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Mind you, I could make any house do me but some places don’t belong to your type – squares in rounds and rounds in squares… There must be a place somewhere for me.

– Emily Carr, Hundreds and Thousands

When Emily returned from France she felt stronger “in body, in thinking, and in work” than she felt after England. She had learned invaluable lessons about colour, form, and how to say what she wanted with shape and colour. She knew the work she had done there was her best to date, but it was radically different from what was traditionally considered “good art” and when she showed it to her family and close friends, they turned away in embarrassed silence. As Emily recalled, “One [sister] was noisy in her condemnation, one sulkily silent, one indifferent to every kind of art.”

The following spring, in Vancouver, she put on a show of her French paintings. Her bold colours were unlike anything people had seen before. They were shocked. Most people thought the new work was a joke. “This is small children’s work!” they said. “Where is your own?” Emily never took criticism lightly and now, although the newspapers gave haltingly positive reviews, she remembered only the negative responses.

To Emily, the new work was brighter, cleaner, simpler, more intense. It had all the “bigger, freer seeing” she had been striving for. But the public thought it outlandish. Her paintings were insulted and jeered at. Her friends, when they came to visit, didn’t mention painting and averted their eyes from her walls.

Emily had a habit of hovering at her own exhibits in hopes of overhearing people’s spontaneous comments. When her pictures were hung at an exhibition of The Fine Arts Society, she heard people laugh at her work. She said, “It could not have hurt me more had they thrown stones.”

The schools where she had taught children refused to hire her back. A few of her old pupils came for lessons, but Emily feared it was strictly out of pity for her and “their money burnt me.”

She refused to be ashamed of her new work. She knew the humiliating silence from her family and the jokes were a result of the conservatism of western Canada. She clung to her belief that her new ways of painting suited this new country. As she saw it, she had “broken loose from the old photographic, pretty-picture work” of docile cows beside placid rivers. That had to be left behind if she was ever to capture the wild-ness of her beloved British Columbia.

In spite of the less than enthusiastic response to her new work, she was eager to return to the totem poles. In 1912 she launched the most ambitious of all her sketching trips to date – a six-week visit to coastal and central northern British Columbia, including Alert Bay, the Skeena River Valley, Kispiox, and the Queen Charlotte Islands, now known as Haida Gwaii. She did dozens of drawings and paintings. As she did so, she realized she was holding back some of the more “modern” aspects of the “bigger, freer work” she had learned in France. Instead, she was “working for history,” in a photographic manner, to record what she considered the treasures of a dying culture.

It was the first time she had spent such an extended period of time in B.C.’s forests and the first time she met D’Sonoqua.

On Haida Gwaii she made friends with Clara and William Russ, a Haida couple from Skidegate, who were patient, attentive guides. They took her to villages where she wanted to sketch, put up tents for her when it rained, cleared bush from the base of totem poles so she could paint them properly, and once caught a “devil fish” to give some variety to the canned rations she’d brought along.

One night they arrived at Tanu off the southern end of Haida Gwaii. William moored his gas boat at what Emily thought was a long distance from land. Then he paddled Emily and her small escort (a girl) and her dog to shore in his canoe. (Local missionaries usually insisted Emily take their daughters along to avoid the “scandal” of being an unescorted woman.) When William went back for the others, Emily and the girl were alone. “It was so still and solemn on the beach, it would have seemed irreverent to speak aloud,” she said later. There is a particular, overpowering silence in these islands, as if everything “were waiting and holding its breath.” Even her dog felt the power of the place for “he stood with cocked ears, trembling.”

At one side of the beach was a bluff the Russes said was haunted. Facing the water were the remains of the great houses where several families once lived, and several totem poles, one of which had belonged to Claras grandmother. Emily knew that, because she was non-native, what she saw in these villages “must have been quite different” from what native people saw.

The Russes helped her by telling her about their stories as they sat around the fire: how the hat on the figure at the base of this pole, for example, was a hat of honour. Clara told how the man wearing the hat once adopted a raven for his son. But the raven was a trickster who caused a flood to be brought down on his foster parents, and the family was only saved by climbing up on the rings of the hat of honour.

When it was time for bed, Emily was alarmed to see the Russes carry their canoe toward the water.

“What are you going out to the boat for?”

“We are going to sleep out there.”

“You are going to leave us alone in Tanu?”

“You can call if anything is wrong,” they told her.

But Emily knew the boat was too far out for them to hear her if she called. She watched the canoe slip into the blackness, and all that night, with the story of the trickster ringing in her ears, she slept with the tent flaps open. She felt safer when the trees were close.

The next morning she got to work early. When it was time for breakfast, there was still no sign of life on the big boat. It got late. Suddenly Emily remembered something she’d heard in the last village.

“Do you remember what they said about those Indians being asphyxiated by the fumes from their engine while they slept?” she asked the girl.

“I was thinking of that too,” the child replied, and suddenly they both yelled louder and ran as far out onto the point as they could to get closer to the bobbing, empty-looking boat. “There was a horrible feeling down inside us,” Emily said, “that neither of us cared to speak about.” Finally a head peered up over the side, and the woman and girl on shore were greatly relieved.

On this ambitious trip, Emily found native people who welcomed and helped her, like the Russes, and others who ordered her to leave their village. She encouraged the people who wanted to watch her draw, often giving them a sketch, and when she left an inhabited village, she gave a small exhibition of what she had done there.

She found some villages abandoned, like Tanu, and others with brass bands and street lamps. She camped on beaches and slept in missionary beds, broke through thick salal and nettles, fended off hordes of slugs and mosquitoes, and everywhere, she sketched the poles.

It is unlikely any European woman before Emily Carr had accomplished such a trip alone. (European women in the northwest were mostly wives of missionaries and pioneers.) In overcoming the hardships, dangers, and fears of the journey and returning triumphantly with a large number of sketches and drawings, she must have had some sense of a quest complete.

Emily’s hope now was that the provincial government would buy her entire collection of over two hundred northern paintings to hang in the parliament buildings in Victoria. To this end, the minister of education contacted Dr. C.F. Newcombe, an ethnologist for the provincial government. Would he please visit Miss Emily Carr to assess her work for its anthropological value?

Dr. Newcombe liked Emily and bought three of her paintings for himself, but after his visit to her Vancouver studio he reported to the minister that although her sketches were accurate, he found the colours too bright. Also, in her efforts to get the entire pole into her pictures, she sometimes distorted perspective. He suggested that Miss Carr be hired to paint decorative scenes on the walls of public buildings. The government, now restrained by a growing economic depression, refused to buy her work.

This rejection must have hurt Emily. If she could not make a living selling her art, she would have to find another way. She returned to Victoria, where, with the money her father left her, she built a small boarding house at 646 Simcoe Street in what had once been the cow yard of her family property. At the age of forty-two, she became a landlady.

The house was called Hill House, but when Emily wrote about it years later, she called it The House of All Sorts because of the many different kinds of people who passed through. It had two suites on the bottom floor and a larger one, including a splendid painting studio for herself, on the top floor.

It was a good idea – keeping a boarding house was considered an appropriate job for a woman – but it was bad timing. In 1913 there was a worldwide depression that would soon culminate in World War I. There were fewer and fewer people who wanted to rent houses and many families trying to survive on a soldier’s low wages.

Emily’s original plan had been to have a handyman or maid to help her with the work so she could paint part-time. But as World War I closed in and rents fell, she could barely afford to pay the mortgage let alone hire help, and she was forced to do most of the work herself. For extra income she also had to turn part of her own flat into a tiny additional apartment she called The Doll’s House.

Emily loathed landladying. The work was endless. In winter she woke up before dawn and eased her way down the wet or snowy outside steps to light the coal furnace in the basement. In summer she cut the grass, kept large fruit, vegetable, and flower gardens, and always, she cooked, cleaned, repaired, and painted apartments as tenants came and went.

It wasn’t the work that bothered her. She was rather proud of the fact that she kept such a neat establishment. But The House of All Sorts, the book she later wrote about the experience, is full of anger. Dealing with her tenants was a torment because it constantly drew her away from her own work. She felt not just tied, not just nailed, but screwed down, twist by twist, to the house and its unending stream of crabby, demanding, noisy, endlessly demanding tenants. They seemed to say to her, “Forget you ever wanted to be an artist. Nobody wanted your art. Buckle down to being a landlady.”

Her first tenants were newlyweds fresh from their honeymoon. The bride slip-slopped all day around the apartment in her slippers and negligee. When she occasionally did a washing, she embarrassed Emily by leaving it, shamefully grey, hanging for days on the clothesline until Emily furiously pulled it down herself. The couple left abruptly when their brand-new furniture was reclaimed because they hadn’t kept up the payments. Their parting gift was a pot of soup thrown down the kitchen sink that required that Emily become a plumber because she couldn’t afford to hire one.

When Emily consulted a more experienced landlady about the whole affair, the woman explained, “In time you will learn to make yourself hard, hard!”

Emily took everything personally, She was scandalized when her tenants did things like hang their woollen underwear and peach scanties out their (her!) front window to dry, for all of Simcoe Street to see.

She was embarrassed at having to negotiate and take money from tenants, angry when they rearranged or complained about the furniture she carefully bought and placed in each apartment. She resented their demands to pay a few pennies less rent and their insistence on gossiping to her about the other tenants.

In those days, builders didn’t know much about soundproofing, so she also had to deal with complaints about noise, especially from amateur musicians. It was agony for her to be “tough” in these situations.

One of the musicians was a sweet young girl whose commitment required piano practice from 7:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m., immediately under Emily’s studio. Emily felt as if “each note might have been pounded on my vertebrae.”

Without letting go of the piano, the child then took up the violin. Now “squealing wails” were added to the tumult of endless piano scales. Emily agreed with the other tenants that “something must be done” but she was loathe to be the one to do it. The child was sweet. Her parents were lovely people. The noise was unbearable. Emily went.

There was the child seated at the piano not looking at all “strong, wicked or big enough to torture a whole household.” Emily chatted. She talked of everything except pianos and violins. Then she sneaked back to her studio, trying not to catch the other tenants’ eyes, and started to paint.

“Wail, wail, wail! Every wail wound me tighter,” she wrote. “I was an eight-day clock, overwound, taut – the key would not give another turn!”

Down she went again. This time both parents were home and Mother was surprised at such a quick repeat visit.

Emily stammered, “Other tenants…object…”

Papa and Mama exchanged nods.

“Perhaps the violin practice could be arranged for where she learns.”

“Impossible,” said Mama.

“At the home of one of her aunts, then?”

“Both live in apartments where musical instruments are not tolerated!”

“The Park bandstand,” groaned Papa with a nervous glance towards Mama. “I suggest the Park bandstand.”

The little girl rushed from the room crying.

“I fear we must look for a house,” said Mama.

“An isolated house,” groaned Papa.

And Emily retreated to the sounds of the little girl’s sobs.

She was not beyond physical violence when things got too much for her frayed temper. Take for example the widow who crammed her three-room apartment with a yellow-haired son and twelve rooms’ worth of cheap, glossy furniture with only a narrow alleyway to let visitors squeeze through.

When the widow would neither pay her rent nor leave, Emily seized a basket full of her pots and pans from the back step as a form of payment. When the widow followed her upstairs, “screeching,” Emily, pushed to the limits of her temper, retorted, “Take it then – this too,’” and from a higher step, plopped one of the dirty zinc pails over the widow’s head so that the woman retreated, wobbling, with her arms full of basket and her head encased in a helmet of dirty zinc. The widow and her yellow-haired son left shortly after.

Emily seems to have kept her apartments none too warm in winter, for coal cost money. Once when she caught a male tenant sneaking extra coal into the furnace, there was a scuffle. Emily says he hit her. Other tenants cheered. One tenant said she pushed him into the coal bin and trod on his glasses. Another time she turned the hose on a tenant.

Events like these made her feel like “a hen under whose wing hornets had built their nest and stung me every time I quivered a feather.” When she grew really, really angry with her tenants, she turned off the water, pulled the fuses from the electrical box, and went upstairs to hide in her attic room, leaving them waterless and in the dark.

The attic room that was Emily’s “special corner” and hiding place lay at the top of a narrow staircase in one corner of the studio. On its small entrance door she painted an Indian-style bear totem and on the underside of the roof, right on the cedar shingles, two huge eagles – also in the Indian tradition. Their spread wings covered the entire ceiling and hovered a few feet above her head as she slept. Emily loved these two great symbols. They made, she said, “‘strong talk’ for me.”

Money was constantly a worry. She sold the produce from her garden, raised chickens and rabbits, and made hooked rugs. In about 1924, she began producing pottery. One of her tenants asked her to make “Indian pottery” she could sell in a gift shop that she operated in Banff in the summer.

Emily got out the old wicker pram she used to help carry things (the same way we now use grocery store buggies) and wheeled it to the Dallas Road cliffs or to local construction sites. There she dug out the local blue clay and wheeled it home. Then she shaped it into small objects such as bowls, candlesticks, ashtrays, miniature totem poles, and plates: “stupid objects,” she called them, “the kind that tourists pick up.”

With the help of her chimney sweep, she built a rough brick kiln in her back yard. Firing the kiln was a twelve- to fourteen-hour ordeal that required her to stand constant guard with the garden hose to keep the roof soaked. Once the roof caught fire and another time, the floor.

She decorated her pottery with Indian-style designs. She felt guilty using those beautiful designs on material for which it was not intended, but she knew it was why the tourists bought her pots. As she said, “I hated myself for prostituting Indian art; our Indians did not ‘pot’, their designs were not intended to ornament clay – but I did keep the Indian design pure.”

Other potters, however, seeing how well her work sold, copied her designs, but badly, because they didn’t understand or care that they were misusing them.

Over several years, Emily produced hundreds of these small objects to eke out her poor income. As she said, “Clay and bobtails paid my taxes – clay and bobtails freed me from the torture of landladying.” It was the bobtails that gave her joy.

When her English bobtail sheepdog named Billie died, Emily decided to start a bobtail kennel. The breed was known for being strong, hard-working, and excellent companions, and there weren’t many in Canada. Soon, it was one of her few great pleasures to open the gate early each morning to release the dogs, then pant along behind them as they burst from the yard and raced across the park to the top of Beacon Hill. On top of the hill there was a moment of peace as all of them rested and Emily watched the new dawn. Then they returned to the responsibilities of the boarding house.

As a landlady who could rarely afford to hire help, Emily frequently picked up the tools herself. She built her own painting easels and her own wooden stretchers to prepare canvases to paint on. Once, when she ran out of wood to make her own picture frames, someone saw her pull the pickets off her garden fence. She fixed plumbing, did repairs, and regularly calcimined, or whitewashed, dirty walls to keep them sparkling and sweet smelling.

She also built the dog kennel at the foot of her garden. For the little ones, she set up a puppy room in the warm basement with a cot nearby so she could be close when a dog gave birth, or was sick. On occasion there were up to thirty pups at a time in the puppy room. If a mother had more than six (and nine was considered an ordinary litter), Emily would help by feeding the babies three times a day for three weeks with a feeding bottle.

The kennel was hard work, and sometimes it was heartbreaking. Once, an epidemic of distemper broke out. So many of her dogs died that she had no more room in the back yard to bury them. Emily was forced to put their limp bodies into weighted sacks and carry them to the Dallas Road cliffs where, at high tide, after dark, she threw them to the sea.

The sight of this elderly, heavyset woman in her hair net and home-made dresses, throwing sacks of dead puppies over the Dallas Road cliffs, surely did nothing for her growing reputation as an eccentric.

She used her wicker pram to bring home bones and scraps from the butcher for a nourishing stew for her animals, and once, her load included half a pig’s head. “There was something sinister in that pig’s one eye,” she remembered later.

The meat, it turned out, was bad; not bad enough to hurt the adult dogs, but the next morning one females new litter were all ailing and one pup had already died. For the next several days and nights Emily sat up, spooning milk and brandy down puppy throats. The runt had the toughest time; for days he writhed from one convulsion to the next, and one day, just before dawn, Emily found him stiff, his tongue lolling, eyes glazed.

Too exhausted to dig a grave, she hopelessly poured another trickle of brandy down his throat and, leaving the feeding bottle on the floor where it lay, went back to her cot for a few more hours of sleep. In the morning when the sun woke her, the runt was on the floor in a patch of sunshine, sucking at the feeding bottle between his paws. She named him Grits.

By now, Emily’s reputation as an eccentric was in full bloom. For years she had been known as “hard to get along with.” Now she had adopted those wild colours in her paintings and further shocked the good people of Victoria by smoking, swearing, and playing cards. Added to that were her looks – a short, chubby woman who always wore shapeless black smocks she sewed for herself, each exactly like the others, with no shred of attempt at fashion, design, or decoration. On her feet she wore sturdy laced shoes or –for rough walking – a pair of old boots. From the 1920s on she wore on her head a hairnet with a velvet band. No one knows exactly why. Maybe it was just to keep the hair out of her eyes.

She seldom went anywhere without animals: some combination of dogs, rats, cockatoos, parrots, cats, and later a monkey, attached to her waist by a chain. When she pushed her highly sensible wicker pram down the street to carry her groceries, people crossed the street to avoid her. “There’s the woman who travels alone to the forest, who lives with Indians and paints totem poles in wild colours,” they might be saying. “There’s the landlady with the terrible temper, the one who keeps a rat and a monkey for pets.”

In 1921 Emily had traded a bobtail puppy and thirty-five dollars for a Javanese monkey she called Woo. Things got livelier around the House of All Sorts as Woo, clad in the bright dresses Emily sewed to keep her warm, ate whatever came to hand, including soap and tubes of artist’s paint. In the shed where she slept in summer she tore shingles off the roof, smashed the window with her drinking cup, tore up floorboards in the search for tasty bugs, and allowed no animal except her favourite dog, Ginger Pop, and no human except Emily, to enter. Whether they liked her or not, everyone was fascinated by Woo.

Next to Emily, Woo adored Alice, who always kept a treat for her – grapes, cherries, or a candy. Only once was Woo angry at Alice. Alice was busy in her crowded kitchen, surrounded by a confusion of children, when she accidentally stepped on Woo’s tail. Furious, Woo squealed and grabbed the strings of Alice’s apron and tugged hard, hoping they were as sensitive as her own tail.

As it got harder to rent suites, Emily had less and less time to paint. At one point, things got so bad that she was forced to rent her own suite and live in a tent in the back garden, cooking in a lean-to. Another time, her studio became a dining room for boarders.

Her house was built to contain, she said, “the finest studio in the town.” But for many years the studio of which she was so proud was “a torment” for her to work in – when she could work in it at all – because it was so public. The only way to her flat was through the studio where canvases in progress stood on two home-made bench-easels that she instantly covered in dust sheets if anyone came. If a tenant tapped at her door while she was painting, she felt caught, “exposed and embarrassed as if I had been discovered in my bathtub!”

To save space, Emily had suspended her chairs from the high studio ceiling with a pulley system she rigged up herself. If a welcome visitor came, she lowered a chair; otherwise, the furniture stayed overhead. Time was precious. If she had tedious guests, she might also “put the clock on a little” to speed their departing.

But in fact, for the next fifteen years Emily’s studio was rarely used for art. She felt isolated from the artistic community of British Columbia and “heavy in spirit” because they had ridiculed and refused to buy her work. She gave up hoping for their approval. Painting had given her so few rewards. Now she would be a good landlady – even if she hated it. She would show the world that she could do something right.

Emily once talked about how satisfying it could be to “clean perfectly, to shine and polish and know that it could not be done better. In painting that never occurs.” There is an absolute certainty to cleaning – a certain satisfaction in knowing, all by yourself without anyone else’s judgment, whether it is done “right” or not – and Emily grasped at it. Besides, the life of a struggling landlady kept her so busy, she told herself, she had no time for art, anyway.

One consolation was the friendship of a child named Carol Dennise Williams, whom she met in the early 1920s. Emily regularly went for lunch to Alice’s school and they probably met there, when Carol was a student. To Emily’s amazement, the child defended her against her sisters’ criticisms. They liked each other instantly and began spending long periods of time together. They had much in Emily Carr_common, including a love for animals and painting. Emily taught Carol everything she knew about dogs, and they frequently painted together and went on sketching trips around the city.

In the girl’s presence Emily returned to a world of fantasy and play, and all the warmth that until now had been reserved for her animals was showered on Carol. Emily liked Carol so much that she asked her mother if she could adopt her. Mrs. Williams said no, but she agreed to let Carol call Emily “Mom,” and Emily gave Carol the pet name, “Baboo.” In 1926 Carol moved to Toronto, where she eventually married and became Carol Pearson, but their friendship continued – with letters, visits, and Mother’s Day flowers – until Emily’s death.

Mostly, the years as a landlady were a time of withering for Emily. When the boarding house was originally built, there were four large maple trees on the lot. The two where the house would be built were cut to three-foot stumps. One of these immediately died and the second was isolated in a dark part of the basement. It had no air and only one small window in a far corner for light. But that maple tree would not die.

Emily described how “robbed of moisture, light and air, the maple still remembered spring and pushed watery sap along her pale sprouts, which came limper and limper each year until they were hardly able to support the weight of a ghastly droop of leaves having little more substance than cobwebs. But the old maple stump would not give up.”

Like Emily. Given little nourishment by her family or artistic community and barely ahead of the debt collector, she still had some small instinct for art that struggled to stay alive within her.

Emily liked to say that for the fifteen years she was active as a landlady, she never painted at all, but this is an exaggeration. Although she was discouraged, she managed to do some painting during this time. A few people, like Marius Barbeau, an anthropologist who studied B.C. native cultures for the federal government, and H. Mortimer Lamb, an important art collector in Vancouver, saw and appreciated the value of her work. Emily also continued to go on sketching trips, although they were closer to home than the ambitious trips of earlier years. She exhibited some paintings and made connection with several Seattle artists whom she could talk to about painting and art. But mostly, like the maple tree in her basement, she just hung on.

Now, all that was about to change.