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