A Painter Who Wanted To Write*

Adapted from:
Eggleston, Wilfred. "A Painter Who Wanted to Write"
The Ottawa Journal. January 28, 1967.

EMILY CARR'S ambition to write was almost as strong as her passion to paint. She had the true professional approach to both of these arts. We have had our share of dilletantes and casual amateurs in all the arts; Emily Carr was "the genuine article." She was prepared to sacrifice just about everything else in the cause of artistic integrity and final success.

"What will you have?" quoth God. "Take it and pay the price." Emily Carr was prepared to pay for it.

All this and much more comes out in her journals, published a few months ago under the title "Hundreds and Thousands." (These were the tiny licorice candies which were nothing individually but delicious in quantity. The same idea was conveyed by Martin Burrell, who was once a columnist on this page, in his book entitled, "Crumbs Are Also Bread.")

Who knows? It may be that future generations of Canadians may come to regard Emily Carr's writings as just as important and valuable as her paintings. Even if she had never laid brush to canvas, her literary work adds up in quantity and qualilty to an assured place in Canadian letters.

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I HAVE noticed that some of the most vivid prose I have ever read was written by artists. Vision is the essential ingredient of both arts. If you can see vividly enough you can convey it, and the medium isn't that important. I don't think it is entirely irrelevant here to suggest that Bruce Hutchison's lively writing owes something to the fact that he aspired to be a cartoonist when young, and was gifted in that art.

Here is Bruce, for example, describing J.W. Dafoe: "a huge and burly figure, the shaggy head, the sprawling hair, the twinkling eyes, the slow rumbling laugh." You can dip into a book like "The Incredible Canadian" and come up almost at random with a sentence like this, describing "Charlie" Dunning in the House of Commons in 1926: "That redoubtable young dirt farmer, with bushy black mustache, chiseled features, dark suit and gray spats, who looked exactly like an old-fashioned advertisement for gents' superior clothing."

Or here is Peter Hurd, the New Mexico artist whose portrait of Lyndon B. Johnson got such a rude brush-off from the sitter the other day:

"No artist is inwardly satisfied or happy except perhaps during those rare and exalted moments when in a state of temporary equilibrium he considers with pleasure some work he has lately completed. Neither contentment nor satisfaction belong to us, for there are constantly stirring within us forebodings of a realization of the passing of time, of the inevitable falling short of a self-set mark."

"In times of despair we feel the harassing dread of attaining finally only to the mediocre. In times of confidence, as when a work in progress seems to be moving well, there is a wonderful excitement attendant upon the effort; and unexplored horizons widen before us. To acquire any taint of complacency, or to look upon success as anything but fortuitous would seem to me to surrender all hope of growth."

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WHICH brings us back to Emily Carr, who must have felt so on many occasions. Emily Carr's journal registers the moments of ecstasy as well as the agony. Here are two of her entries spaced only two days apart:

"After a real struggle I finished the story of the crow. Is there like me (she was 54 at feel them deeply as I write.[sic] I wonder if Flora is right that my painting is waiting on my writing. How interesting it is to work on the two. They are alike and different. I want to write and write longer spells than I want to paint. Writing is more human than painting."
Then two days afterwards: "I went to an Authors' Association meeting yesterday. It was very stupid."

Why? "Mostly old women there like me (she was 54 at the time), and a sprinkling of the ugliest men I ever saw; and afterwards we went to the conservatories and saw the chrysanthemums, which were far more inspiring..."

She joined a writing class and at first had high hopes of it. But this didn't last:
"I'm so dreadfully sore with writing. I verily believe my stuff gets poorer and poorer. The writing class gets duller and duller, and I will fall to yawning and that makes her (the instructor) mad and she's so dull and dense and so am I. She's bored stiff with her class and we are all bored stiff with her. I'm off painting and writing. If only the ground wasn't frostbitten I would go and dig. Maybe I'll whitewash."

Of course that mood passed too, and Emily Carr moved ahead into the richest and most productive era of her life in both painting and writing. Her journals are of absorbing interest to all students of Canadian painting and they also take us behind the scenes of a struggling writer's workshop, who stayed with all the drudgery and discouragement and triumphed at last.

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