Canadian Artists Bundle. Kate Braid

was for complete rest and freedom from worry for one year. Emily could do some sketching but no painting. Any emotional stimulation, they said, was harmful, so tears as well as laughter were discouraged. According to Emily, “Even thinking was prohibited.” Mostly, she stayed in bed and ate. Occasionally she was allowed to draw cartoons and write silly rhymes to pass the time and to get her revenge on nurses she didn’t like. “I was not always polite,” she remembered later.

      Her one joy was that she was allowed to raise birds. The beautiful songs of some English birds, she thought, were the only thing England had that Canada did not. Her plan was to take songbirds back to Canada with her and release their offspring in the wild. Today, people could tell her such experiments don’t usually work, but at the time, Emily thought it was a splendid idea.

      When spring came she stole several nests, eggs and all, from nearby bushes. Her books said that if her hand with its juicy worms was the first thing the young birds saw, they would accept her as their mother.

      When her nestlings hatched, she poked food into their mouths every two hours with a tiny pair of pincers. Other patients helped her. After their walks they left small offerings of ants and grubs, beetles and worms on Emily’s windowsill. Kitchen maids donated rhubarb and cabbage leaves that, when laid on the grass, attracted snails and other bird treats. She was christened “Birdmammy” by a doctor who found her asleep one day with five baby bullfinches cuddled under her chin. When they began to fly, the birds were put into a large aviary in the yard.

      Emily’s birds became the San darlings. If a patient was feeling bad, the nurse would ask Emily to, “Lend the soldiers!” and head off with a cage full of birds to cheer the sad one.

      Today, some would criticize her for capturing and raising wild birds, but these small creatures and their songs were the single thing that brought her – and many others in the hospital – joy. “But for birds,” Emily said later, “I doubt I could have stood it.”

      All her life she kept large numbers of animals – wild and domesticated – as a way of connecting to nature. They were also an outlet for her devotion. Emily was never a mother but she had a strong maternal instinct. If she couldn’t have her own babies, she would have these wild ones who quietly loved her and didn’t require her to sacrifice her art.

      After more than a year, everyone’s special gentleness to her – and the fact that she was no better – made Emily begin to wonder if she would die. When simple rest and good food didn’t help, the doctors began to “treat” her by alternating under- and over-feeding and giving her cold and hot baths. When she still did not get better, they proposed, as a last resort, a more severe and experimental form of treatment. Before she agreed, Emily called her doctor.

      “May I get up?”

      “You are not able, Mammy.”

      “Something I must do.”

      “Your nurse is here.”

      “No one can do this but me.”

      Emily had hoped to take her birds back home. Now, sadly, she put them one by one into a box and asked for the doctor again.

      “The birds, Doctor. There in the box. Chloroform them.”

      The doctor was shocked but Emily insisted, “Quick, they are waiting.”

      “Free them, Mammy!” the doctor urged.

      “They do not know freedom,” Emily replied. “Villagers would trap them – tiny cages – slow starvation…. Broken necks, fertilizer for cabbages! Please, Doctor. I love them too much.” And the doctor did as she was asked.

      Now Emily gave herself into the hands of the doctors, who drowned her in huge amounts of food, massage, and electrical treatments – four hours each day for the next six weeks.

      Although Emily is vague about this time and the hospital records have been lost in a fire, the “electrical treatments” were some form of electro-shock therapy, though probably not the extreme kind we know today. Doctors at the time were experimenting with different kinds of electrical equipment, including an electric massage device that produced a buzzing sensation on the skin. Verses Emily wrote later in which she compared the treatment to sitting on a bee hive, seem to agree with this.

      When Emily finished the experimental treatment she was declared “cured” and told never to go near London again. It was big cities, it seemed, that made her sick. She was as rooted as any pine tree in wild Canadian soil. Without it, she seemed to fade.

      Still, she wasn’t well. After eighteen months in the sanatorium she was depressed. Her struggle to paint had become a distant dream. She cared about nothing and she was afraid the doctors had killed her enthusiasm for painting. When she left the sanatorium she returned to the last village where she had studied and, not knowing what else to do, wrote about her time in the San as a series of silly verses illustrated with sketches. She cried the entire time she was writing it.

      In June 1904 Emily caught a ship back to Canada. She was thirty-two years old, depressed, and convinced that her five years of study in England had been a complete failure.

      5

       Digging In

      Every year Sophie had a new baby. Almost every year she buried one…. By the time she was in her early fifties every child was dead and Sophie had cried her eyes dry.

      – Emily Carr, Klee Wyck

      On her way home to Victoria, Emily stopped for eight weeks to visit friends in the Cariboo district of British Columbia. Here she began to get better in the clean air and open spaces of B.C. ranch country. Her friends taught her to ride a horse astride instead of in the more “ladylike” sidesaddle position that women were expected to use, and she spent most of her time outdoors, riding.

      Once again, Emily defies expectations of how “nice” ladies should act, by learning to ride her horse astride, instead of sidesaddle, while in the Cariboo district of British Columbia.

      When she returned to Victoria, Emily seemed to her family more strong-headed than ever. Not only did she shock the entire neighbourhood by riding astride, but she’d also picked up the unladylike habits of smoking, swearing, and playing cards, and she refused to attend church regularly.

      Most of her childhood friends had left Victoria. Sophie Pemberton was back in Victoria but she had married and now had other interests than art. Emily felt restless. She was deeply disappointed in how little she had learned in England and she was still not completely well. Her sisters were busy with their own lives: Lizzie was going to study physiotherapy in Seattle; Edith worked on charities; Alice had opened a new kindergarten. Emily sought comfort by heading back to Ucluelet for a while; then she and her birds, squirrels, chipmunks, and Billie – a sheepdog one of her sisters gave her – all moved to Vancouver, where she was hired to teach the Vancouver Ladies’ Art Club.

      Things immediately went bad. Knowing she had just returned from study “abroad,” the ladies assumed their new teacher would be witty, clever, and smartly dressed. Instead, they got a shy, fat, dowdy creature who smoked and swore at them. They had hired her to look at their paintings and give criticisms, suggest ways to improve, but it quickly became clear they didn’t take their art seriously enough for Emily Carr. Ladies came to class late. They re-posed the models. One refused Emily’s art criticisms altogether.

      Being Emily, she took her revenge not by fading away but by going on the offensive. She considered their casual attitude to art a sacrilege and called them “vulgar, lazy old beasts.” When they snubbed