough-going, downright Canadian. She early gave evidence of unusual interest and talent in drawing, promise richly realized in the ample and distinguished achievement of her painting. In her early teens she ventured into the then reputedly wicked city of San Francisco to train at the Art School there. With the exception of that period, a sojourn of some years in England and another in France, Miss Carr has lived her whole life in Western Canada which she loves with deep loyalty. Here she has worked at her art with singular devotion and courage despite the indifference and, at times, even hostility of her friends and fellow citizens. Perhaps it is because of public neglect of her early work that she developed in her painting a style so individual and sincerely personal that it seems to me presumptuous to try to analyze it, looking as usual for influences and tendencies, and quite futile to come with labels all ready to smack onto this Canadian womans vital, vivid work.

TO A FEW of her closest friends it became known some time ago that Miss Carr had for years been writing, setting down in simple, unaffected prose, early experiences of her childhood in Victoria or later adventures in Indian villages of the British Columbia Coast. This writing has been done for no other reason than to provide occasional escape and relaxation for the artist, or, at times, to fix clearly in her mind sequences of events and impressions of people and places, the edges of which might become dim. It has none of the too frequent self-consciousness which makes tedious reading of reminiscences prepared intentionally for the public.

Klee Wyck is made up of sketches written at various times and brought together and published now for the first time. Long ago when it was her habit in summers to go into wild, lonely places seeking Indian subjects, Miss Carrs artist mind received impressions which have remained sharp and real for her across the years. By fish-boat, gas-boat, sometimes by Indian canoe, taking with her a few books, at least one dog and her sketching kit, she penetrated forest and village on the British Columbia coast, even going on occasion over to the Queen Charlottes. The vivid images stored then in her mind have been brooded over since by her rich imaginative faculty and the result is an unusual collection of sketches, this time in words, not paint.