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Klee Wyck is a collection of short stories–fragments, really, many of them–begun in Emily Carr’s youth and then polished and published in her old age. I’ve written a little about some of these fragments here and here.

First and most importantly, I need to emphasize the story revealed in Kathryn Bridge’s fine introduction. If you are at all interested in this book, it is imperative that you get this edition of it. Here’s why.

Emily Carr is best-known as one of Canada’s finest painters. She was passionate about depicting her home environment of west coast British Columbia, which as she explored it in her teens and twenties in the late 1800s was still mostly unspoiled big forests; but perhaps she was most passionate about the lives, traditions and plight of the Indian or First Nation people she knew there. Their totem poles were among the central themes of her work. She also wrote extraordinarily well, and her writing was concerned with the same issues. The collection Klee Wyck serves largely as an indictment of the white settlers, especially the missionaries, who worked so hard to destroy native cultures. After a first edition by Oxford University Press, publishers Clarke, Irwin and Company purchased the rights to Klee Wyck, and put out an educational version thereof that thoroughly whitewashed Carr’s words and intentions. Bridge details the tragically extensive cuts and edits. And that’s the version of Klee Wyck that was available to so many for so long.

As it stands now, the restored & complete collection I’ve read is lovely, understated but firm. As I said in the teaser posted earlier this week, Carr had a keen eye for clean, tight prose, rather like Hemingway I’d venture. Her sentences are clear and direct, but often glittering with word choice and turns of phrase.

The grating of our canoe on the pebbles warned the silence that we were come to break it.

The sockets had no eye-balls, but were empty holes, filled with stare.

The tent full of sleep greyed itself into the shadow under the willow tree.

(She also has a knack for anthimeria, or the usage of one part of speech for another.)

The tips of the fresh young pines made circles of pale green from the wide base of each tree to the top. They looked like multitudes of little ladies in crinolines trooping down the bank.

The story “D’Sonoqua” about a character in the Indians’ mythology, and the striking, horrifying, awesome totems she inspires, is as striking as the totems Carr describes. In other words, I read her skill with language as parallel to the skill of the carver when she writes

The power that I felt was not in the thing itself, but in some tremendous force behind it, that the carver had believed in.

That clean transfer of force from the thing itself to the receiver is Carr’s gift, too.

And then in contrast is the story “Wash Mary,” a scarcely 2-page sketch of a woman Carr knew when she–Carr–was very small. Its simplicity is its accomplishment; I love that everything we see is everything the child Carr saw, nothing more, and with no added translation of meaning. It’s powerful nonetheless, perhaps because it shows how much a child can see without understanding.

Klee Wyck does address nature and the visual arts, the subjects for which Carr is known. But this book is firmly about people, not trees or totem poles. It’s about a human tragedy, for example the Indian children taken from their parents and villages to Indian residential schools (as I read about in Wawahte). This is why it’s so important to get this edition. Also: gorgeous, clean, precise writing. Emily Carr was a master of several forms. Do check it out.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: essays, history, nonfiction, race, visual arts | 2 Comments »