Hundreds and Thousands (13 page)

Little book, I have toiled all day and caught nothing. It’s the mountain again. There’s nothing to it, just a fritter of nothing like a foam sauce and no pudding to go with it. I say to myself, “Lie down, old girl. Be quiet. Relax. It will never come if you fuss. Leave it. It is not your affair. It may never come but it may be a stepping stone to some other thing better.”

I have been mounting paper sketches for the Edmonton Exhibition. I am not quite sure if it is a good thing to exhibit sketches — thoughts. Then I think that maybe it won’t do
me
any good but maybe it will give some other person an idea that will be way ahead and go much further than mine, and that
would
be good. It’s the
thing
that matters not who does it. To glorify and express the supreme being, that is
all.

Little book, I’m tired, bodily and mentally. I’ve had a visitor for three days and to one who lives much alone a visitor disturbs and exhausts. Superficially we had quite a lot in common, interiorly little. Does one ever have interior friends? I doubt it. When my work was surface smattering she liked it extravagantly. Now when I am trying to dig deeper she shies at it. She is pleased at any recognition I receive but it is for the sake of the “I told you so” of the old work when she liked it and folk ran it down, not for the sake of any growth there is in it. That is what hurts. People don’t care about any development or growth, most of them anyway. I don’t care a whoop for myself (it means nothing) but that I am not making them see further into the thing I am after hurts.

They have asked for two exhibits for Edmonton. When the man came to see me in summer I was all “hedgehogged” up in bristles and prepared with No. But he was so nice. He told me of the many Alberta people stuck out there on farms. Their ideal was to finish life out at the coast after they had grubbed out a fortune on their prairie farms, toiling through heat, cold, blights and blizzards, with the thought of the mild coast climate, the sea, the trees and gardens always before them. Now, with the long-continued badness of things out there, and snowed under
in debts, they have settled in dumb despair to finish out there. He said they were knife keen on seeing and hearing anything to break the dull monotony. The Carnegie Extension were doing a lot in spreading round exhibitions, borrowing here and there. He said the exhibition would be crowded, people driving miles, and great appreciation shown. When he said all this my bristles all fell and I felt glad, proud to contribute a wee bit. I promised him two exhibits, one oils — he wanted them for the university — and one my paper sketches for the people. I have them all mounted now and can honestly say they are quite an exciting exhibition, rough and unfinished but expressing, a little.

I have just had a surprise and a great joy. My sister Alice came to see the sketches and they really moved her. She went over and over them for a full hour, changing them about on the easels, sorting and going back again to particulars. And she repeated several times, “They’re beautiful. No that’s not quite it. They’re wonderful.” And she kissed me. I felt stuffy in the throat and foolish but that meant more to me than three columns of newspaper rot.

Two artist photographers came to the studio today. They were very enthusiastic over my work. Said it was individual and I was getting something. Am I? I’ve worked happily for a week grinding at some of my long commenced canvases. I think some of them are waking and beginning to move a little. It’s vastly interesting. I’m a lucky devil to be as free as I am: home of my own, studio, no money but as long as I can keep clear of debt I don’t need much except paints. If it wasn’t for the infernal repairs always bobbing up!

I HAVE WRITTEN HARD
all day reconstructing my story “The Heart of a Peacock.” It was the first of my animal stories and very weak and sentimental. I changed the angle somewhat. I think it sounds better now. I got so excited!

Little Lee Nan also came to see the Edmonton sketches. He sat Chinawise on his heels, spread the sketches on the floor and studied them seriously. I felt more sympathy and understanding from him than from all the other “locals” put together. His Chinese hands were expressive, pointing, indicating and swaying over the sketches. His English is broken and obscure.

Max Maynard and his wife came in later. Max picked on footling unessentials, harping on the misplacement of one small hut. He ignored the forty-five other sketches while he rasped and ranted over that one little hut. He says that women
can’t
paint; that faculty is the property of men only. (He is kind enough to make me an exception.) He tells me he only comes for what he can get out of me but he goes away disgruntled as if I’d stolen something from him. Sometimes I think I won’t ask him to come over any more but if he can take anything out of my stuff (and he does use my ideas) maybe it’s my job to give out those ideas for him and for others to take and improve on and carry further. Don’t I hold that it is the work that matters not who does it? If we give out what we get, more will be given to us. If we hoard, that which we have will stagnate instead of growing. Didn’t I see
my
way through Lawren? Didn’t I know the first night I saw his stuff in his studio that through it I could see further? I did not want to copy his work but I wanted to look out of the same window on to life and nature, to get beyond the surface as he did. I think I can learn also through Lee Nan and Lee Nan
thinks he can learn through me, light and life stretching out and intermingling, not bottled up and fermented.

Oh, that mountain! I’m dead beat tonight with struggling. I repainted almost the whole show. It’s still a bad, horrid, awful, mean little tussock. No strength, nobility, solidarity. I’ve been looking at A.Y. Jackson’s mountains in the C.N.R. Jasper Park folder. Four good colour prints but they do not impress me. Now
I
could not do one tenth as well but somehow I don’t
want
to do mountains like that. Shut up, me! Are you jealous and ungenerous? I don’t think it is that.

My mountain is dead. As soon as she has dried, I’ll bury her under a decent layer of white paint and top her off with another picture. But I haven’t done with the old lady; far from it. She’s sprawling over a new clean canvas, her germ lives and is sprouting vigorously. My inner self said, “Start again and profit by your experience.” Oh, if I could only make her throb into life, a living, moving mass of splendid power and volume!

TRIP TO CHICAGO 1933

A letter from Lawren telling me of his visit to the Chicago World’s Fair, setting up within me the awfullest ache of longing to go and see for myself the picture exhibition. It must be comprehensive and wonderful. To be on the same continent and not to go to see it seems a shame. I wouldn’t care about the rest if I could see the pictures. What an education! Well, if it was necessary for my soul’s fulfilment I would see them. Maybe I’ve got to plough along alone and find my own way, going straight to God for knowledge and instruction. I’m not going to grunt anyhow.

Direction, that’s what I’m after, everything moving together, relative movement, sympathetic movement, connected movement, flowing, liquid, universal movement, all directions summing up in one grand direction, leading the eye forward, and satisfying. So to control direction of movement that the whole structure sways, vibrates and rocks together, not wobbling like a bowl of jelly.

Things have to be in Toronto for the first group of twenty-eight by the 25th. Only three days more to pull them together. Yet knowing that, perhaps because I knew that, I chucked all to the winds and went to Beecher Bay with Phil. It was splendid. We built a fire, ate tea on the beach. Four little tiny beaches made by jutting rocky points with round, flattened trees and wind pouring up the ravines. Groups of small trees scuttling together in hollows, and frail wind-broken shacks — such glorious shades of weathered boards. Pine trees and grey sea and sea gulls and glowing russet-red bracken. All lovely, forsaken, free and wild. Got home to my ravenous dogs at seven o’clock. I took a long straight look at my canvases.

I THINK WE MISS
our goal very often because we only regard parts, overlooking the ensemble, painting the trees and forgetting the forest. Not one part can be forgotten. A main movement must run through the picture. The transitions must be easy, not jerky. None must be out of step in the march. On, on, deeper and deeper, with the soul of the thing burrowing into its depths and intensity till that thing is a reality to us and speaks one grand inaudible word — God. The movement and direction of lines and planes shall express some attribute of God — power, peace, strength, serenity, joy. The movement shall be so great the picture will rock and sway together, carrying the artist and after him the looker with it, catching up with the soul of the thing and marching on together.

DON’T CULTIVATE PARSONS
out of their pulpits. They are very disappointing. Let them step up in the pulpit and stay stepped up. It is best for them and you and ideals. I asked one to supper tonight
and to see my pictures after. He enjoyed his supper enormously and the pictures not at all. I had hoped he would see a little in them. Down came my hopes, bang! smash! The further back to my old canvases I got the better he liked them, just skin-deep pictures, full of pettiness and detail. “There’s such lots in them,” he would say, “so much detail.” That pleased him while the struggle for bigness, simplicity, spirit, passed clean over his head, only meaning bareness, lack of interest to him. “I don’t want to see any more,” he said at last (I had only brought out about one dozen) and, pointing to my totem mother, “I’d hate to dream of her.” Oh, those that gab about beauty and can’t see it! Another can be ungodly and all that is bad, and yet beauty can just hoist him up easy as a steam winch. We are queer. “To know the universe itself as a road, as many roads, as roads for travelling souls.”
*
If the terminus of all roads is God, what matter which road we take? But hail your fellow travellers from a distance. Don’t try to catch up and keep step. Yell cheerio across the fields, but stick to your own particular path, be it paved or grassed, or just plain old dirt. It’s your path and suits your make of boots.

The mountain is finished, and the Brackendale landscape and the tree with moving background will be coffined tomorrow and away. They ought not to go out as pictures, finished. I feel them incomplete studies, just learners not showers. Will I ever paint a shower, forgetting the paint and remembering the glory? I will not berate them. I have wrestled with them honestly, now I put them from me and push on to the next, carrying with me some

*
Walt Whitman.

bit of knowledge and growth acquired through them — on, up! Oh, the glory of growth, silent, mighty, persistent, inevitable! To awaken, to open up like a flower to the light of a fuller consciousness! I want to see and feel and expand, little book, you holder of my secrets.

I gave a birthday dinner party. Of the four guests one was a vegetarian, one a diabetic, one treating for biliousness, and the remaining one a straightforward eater. I cooked all afternoon to pacify the vagaries of each and it was a good supper but I hated food-stuffs as I dished up the messes. We three old sisters make much of our birthdays, meeting at one or the other of our houses, exchanging visits and gifts and sitting round fires to talk. Alice starts in October, Lizzie follows in November and I end up in December. Only three of us left. We are particularly free of outer relatives, cousins and things. Alice usually carts along a mob of other people’s offsprings, her boarders, and Woo and the dogs and Susie join the circle if the party is at my house. They have inaudibly accepted Susie now. That is, they don’t hysteric when she cavorts round under their chairs.

I’M GOING TO CHICAGO
to see the art exhibition first and foremost and the Fair incidentally. Both Lawren and Bess have written of it and say it’s grand and I’m wriggling with thrills. The art of all ages collected together, the old thoughts and the new thoughts hobnobbing on the walls, saying to each other, “We are all akin and not so different either.” I wonder what they will do to me. I hope they’ll speak plain, the old ones and the clever ones and the holy ones. As always, I go alone. Funny, it seems it must always be so.
I’d love an understanding companion. Otherwise I’d sooner be alone. It teaches one things. The girls are quite keen and enthusiastic over my going and the railway fares are ridiculously low, so low it would be trampling on Providence not to take advantage. I’m dreadfully busy making clothes and safe dog pens, cleaning stove pipes and generally arranging. I used to think the world couldn’t wag if I wasn’t right here running my house. That’s silly, fancying oneself so important and growing into a congealed stagnator instead of living and moving and seeing.