Opposite Contraries Read Free

Inglis, perfectly genial and willingto help. He reported that his mother had loathed Emily Carr and rid herself of all the paintings and memorabilia she had the moment that Ira Dilworth died in 1962. He himself had never investigated his inheritance or seen the archive, but he was happy to see it was still being used.
    With Mr. Inglis’s permission, a major portion of the Emily Carr archive now meets the light of day, notably the restored portions of the journals, Carr’s earliest autobiographical statement and the text of her first public talk. This completes the personal record as Carr herself bequeathed it. Although caches of material (mostly correspondence) still remain to be unearthed from both public and private collections, this publication, together with Carr’s already published books, represents the voice of the artist narrating her own life. That voice spans thirty-two years of her career in this volume, from her public debut as an independent artist in 1913 to the last weeks of her life in 1945.
    The title of this volume comes from Emily Carr’s journals. It appears in a passage in which Carr describes a journey by train from Chicago back to Canada in 1933. “Life is full of opposite contraries,” she declares as she watches the countryside slipping by through the window, noticing turkeys roosting on barn rooftops, away from the icicles. “Opposite contraries” was indeed the way Carr viewed the world. As the journals attest, she was endlessly fascinated by differences between people and between places. Even as a child, she was attuned to the hypocrisy imbedded in the transplanted English culture of her father’s generation, and in reaction she embraced the West and its peoplefor what it was and what they had become. She started early down the path of difference, becoming a contrary within her family, and then remaining a contrary within Canadian society all her life. Emily Carr was a woman who consciously did things differently, and even though this difference bedevilled her, she embraced it.
    Susan Crean
Gabriola Island

PART ONE
INTRODUCTION: CARR’S JOURNALS

    Emily Carr and her brother Dick in 1891. B.C. Archives I-60892
    The expurgated portions of the journals of Emily Carr fall into two categories: one comprises passages, sometimes entire entries, left out of
Hundreds and Thousands
, and the other comprises a handful of short stories that are in the notebooks in which Carr kept her journals but are plainly not part of them.
    What was edited out of
Hundreds and Thousands
is indicative. The story of Carr’s break with her older sister Clara’s daughter, Una Boultbee, which featured a silence of eleven or twelve years, set off by a letter that Emily saw and wasn’t supposed to, involved people who were still living in 1966 when the journals were first published. Decorum and libel laws may have suggested this be cut. To avoid repetition, a good many passages detailing angst about her family were also left out, along with several of the searing laments over her (thus far) fruitless artistic quest, a quest she viewed, more and more, as a spiritual one. The work of preparing
Hundreds and Thousands
for publication was begun by Ira Dilworth and, after he died, was completed by the publishers with the help of Phyllis Inglis. Collectively, these editors took a dim view of Carr’s gratuitous commentary, particularly her scathing remarks about people’s looks and behaviour, observed while she was attending social events or travelling about (Carr’s trip to Chicago by train in 1933 is the main example ofthis). These were unceremoniously dropped from the published version. Similarly, the diatribes against her tenants seemed excessive and were trimmed. Passages of both types are included here in some number, but not in their entirety for the same reasons of excess and repetition.
    The unpublished portions of the journals also contain the inside view of Carr’s spiritual return to Christianity, her struggle