emily carr | Matilda Magtree

It’s Wednesday, which means I ought to be posting a mysterious photo or story prompt… more or less a self-imposed rule, which makes it easy to break.

Instead, I want to talk about bookshelves, other people’s, and how a recent snoop is connected to last Wednesday’s mysterious photo.

Snoop is a harsh word. I was more ‘browsing’ at the cottage where we stayed recently, a remote place in 300 acres of forest, on a lake, surrounded by trails and perfect snowshoeing conditions. We go to this place every year for the seclusion and disconnection from everything other than books, food, wine and fireplace (tea and starlight and thick blankets on the deck also allowed).

As always, my travel bag is mainly filled with books, even for just a few days. But if there’s a bookshelf where I’m staying, chances are I’ll be seduced. (There is something so satisfying in perusing other people’s bookshelves.)

It should be noted that my interest is not to see what they’re reading, as in current titles… bore bore bore… but rather what they’ve collected, the quirky books that might have been culled over time but were kept instead. Those are the ones I’m drawn to. Cloth covers and dust, that kind of thing. Also how the books are filed is interesting… alphabetically, by subject, theme, mood…

This place does it ‘by subject’, which subjects include theology, Shakespeare, political memoir, climate, history, nature, art, Ireland, novels about Ireland, and classic novels, the Brontes, etc., as well as obscure (to me) volumes of poetry such as ‘I Take it Back’, by Margaret Fishback, who strikes me as a sort of poetic Dorothy Parker for all of her delicious rhyming sarcasm as she comments on the state of society. (The rhyming, of course, is essential to the sarcasm.)

To a Baby One Day Old

It seems a sweet absurdity
to call so small a morsel ‘he’.

I mean, to think she was writing about gender identity in the 1930’s…

And this, a little tongue in cheek for, well, you know who you are.

On My Toes

I’m the pronunciation snob who knows
how to cope with the Ballet Joose…
nor does the Monte Carlo Ballet Russe
stagger me as it may do youse.

I also read about Lewis and Clarke and how Lewis was a bit of a jackass who thought very highly of his white self and neglected to give credit to the Shoshone wife of a member of the their crew. Her name was Sacagawea and without her they’d have been sunk as she was the only one who knew the terrain, the language and how to navigate the territory, including interactions with indigenous ‘residents’. Fortunately the transcribing of Lewis and Clarke’s journals fell to Clarke after Lewis’s death and he, being a much more decent bloke, gave her the credit she deserved (and which Lewis had conveniently left out of his own notes).

And I read about Emily Carr, who I’ve read, and read about, many times. But this was different in that the book I found was a rather obscure volume, written by one of her art students and life long friend, Carol Pearson. And not only was Pearson a friend of Carr, she grew up to be Aunt Carol to the people who own the cottage we were staying in. And not only that but Aunt Carol had a small cabin of her own in these very woods, which is now ramshackle (but the dish rack remains) and every time we’ve been up here I’ve passed it and wondered who it belonged to. And now I know.

This is what happens when you snoop in people’s bookshelves.

I mean browse.

♦

Other (not always) wordless friends:

Cheryl Andrews
Allison Howard
Barbara Lambert
Allyson Latta
Elizabeth Yeoman

As with so much of what crosses my reading path, I can’t recall how this book initially came to me. Originally published in 1998 by Polestar, it was reissued by Caitlin Press in 2010.

Inward to the Bones is an imagining of a relationship between Georgia O’Keefe and Emily Carr. A relationship that never existed. The two women barely met at a 1930 showing of O’Keefe’s work in New York City. In her introduction Braid writes “To me, this passing incident was a spark that struck fire. Here were two of the great abstract painters of the 20th century—among the very few women of the time with a commitment to being artists. What if they had caught each other’s attention?”

And with that Braid begins the imagining.

The result is a slim, gorgeous volume of poetic verse written in the voice of Georgia O’Keefe (so true is this voice that the book feels more whispered than written) and based on Braid’s research of both women. Many of the details are founded in actual events (footnotes are included at the back of the book and, in themselves, make good reading).

The story she tells begins with a brief nod to the era in which O’Keefe grew up, the late 19th and early 20th century, a time when women were not taken especially seriously in the art world; O’Keefe tells us about her involvement with the photographer Alfred Stieglitz and, eventually, her thirst for something more, a deeper relationship, a sisterhood of artists.

By the time she meets Emily Carr we’ve pretty much forgotten this telling isn’t entirely real, that the invitation from Carr to join O’Keefe in New Mexico to walk and paint the desert with her, never happened. And yet, there is Emily Carr in the desert with Georgia O’Keefe. There is Carr, feeling out of place and pining for green in the heat of New Mexico while Georgia O’Keefe looks on and complains about this weird companion.

“She… insists/ on painting my hills/ in shades of British green./ They’re everything but! I snap / Try purple! Try yellow! Try red!”

Then a trip to Bandelier National Park changes everything and suddenly Carr finds connection among the cacti, mesa, bones and bluer than blue sky.

Braid paints a convincing picture of similarities that might have brought these two together, not the least of which their dedication to art in a man’s world. But it’s the case she makes for their differences that moves the book forward, as when O’Keefe wonders at Carr’s ability to function without privilege, wealth, the assistance of a patron such as Stieglitz. Wonder turns to awe and then envy… “I am brittle and thin, starving/ for what feeds her.”

Ultimately their similarities win out… different lives, shared passion.

“I know absence rather than plenty./ Our only difference is rain.”

O’Keefe also visits Carr’s world and tromps about Vancouver Island in her black clothes and fedora, finding nothing among the giant red cedars, dampness, moss, rotting logs and lichen that speaks to her in a language her desert soul understands.

“When we go into her woods together to paint/ I don’t tell her I am terrified.”

She feels constrained by the city of Victoria’s culture, its population of tea sippers “with knees together impossibly tight and polite”. It’s the ‘violence’ of the ocean that finally soothes her, the “waves speak in an accent” she understands. “It is the silence of the desert, made manifest in motion.”

But the friendship continues to grow and the fascination for each other’s work is also personal. “I want what she has./ I know no other way to get/ than to be here, in her forest, siting under this damned dripping tree for hours,/ trying to see through her eyes/ with her.”

You might say the book is like a painting made by either O’Keefe or Carr, the power of emotions visible through what appears to be the most ordinary of things. In this case: respect for the sisterhood of artists.

What if they’d caught each other’s attention?

Such a good question. Braid makes us feel it’s a loss that they didn’t, while at the same time convinces us that surely they did.