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.